And, on the beat, the audience en masse gave him the line:
If it ain’t fried, it ain’t food!
Astounded, Sara turned to look at Yosemite Sam, who was grinning inside his beard as though remembering with pleasure every greasy meal he’d ever faced. And all through the theater, happiness was loud and palpable as Ray Jones went on:
Oh, I’ve been stupefied, by stuff that’s steeped and stewed,
And I’ve been mystified, by things that I have chewed,
If you want me satisfied, just watch as I conclude …
The audience didn’t need any priming from Ray Jones this time as they roared him the line:
If it ain’t fried, it ain’t food!
It’s an affirmation, Sara thought; it’s a declaration of class solidarity; it’s a tribal anthem; it’s a credo; it’s a social statement at the bedrock of self-image and belonging, and I have to remember this for the piece for Trend. This is who we are; that’s what these people are singing, and we’re all here together, and there’s no strangers to laugh at us or look down their noses. This is who we are.
Meantime, Ray Jones had gone on into the bridge, and Sara’s foot was tapping along with the beat:
They got snails, and frogs’ legs, and lobster on a leash,
With chocolate-covered ants they do get pushy;
They got squid in its ink, they got tofu and quiche,
And when the oven breaks down, they got sushi.
Half the audience was clapping along with the song now, and Sara had to resist the impulse to do the same. Ray Jones, grinning, nodding, pounding his own left foot on the stage floor, drove them all into the peroration:
You know I got my pride, it isn’t that I’m rude,
But I just won’t be denied, even if it starts a feud.
Only one things qualified, when I am in the mood …
Everybody bellowed it out:
If it ain’t fried—
Grinning, winking, Ray Jones side-talked the mike:
You know this is true—
Everybody:
If it ain’t fried—
Ray Jones:
There ain’t nothin else to do—
Everybody, including (to her utter astonishment) Sara:
IF IT AIN’T FRIED, IT AIN’T FOOD!
Cheering, rousing, standing ovation. Openmouthed, amazed, Sara turned to stare at Yosemite Sam, and he grinned at her and winked.
9
Dear Jack,
Herewith, a preliminary report and a suggested approach:
The exhilaration of finding oneself in the very heart of the American ethos is hard to describe. Despite the complications and sophistication of 200 years of history, Americans are still essentially the same rugged, simple people who first braved the unknown to carve a civilization from this new continent’s wilderness. The process of taming that wild and beautiful land continues, here in Branson, Missouri, among these rugged rocks and sandy scrubs, where the eternal verities of family, honesty, and valor now unexpectedly find themselves confronted by many of our postmodern ills: murder, rape, dark passions, and a complex, cynical, uncaring legal system.
Branson is country-western star Ray Jones’s spiritual home, as exciting as Atlantic City, as clean as Disneyland, as fresh and new as wet paint. And these people are Ray Jones’s people, honest, simple, slow to anger or judgment. In this confrontation between Ray Jones and the citizens of his soul, the presence of the world’s press, eager for a kind of meaning they can understand, seems almost irrelevant.
Sara Joslyn
Jack Ingersoll showed the fax to his boss, Hiram Farley. “I think I’d better go down there,” he said.
“Go now,” Farley said.
10
Upon sending her initial fax to New York, the morning after attending the Ray Jones show—she’d actually written it last night but still thought it a good, evocative first draft this morning, and so sent it—Sara decided to do some legwork, which actually meant carwork, which meant that awful traffic outside. But there was no way to avoid it; Sara joined the hordes searching for the world’s cheapest pancakes, struggled through them at last, and pointed the nose of the trusty rental east.
Forsyth seemed weird at first, until Sara realized that what made it so odd, after Branson, was its normality. This is what small towns actually look like—sleepy, quiet, a bit dusty. Low buildings flanking wide empty streets. Lots of cars and pickup trucks parked at the curbs, but little traffic moving.
