The
Drifter and Mr. Cronkite
By F.M. Scott
In the
fall of 1937, Walter Cronkite made a career stop in Oklahoma City as the voice
of OU Sooner football for WKY radio. By all
accounts, it was a dismal gig for the 21-year-old reporter, fraught with the
technical limitations of a still young broadcast medium.
There
exists very little legacy of Cronkite’s one-season stay—a fact that affords
room for the legend of the newsman who would later cover the violence and
upheaval of the 1960s, issuing the famous “Report from Vietnam” on CBS after visiting
there in the wake of the Tet Offensive in February 1968. The report proved to be a factor in President
Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from a second-term nomination in that year’s
election.
#
The small, pale, wiry man sat against the
Union Station depot, huddled against the cold night air of Oklahoma City. “Hey, Dick Tracy!” he shouted. He scowled from underneath a dirty wool cap,
his eyes a pair of shiny probes in the light of the skinny street lamps. A gray linen bag, half-full and smeared, sat slumped
beside him like a wrinkled, soiled fruit.
Nearby, passengers boarded the Rock Island train.
A lanky, younger-looking
fellow in a gray overcoat and a fedora stopped and turned. A briefcase swung at his side.
“Yeah, you.” The small man rose. His greasy, tattered clothes and shoes told
the story of millions.
The gentleman in the coat moved toward him. “What?”
“I see your H,” the man replied, pointing at
the briefcase. “And I need protection.” Twin straps lay across a horizontal seam in the
telltale shape.
“Beg pardon?”
“H,” he said.
“Heaven, hell, halfway, wherever you stop.” He moved toward the edge of the
sidewalk. “Comin’ from the panhandle, the
Rocky Mountains, the Ozarks, and waitin’ for you in every city you roll into! Didn’t nobody warn you?”
“Uh, no.”
The little man smirked with real irritation. “Well, I mighta known. A man carryin’ a case like that wouldn’t know
it.” His eyes widened and he jerked his
head downward. “Don’t you talk to no
stranger like that, Aldon,” he said. “Don’t do it!”
The man in the coat leaned in. “You all
right, fella?”
Aldon’s head shot up. “Yeah, what’s it to you?”
“Don’t know.
Listen, I was just seeing a friend off.
I’m going back to Norman.”
“Norman, Norman town,” Aldon sang. “Yeah, I heard ‘bout them college gals,
whoo-wee! All stacked and cushion for
the pushin’. Gonna get some on ya?” He clapped and whistled. “And what do they call you down in Norman
town?”
“Walter,” the younger man said, extending a
hand. “Walter Cronkite.”
“A what kite?”
“Cronkite, WKY radio. You ever listen to the Sooner football
games? That’s me, the announcer.”
“Well, that’s nice, buddy, just great,” Aldon
said.
“The last game of the season’s tomorrow with A&M
coming down from Stillwater. Stidham’s
boys are bound to have their hands full with—”
“You’re young, ain’t you?” Aldon chuckled. “You sound like you’re still learning a
little bit ‘bout what you’re doin’, am I right?” Again he jerked his head toward the pavement.
“I…suppose so,” Cronkite said.
“Well, hooray for the home team!” The little man snickered through his teeth.
Cronkite studied him for a minute. He’d seen beggars on the streets of Kansas
City, men who’d lost everything after 1929 or maybe had nothing to begin
with. But this man told a different
story. Little he’d said or done tethered
him to the idea that he was a rational human being. But if something made sense to him, he’d call
it.
“You know,” Cronkite said: “a year ago I was
calling sports for KCMO, and they thought my last name wouldn’t go over on the
radio. Too German. They made me change it to Wilcox. I had to wait on messages coming over—”
“I’m the sweet bullet!” Aldon bellowed. “Made it all this way through wires and holes
in the ground. Saw it all burn. Made a light behind me.”
Cronkite turned his collar up, studying
Aldon’s small frame, which seemed to sway with the wind. “Fella, you look like you could use a bite to
eat.”
Aldon issued a low grunt.
“C’mon, there’s a diner down the street there,
and it still looks lit up.”
