Gus is a national treasure. Every city, every newspaper, no, every guy my age should have someone like Gus-a leathery-faced geezer of a man who has seen wars start and end, watched children born and, in one case, die, has witnessed fads come and go, all through the eyes of someone who knows what matters and, more important, what doesn't. Gus tends not to get excited by much. It's not that he doesn't care. In fact, he does. It's just that he's seen so much, remained so even, and is so confident of who he is and what he likes that he knows deep in his psyche what is truly worth getting excited over. Gus is a guy, in short, who you can trust.
Gus works in the pressroom of the Record. When I saw him standing in my hospital room, it was the first time in what must have been ten years that he wasn't wearing his ink-smeared hunter green apron draped over his work clothes. He was my father's best friend at work, back when they worked the overnight shift at the Record, keeping watch over the mammoth printing presses, recasting inks, and refilling the massive rolls of newsprint that rattled through the presses and turned into the next day's newspaper. It was, I used to think, and probably still do, the most important job in the world, the manifestation of which used to be on our kitchen table every morning, in black and white, when my father arrived home from work and I awoke to go to school.
As a kid of twelve, I told my father I wanted to work at the Record, and he immediately assumed I wanted to do just what he did. It wasn't until I was maybe seventeen years old, as we leaned against his car eating cones at the local Dairy Queen, having just come back from splitting a large bucket of balls at the driving range, that I explained to him I wanted to be a writer, a news reporter, perhaps even cover politics and go off to Washington. He didn't say much. No one in his family had ever been to college, let alone held a job with a title like Washington correspondent, and I'm not sure he knew how to react. When I was a senior in college, in Connecticut, he died of a severe stroke. He never saw me walk into the newsroom of the paper he had worked at for more than thirty-five years.
Gus did, though. After school, I did what all would-be reporters have to do: worked my way up through what would count as the minor leagues.
I wrote for a small paper in Vermont for a year, built some clips, then took a job with a paper in suburban Boston and beat the Record day after day for a year and a half, until they had no choice but to hire me. That first day in the newsroom was the culmination of my loftiest dreams. There I was, among all the people I had read for so long-huge names in the industry, Pulitzer Prize winners, editors who had been to Washington, traveled overseas, jetted across the country on presidential campaigns. That first day I stood arranging a few books at my desk. I was dressed in a crisp Brooks Brothers pinpoint shirt, a neatly striped tie, the woolen trousers to a smart gray suit. Gus came walking up to my desk, limping as he does, given that he was born with one leg two inches longer than the other. I suspect he had never been in the newsroom before during business hours. I don't know if he had even talked to a reporter in his life. He was short and balding, and he stopped in front of me, staring with a long, proud gaze, a hint of a smile rounding out the edges of his lips. It was deadline, and Gus was wearing his apron during what must have been an early start to his shift.
He extended his hand to me, and I knew what my father would have felt.
I moved past his hand into a soft embrace, and Gus wrapped his right arm tightly around me and hit me hard in the back, speaking into my ear, "You're going to be the best reporter this place has ever had."
He stepped back and said, "Your father helped me get this job, at a tough time in my life. If I can do anything to help you, I will."
Then he walked away, leaving a black ink smudge on my new shirt.
Beside me, a rather bleached-out reporter in a bright bow tie, Troy Ellis, whose name I had read for years, usually over stories about academia and other intellectual issues, looked at me with shock, rolled his eyes in a superior way, and said in an exaggerated Brahmin accent,
"My God, that looked interesting."
I was kind of caught. I was the new kid here, one day in the newsroom, standing among all these people who were my heroes, yet one of them was making fun of Gus. What the hell, I thought. "That, Troy, is someone more interesting than you would ever understand."
Troy didn't seem to understand even that, which I sensed was part of a pattern with him. He said nothing and turned back to his computer, me to my books, and that was that.
"Well," I said to Gus, who had settled into the orange vinyl-backed chair beside my hospital bed, "tell me, what on God's good earth is going on here?"
"What's going on here is that, through the luck of the skilled, you've just placed yourself at the center of the biggest story in America.
There's nothing bigger. You're the witness to an assassination attempt on the president of the United States. From what I read today, you're his journalistic equivalent of a confidant. In my own humble view, this story is going to get a lot bigger before it fades away. The presidential campaign is in turmoil, and because of the militia? I mean, come on. The militia taking a crack at our president?"
"Doesn't get much bigger, does it?" I said. I was getting tired just thinking about it, the layers that would be involved, the assassination investigation, the impact on the race, the stories about American culture, reports from the hinterland on the antigovernment movement spreading across the country. And the reach for the explanation on how it came to this: the attempted murder of the president.
Gus said, "I want you to be careful. This little room is like a cocoon, but that's all over soon. You are going home tomorrow."
Jesus, I thought, the voice on the telephone was right. Gus continued:
"Everyone's going to want a piece of you. The FBI is going to want a piece of you. The TV cameras are going to want a piece of you. Even the president is going to want a piece of you. You should enjoy it, but do your job. You're the best reporter I've ever met, and granted, I'm a bit biased. But do your job, and everything else will take care of itself."
These were the reassuring words I wanted to hear, and, lying in bed, I said quietly, "Thanks."
We made small talk about golf with the president and the FBI agent who had been in the room and the likely impact of this shooting on the campaign. After a while, Gus stood up from his chair to leave, and hesitated a moment at my bedside. He looked down at his feet as if he was not quite sure what to say. "You going to be all right at home?"
he asked shyly.
Truth is, I wasn't sure. I hadn't spent more than three straight nights in that house in the last year. Suddenly I thought of my dog, alone there over the past twenty-four hours, and a wave of panic washed over me. "Jesus Christ," I said. "Do you know if Baker is all right?"
"The dog is fine. Your dog sitter came over and picked him up yesterday afternoon when she saw your picture on television. She said she'll bring him back when you get home."
I paused, basking in the relief. "I'll be fine," I said.
"I'll get the doctor. And I have to get back to Boston. The publisher was nice enough to pay my freight down here, but I have to get back to work tonight." And with that, a proud smile came over Gus's face. He gave my hand a long, affectionate squeeze, whispered, "Jack, do your job," then limped out of the room.
Cops and reporters are like oil and water. They share a like goaclass="underline" to gather information for an ultimate presentation in the public domain.
Police prepare for court cases. Reporters compile information for the pages of their newspaper. But how they go about it is vastly different. Police detectives prefer the privacy of an interrogation room, sitting at a spare table with graffiti marks dug into the top, surrounded by bare slab walls, illuminated by a single lamp, with some suspect or witness looking around at the sober surroundings and wondering what has become of his life and how he can quickly and drastically change it. Detectives can take the most theatrical, most sensational case and break it down into the dull sum of its scientific parts-semen and blood samples, fingerprints and fibers. They move with a painstaking methodology gleaned from the pages of the police training manual they memorized when they ascended to the position so many years before. God forbid, publicity. That causes witnesses to be tainted, politicians to speak out, police chiefs to demand hasty action, and ultimately, protocol and common sense to be violated.