The Crescent

Chapter 3

Will glanced down either stretches of the hallway, half-expecting Dr. Baker to make an appearance. The hospital creaked and groaned, each sound more suspicious than the next. The smell of damp carpet filled his nostrils and settled into his clothes. In the distance he made out the foyer he'd entered through not too long ago.

With Mrs. Wright – or rather, her body – far behind him, scenarios flickered through his mind like snippets of film. Focusing on a positive outcome of his endeavor kept his knocked knees and short breath in check, if barely. He imagined The Cellardoor Journal, his pride and joy, renowned for its muckrackery, in league with the Arkansas Gazette and Northwest Arkansas Times.

The Cellardoor Journal was not as white collared as its contending newspapers. It was a leaky shotgun house shuttled in the worst side of Fayetteville. The name began as a running joke when Will and Winston first rented the place. The windows and doors were mostly boarded up, and for a long time the only entrance into the house was through the cellar door, and the name stuck. It was hardly considered an up and coming newspaper, so Winston, the de facto leader, insisted their stories be unique, and above all, truthful. However, Will had felt trying for an interview with Norman Baker was a bit ambitious. Norman Baker's autobiography was more of a splurge, a cheap romance, a briefly satisfying bar of chocolate. He recalled the days before his drive to Eureka Springs. Will was flipping through Baker's autobiography, lounged at his desk in the The Cellardoor living room, now converted into a newsroom. There were enough rooms in the house for Will, Winston, and Charlie to each have their own office, but instead they found themselves crowded in the living room, voices and typewriters bleeding into one another. And to their luck, the previous tenants had left behind a few sagging pieces of furniture to make the place homier.

"Will, you're supposed to be working on that article about that widow, Mrs. Jennings." Winston had interrupted, poking a pencil through Will's hair. "You've had your nose in that book all day. Write something on that Baker fellow. I don't care what you write at this point, just as long as we have something to print in this week's paper."

Will plucked the pencil out of his hair and tossed it back to his coworker and longtime best friend. "I've nearly finished Mrs. Jennings's article. And what about your article on that old veteran...Bill...?"

"Alright, I'll finish Jennings. Baker's just such an exuberant character. He runs a hospital in Eureka Springs on the basis that he can cure cancer."

Winston raised an eyebrow and slicked back a cowlicked strand of flaming red hair. "So do an article on him. You're reading his autobiography; you don't even need to drive up for an interview."

"I don't know how much you could learn from that autobiography," Charlie, their editor, piped up from behind his typewriter, making air quotes. "It's clearly ghost-written, and far too subjective. And the writing style – don't get me started."

Charlie sipped his mug of coffee and placed it firmly on its coaster. His desk was spick and span, the model environment for a professional journalist, while Will's desk spilled over with momentums collected from interviews, from feathers plucked on the pavement to thank-you letters he sometimes later received. But Will admired the precision in which Charlie placed his typewriter, his notes, his books. And he adored the blue of Charlie's eyes, not a pale, marbled blue coveted by suiters, but a blue that ran dark from fountain pens, initially subtle, but step in and find yourself submerged. Will enjoyed disrupting the quiet order of Charlie's desk with gifts of ink-blue plumes left in the soft hours of the morning, before either Charlie or Winston arrived to work, when Will was alone in the hush of rickety old house.

"But if it's more or less an actual biography, doesn't it offer more insight to who Norman Baker really is?" Will countered.

Their verbal sparring was a treasure.