The Goliath Run, page 6
She was glad that he didn’t press her on the drink. He stood as well. “Good seeing you, Jo. I wish it wasn’t under such sad circumstances.”
She didn’t know what to do so she extended her hand.
“So do I,” she said and she headed for her room, where she would spend most of the night vainly seeking sleep, thinking about Grace, and of how her heart would ever get past its shattered state.
THIRTEEN
Upon arriving in Laureltown Sam had convinced ABN to give him a commentary on their noon update, which meant that his rant went out live. There was, in fact, a standard delay in the broadcast, but the crew didn’t cut him off. Presumably they couldn’t have seen it coming and by the time it registered with them, it was out there in the world, impossible to retrieve. Renata watched it live from the studio, where she had been pulling together the usual second amendment proponents for that night’s show. Afterward Sam’s soliloquy there was stunned silence until Will finally spoke.
“I’ve been looking for an excuse to quit this shit show.”
“You might as well hold on and get your severance,” Renata told him. “They were close to cancelling us before. This will do the trick.”
“What about tonight’s show?”
“Carry on like it’s going to air,” she said after a moment. “We could last a day or two. The brass might want to play it out. They can make themselves look good as they pretend to respond to the country’s moral outrage. Because there’s going to be a lot of fucking moral outrage over this.”
“What about the guy from the NRA tonight? He might bail now.”
“He won’t bail. He’s probably the only person in the country who agrees with Sam. So get him in here. The show must go on.”
“Not that anybody’s going to be watching.”
“Oh, they’ll be watching tonight,” Renata said. “That’s one thing I do know. Tomorrow’s another subject altogether…but tonight they’ll be watching.”
She was right that they’d be watching. What she couldn’t have guessed was that it was the beginning of something both remarkable and reprehensible. Sam’s numbers that first night were up considerably, as expected. Viewers who had never watched before tuned in to see the lunatic. And while the network was presumably trying to decide just exactly when to cancel him, the ratings continued to climb and the fact that as many people tuned in to hate him as to admire him didn’t matter. When Sam saw what was happening he beat the drum even harder, urging the population to arm itself against “the thugs, fiends and miscreants” who threatened the safety of “our most precious commodity—our children.” He continued to blame the parents of the kids who were killed. The network, seeing what was happening, backed off for the time being, waiting to see just how long the surge lasted. They could always take the high ground down the road, when the ratings began to fall, as they inevitably would. Even a freak show gets stale after a while.
By the end of the first week Sam’s ratings had doubled. The recalcitrant Will, the primary victim of Sam’s bullying for seven years, promptly quit. Before he did, he told Sam that he wished that he—and not the children of Laureltown—had been in that schoolyard when Hays showed up. Even a worm will turn, trodden upon.
By the end of the second week, Sam won his time slot.
“Tell me the truth,” Renata said. “When did you know what you were going to say in Laureltown?”
“When I said it,” Sam replied.
They were having lunch in midtown, at an alehouse that served fish and chips and corned beef sandwiches on rye. Sam liked the corned beef.
“You couldn’t begin to count the number of reporters there,” Sam continued. “Lined up all along the road in front of the school like they were there to cover the Santa Claus parade. And every fucking one of them saying the same thing. It would have made great satire if it wasn’t so pathetic.” He had a drink of ale. “So it wasn’t exactly a stroke of genius, changing the dialogue.”
“Maybe it was,” Renata said. “I mean—the numbers.”
“Fuck the numbers.”
“I can’t believe you just said that.”
“I didn’t do it for the numbers,” Sam said. “I did it to get fired. I fully expected to get the news when I got back to New York that night. I even had my farewell address ready.” He smiled. “I was going to call the network out. Go down in a blaze of glory. And look what happened.”
“Yeah, look what happened.”
He took a drink. “This just proves my point. It’s all theater and the actor with the brightest nose and the loudest horn gets the attention. What—the network suddenly loves me again? How am I different than I was a week ago? Two weeks ago?”
Renata lifted her glass and sat back to have a drink, thinking how odd it was that he should ask her that particular question. Because he was different than a week or two ago. He was looser. He was relaxed and that was something he hadn’t been for some time.
“All right, what’s going on?”
He shrugged. “You don’t know? I got what I want. Now I can leave. First, I’m going to make them ask me to stay, and then I’m going to leave. My terms.”
“When is all this going to happen?”
“I’ll ride the wave as long as it’s peaking,” he said. “Then I’ll tell the network to kiss my ass. I’ve just now realized that the only reason I wanted this was because I was afraid they were going to take it away. But I don’t want it anymore. It’s fucking exhausting, pulling on a persona every morning.”
“So what will you do—just write?”
“No,” he said. “Mikey does all the heavy lifting there anyway. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that.”
She smiled. “I had my suspicions.”
“You were afraid to ask?”
“You intimidate people, Sam.”
He smiled, pleased with that, and drank more ale. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. But it’s time for a change.”
FOURTEEN
She worked. She got up when it was daylight and sometimes before, and she worked until dark, until she made herself so physically tired that she could shut her brain down enough for sleep. Otherwise it was impossible. Someone once sang that he needed a dump truck to unload his head. There wasn’t a truck big enough to handle Jo’s tangled menagerie of thoughts and regrets and anger and guilt.
