“Alejandro, you see those men standing on the corners with their guns?” Francisco Chapa asked his son one day as they drove back from the market with less than half of what they’d been promised and only a fraction of what they’d need just to get by.
“You mean the soldiers?”
“No. Soldiers shoot foreign enemies, not their own people. Those are not soldiers. Soldiers don’t have beards. Whenever you see American war movies, the soldiers never have beards. John Wayne could not have captured Iwo Jima if he’d had a beard.”
Francisco pointed at a trio of bearded revolutionaries, rifles strapped over their shoulders, smoking cigarettes and harassing a pair of teenaged girls.
“Those are H-D-Ps.”
“H-D-Ps?”
“Yes, and you do not want to grow up to be one.”
A month later, Alex and his father were on a bus headed for the beach when a revolutionary got on. He was dressed in fatigues that smelled like they hadn’t been washed in weeks, lunch pail in hand, apparently on his way to work.
The boy stared at the man for a moment, noticing how odd his uniform seemed mixed in with a busload of civilians, then elbowed his father, pointed at the bearded passenger and said, “Look, Dad, it’s an H-D-P!”
Several folks sitting nearby pivoted to see who had said that. An old man ignored it, as his wife fought to suppress a laugh. Francisco immediately covered his son’s mouth, and turned the boy’s head so that it appeared like he had seen something or someone outside the window.
Francisco quietly scolded his confused son, who did not yet understand that H-D-P was short for Hijo de Puta, or Son of a Bitch. Alex Chapa had been told that story many times by his mother as well as several other relatives. It was a favorite of his, and at times he believed he actually remembered the event. But he’d never be entirely sure.
One thing he was certain of. If he’d known at age four what H-D-P meant, he would’ve yelled the insult even louder. Especially if he’d known what it meant.
Chapa wondered now, as he drove past his old high school and pointed out the place where the engine of his first car had caught fire, what impact the memories from this week would have on Nikki. He’d seen so little of her over the past year, and feared that the next decade might hold more of the same.
It was just past five when they pulled into the parking lot of the Chicago Record. Despite its name, the newspaper was headquartered in a quiet suburb, roughly thirty miles west of the city. The Record’s coverage area extended from the Loop and all parts of the city, to its suburbs, some more than fifty miles from Lake Michigan.
The day staff was still knocking around as Chapa and Nikki made their way through the newsroom. Duane Wormley leaned out of his cubicle, and appeared ready to greet Chapa with one of his half-assed barbs, when his attention was diverted by the sight of a child.
Wormley was one of the Record’s most widely read writers. Though as far as Chapa was concerned the man had never filed a single hard news story, wouldn’t know how to write one even if his life depended on it.
“Hey Duane, working on something big, no doubt. Let me guess, a pull-no-punches expose on the seedy side of candle parties?”
“Is this Take Your Child to Work Day? I don’t think it is. I don’t think it’s Take Your Child to Work Day, Alex.”
“You know darn well it’s not, Duane. Otherwise you’d be at your mom’s place of employment.”
“My mother doesn’t work, and that wasn’t very nice, Alex.”
“Okay, then you’d be with your mom picking up her unemployment check.”
“Daddy, that was even less nice,” Nikki said with a smile that reminded Chapa of the young face he’d seen in his mother’s photos of himself.
Matt Sullivan emerged from his office. Sullivan looked as he always did, like he was wearing someone else’s discarded clothes. The bottom of his white shirt had been recently and hastily shoved into his dark brown pants. Sullivan’s worn black leather belt was narrower in those places where his gut had pressed against it, week after week, month after month. Chapa was surprised that he was still wearing his tie, though the shirt collar was open, and the knot was a good four inches below Sullivan’s second chin.
“Alex, I’m glad you’re here. We gotta—” he stopped and pointed at Nikki. “Um, what—”
“She is what we call a child, Matt. This one happens to be my daughter.”
He could almost see the light go on in his editor’s head as Sullivan remembered that Chapa had plans before he got the phone call. Sullivan’s demeanor changed in an instant as he introduced himself and explained to Nikki that her father was a very important reporter.
“I know,” she said, no hesitation. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Sullivan smiled. “Yeah, she’s your kid all right. We need to talk, Alex.”
“Give me a second,” Chapa said, and led Nikki over to a cubicle where a man in his early twenties wearing a black Nine Inch Nails T-shirt under a plaid long sleeve button-up was pounding away at a keyboard.
“This is Zach, he’s an intern, but we don’t hold that against him.”
The young man swiveled around to face them. If the T-shirt didn’t already constitute a clear dress code violation, the Kane County Cougars cap he was wearing backwards sealed the deal.
“Alex Chapa, journalistic rock star,” Zach said.
Four cubicles away, Duane Wormley chortled loudly enough for everyone to hear.
“Zach is a good guy, a terrific writer, and best of all, he plays cool computer games when no one is looking.”
Zach smiled and offered Nikki a fist bump.
“Are you going to be a famous journalist too?” Nikki asked.
“No,” Zach said, then clicked on an icon and a colorful game filled the screen. “I’m destined to be the newspaper industry’s last intern.”
Chapter 10
Alex Chapa watched as his boss struggled to find comfort in a chair that should have been replaced years ago. Chapa was one of only four reporters at the Record who still had an office. So, as he explained to Sullivan, they may as well use it. There was also a bit of a power play involved. It’s always best to meet with a superior on your turf, even if that turf is slowly being taken away and constantly threatened.
“Do you understand what I need you to do in your current assignment?”
Chapa leaned back in his dark brown chair and took in the comforting smell of old leather.
“Figure out what Jim was working on, connect the dots, cover the same ground he would be covering, keep my job.”
Sullivan let out a sigh that was big enough to inflate four tires plus the spare.
“That last part—”
“My job?”
“Yeah, that’s why I wanted to talk. That may present the biggest challenge.”
Chapa already knew that. The Chicago Record had once racked up awards so routinely that at times it seemed like some were being invented just for that purpose. Was it really only four years ago that the Record had been named one of the nation’s top twenty dailies? To Chapa, it seemed like a lot more time had slipped past, during which countless column inches had been sacrificed to the sort of fluff and nonsense Wormley wallowed in.
Chapa