Phil Pepper's grey Ford Tempo burped once and then lost its will. Phil steered onto the interstate's right shoulder, clicked off the a/c, cut off the morning zoo deejay mid-witticism and resigned himself to wait for a police car. He was miles from any phone.
Phil got out of the car immediately and into the air, which was unusually warm for March at 8 a.m. He couldn't stand to sit in a car that wasn't moving. He couldn't help thinking of all those dogs and children you'd hear about baking to death in a parked Toyota while the driver was in the Safeway, contemplating the differences between heads of lettuce. Half sitting on the hood, Phil shook his head and peered up the highway.
The gang at the office would gripe. No one proofed copy faster than Phil. And the reporters looked askance at any stand-in. Monica would be especially anxious. She always said Phil could spot her unnecessary and saggy qualifiers from across the room. Phil smiled at that thought. It was easy for him to spot her other very necessary and very firm qualifiers, too. After he smiled, he nodded, because a smile didn't seem enough. No one pruned the useless verbiage from news copy like Phil did--and no one had his flair.
Phil kicked gravel, picked a weed, chewed it, counted cars, counted foreign cars and looked at his watch a lot less often than you might think he would. He tried to compare the color of the clouds to other things he knew, but that particular grey reminded him of nothing else. At 8:25, a blue and white, multi-vitamin-shaped police car slowed and parked about 40 feet behind Phil's sleeping Tempo. Remembering a pamphlet he'd read, Phil waited for the two policemen to get out and walk to him. Phil kept his hands open and visible while he watched step out of the car a black policeman with a mustache that made a tall, right-side down letter E, and a white one with a facial expression like you make when waiting in a supermarket line. The white policeman looked older by about ten years than the black one, who looked to be in that place in the 30s when people start to talk about insurance rates more than they talk about music.

Phil looked around. He was wondering if the guy who had been caught two nights ago displaying himself to the sorority house had sat in here. That was one of the Rufus' stories. Phil had to change all the there's in the story to their and rewrite the lead. "What the women of Chi Theta house saw from their windows Monday morning gave new meaning to the phrase rude awakening" had been no way to begin a write-up of an experience that had cost those young women a modicum of their innocence, he had told Rufus Banks.
Rufus shrugged, not varying the rhythm of his gum-chewing by a beat. When a story needed a clever lead, he wrote a straight one. When it needed a straight one, he wrote one you could send to Jay Leno.

The patrol car parked among three others at the side of the road in front of a house in a lower middle class neighborhood. Barstripe flicked off the siren. "You stay in here," he told Phil. "We don't really know the situation yet. But just watch what we do and write something good about it. We're tired of dealing with these. On a good day it's like breaking up a Doberman fight."
As Barstripe and Crupton got out of the car, simultaneously slamming the doors behind them so that Phil's ears popped, a policeman brought a man in a blue terry-cloth bathrobe out of the mid-size brown brick house. All over his right sleeve was blood. Half the man's face was coated with shaving cream. His wisp of white hair reached for the sky. With one hand on the man's shoulder and the other raising the walkie-talkie to his mouth, the officer spoke and Phil heard what he said on the radio.
"White male suspect, won't give his name. He hit his wife on the nose with his shaver because she was on him about the hot water heater leaking again. Send an ambulance."
From somewhere behind him, Phil heard the rapid woowoo woowoo siren of an ambulance slowly increase in volume. He hated sitting in an unmoving car. His breath began to get a bit warm, so he stepped out of the car and leaned on the side. He thought he felt a rain drop.
"Now, what'd they catch you doing?" said the husband sportively.
"Me? Oh, I'm a reporter."
With that the man threw his razor and began to charge forward. From three yards away, Phil could see the man's nostrils puffing out like a bull's. The officer grabbed the man's shoulders, nearly yanking him off his feet. "What did you have to go and tell him that for?" the policeman said. "Get back in the goddam car before I get you for interfering with government operations."
"Yeah," the old man said, "Get back in the damn car."
That's what Phil did. He did not turn around to hear the policeman and the suspect express their mutual disdain for the leaches in the press who chomped their little mandibles into America's groin, sucking all color from the skin of a nation soon to be the uniform pallor of the chronic masturbator your buddies warned you you would become. Phil wanted to protest he was only a proofreader. He really wanted to be the creator of crossword puzzles or maybe write the owner's manuals of surround-sound systems, whichever was the easiest business to get into.
As Phil closed the door, shutting out all sound, he watched the man go through the manual exertions of a harangue. He looked like he was saying, "What I need is a much much bigger cup of coffee than what they'll serve at most convenience stores." Later he stepped back and faced the officer, chin in palm. The officer pointed to the ground jabbing his finger downward at some words, but not at others. "Buddy, I've been around. I know. Next time you pick an accountant, don't pick one who wears sandals," the officer seemed to reply.
Phil sat back in the seat and wondered how he'd phrase his explanation to Vickie Lou. My car broke down, then the cops showed and when they found out I was in the media, they took me on a call. But why didn't you tell them you're only the proofreader? Because I didn't want to disappoint them. This inner-office scenario Phil rejected. At times the truth needed editing. That last answer? Cut it. Put something like "I tried but they wouldn't listen. You know how cops can be." Now paste it up.
Phil drummed his fingers on the vinyl to the tune of "Africa" by Toto, which he hoped someday to dedicate to some girl on the radio station request lines. The words bobbed up at him from some puddle of memory. Some of the lyrics floated on the surface, others had sunk too far beneath the muddy years of school and college to see. Some man waiting for a plane, thinking he should stalk his woman, his voice rising jaggedly against the 80s overproduction, finally a chorus of the other Totos, joining in, possibly a thousand of them. They were men, too. They understood.
Phil remembered reading about the lead singer's near-death from a bad drug salad and the drummer's anaphylactic end thanks to allergenic weed killer. Suddenly the song made no sense to him. The ambulance pulled up and onto the yard. Out of its ass came a stretcher with three men attached. It went into the house as the old man and the officer stopped talking. Phil stopped thinking about 80s coke-high rock and leaned forward.
The stretcher came out again shortly, bearing a lady who seemed to have spilled hot chocolate as she was drinking it. Her blue robe matched her husband's in every way except the Alaska-shaped splash of black on the front. She held a newly red washcloth to the bridge of her nose. As the procession passed the old man, he followed for a few feet, uncrossing his right arm from his chest and reaching at her as she was bourne past. But he grabbed only air and didn't seem much disappointed by that fact. When the ambulance left the man sat down on the porch and gestured at its wake as though he were saying, "I knew it. Right through the azaleas."
A few minutes later, the officers bade him stand up and come with them. One chivalrously opened the back compartment of a nearby patrol car and the man sat in the backseat with his hands relaxed in his lap. He looked like he was expecting to be brought a menu and a glass of ice-water.
As the door was closed and the officer drove away with him, the man nonchalantly flashed the bird at Phil, nodding and mouthing words that looked to Phil like, "You better replace your pencil sharpener. It's become a Frito."
Barstripe and Crupton at last got back in the car and drove Phil toward the Times' offices.
"See what I'm talking about there," Barstripe said. "It's the kind of cruelty we see every day that nobody talks about. It ain't a murder so it never makes the front page."
Phil nodded and as he got out of the car Crupton asked him when they'd see the story appear.
"Well, we'll talk about it. I'll talk to the news editor. I'll do my best," Phil said.
Crupton turned to Barstripe. "What did I tell you?" he said, then put the car into gear. Phil raised his hand to wave goodbye but the officers seemed too engaged in their own conversation to see. At the exact moment Phil stepped toward the office, there was a hiss from above and a strong rain pelted him through his shirt.