Newspaper Gypsy

Chapter One

Curriculum Change

High-school journalism class: putting the school newspaper to bed, typing the last-minute stories late into the golden January afternoon.

Buck could see palm trees on the edge of the school grounds thrashing in the onshore breeze. The breeze would cut like a knife through his denim jacket on his way home. His 1956 Cushman Husky motor scooter leaned on its kickstand by the hurricane fence at the school’s north gate, the only vehicle left beside the journalism teacher’s Nash Metropolitan. The Cushman could make 30 mph on a good day, which was numbing enough without the onshore breeze.

Buck loved the autumn Northeasters that blew in for three days and finally flushed away the summer humidity and heat of the North Florida coast. After Labor Day the tourists vanished, the beaches belonged to the locals again, it was time for school to start and time for the first Northeaster. He liked that the school paper was named the Northeaster because it fitted, but he never had wanted to be a journalism student.

He was in twelfth grade; the last year high school would start for him after Labor Day, when the Northeasters were due. That September Buck finally had enough credits to pick electives that he truly wanted: Honors World History and Senior Art. He had begun to enjoy school again. But now it was January after Christmas break.

When he came back to school there was no Senior Art anymore. No blond, lanky soft-spoken Mr. Lundgren with a passion for art and a strange soft lisp in his voice that somebody said was Scandinavian. Mr. Lundgren was gone as if he had never been, fired over the holiday break. The Senior Art classroom in the main building was stripped and dark, the students scattered. Buck wound up in journalism class. Nobody seemed to know what had happened to Mr. Lundgren. No teacher would talk about it. If Buck tried to ask, they got funny strained looks on their faces and their eyes got shifty.

It was the same kind of look that Buck usually got from just about everybody two years ago, when the head cook at Dawson’s Famous Seafood Restaurant was arrested for murder the year before Kennedy ran for President. Buck’s mother, a Dawson’s waitress, got pulled into the story by the cops, who identified her as the woman the shooting was about. Life had gotten very strange for Buck and his family, and it had taken two whole years for those strained looks and shifty eyes to stop. When the cook went to Raiford for twenty to life, the local sensation finally died down.

The minute Buck tried to ask teachers about Mr. Lundgren, those shifty looks came back. As if only he, of all people, would think to pry. That’s when he knew that he would never find out what had happened to Mr. Lundgren unless somebody got arrested and the newspapers got hold of it. So he gave up asking.

Buck wasn’t happy about journalism class. He didn’t think highly of newspapers and magazines, or the men who wrote for them, after the way they dragged his mother’s name through the ink during the seafood cook’s murder trial. But his senior-high counselor told him that his English teachers agreed he was a good writer when he applied himself, and he needed the semester credit.

But I want to be an artist, Buck said. Mr. Lundgren was going to get me an apprenticeship with his friend in Jacksonville who runs a studio. Drawing and painting all day every day, live nude models, the works.

Yes, well… was all the counselor replied. She pursed her mouth at the word ‘nude’ and her face went funny and her eyes got shifty like the other teachers.

So now he was under the supervision of petite, spare Miss Bensen, she of the slightly protuberant blue eyes, nondescript pageboy haircut and passion for snappy paragraphs. All the other journalism students had been together since September, their assignments settled, so Buck was the odd man out. Miss Bensen liked his writing right away, though, and at least he knew most of his new classmates from six school years on the beaches.

Buck had deep-sea fished with the charter boat captain’s son, who carried his guitar everywhere, hated fishing, and wanted to play in a band. Buck and the county deputy’s son had hunted marsh hens on autumn high tides blown in by the Northeasters. The deputy’s assignment was Palm Valley moonshiners; he had not been involved in the seafood-cook shootings, so the boys remained friends. Buck played Little League baseball against the wealthy Ponte Vedra kid named Larry King when they were in grade school, which remained a bond though Larry went on to Pony League and now starred on the high school varsity squad that Buck never had the nerve to go out for.

