Zodiac Pets, page 4
“Writers, editors, staff of the Bobcat,” I began. “My name is Graham A. Bundt. I am an Adams. I am the partial owner and editor-in-chief of the Pennacook Beat, our town’s only weekly. I grew up in Pennacook and have dedicated my professional life to journalism. Your teacher, Mr. Susco, was my teacher and edited my work when I was on the Bobcat, and now I want to be your editor, at the Beat. I have eight after-school slots for staff across all divisions. The work will be demanding, but there will be many rewards.”
“Will we be paid?”
“You will not be paid but there will be many intangible rewards. You will fact-check. You will answer the phone. You will interview citizens. You will design the paper and insert ads. You will deliver it. You will proofread and edit articles, and you will write them.”
Mr. Susco leaned back on his heels and whistled.
“Under my close supervision and management, of course. I—I’ll always have your back.”
“In short,” Mr. Susco interjected, “it will be just like the Bobcat, but real.”
He saluted me with a fist. Under his breath at the door he added, “You’ve bitten off a nice big chunk there, buddy. Hope you can chew it.”
The Bobcats Impress Graham
They came aboard in June and made quick work of my Perry White-style hard-ass orientation. As the summer progressed, they dazzled me with their efficiency and pluck. Tuned to grand themes, they didn’t bog down in small stuff, like the rules of capitalization or nonsense questions like “Is that a word?” We don’t have ages, I’d tell them. If they used it, it was a word or probably should be. They trusted me and moved on. I knew these rulings were loose—I wasn’t always sober when I made them. But (to my addled G1 brain) this was only history’s first draft and whether you were seventy-five or in seventh grade, you couldn’t get it right.
Mind you, there was room to grow. Children are prone to snap judgments, and this told in Obits. Bill Marino’s “Herb Schmidt should have done more with his kids” comes to mind.
“How can you know that?” I asked him.
“Everything I write is based on things people said. You want me to lie. Then, like, what’s the point.”
“No one’s that nice. We all need a little help at the end.”
“My mom’s that nice. My brother Harold. Jim from the store. Dad’s okay, I guess. Rufus (that’s my dog)—”
Above ground, I had to stamp out a folksy Weather trope. Simon Fells personified one season, which had already passed, and delivered all reports from his blinkered point of view. “Old Man Winter Tweaks Spring’s Schnozz: Temps Plunge to Thirties.” “Old Man Winter Snoozes through June.”
“Enough already. There is no Old Man Winter.”
“There is if only you believe in him with all your heart.”
I couldn’t read this or his daft grin. At twelve, the boy was probably yanking my chain. But more than once they had surprised me with their tears. Was it plausible that he had taken the message of holiday specials all too seriously and for far longer than the others? Then again, who was Old Man Winter anyway? I didn’t feel a lot of mythic resonance behind the name. No Hollywood franchise there.
Then we had Science Corner. I recalled that I had tanked the Iowa Test in both grades three and four and recognized that, like most of the kids, Sally Boone was probably destined within a few short years to grow smarter than I was. In Science Corner, her searching mind plumbed everything from alien signals to John Q. Taxpayer’s miserly short-sightedness where warp drive was concerned—wild new topics for me. Great for the Bobcat but here in the Beat? I explained to Sally that my high regard for the Bobcat’s range notwithstanding, I felt it my unhappy duty to enforce a certain myopia in our adult paper. A debate raged. It began at my desk and crescendoed through the newsroom. We were speaking different languages. “Sales matter” was my theme. Sally’s was—well, everything. Her subject seemed boundless, just like one of her pieces said the multiverse was.
“I’m cutting,” I said, putting my foot down. “Our writ doesn’t run to space.”
Shaking, Sally fired back. “You—business man. Of course it matters. We’re all in space.”
I had the now familiar feeling of being more logical but wrong. Wild over-generalization, straw men, and hyperbole were all hallmarks of the middle-school mind. They also signaled a passion that trumped any Beat interest that I could identify anymore, and I dreaded the crumpled look of a middle schooler over whom I had mowed with my authority. I decided to fall back on my first principle of supporting the kids’ enthusiasms within broad limits.
