“Tell you what,” Aaron says. “You go back to town for an hour or two. Get yourself a drink. Finish making your deal to get the main edition printed. Let me and Gabe clean this old girl up, see if we can’t get her kickin’.”
“Are you sure?”
The old press man shrugs and gives me a lopsided smile. “Ain’t got nothin’ better to do this evenin’. But tell me this. Say you get this paper printed. Who’s gonna deliver it for you? I hear they done fired everybody downtown.”
“They did.”
“Your regular carriers still gonna stock the machines and stores? Or are you and your reporters gonna ride the routes?”
He’s got a point. “I hadn’t really thought about that.”
Aaron grins. “You better start. But if you don’t have no luck, I might have an idea about it.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
“You’re also gonna need somebody to wrap our broadsheet around the main paper—if we get it printed. Ten thousand copies? That’s some work right there. You gonna need a crew in here to do that by two a.m. to be on the safe side.”
“Shit, I forgot that, too.”
Aaron gives me an expert’s rueful smile. “Easy to take that for granted up in the front office.”
“What about newsprint?” I ask. “I don’t know if I can get into the building downtown.”
“Gabe knows where he can find some. But the less you know about that, the better.”
I’ve found my ideal co-conspirators. “Look, you guys need to know one thing. If we publish under the Watchman masthead, the bastards who own the paper now are gonna sue me. I’ll never give you guys up. I’ll say I did all this myself. But they might try to make life as hard on everybody as they can. You have to know that before you do this.”
The brothers look at each other. Then Gabriel turns to me and says, “Your daddy paid me a check every week for forty-seven years. Wasn’t a big check. But I could count on it. And if I needed an advance, Duncan give it to me, no questions asked.”
I wish Dad could have been here to hear that. I figured these men would remember him as a hard, thankless taskmaster—as I do. But they were not his sons, and they knew a different man.
“Your daddy done a lot of hard drinkin’ for a lot of years,” Aaron says, almost to himself. “A lot like our daddy, really. Life wore ’em both down pretty hard. But I was with Mr. Duncan back in the sixties, when things got bloody. After Medgar was killed, and the movement hadn’t got goin’ yet. You couldn’t find a white man to stand up for black folk. Not in public. But old Duncan sat back in that little office with that Remington typewriter, and he set down how it was. He didn’t care if some white preacher cussed him in the street or a big store pulled their advertising. He said, The time has come to do what’s right. That might not sound like much today. But back then it was like a stick of dynamite.”
I don’t know what to say to this.
Aaron turns and looks back at the old press as though listening to a dialogue in his own head. Then in a soft voice he says, “Duncan tol’ me he needs a paper out tomorrow. So I reckon we gon’ print one. One last time.”
“Damn right,” says Gabriel. “Damn right.”
Chapter 36
The shadows have grown long outside the barn, but when I climb into the Flex, I see yellow light spilling from the cracks around the big door. Aaron and Gabriel are already hard at work, and their commitment has inspired me. Yet I don’t feel like doing any of the things I need to do. Nadine is waiting to hear from me, but she’s not going to like the idea of me going to war with the Poker Club. I should call Ben Tate back to discuss tomorrow’s stories, and also Walter Parrish at the Natchez Examiner, to finalize a deal for him to print a paper for us. But as I sit in the Flex, looking at the barn where my father must have spent hours fiddling with his old printing presses while swigging Maker’s Mark from the bottle, it strikes me that I’ve been ignoring the obvious.
Back on the street outside the Watchman building, I warned Arthur Pine I intended to destroy the Poker Club. By now Buckman and Donnelly and Holland and Russo and