Buck’s fourth acquaintance in journalism class was Sharon from his Sunday school class at St. Paul’s by the Sea.

Buck had seen Sharon almost every Sunday since his family moved to the beaches when he was still in grade school. But being with her in a small high school class was different somehow. For one thing, Sharon had blossomed without his noticing. But he noticed now.

Sharon had developed softly rounded curves to go with her ink-black hair, smooth olive skin and those dark glowing eyes that always seemed to brim with some secret amusement. Her unplucked crow-wing-black eyebrows met above her strong nose without a break, symmetrical as the lifted wings of that same crow. To Buck’s fledgling artist’s eye, the effect had always been a reverse negative of the white wings of flying seagulls that Mr. Lundquist had required him to paint repeatedly, until allowing that Buck might one day become a Boardwalk painter good enough to impress Tobacco Belt tourists in July. Sharon’s body was now catching up to her dramatic face; she was like some exotic feline creature among the other teenage girls in class, with their faded tans, pancake makeup and plucked brows.

Buck was fascinated and uneasy with Sharon’s changed appearance, and with her familiar-strange nearness in journalism class instead of Sunday school. He knew that sooner or later he was going to have to deal with girls, despite his grandmother’s incessant warnings against their wiles.

Teenage girls at this stage of their lives were after boys for one of two reasons, his grandmother would lecture, creaking back and forth in her old Georgia rocking chair in their Florida garage apartment. Their first motive was to seduce you into showing interest and then yelling rape if you touched them. The second motive was related to the first, but more deadly, because it went further. They would trick you into doing more than touch, thereby getting them pregnant and roping you into an early marriage.

Then you can kiss your art career goodbye she would tell him. And usually pause in her rocking to unload a brown stream of Butternut snuff into her spit can. His grandmother, he fully understood, was still bitter about the marriages that his three uncles, her sons, had consummated. She believed each of them had fallen for one of the two tricks, or a combination; shameless hussies always went after the honorable boys who would do the right thing for the wrong reason. She wasn’t going to let Buck make the same mistake.

Buck had never understood if the seafood cook should have distrusted Buck’s divorced mother the way his grandmother told him to beware schoolgirls. It would be a lot colder day than this in Florida—or hell for that matter—before he broached that subject. His grandmother was formidable enough without opening a topic that left him more terribly confused and defensive than he had ever been. His mind simply and flatly denied any sexual inference in the alleged relationship between his mother and the convicted cook.

Through the whole bad time, his grandmother marched his family to St. Paul’s by the Sea every single Sunday and stared down the vestry and the gossipers with the ice-blue stare of her Georgia kith and kin, of whom it was said Sherman chose to march wide around them on his way to the sea. Nobody crossed Buck’s grandmother; everyone swallowed their funny looks about the shooting when they saw her coming.

But Sharon never had to swallow a funny look, even when his mother’s name was in all those True Crime magazines, passed from hand to hand at school and whispered over. Because Sharon ignored the whole issue as if it had nothing to do with Buck at all. Buck had liked her well enough all the safe calm years of Sunday school before the publicity, and he was grateful to her then.

She still seemed to like him now, in the new strangeness of journalism class. They worked well together on Sharon’s editorial page, where Miss Bennett eventually assigned Buck for lack of anything better.

Today Buck was on one of the class’s three big Royal typewriters, finishing up an editorial about the evils of driving drunk. Timely and relevant, Miss Bensen said—but don’t be too specific, and cause fresh pain. On Christmas Eve a drunken college kid had slaughtered the longtime high school shop teacher and his wife out on Beach Boulevard. This was the first Northeaster since the event.

