Kornwolf (19 page)

The article opened with one of his quotes: “I guess the fella just lost his balance”—delivered with an absence of malice so real, he was sure to capture the public's endearment.

He would be cheered around town all week. Come Thursday night, half of the county would be tuned in to watch the fight. This would only work to Team Lowe's advantage—as Roddy, unlike The Cobra, had always been buoyed by roaring support.

With that much, at least, Jack was pleased.

Moreover, the writing itself was solid.

Brynmor had turned to the public files in compiling a no-less-flattering portrait of Jack's career than Roddy's skill. The Coach hadn't paid the kid his due. Along with a penchant for visual detail: with broader, more detailed strokes than might have been gracing the pages of Stepford's
Plea
, the gym was brought to life on a multisensual level, from cellar to roof-hatch—with posters of Hagler and Chavez and Langford, and even “The Great” Harry Greb, on the wall—from the glove racks, “heaped like treated hides in the half-light,” backed by the speed bags' humming, from the medicine balls on a tier by the door to the “sweet smell of wood polish, sweat and the ring mat”—a paragraph devoted to the building, which was founded in August of 1874, including a third-floor showroom, the two-lane bowling alley downstairs—and talk of the “phantom” that haunted it (where in the world had he heard about
that
one?)—to profiles of area trainers and boxers and referees dating
back to the forties, all of which Owen could only have gathered by questioning Roddy, and possibly Marty, and carefully reading the hundreds of newspaper articles lining the walls of the gym.

What's more, the prose itself was strong, inspired, informed and factually accurate. On the big board, of course, there was room for improvement. Some of the jargon was a bit academic. He needed some corner time, maybe. But all the essentials, the smarts, the cojones were there …

Jack was beginning to see an angle.

Meanwhile, life in reporting continued …

So pleased had been Jarvik with the “Week in Review”' piece, submitted to him by midnight Saturday, that, right away, Owen was offered the text on his photo of Roddy and Jones for Monday.

Initially, Owen hesitated—checked by his homecoming resolution. He wasn't about to renege on his vow to step into the ring before writing about it. He wouldn't be able to
cover
the fight …

But this had nothing to do with the fight. This was about someone taking a spill. And in that regard, Owen had definite obligations to Mother Discordia.

What's more, his photo had been solicited by
Ring Magazine
, along with the
Horaceburg Screed
and three different private collectors, before even generating AP demand. It was crucial that one of the staff's more competent writers finish the article quickly. And Owen, after all, had
been
there. He'd taken the picture.

He took the assignment.

Dale Goodall, the editor in sports, didn't seem to mind. Unlike most of the paper's staff, Goodall, a bony, dry-humored man, seemed unperturbed by the Blue Ball Devil, and so, bore Owen no evident grudge. Besides which, he knew good work when he saw it.

And that was exactly what Owen delivered.

It had been one of his smoother, less inhibited turns at the keyboard in years. He'd drawn on the pressurized visceral octane
and sensory freight of a week in training—clear as the freshly driven snow, like rockets flaring across the harbor. These moments came rarely. They made it all worthwhile.

By seven o'clock, he was high as a kite.

He emerged from the microfiche room at ten, bleary-eyed—toting a sack full of empty Styrofoam coffee dispenser cups. He waded through the hum on an angle to Goodall's basket, submitted the piece with a tug of reluctance, then wandered in search of distraction.

As always, the newsroom was stuffy and tense. Out of the fox-hole & into the frost: these people were nearing the end of another wild shift, and none in good humor.

On Owen's desk sat a plastic Hefty bag full of what Kegel referred to as
Hate Mail
—letters addressed to the paper, the editor and/or assistant editors directly. Kegel had sifted through it already. Its worth had been stripped to slender pickings—mostly complaints re: the boogeyman coverage from semi-illiterate Christian trash.

Two new reports had been dropped in his basket: one, from a lady in Bareville who'd called in twenty-five “encounters” if she'd called in one—the latest involving a chimpanzee gone yodeling mad in a nearby cornfield. The second was placed by a country club owner, who claimed to have spotted a naked “maniac” loping across his seventh fairway—then actually leaping (yes, in a single bound, with a howl) over the pond. It was “
faster than One-Time Charlie
,” he said.

