The Best in the West Read online

  The Best in the West

  Books by Kathleen Walker

  Fiction

  The Best in the West

  A Crucifixion in Mexico

  Life in a Cactus Garden

  Nonfiction

  San Xavier: The Spirit Endures

  A Place of Peace: San Juan Capistrano

  Desert Mornings—Tales of Coffee, Cactus & Chaos

  The Best in the West

  Kathleen Walker

  Black Heron Press

  Post Office Box 13396

  Mill Creek, Washington 98082

  www.blackheronpress.com

  Copyright © 2018 Kathleen Walker. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The Best in the West is a work of fiction. All characters that appear in this book are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN (print): 978-1-936364-25-1

  ISBN (ebook): 978-1-936364-26-8

  Black Heron Press

  Post Office Box 13396

  Mill Creek, Washington 98082

  www.blackheronpress.com

  “The great sadness of my life is that I never achieved the hour newscast, which would not have been twice as good as the half-hour newscast, but many times as good.”

  —Walter Cronkite, CBS Evening

  News anchor, 1962-1981

  CONTENTS

  Open

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Segment One

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Segment Two

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Weather

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Sports

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Segment Three

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  OPEN

  “Tits up!”

  The shout hit her as the red light flashed on, the hand came down, and her lips began their rote movement. Son of a bitch.

  “Good evening,” she said.

  Son of a bitch.

  “I’m Jean Ann Maypin.”

  The son of a bitch did it again. Well, he wasn’t going to get her. Not this time.

  He picked up the toss.

  “And I’m Tom Carter. And this is the news.”

  Back again.

  “A major fire in our valley tonight. We’ll have a live report.” Her look was concerned, urgent, his equally so as he took it back.

  “And the governor may have to call a special session of the legislature to help our highways.”

  He allowed the faint hint of a smile to curl the corners of his mouth. They could see that Tom Carter knew the highways needed all the help they could get, that help better be on the horizon, and that the governor was not a favorite of his.

  She let her eyes linger on his face for a split second of silence. They were in this together, partners. Together they had it under control. Together they cared.

  “We’ll have that news and all the news of the valley and the state, coming up next.” She smiled gently, no wide flashing smile, only the assurance that they, together, would be back soon.

  She had it under control without that son of a bitch trying to throw her with that tits up thing. They were watching her, loving her, trusting her, Jean Ann Maypin. That’s why they were watching The Best in the West.

  She straightened slightly in the chair, legs crossed demurely at the ankles. She knew the moves. She was the star and the son of a bitch wasn’t going to be allowed to forget it.

  No mistakes, no mistakes so far. She held the smile. No mistakes.

  Thirty seconds gone, another twenty-eight minutes to go. She had it made.

  With a flash of a hand, she and the son of a bitch disappeared. The screen would now fill with the music and clipped motion that announced what it was she did so well, the six o’clock news.

  *

  Ellen Peters did not have to look through the windows or walk past the patios of the other condos to know the news had begun. She didn’t have to see the blue-gray flickers of a hundred screens chopped, divided, quartered then boxed into eighths and finally sixteenths. She didn’t have to hear the buzzing music of the helicopter as it sliced through canyons or see the familiar worried faces of men and women rushing, typing, talking, running. All familiar, all worried.

  They registered though, those flickers. They had registered in some way every night for over two years. They had to. That is what they were designed to do, to register. That thirty-second flash of movement and music had taken ten days to produce, to shoot, to edit, all to catch her ear and eye and mind.

  She opened the trunk of the car. One last bag, one last trip to be made and it was done. She fumbled for a cigarette from the pack in her jacket pocket. She leaned against the car and smoked. There was no screen she could see, no masculine voice to be heard singing out like the town crier of old. Alone in the parking lot, she rested and she smoked.

  “You know what I want to be?” Debbie had asked her. “I want to be this great reporter pounding out stories on an old typewriter, smoking a cigarette, my hair all messed up. You know?”

  Ellen wondered then, as she did now, if Debbie realized that her dream was to be the person she was telling it to and it wasn’t much of a dream or all that original. It was, however, a strange vision for this tall woman with her soft blond hair and beautiful skin.

  That is how Debbie first came into the newsroom, all soft and young, all ruffled and hot.

  “Gosh, it’s hot,” she had moaned and they all laughed. It was only April.

  She had a Garbo look, skin so white and clear you could almost see through it, with the barest hint of pink on the cheeks. She was twenty-four.

  Ellen wondered that day if Maypin was watching from some corner or office, trying to see down the maze of cubicles to the young woman with the gentle blue eyes.

