Shipping News, The - E. Annie Proulx [3]
Quoyle nodded, hand over chin. If Partridge suggested he leap from a bridge he would at least lean on the rail. The advice of a friend.
“Mercalia! I’m saving the heel for you, lovely girl. It’s the best part. Come on out here.”
Mercalia put the cap on her pen. Weary of writing of prodigies who bit their hands and gyred around parlor chairs spouting impossible sums, dust rising from the oriental carpets beneath their stamping feet.
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Ed Punch talked out of the middle of his mouth. While he talked he examined Quoyle, noticed the cheap tweed jacket the size of a horse blanket, fingernails that looked regularly held to a grindstone. He smelled submission in Quoyle, guessed he was butter of fair spreading consistency.
Quoyle’s own eyes roved to a water-stained engraving on the wall. He saw a grainy face, eyes like glass eggs, a fringe of hairs rising from under the collar and cascading over its starched rim. Was it Punch’s grandfather in the chipped frame? He wondered about ancestors.
“This is a family paper. We run upbeat stories with a community slant.” The Mockingburg Record specialized in fawning anecdotes of local business people, profiles of folksy characters; this thin stuff padded with puzzles and contests, syndicated columns, features and cartoons. There was always a self-help quiz—“Are You a Breakfast Alcoholic?”
[6] Punch sighed, feigned a weighty decision. “Put you on the municipal beat to help out Al Catalog. He’ll break you in. Get your assignments from him.”
The salary was pathetic, but Quoyle didn’t know.
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Al Catalog, face like a stubbled bun, slick mouth, ticked the back of his fingernail down the assignment list. His glance darted away from the back of Quoyle’s chin, hammer on a nail.
“O.k., planning board meeting’s a good one for you to start with. Down at the elemennary school. Whyn’t you take that tonight? Sit in the little chairs. Write down everything you hear, type it up. Five hunnerd max. Take a recorder, you want. Show me the piece in the AM. Lemme see it before you give it on to that black son of a bitch on the copy desk.” Partridge was the black son of a bitch.
Quoyle at the back of the meeting, writing on his pad. Went home, typed and retyped all night at the kitchen table. In the morning, eyes circled by rings, nerved on coffee, he went to the newsroom. Waited for Al Catalog.
Ed Punch, always the first through the door, slid into his office like an eel into the rock. The AM parade started. Feature-page man swinging a bag of coconut doughnuts; tall Chinese woman with varnished hair; elderly circulation man with arms like hawsers; two women from layout; photo editor, yesterday’s shirt all underarm stains. Quoyle at his desk pinching his chin, his head down, pretending to correct his article. It was eleven pages long.
At ten o’clock, Partridge. Red suspenders and a linen shirt. He nodded and patted his way across the newsroom, stuck his head in Punch’s crevice, winked at Quoyle, settled into the copy desk slot in front of his terminal.
Partridge knew a thousand things, that wet ropes held greater weight, why a hard-boiled egg spun more readily than a raw. Eyes half closed, head tipped back in a light trance, he could cite baseball statistics as the ancients unreeled The Iliad. He reshaped banal prose, scraped the mold off Jimmy Breslin imitations. “Where are the [7] reporters of yesteryear?” he muttered, “the nail-biting, acerbic, alcoholic nighthawk bastards who truly knew how to write?”
Quoyle brought over his copy. “Al isn’t in yet,” he said, squaring up the pages, “so I thought I’d give it to you.”
His friend did not smile. Was on the job. Read for a few seconds, lifted his face to the fluorescent light. “Edna was in she’d shred this. Al saw it he’d tell Punch to get rid of you. You got to rewrite this. Here, sit down. Show you what’s wrong. They say reporters can be made out of anything. You’ll be a test case.”
It was what Quoyle had expected.
“Your lead,” said