And Yesterday Is Gone (21 page)

“You've done a pretty good job of that yourself, country boy.”

Apparently she hadn't noticed that after my time with the “boys” in the copy room and elsewhere, there wasn't much “country” left.

“Well, let this country boy see if he can improve his aim.” I shifted my grip, holding her arms tightly to her sides. I pushed her back against the swing and kissed her the way I'd wanted to since the tea and cookies on this very veranda—long, slow, searching kisses that started with her tightly closed lips and traveled down her throat to the cleft of her breasts, where I buried my head in that ivory darkness and kissed a soft white mound. When the pink nipple stood firm against my invading tongue, I thought I would suffocate—and welcomed the possibility.

She was kicking furiously. I moved to hold her hands in one of mine and pulled the pins from her hair with the other, then buried my face in that soft, fragrant hair as it tumbled down her shoulders.

I caught her foot before she could damage me and her shoe came off in my hand. Then I let her go.

She blazed at me in a killing rage. “Give me my shoe, damn you. My pins—you'll pay for this.”

Holding her shoe high over my head, I challenged her. “Come and get it—I dare you.” Turning, I hooked the heel over the decoration that hung high on one of the pillars that supported the roof—safely out of her reach.

Laughing, I said, “Guess I'm just too drunk to know what I'm doing. Probably won't respect myself in the morning.” Somewhere in my mind I congratulated myself on such original lines.

“Seriously, there is only one way you're going to get this shoe back and this is how it's going to happen. I'm going to stand here and you are going to walk over like a lady, put your arms around my neck and kiss me like you really mean it until I am a quivering mass of jelly and beg you to stop.”

“You can go to hell, you damn fool. I'll never do it.”

“Okay, sure enjoyed my part, even if you can't kiss worth a damn. You'll make quite the entrance with your hair all over your face, limping along with one shoe on. I'd say you'll be a sensation.” I turned and walked away.

She started to cry. “Steve, wait. You can't do this to me.”

“Don't underestimate a country boy.” I took another step.

“Steve, please. What will Dr. Teddy say? Or Sara and Juan? We can't embarrass them—this party…”

“Aha. So now you're taking a little responsibility? I agree it would cause a lot of bad publicity, so you better get started. The terms are the same, but could change if you keep me waiting.”

“Steve, you are a real bastard.” She hobbled over, put her hands in my hair, and pulled my face down and kissed me as she had in my dreams, and kissed me and kissed me.

“I love you, Rica, love you.” My arms were around her, pulling her close, so close an onlooker would have said there was only one person on that veranda.

She trembled against me, but my knees had turned to water and somehow, someway, we stumbled to the porch swing—a glider, I think it was.

Somewhere in the distance I could hear the orchestra, but there seemed to be a discordant note. Or it may have been the creaky noise of the springs.

Later we found a valet, retrieved my truck and I took her home. She held the pins in her hand, but she wasn't barefoot.

I was ecstatic…I knew she must love me to have responded the way she did—no-holds-barred, a passionate return of everything I'd given her. Then there were her murmured words, “Hold me, Steve, hold me.”

My mind floated in the clouds as my truck soared like Pegasus over the bridge.

W
aiting to hear something from her, I stuck it out for three days. Even though I had never known her phone number, I thought she might have gotten mine from Juan. So I called him to ask.

“Have you seen Rica?”

“Yes, we've just finished her sitting and she's gone home.”

Despising myself for asking, I asked anyway, “Is she still wearing that damn ring?” knowing for sure that the answer would be “no.”

“Of course, why wouldn't she be? They've set the date.”

“Set the date? The date for what?” My confused mind refused to accept those unbelievable words.

Juan sensed my desperation and gently said, “Steve, let it go. You can live with it. You know I have, don't you?”

I hung up.

I didn't need to check the dictionary for “heartbreak.” The hurt was so deep I sobbed soundlessly without tears.

“Country boy,” she'd called me. Guess she had that right. And guess it was just a one-night stand for her.

