Cabin Fever (8 page)

Sarah knew that the woman was looking for a moment of companionship, but her heart felt heavy and she needed to regain her composure. In any case, she had a story due and wanted to get started on it. She smiled and shook her head. “I’d love to, but I do need to get started on writing this up. Maybe you’d like to get together for lunch some day?”

Winnie beamed. “Oh, that would be lovely! I don’t get out much these days. I know it’s not good for me to be cooped up in here, but sometimes the entire day goes by without my noticing. I need to get out and smell the fresh air sometimes.”

Sarah nodded. “It’s a date, then. Look for the story in the paper in the next day or two.” She reached out her hand for a handshake, and then thought better of it and drew Winnie in for a hug. The woman melted into her arms and rested there for a space. Sarah did not think of herself as much of a hugger, but she held Winnie close for a long space before releasing her with a smile that she hoped conveyed empathy and compassion. Winnie squeezed her hand at the door before shutting it behind her.

10

Twelve hours later she was sitting in a metal folding chair in the newspaper office, watching Duane’s impassive face as he read through her story. The office was a brightly-lit space, full of desks that now mostly seemed empty. Duane’s own desk was the only one to look lived-in, with an old Dell computer on the floor wired into a monitor that perched between piles of paper. Duane was as rumpled as he always was, and he leaned back on his chair with his head resting on his right fist as he read. Sarah scanned for some sign of whether he loved or hated her story, but nothing she saw in his face was any more or less gloomy than she knew Duane to look while he was eating his breakfast.

At last, after what seemed an eternity, he sighed and turned away from the screen.

“You hate it,” Sarah said, more of a statement than a question.

“No, I don’t hate it.”

“But you don’t like it.” She was starting to feel a little angry and defensive, which embarrassed her. She was a confident and successful woman. She had founded her own startup and built it into a thriving business. She would not be intimidated by this small-town newsman and his opinion of her writing skills. Still, the little girl inside of her steeled herself against the criticism that she expected to land any moment like a slap against her cheek.

“Actually I do like it. It’s not what I asked for, though.”

“What do you mean? You said to write a story about a lost dog. This is a story about a lost dog.”

“This is a story about a lonely old woman who has already lost her husband, and now she’s lost the last remaining thing that kept a piece of him in her life. It’s a tear-jerker.”

“It will get people to look for that dog.”

“Oh, they will definitely look for the dog. And they will not see the dog because their eyes will be swimming with sentimental tears.”

Sarah snorted. “Do you want me to re-write it?”

“No, it’s fine the way it is. Sentimental women will probably cut it out and save it for when they need a really good cry. But next time, when I ask for a story, don’t dress it up. Don’t try to make it something that it isn’t. Just give me the story.”

Sarah nodded. It was good advice. She knew that a part of her had turned up its nose at the idea of a lost dog story; she was too proud to write about something that didn’t seem to matter. But, then, what gave her the right to decide whether the story mattered or not? To Winnie the story mattered a very great deal. She decided that it would be a good exercise in humility to set her expectations to the side and just do what Duane asked. “So there will be another story, then?”

“If you want. Do you want?”

“Sure. This was fun. Well, not fun exactly – it really is a sad story, and I’m not made of stone. I felt bad for Winnie, and that made it hard to write. But it was nice to get out of my comfort zone and do something a little different. And it got me out of the house, which has been a challenge lately. What else have you got?”

Duane leaned back in his chair and contemplated her, as if he was reading the tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. Finally he reached some decision and spoke. “There’s an ex-pro football player in town. By the standards of Tall Pines, that makes him a major celebrity, and some people are pretty excited about it. Do you feel up to an interview?”

Sarah shrugged. What she knew about football would fit into a very small pamphlet, with lots of room left over for illustrations. “Sure. Why not? Who is he?”

“The name’s Brad Johannsen. He’s staying with his father John, who’s been living here for a few years now. I’ve got the address here somewhere, don’t let me forget to give it to you before you leave.”

“And what are you looking for this time?”

“How do you mean?”

