Like most successful boys, however, Timmerman was not someone who gave up easily or forgot. Every morning for the rest of the week, he approached Ferguson on the playground and asked if he had come to a decision, and every morning Ferguson tried to put him off. Maybe, he said, maybe it’s a good idea, but it’s spring now, and there won’t be enough time to put out another issue before the end of the school year. We’re both busy with Little League these days, and you can’t imagine how much work goes into it. Weeks of work, months of work. So much work that I’m not even sure I want to do it anymore. Give it a rest for a while, and maybe we can talk about it again over the summer.
But Timmerman would be away at camp over the summer, and he wanted to resolve the question now. Even if the next issue wouldn’t be coming out until the fall, he needed to know if he could count on it or not, and why in the world was Ferguson having so much trouble deciding what to do? What was the big deal?
Ferguson understood that he was cornered. Four straight days of badgering, and he knew it wouldn’t stop until he gave an answer. But what was the right answer? If he told Timmerman he didn’t want him, he would probably lose a friend. If he agreed to let Timmerman join the paper, he would despise himself for buckling in. A part of him was flattered by Timmerman’s enthusiasm for the Crusader, and another part of him was beginning to dislike his friend, who was no longer acting like a friend but a smooth-talking bully. No, not quite a bully, but a manipulator, and because the manipulator was the most powerful and influential person in the class, Ferguson was loath to do anything that would offend him, for if Timmerman felt wronged by Ferguson, he could turn the entire class against him, and Ferguson’s life would become an unrelenting misery for the rest of the school year. And yet, he couldn’t allow the Crusader to be destroyed just for the sake of preserving the peace. No matter what happened, he would still be trapped inside his own skin, and better to be turned into an outcast than to lose all respect for himself. On the other hand, even better not to be turned into an outcast if he could help it.
Both yes and no were out of the question. What Ferguson needed was a maybe that would offer some hope without pinning him down to a lasting commitment, a delaying tactic camouflaged as a step forward, which in truth would be a step backward and a chance to buy more time. He proposed that Timmerman take on a test assignment to see if he enjoyed the work, and once he had written up the story, they would look at it together and decide if it belonged in the Crusader. Timmerman seemed to balk at first, looking none too pleased at the thought of having to be judged by Ferguson, but that was to be expected from a straight-A student with absolute confidence in his intellectual gifts, and so Ferguson was compelled to explain that the test was necessary because the Crusader was his thing and not Timmerman’s, and if Timmerman wanted to be a part of his thing, he would have to prove that his work fit in with the spirit of the enterprise, which was snappy, funny, and quick. It didn’t matter how smart he was, Ferguson said, he had yet to write a single newspaper article, he had no experience at all, and how could they join forces unless they knew what his stuff sounded like? Fair enough, Timmerman said. He would write a sample piece and prove how good he was, and that would be that.
This is what I’m thinking, Ferguson said. Who is your favorite movie actress—and why? Talk to everyone in the class, every girl and every boy, and ask them all that one question: Who is your favorite movie actress—and why? Be sure to write down every word they say, word for word the exact answers they give you, and then go home and turn the results into a one-column story that will make people laugh when they read it, and if you can’t make them laugh, at least make them smile. Okay?
Okay, Timmerman said. But why not favorite actor, too?
Because contests with one winner are better than contests with two winners. The actors can wait until the next issue.
So Ferguson bought himself some time by sending Timmerman off on this useless, make-work errand, and all was calm for the next ten days as the rookie reporter gathered his data and set about to write the article. As Ferguson had suspected, Marilyn Monroe received the most votes from the boys, six out of eleven, with the other five going to Elizabeth Taylor (two), Grace Kelly (two), and Audrey Hepburn (one), but the girls gave Monroe only two of their twelve votes, with the other ten distributed among Hepburn (three), Taylor (three), and one each to Kelly, Leslie Caron, Cyd Charisse, and Deborah Kerr. Ferguson himself hadn’t been able to decide between Taylor and Kelly, so he’d flipped a coin and wound up giving his vote to Taylor, while Timmerman, faced with a similar dilemma between Kelly and Hepburn, had flipped the same coin and wound up going for Kelly. Complete nonsense, of course, but there was something amusing about it as well, and Ferguson noted how conscientiously Timmerman went about the business of interviewing the kids and jotting down their comments in his small, spiral-bound reporter’s notebook. Top marks for legwork and industry, then, but that was only the beginning, the foundation of the house, as it were, and it was still unclear what kind of structure Timmerman would be capable of building. There was no doubt that the boy had a good brain, but that didn’t mean he could write well.
