Dead Fish Jumping On The Road

Chapter Two

Chapter Two“Sassafrass!” spat Theodore Graff, as I bulled my way into the meagre offices of the Applewood Gazette, paid circulation 12, 331, balancing a cup of coffee and an apple danish in one hand and a brownie bag containing all my writing stuff—pencils, pads, erasers, and leaky pens in the other. At short arm's length, Teddy, who wasn't tall but almost excessively squat, blew out his apple cheeks, pursed his thick lips and scrutinized the front page of the afternoon edition as he leaned over the composing table in the middle of the room. By the severity of his scowl, I could tell instantly he disliked the results.

The cigar he'd been sucking on for the past week jutted from his rubbery lips as he closed one eye and stared hard at the page, then did the same with the other.

" Crooked," he muttered disgustedly. Then roared at the top of his lungs, “Stumpy!”

“Hi Teddy,” I said.

He swiveled his thick head about to unleash a blast in my direction. Just then, however, Stumpy Butler, the ancient, wizened pressman, his Popeye-like forearms hanging helplessly at his sides, black ink smeared up to the elbows, leaned in from the composing room.

“You called, Teddy?” he asked in a querulous, innocent voice, as if he might have heard someone call him from a long distance off but wasn't sure and decided to check, just in case. Stumpy owned about three teeth and appeared frequently bamboozled if not drunk. The typesetter broke down the week before and while repairs were effected, Stumpy knocked in type the old way, by hand. Except. With Stumpy, that word lay there, except.

“Crooked again, Stumpy,” Teddy growled at him, doing his best to snarl and curl his lip upward.

“How do you mean?” Stumpy asked in his quavery way.

“The type is crooked, goddammit. It's very simple, Stumpy. It isn't straight. How can I get out an edition when the type is all over the place, man? We'll drive our readers to blindness. We've got standards of excellence to maintain. Get it?”

“Yes sir.”

“Do it, again. And I want absolute precision.”

While following this riveting exchange, I managed to sling my coat over a chair, dump the bag onto my desk, take a bite out of the Danish and get in two or three slurps of coffee, steeling myself for the wrath of Teddy; whole rage fomented out of him because it could. The image of Norma fractured my mind and I thought simple, mundane tasks might wipe it away. Warily, Stumpy ducked back into the composing room to give the type another go. I could hear him whacking the letters into place.

Teddy leveled his bushy brows at me while I continued to consume breakfast. “Where the hell have you been? We're on a deadline here.”

“Asleep,” I answered truthfully. “But from 4:15 to 5:30 a.m., I was in the company of Norma Jennings.” Teddy's creased his brows more tightly knitting a dense bush across his forehead.

“Description,” he commanded.

I wiped the apple glaze off my chin with a paper napkin and swallowed before answering. “Bloated and ugly. A putrified mass of flesh. Brought half the Bay in with her. Steff, Alistair, Hal and Doc Seaton were there too. It was pretty grim. That bastard, Alistair, smiled like a voyeur when Doc touched her,” I said. I held my fist up and shook it. I didn't mind a fight. I'd been in plenty as a kid.

Teddy merely grunted. “And the Rothwell kid?”

“Nothing yet. He'll probably be charged with careless and dangerous operation of a motorboat or some damn thing. He waited six hours before reporting Norma missing.”

“So soooon?” Teddy remarked sarcastically.

“That means he'll beat the drunk rap for sure. He showed up at the station with Freddy Oliveira in tow. Released on his own cognizance. Told to stick around, the usual crap. She used to be a beautiful girl, Teddy, I mean really beautiful. The whole thing stinks. It just stinks,” I said, shaking my head in disgust.

Teddy hooked his thumbs into his suspenders and ran them up and down. For once, his white shirt looked clean. “You remember now—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Stick to the facts. Just stick to the facts.”

“You got it, Joe. That's what we're here for. You write up what you've got and then we'll see what a mess Tommy can make of it. Then I want you to run out to the Beatty place. His sow dropped 12 piglets last night.”

I grimaced. “Now there's a story.”

“It is around here,” Teddy replied in a threatening tone, daring me not to like it.

I lit a Sweet Cap perching on the corner of my desk. Teddy had turned back to examine the layout on the composing table. He glanced over his shoulder.

“You still here?”

“Yup…I was just thinking—”

“I don't pay you to think, Joe. I pay you to report. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?”

I shrugged, trying to swallow my anger with the apple Danish that now sat in my gullet like a hard lump. “You're the boss.”

