Stay Up With Me (17 page)

One of the men smiled broadly, betraying his yellow teeth. Smoke rose from the table in curlicuing eddies that whirled toward a ceiling vent. The man cleared a space for Kistler.

“What can we do for you?” he asked.

“Oh, we're thinking of doing a story on the hamlet.”

“Who is
we
?”

“The newspaper.”

“What do you want to do a story on?”

“The town itself. Sort of a profile.”

The men looked at one another and laughed.

A gaunt older man they called Joseph, around sixty, with tiny blue eyes and two days of beard, took Kistler's arm. His fingers pinched like a clothespin below Kistler's shoulder.

“You're not going to dig up the fire stuff, are you?”

“What fire stuff?” Kistler asked.

“Never mind,” he said. “Every five years or so someone comes out here and writes something about the fire.”

It piqued Kistler, but he knew not to press just then. He took their names and he asked them about town lore, the early days, their grandfathers and town politics. They told him about the cheese mill, a shoe factory, two foundries, and an epic weeklong blizzard ten years ago.

Kistler had the sensation of floating outside his body, watching himself with these men, shooting the breeze and sucking down a beer. What he should do to do this right is to live in the hamlet a while to get a feel for it. He pictured himself doing this, people gradually becoming more comfortable with him and taking him into their confidence. He wondered what their impressions were of him. He realized the man with the red face had finished making a point and he hadn't heard a word of it.

Kistler nodded. “I agree,” he tried.

“You agree?” the man said. Kistler realized he'd answered wrong.

“You agree?” the man said again and snorted. “He agrees,” he said.

Kistler rose from his seat. He pushed the smoke away. “Can I get anyone another beer?” he asked.

 

That evening Kistler e-mailed
the photos of the hamlet to his editor with a note that read “Richest nation in the world.”

It had been a month since Kistler's girlfriend broke things off with him, and her absence had left him feeling disconnected and isolated. In the fall, when she was living in Boston and he'd gone to visit for the weekend, they'd agreed to make lists of the things they didn't like about each other—the issues they needed to work on. Kistler had been critical but honest, and he expected no less from her. They exchanged sheets and her page was blank with a heart on it. Kistler tried to grab his back but she kept it and read it all the way through. She said nothing afterward and even thanked him for his honesty, but it set them off balance.

Their habits diverged. She started talking about sea kayaking and cross-country skiing and bike trips she was taking with friends he didn't know. He was pale and tired, and exercise was something he could barely recollect.

Valentine's Day she called Kistler at the office and told him there was no point in dragging this out. She was spending the night with someone else. She then sent him back his sheet of paper.

 

Kistler lived in the
downtrodden section
of town in a one-bedroom apartment above a barbershop. He showed his parents the place when they visited and the look on his father's face seemed reason enough to stay awhile. “This is the way people live,” he told his father. “The way you live is a completely foreign concept to people around here.”

He heated the leftover lasagna he'd made over the weekend and turned the TV on to CNN. A reporter was speaking through the brattle of gunfire somewhere in Iraq. Kistler found his mind drifting to the men in the diner. He wondered if he'd made an ass of himself somehow.

 

In the morning Kistler
interviewed Helen,
a short, plump woman with a thick swirl of blond hair, on the front steps of her trailer. Under her coat her T-shirt hugged her stomach. The snow whipped across her lawn like litter, spraying the windows, piling at the plastic that gathered like a sheath around her antennae.

“I'm trying to talk to everyone, see where they work, how long they've lived here,” Kistler said.

“I don't work. I take care of them,” she said, pointing to the gang of children screaming and leaping in the snow. Kistler guessed there were seven.

“How long have you lived here?”

“I don't know, maybe two years? Can we wait on this until my husband gets back from the store? He wants to be in on this, he said.”

“I just need a minute. Can I come inside for a minute?”

She paused, looking Kistler over, and he saw his chance.

