The Girl Next Door

by Brad Parks

  “I’m, uh, going to have to, uh … I have to take a leak,” I began, then, as soon as I had clearance, elongated my strides. “I’ll get back to you, Lester.”

  I could sense Lester was gathering himself to begin some serious caterwauling, but I scooted away before he could gain too much volume. I made a straight line for Lunky, who was seated in the intern pod, happily typing away. He dwarfed everything in his workstation—the chair was made for someone roughly half his size—yet he seemed quite content, unaware of the calamity he had caused.

  “Hi, Kevin,” I said, gently. “How are things going?”

  He looked up from his screen and studied me with his usual detached, academic manner.

  “Oh, hello, Mister Ross,” he said, and before I could correct him on the “Mister” part, he added, “I’m doing real well with the first draft.”

  Apparently, no one had explained to him that in this business, all we get is a first draft.

  “That’s great,” I said, then slid the photo onto the desk so he could look at it. “You, uhh … want to tell me about this?”

  I thought I’d get an apology, or at least an embarrassed explanation. Instead, he smiled at it. “Oh, cool picture! Can I keep it?”

  “Kevin, you … uhh … you picked up the bear,” I said, as if the problem with this should be self-evident.

  But Lunky didn’t get it. “It’s okay, he wasn’t that heavy. It was basically like doing a power clean, and I can power-clean a lot more than that.”

  I wanted to be mad at him but somehow couldn’t summon the anger. It would be like getting ticked off at a two-year-old for wetting the bed.

  “It’s not … It’s not about the weight,” I said. “It’s … I’m sorry, how did you end up carrying a dead bear?”

  “He wasn’t dead, just tranquilized,” Lunky corrected me. “Animal control arrived after you left, and the officer decided the only way to get Ben out of the tree—”

  “I’m sorry, Ben? Who’s Ben?”

  “Well, the bear, of course. The animal control guy told me I could pick a name for the bear. So I said ‘Ben,’ because my favorite book as a child was Gentle Ben by Walt Morey.”

  I was rendered speechless, which Lunky took as a cue to continue.

  “Anyhow, the animal control guy had to shoot Ben with one of those darts. That got Ben out of the tree, all right, but then he was just lying there on the sidewalk. The guy from animal control couldn’t lift him, so he asked me to help. But I knew it’d be easier if I just did it myself. So that’s what I did.”

  “Did you tell the animal control guy you were a reporter?” I asked, when I finally found my voice.

  “Why would that matter?”

  Mindful of the fact that we are given only so much enamel in this life, I made a concerted effort not to grind my teeth. “Kevin, has anyone ever told you that reporters aren’t supposed to become part of the story they’re covering?”

  Lunky pondered this for a moment.

  “So I shouldn’t have named him?” he asked.

  “Actually, you shouldn’t have picked him up to begin with.”

  “Hmm. Sorry about that. I won’t let it happen again.”

  “That’d be peachy,” I said and, as usual, Lunky missed my sarcasm.

  I was about to continue my little journalism lecture when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tina Thompson closing in on me.

  “You,” she said, pointing one finger at me, her eyes narrowed, her voice quietly dripping poison. “Yoooouuuu. My office. Now.”

  * * *

  While I would never consider myself an expert on the speech patterns of the adult female Homo sapiens, it is my general experience that when they lose the capacity of articulating in full sentences, it’s an indication they might possibly be angry.

  Either that, or they’re having a stroke. In Tina’s case, it could have gone either way. But since she was still walking upright—and was puffing out her cheeks like Dizzy Gillespie reincarnated—I took it that she was fairly incensed.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told Lunky, who was typically oblivious.

  I made the force march to her office, where she gestured for me to enter. She followed me inside, then slammed the door loud enough that half the heads in the newsroom jerked our way.

  “Sit,” she said, pointing to one of the two chairs in front of her desk.

  I thought she would go behind her desk, like she usually did. Instead, she selected the chair next to mine. I was alarmed by the choice. Not only did it increase our physical proximity—and the chance she’d wind up cuffing me on the ear—it made me feel more vulnerable to what was about to come. I’ve been subjected to what feels like a lifetime of editors yelling at me face-to-face, to the point where I’ve become inured to it. Sal Szanto, my previous editor, was particularly instrumental in increasing this tolerance.

  But side to side? That’s not something I had ever been conditioned against. My defenses were much lower from that direction. And even if I twisted my body toward her as much as the seat allowed, she still had a clear flank attack.

  “I’m not sure where to start with you right now,” Tina said, her voice alarmingly hushed. I definitely would have preferred yelling.

  “Would you like me to get you something to drink while you think about it?” I asked, sounding much more flip than I intended.

  She answered not with a word but with a soul-withering glower.

  “Okay, so that’s a ‘no,’” I said, and hunkered down to wait for the coming storm.

  She paused for ten seconds—it felt longer—then said, “When we last spoke, I was of the understanding that you would be working on a story with Kevin Lungford about the bear that was traipsing through Newark. Am I correct that was also your understanding?”

  This was clearly one of those situations where it would be advantageous to say as little as possible, lest my mouth get me in any more trouble. So I just nodded.

