The Bottom by Howard Owen

out how self-defeating it would be to thwart a would-be suicide by killing him.
    “So,” I tell Peggy, “I’m telling you just like you told me: you will have better days, I promise you.
    “And if you don’t eat some goddamned food and stop whining, I’m going to kill you.”
    I can hear her laugh, albeit involuntarily, under the sheet.
    “Just do this,” I tell her. “Give it six more months. Wait ’til the baby is born and see if things don’t get better.”
    Peggy says she thinks this is a bunch of bullshit. She does, however, get out of bed. She promises that she will start eating again, even if she doesn’t want to. She promises me she will give life a six-month extension.
    I advise her to smoke more dope.
    Doctor Willie’s work here is done.
    I HAVE ARRANGED a meeting with Jessica Caldwell’s mother at noon. She refused to speak with Baer. One of the small perks of writing for the local paper for more than three decades is that people know you. That, of course, can be a mixed blessing. In this case, though, Maria Caldwell told Baer she would only talk to “that Willie Black fella.” She said she thinks I am a “square shooter.” Baer seems offended that his shooting isn’t so respected. I tell him that it’s probably just his accent.
    I drop by the newsroom first. It is, I am soon informed by several of my colleagues, another red-letter day for the paper.
    Yesterday was the day Ray Long decided he’d had enough. Ray’s been on the copy desk forever. It is not a happy place to be.
    The first thing newspapers did, when it became apparent that the Internet was going to swallow us whole, was to start cutting bureaus. Check out any state government body, check out Our Nation’s Capital, and you’ll find a fraction of the reporters keeping an eye on the politicians and other rogues as were there twenty years ago. The henhouse has been left to the foxes.
    The second thing to go was copy editing. I can understand, I guess. If you choose between having somebody cover city government and an editor to turn what they write into English, content has the trump card.
    The last straw for Ray was when they cut his hours from forty to twenty-eight, just few enough so that his fifty-four-year-old ass wouldn’t have health insurance anymore. I can relate: Ray and I both are too old to be attractive additions to anybody else’s newsroom staff and too young to die.
    So when Ray came in last night, on one of his four seven-hour workdays, he took matters into his own hands. Somebody else might have used a bit more imagination, once he realized that there wasn’t one other set of eyes between his tired, heavy-lidded peepers and the guy who picks it up out of the gutter and takes it into the breakfast nook the next morning.
    Somebody else might have fabricated some bogus story in which the new publisher has Nazi roots or Wheelie gets caught screwing a male sheep in the newsroom.
    What Ray did was elegant in its simplicity. I think Hemingway, who hated adjectives and big words, would have been proud.
    Needing one more story to fill up A4, where we cram most everything that happens outside the greater metropolitan area, he eschewed picking off a wire story from Kyrgyzstan or Upper Volta.
    Instead, Ray went DIY on us. The headline on the eight-inch prizewinner he created read, “Fuckfuckfuck/fuckfuckfuck.” The copy was more of the same, with the fuck word appearing 358 times, with occasional paragraph breaks. The byline: By Fuckfuckfuck/Staff writer.
    As Ray knew it would, the paper made it outside the building with his story unscathed. What he hadn’t counted on was that one of our pressmen actually decided to read the damn paper. Our printing plant is twenty minutes away from the newsroom, thereby ensuring that we don’t have actual warm-off-the-presses copies of tomorrow’s editions delivered to the newsroom, the way we used to when the presses were right here in the building.
    But this one pressman was going