My work went to hell. I couldn't concentrate. My coworkers stayed clear of my nasty mouth and Ma called to ask why she hadn't heard from me.

Prentiss called me in, a scowl on his face.

“What in hell is wrong with you? You're a real prima donna lately. Or to put it more plainly, a real pain in the ass. You need to get out of here before you get lynched.

“I'm sending you to Centerville, Kansas. There's been a tornado there that almost wiped out the town. Hit three other states, too. Should be some good stories there and you're the man for the job. Wire me something I can use on the front page.”

He handed me an envelope. “Here's your ticket and some mad money. Don't waste any time, the flight's at two thirty. I'm probably saving your life.”

It was a short flight into the airport near Centerville; I arrived only hours after the destruction of a town with a population of eighteen thousand. I rented a car and drove the forty miles on a road straight as a string and bordered on both sides by a golden sea of gently waving wheat.

Nearing my destination, the reality became a nightmare. That golden wheat lay flat as though trampled by the giant feet of a madman. The black, muddy earth screamed through the scattered broken stalks. The sun had come out; the sky was cloudless as though the heavens were trying to make amends.

The road became increasingly impossible. Fighting their way through were ambulances and fire trucks, along with heavy equipment pushing aside telephone poles canted at impossible angles, their dangling wires rolled into a tangled mass—like a ball of yarn pounced upon by a playful kitten.

I parked the car on a wall that lay somewhat flat beside the road—the frame that held it together gouged deep in the mud, set the brakes and prayed the car would still be there when I came back. It was.

Carrying my suitcase with my typewriter in a bag, I hitched a ride with an ambulance driver. He had passed me but stopped when I yelled and waved my press card.

Progress was slow and his voice shook as he cursed two cows that lay across the road bloating in the sun. He gunned the motor only to see the mud fly when the wheels spun as we dug our way around the cows. Then we encountered an overturned tractor and a refrigerator.

With a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, his fingers brown with nicotine, his words flung out as if to rid his mind of the image of black body bags, the names printed in white, that lay in neat rows on the torn grass of the makeshift morgue.

“It was hard, punishing rain pounding down and the wind had picked up, but hell, that ain't unusual.” His voice roughened, “But suddenly, without warning, the black roiling clouds, twisting that hideously colored funnel straight from hell…” He paused to light another cigarette. “The goddamn wind was a hundred seventy miles an hour.” He took a long drag. “And there was no time, no time, no place to hide.”

I could see it vividly in my mind, this horror that had settled over this town like a hungry animal with its prey. Then, its appetite sated for the moment, it moved on.

“I'll let you out here. It's as good a place as any.”

An immense pile of bricks, tall shards of glass, a steeple buried amidst the splintered pews identified it as a church. A little boy's shoe, the strings still tied in a bow, lay on a step.

Two boards, nailed roughly together to form a cross, leaned uncertainly as if it was inappropriate to stand where so many had kneeled.

“Eight people died here, three of 'em kids and a five-year-old boy still unaccounted for,” he said. I closed the door.

Walking down the broken concrete path that was the sidewalk, I saw the rows and rows of raw black earth that showed where houses had stood. A foundation here and there, a standing fireplace like a sentinel spared. Furniture broken and scattered marked the places where only yesterday ordinary people had lived their ordinary lives.

Pausing beside a group standing quietly by a gigantic uprooted tree, I heard someone say, “Two hundred years old…”

Something moved with the breeze in the fork of a bare branch. Looking up I saw a doll in a ruffled bonnet, one eye hanging loosely by a thread, then my gaze followed a pointing finger. Barely visible beneath a massive limb lay an old man in bib overalls with white hair caked in red. His arm flung protectively over a small woman with hair the same color.

The hush was broken by the sound of a chainsaw.

A feeling of utter desolation lay over the town. The inhabitants walked slowly, staring vacantly or digging through the fallen timbers and corrugated tin of their former lives. Occasionally I heard a muffled sob or a curse as this incomprehensible horror grew into reality.