During that ten-day period of watching and waiting, Ferguson lapsed into an odd state of ambivalence, becoming less and less sure of how he felt about Timmerman, uncertain whether he should go on resenting him or begin to show some gratitude for his hard work, one minute hoping he would fail with the article and the next moment hoping he would succeed, wondering if it might not be a good idea to have another reporter share the load with him after all, realizing now that there was a certain satisfaction in assigning tasks to other people, that being the boss was not without its pleasures, for Timmerman had followed his orders without complaint, and that was a new feeling, the sense of being in charge, and if all went well with Timmerman’s article, perhaps he should consider letting him in, not as a partner, of course, no, not that, never that, but as a contributing writer, the first of what could be several contributing writers, which could end up making it possible to expand the Crusader from two pages to four. Perhaps. And then again, perhaps not, for Timmerman had yet to hand in the article, even though he had finished the interviews in five days, and now that another five days had gone by, Ferguson could only conclude that he was struggling with it, and if Timmerman was having a hard time, that probably meant the piece was no good, and anything less than good would be unacceptable. He would have to tell that to Timmerman’s face. Imagine looking into the eyes of hotshot Michael Timmerman, he said to himself, the one person who had never failed at anything, and telling him he had failed. By the morning of the tenth day, Ferguson’s hopes for the future had collapsed into a single wish: that Timmerman was writing a masterpiece.
As it turned out, the article wasn’t bad. Not horribly bad, in any case, but it lacked the bounce Ferguson had been hoping for, the touch of humor that would have turned its trivial subject into something worth reading about. If there was any consolation in this letdown, it came from the fact that Timmerman seemed to think it was bad as well, or so Ferguson surmised from the author’s self-deprecatory shrug when he handed him the finished manuscript on the playground that morning, accompanied by an apology for having taken so long to do the job, but it hadn’t been as easy as he was expecting it to be, Timmerman said, he had rewritten the article four times, and if he had learned anything from the experience, it was that writing was a pretty tough business.
Good, Ferguson said to himself. A little humility from Mr. Perfect. An admission of doubt, perhaps even an admission of defeat, and therefore the confrontation he had been dreading most likely would not be taking place, which was a good thing, a most excellent and reassuring thing, since Ferguson had spent the past days imagining fists flying into his stomach and summary banishments to the outer realms of the scorned. Still, he realized, if he wanted to keep their friendship intact, he would have to tread cautiously around Timmerman and make sure he didn’t step on his toes. They were big toes, and the person they be
longed to was a big boy, and amiable as that boy could be, he also had a temper, which Ferguson had witnessed several times over the years, most recently when Timmerman had decked Tommy Fuchs for calling him a stuck-up shit, the same Tommy Fuchs who was known to his detractors as Tommy Fucks, and Ferguson had no wish to be fucked around by Timmerman as Tommy Fucks had been.
He asked Timmerman to give him a few minutes, and then he withdrew to a corner of the playground to read the article alone:
“The question was: Who is your favorite movie actress—and why? A poll of the twenty-three students in Miss Van Horn’s fifth-grade class has given us the answer—Marilyn Monroe, who garnered eight votes, winning out over Elizabeth Taylor, who came in second with five votes…”
Timmerman had done a creditable job of reporting the facts, but his language was bland, stiff to the point of lifelessness, and he had concentrated on the least interesting part of the story, the numbers, which were profoundly boring when compared to what the students had said about their choices, comments Timmerman had shared with Ferguson and then had largely neglected to work into the piece, and as Ferguson recalled some of those statements now, he found himself beginning to rewrite the article in his head:
“‘Va va voom,’ said Kevin Lassiter, needing just three short words to explain why Marilyn Monroe was his favorite movie actress.
“‘She seems like such a kind and intelligent person, I wish I knew her and could be her friend,’ said Peggy Goldstein, defending her choice of Deborah Kerr.
“‘So elegant, so beautiful—I just can’t tear my eyes away from her,’ said Gloria Dolan about her number one, Grace Kelly.
“‘Some dish,’ said Alex Botello, referring to his top star, Elizabeth Taylor. ‘I mean, get a load of that body of hers. It makes a boy want to grow up real fast.’”
Impossible to ask Timmerman to go back to the beginning and write the article for a fifth time. Useless to tell him that his work had produced neither a laugh nor a smile and that he might be better served by focusing on the why instead of the who. It was too late to get into any of that now, and the last thing Ferguson wanted was to lord it over Timmerman and start lecturing him on what he should or shouldn’t write. He walked back to where Mr. Big Toes was standing and returned the article to him.
Well? Timmerman said.
Not bad, Ferguson replied.
You mean not good.
No, not not good. Not bad. Which means pretty good.
And what about the next issue?
I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about it yet.
But you’re planning to do one, right?
Maybe. Maybe not. It’s too soon to tell.
Don’t give up. You’ve started something good, Archie, and you’ve got to keep it going.
Not if I don’t feel like it I don’t. Anyway, why should you care? I still don’t get why the Crusader is suddenly so important to you.
Because it’s exciting, that’s why, and I want to be part of something exciting. I think it would be a lot of fun.
Okay. I’ll tell you what. If I decide to do another issue, I’ll let you know.
And give me a chance to write something?
Sure, why not?
You promise?
To give you a chance? Yes, I promise.