Both reports had been filed by 8:00.

There were also two envelopes. Neither was marked with a return address. Enclosed in the first was a copy of what appeared to be an agricultural newsletter—one without photographs.
The Budget
, it read. Owen began to flip through it. Entries were grouped into columns by order of town: Hutchinson, Kansas. Brown City, Michigan. Danville, Ohio. Boyd, Wisconsin.

It was an Amish and Mennonite newsletter: entries from families around the world—mostly relaying harvest, weather, domestic and church-related concerns. Letters from Stepford, as maybe no longer the biggest, but the oldest, most influential Anabaptist community
in existence (the “Hub of the Plain Folk,” the “Old Order Mecca”), extended in print for over three pages, more than any other town—on the second, inside column of which an entry was circled in bright red ink: a letter from an Eli Hershberger, dated October 3rd, which read, from start to finish: “
The Time of the Killing Is Back
.”

The second piece opened up to a threat: “
We know where you live
”—which Owen stuffed into a pocket to file away at home.

And finally, a memo from “Charlene” in copy: “Your wording is cumbersome. Try to economize.”

He dropped her remark in the trash, then picked up his cell phone and went in search of a place to talk without being leered at.

He found a spot by the coffee machine in the break room, and dialed the country club's number. Moments later, the owner was swearing to Jesus by it: “
the damnedest thing I've ever seen: right over the lake!
”

“What time did this happen?” Owen asked him and, in doing so, looked down to realize that Bess, that frumpy vampire girl in Layout, was sitting at the table, directly in front of him. He had been standing there gripping his testicles. She looked disgusted, if vaguely amused.

“
An hour ago
,” the club owner answered.

Owen hung up. “What are
you
looking at?”

She shook her head. “You tell me.”

He pivoted, turning away, horrified. “I'm just trying to word myself here …”

She said nothing.

Jarvik walked by the window, dressed in a tux. They watched him pass.

Owen, too happy to change the subject, asked: “Has he always been like this?”

Leaning back on her chair, she replied with a shrug: “Only since you got here.”

He waited for something, a word of explanation, a guess, anything.

Silence.

Finally, he followed up: “What do you make of it?”

Smirking, she looked him up and down. She was shaking her head. Her grin was ambiguous. “He must like the way you carry yourself.”

That busted her up.

She coughed. “Or not.”

She got up and made for the door, looking satisfied. “You're the reporter. You find out.”

Fine, then: he would find out for himself …

But first: a wild night in The Basin.

From the moment the Lamepeter scanners began to crackle and hiss with disturbance reports—just before quitting time (midnight) at the paper—activity would scarcely let up for a moment, carrying through to the early morning. Along with the chimp in the stubble report, and the lake-leaping maniac, already registered, a handful of goblin, werewolf and “negro-streaker” sightings would also come in. Twenty-four emergency calls would be logged in the course of the following seven hours. Among them: one case of “firebombing” an elderly widow's (reportedly one of the resident superstore protesters) mailbox, a “team of derelicts” spray-painting three of the “Welcome to Stepford” billboards on Old Route 30 with “Beware of The Dutchies” in black, and the trashing of an estimated one-acre plot of corn (by uprooting) just south of Paradise. Other damages throughout The Basin would include a six-figure toll at the Sprawl Mart, yet-to-be-tallied losses at Holtwood, four dozen bottles of missing whiskey, three hundred dollars in register cash, and Officer Beaumont's overturned cruiser—along with the injured youth inside of it …

In formatting text, Owen would focus on the latter situation specifically.

Having arrived at the accident site less than ten minutes after the call had come in, he had watched as, in view of dozens of witnesses, Russel Commons, the owner of Cry in the Dark, the seasonal horror park had verbally blasted responding officers Corbett, Kutay and Edwards on behalf of the Lamepeter Police Department
at large (and, above all, Officer Rudolf Beaumont) for beating, endangering and deserting his seventeen-year-old employee, Jeremy Ruoss.