The place smelled of grease and stale tobacco
smoke, odors that seemed to mix with the rest of the place. Green and white linoleum, rutted and chipped
at random, made an odd geometry along the floor. Several hanging lamps had burned out, leaving
uneven patches of light. Aldon and
Cronkite took a seat at the counter on stools with worn, ripped fabric. Through the kitchen window, a bulky, scarred man
in a grease-smeared apron stacked plates as he eyed the two mismatched patrons
who dared to blow in this late on the night before Thanksgiving. Aldon pulled a bottle from his inside coat
pocket. The label was torn and illegible. He took a hearty swig and held out the bottle. Cronkite hesitated a second, then took a big gulp
of rye that sent a wave of heat—throat-warming, then soul-warming—through
him. He looked at Aldon, who gave him
the nod for another.
“Helps me think straight,” Aldon declared.
“Hey!”
The bulky guy bolted out toward the counter; a blue vein sprang to
attention on his forehead. “You guys put
that away right now! I’m trying to keep
my business here. I got a family.”
Aldon frowned and tucked the bottle back into
his coat. The man took their orders and
issued a spiteful look before disappearing into the kitchen.
“Might be a while before we eat,” Cronkite
said.
Aldon shrugged.
He had been a farmhand near Medford. Every day he worked and sweated for a strapping,
thick-browed man who kept his shirtsleeves rolled up and batted green walnuts into
the air with part of a tree limb, a man who swore that he and his family would
be called to heaven before he lost his farm.
That was because the Lord had spared his land some of the drought that had
made a fine powder of so much overworked land to the west and south.
“He seen things in the light of ‘God help any
man who’d rise up against me now,’” Aldon recalled.
He built fences and pitched hay while the
farmer and his two sons tended the blessed, chosen wheat. He’d take off his straw hat, muss up his
matted hair to dislodge the searing afternoon heat. The sweat trickled down his face. Buckets of water from the well quenched his
thirst and ran down his shirt and pants legs.
There were other eyes on him. The deep blue eyes of a girl in a light gray
dress with yellow flowers on it. She tossed
a bright red rubber ball from hand to hand.
The farmer’s daughter—Aldon never said her name or the names of her
family—was strawberry blonde, looked older than her fourteen years, and had a laugh
“that might mean good, like she liked you, or bad, like she was laughin’ at
you.” Whenever the girl started to talk
during supper, her father cut off the first word with a look that…
“That what?” Cronkite said.
“That came from the word of God,” Aldon said. God the Father. A girl of fourteen had no business talking
during supper, and no one else did, either.
Only the Father. But the girl
would smile a lot. She’d be in the field
every day, with that laugh. When it meant
good, Aldon said, it was too much. One
day she laughed about her pa and his preaching and skipped off, her long braids
knocking against her shoulders. When she
was out of sight, Aldon dropped his pitchfork and headed for the toolshed. There was a dark corner in it, and when he
had finished, the voice of the Father sounded off from across the field: “Where
are you, son?” A crack of the tree limb,
and a walnut must have gone sailing into the next county.
On another day, the girl’s laugh meant bad. Aldon tried to impress her with his imitation
of a coyote; she laughed and said, “How dumb can you be?” He snatched a small red ball from the girl’s
hands and hurled it across the field to skitter on a patch of dry soil. She stared at him, not mad or upset but with “ways
about her that her pa couldn’t see.”
That night he found the ball on his bed, dead
center.
“I’m lyin’ there in the middle of the night,
just tossin’ that thing up in the air, over and over. Then she tippy-toed right in with a big grin
on her face. She made fun of her pa,
talkin’ real big—‘the Lord’s at war with the Devil in my house and I’m his
soldier’ and all that. She just, what
with smellin’ so good and all, like a little flower.” He let go a jarring, high-pitched staccato giggle,
then cut it off. “I told her I wouldn’t
do her no harm, she’d just go out to the toolshed with me, everything’d be all
right. I took her out there, tryin’ not
to wake the hound dogs. Smelled so good,
felt so good. We was done ’fore I knew
it, and then I saw she weren’t smilin’ no more.
I think she even started to cry.”
He steeled his eyes. “Then I
could tell she was thinkin’ about what I done to her. That’s when she got right holy and asked me was
I a believer. I told her I didn’t remember
goin’ to church but maybe once or twice.
She said she didn’t know was it so the Lord was speakin’ through her pa. If not, we didn’t have nothin’ to worry about. But if her pa did receive the word of God, then
his own anger would be no less. I ran
back in my room and stuffed everything I had in that there bag. Outside I heard the hound dogs, and I looked
back at that farmhouse and I saw a lantern lit up in the window.”
