Free Providence by Chris Coppernoll Page A

Go?”
    I locked the back door of CMO and walked into the cold winter. The pavement was frosty white and crunching beneath the weight of my footsteps. The temperature had taken a severe midwestern nosedive, and I wished I’d remembered my gloves. This was the gloomy onset of real winter. Not the fickle cold of November, which could still surprise with warm days awaiting their turn in the queue, but the deep-freeze winter cold, which isn’t afraid to drop a few feet of snow and doesn’t care if you’ve remembered your gloves.
    I drove out of the CMO parking lot not knowing when I would be back. Massey became Second Avenue, and I hit a red light at Broadway. I was quickly learning to dread being alone inside my house, listening to a louder silence and pouring over the storage spaces in my mind. This writing assignment was like beginning a long trip with only a quarter tank of gas. Here it was, just days later, and the warning lights on my dashboard were starting to blink. The last thing I needed was one more unexpected surprise to throw this uneasy rider into a ditch.
    Like a phone call from Bud Abbott.
    I hadn’t expected this day to end with a threatening phone call from Bud any more than I’d expected my week to start with an involuntary three-month sabbatical. My conversation with the reporter didn’t last long. I’m sure he didn’t expect it to. He just wanted to get my attention. Well, he got it. And my anger. What right did he have investigating my personal life? My medical records? And how did he get my unpublished phone number?
    He had the facts, but he lacked the story. They’re not the same thing. The facts only sketch the lines, like a sidewalk chalk drawing. Facts are two-dimensional. They can’t describe depth or intensity, or mystery; and that is, of course, where all the action is. Where the story lies. Life is what happens when the skies roll dark and the daylight burns away. It’s what happens when we mesh our lives with others’ until they are so intertwined they’re practically the same. That’s why ordinary folks don’t get their information from the facts but from the in-betweens. Sure, we listen to facts, but we watch the eyes of the fact teller. We realize intuitively that the facts are little more than mortal promises. Stick men in a flesh-and-blood world.
    Before the light turned from red to green, I decided I wasn’t going home. I’d begun feeling like Paul Newman’s character in Cool Hand Luke, a man repeatedly sent to solitary confinement because of his nonconformist attitude.
    “What we’ve got here is failure to com-mu-ni-cate.”
    Maybe that was my problem. I’d failed to communicate with the world around me. I’d burrowed my head in the sand, and now the French Foreign Legion—I mean the Chicago Tribune —was coming to help me with my com-mu-ni-ca-tion whether I wanted it or not. I could hear it in the frankness of Bud Abbott’s questions.
    “Mr. Clayton, you were hospitalized for two weeks in the Albuquerque Medical Center, recovering from gunshot wounds. I have the name of one doctor, Dr. Gerald DeWhitter, the names of a couple of nurses who treated you, hospital records. Wouldn’t you like to take this opportunity to set the record straight on the circumstances of your injuries?”
    “Opportunity? Thanks, but no comment.”
    “Mr. Clayton, if you won’t speak up and tell your story, someone’s going to tell it for you,” the reporter had said, trying to coerce my cooperation. He was right, but what he didn’t know was I’d already been beaten into a confession by my publisher, who was at this moment selling my life story to the highest bidders in New Jersey.
    The light turned green. Just before I pulled through the intersection, two students wrapped in dark coats darted across the street. Their faces were pink from the razor-edged wind. The sky gave birth to a billion snowflakes, swirling in downtown Providence like a ticker-tape parade. Directly in front of