BY JANE ROSENBERG LAFORGE
This is a novel excerpt. Copyright is held by the author.
Chapter 1
PETRA WAS a lost city, but it was a theoretical loss. It was not lost to the Bedouins who lived in its caves and ruins for centuries. Neither was it lost to worshippers from the Greek Orthodox church of Jerusalem, whose clergy maintained a diocese there, in the expanse of the Jordanian desert. The city was named and re-named again, in different languages but for the same purpose: If not to declare ownership, then to discourage others from staking a claim, or governing a ghost. For though Petra was called an oasis, it was more of a weigh station. A cemetery for monks who had once lived there, a myth traded among those who believed in the promises of the ancients.
St. Martin’s City, a barrier island off the coast of Maryland, was famous for its boardwalk, its t-shirts, its tastelessness. The place was garish, slipshod, architecturally inconsistent. City officials counted the number of visitors each year through the “Demoflush” system. In other words, by measuring the flow through its sewage plant; the number of times people flushed the toilet in its houses and hotels; the volume of human waste generated. There were other forms of waste in St. Martin’s: the annual bacchanal of many a state organization. The annual firefighters convention was the most raucous of all, not counting the weekly Best Body on the Beach competitions.
A 1933 hurricane carved an inlet between St. Martin’s City and the mainland, transforming a minor fishing village into a tourist trap for the rest of the 20th century. Petra did not exist in the western imagination until the 19th century. A Swiss traveler and a Scottish painter are often credited with introducing the rose-coloured cliffs and rock-embedded architecture of Petra to the west. They came, witnessed, and recorded. With words, correspondence, impressions set down in paint, on canvas, and then exhibited to the wonder and awe of audiences, Petra became the Rose City. It was celebrated for its colours within the range of sunrises and the sunsets. Archaeologists rushed to explore its sandstone-carved buildings. Geologists measured the narrow, treacherous chasm that led to it.
Among Israeli teenagers, who were once forbidden to travel to Arab nations, Petra became a rite of passage. To sneak out of Israel, into Jordan, and finally into Petra; to brave the length and temperatures of the chasm, as well as the Arab soldiers enforcing the geopolitical realities of the region, was proof of one’s daring and competence. Those who had been to Petra had proven their resilience, their trustworthiness, their ability to keep a secret. Often teenagers would make their pilgrimage to Petra after they graduated from high school, but before mandatory enlistment in the Israel Defense Forces.
The Best Body on the Beach competitions in St. Martin’s were the resort’s equivalent of a beauty pageant. A celebration of the female form as if judged by a mob, overwhelmingly drunk and male, who were then teased and tantalized by a parade of scantily clad women randomly selected by the bar hosting that week’s tournament. But those mobs brought in the profits, as did the June Bugs, a tide of graduating high school seniors who came every year to commemorate their surviving 13 years of compulsory education. The June Bugs rolled into the cheaper hotels and rentals once they had graduated. For most of them, that week represented their first taste of adult freedom, inaugurating a period of party drugs, hard liquor, and experimentation with arson. In a game called Liar’s Dice, participants were dared to shoot flames from their mouth or strip past their skivvies, to blast out fire with their farts.
***
Janice Gallante, put in charge of the St. Martin’s City bureau for the Baltimore Daily Bulletin, wanted to go to Petra. She wanted to be a foreign correspondent, specializing in the Middle East and Israel, where her American father had served in the Israel Defense Forces and her mother was born on a kibbutz. The St. Martin’s bureau was the first in many steps she would have to take to get to Petra, where her arrival would confirm her ingenuity, courage, and stick-to-it-ness, the qualities most valued in a journalist. Gallante’s boss, Peter Hale, found all this amusing, as he had visited the city he called Al-Batra, in Arabic, many times. But reporting in the Middle East, particularly from Lebanon, incredibly dangerous in the mid-1980’s; with the rise of Hezbollah and other militias, the peril became too great. Especially for his wife and children, whose American passports seemed like a guarantee against thriving in a region with so many tribal resentments. So Hale returned to Baltimore, where he was promised an editing job after two decades of service at The Daily Bulletin.
“If you don’t want the story for today, I can wait until the weekend and give you something longer,” Gallante told him; she was talking about the first story she would ever file from St. Martin’s. “Or I could wait until the weekend, turn in something longer–once again St. Martin’s is struggling with its image,” she said. Hale wasn’t thinking so much about the story as whether he should take Janice Gallante seriously. She’d been thrown at him by the metro editor in consultation with the Style section. It was tradition, at The Bulletin, to unleash a new St. Martin’s correspondent at the state editor every summer. In this way, their working together was as much an initiation ritual for him as it was for her.