“Two minutes. It's no big deal,” he said. She opened the door.

Once inside he scanned the living room: the red plastic couch, the stuffed animals, and old dolls and board games strewn about.

Helen poured Kistler a glass of coffee, and on the brown couch in her living room he asked about the fire.

“They burned it down. They set their own fire department on fire to collect the insurance—three of them from the department. Your newspapers went wild. A fireman committing arson is big news. It got to be sort of a joke. I was in high school then and they rode us about it pretty hard. And then there was the lice business.”

“What was that?”

“Oh, the kids had lice a few years back and they had to run tests on them. There are a lot of mean things people say about the place. You know, that we're arsonists, that our kids are having incest. When you grow up here you get used to thinking of yourself a certain way,” she said. “Now I read a good deal, and I've got family in Rochester and Albany so I know different.”

“Have you thought about moving somewhere else?”

“I really haven't.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, you know. This is my home. I live here,” she said.

“Of course,” Kistler said.

 

Saturday, Kistler called
the schools department to talk about Paris. The superintendent told him the lice story was true. He asked the county social services department about the unemployment rate and outbreaks of birth defects and incest. He asked a farm psychologist about sexuality in isolated areas. He called a teen pregnancy center to find out how many of their clients came from Paris. They gave him the number of a fifteen-year-old client, who he interviewed on the promise he wouldn't use her real name. He pulled old clips on the firehouse fire, gathered stats from Pulaski, another town near there, for comparison. The Paris General Store manager gave him the liquor and cigarette sales figures and told him about four men he knew who spent most of their welfare checks on lottery tickets.

He took quotes from an apple farmer who told him he couldn't get people in town to pick.

“I've got migrants that come in from Florida and Texas that are making ten, fourteen dollars an hour sometimes. But almost no one around here will do it. They'll pack the boxes and I pay less for that,” the man said.

The man told Kistler social services had become a trap for the people in Paris.

“If they work, they got to give the sitter eight bucks an hour, right? So in the long run they figure it doesn't pay,” he said. Kistler wrote the quote down and put a star next to it.

The piece, when it was finished, was strong, Kistler knew. There were no quotes that weren't corroborated, no facts stated without statistics. He had not editorialized. And beyond all, the pictures were vivid. There was a shot of the diner, the regulars playing cards or laughing behind beers and plates of food. Another shot of the vacant factories and two of the trailer park. It was as compelling a portrait of rural poverty as he had seen.

When he sent the story in, his editor called him.

“This is staggering stuff,” he said.

The story ran the next morning with pictures of the trailer park and the diner. Kistler's prose ran two full pages.

He would not have chosen the headline: “The Town Time Left Behind,” with the subhead “No Springtime in Paris.” A bit too flippant, Kistler thought, but the article was left mostly untouched.

At ten, the county social services director called to say his whole family had read it. “It carries an important message,” he said.

Another reader from Syracuse called a half hour later. “Imagine living like that,” she said. “And all those children. It made me feel a little more fortunate, I'll tell you that much.”

Then a man from Paris whom he hadn't met called to say the paper had sold out in Paris, in Albion, in Pulaski, in Williamstown. He didn't speak to Kistler. Instead he called the editor. He said the article pointed to a lot of matters that needed discussing and he invited “the reporter” out to an impromptu meeting.

The word spread around the newsroom that Kistler's story had caused a stir. The managing editor read it. The publisher looked it over. Every ten minutes or so Kistler's phone rang.

“I think a story about that meeting could go front page,” his editor told him. “Especially if you've got some people hollering, demanding things from the town board.”

His bureaumate, Marsden, pored through it, his feet on his desk.

“What do you think?” Kistler asked.

“I don't know, Kistler,” he said. “You've got people talking about incest and arson here. They all sound like drunks.”

“That's a fairly narrow read of it.”

“I guess I'm narrow then.”