Ruoss, a slight, gangly type with alleged theatrical aspirations, had been cast by Commons as the lead in the park's latest feature: the Blue Ball Devil Maze.

Through the first seven days of the season, he'd been assaulted on four separate occasions—first by “East Petersburg Hessians” who, according to Ruoss, were “nasty, but couldn't throw a punch,” then moving on to “stinking wasted” football players from Muncie Township, most of whom outweighed him by over a hundred pounds, and who charged him in squads.

By midweek, they had been showing up early, jamming the parking lot just after practice to power-slam quarts of Miller Lite through plastic funnel bongs, belching it up. At opening time, the crowd had been charged. A few of them actually paid for tickets. The rest just hopped right over the gate, letting out for the nearest geek in a suit—and the Blue Ball Devil Maze, in particular, where Ruoss and others in masquerade were to spring out of bushes, startling maze-goers.

Commons had been phoning the police all week, to no effect whatsoever, thus far. On two occasions, an officer had come by to take a report subsequently—but only after the squads had gone home, the damage was done and the park had been closed. To date, not a soul had been questioned about it. Police protection had not been provided. The park was on a first-name basis with the 911 operator—yet, so far, no circuit patrols—not even an hourly drive-by had been dispatched. Commons himself had appeared at the sheriff's office, demanding to speak with Highman, only to be turned away without explanation.

The cops had been
zero
help.

That evening (the 17th) Ruoss had been attacked and beaten by one of the squads, after which he'd been chased, driven into the fields, recaptured and beaten again before Officer Beaumont could intervene—and he himself had delivered another beating,
followed by a General Lee off the road—and topping it all, a prompt abandonment.

Beaumont seemed to have disappeared.

Commons now regretted having called the police for help at all.

As Jeremy Ruoss would manage to splutter upon being dragged from the overturned wreck, he had come to his senses with power lines floating by the window outside—holding steady, drifting, falling and—SLAM—into darkness. Then waiting, pinned upside down in the wreck. The cop had given him up for dead.

“Who
hired
that asshole?” was Ruoss's final remark upon being escorted away.

That was all Owen had needed to know. A goatboy, maybe—confused, pissed and alone, but
not
the Blue Ball Devil. No further testimony needed on Ruoss.

For now, Russel Commons would deal out the whoop ass—cursing the township police as incompetent morons—and
doomed
in court …

The young man's father was a prominent surgeon.

The sheriff responded, as relayed through Officer Corbett, with the incomprehensible charge that Ruoss was also, despite his claims, the primary suspect in “this Devil business”—the lone agent believed to have been behind dozens of sightings in recent weeks.

More than absurd, the contention was self-negating—especially in light of the fact that, even before the cruiser was dragged from the mud by a locally hired wrecker, two more “ape dog” sightings came over the radio. Clearly, nothing was over.

For whatever reason, the Lamepeter P.D. was standing behind—to a certain extent even shielding—Officer Beaumont's conduct, probably in hopes of eluding a brutality suit.

But they couldn't protect him from Owen.

Hence: “
The Blue Ball Devil Captured!
” as next morning's lead. The “Wildest Night in The Basin” opened up with a rundown on not just events at the Sprawl Mart, the state store and the Holtwood grounds, but thirteen robberies, just as many prowler calls and even more motorists claiming to have been chased by a fearsome, repulsive
creature—none of which triggered half of the reaction elicited by Beaumont's treatment of Ruoss: the reference to Chappaquiddick had been deserved. The officer had, after all, left the young man to die. And to worsen his image, he would turn up drunk at the Dogboy later that evening. The tavern's owner would place a call to the precinct at 1:38 a.m., complaining of an officer in full uniform guzzling whiskey right out in the open—sweating profusely, mumbling gibberish and “scaring” the regular, paying customers—on top of which, he had “lost” his wallet and hadn't paid for a drink all night.

All of which Owen relayed verbatim.