The Timer Game. Susan Smith Arnout

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       FOUR

       Monday

      The CNN reporter had been following the taillights of a battered pickup truck for almost an hour as it headed into the Tohono O’odham Nation, a hundred miles of desert stretching from Arizona into Mexico. It was two in the morning, and stars spangled the night sky.

      Mac McGuire was traveling a road he’d taken half a dozen times, but a sudden rain the night before had cut gullies through it and left part of it a mire. He was relieved to have a guide.

      On the seat next to him Pete Hildebrand snoozed, a burly arm around the camera. Mac felt a flash of irritation. One day, the car would hit a bump and that camera would fly out of his arms and smack the dashboard like an egg. In back, Aaron Spense stretched out, arms crossed, wearing his dad’s Marine boots, iPod earbuds in his ears. Next to him lay a mixer in a tangle of cables and snarl of mikes. Aaron was twenty-two, Pete not much older. It made Mac feel tired. He was thirty-eight, his last birthday.

      Usually, CNN would have sent at least one producer, but Mac had insisted on keeping the size down, instinctively understanding that the fewer people pushing into their world, the greater likelihood he had of getting what he’d come for.

      He thought through how it was going to go, what he was going to say, where the overhead boom mike needed to be positioned, and when exactly he wanted Pete to come in close for a tight shot. The mechanics kept his mind off the shoot itself, how important this one was.

      Hekka Miasonkopna was a Yaqui Indian girl, three and a half years old, who was born with a damaged left ventricle. What had started as a piece about the nightmare of getting expensive cardiac care when poor had evolved into a series about the complexity of culture shaping worldview and the ferocity of a parent’s love.

      Hekka’s parents knew she would die. They accepted it. So it became Mac’s fight, for her. She was now in end-stage and would die without a transplant, something they’d resisted considering. There was another thing they could try. Something so new it was still in experimental trials. So new nobody in the media except Mac and his producers and video team even knew of its existence.

      His job was laying out the options and stepping back to record what happened next. Part of him came here wanting to nudge her parents into action, a move that was right at the edge of stepping over the line, and he knew it.

      He and his colleagues joked about the special hell reserved for reporters. Someplace where they’d be forced to sit for eternity with the hapless fools they’d talked into doing something – a giddy kid he’d once coached early in his career into getting a tattoo on camera came to mind; that one still gnawed at his conscience – and the problem was that even with the most altruistic of pieces, like this one, there existed a small part inside himself that was looking at it coldly, evaluating it not just for its emotional wallop but for its ability to be a Mac piece, helping him – just like that old American Express ad – go everywhere he wanted to go.

      Unlike local stations keyed to November sweeps, CNN tracked ratings all the time. TV viewing was higher in the fall, and Mac was working on two series simultaneously that would get big play: a graphic and disturbing one about child porn on the Internet that was close to being in the can, and this one with Hekka, culminating in her ground-breaking surgery and its aftermath.

      Providing they went for it. Or not. Either way, it was a story. He hated himself for even thinking that. Mac sincerely wanted her to live. He’d grown attached to the little girl and her family. But part of him, almost equally as strongly, knew if they chose to let her die, it would tug at the audience just as much.

      Horrible business, news. Someplace along the line, he’d sold part of himself and he couldn’t figure out how to get it back.

      Clouds of dust rose and seeped into his vehicle, making it look as if Arturo’s truck was floating in a puff of magic. Mac’s eyes burned. In the lights, the Coyote Mountains rose like an apparition of shaggy cliffs and granite bluffs.

      The pickup veered off road and Mac shifted into low, bumping across a dry riverbed. The Swiss Army knife on his key chain clinked like wind chimes.

      The СКАЧАТЬ