“And don't you forget it.”

“Wouldn't dream of it,” I murmured.

“What was that?”

“ I hear you, Teddy.”

“Good. Now scram.”

Before I could vamoose, I needed to pluck my courage up and ask Teddy for more dough. I owned a black 1960 Chevrolet Biscayne convertible. It had looked sweet and gleaming on the dusty used lot. When I bought it a few months ago, the original whitewalls were still on the car. Within a week, however, two of the tires had blown, the transmission had acted up and the brakes squealed louder than I imagined those baby piglets ever could. Barney Diggle from Diggle's Gas Bar sold it to me. Barney had a reputation as a bit of a crook but I needed a set of wheels cheap to get around, especially when stories popped up in the backwoods. The repairs set me back a few hundred and my rent was due.

“Teddy….I need a raise….badly…”

His back stiffened so tight I though his suspenders would snap. He swiveled back to me. “I told you not to buy that damn car, didn't I? But no, you didn't listen to me, did you? Smartass kid who thinks he knows better, aren't you?”

“Hey, I'm twenty-six.” Teddy had a point. I probably bought the car because Teddy harangued me about Barney Diggle. “Besides, I don't know about that….”

“I do…” And he thrust the stub of putrid cigar in my direction. I steeled myself.

“What's your point, Teddy? If I sell my car will you give me a raise?”

Teddy choked on his bile. I could see it in the sudden red flush that repainted his face from its normal pink to a severe purplish hue. “Don't be a damned fool, Joe. Of course I'm not giving you a raise. Do you know how—”

“—Lucky I am to have this job? That there are at least sixty, eager young newshounds waiting in the wings. Waiting for my demise, waiting for me to falter, waiting for my miserable ballpoint to blow up in my face. Isn't that what you were going to say, Teddy?” I asked him.

I had what the others didn't. A mother in prison, serving life for murdering my father. Norma's body was the first I had seen in the flesh. But I couldn't forget seeing the outline of my father's corpse under a sheet hastily thrown over him just after my twelfth birthday. Nice present. I saw the blood dripping into the cracks of the floorboards, the pale, flushed expression as my mother, wild-eyed, frantic, her expression pleading, the cops dragging her out of our apartment, a third floor walk-up on a 19 by 120-foot lot on Borden Street in Toronto. A guy in soiled coveralls wheeled the covered gurney carrying my father's body down the long hall of our building. And like Norma, my father's arm flopped out from under the starched sheet. The fingers splayed, the back of his hand grimy with black hair. I remember one of the detectives in a rumpled suit, fedora crushed on his skull, saying, “Jeezus Harry, get the kid the hell outta here.” A large, blue policeman carried me down into the street. I kicked and cried, beat my hands against his massive chest. It felt like striking a stonewall.

Like me, my dad reported the news. He worked the crime desk for the Toronto Mercury and wrote lucid stories that were simple and powerful in their brutality— that is, when he was sober. He blamed it all on the War, of course. Said he came back from Germany damaged. My mother sulked. They only kept each other company when they hit the bottle. Then all of the suppressed rage spilled out of him and she loomed there, right there in front of him. And he had to punish someone.

She used a steak knife from the kitchen drawer. The serrated blade broke off in his chest. In this regard, being 'special' sucked.

Knotting the clump of greying sagebrush that marked the beginning of his forehead, Teddy shook his foul, shredded cigar stub in my face.

“I'd watch it if I were you, Joe. You're getting too damn big for your britches. If you weren't such a good reporter, I'd have kicked your butt out of here a long time ago.”

“That and the fact you haven't given me a raise in two years,” I said.

“Two years?” he grunted. “What is your salary now, Joe?”

“Eighty-seven fifty; gross,” I replied, shoving my hands into the pockets of my scuffed chinos, looking at him in a brash sort of way. As brash as I could muster, blowing smoke to the ceiling.

“Eighty-seven fifty,” he repeated. “You know when I started out that would have been a king's ransom. You could have fed a family of ten on that wage and had plenty left over.”

“This isn't 1925,” I replied.

Teddy smiled dangerously. “No,” he said. “No, it isn't…” he said.

“I'm not talking about anything outrageous, Teddy. A hundred a week would do me fine.”

“A hundred a week, eh?” he said quietly, prelude to a welling torrent of outrage. “Just a lousy twenty percent increase, that's all you're asking for?”

“Um, fifteen percent actually.”

