The haze lifting, Jamie was able to place himself outside the building. He remembered more now—the forearms extended, the clenched fists, even the breathy aroma of potato chips.
“This guy…came at me…don’t know why…”
He lifted his head off her thigh. Carla continued to apply the ice pack and pushed him back down.
“It was an accident, he didn’t mean to take you out,” said a man in a navy blue hooded sweatshirt and a Mets cap pulled so low that his eyes were hidden.
“Jamie, listen,” Carla said. “The drivers just walked off the job a little while ago. Management is trying to move the trucks with scab drivers they must have had hidden nearby. All hell just broke loose. Someone was running by here just as you stepped outside. You understand?”
In the distance, there was more obscene shouting. When Jamie turned to look into the street, blurry as his naked night vision was, he could make out a Trib delivery truck, immobilized in the intersection. Its windshield was smashed. The dumped contents were burning, dozens of bundles of Monday editions—hundreds of copies of Jamie’s story suffering the worst of all possible trims.
Carla and the handful of bystanders anxiously watched a cavalry of ranting Trib drivers moving in the direction of the trucks that were lined up behind the one that was attacked. A phalanx of city cops was trying to push them out of the street. Police cars were haphazardly parked with their driver-side doors flung open.
“I must have just followed you down in the elevator,” Carla said. “When I opened the door, you were laying here.”
“For how long?” he asked.
Men rushed past them, wielding baseball bats. One yelled, “Scab bastards.”
“Jamie, are you listening to me? Should I send someone up to get your father?”
The acrid air from the drifting smoke seemed to act as a stimulant—unless it was Carla’s request to call his old man.
“Why would you do that?”
“So he can drive you home,” she said. “You don’t look so good.”
He sat up and took the ice pack from Carla.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I can drive.”
He noticed his broken glasses on the ground next to him. He unzipped his shoulder bag to find the extra pair of tortoise shell glasses he always carried there. Back on his feet, his head throbbed, as if someone had cranked up the bass too high.
He straightened up, replacing the bag on his shoulder.
“Take the ice pack with you,” Carla said.
“What exactly did you say is going on?” Jamie said.
Her first-aid mission complete, Carla was already moving off in the direction of the mob.
“Go home,” she called back, glancing sympathetically over her shoulder, pressing a palm to her eye. “Keep using that ice.”
Jamie decided to take her advice. He’d had enough excitement for one night—and enough damage done. His jeans were torn at the left knee and his right ankle felt like he’d twisted it during his fall. It took him several seconds to remember where his Corolla was parked. He walked away with a slight limp and made the short drive over the bridge into downtown Brooklyn for what he hoped would be a decent night’s sleep.
With any luck, the drivers would be delivering newspapers again by the time he woke up—not burning them.
Chapter Three
Jamie squinted to meet the sun streaming through the half-drawn blinds. It wasn’t the most prudent idea—the swelling beneath his left eye made any optic movement a chore.
He picked up a ringing telephone from the night table next to his bed.
“What’s up?” he said, closing his eyes and letting out a noisy yawn.
“Are you?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“Heard you took one for the team last night,” Steven Kramer said.
“Some team,” Jamie said, his head back on the pillow. “An asshole walks off his job and thinks I’m a human turnstile.”
“Unless that asshole gets back to work today, my guess is that we’re going to be out with him. That’s what I’m calling about, actually. The Alliance is meeting this afternoon at headquarters. Big vote. You should come.”
Jamie closed his eyes and frowned.
“You there?” Steven said.
“Still here.”
“It’s at twelve-thirty.”
“I’ll try,” Jamie said.
“Don’t try, be there. We’re in this.”
“In what?”
Too late, Steven was gone. He was questioning a dial tone.
It was a few minutes after ten. As usual, Jamie hadn't been able to relax and fall into a deep sleep. He had battled insomnia since preadolescence. He typically slept well in the morning but invariably woke up feeling he needed more. Today was no different.
He inspected the discoloration on his face in a wall mirror beside his bed. There was a spot of dried blood that could be washed off but it didn’t look as bad as it felt. Sunglasses would hide the worst of it.
He brewed coffee, waited in the cramped kitchen, feet bare on the linoleum floor. He returned to the edge of his bed, clicked on the television to catch a report about what had happened at the Trib.
Drops of coffee, tasteless as tofu, slid off his lips, down his chin and onto his bare chest.
“Trucks attempting to leave the plant were halted by Trib employees, who smashed windows, hurled rocks and set bundles of papers on fire,” the anchorwoman said. “Three of the non-union drivers attempting to man the trucks were injured. Police estimate about two dozen arrests. By one a.m., Trib executives were admitting that the paper would not be on today’s newsstands. For more, we go to Deborah Givens, who is with the drivers’ union president, Gerard Colangelo, outside the Trib plant in downtown Manhattan.”
Jamie had run copy at the Trib with Debbie Givens, a diminutive blonde with a pristine complexion and immovable shoulder-length hair. She was from a small town in Iowa. She also had a master’s degree in broadcasting from the University of Missouri—enough to land her a general assignment reporter’s gig at the city’s cable news station.
When Jamie was still married and living out of the city in a suburb that some wintry nights seemed north of Yonkers and south of Maine, they had gone out for a drink, commiserating the meaninglessness of their work and pondering the prospects of elevation, or escape. For Jamie there weren’t many.
Gerard Colangelo was almost a foot taller than Givens. His combed-back black hair left a three-inch scar uncovered high on his forehead—a remnant of his days as a boxer who cut too easily. With his lined, angular face, Colangelo bore a fair resemblance to Pat Riley. But he was not exactly giving the kind of corporate motivational primer for which the famous Knicks coach demanded a working man’s annual haul.
“We tried…we begged the Trib to negotiate with us like human beings,” Colangelo said. His scratchy voice suffered the effects of a long, argumentative night. “Lee Brady doesn’t want to work with the unions. He doesn’t want contracts. He doesn’t seem to believe in them. And our workers, all the unions, have taken enough from this bully who thinks he can come to New York and do what he did to the unions in Dublin and London. New York is not Dublin or London. Now we show this guy what New York is all about.”
There were cheers and a mix of obscenities from the mob of drivers behind them.
“Mr.