Buck pontificated with generalities until he remembered an old Roy Acuff song on the Grand Ole Opry: …I heard the crash on the highway, but I didn’t hear nobody pray…When whiskey and blood ran together, I didn’t hear nobody pray…

He used some of the words he could remember from the cabinet-model radio in a Georgia living room when he was ten. Miss Bensen liked it. Sharon liked it well enough to place it in the upper left hand corner, what she called the lead.

Then Larry King wanted Buck to finish the cartoon he’d volunteered to do for the sports pages. Buck used his left-over India ink and sketch pens to draw a catcher suspended high above a baseball diamond, gloving a Soviet Sputnik, while tiny figures below stared up at him. Nothing gets by that boy, the caption said. Larry, who had shifted from Little League shortstop to varsity catcher and was already itchy for spring training, loved it.

Sharon arched her left eyebrow at Buck, amused over Larry’s enthusiasm. She asked if he could find typos as well as he drew. It was like she was complimenting him and teasing him at the same time, which made him feel strange and excited all at the same time. So he went through the pages of copy with her, proofreading before Miss Benson took the copy to the typesetter. Buck found more than Sharon did. This time Sharon’s arched eyebrow was even more fetching. She allowed that Buck was possessed of many talents.

While Miss Bennett pushed the others to finish their copy because the typesetter downtown closed at 5 p.m., Buck and Sharon talked quietly, mostly about Christmas and the cold weather than had finally come in. Somehow, he never remembered how, it came up in conversation the last school bus had long since departed and Sharon faced a three-mile walk to her home at the south end of Jacksonville Beach. Pause. No, there was no one at home to come get her.

Let me drive you home. Buck plunged in before he could even think.

Her eyes were full of immediate mirth. "I’m not riding behind you on that. Head toss toward the Cushman scooter out the window. What? Hike my skirt clear up—I don’t even know how high!—and show my legs and who knows what to everybody on the beaches? No, thanks."

Buck’s eyes flickered to her slim dark pencil skirt. His estimation was precise as an engineer’s how high she would have to hitch it to climb on his buddy seat. His ears roared like jets taking off. In this land of the endless swimsuit, a high-hiked skirt was instantly inflaming. Particularly if such suddenly naked legs were around his waist. At the same moment that his imagination flamed with the thought of that sensation, he was shocked that she thought he would compromise her dignity that way. And suddenly terribly ashamed of his old motor scooter, that he had liked fine right up until then.

Your ears are turning red. She giggled.

The giggle did it. I didn’t mean the scooter. I meant my car.

What car? She didn’t believe him for a second.

My 1955 Mercury sedan, before he could stop himself. Two-tone, white over maroon, the big V-8 and—and air conditioning!

She cocked her head, considering. I don’t think we’ll need the air conditioning in January, she said. Her eyes were laughing at him again. Does this car of yours have a heater?

Of course it has a heater! He was stung. And sunk. He didn’t have a car; his grandfather did. And his grandfather had not let Buck drive the Mercury three times since he’d turned sixteen. Maybe she’d still turn him down and Buck would be able to save face…

Well, okay, Sharon said. Where’s your car?

At home. Students can’t park cars on the school ground. That at least was true.

Oh. Her mouth turned down. Too bad. The scooter or nothing, huh?

I’ll run home and get it, Buck said. Digging himself deeper. Why couldn’t he stop? It won’t take fifteen minutes.

Well--Okay, she said again. But I’m not going to wait here for you. I’ll just start walking home. You can pick me up on Third Street when you get back.

Buck was out the door before she could take it back, and damn near running to his Cushman. He could feel a clock ticking in his brain like a stopwatch at a track meet. She didn’t want anybody to see her waiting for me. That’s how rumors start in high school. That was really smart of her. He jumped down on the kick starter with something like frenzy. It took four kicks in the cold for the scooter to sputter to life, and then the choke caught and held.

Today it seemed as if he could have walked the first two blocks faster. Then the cold wind of passage seared his face as the Cushman plodded up to speed. His eyes streamed; only sissies wore goggles. Then he was home. He dismounted almost at a run, wondering what the hell to do now. His grandmother was watching Dark Shadows on the old Muntz TV. A soap opera about Barnabas the Vampire. His grandmother liked Barnabas a lot.