“Whatever you want,” she said. “I’m easy.”
“You should never say that to me,” he said, “because I just might take you up on the offer.”
“Yeah, that’s not an offer,” she said. “It’s a strategy to get better play for this story.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, trying to sound as though he had not been beaten at his own game, because it was a game to him. All stories are games, gambits, propositions about what is outrageous, unusual, unfair, or important. “I’ll get back to you after the 3:30 meeting,” he said.
The next morning, at the bottom of the front page, Gallante’s byline appeared atop the first story from St. Martin’s City of the season. “Summer in St. Martin’s City may never be the same,” Gallante’s lead began, “now that its police are officially patrolling condoms.”
Gallante had learned the St. Martin’s police chief, Avery Barber, wanted to shut down a new boardwalk concern, the Rubber Ducky condom store. He was upset by the store’s mascot, a bright yellow duck spouting off the slogan, “Don’t trust your luck; trust the duck;’’ he thought children would be attracted to it, and pepper their parents with unnecessary questions. “The police chief confirmed he assigned two officers to patrol the store’s entrance as part of a new program: ambassadors to a safe stay at the beach,” Gallante reported. “Officers stationed at the store said they were unaware of such a program; only that they were to notify the owners of Rubber Ducky Condoms they were to be cited for violating city business laws. The officers, who declined to be identified, were unable to name the infractions the shop owners may have committed.”
The newspaper stories “with legs,” as the saying went, are not necessarily the better stories. But they are those that last beyond the day they’re printed. The Rubber Ducky story had legs. It had feet. It had wings. The ACLU sued the police chief, the mayor, and the city council for its cavalier treatment of the First Amendment. Counter-protestors somehow emerge spontaneously to support the store and sing the praises of unfettered free speech. Gallante kept up with the “folos,” or what they were calling updates in those days, and Hale was glad to have them. During the summer, the state Legislature was not in session, and his stable of reporters was notably under productive.
“You’re doing a yeoman’s job with this story,” he told her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m doing my job.”
She eventually wrote the larger piece she had threatened: St. Martin’s officials talked a good game about being a family-friendly resort, but they also had made decades’ worth of decisions discouraging the kind of development needed for a family-friendly place. The story was cleanly written and fair in its distribution of quotes and spokespeople. But Hale sent it to the Sunday opinion section, for a number of reasons. Chief among them was he couldn’t be sure she understood the tensions in the story were endemic to towns like St. Martin’s, or if she was simply taking an elementary “both sides of the story” approach.
“This is a thesis in search of hard facts,” he explained later. “You’re making a lot of statements—‘’
“People are making these statements, people who live here, work here, own property and businesses here,” she said.
“As I was saying,” he began again, “you’ve got to do more than quote people when they’re saying things like this.” He could say this to her, in the fatherly tone that had overtaken his voice, because he had once been similarly admonished over a story—a profile of Israelis living in the seized homes of Palestinians in the Old City. The problem with his story, his first from the Jerusalem bureau, had been both explicit yet inexplicable, the editors said. It also did not further either side’s argument, or introduce a solution. What that story needed—what hers needed now—was less of a reliance on conventional history, and more documentation of the decisions that led to the status quo.
“You’ve got to get down into the nitty-gritty,” Hale said. “Who voted when to allow all the high-rise construction, what were they thinking then, what are they thinking now? Who let all those nightclubs go up, the bars—was anyone keeping track, did they have any warning? Or you’ve got to show what a family resort really looks like, and how its decisions over the years were different than in St. Martin’s.”
“How am I going to do that?” she asked.
“Research,” he said. “A lot of research. Property records, minutes of meetings, clips. You can’t do this in a day, or a week. We’re talking months, a longer view.”
“And when am I going to do that?”
“You shouldn’t ask questions,” Hale cautioned her, “you don’t know the answers to.” Because he knew the answers, and doubted she’d sit still long enough to hear it. Because she was in St. Martin’s, like all St. Martin’s correspondents before her, to feed the beast. Fill the news hole. The more she filled the news hole, the more advertising from St. Martin’s, and other beach resorts, the paper might attract. But only for the summer, since most of the beach resorts shut down as soon as the crowds left. The clock had been ticking on her position ever since she took it.
“And this family-friendly resort everyone’s talking about,’’ he said, to change the subject. “Does it even exist?”
“Cape May,” she said brightly. Cape May, in New Jersey, was the queen of mid-Atlantic coast cities. It had managed to monetize its Victorian architecture and old-fashioned charm far beyond the summer. People came for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, for Valentine Day’s weekends. Cape May was pioneering the year-round resort. Clean, classy, and elegant. Its boardwalk was small, tightly controlled. The real attraction was its outdoor mall with a ten pm curfew. The bay at Cape May faced west, granting visitors the chance to see a California-style sunset over the water, if not the ocean.
