Beezer leads his companions around a crapped-out old red Toyota and is visited by an idea so perfect that he forgets to strike unreasoning terror into the beater's driver by looking him in the eye and snarling, "I make Kingsland Ale, the best beer in the world, you dimwit cur." He has done this to two drivers this morning, and neither one let him down. The people who earn this treatment by either lousy driving or the possession of a truly ugly vehicle imagine that he is threatening them with some grotesque form of sexual assault, and they freeze like rabbits, they stiffen right up. Jolly good fun, as the citizens of Emerald City sang in The Wizard of Oz. The idea that has distracted Beezer from his harmless pleasures possesses the simplicity of most valid inspirations. The best way to get cooperation is to give it. He knows exactly how to soften up Dale Gilbertson: the answer is putting on a baseball cap, grabbing its car keys, and heading out the door — the answer lies all around him.
One small part of that answer sits behind the wheel of the red Toyota just being overtaken by Beezer and his jolly crew. Wendell Green earned the mock rebuke he failed to receive on both of the conventional grounds. His little car may not have been ugly to begin with, but by now it is so disfigured by multiple dents and scrapes that it resembles a rolling sneer; and Green drives with an unyielding arrogance he thinks of as "dash." He zooms through yellow lights, changes lanes recklessly, and tailgates as a means of intimidation. Of course, he blasts his horn at the slightest provocation. Wendell is a menace. The way he handles his car perfectly expresses his character, being inconsiderate, thoughtless, and riddled with grandiosity. At the moment, he is driving even worse than usual, because as he tries to overtake every other vehicle on the road, most of his concentration is focused on the pocket tape recorder he holds up to his mouth and the golden words his equally golden voice pours into the precious machine. (Wendell often regrets the shortsightedness of the local radio stations in devoting so much air time to fools like George Rathbun and Henry Shake, when they could move up to a new level simply by letting him give an ongoing commentary on the news for an hour or so every day.) Ah, the delicious combination of Wendell's words and Wendell's voice — Edward R. Murrow in his heyday never sounded so eloquent, so resonant.
Here is what he is saying: This morning I joined a virtual caravan of the shocked, the grieving, and the merely curious in a mournful pilgrimage winding eastward along bucolic Highway 35. Not for the first time, this journalist was struck, and struck deeply, by the immense contrast between the loveliness and peace of the Coulee Country's landscape and the ugliness and savagery one deranged human being has wrought in its unsuspecting bosom. New paragraph.
The news had spread like wildfire. Neighbor called neighbor, friend called friend. According to a morning 911 call to the French Landing police station, the mutilated body of little Irma Freneau lies within the ruins of a former ice-cream parlor and café called Ed's Eats and Dawgs. And who had placed the call? Surely, some dutiful citizen. Not at all, ladies and gentlemen, not at all . . .
Ladies and gentlemen, this is frontline reportage, this is the news being written while it happens, a concept that cannot but murmur "Pulitzer Prize" to an experienced journalist. The scoop had come to Wendell Green by way of his barber, Roy Royal, who heard it from his wife, Tillie Royal, who had been clued in by Myrtle Harrington herself, and Wendell Green has done his duty to his readers: he grabbed his tape recorder and his camera and ran out to his nasty little vehicle without pausing to telephone his editors at the Herald. He doesn't need a photographer; he can take all the photographs he needs with that dependable old Nikon F2A on the passenger seat. A seamless blend of words and pictures — a penetrating examination of the new century's most hideous crime — a thoughtful exploration into the nature of evil — a compassionate portrayal of one community's suffering — an unsparing exposé of one police department's ineptitude —
With all this going on in his mind as his mellifluous words drip one by one into the microphone of his upheld cassette recorder, is it any wonder that Wendell Green fails to hear the sound of motorcycles, or to take in the presence of the Thunder Five in any way, until he happens to glance sideways in search of the perfect phrase? Glance sideways he does, and with a spurt of panic observes, no more than two feet to his left, Beezer St. Pierre astride his roaring Harley, apparently singing, to judge from his own moving lips
singing
huh?