The Gazette-Journal

Kevin Fitzgerald filed the story at nine minutes to ten, and then he leaned back and watched the copy desk pull it into the system, and he waited to see how much of it would still be there in the morning.

He was twenty-eight. He had covered city hall for the Gazette-Journal a little under two years, which was about as long as there had been a Gazette-Journal to cover it for. The merger had come in the fall of 1983, the old Evening Gazette and the morning State Journal folded into a single masthead by the Gannett people who owned them both, two papers that had spent a hundred years running each other down now printing off the same press out on Kuenzli Street. A few of the old hands still could not say the new name without making a face over it. Kevin had come on after, so it had only ever been the one paper to him, the one long building south of the river, the presses in the back loud enough at deadline that you felt them in the floor before you heard them.

The story was about a council meeting. Most of his stories were. Three hours on a Monday night in the chamber on South Center Street, the city hall they had put up in 1965 to replace the old brick building with the clock tower, the one his great-grandfather Patrick had walked into six days a week for forty years when the police department still had the ground floor. That building was a bank parking garage now, had been for twenty years. Kevin had never seen it standing. He knew it the way he knew most of the family history, secondhand, as a thing that had been there before him and was gone.

He had covered the meeting from the press table at the side of the chamber with a legal pad and a cassette recorder he did not entirely trust. The main item had run past nine. It was the thing it was always about lately, in one form or another. What to do about downtown. The retail had been bleeding south to the mall out on the valley floor since it opened, seven years now, and the storefronts on Virginia Street that had sold shoes and hats and hardware to the whole town were going dark one at a time or turning into gift shops that sold dice clocks to people waiting for a bus. The casinos held the core, the arch, the four or five blocks that still lit up at night, but around the edges the downtown was quietly emptying, and the council and the redevelopment people had been arguing for two years about what a city was supposed to do about a thing like that, whether you could bring a downtown back or only manage the way it left.

Kevin had written it straight. Who moved what, who voted how, the number attached to the study they had commissioned, the developer who spoke during the public comment and the two residents who spoke against him. He had learned the beat the way you learned any craft, by doing the plain part of it well enough times that the plain part got out of your way. He did not editorialize. That was not his job and he did not want it to be. His job was to sit in the room and get it right and have it on a doorstep by six in the morning, and that was a kind of work he understood in his blood, though it had taken him a while to see it that way.

Because they had all done work like that, the Fitzgeralds, in their different ways. Bridget had come from Clare in 1874 and cooked in a depot hotel, carried dinners in a pail. Patrick had worn the badge. His grandfather Michael had riveted the Riverside Hotel up on the high steel and then gone down into the river mud and built the retaining walls for the government when the private work dried up. His own father Tom had come home from the service and gone to work for a contractor and bought a house on the west side in a subdivision that had been a ranch the year before, and had raised Kevin and his sisters out there among the new streets with the trees still staked. They were people who made the town or held it together, all of them, with their hands or their backs or the plain fact of showing up. Kevin was the first one who did it with words, and for a long time he had felt that this was a lesser thing, a soft thing, a thing you did instead of a real job. His father had not said so. His father had only asked, the first year, whether there was a pension.

But he did not feel that way tonight. He had sat in a public room and watched people decide the shape of the place, and he had written it down so that in the morning thirty thousand households would know what had been decided in their name while they slept, and that was not nothing. His grandfather had built the walls that kept the river off the park. Kevin kept the record. Somebody had to, and the somebody was him, and the town he was writing about was the town Bridget had cooked in and Patrick had patrolled and Michael had raised out of the mud, the same streets, the same river, and he was the one at the table now with the pad and the bad recorder.

The night editor came by and stood over the terminal and read the story on the screen with his glasses pushed up on his forehead.

“You’ve got the developer’s number wrong,” he said. “It’s three point two, not two point three.”

Kevin checked his pad. The editor was right. He fixed it.

“Otherwise it’s clean,” the editor said. “Go home.”

Kevin logged off and got his jacket off the back of the chair. The newsroom was thinning out, the day people long gone, a couple of the sports guys still up waiting on a West Coast score, the police scanner going low and steady on the shelf by the metro desk the way it always went, the flat voices reading off addresses into the empty room. He knew half those streets. He could have drawn a map.

He was almost to the door when the phone on his desk rang.

He looked at it. It was ten o’clock. Nobody called the city hall desk at ten o’clock with good news, or with nothing. He stood in the aisle with his jacket half on and let it ring twice more while he decided, and he thought about his father asking about the pension, and he thought about the walls in the park holding back the river in the dark, and then he went back and picked it up.

“Fitzgerald,” he said.

---