The appeal of newspapers was altogether different from the appeal of books. Books were solid and permanent, and newspapers were flimsy, ephemeral throwaways, discarded the instant after they had been read, to be replaced by another one the next morning, every morning a fresh paper for the new day. Books moved forward in a straight line from beginning to end, whereas newspapers were always in several places at once, a hodgepodge of simultaneity and contradiction, with multiple stories coexisting on the same page, each one exposing a different aspect of the world, each one asserting an idea or a fact that had nothing to do with the one that stood beside it, a war on the right, an egg-and-spoon race on the left, a burning building at the top, a Girl Scout reunion at the bottom, big things and small things mixed together, tragic things on page 1 and frivolous things on page 4, winter floods and police investigations, scientific discoveries and dessert recipes, deaths and births, advice to the lovelorn and crossword puzzles, touchdown passes and debates in Congress, cyclones and symphonies, labor strikes and transatlantic balloon voyages, the morning paper necessarily had to include each one of those events in its columns of black, smudgy ink, and every morning Ferguson exulted in the messiness of it all, for that was what the world was, he felt, a big, churning mess, with millions of different things happening in it at the same time.
That was what the Crusader represented for him: a chance to create his own mess of a world in something that looked like a legitimate paper. Not truly legitimate, of course, no more than a rough approximation at best, but his young boy’s amateur version of the real thing was close enough in spirit to make an impression on his friends. Ferguson had been hoping for that kind of response, he had wanted to turn heads and make the class notice him, and now that his wish had been granted, he plunged into the second issue with an ever-growing sense of confidence, a new faith in the power of his own genius, and so blind had that faith become that not even the partial boycott by Krolik and his pals could make him see what was happening. It wasn’t until the next morning that his eyes began to open somewhat. Michael Timmerman was one of his closest friends, a smart and popular boy whose grades were even better than Ferguson’s, a quasi-heroic figure who towered over evil midgets like Ronny Krolik in the way an oak towered over a patch of poison ivy, and when Michael Timmerman pulled you aside on the playground before school and said he wanted to talk, you were more than happy to listen to him. His first words were all about how good he thought the Crusader was, which pleased Ferguson enormously, since the opinion of the top athlete and scholar in the class weighed more than anyone else’s opinion, but then Timmerman went on to say he would like to work with Ferguson, that he wanted to join the staff of the Crusader and contribute articles himself, which would make a good publication even better, he felt, for who had ever heard of a one-man newspaper, there was something weird and rinky-dink about having one reporter write all the articles, and if Ferguson gave him a chance and things worked out well, maybe there could eventually be three or four or five reporters, and if everyone chipped in some money to help with the printing costs, maybe the Crusader could expand to four pages or eight pages, with everything set in type instead of depending on Ferguson’s atrocious handwriting, and just like that it would start to look like a real paper.
Ferguson was not prepared for any of this. The Crusader had always been intended as a one-man show, his show, for better or worse his show and no one else’s, and the idea of sharing the stage with another boy, much less several other boys, made him ill with unhappiness. Timmerman was smothering him with his comments and suggestions, trying to strong-arm him into ceding control of his rinky-dink rag with its atrocious hand-printed letters, but didn’t Timmerman realize that he had already thought about those things, that even if he had known how to type he wouldn’t have used a typewriter because the look would have been wrong, and because he couldn’t afford to pay a printer, owing to the fact that he was eleven years old, he had opted for handwriting instead, and what did Timmerman know about his mother’s deal with Myerson to give a discount on portraits of his three children in exchange for the use of his printing equipment to run off the facsimiles, that was how things worked, he wanted to tell Timmerman, you bartered to cut down costs and did the best with what you had, and forget about chipping in to produce a so-called real paper, no five boys could ever raise enough money to afford that expense, and if Timmerman had been anyone other than his most admired friend, Ferguson would have told him to butt out of his business and start his own paper if he had so many bright ideas, but he respected Timmerman too much to speak his mind, he didn’t want to risk insulting his friend, and so he took the coward’s way out and hedged his bets, saying Let me think about it instead of giving a clear yes or no, hoping time would dull Timmerman’s newfound passion for journalism and that the matter would be forgotten in a couple of days.
Like most successful boys, however, Timmerman was not someone who gave up easily or forgot. Every morning for the rest of the week, he approached Ferguson on the playground and asked if he had come to a decision, and every morning Ferguson tried to put him off. Maybe, he said, maybe it’s a good idea, but it’s spring now, and there won’t be enough time to put out another issue before the end of the school year. We’re both busy with Little League these days, and you can’t imagine how much work goes into it. Weeks of work, months of work. So much work that I’m not even sure I want to do it anymore. Give it a rest for a while, and maybe we can talk about it again over the summer.
But Timmerman would be away at camp over the summer, and he wanted to resolve the question now. Even if the next issue wouldn’t be coming out until the fall, he needed to know if he could count on it or not, and why in the world was Ferguson having so much trouble deciding what to do? What was the big deal?
Ferguson understood that he was cornered. Four straight days of badgering, and he knew it wouldn’t stop until he gave an answer. But what was the right answer? If he told Timmerman he didn’t want him, he would probably lose a friend. If he agreed to let Timmerman join the paper, he would despise himself for buckling in. A part of him was flattered by Timmerman’s enthusiasm for the Crusader, and another part of him was beginning to dislike his friend, who was no longer acting like a friend but a smooth-talking bully. No, not quite a bully, but a manipulator, and because the manipulator was the most powerful and influential person in the class, Ferguson was loath to do anything that would offend him, for if Timmerman felt wronged by Ferguson, he could turn the entire class against him, and Ferguson’s life would become an unrelenting misery for the rest of the school year. And yet, he couldn’t allow the Crusader to be destroyed just for the sake of preserving the peace. No matter what happened, he would still be trapped inside his own skin, and better to be turned into an outcast than to lose all respect for himself. On the other hand, even better not to be turned into an outcast if he could help it.