“Brian: X that. Move up Science Corner. I want it on the front page!”
The whole staff cheered.
“Above the fold?”
“Beneath.”
“Boo.”
“One more word and no Fun Friday.”
The much-used threat was empty and they knew it. I needed Fun Friday more than anyone. They were an ace staff from Saturday delivery to Thursday night when they put it to bed. But on Friday they crashed and turned surly, pushed to the wall by my stiff deadlines. For the broader peace, I let them scarf Smartfood and play Minecraft on Friday. No shoot-’em-ups, and no excluding. (Guess who wiped the keyboards.)
Another change that summer concerned the Beat’s décor. Mr. Susco had acquired an excess of tchotchkes from almost forty years of teaching and trucked some over in his battered Ford pickup. Educational posters (hygiene, the Bill of Rights). A full Union uniform with sword. Harriet Tubman posing in her shawl.
“Are you sure we can take this?” I asked, holding like an enormous prize check a crazy old map that had Virginia and the Carolinas stretching infinitely westward.
“Believe me, I’ve got plenty.”
The kids’ labor—and rising subscriptions—freed me up for a deferred Adams project. First I printed an adventure story, about John and the boy John Quincy crossing the Atlantic to represent America to France during the Revolutionary War. But it seemed even a bolt of lightning striking the Boston’s main mast could not rouse Pennies from their Adams antipathy. Then I tried my hand at the bestselling romance genre, reprinting the sexiest of the John-and-Abigail letters. But this stuff—“Words cannot convey to you the tenderness of my affection.” “We have not yet been much distressed for grain.”—just wasn’t hot. For the final piece, I broke my rule-of-thumb against headlines in the form of questions in a last-ditch effort to seize the limelight. I have it here somewhere. Oh, yes, here it is. I’ll read it!
WAS ADAMS, NOT MADISON, THE TRUE FATHER
OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION?
A number of Pennies will no doubt object that Adams wasn’t even in North America during the Constitutional Convention. He was in London, before the Court of St. James’s! So he couldn’t have written the U.S. Constitution. But how many of you know that Adams personally wrote the Massachusetts Constitution, the oldest working constitution in the world? It created the basic—*
By now, the swirling rumors had reached us. Unnamed interests were planning to plop some kind of geodesic dome over at least part of the town, to keep out rain and avert further flooding. I didn’t think floods worked that way. If you wanted to stop the floods, you’d better put that dome over the entire Merrimack Valley. Or even the White Mountains and Lake Winnipesaukee, which the Pennacook River’s headwaters came from.
All through summer, the dome rumors persisted. I was generally averse to wading into divisive and depressing Beat content (I know: very G1) but, as with the carcinogenic schools, I felt duty-bound to call this one out. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. In early September, a sassy LTE (one in a long line of Penny exit letters that we published) responded to my initial, neutral article on the subject and topped anything that I could write. It took dead aim at the dome and was the first major swipe against it. I pulled that for you, too:
Dear Beleaguered Editor:
Re: “Pennies Ponder Pennacook Dome.” Now why the heck does this town need a helmet? This ain’t no Tycho crater nor the sulfuric clouds of Venus. Last I checked, Earth’s O2 is 100% breathable to apes the likes of us (I hear it’s even free in places). Maintenance alone on that mucky plastic will be through the roof (er, dome). Le dôme scrubbing. Le dôme repair. Blasted le dôme insurance. Not to mention that armed secure checkpoint that some of y’all wackos want staked at le dôme’s entrance. Whatever happened to “no new taxis”? [sic] Wake up, domies!
Luv ya,
Mainely Moved My Stuff to Bangor Already
I figured that Mainely’s rant would put a knife in le dôme cher and take it down for good.
Interviewer
But it didn’t.
GAB
No, it did not.
Interviewer
Now, I want to stay chronological. Imagine I’m a camera on your shoulder.
GAB
A camera on my shoulder?
Interviewer
Metaphorically speaking. I’m a camera on your shoulder, and I’m following you around, all through that ominous year. We’ve gotten through summer, and you’ve introduced the Bobcats. It’s fall now, and that means—
GAB
Athena!
