The Stringers, page 24
“How do I put it? Writers write. They don’t think. Thinking is for philosophers. That’s the difference between writers and everyone else. They put down what people can see and hear and taste and touch but can’t describe. Written words. Not just verbal words. The way they have it now got rid of all that. There really aren’t any writers. Just thinkers.”
He pointed at the typewriter. “That’s why we have these. That, and the ISA can’t track them. Not much they can do about it. You can’t hack into a typewriter, and they don’t carry information on them unless the paper’s in there when you find it. You don’t need much security for them, either. Having guns and not being a moron usually helps, too.”
I stopped typing and pushed the typewriter away from me. I waved off the cigarette smoke and told Tom I didn’t care for the smell.
“Why not?”
“Reminds me of death.”
“Ha! You’ll get a lot of reminders of that in this business.”
“If I can avoid it.”
“Kid, there’s some things you’ve got to let go of, for your own sake. One of them is your sensitivity. This is no picnic. People have a lot of pressure on them to deliver. Trust me, you’ll find that out soon enough. A smoke is far better way to take out stress than some of the other means men do, and you aren’t that kind of guy.”
I eyed the door and asked if I could leave for a minute. I didn’t see the harm in taking a walk along the street to get some fresh air. But Tom did. I didn’t get to complete my sentence before he shook his head.
“No way, kid. Not yet. We’ve got work to do.”
“This is work?”
“Don’t ask too many questions yet.”
I sighed and rubbed the side of my head as I leaned on the table with my elbow. “I hope this isn’t going to last much longer.”
“What?”
“Being cooped up and not being able to go out and do something.”
“Like what?”
I paused. “I don’t know…fun, like go to a park or restaurant. Just go out. I want to have a life at some point.”
Tom looked at me for a while, appearing staid. Then he unrolled his jacket and placed it on my cot and sat next to me. He took out a pack of cigarettes even as I glared at him and lit one and puffed on it lightly.
“I’m sorry, kid,” he said quietly. “But you don’t seem to have a clue what you’re in. You really don’t. I can’t blame you. You’re young. You’ve been taught to see the world from a certain view, I guess. That doesn’t change overnight. I get it. But that’s got to change soon. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not the day after that. But soon. Before you go waltzing in to the newsroom and blab off to the wrong guy. You’ve got to have the right mindset or you won’t last a day in this business. I don’t see why McCullen’s little speech to you didn’t send the right message.”
“What message?”
Tom sighed again and ran his fingers through his hair, gazing up at the ceiling as cigarette smoke sifted through his mouth and trailed off above him. “Kid, you talk about having a life. I get you. We all wanted one. I remember when I was your age. I wanted a life like yours. But that isn’t the way the game turned out for you. You got dealt the wrong hand, but you played it, and now you’ve got this.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Tom stood up and moved himself closer to me, his elbows on his knees as he stared into my eyes with the same solemnity as the doctor who had told me my mother had just died.
“Whatever life you had before, kid, it’s over. Gone. Dead. It ain’t coming back, and you can’t get it back. Like throwing a document in a furnace. You can’t piece it together again. When you got fingered by the ISA for that column and you didn’t rat out your old man, it was over. You can’t go back to it, and they wouldn’t let you even if you tried. That’s the nature of this business. It’s clichéd, but true. Once you join this racket, you can’t get out of it. It ain’t a cliché because there isn’t one guy who pulled it off, and believe you me plenty have tried. So you aren’t going to be walking in the park or eating at those swanky joints you used to eat at with your friends. Most of them you won’t ever get to see again. You live in this world now. It’s got everything you need. It ain’t always pretty, but it’s all you got. Unless you want to rot in an ISA holding cell for the rest of your life, and I know men who are because they wouldn’t just let it go and live life for all its miseries. Life didn’t prepare you for it, but you have to grow up fast, kid. You can’t let expectations in life tell you what you can live with. You accept what you can and tolerate what you can and ignore what you can. The rest is…well, it’s life.”
I looked away from Tom and put my head on my fist and pretended to be meditating about what he had said. In reality, I was defiant. I knew he was telling the truth, as he saw it. He had that resignation in his voice. In my heart I didn’t accept it. It seemed wise to do so. But the price was more than I was willing to pay. To surrender was to give up the only hope I had left—finding my father and freeing him.
I would never give up.
I must have appeared despondent to Tom, for he rose and patted me on the shoulder and left the pack of cigarettes on the table and told me if I needed one I could take them all. He had plenty to spare. Alone, I looked down at the cigarettes and picked them up, lifting back the makeshift opening. They were all hand-rolled, some thick and crammed with tobacco, others thin and lean. I breathed in the dark, leafy aroma and then placed the pack on the table, shoving it over to Tom’s side. They were a source of comfort to those who had no hope.
As I was about to get up and move to my cot, I paused and looked back at the pack sitting there, wondering if whether I should leave them be. Tom would come back in the morning and see them. He was perceptive enough to know I hadn’t smoked one and the implications from that.