What’s got you in such a state of high dudgeon? She dribbled some snuff into her spit can.

Buck had never known what a state of high dudgeon was till just that minute. He would never, later, remember all the lies he told, or in what order, talking a mile a minute, but he used the Sunday school connection with Sharon a lot. His grandmother knew the family name from Ladies Auxiliary. Buck managed to convey that poor Sharon was running a bit of fever from hard school work and might catch her death walking home in the chilling shank of the January afternoon.

Buck’s grandfather was having his third nap of the day. Naps were the God-given right of an honorably retired working man, and his grandfather exercised his rights frequently.

But when his wife woke him up, he was instantly awake and comprehending, like the old fireman he was. He rolled over and started to put on his shoes almost before his eyes were open. Quick as he was, his wife was back with Barnabas, her civic duty done, before he got the first one tied.

I’ll go take the poor child home, Buck’s grandfather was yawning and scratching under his arms.

Buck stood in frozen horror. There was no way he could survive such a disaster. He waited for his life to flash in front of his eyes, because he would die if his grandfather went to take Sharon home. He opened his mouth to try to say something, but he’d never know what. His grandfather had stopped yawning and now he was smirking, more comprehending than Buck could ever have imagined.

You told her you’d come get her yourself, he said.

Buck’s ears burned and his throat locked, but he nodded.

His grandfather took the keys off his dresser and flipped them to Buck.

That Merc is only the third car I’ve ever owned since the First War, he said. Those are cloth and suede seats in that car, you hear? If those seats get anything sticky on them, they still better come home as clean as they leave.

Buck was flattered and horrified all at the same time. He took the keys and fled. His grandfather had a way with women—any woman, any time, anywhere—that gave the lie to his grandmother’s fierce portrait of a man’s vulnerability to treacherous witches one and all. It would have never crossed his mind that Buck wasn’t going to try some hanky panky—any more than it would have crossed his grandmother’s mind that Buck was.

Buck sternly controlled his rioting emotions as he guided the big Mercury out of its narrow garage beneath the TV room. If he dented a fender, he might as well never come home. No one wanted to awaken his grandfather’s titanic temper. At the same time, his grandfather’s words had him trying to think creatively of what hanky panky to try.

Before he knew it he was cruising grandly past the high school, eyes raking the sidewalks on both sides of Third Street for the first sight of Sharon as he drove south. Would she walk on this side to make it easier to stop and pick her up, or on the other side? He wasn’t about to drive right past her by focusing just on one side of the street.

The three miles or so to her cross street at the south end of town twisted time’s pace; it had been racing like a stopwatch before he got the Mercury, but now it slowed to a torpid crawl. Still, he was all the way south before he could quite grasp that Sharon wasn’t on Third Street.

The Mercury’s heater was throwing out far too much heat now. He was sweating through his shirt against the seat. Would that count against him when he turned the car in? He glided all the power widows down and turned off the heater. The deepening chill off the ocean nipped at his ears and fingers. Sweat dried and he shivered. He could always start warming the car up the moment he saw Sharon.

Maybe she had stopped off for a Penny burger and a Coke. He hadn’t thought to look inside the Penny’s dining room as he went past. He was sure she hadn’t been at the Dairy Queen up by the phone company; it was too cold for ice cream. He drove slowly back north, trying to look everywhere at once. Maybe she had changed her mind and waited at the school, out of the cold. Maybe Miss Bensen had made last minute changes to the Northeaster and kept her even later.

Maybe some crazed rapist from New Jersey had snatched her off the street in broad daylight.