  “Well, in that case, it would be great if you could explain to me why you were talking with”—she interrupted herself to lean forward and grab a scrap of paper off her desk—“Nikki Papadopolous. She called here looking for you but didn’t want to leave a message on your voice mail, because she wasn’t sure if you checked it. She was explicit that she talk to someone who could get you a message. So the call got forwarded to me because, well, it seems I’m your boss. You do remember I’m your boss, right?”

  I nodded again, though a bit more meekly this time.

  “Well, good ol’ Nikki said she was from the State Street Grill in Bloomfield and said she had spoken to you earlier in the day but had forgotten to get your phone number,” Tina continued. “So you can imagine my curiosity as to how you ended up in Bloomfield when I thought I had sent you to Newark. You can imagine that, right?”

  Another nod. Even smaller.

  “And do you know what she told me?”

  Head shake.

  “Well, first she told me she thought you were an excellent reporter, and very cute on top of that, so kudos to you there, stud. Then she told me you had been asking questions about Nancy Marino. Now, I’m sorry, is the bear I asked you to track down named Nancy Marino?”

  “No, his name is Ben,” I said, immediately regretting it.

  “Really? Really. Ben, huh? Well, so you know something about the bear after all,” she said, her volume rising for a brief moment.

  She stopped herself, did some strange breathing thing—yoga stuff, I imagined—then continued in her softer, scarier voice.

  “Well, then perhaps you can explain this,” she said, reaching for another piece of paper on her desk and producing a printout of the dreaded Lunky-and-the-bear photo.

  “The, uh, animal control guy asked Lunky, to, uh…” I started, and realized it was sounding lamer the more I talked, so I finished with: “He was just trying to be helpful.”

  “Helpful? Really? And where were you, his supposed mentor, while he was being so helpful?”

  I look
ed out Tina’s window, which offered a panoramic view of a brick wall, like the right answer might be written in the grout. Alas, there was nothing but graffiti.

  “Were you in Bloomfield?” Tina prompted.

  I considered saying that, at that point, I might have actually been in Newark—albeit downtown, several miles away from the bear, chatting with Big Jimmy. But that didn’t seem like it would aid my cause.

  “Look, Tina, obviously I wasn’t with the kid,” I said. “We found the bear and the thing was up in a tree, and I really thought Lunky could handle it from there on his own. I was wrong. I apologize.”

  Tina was making the kind of face I only thought was possible if someone was actively sucking on a lemon, but I continued:

  “But, I’ve got to tell you, the story I’m working on instead is really—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Tina said immediately.

  “No, I’m serious, I think—”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” she said, now in full crescendo. “What you did today was totally inexcusable.”

  “Tina, it involves—”

  “I don’t care. Look, we’ll talk about this more later. For right now, it’s”—she looked at her watch—“quarter after six. I better have a story about a bear in my basket by seven o’clock. And if it’s not the very best bear story I’ve ever read, you’re going to ride the copy desk for a month.”

  Tina knew there was no greater threat to a free-range reporter such as myself than a month chained to a desk, scouring for typos. I’d rather do time as a galley slave. At least the boat is going somewhere.

  * * *

  With no time for moping, I returned to the intern pod, feeling the usual charge of adrenaline that accompanies being on deadline. There are people in our business who can’t handle the stress: tender souls who eventually wind up following gentler pursuits, like public relations. Me? I love the rush. There’s nothing that focuses your concentration like knowing you have forty-five minutes to write six hundred words.

  “So,” I said as I arrived, “what do we have so far?”

  I scooted a rolling chair next to Lunky, who puffed out his mile-thick chest and proudly turned the screen toward me. I began reading.

  By Kevin Lungford

  In William Faulkner’s acclaimed story “The Bear,” which is rightly gaining its place as one of the finest works of twentieth-century American short-form fiction, the hunting and ultimate slaying of a lame-pawed bruin becomes a powerful symbol of European encroachment into the Native American way of life, and the tragic consequences therein.

  In John Irving’s quixotic, madcap romp The Hotel New Hampshire, the strength and sorrow of bears are an important and continuing theme; and the character of Susie the Bear, a young woman so ashamed by her appearance she wears a bear costume, deserves greater scrutiny within the field of LBGT literature as an example of the ways in which lesbians are forced to, in essence, cloak their sexuality.

  And, of course, most schoolchildren can identify Ursa Major and Ursa Minor—literally “big bear” and “little bear”—by their more common names, the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, yet do not know the names hearken to a classic story in Greek mythology that has been echoed in the canon of nearly every literary movement since.

  I kept myself absolutely still for a few extra moments, pretending to be reading while I was actually trying to think of how to respond. My humane-to-interns policy was being rather sorely put to the test, but I was determined to stick with it.

  “How is it? Pretty good, huh?” Lunky asked.

  All I could think of was an article I read once that found the lowest-performing workers—people identified as being in the bottom twenty-five percent by their bosses—consistently rated themselves in the top twenty-five percent. While it seems to be a testament to the power of human self-delusion, the researchers concluded the real problem was that low-performing people lack the skills and training to know how bad they are.