“Will you send me to Cape May?” she asked. Not sweetly. She didn’t do sweetly. She did only impetuous.
“This newspaper has only so many resources and you are one of mine,” he said. “I’m keeping you where you are.”
“But —” she began.
“But for another day,” he said. Hale couldn’t promise Gallante anything. At the summer’s end she’d be exiled to wherever she had come from: a suburban bureau, a freelance gig, or the worst yet, an editorial clerk’s position. Drive, talent, a certain political acumen: the issue wasn’t whether she possessed these abilities but whether he had a reason to break with this tradition, because it meant risking his neck as well as hers.
Every summer has its story, along with its calendar journalism. These are stories not gambits, speculation about the future, but commemoration of past change. The end of racial segregation, or the hiring of the first women lifeguards. Both were each hitting their 20th anniversary that year. Gallante filed stories on both, though she failed to find happy endings for either. Women lifeguards continued to face harassment and belittlement from their male colleagues. Black people were no more welcome in frontline jobs in hotels and restaurants than they had been during the old Negro Excursion Days, the only time black people could go to the beach. But who would have found progress, in a town like St. Martin’s? The best places for journalism are seldom anywhere anyone would want to live.
“This town is cursed,” Gallante announced one morning, as she reported the arrival of an unexpected scourge of the season: hypodermic needles. Thousands had appeared on the shores of the eastern seaboard all summer, although St. Martin’s had been spared. Until August. A school of needles migrated past Cape May Point, and littered the southern-facing beaches.
“It’s not cursed,” Hale said, as if he sought to calm her. “It’s having a run of some rotten luck.”
“They knew I was coming, and they cursed it,” Gallante insisted.
“You shouldn’t take these matters so personally,” he advised.
“I wouldn’t,” she said, “but I am the only person here. Aren’t I?”
“I concede your point,” he answered, “for now. Now get to work.”
It was another story with legs, and Gallante stretched them as far as they would take her. For her second day folo, she contacted the hypodermics’ manufacturer and asked how their product wound up in St. Martin’s. For the third day, she wrote about ocean currents and tidal patterns, to speculate on where the hypodermics originated. On the fourth day, three blocks of the beach were closed, because routine testing of the water revealed elevated levels of fecal coliform. St. Martin’s was contaminated by its own shit.
“This is bad news for St. Martin’s,” Hale said. “But good for The Bulletin.”
“Good enough to keep me past the summer,” she said; it was not a question but a statement. He easily recognized her tone, even though the filter of the telephone, because it was one younger journalists often defaulted to. The younger journalist often mistakes bitterness as a badge of honor in the business, proof of dues paid, innocence lost, achievement of journeyman, or woman, status.
“Now is not the time for that,” he responded, because it was Friday afternoon, and on Fridays his priorities shifted. On Fridays he focused exclusively on getting out of the building at a suitable hour, a time that allowed him to get home and have the dinner with his wife and children. In the 48 to 72 hours that followed, he would not think about the quickly approaching zero hour on Janice Gallante’s position. He would not think about St. Martin’s or the state Legislature or any other topic he considered demeaning to his intellect. He dealt with far more baroque dilemmas on his weekends: The Palestinian Problem, for instance, and why he had yet to write a book about it. Or the fall of Lebanon starting from the Day of Independence, and whether it was possible to write a book about that. He had his own opinions on these subjects, too, marinated by age and experience, but they were clouded during the week by the provincial. By concentrating on stories with an impact that is so quickly, and only locally measured, he found he was sweating out the smallest stuff, forgetting about the wider world he once was a part of.
At the office, he knew what she was calling about before he picked up the call. The story was staring at him beneath the headline “Shore Keepers Hit St. Martin’s.” An environmental group was asking people to fill one hundred ml bottles with sea water—the amount needed to test for contamination—and sign the labels with their names. The selfless and self-aggrandizing environmental group sponsoring this activity, The Shore Keepers, would then deliver the bottles as a protest to Washington DC. He’d quickly glanced at the story at home, over breakfast, because the night before, the copy desk had called and asked whether he wanted to see it first. He declined, and now he regretted it. He had trusted Gallante’s judgment. Seeing how large and ridiculously the story was now played, he wished he’d been less trusting, or she had been more skeptical of it.
“Did you ask them how many gallons of gas they’re going to burn when they transport these things?” he asked Gallante. “Or what anyone’s supposed to do with them once they’ve served their purpose and become another load of garbage?”
