Excerpt from Skywriting - retitled Helena Is Missing
Denis Cannon stopped humming. He grimaced as he reread the obituary that lay before him. What is the matter with this reporter? The writer had shredded the newspaper’s stylebook into confetti.
He was aware that the Salt Lake Post was an anachronism, writing its own obits. It was a reflection of a city with small town ways.
As city editor, it was Denis’s duty to maintain editorial integrity while honoring even the dullest life. Obituaries, printed in agate type with tiny photographs of the deceased, were second only to the front page in readership.
He fumed as his grease pencil slashed down the page, blotting out words, letters, and entire sentences in a dark-blue fury.
Denis stopped, aware of the smell of hot lead that rose from the composing room one floor below him. He seemed to taste it. Something jagged behind his eyes telegraphed an arriving headache. Opening his desk drawer, he withdrew an aspirin bottle and unscrewed the cap. He shook two tablets into his hand and shot them between his lips, swallowing without water, gulping to clear the acrid streak they left in his throat. He resumed his trademark humming, a little more subdued now, and the sound filled the space around his desk like an electrical current.
Denis waited for the aspirin to work. Eyes half-closed, he gazed at his surroundings. The editorial office of the Post looked much the same as it had when he had left it on a cold day in January 1942, except that some of the reporters and editors were now women, replacements for the men who had gone to fight Germans or Japanese.
Denis, 26, was devoted to the Post, since his life had virtually begun as a teenager among its battered desks and chattering sounds. A violent interlude had taken him to the war, then returned him to the Post, maimed and limping.
He returned his attention to the obituary. Of all the sections he oversaw—weather, crime, and local news—obituaries gave him the most satisfaction. He believed Schopenhauer: Newspapers are the second hand of history, a clock stopped at the instant of happening. Obituaries placed him in the continuum of time and, in doing so, soothed his sense of mortality, which had been so intensified in the South Pacific. Obituaries were set in type using hot, melted lead. The lead was reused again and again, as transitory and reconstructed as humanity itself. Denis was comforted by the idea that, in some parallel way, the dead were revived to never-ending and useful purpose.
This particular obit writer had been carried away:
Family and friends knew when Tom thought a song was good because he would tap his toes and whistle along. His favorites were Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine.”
It came from the one reporter for whom he would cut no slack, the new woman who was too pretty for her own good, the one with the smart mouth and the short crop of tousled black hair. Cannon summoned the writer in his usual manner.
“Burke!” He roared it loud enough to carry across the city room. He saw her head pop up.
Leni Burke rose and walked toward him, chin tilted, daring eyes the color of liquid emerald.
“Are you in a trance?” he snapped. “Glenn Miller? Artie Shaw?”
“That’s the way the family wants it.”
“Do you work for the family or for the Post?”
“Is it too much to ask? She’s a grieving widow—”
He arose from the desk, his face flushed with indignation. Later he would remember pointing his index finger at her. He would remember that she had faint crow’s feet forming at the corners of those green eyes. Suddenly his left leg locked and the sole of his shoe slapped uncontrollably on the tile floor. The corner of the desk met his head with a meaty thud. Inky dots swarmed to form a black hole into which he tumbled.
The Salt Lake Post occupied a dowdy building constructed forty years earlier. It rose like a battered five-story warehouse, its brown bricks eroded and exhausted from its ongoing battle with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormon Church.
Few of Salt Lake City’s buildings climbed higher than a dozen stories on this late April day in 1945. It would sprout height in a few more years. This city of Mormons and miners, enemies formed by the conflicts of the city’s century of history.
Two blocks north, on City Creek, the Mormon Temple loftily ignored the Post.
A mile east of the Post building, Holy Cross Hospital opened its emergency room doors to a white Cadillac ambulance.
Even though Cannon was unconscious, Leni Burke looked down on his form with both hauteur and caution for the man whose angry tongue had lacerated her for weeks.
“He’s the city editor at the Post,” Leni said. She bent over the gurney to watch as the doctor directed a needle of light into the pupil of an eye that was possibly blue.
Leni heard the editor’s breath, quick and shallow, rising from his prostrate form on invisible clouds of pain. She heard the doctor inhaling rhythmically. She heard the squeaky-soft sounds of nurses’ shoes and wheeled carts. Permeating everything was the pungent sweet scent of alcohol and iodine.
“He’s got a concussion,” said the fiftyish doctor with crooked teeth. The doctor clipped his penlight to the pocket of his jacket. “You say he fell?” He moved the stethoscope across the editor’s sternum like a chess piece, bringing it to rest in a sparse nest of black hair.
She nodded. “He crumpled like he was shot. He tried to put out his arms, but his head struck the desk. Bounced like a tennis ball. I guess he had a stroke.”
The doctor, whose hands palpitated the editor’s throat, looked at her for further explanation.
“He was mad at me, doctor. Apoplectic.”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“Oh, I won’t.”
The doctor frowned. “You’re the next of kin?”
“No. I just happened to be there when it happened. My managing editor told me to go with the ambulance.” She shrugged.
“How am I going to get a history on him?” said the doctor.
“Beats me.” She noticed the doctor wore a bow tie that looked as if it had a peanut butter smear on it.
From beneath Cannon’s eyelids came a glint of blue light, as if he was spying on her, taking in the conversation while pretending to be asleep. His thick black hair was tousled and angry-looking, sticking up in sprigs or matted into clumps where blood and sweat had been sponged from his bruised head.
At least he’s quit that damn humming.
She thought she would walk out of the emergency room and be done with it.