The county courthouse was a neat two-story building, modern, beige, with unnecessary horizontal gray stripes to show an architect had been around, the whole surrounded by trim lawn and plantings. The rear facade featured a tall oval-topped two-story window surmounted by a functioning clock, and the front facade consisted of some sort of Mayan arched entrance, plus a bit of grammatic confusion: TANEY COUNTY COURTHOUSE it said over the door, but in larger letters above that were the words TANEY COUNTY COURT HOUSE. So apparently, there were two factions in Taney County: those who thought courthouse was one word and those who thought court house were two words, and both factions, this being a democracy, had been satisfied.
Sara wandered for a while in the neat fluorescent interior of the building, unchallenged. It was almost empty, particularly upstairs, where the courtroom waited, untenanted and unlocked. Sara took a few pictures of the simple bare space with its fuzzy blue-seated wooden armchairs, long dark brown attorneys’ table, Missouri state seal like a huge bronze Roman coin over the judge’s bench, gaudier Taney County seal on the side wall, four rows of spectators’ pews in dark wood, and the drooped flags of both nation and state standing upright to flank the banc like a pair of colorful lances.
Downstairs again, Sara opened doors and asked questions of the few but friendly clerks she encountered until she reached the office suite of prosecutor Buford Delray, whose friendly secretary smiled with real regret as she said, “I’m sorry, but Mr. Delray’s awfully busy right now.”
“I realize, with the trial coming up,” Sara agreed, “but surely he can spare just a few minutes for the press.”
“As a matter of fact,” the secretary said, her smile now bubbling with excited pride, “Mr. Delray’s meeting right at this moment with a reporter from The Economist. That’s an English magazine, you know.”
“I know,” Sara said. It surprised her that The Economist would be here in Taney County this soon. What would be their angle on a story like this? “I could wait,” she offered.
“You could, I suppose,” the secretary said, sounding doubtful. “With jury selection tomorrow, you know, there are many demands on Mr. Delray’s time.”
“I’m sure there are.”
“It all depends, I suppose, how long the other gentleman is in there.”
How long could The Economist legman talk to a rural Missouri prosecutor? “I’ll wait,” Sara decided, and sat in the only available chair.
“Up to you,” the secretary said. She showed Sara one last smile, then turned back to her typing, of which she had an unending supply.
Sara waited. She waited for thirty-five minutes, with increasing impatience and disbelief, and then at last the inner door opened and out walked Louis B. Urbiton.
Louis B. Urbiton! The oldest and drunkest of the Down Under Trio!
The Economist! Louis B. Urbiton of The Economist! Why, that snake in the grass! Waiting thirty-five minutes for Louis B. Urbiton and some Weekly Galaxy scheme! Steam curled from Sara’s ears. Her split ends resplit.
Behind Louis came a hearty butterball in his mid-forties, a round-bodied, round-headed, well-packed man with a politician’s smile and big open politician gestures and shiny beads of politician perspiration on his gleaming high forehead. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Fernit-Branca,” he was saying to Louis, patting the horrid man on his horrid shoulder. “Dew drop in anytime.”
“Than kew,” Louis responded, with a dignified nod. He gave the secretary an equally dignified but somehow more chummy nod, then laid upon
Sara a blank, bland stare and departed.
Blow his cover? Blow that pompous ass—both of these pompous asses—right out of the water? “How would you like to know, Mr. Prosecuting Attorney, that you just spent the last hour with a famously drunken Australian—not even English, Mr. Prosecuting Attorney, as anyone with the slightest sophistication would have realized at once—famously false reporter for the Weekly Galaxy?”
He wouldn’t like to know it. It would be bad for Louis B., of course, but it would also be bad for Buford Delray’s selfe-steem, and that would be bad for the person who’d blown the whistle/cover/them out of the water. One of the first things every professional reporter learns is that killing the messenger is the rule in this life, not the exception.
So there was nothing to be done about Louis, at least not now and not directly. There would be nothing gained, unfortunately, were she to stand as tall as one can possibly stand in flats, point the forefinger admonitory, and cry out, “J’accuse!” No; to admit even knowing a Weekly Galaxy reporter would open a whole nother can of worms, wouldn’t it? It would.