So she worked. It was an unconscious and futile effort to forget something she wouldn’t forget if she lived a thousand years. There was nothing she could do about that and so she worked. She was fortunate that it was fall, the busiest time for the farm. She and Henry harvested every afternoon and drove to one farmers market or another nearly every morning. Sometimes she sent Henry on his own while she remained in the fields. She preferred not to see people if she could avoid it, especially happy people, trolling the market stalls, sometimes with little kids in tow.
Henry didn’t talk much anymore. He’d never been the most gregarious man, except around certain people, and now he grew even quieter. He did his work and at night either went to bed early or retreated to his woodworking shop, where he did little but sit there by the cold wood stove, drinking his wine and smoking his home-grown weed.
A week after the shooting, he went by himself to the livestock auction in Britnell and came home that night with a brown and white pony, the animal tethered in a trailer he’d borrowed from a neighbor. Jo was tearing down a sagging wooden chicken coop when he unloaded the animal and he’d looked at her defiantly, as if expecting some sort of confrontation, or at least a demand for an explanation as to why he would buy a pony now. She said nothing. That evening, after dinner, he began to train the animal to pull an old cart that had been tucked away in the corner of the barn for decades. He kept at it nightly and was usually out there when Jo came in, finished for the day. Henry talked to the animal constantly, reassuring it, even joking with it. Jo had heard the tone before. It was the voice he had used when talking to Grace.
Jo borrowed money from the bank and hired a local contractor to put up a building where the chicken coop had been, where she planned to make goat cheese. One end would house the stalls for milking and the other the equipment for the cheese production. She wanted it up and running by spring. In truth, she couldn’t afford the building or the equipment right now, but she did it anyway. She had no interest in reticence, in playing anything safe.
In the evenings she ate in the living room in front of the TV, flipping from one news station to the other. The coverage from Laureltown continued for weeks, long after there was anything new to tell. The gun debate roared and then sputtered and then faded away, as it always did. Experts were adamant in their various theories of how the tragedy could have been avoided, and not one of them knew—as Henry would say—shit from wild honey. How could they? The mental state of Arthur William Hays was dissected and analyzed and poked and prodded. To what avail? None of it would change what had happened and Jo doubted that any of it would stop it from happening again.
For a while she had called Susan every night. They couldn’t bring themselves to talk about the shooting, so Jo fell into a habit of telling Susan about her day. What she’d harvested, cut, sold, dug up, built, fixed or planted. After a while, she came to realize that Susan wasn’t paying all that much attention. Jo was a radio playing endlessly in a back room somewhere. Of course Susan wasn’t listening. She wasn’t listening to anything. How could she? The phone calls tailed off.
In spite of herself, Jo began to tune in to Sam Jackson’s show, if only for a few minutes, almost every night. During the day she told herself not to do it and then did it anyway. She was like an alcoholic, waking up every morning vowing to quit the sauce, only to reach for the bottle at end of day.
He had expanded his rant incrementally. Ridiculously. He was like a character out of Monty Python, a cruel and colossal joke. He called for ten-year-olds to be trained in firearms. He wanted teachers carrying weapons. He became revered by a legion of marginal louts who believed that a pistol-packing citizenry was the solution to all the country’s problems. And the louts were all tuning in, seeking direction from Sam Jackson, who was now signing off every night with the words, lifted from his tirade at Laureltown––“All bets are off!”
Jo, as she was watching, could imagine his disciples across the country, hurling the catch phrase back at the screen. A drooling mob. They believed what he was telling them. But did he believe it? Jo doubted it.
Each time she turned the show off, she vowed never to return to it. And yet she did. It was as if she wanted something from him, something to show that he didn’t believe it. Contrition or regret, something that made him human. Or maybe she wanted to nurture her hatred for the man. That part was easy.
One day in October she was filling hamper baskets with acorn squash, in readiness for the market in Middleton the next day, when she looked up to see Susan pulling into the laneway in her Honda SUV. She got out, a canvas tote slung over her shoulder. She’d lost considerable weight in the weeks since the shooting. Her jeans hung on her.
“What are you doing here?” Jo said as they hugged.
“I don’t know,” Susan replied. “Woke up this morning and felt like a drive.”
“A long drive.”
“Well, Dave’s back to work and I’m—well, I’m not ready to go back yet. I cannot be around those well-meaning people all day long.”
“So you came here?”
Susan laughed. “You see? I needed that. Yeah, I thought I’d come and see you. You can put me to work if you want.”
“I will absolutely put you to work.”
Susan hesitated. There was something else. “And I brought you this.” She reached into the bag and brought out the book. “You should have this, Jo.”
“No,” Jo said at once, pushing it away. “You should keep it. I couldn’t take it.”
Susan held the book forward again; her hand was shaking slightly. “You don’t understand. I can’t have this in my house. I can’t.” She began to cry. “Every time I see it, it tears me to fucking pieces.”