As I talked to the survivors—walking with them for almost three days, sharing food and coffee at the Red Cross wagon—I took notes. I heard things, saw things I never dared to think about.

Writing my first report by the light of a borrowed flashlight, I sent it out the next morning with an ambulance driver who promised to fax it to Prentiss.

That night I slept in a donated sleeping bag on a porch that had no house. Somewhere in the distance, I heard the mournful howl of a dog.

The next day help was pouring in with food, tents, water and a large shelter erected for the medics.

Huge earth-moving machines and tractors were scooping up the remnants of the townspeople's previous existence. Piles of debris grew high outside the desolated town. Reporters and photographers swarmed everywhere.

On the outskirts of town, I passed by one of the few remaining houses that still stood upright. It was settled snugly beside its foundation; a woman stood inside, looking out a window with no glass.

The woman ran out to me, followed by a man who was vainly trying to hold her, begging in that broken voice I'll never forget, “Robbie, Robbie, did you find Robbie?”

The man disengaged her frantic hands from my arm and she screamed hoarsely, “Robbie, you come home this instant, you hear?”

I think we all knew the unspeakable truth. Robbie
was
home.

Hurrying away, I heard the discordant clang of a bell. Following the sorrowful sound, I rounded a corner and saw a belfry perched unsteadily on the broken back of a small clapboard church. The bell sounding intermittently, swinging aimlessly as though it had no place to go but couldn't bear to leave.

It seemed somehow appropriate.

I wrote my second report under the light of a single bulb that dangled from a cord wrapped around the one remaining beam that had held a roof only yesterday.

It was not the sound of an orchestra that I heard, but the metallic clank-clank of a generator that denied me the sleep that would give me the distance for which I prayed. I left late in the afternoon, stopping long enough to spend my mad money on everything from shirt to shoes, then caught the red-eye flight and sat way in the back. It seemed that the odor of death clung to me like that of dirty underwear.

Three hours before the paper went to press, I was back in my sane world. My report made the front page. Prentiss was delighted to have scooped the
Kansas City Star.
Somehow it didn't matter to me.

Coming home to my apartment, I had an overwhelming urge to kneel and kiss the floor. After showering until the hot water ran cold, I slept for twenty-four hours between clean sheets.

One of my stories had caught the eye of the senior editor of the
Bay City Chronicle.
His name was J.W. Marteen—J.W. to his associates. He offered me the job of news reporter with a sizeable increase in pay and benefits, plus a desk in the newsroom—a dream come true.

It was a giant leap for me and I was apprehensive. This was the second-largest paper in the city. This was
Big Time
. Wildly excited and scared at the same time, I stuttered when I said, “Good morning.”

I would be working with men who had formidable experience and education—Harvard and Yale no less. And me, in my twenties, with just one semester of journalism on my resume? Well, I had reason to be scared.

J.W. later told me that he knew about my brief encounter at the small college, but he weighed that against my “natural talent and originality”—Prentiss' kind words.

Prentiss' confidence in me gave me the reassurance I so badly needed and, settling in, it entered my mind that this may be the closest I'd ever get to heaven.

Prentiss held a going-away party for me, which I vaguely remember. Then came the reluctant good-byes.

Prentiss was a patient man who taught me a lot about life that Mrs. Dowd didn't know—or didn't tell.

F
our months flew by in a whirlwind of work. No need to search for anything to write about in this enormous city teeming with life. The streets, my hunting grounds, provided the raw material.

Whores who called me “Sonny” offered services at a reduced rate. The wretched homeless were ever-present. At first, it was impossible to resist an outstretched hand, but as time went on, it became easier for me to walk with my eyes straight ahead. Then there were the gangs that fought for dominance and would kill for a pair of shoes. The downside of a beautiful city.

What a thrill to get an approving nod from J.W., to see my name in print in the byline on the front page. Time slipped away.