* At this point in our interview, I interrupted Graham—“Stop!”—and firmly redirected him to the dome. “Right!” he conceded. Too much G1.”
Graham Meets Athena
As autumn swept in, the dome rumors had settled to a simmer. I felt good about the paper for the first time in years and looked forward even more than usual to my annual meeting with Athena, my once-removed contact for P.M., my secret Beat partner in the Chaeronea Company. My understanding was that P.M. was an investor who had created Chaeronea to own and operate the Beat. I had taken the helm in exchange for sweat equity.
For the better part of two decades P.M. and I had communicated only through Athena. We met once per year, on Halloween day, over far too many All-In hot dogs (spicy mustard, chopped onions, and relish, placed under a steamed hot dog, on a steamed bun) at the ten-stool Lion Diner (1923), a 10 × 20 converted lunch-cart “Where the Posh Nosh.”
The barrel-roofed diner was my favorite spot in town. It was reliably open on only a few scattered holidays. Most days it was covered over by bamboo and palm fronds to discourage the Penny trespasser. The props lent the diner an air of mystery, as if it were a small-town, patty-melt equivalent to the back-alley speakeasies of yesteryear. I enjoyed all the old-timey touches, down to the china plates with aster on their lips. I’d balance-bike by on a hungry day, and if they were open, you’d find me there for hours, filling up for the season. If they were closed, I toddled off to End’s Meat, the budget-beef eatery: only the round. My other favorite spot, Shorty’s Rib Cage, was gone. Shorty’s left after the Bounty Bag supermarkets, their best buyer, evacuated Pennacook. Mr. Robinson, the proprietor, was a Southern gentleman and almost the only Black man in town. He confided that it wasn’t just about the supermarket. He and his crackerjack daughter Doreen didn’t care for the town’s recent “sour note.”
As always, Athena and I reported in costume. I was second president of the United States John Adams, who I’ve been told was my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather and whom I somewhat resemble: short and cherubic, but with the Benjamin Franklin up top (half-bald pate ringed by wavy hair-curtains). Athena was highly suitable as her namesake.
Inside, Athena set down her plumed helmet and awarded Stu his annual Halloween hug from a Greek goddess. Stu was the discreet, golden-smiled sweetheart in the Red Sox cap who, for the past decade or so, had manned the diner, silently slabbing relish and mustard on our well-steamed buns. I had always featured him as a retiree lovingly carrying on an old trade, in part for the extra dough but mostly for the neighborliness of diner life, and for the whip-smart humor and snappy one-liners that I associated with crusty locals in such places. Though I had yet to detect such wit in Pennacook.
We settled in for dogs and small talk. My pet topic was Josephine’s extended jaunt, as I still liked to frame it (divorce papers had been prepared for my signature; they rested in a clasped envelope on my kitchen counter). Athena’s was her overcomplicated polyamorous adventures, and especially the various logistical issues they gave rise to. Some of those stories lacked a proper dramatic arc, for the disinterested observer, but I was always left with some newfangled polyamory terms to look up. I wondered how anyone could hang on to more than one person, given what had happened with Josephine.
Athena had a fresh angle on things. She’d once avowed that she was an anarcho-syndicalist (“like Camus, or Dennis from Monty Python and the Holy Grail”). And yet politics, I had gleaned, was not a major concern. She had too many other pursuits. There were the personal entanglements of her polycule and the Muskrat, and her time-consuming hobbies: gardening (basil, grapes) and jazz trombone in Jack Teagarden’s style (at least two hours a day). She also had this proxy role for P.M., which didn’t quite fit in the puzzle I had been building of her. But the lynchpin to it all was Gags ‘n’ Strops. Gags ‘n’ Strops was her kinky vegan-leatherwork business. It had a lucrative online component, but was also brick-and-mortar. Athena had a quaint wooden workshop out back, redolent of hay and maple but plagued by bees, that also served as a store and demonstration room. She leveraged the colony’s contacts (from the Renaissance fair, the sci-fi conference, the circus) for customers. Her hands-on training, which commanded a large fee—she was courting the wrathful blue laws while catering to a specialized taste—also helped finance the Muskrat through winter. Indeed, Gags ‘n’ Strops paid for nearly everything, including the trombone. Anarcho-syndicalism had bold plans to overturn the world. For Athena it may simply have been a way of interrupting “Stars Fell on Alabama” to say, “Let me be. I’m playing.”
