Damnation Falls (2007) by Edward Wright

Author:Edward Wright [Wright, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

I started by telling her about the Columnist and the world he lived in, the high-stakes, competitive world of big-city journalism. The Columnist, I told her, was hot stuff, with a thrice-weekly spot on page three of the Chicago Examiner, a platform for just about any subject that struck his fancy, a megaphone to send his thoughts out to the streets and suburbs. He wrote about the little guys and the fat cats, about the working stiffs and their bosses, about the people who ran Chicago and the people who didn’t seem to count. He was responsible for the firing of a deputy mayor and the resignation of an alderman. He made people laugh and cry. They read him, they wrote letters to the paper, they argued about him in the bars. Some people called him the voice of the city. He had a job almost any other newspaperman would kill for.

I also told her about the Columnist’s ambition, his drive to be not just good but the best. He knew he wasn’t the best, because the Historian already had that title, along with a Pulitzer Prize to show for it. Now as you know, the Pulitzer goes to a whole grab bag of writing types—novelists, biographers, poets, playwrights, historians, all kinds of scribblers. But old Joe Pulitzer, who dreamed up the prize, was a newspaperman, and it’s still considered the gold standard for newspaper writing. The Columnist, naturally, wanted one to show to the Historian, for reasons we needn’t go into but that are as deep as anything between father and son.

His job wasn’t easy. Three times a week he had to come up with something that would stir people’s anger or touch their humanity or just make them laugh at their own foibles. He ranged far and wide for his subjects. Sometimes he had to reach down inside himself for them. He liked to joke that his job was easy—he’d just sit down at the keyboard, open a vein, and bleed.

One night, when the Columnist was on his way from dinner to his car, he met the kid. The locale was a gritty stretch of street called Lower Michigan Avenue. Up above was the real Michigan Avenue, the Magnificent Mile, home of gleaming high rises and high-end shopping. The lower level was dank and dirty, a place of loading docks and grimy Dumpsters and rusty girders that held up the shiny street above. Tourists out after dark peeked under Michigan Avenue and decided that the lower level was not for them. It was not a place for a kid either.

The kid was filthy, with coveralls and sneakers without laces and a head of hair that might have been sandy-colored under all the dirt. He had a bloody nose, which caused the Columnist to stop and ask if he was all right. This met with a snappy and obscene response that would have caused most would-be Good Samaritans to back off, but the columnist was the curious sort. He gave the kid a handkerchief to wipe his nose, and a minute later they were talking.

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