The journalism classroom was dark and locked. It felt weird to drive his grandfather’s Mercury around the school-bus loading loop, just another sensation in a day full of weirdness. He went south again. She wasn’t at the Penny Burger. The first doubt assailed him. Maybe he’d heard her wrong. Maybe she said First Street and he heard Third. What an idiot! He drove toward the ocean and turned on First Street, rolling slowly through lengthening shadows past motel after deserted motel. Not a tourist to be seen. The motel pools were empty as the parking lots. Most of the motels had their Vacancy signs turned off; the season was long over.

No sign of Sharon.

That only left Second Street, lined with rental cottages, a few homes and some small apartment buildings. A few locals were out and about in the cold, some of them walking dogs. Every female he saw triggered a rush of relief followed by a deepening sense of dread when it wasn’t Sharon. It was as if she had vanished from the face of the earth, all because he had offered her a ride home. Somehow Buck felt like it was all his fault. He kept looking, cruising and craning his neck, until he reluctantly accepted that enough time had passed for her to walk the entire distance home—maybe crossing back and forth between First and Third watching for him, just when he moved the other way looking for her.

But he didn’t believe that. Something else had happened, something that he couldn’t imagine. Something as unimaginable as the Beach police showing up to question his mother the night that his grandmother had gazed strangely at the moon over the ocean and said blood on the moon—somebody’s gonna die tonight.

Buck wished he had not thought of the grim look on his grandmother’s face the night she made that prediction. Not when Sharon had just walked off the face of the earth.

If the newspapers were to be believed, people died by violence all the time. People—usually children or attractive women—walked away from home or school or work and vanished utterly all the time. Sometimes their brutalized bodies were found weeks or months later, sometimes they were simply—gone. But those things always happened someplace unimaginably far away, like Los Angeles or Toronto. Not here, not on the Beaches. Not until the night of blood on the moon.

The fear that something like that was happening again crept through his unwilling brain. All his excitement was long since drained out of him. Sharon’s big two-story home sat just behind the seawall, quiet and peaceful. Smoke puffed out of a sure-enough chimney, and was shredded by the strengthening onshore breeze. Buck hadn’t seen a smoking chimney since his family moved to the Beaches from Georgia. A whiff of wood smoke momentarily blanked his fear with a rush of vivid memories of a peaceful childhood in a colder but somehow safer place than Florida.

He parked, spinning up all the power windows and carefully locking the Mercury before shrugging into his denim jacket again. The long shadows cast by her big house reached across the seawall now and onto the beach itself. The sunset tide was building strongly now. He trudged up the walk and the wide front stairs, cold and miserable, and rang the bell. A smiling woman, vaguely recognizable from St. Paul’s by the Sea, answered the door and had him step in out of the bitter wind.

In the shiver-provoking warmth of the hall, Buck introduced himself as Sharon’s Sunday school classmate. Her mother said how nice! Then, oh too bad you’ve missed her! She works late on the school newspaper you know.

Buck said he did know. Then his words came in rush. His proffered ride, the agreement to pick her on Third Street, at least he was pretty sure she said Third but it might have been First, and then his search. Maybe Sharon had called from somewhere, been delayed? Something to do with the Northeaster, maybe Miss Bensen needed her at the print shop today?

He was afraid he sounded like an idiot until he saw the worry come up in the woman’s face.

No, Sharon hasn’t called. She called back into the house for her husband. He came to the door looking worn, still in his suit and tie from the city. The grownups exchanged a worried look.

This isn’t like Sharon. Is it? her father asked.

No it isn’t, his wife said.

They all just stood there in the warmth and the smell of wood smoke as if they had run out of a single thing to say. Then that mysterious adulthood thing kicked in and Sharon’s parents put on their company faces and thanked Buck almost formally. For his offer of a ride, then for looking for Sharon so carefully, and finally for letting them know that something must have happened, instead of just giving up and going home like most boys would.