  “Got a new reporter coming from Bakersfield,” Carter told them at the last meeting. No one rolled their eyes or sighed dramatically at yet one more proof of Carter’s insanity in hiring. They didn’t need to hear the story of how he heard her read the news or saw her report one story.

  All he said was she was coming from Bakersfield. He did add that she was young and pretty, sneering across the room. They expected that from him, one of his sick jokes, but Bakersfield brought no snickers or groans. They all started in someplace like Bakersfield, except those few who had started with The Best right f
rom the beginning.

  Yes, that’s how she came to the station, young and pretty.

  “Probably how she left it too,” would have been Ellen’s aside, had she found a place to use it or cared less about Debbie.

  She thought about it now. Was that how Debbie left, all innocent and hopeful and wondering at the relentless heat. Did she simply step out and float away?

  The reason it was a sick joke, that thing about her being pretty and young, was that Carter made damn sure all of the male reporters he hired were married. And, he wanted them more than married. He wanted kids, lots of kids. Like he told Ellen, a good Mormon boy was his idea of a reporter.

  It had to do with keeping them and scaring them. Men with kids were scared, hungry and scared. Carter knew that. He had no children. If he ever had a wife, no one knew about it, not even Ellen Peters, and he always told her more than he should.

  “I can’t stand those good-looking blond guys,” he once blurted at her.

  “What?”

  “You know, guys like Adkins. I can’t stand them.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I never liked blonds. Too many sissy boys are blond.”

  He hesitated, turning his salt and pepper head of hair away from her and looking toward the bookcase with its folders and piles of tapes and résumés. A row of award plaques and citations hung on the wall above them.

  “Shit, they got everything going for them. I don’t know. Maybe I’m jealous.”

  It was the kind of thing that threw Ellen about Carter. Right when she had lived through weeks of good reasons to despise the man, enough reasons to shoot him, he’d say something like that, flat and sad. She’d wait though, for that glint of meanness to return to his eyes. And, it would.

  Carter picked Debbie Hanson from those piles of tapes and résumés and she came to them ready to start on the next set of steps on the path of television news.

  Of course, Maypin was watching from somewhere. She wouldn’t miss any tall blond under her own age of twenty-eight or was it thirty. Ellen thought and said often enough that Jean Ann Maypin had been twenty-eight for the last five years at least.

  Jean Ann and the weekend anchor Scott Reynolds shared their own windowed office. Unlike Tom Carter, they had no dark blinds that could be dropped down and tightened shut. They could be seen by anyone going in or out of the newsroom.

  Ellen could see them from her cubicle, at least a corner of their glass room, enough to see the purple sheen of fluorescent light on Jean Ann’s black hair.

  1

  She was born a blond, dishwater blond which turned darker with the years but never, of course, black. That came later. Blonds were a dime a dozen in television news or would be. She was smart enough to figure that out. They were white blonds or golden blonds or soft blonds like Debbie Hanson. Soft and fluffy and gentle blonds or they were hard blonds like that weekend anchorwoman Across the Street.

  That’s what they called the competition, Across the Street, which it was, about a half a mile down. It held the number one slot in the ratings. The other network affiliate was so low they never bothered talking about it. As for the public television station, they might as well be off the air. Across the Street was number one but not, they reminded themselves, a strong number one. Slick, they were slick, but The Best was better. The Best gave the viewers basic, solid news. The Best won the awards. The Best was there when you needed them and with a black-haired anchorwoman. Now, that was unusual.

  She started as a brunette at the station in Virginia. The color went well with her dark eyes. That too was unusual. Anchorwomen, the few there were, and reporters, men and women, had blue eyes or light-brown eyes.

  You did have to be careful with blue eyes. Sometimes they were too piercing, too snapping and, for some reason, the audience didn’t like them. Oh, they’d take them at six-thirty in the morning or at noon but not for the big newscasts, not for the six or the ten. That’s when they wanted, they needed something gentler, blue but not too blue.

  Jean Ann’s eyes were dark brown and not that deep endless brown that makes you want to fall into them. Hers were a dull dark brown. However, the right makeup and lighting gave them a sort of luster that made them almost perfect with black hair. And, so unusual.

  She was born Virginia Susan Maypin. Like the hair, the name would have to be changed. At the beginning though, at the first station, she made it an asset.

  “Please, let me try,” she begged the producer. “I think it would be good. Don’t you think so? Couldn’t it be good?”

  “Sure, sure,” he said. “Go ahead.” He didn’t care. He wanted to get the newscast on the air and grab a couple of beers before going home.