“You told me not to dress up a story and turn it into something that it’s not. So what is this story?”

“It’s a celebrity interview. A puff piece. People around here watch football, and the guys who play in the pros are kind of like gods. So now we have a god, or at least an ex-god, walking amongst us. Our readers want to know what he’s like. What he thinks about the town - as long as he thinks good things. We don’t want to hear the bad stuff. What it was like to play in the NFL? If he ever met anyone famous, who were they? That sort of thing. The stuff that sells papers.”

Sarah looked around the near-empty room and carefully phrased her question so as not to give offense. “It looks like maybe selling papers is something you could really use right now.”

“Right now? Nah,” Duane asked, shaking his hand dismissively. “If I had sold more papers five years ago, maybe that would have made a difference. Now I’m so deep in the hole I know I’m not getting out again.”

“So what will you do?”

“Oh, I’ll shut it down.” He looked around the office, and from the distant look in his eyes Sarah could tell that he was seeing things that weren’t there anymore: a bustling office filled with staff members working on the next edition of the paper.
 

“You sound sad,” Sarah said, feeling a little sad herself. She was surprised at her reaction; what was this place to her? It was just a tiny little newspaper in a tiny little town, no different from the innumerable other small papers throughout the country. But still, now that she knew Duane and was beginning to know some of the other people in Tall Pines, it was beginning to feel personal to her.
 

“I feel relieved mostly,” he answered, his attention returning to her and the present day. “Regretful, too, when I’m being honest with myself. Maybe if I had done things differently it would have turned out better. Back when things were going good, I knew that I’d retire one day, of course, and I always just assumed that there would be someone who would take over from me. Now, though, the newspaper staff is me. I’m the only one who cares anymore. And soon no one will care, me included.”

“How soon?”

“A few months maybe. Or a few weeks. I really don’t know. Every morning I roll out of bed and ask my aching joints whether they want to get up, get dressed, and head into the office. So far the answer has been yes, though I can’t say I’ve been very enthusiastic about it for quite some time now. Eventually the answer will be no, and then I’ll be done. I’m not planning to be sentimental about it. I won’t throw a party for myself, or come out with some self-pitying final edition of the paper. I’ll just stop, and then we’ll see if anyone cares. Of course I want them to care. I want them to come to me with tears in their eyes, lamenting the fact that they didn’t support the paper when I needed them to. But it’s more likely that they’ll just turn on their computer screens and head over to some website that will give them the news with prettier pictures than I could ever put in the paper. It won’t be exactly the same, but it will be good enough, and it will be free. It’s hard to compete with free. I’ve struggled to compete with it for years. But not much longer.”

Sarah shook her head. “That’s a shame. It’s important for a town to have its own paper. CNN may tell you what’s going on in national or world news, but it doesn’t build community in a place like this. It doesn’t help women like Winnie find their lost dogs. It will be a terrible shame when the paper isn’t around anymore.”

Duane shrugged. He looked tired. “It may be, but it’s been a long time coming. The newspaper business just doesn’t make sense anymore, and most people aren’t as stubborn as me. They moved on, and I didn’t want to. Eventually a man doesn’t have a choice.”

Sarah chatted with him for a few more minutes, working out the details of the interview piece she was to submit by the end of the week. Duane rummaged through some papers until he came up with the phone number of the football player’s father, and Sarah promised to call him the next day. All the while, though, her mind was on a different question: was there something that she could do about the newspaper?

She left the offices thinking about the question. She walked down Tall Pine’s streets pondering the question. She looked at it every way she could think of, and she kept coming back to the same answer: she had money put away, enough to take the newspaper on and keep it running for a while, but it wasn’t enough to make a difference. If she burned through her savings, maybe she could put the paper out for another couple years. She had no illusions that she would be able to sell more papers than Duane did; he’d been at it more years than she could count, and he knew this town much better than she did. It was much more likely that the newspaper would sell even worse under her stewardship. And if she couldn’t find a way to make the paper self-sustaining, there was no real point buying it as an act of charity.
 