Buck drove home in a daze, and slipped the big car into its narrow stall with the absent-minded grace of a distracted young man with perfect vision and reflexes. After that, he rattled around miserably at loose ends as it got dark. His grandmother was watching the six o’clock news now. Buck was sitting in the dark on the glassed-in downstairs porch, as close has he could to the old Duo-Therm oil heater, when the phone rang downstairs. His grandfather yelled from the kitchen.

Buck. Some girl.

The old man was carefully deadpan when he handed him the phone. First time for everything, his grandfather said. Now they’re calling you at home. Where’s it gonna end?

Buck turned his back, ears burning again. Hello?

Hello, Sharon said on the phone. It sounded like she was suppressing a laugh. Buck felt his stomach flip-flop like it did when he was seasick fishing offshore for snappers.

My mother made me call you, Sharon said. She said you were all worried about me. The amusement in her voice cut him.

Buck didn’t know what to say. I looked everywhere for you, he said finally. What happened to you?

Nothing happened to me, silly! I just decided to walk home along the beach. Feel the cold breeze in my hair. Winters are too short in Florida, don’t you think?

Buck did, in fact, think winters were too short in Florida. Any other time he would have been thrilled that Sharon and he saw eye to eye on that. But he couldn’t shake the emotions of his afternoon.

You walked home along the beach, he repeated mechanically. But you said you’d like a ride home!

No, Sharon said. Laughing openly now. "You said you’d give me a ride. I just changed my mind and decided to walk on the beach."

But I looked for you all over. He hated the whine in his voice.

I knew you probably would, she said. I didn’t want to be bothered. So I took the beach.

At that precise instant, Buck’s grandfather went into the tiny downstairs bathroom on the other side of the kitchen wall to urinate. The sound of the heavy flow came clearly into the kitchen—it was why no one could use that bathroom when there was company. Buck, curled around his numbness at her casual cruelty, suddenly thought he would just go ahead and die if Sharon heard that, sitting in her nice big warm house, with a real fireplace burning real wood.

What’s that sound? she asked right away.

What sound? he said.

You sound dopey, Buck, she said. Did I wake you up? What’s that roaring sound? It sounds just like an electric train going round and round. Do you still play with electric trains, Buck?

Buck couldn’t imagine being much more miserable. What on earth had his grandfather been drinking to make him go on and on like that? The old man never drank beer and had stopped drinking corn liquor when he retired and moved the family to Florida. Finally he was done, and the heavy roaring sound stopped.

I don’t play with electric trains anymore, Buck said.

You just turned off the transformer and stopped your little Lionel train when I caught you! Sharon was having a fine old time. I never knew you were so silly, Buck!

His words—if he had any left—stuck in his throat. His grandmother went on and on about women who yelled rape or who trapped you into marriage. She never warned him about being made to feel like an utter moron. He hated this so bad he was grinding his teeth.

I think playing with an electric train is cute for your age, Sharon said brightly. Maybe I’ll come over someday and help you play with it.

I don’t have an electric train!

He didn’t, either, not technically. He had boxed his Lionel set away carefully with his Gene Autry cap pistols and baseball cards the year his mother bought him the second-hand Cushman and his grandfather gave him a twenty-five-dollar Sears Roebuck shotgun to hunt birds with. He had put away childish things, like it said in the Bible.

Buck? Sharon said. You still there?

He realized they had both got quiet.

All I wanted was to give you a ride home, he said doggedly.

Well, I just decided that I didn’t want you to.

He wondered how he could ever face her in class again, let alone her girlfriends when she told them what a dupe she’d made of him.

Maybe he could skip Sunday school from now on. He was a senior for god’s sake, almost ready to go out into the world, maybe get drafted and sent to that strange Southeast Asian place that had wrecked the French army, Dien Bien—whatever it was called. Kennedy would draft Floridians first of course, because the enemy over there laid ambushes in humid swamps with poisonous snakes and insect swarms. It would be like hunting suspicious moonshiners in Florida before the first November cold snap.

