Baby, Would I Lie?

4

And what fresh hell is this?

It wasn’t Sara’s own life that was passing before her eyes with horrid slowness as she edged infinitesimally forward with the rest of the traffic; it was somebody else’s life, someone Sara automatically both pitied and loathed. Nevertheless, Sara felt as though she were the one drowning.

Texans Bob-O-Links. Foggy River Boys. Ride the Ducks? What the hell is Ride the Ducks? Baldknobbers? Presleys? Isn’t he dead? All these signs, all these billboards, all these flashing lights, moving by her car on both sides in sloooooww mo.

The highway from Springfield had emptied Sara here at last, without warning, into the worst traffic jam she’d ever experienced in her life. Campers, pickups, huge tour buses, station wagons, every kind of motorized vehicle known to man — all crept both ways along this narrow, winding ridge road, two traffic lanes and an empty center lane for immediate left turns only, flanked by any number of country-music theaters intermixed with the most appalling examples of family fun: water rides, roller coasters, parachute jumps. Bungee jumping inside a tower. Family restaurants; all you can eat at our buffet. Family motels. Family shows. Family shopping malls. And all of it perched like colorful scavenger birds along the teetery rim of this ridgeline, so narrow that beyond the gauntlet of fun on both sides of the road, the stony land could be seen to fall precipitously away into semidesert, as though God had blasted everything else in the whole world and had left just this one meandering highland line of neon glitz as a reminder of what it was that had teed Him off in the first place.

Sara snailed westward. This endless traffic was like a punishment in a fairy tale; you have to push this vehicle forever with your nose while crows peck at your eyes. No, not crows; there’s nothing black in Branson.

And there’s no such thing as entertainment for the whole family, either.

A traffic light. (The pinwheeling deputy had left an hour ago, the light functioning less entertainingly in his place.) No one, faced with this light, seemed to know what to do next or which way to turn. (That’s why the deputy.) Get on with it, will you?

Through the light. Roy Clark; well, at least it’s a name a person has heard of. And just beyond Roy’s lil ole Celebrity Theatre is the Lodge of the Ozarks, which Trend’s travel person had assured Sara was the only possible place to stay in Branson.

Yes? Modest, discreet, dark wood, no flashing lights, a nice absence of the word family. Encouraging.

In the nice lobby, Sara used her Trend Optima card on the extremely nice lady behind the counter and was just writing her name when an Australian voice behind her said, “Would that be the delectable Sara?”

She turned and, by golly, it was Harry Razza, a coworker of hers from the old days, back when she had been employed by the Weekly Galaxy, the nation’s — probably the world’s — most despicable supermarket tabloid. “Harry!” she said, honestly happy to see the Razzer again. “Of course, you’d be here.”

Harry basked in her good fellowship, and they smiled at one another in honest pleasure. He might have an undimmable belief in his winning ways with the fair sex — as he himself would no doubt have phrased it — but he and Sara had gotten all that nonsense out of the way at the very beginning of her time with the Galaxy, and now the sight of him merely brought back those old days of heady irresponsibility, when sneaking a microphone into a television star’s bathroom was the height of journalistic achievement. She could look herself in the mirror these days, an honest and worthwhile human being, a decent citizen, a true investigative reporter for a serious and respectable magazine; but she had to admit, those old days had been fun. The sight of Harry Razza brought it all back.

As did Harry’s next remark: “A terrible place, this, Sara. You must have done something astonishingly wrong in your new employment to be exiled out to these pastures.”

“Come on, Harry,” she said, “we’re both here for Ray Jones, and you know it.”

“Some sort of minstrel, I understand,” Harry said, waving away Ray Jones with a dismissive hand. “Became a bit too enthusiastic in the hayloft; the bint din’t survive.” Casually, he added, “She’s a cousin of Princess Di, you know.”

Sara laughed out loud and accepted her key from the extremely nice lady, who was at this moment sprouting extra ears all over her clean forehead and concrete-permed hair. “Harry, you guys are still the same,” Sara said, picking up her bag. “I’ll see you.”

“Not one place to drink in this hamlet,” Harry informed her. “That’s how horrid it is. We’ve set up a little hospitality suite, you know, just for our friends, over at the Palace. You go out here,” he said, pointing at the door, “turn left, go just one mile through this horror, and you’ll find a cottage inaccurately called the Palace. We’re in Two-two-two. Easy to remember, yes?”

“Very easy,” Sara agreed.

Harry stepped closer, lowering his voice, looking serious and concerned. “I’ll tell you how bad this place is,” he murmured. “They have an Australian restaurant. Could you believe it? With oysters.”

“That doesn’t sound bad.”

“Look about you, Sara,” Harry advised. “Do you see an ocean?”

“You may be right,” Sara said. “See you later, Harry.”

“Don’t forget. Two-two-two.”

“I’ll remember,” Sara assured him, then went up to her standard-issue motel room, neat and inert. Having unpacked, she phoned Jack Ingersoll, her editor back in New York, to say, “While checking in, I ran into Harry Razza.”

“Oh, good old Harry,” Jack’s voice said in her ear. Jack, too, had worked for the Galaxy at one time, where he’d been both Sara’s and Harry’s editor. “Did he try to get you drunk?”

“Apparently that’s difficult in this town. No major hotel with a bar, no airport with a bar, nothing central and useful. So the Galaxy’s set up a hospitality suite at one of the other motels. The Down Under Trio’s out rounding up the nation’s press.”

“Go over there,” Jack said.

Surprised, Sara said, “What? Why? You know what they’re up to; it’s the same stuff they used to do for you.”

Which was to eliminate the competition. Given a story like the upcoming Ray Jones trial, the Galaxy would undoubtedly flood the area with anywhere from fifty to a hundred reporters and photographers and sneak thieves, and the task of the Down Under Trio was to distract, befuddle, and snooker the rest of the press, thus hobbling the world of journalism with booze and disinformation like the Princess Di gambit, while keeping all actual scoops and sidebars and juicy tidbits in the story for themselves; that is, for their team at the Galaxy. Sara might once have been a coworker of Harry Razza’s, but today she was a rival, so why would Jack want her to fly into the Galaxy’s web?

“Because,” Jack explained, “they need stuff for this week’s paper, and you don’t. You are there to study the whole scene, to do a think piece and a summing-up after it’s all over. And what’s going to be a big part of that scene, all along the way? The Weekly Galaxy.”

“Ah,” Sara said, following the idea. One concept that Jack had retained from his days on the Galaxy was that the story is never really the story. The story is just the doorway that lets you get inside and find and cover the real story, the story you want to cover. So Jack had just nosed out one possible story, which was not, in fact, the upcoming murder trial of country singer Ray Jones but was — surprise, surprise — the Weekly Galaxy. In the past. Trend had tried and failed to do a Weekly Galaxy exposé; maybe this was the time.

This could be fun, Sara thought, and said, “Two-two-two.”

“Right you are,” Jack said, misunderstanding.