And besides, if she was running Tall Pines’ paper, that meant that she’d have to live here – for years, at least. That’s not what she wanted. She was getting her thoughts together and preparing for another assault on the startup business scene in San Francisco. She did not want to end up living out her life in a small, sleepy town. Did she?

11

Sarah was quite a way into the call before she realized how much trouble she was in. She had dialed the number that Duane gave her, and a somewhat gruff but otherwise pleasant older man answered and called his son, the former football player, to the phone.
 

“Hello, is this Brad” she asked when he answered, knowing as she said the words that it was a stupid question – why would his father have put anyone else on the line?
 

“It is,” he said, his voice a pleasant tenor. Sarah had expected that this former professional athlete would be a large man, certainly, but in her mind she had imagined that he was enormous, both very tall and very fat now that he was no longer working out regularly. She had seen often enough what happened to men who were sports heroes in high school and then went out into the wider world – their hairlines receded as their stomachs expanded, until they became a bloated, corpulent mockery of their former physical greatness. Perhaps someone who actually was talented enough to play football for a living would decline at a slower rate.

“Hello, my name is Sarah, and I’ve been asked by the editor of the local paper to conduct an interview with you. Would you be willing to sit down and talk about a few things? The beer is on me.”

There was a pause on the line, during which she could guess that he was searching for reasons to say “no” politely, which in itself was to his credit – from what she had heard about professional athletes, not many of them wasted their time on politeness. At last she could hear him give a little sigh as he came up empty.

“Um, sure. I can find twenty minutes for a beer. Where and when?”

Sarah was at a loss – she hadn’t thought those details through. “Oh! Well, how about tomorrow night? And … um … is there a place you like?”

“There’s a place my Dad likes, called Jimmy’s Tap. It’s just off of … actually, I don’t really know the street names here.”

Sarah laughed. “Neither do I.”
 

“We’re a good pair then,” he said, his voice full of humor. Sarah was beginning to warm to the man on the other end of the phone; he didn’t seem like the dumb jock she’d been expecting.

“I’m sure I can find it. I’ll just go to Main Street and ask for directions.”
 

He chuckled. “Yeah, there’s nothing here that’s more than a couple blocks from Main Street. So, eight o’clock?”

“Eight o’clock tomorrow. See you there.”

Sarah was right at the point of hanging up the phone when she heard him still speaking. “So how will I know you?”

She paused and wondered what to offer him. Verging on middle-aged? Brunette hair with highlights? Passable face that’s not half as pretty as my sister’s? “I’ll be the one there who doesn’t look like anyone else in the place,” she finally managed.

He laughed again. “All right. So will I. And so long as we don’t look like each other, we’ll be OK.”

Sarah had really no idea how to prepare for an interview, so she reconciled herself to not really preparing at all. She knew that she could easily look the football guy up on the Internet and learn a few things about him, but she felt like it would be better to come at the story fresh, without a lot of preconceptions. If she needed to flesh out a few details later, she could Google him to her heart’s content after the interview.

Part of her wished that she was better equipped, at least. In the movies and on television, reporters always had hand-held recorders that they whipped out and placed on the table before them. Sarah didn’t have anything like that, and she didn’t really like the idea of buying something just for the occasion even if she could find a store in Tall Pines that would feature that sort of thing. She knew that, if she gave it some thought, she could figure out a way to record the conversation with her laptop, but then she’d be the woman who brought a laptop to a dive bar – she’d stick out like a sore thumb! Sarah was pretty sure that she was going to stick out no matter what she did, but she saw no point in making things worse than they needed to be.

When it was time to leave for the interview, Sarah had still done nothing and purchased nothing. That fact made part of her feel like a confident woman who was prepared for anything, while the other part felt like a girl walking into the final exam who had forgotten to study. The combination had butterflies flitting around in her stomach when she arrived outside Jimmy’s Tap (as predicted, one block from Main Street), brushed a few wrinkles out of her sweater, ran her fingers through her hair, and pulled the heavy door open to walk into a gloomy interior.