shop, almost all white. Why do we even want to risk everything for those assholes?”
The room was stunned into momentary silence, followed by murmurs that quickly increased in quantity and volume into a collective expression of anti-driver sentiment. Someone yelled, “If we walk out, we’re committing professional suicide.” Another voice from somewhere on the side wall near Jamie groused, “This is all a goddamn setup.”
Jamie could feel a surge of passion from those who wanted no part of this. He, too, wanted to shed his veneer of neutrality, leap on top of this surge of politically incorrect passion, ride it right out the door and back to work. But he kept his opinion to himself.
From the row right in front of the original voice of dissent rose a shrill, “What the…?”
Carla Delgado wheeled in her seat, turning to stare down Sunday Arts.
“Let me tell you something, those assholes saved your pitiful ass four years ago. They supported you and everyone else in here when Maxine wanted to make all of us pay through the nose for our health insurance. Am I right?”
Sunday Arts frowned but obediently shook his head.
Carla, fueled by her access to expense accounts, wasn’t about to let the ingrate off the hook.
“And who the hell are you, Henry, to accuse people of stealing? I see the crap you run by every goddamned week. When was the last time you paid for dinner? How’d you like me to run back to the office right now and bring over a copy of that crap you turned in last year, a week in Bermuda doing some bullshit—what was it?—weekend getaways to fuck your bitch from the art museum?”
“Art museum?” someone along the wall snorted. “She looks like she’s from The Museum of Natural History.”
Carla sat back down, crossed her legs, pulled her black skirt closer to her knees and crossed her arms. The room grew quiet. The protest seemed successfully squelched by the office manager and Jamie’s emergency nurse.
Jamie thought, Damn, she is some piece of work. A good thing I kept my mouth shut.
Up in the front, he noticed Steven edging his way forward, placing something in Robbins’ hand while whispering in his ear. Robbins delightedly held up a security pass that buzzed employees into the Trib building during nighttime hours when there was no one manning the front desk in the lobby.
“Carla, I can tell you that you couldn’t just run back to the office,” Robbins said. He was grinning like the gap-toothed Letterman after another bland monologue joke.
“We had someone over at the building a couple of hours ago. These cards don’t work anymore. They’ve already installed a new security system. In effect, they’ve locked you out too. Since the Trib has taken a position of not wanting to negotiate a new contract with our union, I move that we officially are on strike, as of this morning.”
Jamie couldn’t believe it or didn’t want to believe it.
Half the people in here are reporters—and no one is going to at least ask who the source of this information is? This is such bullshit!
“Let’s show this bastard who we are,” Robbins yelled. He shook his fist and punched the air.
That was the last thing Jamie heard before he was caught in a tide of humanity pressing through the corridor, surging toward the street.
On the way through, to Jamie’s left, he spotted Blaine, pinned against the wall, the proverbial fly. In the midst of another long drag, holding the cigarette high to avoid setting fire to someone’s hair, he caught Jamie’s eye.
Blaine smiled, wickedly. He mouthed the words, “What did I tell you?”
Jamie didn’t respond. He only lamented that Blaine had been right—damn straight this is no fucking democracy. We didn’t even get a show of hands.
Needing no effort to move forward, Jamie felt as if he were floating on a raft, about to go over the falls. He was pushed along until he was out the front door, into the street, meeting the flash of cameras and the glare of television lights.
He recognized some reporters from other media outlets. One spotted him and called out his name. Too late, he was shepherded past and handed a cardboard picket sign by an Alliance member who had clearly been positioned before the meeting was over.
Jamie had a flashback to an awful night when a boy from down the street slept over and his striking father and uncle paraded around the apartment wearing picket signs on their heads with their pants down around their knees.
At least they had an excuse—they were drunk.
Feeling stiff, almost programmed, certainly silly, Jamie slipped the picket sign over his head without looking what was printed on the front. It might have said, “Kick me, I’m Unemployed,” but all he knew was what he felt: This string feels like a damn noose digging into my neck.
His tic got worse. If only he could spin his neck 180 degrees and exorcise himself from this fast-developing nightmare.
Chapter Six
“Molly, has Louie called yet?”
Morris waited ten seconds for an answer that didn’t come. That could only mean his wife was in the back bedroom, on the phone again with their daughter. Their marathon conversations exasperated Morris because Becky lived in the downstairs apartment of their two-family home.
“What’s the big deal?” Molly would say. “If someone calls, it’ll beep and I’ll get off.”
It had been weeks since Becky’s last failed attempt at getting pregnant. That meant another mourning period could commence at any moment, leaving Becky in bed, depressed and refusing to report to her teaching job. Molly’s maternal mission was to talk her back on her feet.
Next to Jamie’s divorce and his living more than an hour from his ex-wife and son, Becky’s unrelenting infertility was the family’s worst source of tension. The most benign baby chatter risked sending her on a tearful trail to a bedroom with her husband Mickey in immediate and reluctant pursuit.
Molly’s prescription for her first-born child seemed to be inexhaustible patience. “Next time,” she would say. “You’ll see.”
Morris sat on the living room sofa, facing the old console he stubbornly refused to part with. The color on its television faded in and out like out-of-town AM radio. The stereo had not been touched since the kids flap-jacked those revolting Rolling Stones albums on it.
The radio was on, set to the all-news station. Morris was dressed in his standard home uniform—boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt covering but in no way hiding his pot belly. He needed a shave and a comb for his thinning gray hair. His calloused bare toes were perched on the wood trim of the glass coffee table.
He had already heard several updates on the Trib story, one every twenty-two minutes, hoping for a new nugget of news.
Next to him on the couch was the New York Sun. Its front page, ignoring the mid-term election, screamed in red banner delight—“CLOSED!!”—of its rival’s sudden shutdown.
Morris only bought the Sun because the other option in town, the Times, was out of the question. He couldn’t handle the microscopic print and the constipated writing. So he indulged the Trib’s tabloid competition, read it for its excellent coverage of baseball, the only sport he followed.
Even now, confronted with his own work stoppage, he was fuming over the baseball strike that had forced the cancellation of the World Series—and just when it looked as if his beloved Yankees were making a run. Morris’ head told him the players were spoiled and overpaid. His union heart could not root for an owner.
Molly called out to him from the bedroom to pick up the telephone in the kitchen.
“It’s your brother,” she said.
Morris rushed to the phone. “Louie, where are you?”