A Better Way of Saying by Sarah Pinsker

Author:Sarah Pinsker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

* * *

I didn’t have a nickel for the train when I left the hotel; even if I had money, I think I would have walked. It took me a good hour or so. I needed the time to try to sort out what had happened, whether everything in my missing notebook could be brought to memory, and what exactly I was going to tell Lenny. Fairbanks met with reporters at his hotel, then took everyone to the roof, where—what happened? I wished I knew any of the other newspapermen there to ask them, but like I said, I wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone, and anyway, they were all strangers to me. I left quickly after the second arrow flew.

Lenny caught up with me in the evening as I walked to the theater for my real job. “Did you call in the Fairbanks bit?”

I nodded. A lie, my first of the new year if you didn’t count pretending to be him at the hotel. My hope was that maybe between the baseball and whatever else had transpired over the day, there’d be enough news for Lenny to assume the paper had simply run out of room. A nonevent, unworthy of column space. He looked at me like he expected me to tell him how it had gone. I waited him out, and after a minute he started talking about Bullet Joe’s fastball and where he put the Yankees’ chances.

The next day, I scrounged two cents each for the Herald and the Tribune, eager to read how their reporters had written up the event. The Herald had a story on the third page, “Mysterious Arrow Hits Man on Fifth Avenue.” What was mysterious about it? A fellow from the Herald stood next to me when that arrow flew! I kept going, and on page fourteen found, “Fairbanks Here with Mustache but Minus Beard,” which quoted Pickford at length but made no mention of the rooftop.

The Tribune had “Furrier Punctured by Arrow; Fairbanks Denies Practice Stunt.”

“That archery yarn was a press agent story that unfortunately coincides with the accident to the injured man,” the picture star’s representative declared. “Mr. Fairbanks was not on the hotel roof this afternoon and he did not fire any arrows.” This one baffled me, too, with reporters from every newspaper up there on the roof, or at least real photographers standing alongside all of us pretending to be reporters.

Someone else at the Evening World put the two together. I hadn’t bothered to buy the World, assuming they had no story without my call, but Lenny appeared in my ticket line mashing page three against the window to show me the headline: “Police Trace Responsibility for Arrow that Hit Seligman.”

“This wasn’t worth mentioning?”

I shrugged. “They encouraged us not to write about it while they sorted it out.”

Lenny looked at me with pure disappointment, like I had completely misunderstood the brief he’d given me; he never asked me to stand in for him again, and soon after, the World stopped paying me for news.

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