Maybe my old life was dead. Or not. But I wouldn’t let anyone else determine that. Not the ISA. Not McCullen. No one. Everyone else before me had evidently failed. It made me think of the first men to climb Everest, Tenzing and Hillary. No one had succeeded before them. But they had climbed it anyway. It reminded me of what my father used to say to me; if you only try things that you know you’ll succeed in, you’ll never accomplish anything.
Nevertheless, Tom was right on some level. I could keep my hope. But I couldn’t go around advertising it to everyone. Or anyone. Including him.
I slipped out two cigarettes from the pack, lit them with the lighter he had left for me, and watched as they burned between my fingers. I blew into them until a thin column of smoke rose like that of a distant campfire in the horizon, and then I snuffed them out and scattered the ashes around and threw the remains in the garbage can.
***
The rest of the week was spent honing my typing and writing skills. After several days we stopped working on my writing and concentrated on typing until I could use the typewriter without looking down at the keys, having memorized their places.
Tom didn’t have me dedicate my time solely to those two, though. When he was convinced I had reached the point where I could do both tasks at a rudimentary level, he integrated it with other assignments. He took away Common Sense and handed me previously written newspaper articles for me to copy, using a stopwatch to gauge my speed, shaking his head and barking at me when I didn’t complete them in time.
Deadline. He emphasized that above everything else. Because it was a print newspaper, there was a deadline. Not the kind of deadline I had come to understand. Working for a news site, the deadline was when the story reached its peak of interest and readership, and thus would generate the most views. Once the story itself died down, usually within a few hours, the deadline had passed. Depending on the story, the deadline was a few hours or a few minutes, sometimes a day or two if more details kept coming out and adding to it.
With the newspapers, however, it was the same deadline every day, 6 p.m. sharp. Aside from the rare exception, I could never be late for a deadline. If I was handed an assignment, I had to get it done, whatever the cost.
This didn’t concern me until Tom told me how he almost missed a deadline, meeting it only after he had shot his way through a street in Ballard with three other stringers pursuing him.
“Why were they shooting at you?” I asked.
Tom cocked his head to the side, but then seemed to realize he had neglected to tell me something.
“We ain’t the only newspapers, you know,” he said.
“I know.”
“Then you’ll know that we ain’t the only one sending stringers out to get stories. There are others from the competing newspapers. The stuff we print is important, especially if we get to it first. That means people buy our paper instead of someone else’s. Because we have deadlines, all of us, it means if we get to a story and they don’t, it gets printed in our newspaper first, and usually that means they don’t get the story because by the time it gets published in their paper the readers don’t care anymore because they got it from us first. That’s why we meet our deadlines. It’s the difference between someone picking up our newspaper and buying it or not. A lot of newspapers have come and gone because their stringers didn’t cut it and they caved or got bought out.”
“What kind of stories do you write?”
“Depends on what you’re assigned to write about. We write whatever doesn’t get published in the PR shit called the media, the ones who kowtow to whatever the ISA says. Think about it; anything you can’t ‘prove’ doesn’t get published. For us, we ain’t burdened with the proof, so to speak. We don’t have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt something happened. In fact, it’s the opposite here. Somebody don’t like what we say, they got to prove otherwise.”
“Doesn’t that mean you can just print whatever you want and it doesn’t have to be true? Where’s the incentive to get the facts straight?”
“Money, kid. Money’s the incentive to be accurate. If we don’t get it right, people who we need to talk to don’t talk to us. We get the story wrong, people don’t trust our paper. And then we die. I know what you’re thinking. What if somebody thinks we libeled them? They can’t sue us, but they can get their story out in another newspaper and if readers think they’re telling the truth, they won’t trust us. We print shit all the time people don’t like, but what they can’t do is dispute it because we did our homework and did it proper. That’s why we have to get it right. We’re not doing it because we’re bound to some divine obligation to be honest. It’s because men like McCullen are too greedy to lie when it doesn’t yield a profit. If we wanted to lie we would have gone to work for regular news sites.
“Think about it, kid. People want to read about what’s really going on. They want to know the truth that doesn’t get printed. They want to know the real reason why taxes go up or why prices are rising and costs are increasing They want to know why a road on one side of the city is nice and paved and another is full of potholes, why one school gets all the funding and the other looks like it got hit by a meteorite. They want to know about how bad crime really is, where murders are occurring and scandals and what not. They want be able to read people’s opinions without having to censor themselves out of fear from that damn ISA. They won’t find this out from a news site that can’t publish anything they can’t prove when they got ‘standards’ so high that even God couldn’t climb over them. They go to us, and that’s what gets them to pay for it and believe you me it ain’t cheap, either. But people will pay, because they know they’re getting their money’s worth. And, to get back to my original point, that’s why we don’t miss those godforsaken deadlines, because we’re McCullen’s Press, and we get the story first.”
“And that involves shooting other stringers?” I asked as I pointed at the pistol holstered on his hip.
A strained crease in Tom’s features appeared as he gripped his chair. He pulled back the edge of his jacket and glanced at his pistol. He then un-holstered it, took out the clip, emptied the chambered round, then placed it on the table between us.