The subject of today’s small talk wasn’t polyamory but golf.
“Did you know I’m against golf?” she asked.
“I did not know that.”
I fiddled with a cufflink.
“It’s an elitist, costly sport wasting untold gallons of water on grass they’ll never let grow.”
“That doesn’t sound very good.”
I relaxed. Athena would carry the conversation. My only duty was to remain curious and good-humored like John Adams on a day off, which, in her presence, I was. I tapped my fingers. I could smell the onions grilling.
“The sport itself is bunk. What did Twain say? ‘Golf is a good walk wasted.’ Unless it was Lincoln.” Eyes wide, she touched a finger to the corner of her mouth. “Couldn’t be Lincoln.” She clasped my forearm. “I know it wasn’t John Adams!”
I grinned. (G1 always welcomed a reminder of his heritage. I’m not yet totally beyond this.)
She said golf balls from a nearby course plagued the Muskrat, knocking the clapboard and threatening bloody murder. Over at the grill, Stu grunted. Athena pinched her face in a cute frown and stuck her tongue out.
I didn’t know a single Penny golfer and was surprised that Stu was one. Hard to feature him in those preppy duds. It was easier to see him in a bullfight, as the bull. This was probably because of what he was doing now. After Athena stuck her tongue out at him, Stu had turned to the side and begun pacing back and forth in the diner’s miniscule galley, arms down straight and heavy shoes clomping. On a pivot, the light hit Stu in an odd way and lent his face a strange, pressed look. A less romantic comparison than a bull would be a prisoner in a cramped jail-yard. Stu often paced in down moments. I guessed it was on some doctor’s order to prevent blood clots. On his way back up the galley, he caught my eye, and the reassuring smile broke through. I surprised myself by sighing with relief: I had been holding my breath through the demonstration.
Inevitably, it came time to go over the numbers, buffeted the past quarter—I boasted—by my expenses-free Bobcats, who, at the moment, were blackening the windows for a haunted-newsroom party I had allowed. Athena complimented me on my staffing coup and smiled in the manner of a generous grammar-school teacher at my latest fanciful plan to advance the Beat’s fortunes. An “Eat for Hunger” fundraiser was the notion: a timed, All-Ins eating contest right there at the Lion—if we could reach the owner and fix a day. We’d sponsor to elevate their profile and boost goodwill while forging Beat filler. (I still like the concept.)
“That sounds swell,” Athena said, and moved on.
After Hoodsies—vanilla and chocolate ice cream face off in a wax-paper cup—she handed me a check and gave me a firm handshake.
“Farewell, Adams.”
“Goodbye, Athena.”
She donned her helmet, visor up to show her beauty, and sped away in her red convertible—top down, white robes trailing in the wind.
Interviewer
What did happen with Josephine?
GAB
She left me. Flew the coop to Errol, in remotest New Hampshire: above the Notch with a narcissistic lumberjack. That’s how G1 saw it. Does it matter?
Interviewer
It’s the rare topic from my questionnaire on which you didn’t write at length. The other is the time you lost a fortune with Bundterbikes, your Woonsocket adult balance-bike business. It makes me wonder what else you’ve left out.
GAB
I don’t dwell on that stuff anymore, and it didn’t seem important. My failures: who cares! But if you must know, the bank guy screwed me.
Interviewer
That’s right. Keep hiding. Keep blaming someone else.
GAB
(hums “Man in the Mirror”)
Remember that tune? “Man in the Mirror,” by Michael Jackson? It’s famous. It’s a good eighties song with a message. It means: sometimes, when you’re blaming someone else for the world’s problems, you’d better take a look at yourself, the “man” in the “mirror.” Okay, so maybe that’s a silly G1 example (that guy’s contagious, once you start him up!). But my point—I mean it kindly—is this: maybe you’re the one who’s hiding something. Maybe that’s why we’re stuck in this dynamic.