“Yeah, and how was your weekend?” she answered. “What do you want to do when they dump all this on DC? They’re going up and down the coast, anywhere there’s been a high bacteria reading.”
“Is that so,” he said plainly, because she was too impressed with this stunt.
“There were camera crews for this thing,” she began, but he tried not to listen. He did not want to hear even the substance, if not the form, of braying begin in her voice. He had long since told her that television news crews were the suckerfish of the state press corps. They latched onto whichever shark would provide them with the most food while driving them the fastest, at the greatest distance.
“Don’t you think it’s too soon after breakfast to be discussing shit in the sea water?” he said.
“That’s all people talk about here. It’s dollars and cents to them. Butter on their bread.”
Hale said nothing, because she was correct, in too many ways.
“Well, when do you want to discuss it, then,” she said sharply.
“After lunch,” he told her, because it would take him that long to figure out how to approach this. Not the story, but how quickly and completely she seemed to have fallen in the thrall of the people who staged it. Stories about environmental activists were a short-cut; rather than provide real information, or document actual change, they provoked and badgered, whipped up readers unnecessarily. Unless it was necessary to whip them up, and in this case, it wasn’t. If anyone wanted to see real shit in sea water, he knew just where to direct their attention, and how to get them there—to Beirut, through a circuitous route involving twenty-four hours of air travel, three customs stations and an unsettling number of military checkpoints. But this was beside the point for the moment; he told himself that what he truly resented were how circuses like this hijacked the news hole. The kinds of stories that emerged from their happenings read like campaign literature for rookie runs at the state House of Delegates.
“What was I supposed to do, ignore it?” she asked.
“Later,” he said, and he poured as much command in his voice as he could on a Monday morning. The telephone handset: slammed against the cradle, for emphasis. If newspaper stories are primarily about change, this was the kind of story about change Hale hated: forced, manufactured, inorganic. To say nothing of how it cluttered the newspaper up with jargon: parts per million, high median and low average, what was tolerable, what was toxic. He thought he knew something about the difference between the two, when the boundaries between each blurred and lured people into messy consequences. This episode in St. Martin’s was not one of them.
When he returned from lunch, well–oiled and liberated from his inhibitions, he scouted out a desk and telephone away from the city desk. He wanted this to be a private conversation, or as private as the newsroom would allow.
“On that Shore Keepers nonsense,” Hale began without any pleasantries. “You should have waited.”
“Waited,” she repeated; and in the pause that followed— as she likely needed time to come up with a rejoinder—Hale detected something disturbing, but inevitable. In the time enough for her to either roll her eyes, or lift her feet up onto the desk, Hale ascertained boredom in the background, the type that devolves into insolence. Boredom he understood; they were all bored at some point at The Bulletin, from the managing editor to the news clerks. That was to be expected at a mid-size daily determined not to be bigger, or better, or anything beyond its current circumstances. But insolence: that was neither her M.O., nor a good fit.
“Waited for what?” she asked. “When it was already going out on the wires, the radio, the television.”
“You should have waited for guidance,” he said. “You should have waited for perspective. The voice of someone older and wiser, so you don’t get taken for a ride,” he said.
“I filed a story and they ran it,” she insisted. “It’s not like it got slipped into the newspaper unedited.”
“You do not need to file every piddling thing from St. Martin’s,” he said.
“This is not piddling,” she said. “This hits at the rot of the resort. This is a town that gauges success by how many toilets it can count flushing over a weekend. I mean, can you not smell the irony?”
“I’ve smelled irony far worse than that, and no one wants to smell that kind of irony first thing Monday morning,” Hale said. “You may not worry about things like that, but I have to. On the weekends, you have to think for both of us.”
“They’re doing it in all the other shore towns,” she said. “Starting this week. They’ve got a million bottles and they’re going to flood Congress with their samples this week or next, in the middle of the dog days. This is going to be a shit storm for the ages.”
“Enough,” Hale declared, and he raised his voice, though not with the force that would lead to embarrassment. He believed in humiliation, in intimidation and public shaming, when necessary. It was his default management strategy, but this situation was not worth the demeaning consequences.
“Next time, call me,” he said in a gentler tone. “Call me first. No matter what.”
***
Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of four full-length collections of poetry; four chapbooks of poetry; a memoir; and two novels. Her fifth collection of poetry will be The Exhaust of Dreams Adulterated, coming from Broadstone Books in 2025. Her 2018 novel, The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War (Amberjack Publishing), was a finalist in two categories in the Eric Hoffer awards. Her 2021 novel, Sisterhood of the Infamous (New Meridian Arts Press), was a finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards for regional fiction (west). Her poetry and short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and the Best of the Small Fictions anthology.
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