Jo took the book from her and hugged her again. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
They worked all afternoon, crating pumpkins and melons and squash. They shoveled out the goats’ stall and Jo showed Susan how to drive the Ford tractor to spread the manure over the bean field. Henry came home from market and showed off the pony, unabashedly calling it Grace’s, which made Susan tear up and smile at the same time. They had chicken for dinner and a bottle of Henry’s wine, the quality somewhat suspect.
“There’s stuff floating in there,” Jo said, looking at the bottle.
“What the hell, it’s still wine,” he told her.
After they opened the second bottle it was agreed that Susan would spend the night. By ten o’clock Henry was gone to bed. Jo and Susan took their glasses outside to sit on the old porch. They could hear the frogs in the pond, and the goats and the chickens as they settled in for the night, the hens clucking softly, deep in their throats.
“So Dave’s back to work,” Jo said.
“Yeah.”
“Is he okay?” She put her hand up to deflect any reply. “I’m sorry, that’s an incredibly stupid question.”
Susan dismissed the apology. “He’s doing all right. Better than me, I’m afraid. He devotes a portion of his day to firing off nasty emails to ABN about Sam Jackson.”
“He does?”
Susan nodded. “He’s become obsessed with the guy. He wants him banned from the air. It’s his mission, as if that would make things… better somehow.”
“It would make the world better.”
Susan nodded. “But apparently he’s more popular than ever. Explain that to me. What does that say about us? What does that say about the country?”
“Not much,” Jo said. “Or maybe it says too much.”
“Do you ever turn it on?” Susan asked.
“No way,” Jo lied. She indicated the barns. “I have plenty of manure right here. What do I need him for?”
“Dave watches sometimes. He only lasts a couple minutes though. Then he’s yelling at the TV.” Susan took a drink of the bad wine. “Dave knows some people in Pittsburgh, network guys. They say this saved Jackson’s show. He was about to get cancelled.”
“Good for him. I hope he can sleep at night. Oh shit, he probably sleeps like a baby.”
Susan fell quiet. After a while she appeared to shrink in her chair and her breathing became ragged. Jo watched for a moment.
“What is it?”
“It’s just…I keep wondering,” Susan said. “I know I shouldn’t. But what if he’s right? What if it is our fault?” She began to cry now, the tears rising like a pot boiling over. “I didn’t protect my baby. If I did, she’d still be alive. He’s right, you know.”
Jo stood quickly and went over to kneel in front of Susan. She took her friend’s face in her hands, felt the warm tears on her fingers. “Don’t you do that! Don’t you fucking do that. That sonofabitch is a lot of things. But right isn’t one of them.”
She held Susan in her arms for a long time, until the sobbing subsided. They drank more wine and talked for another hour about things of no consequence.
When they went to bed, Jo lay awake in her room, thinking about it all. Susan in a grief so blinding she could actually consider that what happened was her fault. Dave writing angry and futile emails to a TV network that couldn’t care less about him. Henry talking to a pony he’d purchased for a little girl gone away forever. That same little girl in the gazebo, the wonder in her eyes seeing a book about herself. And Sam Jackson. His hatred and his horseshit and his rhetoric, how pervasive it could be. And Jo still tuning in to the program, in spite of her overwhelming contempt for a man who was in every way an abomination. A man whose only function in life was to hurt people, to tear things down.
Somebody needed to tear him down.
FIFTEEN
It was assistant producer Kevin who took credit for persuading Senator Tom Harrison to come on the show. A few days after the Laureltown shooting Harrison had sponsored a bill banning assault weapons and had been appearing all over the map ever since, pushing it. But his office had turned down Renata several times, and even suggested that he stop asking. But then Sam ran into Harrison at a charity event with Rachel in the city. It was no coincidence. Sam never attended such things and Rachel was more than content with that. However, when he heard from Kevin that Harrison was going to be there, Sam insisted on coming along. Rachel tried to dissuade him; she knew that he was capable of changing the tone and the dialogue of any occasion, even one whose purpose was to raise money for medical research. He was adamant; he put on a tuxedo and drank scotch for an hour in his den while he waited for her to get ready.
At the event, Sam wasted no time in tracking down Harrison. The senator was standing with his wife, Martha, and both were talking to a TV actor and a columnist from the Post. Harrison, a glass of wine in his hand, stood ramrod straight, like the Marine he’d once been. He retained the crew cut from his military days. His wife was short and heavyset, with a helmet of blonde hair. She looked older than her husband, although she wasn’t.
“Senator,” Sam called out as he approached. He’d left Rachel when they’d arrived, grabbed a drink at the bar and gone looking for Harrison.
They’d never met before. Harrison’s eyes flicked over Sam and then he accepted the extended hand, smiling but just slightly. Introductions were made but Sam paid scant attention to the actor or the columnist. Or Martha either, for that matter. He had the focus of a bird dog; he was there for one reason only and it wasn’t to drink warm wine and schmooze with people he didn’t care about.
“I’ve followed your career for years,” Sam said. “I feel like I know who you are. So I have trouble believing it when I hear that you’re afraid to come on my show. Guy like you.”
Harrison nodded, as if to say—so this is how it’s going to be. “A guy like me,” he repeated slowly. “A guy like me is afraid of a lot of things. Your show would not be on that list.”
