A Matter of Opinion

 Up in the state capital, the legislature was debating a bill designed to make it tougher for workers injured on the job to become millionaires. Robinson A. Rocker, whose carpal-tunnel syndrome accounted for his fervent opposition to the proposal, was—to the further detriment of his wrists—typing a spirited editorial in favor of it when Bev, the newsroom receptionist, poked her head in the fishbowl, as everybody, excluding him, called his small glass-enclosed office.

“There’s a guy here with a letter for you.”

—Not so fast. If he was against the bill, why was he writing an editorial in favor of it?

On orders from above. As editor of the Daily Dose, he was free to say whatever he liked about the impact of climate change on the prospects for peace in the Middle East, but, when it came to issues of real importance—i.e., those affecting the paper’s bottom line—he was strictly the mouthpiece of H. Thomas Scroop, the publisher.

“Did you hear me, Bob? I said there’s a guy here with a letter he insists on giving you himself.”

He cast his eyes up to the ceiling. “Please not another wack job.”

Now Bev may not have been the most presentable of receptionists—bad teeth, a legacy of the poverty in her background, tended to spoil her looks—but, as the paper’s first line of defense, she excelled at taking the measure of unexpected visitors.

“He tipped his cowboy hat to me like a gentleman when he introduced himself, but I thought I’d better come back and warn you he’s carrying a gun.”

Though Rocker stopped himself just in time from violating Scroop’s ban on foul language during the workday, as he followed Bev out into the newsroom he couldn’t keep from cursing under his breath the absence of security in the building.

—The company didn’t want to spend the money?

That was of course a factor, but Scroop also strongly believed a local paper should receive its readers with open arms, evcn if all too many of them appeared—like the guy waiting at Bev’s desk—never to have learned how to return a hug.

“I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t bring a weapon in here.”

“Last I heard, this was an open-carry state and the Second Amendment was still in effect.”

“Not on private property.”

Or so their conversation might have gone if Rocker hadn’t been too leery of Glocks to do anything in the vicinity of one but pretend not to notice it.

“What can I do for you, Mr.—ah—?”

“Slayers, Sam Slayers, and I’ll tell you exactly what you can do for me, Mr. Editor—you can print this, if you’ve got the guts.”

The letter looked as if it had already passed through numerous hands. Rocker did his best not to think about the origins of the dubious stains on it. In his haste to be rid of its author, he made a show of running his eyes over every line, though it’s unlikely they registered much more than the requisite signature and phone number at the bottom.

 “You’re in luck, sir,” he said finally. “With the primaries behind us, we’ve only got a couple of letters in the queue, so this should go right in.”

Slayers, whose pugnacious air was reinforced by an undershot jaw, seemed almost disappointed by this rapid acceptance—as if he’d been counting on a rejection to justify opening fire.

“Then you don’t have a problem with it?”

“Why would I have a problem with it?”

 “You wouldn’t be the first.”

“Let me put it this way,” Rocker said blandly. “Even if I had a problem with it—which I’m not saying I do—we’re not in the business of censoring opinions. Or—as an old-school editor I once worked under was always repeating for my benefit—if two people agree, one of them ain’t thinking.”

With a grunt expressive of grudging satisfaction, Slayers paused in turning away to dig something out of his back pocket that he slapped down on Bev’s desk.

“Put that toward the coffeepot.”

Before Rocker could protest, his new friend was—with what sounded very much like a cackle—galumphing down the broad flight of stairs from the newsroom to the lobby.

“Consider that a bonus,” Rocker said to Bev.

After finishing up his exhortation to the legislature, he was headed for the stairs himself when Lyons, our boss at the copydesk, flagged him down.

“This letter that just came over, Bob—this Slayers letter—”

“What about it?” he said warily.

It was evident that, having had a chance to reread the thing, he’d been having second thoughts, but, as the paper’s last line of defense, Lyons knew better than to push him too hard.

“I just wanted to be sure you’re okay with it.”

“Would I have let Bev put it into the system if I wasn’t?”

All the same, as he made for the supermarket up the block, he was obliged to admit to himself that Lyons was seldom wrong when he voiced misgivings, and that Slayers’s letter, if it was to be elevated to the dignity of print, probably ought to be accompanied by a disclaimer of some sort.

—And you know all this how?

How else? Because I’m making it up, just as I’m making you up, for reasons I’d rather not go into.

—Ask a stupid question.

In any case, while his ham-and-Swiss on whole wheat was being slathered with mayonnaise behind the take-out counter, Safeway provided Rocker with the very thing he needed for his disclaimer: a can of Frodlaw’s Famous vegetarian beans.

“Opinion go down yet?” he asked Lyons on his return to the newsroom.

“A few minutes ago.”

“Get it back. I’m thinking of tacking a note onto that letter.”

Lyons was careful not to grin at me before Rocker walked away.

Resettled in the fishbowl, he took a bite out of his sandwich and called the toll-free number on the can of beans.