Meanwhile, as Sara was confirming her impotence to herself, the faithless Urbiton had departed and the gulled Delray was giving Sara a politician’s appreciative leer, until the secretary said, “Buford, this is a lady from some New York magazine.”
Talk about the kiss of death. Buford Delray’s face closed up like a Parker House roll. The first name of all New Yorkers, as the whole world knows, is Smartass, as in, “Some Smartass New Yorker tried to put something over on me today, but us country boys ain’t as dumb as they think.” And meantime, an Australian from Florida was even now waltzing out of town with Buford Delray’s jock.
Frantic beneath, calm on the surface, Sara said, “I’m from Trend magazine, Mr. Delray, and I—”
She’d been moving forward, intending just naturally to ease on by him into his office, but he rolled like a beach ball into her path, a cold little pursy smile on the front of his Parker House roll. “I’m sorry, Miss, but I—”
“Sara Joslyn,” Sara said, and stuck her right hand out.
Which he did not take: “—have very little time for the press at this juncture, as I’m sure you can understand. Perhaps after the verdict.”
He was rolling slowly backward into his office, hand on the doorknob. Sara pursued, trying to look as though she weren’t in pursuit. “Sir,” she said, desperation getting the best of her, “The Economist won’t print anything about the case, certainly not in this country, but Trend—”
“I’m looking forward to the series of stories The Economist plans to run, Miss,” Delray interrupted, with his smug smile. “And to The Economist’s photographer, as well. If you’ll excuse me.” And he shut his office door in Sara’s face.
Louis was long gone, of course. Sara circled the courthouse like a cat girdling a chipmunk hole, but Louis B. Urbiton was nowhere to be found.
A photographer! That’s what the scam was all about. If it were possible to put out a newspaper for the illiterate, the Weekly Galaxy would be it; nowhere on earth do pictures so literally take the place of thousands of words as in the supermarket tabloids, and none more so than in the Galaxy. While Louis B. Urbiton would spend the next week or so listening attentively, admiringly, even slavishly, at the feet of the dimwitted Delray, Weekly Galaxy photographers would be the only photographers permitted unlimited access to the courthouse (or court house), the murder scene, the witnesses, and anything else that struck their magpie interest, because, of course, the main point in Buford Delray’s tiny mind would be the appearance of Buford Delray’s words, not his fat face, in the pages of one of the world’s most distinguished news journals.
I’m gonna get em, Sara promised herself as she marched to her car for the angry ride back to Branson. I’m gonna nail em to the barn door, and Buford Delray is the barn door.
And that’s a promise.
11
Jack Ingersoll stood on the sidewalk outside Sara’s hotel and watched the families ooze by in their station wagons, campers, vans, pickup trucks. I’m going to get the Weekly Galaxy, he thought as he watched his onetime readers seep past. This time, I’m gonna get em.
Jack Ingersoll at thirty-three had already lived too many lives. A counterculture journalist to begin with, he’d gone straight from college to the St. Louis Massacre, an antiestablishment weekly newspaper fawningly modeled on New York City’s Village Voice. Though it was great fun at first, the fact had eventually become clear, even to the dewiest-eyed among the Massacrees, that they were accomplishing nothing. They were preaching to the (very few) converted, and it didn’t matter what wonderful exposés their industrious digging produced. Human beings know only what they want to know, and if they don’t want to know the facts, the data, the truth, this wonderful truth you have just unearthed for them at great risk and with uncommon brilliance, they just won’t listen. Won’t listen.
Jack’s contemporaries didn’t sell out, exactly. They just moved on to better-paying jobs (after all, they had families now) with more careful publications. Jack stayed longer, until in fact the Massacre was shot out from under him; that is, bought by a conglomerate that turned it into a youth-oriented music and movie paper. Before the Massacre’s massacre was complete, Jack underwent a sea change, a total conversion of all the atoms of his body and brain into their opposites. He didn’t sell out a little; he sold out a lot. The biggest salary bucks in the world of journalism were to be collected at the Weekly Galaxy and its supermarket sisters, and that was because, of pride and prestige and self-esteem and the knowledge of a good job well done there was fuck-all at the Galaxy. They made up for the lack, quite handsomely, with money.
