Deadline by Gerry Boyle Read Free Book Online Page A

honest.
    No, you couldn’t bullshit a kid. Not one. Not thirty, which was roughly the number of faces staring up at me as I stood in front of the class. Behind them was a diorama kind of thing with dinosaurs and big, green plants with lots of fronds. I had barely glanced at it when the teacher, a bearded guy about my age, wearing jeans and a western shirt, finished my three-second introduction. I didn’t catch his name but I did catch something about milk break being at some particular time.
    Belly up to the bar, boys. And girls.
    And then I was up there and they were all waiting.
    The first thing I did was tell them they could interrupt me at any time with questions. Fifteen hands shot up, which was fine with me. Over the years, I’d learned that the best way to talk to kids was on their terms, in their language, about what they thought was interesting.
    â€œHow much do you get paid?” a small boy asked from the front row. He wore big sneakers and a faded Boston Bruins sweatshirt.
    â€œNot enough,” I said, and then caught myself. If the kid wanted to know, I’d tell him.
    â€œAbout five hundred dollars a week,” I said.
    Somebody out there said, “Wow.”
    A little girl with big glasses read her questions off a piece of yellow lined paper.
    â€œDo you like your job? What other newspapers have you worked for? Do you write your stories on a computer?”
    I said I did like my job. I said I got to meet people like them, that every day was different. That was true at all the papers where I had worked, I said. Did they want me to name all those papers?
    â€œSure,” the bearded teacher said, from his post leaning against the bookshelf under the window.
    Who asked him?
    So I did. I told them I’d been doing this kind of work for almost fifteen years, longer than they’d been alive. They looked at me like I was Methuselah. I told them I’d worked at the Quincy Patriot Ledger . A boy asked me what a ledger was, and I told him it was a book that you used to keep track of things. Then I went on. The Providence Journal . The Warwick Beacon , which was also in Rhode Island. I started there writing sports. The Hartford Courant , I said. And then the New York Times in New York City. I was something called a metro reporter there, I told them. I covered police stuff, which there was a lot of in New York. After that, I wrote about borough politics.
    â€œDo people in New York live in burrows?” a rambunctious boy in the back said.
    The class tittered and I said no.
    â€œDid you ever go to a murder?” a girl asked.
    I said yes, I did. There were a lot of murders in New York.
    â€œDid anybody ever shoot at you?” a boy asked.
    â€œYeah, did you ever get shot at, like with an Uzi?” his buddy asked.
    I said no and saw my approval rating plummet. Reporters didn’t usually get shot at, I said. No more than anybody else. I didn’t tell them it was criminals and poor people who usually got shot at, that the punishment for being poor in the city sometimes was death.
    A girl in the front, small and sort of pale, asked, “Do you like it here better than New York?”
    Hey, these kids had a future. As therapists.
    â€œThis is a better place in a lot of ways,” I said. “You get to know people easier and they know you. It’s safer, and in New York you can’t go skiing as much. You can’t go hiking in the woods, except in Central Park, and that isn’t really woods. It’s more like paths and ponds and places to ride bikes.”
    â€œWhy did you work for so many papers?” the Uzi kid asked. “Did you get fired a lot?”
    The kids snickered. I smiled.
    This wasn’t analysis. This was primal-scream therapy.
    â€œWell, you don’t really get fired in the newspaper business,” I said. “Not usually. But people like to sort of move up to bigger papers. It’s sort of like in sports. Baseball. Who