Even as he spoke those words, Ferguson knew that his promise meant nothing, since he had already made up his mind to shut down the Crusader for good. The fourteen-day battle with Timmerman had worn him out, and he was feeling depleted and uninspired, disgusted with himself for his weak-minded changes of heart, demoralized by his reluctance to stand up for himself and fight for his position, which was a one-man paper or nothing, and now that he had made his splash and done what he had set out to do, perhaps it was better that it should be nothing, better that he should get out of the pool, dry himself off, and call it quits. Besides, it was baseball season now, and he was busy playing for the West Orange Chamber of Commerce Pirates, and when he wasn’t playing baseball he was busy reading The Count of Monte Cristo, the immense book that Aunt Mildred had sent him last month for his eleventh birthday, which he had finally started after the second issue of the Crusader had been put to bed, and now that he was in it he was fully in it, for it was without question the most absorbing novel that had ever fallen into his hands, and how pleasant it was to be following the adventures of Edmond Dantès every night after dinner instead of counting the words in his articles in order to fit them into the narrow columns of his broadsheet, so much labor, so many late nights squinting under his one-bulb lamp, forging on in the near-black while his parents thought he was asleep, so many false starts and corrections, so many silent thanks to the man who had invented erasers, knowing now that the job of writing was as much about removing words as adding them, and then the tedious work of going over every penciled letter with ink to make sure the words would be dark enough to be legible in the facsimiles, exhausting, yes, that was the word for it, and after his prolonged and harrowing standoff with Timmerman, he was exhausted, and as any doctor would have told him, the only cure for exhaustion was rest.
He rested for a month, finished the Dumas with a heavy heart, afraid that years might go by before he came across another novel as good as that one, and then, in the three days following his completion of the book, three things happened that changed his thinking and brought him out of retirement. He simply couldn’t help himself. The words of a new headline had popped into his head, and so delightful were those words to him, so vivid was the rhyming jangle of their clattering consonants, so tricky was the way their apparent nonsense was in fact not nonsense but sense, that he longed to see those words in print, and so, reneging on his vow to leave the newspaper business, he started planning a third issue of the Crusader, which would carry his one-two punch of a headline in large letters across the front page: FRACAS IN CARACAS.
It began on May thirteenth, when Richard Nixon was attacked by a mob of Venezuelan protesters on the final stop of a three-country goodwill tour of South America. The vice president had just landed at the airport, and as his motorcade drove through the streets of downtown Caracas, the crowds lining the sidewalks chanted Death to Nixon!, Nixon Go Home!, and before long Nixon’s car was surrounded by scores of people, mostly young men, who began spitting on the car and smashing the windows, and a few moments after that they were tipping the car from side to side, jostling it back and forth with such fury that it looked as if the car was about to turn over, and if not for the sudden appearance of Venezuelan soldiers, who dispersed the mob and cleared a path for Nixon’s car to get away, things might have ended badly, quite badly for everyone concerned, especially for the almost murdered Nixon and his wife.
Ferguson read about it in the paper the next morning, saw footage of the incident on the TV news that evening, and late the following afternoon cousin Francie, her husband Gary, and their five-month-old baby stopped by the house for a visit. They lived in New York now, where Gary was about to finish his first year of law school at Columbia, and ever since Ferguson’s performance as ring bearer at the wedding ceremony four years earlier, Gary had treated his young cousin-in-law as a kind of protégé, an up-and-coming fellow traveler in the world of ideas and manly pursuits, which had led to some long conversations about books and sports, but also about politics, which were something of an obsession for Gary (who subscribed to Dissent, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, and the Partisan Review), and because Francie’s husband was an intelligent young man, surely the best thinker Ferguson knew besides his Aunt Mildred, it was only natural that he should ask Gary what he thought about Nixon’s run-in with the mob in Venezuela. They were outside in the backyard together, walking under the oak tree that Ferguson had fallen out of when he was six, the tall, heavyset Gary puffing on a Parliament as Ferguson’s mother and Francie sat on the porch with baby Stephen, that plump little novice human being, as young in relation to Ferguson as Ferguson had once been to Francie, and as the two women laughed together and took turns holding the b
aby, the didactic, ever-solemn Gary Hollander was talking to him about the Cold War, the blacklist, the Red Scare, and the unhinged anti-communism that drove American foreign policy, which had led the State Department into supporting vicious, right-wing dictatorships all around the world, especially in Central and South America, and that was why Nixon had been attacked, he said, not because he was Nixon but because he represented the government of the United States, and that government was despised by vast numbers of people in those countries, justly despised for backing the tyrants who oppressed them.
Gary paused to light another Parliament. Then he said: You follow what I’m saying, Archie?
Ferguson nodded. I get it, he said. We’re so scared of communism, we’ll do anything to stop it. Even if it means helping people who are worse than communists.
The next morning, while reading the sports pages over breakfast, Ferguson stumbled across the word fracas for the first time. A Detroit pitcher had thrown a ball at a Chicago batter’s head, the batter had dropped his bat, run to the mound, and punched the pitcher, and then the players from both teams had charged out onto the field and taken slugs at one another for the next twelve minutes. Once the fracas subsided, the reporter wrote, six players were ejected from the game.