Roscoe by William Kennedy

because of that connection, and still smarting with guilt over Artie, Roscoe persuaded Patsy to give Roy the okay. Roy ran the paper with two reporters and a photographer, and also wrote the
anonymous “Ghost Rider” himself.
    Roscoe halted at the door to the Sentinel and took six deep breaths, his usual tactical pause to retreat from rage. First find out what Roy knows, for he does tell secrets.
    Roy Flinn’s Secret
    In their senior year of high school, Roy came to Roscoe’s house to tell him that he had a chancre, a gift from the eighteen-year-old girl he’d been boffing, with
modifiers, four times a week, and who told him one night, Roy, gimme it for real, and who turned up at the side door of Roy’s house on Christmas Day with a predictable second gift, asking for
help getting rid of it.
    Roy came to Roscoe because Roscoe knew people, and Roscoe talked to Patsy, who recommended an Arbor Hill doctor who said, sure, thirty bucks up front, which Roy and the girl did not have. So she
got some how-to-do-it advice elsewhere, waited until her parents left town, then went at it in the cellar with assorted implements and a piece of wire, sitting on a spread of newspapers. After a
while she strapped herself to keep the blood from staining the world and called in sick at Marie’s Millinery on North Pearl Street, where she sold ladies’ hats.
    When she could function she went to Roy’s and brought him home, opened the door of her furnace, and showed him how she had burned the bloody papers but not the baby. “He don’t
burn,” she said. Roy took out the fetus, stoked the fire with wood, and heaped on the coal, terrified that the girl’s father might walk in and murder him on the spot. He wrapped the
unburned baby in a blanket of newspaper and put it on the flaming coals with a shovel. Soon there was a strong odor in the cellar, said Roy. He kept feeding the fire, and after a few hours there
was nothing at all among the coals. Roy still had his chancre, however. And arsenic, mercury, bismuth, and shame were his treatment for years afterward.
    He never married, was rejected by the army in the Great War, and turned into a peephole columnist, voyeur at the sex games his trauma had kept him from playing. You are one sad bastard, and it
could happen to anybody, Roy, but that’s no excuse. Roscoe whistled his way into the news office at the front of the print shop.
    “Roy Flinn, where the hell are you?” Roscoe called out jovially as he entered. He saluted two reporters typing at their desks and saw Roy emerge from the back room
with a handful of galleys. Tieless, in shirtsleeves, fingers stained with printer’s ink, Roy Flinn was an angular, bony figure, his hair plastered down with Vaseline, a twisted and bitter
freak of fate.
    “Roscoe, you rascal,” said Roy, “what brings you here? You have some news for me?”
    “News? What would you do with news, Roy? You know less about news than my sister, who thinks Wilson is still President. You find your news scrawled on public-toilet walls. Even your
saintly sister, Arlene, is repelled by your sheet. News, Roy? I’m stunned you can even use the word in a sentence.”
    “Roscoe, old mushmouth, I’ve heard your song before. Why are you here?”
    “Why do geese run funny, Roy? I’m here because your scurrilous scribbles summoned me.”
    “The item on the Fitzgibbon custody suit?”
    “That suit is public record. I’m talking about your innuendo on Goddard, and that Elisha committed suicide.”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “Roy, I am fluent in the English language, and you are fluent in the language of pollywogs.”
    Roscoe pulled the Sentinel out of his pocket and read from the “Ghost Rider” item: “‘Remember Mayor Goddard dying strangely in Havana in 1928? . . . Speaking of
grave matters, Ghost Rider hears a recent death from natural causes looks like suicide!’ Dying strangely, grave matters, and suicide. I consider that innuendo,