Aldon pulled the bottle of rye from his coat
pocket, took a gulp, and put it back. “I
ran and I ran. I found the railroad
track and kept goin’ south on it by a sliver of light at the crack of dawn. I’d only got a couple miles or so, and that’s
when I seen it.” He drew closer to
Cronkite. “The grain elevator. That’s when I seen the truth. The bigger truth I could only see right then
and there. That thing was full of the
poison of that place. It was feedin’ the
real devils that lived in all those folks ‘round there, everybody sayin’ one
thing and doin’ another.” He pounded the
counter with his fist. “And goddamn ‘em,
they was spreadin’ it around everywhere!
I had me an old shirt and some matches and some rye like I brung here. I tore up the shirt in three pieces. I climbed up in that thing, hopin’ with every
bit of my being it was full. I soaked
those pieces and I lit ‘em all up one at a time and I threw ‘em down the
spouts. Then I scrambled down that
ladder and I grabbed my bag and ran. That
fire behind me was gettin’ brighter, and I could hear yellin’ and screamin’,
then the biggest BOOM! you ever heard. Shook
the ground right under my feet. The
goddamnedest ball of flame you ever saw!”
Two plates of food arrived: pan-fried steak
with a mound of fried potatoes and gravy, and a grilled ham and cheese sandwich,
slightly burnt at the edges. The two men
ate in silence, for reasons tied to the moment in general and to the amount of
food each consumed. When they finished, Aldon
mopped gravy from his mouth, nose, and cheeks with the sleeve of his coat. Cronkite tossed his cloth napkin onto the
crusty remnants of his sandwich. The
cook appeared in the window, wiping a glass.
He raised a hurry-up brow.
Cronkite laid money on the counter.
Outside,
Aldon threw the linen bag over his shoulder.
“You’re awful quiet, buddy.”
Cronkite
shrugged.
“How
come?”
“Don’t
know. Just all—took me by surprise, I
guess.”
Aldon
smirked. “That right?”
“Yeah,”
Cronkite said. “Look, pal, I’m moving
on. It’s been nice talking to you, but
I’m done here.”
“I
see.” Aldon stepped closer . “Then I reckon you ain’t got no business
doin’ what you’re doin’.”
“Beg
pardon?”
Aldon
stared for a moment, then the bag slid down his back and hit the pavement. “Bein’ a reporter. That’s you, ain’t it? With your briefcase and your big-city
ways. You’re just a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed
kid with some dream, I can tell.” He
chuckled. “A dream, you and every other
jasshonkey. I just gave you a story you
could take to the papers if you wanted to.
A man fightin’ his own good fight, tryin’ just to survive in the
dog-piss world he’s been thrown into!
Takin’ up against the devils who’ll wanna kill me sometime down the
road! And what is it you’re all
about?” He stooped like a quarterback
awaiting a snap. “Three, four, hut,
hut! Callin’ the big plays.” He laughed.
“Damn, I bet you don’t even know who’s who on that field, do you?”
Cronkite
frowned and drew back. This had indeed
been an issue all season, due to problems with getting relays from the spotters
on the field.
“Listen,
fella, who are you, anyway? One of the
boys at the station send you on a prank or something? How do you come off like that? And what’s more, you sat there and told me a
story that’s either a king-sized crock or it’s your ticket to the big house.”
Aldon
drew close again. “So that’s it? All that power, and you’re too damned scared
to use it. You’re too scared to talk
about all that’s done in the name of a God who rewards those who accept his son’s
blood no matter what else they do, gives them land and cattle and crops—remember
Job, though yea he’s now just a distraction they talk about to remind us all of
the Devil, who’s really a tool in the Lord’s hands, thank you, Jesus!” He tore off his cap and threw it to the
concrete. “How ‘bout it? I wanna know, big man, whose side you
on? Yeah, you ain’t on no side at all. You don’t care, just so long as you’re talkin’
on that big radio box!” He retrieved his
cap and bag. “Goddamned football! Like to see the big reporter man get his nose
into some real business!” He giggled. “How ‘bout it? Where you gonna be when you got to stand up
and say somethin’?” Aldon stalked off
into the night, the bag bouncing off his back with every step.
Cronkite
stood in silence as he disappeared around a corner. A drifter, a farmhand. And for someone who hadn’t gone to church
much, he seemed to talk up the Bible—which was all he needed to place himself
at the center of some holy struggle.