“Aside from your pen and notepad, this is your most important tool,” he said. “This place ain’t a freedom-loving utopia, kid. Don’t get me wrong. We all hate the ISA and the feds. On that, we’re a big happy familia. But that’s where it ends. It’s not a paradise filled with lots of patriots and Americans yearning to fight for their civil liberties and the freedom of the press and all that fluff shit. You’re got a bunch of people who want to make a fast buck and they’re willing to plug you full of holes if you get in their way. And you will always get in their way. You’re going to want the same story as them. You’re going to want to talk to the same person as them. You may get to them first, but if you can’t shoot straight and true it won’t mean a glass of lukewarm beer.”
I picked up the pistol and examined it gingerly. It felt heavy, but when I aimed it at the wall it had an even balance in both hands. I set it down and picked up one of the large cartridges, peering at the gaping hole at the tip, imagining what it would be like to get shot with one.
Tom chuckled and took the bullet from me. “This will put a man down. One shot, if you aim right. 45. caliber. Hollow point, flattens on impact, maximum damage to the internal organs, goodnight sir.”
“Have you killed anyone?” I asked.
“I don’t think about it, kid,” Tom replied.
“Do you think that’s good?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. Why should I think about it? None of them were innocent. I only got one rule. I don’t shoot first. I’ve never shot at a man who didn’t shoot at me first. So no, I don’t get worked up about it. No point to it. Another thing you’ll have to learn, kid, is to never let your moral senses get the better of you. It ain’t pleasant to put a man down while he’s on the ground screaming because you plugged him in the leg and it’s dangling by the bone. But you do it, anyways, because you know if you don’t he will come after you someday and when you’re on the ground like that he won’t be merciful.”
“May I ask you something?” I said.
“You just did.”
“…right, anyways, have you ever shot a policeman?”
He glowered as he lowered his head, his tone full of severity. “Depends on what you would call a ‘policeman.’ Some of them are just like soldiers. You can’t tell the difference. Honestly, couldn’t tell you the truth on that. I try not to shoot the local boys, but then again they’re not the biggest worry. The ISA makes sure that they don’t get involved. They love their jurisdiction too much to allow anyone to take the credit or glory for busting a newspaper gang. ISA officers, on the other hand, that ain’t the same. I’ve shot plenty of them. Not killed them all. Wounded, mostly. But I don’t have any trouble shooting them. I have no qualms putting lead into their hides.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Simple. They’re all sociopaths.”
I stiffened my back as I stood up in my chair. “What?”
Tom raised an eyebrow. “Confused?”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said,” he replied. “They’re sociopaths. Everyone last damn one of them.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” I protested.
“Ha! Of course, I do!”
I didn’t answer right away, startled not merely by his claim but the assertiveness with which he made it. As though it were a scientific fact.
“How can you judge so many people like that?” I asked. “You can’t judge an entire agency like they’re one person. Some of them I’m sure are good people.”
“That don’t matter,” Tom said. “They’re sociopaths. They just fooled you. Look at the way they treated you. Is that how decent people treat others?”
Thinking of Casey, I frowned and gestured firmly at Tom. “I think you’re wrong on this one. I know some, one. He tried to help me. He protested when I was treated badly.”
Tom lowered his legs, which he had had planted on top of the table while listening to me with raised eyebrows. He folded his hands and grinned.
“Tell me something, kid,” he said. “If you saw a man attacking your old man or threatening a friend, what would you do?”
I thought for a second and then answered that I would try to stop them.
“Exactly,” he said. “You wouldn’t just protest like one of those worthless little beagle rat dogs. You’d act. You’d intervene. You wouldn’t try to be polite or tactful about it. Nobody has any time for a sissy loser who feels they have to be submissively cordial when standing up against an enemy.”
“No. I suppose I wouldn’t.”
He raised his eyebrows, offering a wry grin. “Doesn’t that bother you, kid? You’re having your rights violated, arrested without formal charges, interrogated, tortured, sleep deprived, and whatnot, then sent to a detention facility where you would have spent the rest of your life probably, and all this ‘friend’ did was protest? Seriously? You kidding me, kid?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Explain.”
“He…he couldn’t have done any good by trying to stop them.”
“No,” he said. “But then again, I wouldn’t be able to do much against a whole gang trying to kill a friend of mine. But I wouldn’t sit there and do nothing. I’d act, even if it meant I died along with him. That’s what normal people do. Sociopaths don’t.”
“I don’t follow.”
“All those people at the ISA are there to tell other people what to do who aren’t hurting anybody. And they ain’t there because they have to be. Nobody put a gun to their head and forced them to join. That means they want to be there, and the only person that I figure who’d want to be there has to be a sociopath.”
Flustered, I leapt up to interrupt him, but Tom held up his hand and chuckled. “Hold on and listen. Think about this: Those people who worked in the waiting rooms, the ones who sat behind the counter and ‘helped’ you see if they could find the charges filed against your father. You think they had any idea that he had been arrested without charges, without a warrant?”