 

On the day of
the meeting,
Kistler didn't shave. He put on a creased shirt with thin ridges of dirt on the collar and cuffs and old blue jeans. He took his own camera. It was an afternoon for pinks and blues in the sky and as he drove through the dead tan benchland, disked with corn skeletons and bare thin trees, he realized how focused he'd been the last week or so. It made him feel good.

 

The day had warmed
and the cleared wet road caught the sun. If the meeting went more than three hours, Kistler would have to file by phone, which he didn't like to do. He'd done it at a drowning and people had eavesdropped on his description of the body he'd seen pulled from the water. It made him feel self-conscious and he edited himself more than he should have. The piece when it ran was flat and had none of the color of the moment.

The meeting was in the town's fire hall, a florid metal and wood structure that might once have been an airplane hangar. Next to a flagpole on the front lawn, a wide yellow sign listed Bingo nights. Kistler veered around the lot, which was clogged with pickups and cars, a dozen or so children's bikes with banana seats and thick-ridged tires. It was the biggest meeting Kistler had ever covered.

The air inside was stale, with thick curls of smoke passing through the beams of light, which emerged from two old-style spotlights in the back corners of the room. A podium stood at the center on what looked to be a theatrical stage. A man whom Kistler hadn't met in his previous visits walked over to greet him. He had a red-and-white-checkered shirt and new blue jeans, eyebrows that came together in a V, and tall black hair that gleamed with comb marks. His name was Mr. Thomas, he said, and he would introduce Kistler.

“People are kind of upset,” he said. “But you can understand that.”

Kistler nodded, though he did not know what he meant.

“I think people will appreciate the guts it took to come out here like this. By yourself, too.” Mr. Thomas had a copy of the story in his hand and Kistler wanted to grab it from him. It felt like he'd stepped onto the wrong train and was heading far from his desired destination. When he looked out at the audience, he saw that nearly every one of them had a copy of the newspaper in their hands.

Mr. Thomas moved to the podium and motioned Kistler to wait to the side, near the American flag.

He poked the microphone until it sang like tires burning. Kistler saw the men from the diner in the front seats. They stared straight at him as if they could make him disappear with a good glare. In fact, it was all men in the first two rows, large and, from the looks of it, angry men in flannel shirts and baseball caps, and behind them were some couples and whole six-member families, children in bright sweatshirts fidgeting. He heard a baby cry and then somebody cough. And then it seemed as if everyone was coughing. He saw other people he'd interviewed.

These people hate me,
Kistler thought.
Everyone in this room hates my guts.

Mr. Thomas tested the microphone and then smiled unpleasantly.

“We've got the reporter here and he's going to answer our questions,” he said. “I think we're quite fortunate he made the trip. It's not everyone who'd do it under the circumstances.”

Mr. Thomas motioned with his hands and then stepped to the opposite side, near an exit. As Kistler walked up, the crowd talked among itself—a sort of angry buzz. The spotlights shone in his face and Kistler felt his flesh leap. His left eye twitched slightly and he took his glasses off to rub his lids.

He pitched forward, feeling almost dizzy, and before he could speak a woman toward the back stood waving the article.

“My children were teased so hard in school they called me up crying,” she said. “We are not a town of lowlifes and building burners.”

The crowd whooped and hollered. Someone called Kistler a son of a bitch. A young voice demanded that he recant. Kistler started to reply and the man yelled, “Just do it, you little prick!” and rushed from his seat. Someone pulled the man down and held him.

Kistler let his pulse settle and composed himself, breathing deeply, and the crowd quieted. He spoke in a calm, flowing voice that felt apart from him. He talked about purpose, about why he went into journalism, his sense of the world's inequities, his role in their ultimate reversal. He told them how little he was paid, how a lot of jobs would have put him in cushier circumstances. He talked of roaches and mice in his apartment, and the long hours he had to put in. He said he apologized if he upset anyone but his job was to get to the truth.