“Frodlaw’s Famous Foods.”

“Yes, hello, I’m with the Granford Daily Dose, and I was wondering about that letter K that’s on so many of your products.”

He was unprepared for the laugh his question evoked.

“Let me guess. You want to know if it’s true the only reason it’s there is we’ve been threatened with a boycott by certain people unless we pay for the privilege of displaying it.”

“That, and also if it’s true you add the cost of this blackmail into your prices, so that it amounts to a hidden tax on consumers, with the proceeds flowing to—ah—”

“Let me help you again: a certain foreign country?”

“That’s what I’m hearing, right. Is there anything to it?”

The man’s second laugh had a distinct edge.

“All I can tell you is, if your paper is considering providing a platform for this bullshit, our attorneys won’t hesitate to sue you for defamation.”

That was good enough for Rocker, from whose thoughts Scroop’s inveterate aversion to libel actions was never very far. As soon as he hung up, he pecked Lyons’s extension into the phone.

“Kill that Slayers letter altogether.”

“You got it, Bob. What kind of name is Slayers anyway? Ten to one it’s a phony.”

“I was thinking the same thing myself.”

Which would have been the end of it if only Rocker had been able to get semi-automatic pistols out of his head.

—He wasn’t seriously worried the guy might came back and blow him away?

Let’s just say that, on reflection, he decided it might not be a bad idea to beat Slayers to his disappointment with a propitiatory phone call.

“I’m not here. Leave a message.”

This curt reception suited Rocker just fine. He was only too happy to make his excuses to a device that couldn’t challenge them.

“Bob Rocker, Mr. Slayers. I’m afraid we won’t be able to run your letter after all. Because your gripe is with a private business, not a public body, you need to take it directly to that business. Our publisher doesn’t believe the newspaper is the appropriate place for such complaints. Sorry for the mixup … and go drown in your own spit.”

Without tasting it, he was just finishing the last of his sandwich when the floor began to tremble under his feet.

—Come on. You’re not going to be shameless enough to drag an earthquake into this?

It wasn’t an earthquake—just the Dose’s cyclopean four-color web-offset press lumbering to life in its cavernous den downstairs. Usually he found this muffled uproar reassuring—audible confirmation that news-hungry Grenadine County would yet again be served up its daily stew of nutritious information—but today all it conveyed to him was the troubling certainty that, within the hour, papers with the ink still drying on them would go on sale at multiple locations around town. Inevitably he pictured Slayers extracting a copy from an honor box, turning impatiently to the opinion page, and—reaching for his holster. The vision so unnerved him his bowels turned over and he had to scurry downstairs to the men’s room.

He’d hardly had a chance to enjoy relieving himself when a fist pounded on the door of the stall.

“Come on out of there, you sonofabitch!”

For one heart-stopping moment, he was convinced by this egregious violation of the no-swearing code that it could only be Slayers, a non-employee. But then he said to himself, no, it’s impossible, how could he know how to find me?

“I said come the fuck out of there!”

 The fist pounded again, even more violently.

—Well? Who was it?

Anticlimactically, Carl Webber, the lone paraplegic in the building, a brawny kid in his late twenties who worked in production in the ad department when he wasn’t propelling himself with his powerful arms to victory in marathons around the state. What explained his indignation was that Rocker in his distraction had occupied the only refuge in the men’s room equipped to accommodate a wheelchair.

“That’s my stall you’re stinking up.”

“Sorry, Wheels.”

Back in the fishbowl, Rocker found it difficult to focus on the remarks he was slated to deliver at a Rotary lunch the next day. Rotary had recently underwritten his participation in a goodwill junket to Brazil, and now it was his turn to repay the favor with a lighthearted talk on commercial opportunities in Porto Alegre. Only he couldn’t help glancing out into the newsroom every two minutes.

“My money—give it back.”

Bev, who’d prudently left her windfall untouched, promptly returned it to Slayers when—without tipping his white Stetson—he burst in on her from the stairhead.

“Not in the business of censoring opinions, my ass. Get him out here.”

Having grown up in a trailer park, she’d long since learned to remain unflappable in the presence of high dudgeon.

“I don’t see him in his office. He must have gone for the day.”

“Paper.”

“What?”

“Give me a piece.”

After scribbling on it, he folded it in half and handed it back to her.

“Just so he won’t be in any doubt what I think of puppets like him.”

She resisted the temptation to unfold the note as she walked back to the fishbowl to put it on Rocker’s desk.

“Bob? Oh no. Oh shit. Somebody! Help!”

As Rocker told the intern who was stuffing him into a scanner when he came to at the hospital, he’d crawled under his hardwood desk in search of a—yes, of a missing thumb drive and badly miscalculated in standing up.

 “Well, we’ll know in a few minutes if you’ve done yourself any permanent damage,” the intern said. “Let’s hope you haven’t, because, what with this bill I hear the legislature just passed, good luck collecting workers’ comp.”