“Sure,” Teddy smiled sweetly. “Just fifteen percent. Uh-huh. Sounds reasonable to me. I mean, after all, there are steel plants and coal mines closing all across this country…” Listening to this twaddle, I sighed. “…family farms are packing it in and moving to the cities to go on the breadline, the soup kitchens are working overtime, little kids are begging in the street and you want me to give you a fifteen percent raise while all of this abject poverty, this undiluted misery is swilling its black hopelessness all around us?”

I looked out the picture window into the street. It was deserted, no line-ups, no ragged kids pressing their noses in. “That's right,” I replied.

“And where do you think that money's going to come from? You expect a new advertiser just to waltz in here and plunk down a wad of cash for a stack of advertisements? Or maybe we should trim some of the fat around here?”

I shrugged. I really didn't know, or care if the truth be known.

“Perhaps, you'd like me to cut Stumpy's pay? Stumpy,” he roared and Stumpy Butler's bewildered visage, pale and dripping with sweat, popped out of the composing room.

“Yes, Teddy?” His jaw went slack dragging his mouth open.

“Stumpy…how would you like to take a cut in pay?”

“Wwwhaaaattt?” Stumpy swallowed. “What for?” I'd seen lame animals look less pathetic.

“Why…to accommodate Joe here, who feels he's the most deserving of a raise.”

Stumpy looked even more miserable, if that was possible and scratched his meager scalp. “Well, I, uh…”

Teddy cut him off. “Nadine,” he snapped and Nadine Morgan, the chain-smoking office manager who'd heard every word, raised her beehive above eye level to peer over her cubicle.

She breathed smoke. “Yeah?”

“Maybe you'd like to make a fiscal sacrifice for Joe here? What do you say?”

Nadine snorted. “If anybody should make a gesture here, it's you, Teddy.”

Teddy raised his finger and pointed it heavenward. “Of course, of course. Take the food out of the mouths of my children.”

“Your kids are grown up and left home ages ago,” Nadine snorted, shaking her head.

“But still…it's the principal that's at stake here,” he insisted.

“Unbelievable,” Nadine muttered. “All this over a few measly bucks,” she said and shook her lacquered head some more. Not a wisp stirred.

The toes of my shoes had become increasingly more interesting. Just when I thought he would explode, I looked up. “So do I get the raise or not?”

“You think you're pretty smart,” he hissed back.

I knew Teddy would try it on. He always did and in the past I'd usually cave but not this time. This time I was determined to see it through.

“No, I just need a raise, Teddy. And it has been over two years.”

Teddy suspended his performance on a dime.

“All right, Joe,” he said very quietly. “We'll play it your way,” he added in a tone that told me this wasn't the end of it.

But I didn't care about the consequences. “That's a hundred a week, effective today,” I said happily. “Right?”

Teddy nodded. “Now, I've wasted enough damn time,” he said grumpily. “I've got a paper to put together here.”

Stumpy stood aghast.

“Well, I'll be,” he said scratching his sparse head. And then he had an idea, I could see it growing in his eyes, moving slowly downward from his forehead to his chin, until finally his entire face lit up.

“Say, Teddy..?”

“Not now, Stumpy,” Teddy hollered. “I've got work to do.” Stumpy swallowed hard, crestfallen, then slunk back into the composing room, muttering to himself at his missed opportunity. With Stumpy it was often difficult to know just what he was thinking. Maybe he'd lay Teddy across the metal type and threaten to whack him on to the front page if he didn't get a raise too?

“Say Joe, didn't I give you an assignment?” Teddy asked.

I nodded, basking in my newfound prosperity. “Yup.”

“Well, hop to it.” Now that the crisis was over, he'd become reasonable…normal.

“I'm leaving, I'm leaving. Er, I expect Doc's autopsy report on Norma might be ready by now.”

“That's pretty quick work,” Teddy growled.

“Well you know Doc Seaton. He's a fast worker. Listen can I….?”

Teddy waved his hand in disgust, as if he had a sudden bad taste in his mouth and resumed sucking on the cold stogie to take it away.

“No. Piggies first. Autopsy after. Go on, get going,” he said.

“You've made me very happy.”

“Sure.”

“I'll name my first born after you.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

I went to open my mouth again.

“Get outta here,” Teddy yelled. I grabbed my jacket, patted Nadine's wrinkled cheek. She raised her head far enough to give me a wan smile, picked up my brownie bag and left slamming the door.