The Reporter

CHAPTER TWO-1

CHAPTER TWOJesse drove down the highway, beating on the steering wheel like a bongo drum. He was heading to the tiny town of Pierceton, Indiana, to do a story on a fundraising benefit for Henry Coffey, a high school wrestler who had been paralyzed from the neck down in a car crash. This was his first big chance to do a news story on his own. Weatherly had finally sent him out on assignment.

He glanced at his watch. It was six thirty. He had to get the facts and return to write the story and file it by the eleven o’clock deadline. He wondered whether his beat-up 1967 Plymouth Barracuda would make the eighty-mile round trip.

Jesse had written stories in high school and college, but none of them under the time pressure of a deadline. He hoped he wouldn’t choke up with some last-minute writer’s block. He couldn’t think about that right now. He had to focus on the task at hand. First, he had to find the high school gymnasium. Then he had to somehow wrangle an interview with a young athlete who could no longer move his arms and legs.

Jesse didn’t have a camera and there was no photographer with him. Weatherly told him to bring home whatever family photos he could borrow for the story. The paper already had the young man’s photo from a promotional flyer for the event.

Once he was in town, it wasn’t difficult finding the gym. All Jesse had to do was follow the steady stream of cars headed for the benefit. He had to park a football field away from the gym. He grabbed his pen and notepad.

Jesse headed across the large parking lot toward the gym with the other high school students. He seized the opportunity and stopped to ask a few students why they had come. The kids were eager to talk to a newsman even though the only credential he had was an eight-by-four-inch reporter’s notebook and a ballpoint pen.

Jesse was taller than most of the students. He stood at six-three and weighed one hundred and eighty-five pounds. He had curly brown hair, hazel eyes, high cheekbones, and strong eyebrows. His mother always told him he was handsome, but he never felt that good looking. He’d been short until a major growth spurt his senior year of high school.

He was wearing a white shirt with a collar and a tie but no sport coat. He didn’t own one. It was a chilly night, but he left his black leather jacket in the Barracuda.

Once inside the building, he took names and notes from well-wishers as he wedged his way into the center of the gym. The place was huge, a basketball court with ten rows of bleacher seating on every side. The ceiling was thirty feet tall with bright lights hanging from every section. A portable stage was set up at one end of the court with a sea of folding chairs in front of it.

The gym was seriously overcrowded when Jesse waded in and began asking questions of crowd members about why they had come and how they knew Henry. People repeated the usual platitudes about what a great guy Henry was and how his tragedy afflicted the entire community. The story was shaping up to be a colossal cliché until Jesse met an athletic young woman with a long blonde ponytail who burst into tears when he asked for her name.

“I’m Karen, Henry’s girlfriend. I know I’m not supposed to cry, but I can’t help it. He’s being so brave, and everyone has been so kind. But I don’t think I can do this alone.”

Jesse sensed she was talking about much more than attending the fundraiser. He asked questions about how she and Henry had met and what kind of things they liked to do together. My first interview as a reporter, he thought, and the questions are coming naturally. All I’ve got to do is ask about what I want to know. Or what the reader needs to know.

She almost stopped crying as she answered his questions. Finally, she stopped talking and grabbed him by the arm. “Come over here. I’ve got to tell you something in private.”

Karen led him to the back of the event stage. Henry was paralyzed from the neck down and propped up on a hospital bed less than twenty feet away. Karen’s mascara was running down her cheeks as she leaned in close enough for Jesse to smell the spearmint gum she was chewing.

“I haven’t told anybody this. Henry doesn’t even know. And you’ve got to promise you won’t put it in the newspaper.”

Jesse nodded his head.

“Here’s the deal. I’m pregnant. Henry’s the father. I want to marry him no matter what. Should I tell him tonight?”

Jesse stopped taking notes after hearing the word pregnant. He was speechless. Evidently, she regarded him as some kind of moral authority because he wrote for the newspaper. He wondered what he had done to earn her confidence so quickly until he realized she had never been interviewed by a reporter. Answering his questions had put her in a confessional mode. He resisted the urge to tell her that he’d only written obituaries.

He put the notebook in his hip pocket. “How old are you?”

“I’m sixteen, but Henry’s almost eighteen.”

Jesse looked at her stomach and couldn’t see any sign of pregnancy. “How long have you been sixteen, and how long have you been pregnant?”

Karen rubbed her stomach self-consciously. “I’m two months pregnant and I turned sixteen last week.” Her hazel eyes were brimming with tears.

Jesse clenched his jaw. It was clear that she had no idea it was a serious crime to have any kind of s*x with a person under sixteen in the state of Indiana. He realized she’d become pregnant at fifteen years old.

Karen looked away and waved at Henry, who was summoning her by raising his head to come up onstage and be by his side.

“I would like to meet Henry. Will you introduce me?” Jesse asked.

Karen wiped the eye makeup off her face with a tissue as she led Jesse onto the platform and introduced him to the guest of honor. “David, this is the man from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. He drove all this way to do a story on you.”

Henry smiled broadly. “Sorry I can’t shake hands. All I can do is say thanks for coming.”

