tw He marked EOT for End Of Tour and drove to the newspaper. Brazil had a ritual few people knew about, and he indulged himself in it after zipping through a small story on Charlotte’s quirky traffic problems. He went up the escalator three moving steps at a time. The workers in the press room had gotten used to him long months before, and didn’t mind when he came into their off-limits area of huge machinery and deafening noise. He liked to watch some two hundred tons of paper fly along conveyor belts, heading to folders, destined for bundles and driveways, his byline on them.
Brazil stood in uniform and watched, not talking, overwhelmed by the power of it all. He was used to laboring on a term paper that took months and was read by maybe one person. Now he wrote something in days or even minutes, and millions of people followed every word. He could not comprehend it. He walked around, avoiding moving parts, wet ink, and tracks to trip on as the roar filled his ears like a nexus on this sixth night before the seventh day of his career’s creation.
It was chilly out the next morning, Sunday, and sprinkling rain.
West was building a high wooden fence around her yard on Elmhurst Road, in the old neighborhood of Dilworth. Her house was brick with white trim, and she had been fixing up the place since she’d bought it. This included her latest, most ambitious project, inspired, in part, by people driving through from South Boulevard, and pitching beer bottles and other trash in her yard.
West was wet, as she hammered, with tool belt on. She held nails in her mouth, and vented her spleen, as Denny Raines, an off-duty paramedic, opened her new gate and helped himself to her property. He was whistling, had jeans on, and was a big, handsome guy and no stranger to this industrious woman. She paid him no mind as she carefully measured a space between two boards.
“Anyone ever tell you you’re anal-retentive?” he said. She hammered, which was suggestive of what he felt like doing to her the first time they met, at a crime scene, when he could only suppose she had been called from home since she was in charge of investigations, and the victim was a businessman with the weird orange paint over his parts, and bullets in his head. Raines took one look at the babe in brass and that was the end of his rainbo. She hammered, eating nails, in the rain.
“I was thinking about brunch,” he said to her.
“Maybe Chili’s.”
Raises approached from the rear and wrapped his arms around her. He kissed her neck, and found it wet, and a little sAy- West didn’t smile or respond or take the nails out of her mouth. She hammered and didn’t want to be bothefod- He gave up, and leaned against what she was building- He crossed his arms, and studied her as water dripped off Ac bill of his Panthers baseball cap.
“I take it you’ve seen the paper,” he said.
He would bring that up, and she had no comment. She measured another space.
“This is an affirmative. Now I know a celebrity. Right there. This big on the front page.” He exaggerated with his hands, as if the morning paper with West in it was ten feet tall- “Above the fold, too,” he went on.
“Good story. I’m impressed.”
she measured and hammered.
“Truth is? I learned stuff even I didn’t know. Like the part about high school. Shelby High. That you played on the boys’ tennis team for Coach Wagon? Never lost a matfh? How ’bout that?”
He was more enchanted with her than ever, roaming her with his eyes and not getting charged a dime a minute. She was aware of this and feeling ripped off as she tasted metal and hammered.
“You got any idea what it does to a guy to see a woman in a tool belt?” He finally got to his feet.
“It’s like when we roll up on a scene and you’re in that goddamn uniform. And I start thinking thoughts I shouldn’t, people bleeding to death. Right now I got it for you so bad I’m busting out of my jeans.”