This second Jack was as skeptical and faithless as the first had been engagé. While his co-Galaxians squandered their lavish incomes as fast as the bucks rolled in, Jack spent as little as possible, hoarding it all away in expectation of the winter ahead. “Sooner or later,” he would say in those days, “they fire everybody.”
And it is true that they would have fired Jack as well, eventually, if it hadn’t been for the arrival at the Galaxy of Sara Joslyn, girl reporter. Not cynical and burnt-out like himself, she was still fresh from journalism school, with just a touch of employment on an old-fashioned New England local paper to give her a false sense of professionalism.
There’s something seductive about life at the Galaxy; it’s The Front Page without redeeming social significance. Always nosing after a scoop, always a fire engine to chase. Sara had taken to it like a buzzard to entrails. Though Jack had been unable to drag himself out of his mire of unbelief, he had nevertheless staggered at last into action to save Sara. In the nick of time, they’d managed their escape from that particular Pleasure Island, before the donkey ears became too noticeable.
And now Trend: “The Magazine For The Way We Live This Instant.” It’s true the magazine devoted too much of its space and attention to listing the fourteen best real estate agents in Manhattan and the seven best shortcuts to the Hamptons, but in with the service slop for the trendoids and wannabes there was also good investigative journalism, of politics both local and national, of crime both financial and melodramatic, and of chicanery both public and private.
All of which made Trend the perfect place for a Weekly Galaxy exposé, if Jack—and Sara, bless her, wherever she was at the moment while Jack paced the sidewalk out here in front of the hotel—if the two of them could nail down the particulars. The new owners, the old scams. The old felonies: bribery, theft, false representation. Oh, get them.
Not get them for those people out there in the slower-than-molasses traffic. Those were the Galaxy readers, and they would not want to know the truth about their favorite reading matter, and therefore would not listen.
No, the better way to put it to the Galaxians was to make them figures of scorn and obloquy in the eyes of the movers and shakers of their own world, the communications business, combiz: press people, TV people, ad agency people, music biz people, all
that vast ebb and flow of ideasmiths who among them create the zeitgeist, the view of reality in which we all swim. Most of them live at least some of the time in New York, and most of them read Trend.
A car came slashing along the verboten center lane, flashing its lights and blasting its horn at those tremulous souls who might be thinking of making a left turn in any direction. This car and this driver stood out like a panther among sheep; who could it be but the awaited Sara?
No one. The rental radiated so much menace that a camper full of kiddies actually backed up to let the bandit slice rightward back across its own lane of traffic and slew to a juddering halt at the Lodge. Already smiling, already knowing the identity of that driver, Jack crossed the sloping asphalt as Sara sprang from the car, slammed its door, spun around, and said, “What the hell are you doing here?”
Still driving. Jack grinned at her. “I love you, too.”
“Fax it to me,” she suggested, and started around him toward the building, then stopped, turned back, gave him a look of deep mistrust, and said, “You are not taking over this assignment.”
“Of course not,” Jack said.
“You are an editor; I am a reporter.”
“Exactly.”
Skepticism still darkened her features. She said, “So what are you here for?”
“Your body.”
“Oh, that’s all right, then,” she said. “Come on.”
As they walked toward the hotel, he said, “I couldn’t get connecting rooms.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “We’ll connect.”
In the afterglow, she said, “It was my fax, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he admitted, and nuzzled her throat. “Your throat smells wonderful after sex,” he murmured. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
She laughed, hugging him, twining their legs together, wrinkling and roiling the damp sheet even more. “Once an investigative reporter,” she said, “always an investigative reporter.”
Baby, Would I Lie? Page 5