You got quiet again, Sharon said.

Her voice sounded like she was about to giggle again. He had gone so far away in his head that he was almost surprised she was still on the phone.

You could have just told me you didn’t want a ride, he said.

I didn’t want to hang around on the street where you could bother me about it.

Second time she said it. Such a simple thing to say. Such a dagger in his heart. She might as well have accused him of being a rapist, as his grandmother had warned. Angry words jammed all together in his head, salted with bitterness and hurt. I didn’t mean to bother you, your Highness! Kiss my pimply Georgia ass, Princess! Not on the left side and not on the right side, but right in the middle… It’ll be a cold day in hell before I bother you again, you heartless bitch!

Well, guess I’ll see you in class, is what he said.

Buck? Sharon said.

What?

You won’t say anything about this in class, will you?

Perfect. She was afraid someone would know she’d almost let him drive her home. What part was he not supposed to mention, he wanted to ask: me acting like a complete fool, you tricking me like that, or that you even permitted me for one single second to think I might—what? Be permitted the pleasure of your company for three lousy miles home?

I won’t say anything, he said.

Good! Her voice was amused again, lightly teasing. You sure you don’t have a Lionel train for me to come over and play with?

What? She changed course too fast for him. No I don’t have a train.

His put-away childish train was in fact a really nice Lionel, but best to stick with the lie, once told. Anything else and she’d think he was joining whatever crazy game she was playing now. He thought he was going to be physically sick, like mal de mer. He had to get off the phone. But he didn’t know how.

Guess you’ll just have to come see me here then, Sharon said. I don’t have an electric train either, but maybe we can think of something to do.

See you in class, he said again. Good night, Sharon.

He never went back to her house, of course. He did drop out of Sunday school. He could barely stand being in the room with her in journalism class. But he armored his soul against any residual spark he felt from those dark laughing eyes, and it got easier before graduation.

He never saw Sharon again after the evening he saw her in a cap and gown at graduation. He never found out what happened to Mr. Lundgren. He never got an apprenticeship with a studio in Jacksonville to paint live nude models.

Instead, he went to work as a copy boy for a Jacksonville newspaper because his journalism teacher knew the city editor. He thought it about as likely that he would get a chance to be a reporter as it was that he would ever get kissed. Since he shied away from any slightest possibility of intimacy with females, those were long odds.

Ever since that afternoon with Sharon, he could not bring himself to trust any evidence of interest in him by a girl. He could have blamed his grandmother’s doleful warnings. But he blamed it all on the unexpected curriculum change.

Chapter Two

Monday to Remember

Buck hit the fifth floor newsroom that Monday right at six a.m., as he had been hitting it give or take a couple minutes for five days a week every week for two years until two weeks ago. Two weeks ago he had begun his first official paid vacation, and now it was over.

As the elevator door swished shut behind him, he paused. The first thing that hit him was the new-old sensation you get when you’ve been away officially and are coming back. It was kind of like September, going back to school, but felt far more serious. He thought maybe the end of his first paid vacation in his chosen line of work represented some kind of watershed. His uneasy honeymoon with puberty was over and a settled marriage to his balls was now in prospect; he was grown.

From all the way back behind the deserted newsroom he could hear the hammering of the ranked Associated Press and United Press International teleprinters, banging the world news onto their long spools of paper. The hot-oily smell of their electric motors had penetrated all the way to the elevator lobby, mingled with always-present chemical smells from the engraving department. He thought he would remember these Monday mornings of his life long after Friday nights were all mixed up with Saturday hangovers and regrets.

He started the long walk through the newsroom on the worn rubber runner past the executive editor’s suite and the state editors’ desks on the left, and the entire assembly of the a.m. paper’s vacant desks on the right. Next were the sports department desks on the left and the Sunday magazine desks on the right.

The crew-cut p.m. sports editor was already in his copy-desk horseshoe with one rim man, studying the weekend game