  That night, as she ended her report on-set with anchorman Jackson Hale, she said with a chirp in her voice and a girlish smile, “And so for Virginia, this is Virginia, Virginia Sue Maypin.”

  “What the hell was that?” Jackson Hale yelled when they went to commercial. “Virginia for Virginia? What the hell?” Then, he laughed.

  “Oh well,” she sighed sweetly.

  She did real well, real well indeed.

  She went to that station armed with a degree in English from a state college so she could work and a few months of sex with a journalism professor so she could get a job. He made the call to the station. Better them than him was his thinking.

  Only a handful of women reporters sat in television stations across the country. One of them left the local station right around the time the professor made his call. Virginia Sue Maypin was nothing if not lucky.

  The reporter she replaced did a silly little female job created by station management and the news director. They needed someone to take care of the annoying calls they got from viewers who wanted help without offering any news story in return. They decided they needed a consumer reporter.

  It was supposed to be a sort of on-air household hint column – removing wine stains from rugs, blood from lace. People called wanting to tell someone about their problems. Virginia Sue Maypin’s predecessor took the calls and the job seriously and moved it, story by story, into real consumer complaints.

  The questions about rug stains turned into investigations of shaky used car sales, dishonest repairmen and leaky new roofs. Still, a lot of the work involved listening to those little calls and equally small problems. Virginia Sue Maypin was not happy with the job she inherited.

  New car batteries died for no reason, trailer parks had no heat or water. Mail-order companies, carpet-cleaning companies, car-towing companies, nobody doing what they were paid to do. And one of the people who couldn’t have cared less was Virginia Sue Maypin.

  About the only thing she liked about the job was the men in suits who ran or represented the offending companies. They stood when she entered a room and reached for her hand and her chair and her smile. She liked them.

  She wasn’t exactly sure what she disliked so much about the rest of it. It couldn’t be the old ladies who cried and prattled at her over the phone because they also called the station and told everyone how wonderful she was and how she had saved their lives and said over and over, “I don’t know what I would have done without her.”

  It was their problems that made her crazy, the new stoves that didn’t work and the refrigerators that made no ice. Why did they call her? Didn’t they know anyone else to call?

  Every morning she found the little pink message squares waiting in a pile or taped to her desk in lines. They had names attached like Mattie Swanson, Mabel Hicks, Mary Wilson. They had notes about broken pipes and dead batteries and electricity being turned off and the numbers she was supposed to call.

  No, it wasn’t the old ladies that made her dread beginning each day at the station. It was those pink slips and those problems, never the old ladies. Virginia Sue made it a point to love them. After all, they loved her.

  Her starting salary was barely above minimum wage. By the end of the first year it had tripled. At least three times a week Virginia for V
irginia gave her report from the news set and the next day the phones would ring with a female chorus of how wonderful she was and could she help them. Management recognized her value and she earned her money.

  She was in by six-thirty every morning. They saw her working at her desk when they rolled in at eight or nine or ten. She was still there at seven or eight or ten at night and nobody asked why. Had anyone known why, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference.

  Virginia Sue Maypin had a problem. She needed at least three hours to write a two-minute story and that didn’t produce good, solid writing. The good writing came later, from the producer who reworked her scripts.

  After one year she had management and the audience in the palm of her hand. She was pleasant, hardworking and not annoyingly smart. The director she slept with happily assisted her in the creation of a résumé tape. Less than twenty thousand dollars and endless lines of pink slips weren’t going to do it for her.

  The fifteen written résumés and six résumé tapes she sent out resulted in three strong letters of interest and one phone call offering a paid-for trip. She made sure the trip ended with a job.

  One year and five months after she first set foot in a television station, she was on her way to New Orleans where Virginia Sue Maypin would prove to be an unquestionable flop.

  Right off the top, it was the voice. In Virginia, she had added a happy hint of southern charm to her level Maryland-bred tone. For New Orleans, she stretched it to nearly a Carolina twang. It wasn’t going to work in this city of voices blurred by elegance and education.

  Then, there was the hair. She dyed it a deep chocolate brown, admittedly different in a city with a growing collection of blond reporters but not different enough. She would have done better as a blond. The brown looked too flat, the shoulder-length cut too long. The hair and the voice and the bright smile might have been fine for a consumer reporter. As a weekend anchorwoman, none of it worked.

  And, Virginia Sue made another change, her name. She gave it a great deal of thought and many hours in front of a mirror. She mouthed all the combinations of names that might enhance her smile as well as look good printed on the screen beneath her.