Jesse nodded. “You’ve sure got a lot of people on your side. I didn’t think wrestlers got this kind of attention, only basketball stars.”

Henry tried to smile again, but ended up biting his lip. A tear rolled down his left cheek. Karen wiped it away with her tissue and got mascara on his face. “It’s okay to cry, honey. I’ve been crying all night,” she said.

Jesse pulled up a folding chair and sat down next to Henry’s hospital bed. “I guess we’re lucky to have you with us. There wasn’t much left of your car from the photos I saw. Do you remember what happened?”

Henry closed his eyes. “I only know what they told me when I woke up in the hospital. They think I swerved to miss a deer or something and ended up crashing head-on into a big old oak tree. I wasn’t drinking or anything. They tell me the tree is fine.” He opened his eyes. The people around him laughed a little too loudly, grateful that Henry was attempting to maintain his sense of humor.

Jesse took out his notebook and pen. “So, how long were you in the hospital?”

Henry stretched his neck. “I was in a little over two weeks. I’ve been in rehab for five weeks. They rolled me out on this bed for the fundraiser.”

Jesse had no idea what to say next, so he asked the only question that came to mind. “What are the doctors saying about your future?”

Karen intervened. “It’s too soon to tell.”

Henry shook his head. “I’m paralyzed for life. My spine is severed. I’ll never walk again or do anything again.” He fell silent and closed his eyes. Nobody knew what to say. Jesse knew better than to ask any more questions. Karen stroked Henry’s hair as the school principal spoke into the microphone to begin the program.

Jesse stayed to hear the glee club and the band and most of the speakers. Finally, the clock in the protective wire cage hanging over the exit told him it was time to go. He said goodbye to Karen. She gave him a long hug and handed him a photo of her and Henry after one of his wrestling matches. They looked so happy and blissfully unaware of what the near future would bring. Henry’s muscular, glistening physique shined in the photo like nothing could ever beat him.

All the way back to the newsroom Jesse debated what he should write for his lead sentence. Should he focus on the wrestler or on the event? The girlfriend needed to be included to flesh out the story. The stand-by-your-man angle was a tearjerker for sure. But should it be a sad story about the victim or a hopeful tale of a community coming together?

He had no idea what it would be as he sat down to his new Smith Corona electric typewriter and stared at the blank paper. He wasn’t that great a typist, maybe sixty words a minute with a few mistakes. It was ten o’clock, and he was running out of time.

Weatherly walked over to Jesse’s desk and noticed the photo of the wrestler with his girlfriend. He picked up the photo. “Nice touch. Work her into the story.”

Jesse looked up at his boss and grinned. “She’s pregnant with his child and hasn’t told him yet. She wants to get married anyway.”

Weatherly searched Jesse’s eyes to make sure he wasn’t kidding. “Don’t work her in that deep. Stick to the benefit. This isn’t a story about teen pregnancy.”

Jesse kicked himself as Weatherly walked away. He never should have divulged the young girl’s secret. What if the city editor wanted him to write about it? Would he violate her confidence? Trying to impress his boss could have backfired. He vowed to keep his big mouth shut in the future. But something else was bothering him. Why had the girl told him her secret? What had he done to earn such trust? And what kind of internal censor told him not to write about her pregnancy?

Weatherly was right. It wasn’t a story about teen pregnancy. And it wasn’t a story about a paralyzed wrestler who would never take his child for a walk in the park. It was the story of a young man, crippled in the prime of his youth, and the humanitarian reaction of his small town. People were coming together to try to help in any way they could.

He tried to collect his thoughts. A lead sentence had to be written and written fast. He closed his eyes and typed the first thought that came to mind. “The town of Pierceton raised the roof for one of its own last night at a benefit for a paralyzed high school wrestler.”

He opened his eyes. The lead sentence read back much better than Jesse thought it would. Lucky thing. He had no time to rewrite it. The second sentence followed naturally and was much easier to write. By the end of the article, Jesse was clacking the keys on his typewriter like the deadline was all he ever needed to kick him into gear. The sense of urgency inspired him. It was a thrill like nothing he had ever experienced. Sentences were writing themselves, paragraphs parading into his mind’s eye. He had to remind himself to breathe. The deadline rush felt addictive. It was heart-pounding. His doubts about becoming a reporter vanished as he felt the printers’ ink surging through his veins. That’s what older reporters loved to say. “They got printers’ ink in their blood.” Printers were the blue collar boys upstairs who set type and turned giant rolls of newsprint that arrived by railroad car into newspapers.

He worked the girl into the fifth paragraph. “Henry’s girlfriend, Karen Wagner, remained at his side throughout the two-hour program of music and speakers. Henry’s mother cried when she stepped up to the microphone and spoke about the shock of her only son’s horrible accident. At that moment, Karen leaned down and kissed Henry on the forehead. The crowd saw the tender gesture and filled the gymnasium with a thunderous cheer of support.”

Jesse typed the story on a continuous roll of copy paper. When he finally ripped it off the typewriter, it was nearly three feet long. He handwrote “-30-” on the page to show the piece was complete.