Inside
Union Station, Cronkite phoned the chief at the Daily Oklahoman. After
relating his encounter with Aldon, he got a story in return: A grain elevator
had exploded in Grant County in August, killing one worker. A man with a bag was seen running from it at
the same time. Locals found fourteen-year-old
Elsa Tibbs hanging by a rope in a barn, dying with such force that one eye burst
from its socket. Justus Tibbs, his wife
Ralena, and their sons Abner and Charles, were found shot to death in the
family farmhouse, a 12-gauge shotgun in the farmer’s hands and a pistol lying
nearby.
“Jesus
Christ,” Cronkite said. “I never heard a
word about this. Not one word.”
The
chief cleared his throat. “That’s
because the locals wanted it kept quiet.
We only found out last month, after one of them from Medford came to us
with the story, somebody who knew the family.
But it was two months after the fact.”
Cronkite
paused. “And you guys didn’t pursue
this?”
“Why
should we?” the chief said. “This man
was filling me up with some pretty cockamamie stuff. And I think your boy was doing the same. There’s all kinds of crazies out there who’ll
hear stories and say anything. He acted
like one, you said so yourself.”
“But,
sir, you sounded at first like you believed—”
“Look,
Cronkite, number one, we’ve moved on.
Second, would you be willing to walk into a nest of shotgun yahoos
singing about some guy waving the very stick of God because his land was spared
all this mess—one special fella, you see—and about how he killed his daughter
in honor because she’d been defiled and that brought shame and the fear of
damnation upon the whole family as a result?
You think you wanna give that a go, Cronkite? Then you have at it, buddy. You just march on up there and get ’em,
tiger!” The chief laughed, then the line
clicked.
The
wind picked up as Cronkite walked the few blocks to his car. It hammered against him and carried those
walking from the opposite direction. Facts,
those prongs of both credibility and legality, had been both friend and
foe. He’d been canned at KCMO for
calling out the boss when the latter fabricated details about the casualties of
a neighborhood fire. Then a natural gas
explosion at a Texas school killed 295 people, bringing him face to face with full-scale
carnage, extracting from him an objective yet heartfelt story of a national
tragedy.
But
facts at this hour were toothed monsters, assembling and dissolving in a murky
sea of arson, murder, child rape, and a farmer swinging the stick of God at his
family and then himself. And a community
that scared off reporters.
#
In
Norman, the tiny box of an OU dorm room stank of mildew and stale pipe tobacco. Cronkite went to his Olivetti typewriter, a
heavy little job he’d bought secondhand in Kansas City, with the number 22768
scrawled on its side in white grease pencil.
He sat at his rickety desk and tried to hammer out something, if only for
his own records. But nothing came.
Sonofabitch! Words failing a journalist—even the
possibility of it! Another slug of that
goddamned rye, he thought. If only. He lit his pipe and fell back onto the thin,
hard mattress on his bed.
He
lay awake at two a.m., still trying to shake the question of Aldon. His story had come forth in such a churn from
a mind (and body) twitching with an unreal ferocity. It was shaping up to be KCMO in reverse, but
with the same result. Or a false alarm
for city police, who had better things to do with liquor laws and guys who just
looked at them wrong. But goddammit,
given the story from the chief, and the one from Aldon, was there a talking gun
or a smoking one?
And at this hour, with the trail of this man gone, what’s
left other than to assume a silent man’s war of conscience or take the route of
a renegade? As the question sits heavy
and dense, so the hour itself sits.
Cronkite
put a fresh sheet of paper in the Olivetti.
A few moments passed. Then, as if
issuing from a carefully gauged faucet, some words came and then shut
themselves off:
With each crisis, a
new note of truth. What is not taken
home intact shatters thoroughly, heavily, inviting new graves.
He
pulled the sheet from the carriage and read the two sentences. Doggerel, mishmash, nothing to do with
anything at hand. A second pass, and it
became an entry in the journal of a crackpot, gleaned from a showy but anemic
understanding of Shakespeare or Sidney.
A third took him to a room where the eye forms an acrostic, a shedding
of bombast like the melting of fat over a flame, every first letter of every
word calling up the journalist’s credo that less equals more in this line of work.
It
all came down to words. Everything did.
Walter
Cronkite laid the paper on his desk. He
lingered on it a moment, then turned to light a fresh pipe.
# # #
About the Author: F.M. Scott is from Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he lives and writes. His work has appeared in The Horror Tree, The Tulsa Voice, The Rock N' Roll Horror Zine. He has several works forthcoming. He supports his fiction habit by writing grants and providing public relations for Crossroads Clubhouse, a nonprofit serving adults with mental illness
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