  Lunky clearly fit in that category, and I actually felt sorry for him. Princeton didn’t have a journalism program. No one had ever told him how to write a newspaper article. He just applied for an internship—to our sports department, no less—and the sports guys hired him because they thought a Princeton kid was probably smart enough to figure things out (and because they hoped he could hit a softball ten miles). No one had even given this kid Remedial Journalism, much less Journalism 101.

  So I had to treat this as a teachable moment. And the best teachers start by building on strengths.

  “Okay, so that’s a fine treatment on bears in literature,” I said, and Lunky grinned. “Now what about the, uh, bear in Newark?”

  “Oh, I’ll be getting to that.”

  “Yeah, you might want to consider moving that part up a bit,” I suggested.

  “I didn’t want to rush the reader too much.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you. Did anyone ever tell you about the five W’s?”

  “Wilde, Wells, Wordsworth … does Walt Whitman count as one or two?” he asked.

  “Never mind,” I said, and started scrolling down.

  Except below those three paragraphs was a cursor, blinking slowly and insistently, waiting for more copy that had not yet come. And below that was a fat little black bar that told me I had reached the end.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is maybe five inches. We’re on the schedule for eighteen.”

  “Oh, I figured I’d get maybe half of it done tonight, then finish it tomorrow morning.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” I repeated. “By tomorrow morning, this thing is supposed to be in a newspaper, lying on front porches throughout New Jersey. It’s due in”—I looked up at a clock on the wall—“thirty-nine minutes.”

  “Really?” he said, as if this was the first he’d heard of it. I was beginning to grasp why the words “By Kevin Lungford” had not yet appeared in our newspaper.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s review some basic concepts: when all else fails, make your story start with a kid. Editors love stories with kids in them almost as much as they love stories with animals. So if you have a kid and an animal, they’ll be so happy they’ll wet themselves. Did you interview any kids?”

  “Oh, sure,” Lunky said, opening to a page in his notebook and showing it to me. “You told me to interview the young and the old, remember?”

  I grabbed the notebook and flipped a few pages until I found what I needed.

  “Start typing,” I said, clearing my throat and dictating: “‘Before yesterday, the only bear six-year-old Newark resident Tashee Cunningham saw on a regular basis was Winnie-the-Pooh—and then only if he went to the library.’”

  “Winnie-the-Pooh?” Lunky asked, horrified. I sensed his concern he would lose credibility at the next faculty tea.

  “With all due respect to John Irving, Winnie will be a little more familiar to our readers than Susie the Bear,” I assured him.

  I continued my dictation: “That changed abruptly yesterday when a two-hundred-pound male bruin came ambling outside his kitchen.”

  I went back to Lunky’s barely legible scrawl until I found the only usable quote from Tashee, who was, after all, only six. I read it aloud: “I yelled, ‘Mama! Mama! It’s a bear!’”

  Lunky looked up from the keyboard. “Don’t you think that’s a little, I don’t know, obvious? Wouldn’t you rather be more oblique? Maybe we could craft an allegory of some sort?”

  “You know we’re supposed to write this at an eighth-grade level, right?”

  “Oh right,” he said, then added, “The eighth grade is when I started reading Joyce.”

  “You better let me type,” I said.

  For the next thirty-four minutes, Lunky read to me the contents of his notebook, which I attempted to translate into something that resembled a newspaper article. I suppose it was sort of like Joyce, in that it was pretty much stream-of-consciousness crap. In th
e world of Princeton Ph.D. candidates, they call that literature. In my business, we have a different term for that kind of writing: meatball surgery.

  Nevertheless, we reached our eighteenth and final inch at exactly two minutes to seven.

  “Aren’t you going to put your name on it?” Lunky asked.

  “No, this is your first byline, and I want you to have it all to yourself,” I said.

  “Aw, that’s great. Thanks. And hey, if you ever need me to lift anything heavy for you, just give me a call.”

  I assured him I would, then went back to Tina’s office to tell her the story had been filed. She wasn’t there, so I wandered toward the copy desk, expecting she would be harassing someone there. Instead, I saw her curly brown head poking out of Harold Brodie’s office.

  “Carter,” she said, then added the five words that turned my legs into spaghetti: “Brodie wants to see you.”

  * * *

  At least outwardly, there should have been nothing remotely intimidating about our executive editor. To begin with, he was a small man, and ever since his seventieth birthday, he seemed to be shrinking even further. He had this high-pitched voice, these flyaway eyebrows, this near-constant need to urinate—all things that afflict men of advancing age and shrinking vitality.

  Yet on the very rare occasions I was summoned into his office to discuss a story, my usual glibness was replaced with stumbling uncertainty. The instincts that served me so well elsewhere turned out to be false, as if Brodie’s domain was some kind of opposite world. Every note that came out of my mouth sounded off-key.

  Something about the guy just frightened me. He had been the supreme ruler of the Eagle-Examiner since I was in diapers, and while most of the time he reigned with a velvet fist, he was still known to enforce discipline when and where necessary. There was always talk that in his younger days he had been so ruthless—diminishing hardened reporters to whimpering toddlers with the ferocity and precision of his attacks—that my older colleagues still referred to his office as “the woodshed.”