The Rhuins
Deleted/Alternate Scenes from All I See Is Red
Declan Loring’s Opening Scene
Kadoa Sheriff Declan Loring was my favorite character in All I See Is Red. He was completely removed during editing his storyline just wouldn’t connect with the primary plot without making the book 200,000 words. Still, it pained me greatly to remove Declan and his story. My intent, however, is to give him his own book (which he very much deserves!) that would operate as a prequel to All I See Is Red.
Since when had he had to become a politician? He had stepped into his role as sheriff years before and hadn’t once had to polish his smile. He never smiled, not anymore at least, and he had read somewhere that some politicians practiced their smiles in the mirror. Nonsense. So far as Declan Loring was concerned you either had something to smile about or you didn’t, and you didn’t strap on a big fake one for the public. Fake smiles confused people. He was stern but fair, and fair didn’t always come with a smile. Most of the time it didn’t. Most of the time fair came with a swift kick in the ass and a hard chair to sit on after.
Loring looked at himself in his cruiser’s rearview mirror, curled his lips, and produced something more akin to a snarl.
June knew how to smile for any occasion, even in death. June had given it a big, wide whopper in her last moments.
“Oh, Dec, it’s...it’s beautiful.”
And then he’d watched his wife’s smile fade and collapse into a peaceful, flat line.
Loring thought about all these things, looking out his cruiser’s window at the courthouse lawn. The green expanse was speckled with visitors, mostly young women, taking in the morning, reading, drinking coffee, and failing to relax because one of their little ones screamed at another of their little ones and frankly fucked up that morning Zen magazines had these young women believe possible. Morning Zen for Loring was an overbrewed cup of coffee and paperwork. In the ghostly words of his long-dead father, “Park benches were for men who had nothing left to stand for.”
Over in the rose garden, Loring spied a boy of maybe ten tell his mother, “Make Randy stop being a Maxi pad.”
A littler boy, maybe 5 years old, presumably Randy, darted from behind the bench and, while maintaining a protective position next to his mother’s legs, said, “No, I not a Maxine pad. You’re Maxine pad, Ryne. You are! Momma, tell ‘im.”
Loring almost smiled at this one.
The mother, not thrilled, grabbed both her sons by an arm and brought them together in front of her, balancing a carryout coffee between her legs and book under her arm. She said, “Don’t call each other Maxi Pads. It’s not nice. It’s offensive, too, to women and...and Mommies.”
“But, Mom—” Ryne tried.
“No buts.”
The younger one, Randy, looked exulted by his mother cutting off his older brother’s pleas.
“Do you even know what a Maxi Pad is?” Mom said to her sons, “women use it to...”
Loring rolled up the cruiser’s window. He knew what women used Maxi Pads for. He also wished he could slap a Maxi Pad on the collective mouth of the council and dry up any more of the recent stupid drivel it spewed: “Loring, are we any closer to catching the Barn Bandit?"
Barn Bandit?
Thank you to hell and back George Bobbins for giving my current pain in the ass a moniker.
Loring justified that if the council, perched on their half-moon desk high above the council floor, did hit him with that question again, he’d have every nerve to respond, “I don’t know, are we any closer?”
Of course, he wouldn’t say that. Because the badge was beneath your mouth didn’t mean you talked like it was. Most of all he wouldn’t say it because for the first time in his career he had to be a politician and work his jaw until he gave the council and, let’s be honest, the town something to smile about. It was election time. And his opponenant Hem Unzicher was shaking elbows with the right people. One of them being Kadoa Mayor Bernie Parrish.
Loring spotted Bernie across the way exit the Sugar Bowl, shining a big and practiced smile at the stranger holding the door open, compulsively campaigning, and head for his storefront insurance agency. In a few minutes, Loring guessed Parrish wasn't going to have much to smile about. Loring looked back in his rearview before stepping out and grinned. That was the best he could do for now.
Dutch’s (or Jack’s) alternate job offer at the Kadoa Register
This was removed for several reasons. The prose, at times, is too poetic and flowery, though that would have been edited out had the scene survived to the final edit. Mostly, I changed the course of Dutch’s entrance to the Kadoa Register because I didn’t think a news photographer suffering a crisis of conscience from photographing a near-fatal beating would just return to news of his own accord without more story between his departure and return to back up the decision. However, I’m very fond of George Bobbins’ first incarnation in this version.
For those of you who are reading this after you read the book, you’ll notice that pieces of this scene remain in various other parts.
Note: This scene was removed after only the first draft, so it contains no editing and is published precisely as was written, with typos and grammar errors and all!
George Bobbins rolled his pencil back and forth on the desk blotter with the flat off his hand, making a fast humming sound, as if the pencil were a very crude and informal instrument that needed the accompaniment of several real instruments to be taken seriously at all.
George creased his eyes at Jack’s resume and his pencil rolling ceased.
“It says here you’ve shot for the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, National Geographic for heaven’s sake.”
George paused, turned the sheet over.
“And the list goes on.”
“I wouldn’t say I shot for so much as my photos appeared in,” Jack said.
But for a small shrug that said “What’s the real difference,” George paid Jack’s clarification no mind.
“I was a staff photographer at the Washington Post for a year, but beyond that, I only steadily worked for local and regional dailies and weeklies in the Midwest. And even at those I was a bit of ghost. Kept a low profile, came and went, and didn’t make a big deal of myself.”
Jack hoped his humility scored him a point with George. The Kadoa Register was nothing if not humble, and he found himself amazed that for the first time in his life, he had to downplay his experience to get a job. It was a load off his back and just thing he was looking for.
“I’m not over qualified,” Jack said, pushing it a little too much.
“Your qualifications aren’t what concern me.”
“Oh,” said Jack, now feeling foolish and surprised by how much modesty sounded like gloating.
George started up his pencil rolling, got two rips in like a guitarist testing his cords but not liking what he heard, and shot the pencil aside. He reached into a desk drawer and extracted a battered file folder that he handed to Jack.
“Don’t open that.” His tone was as serious as any editor’s Jack had worked with. Jack obeyed, almost froze, and held the file in front of him like it were a stone tablet.
George sat back in his chair and folded his big hands over his chest. He was contained and perfectly embodied his title as managing editor. Like any good leader, George expressed outward compassion, while maintaining inward confidence. It was startling to see a man fill his role in life so well. Jack heard the press pounding out that evening’s edition of the Kadoa Register through the office wall like a heartbeat, George’s heartbeat for all Jack knew. Jack decided that George might not just be a good editor, but a great one.
“Sixteen years ago,” George said, “a young man walked into this office with a camera in one hand and sob story in the other, sat down in the very same chair you’re sitting in, and asked for a job as a staff photographer. His name was Mark Thrugood, and right off, I didn’t like him.”
Jack tightened his grip on the file. Did he really think he’d been the first photographer to lose his nerve in big-time newspapers and retreat to the farm league to put himself back together again?
“But I wasn’t the editor back then. I sat over there, squeaking out 10 inches on the school board or village council meetings a day, so what I liked or didn’t like didn’t matter. Harper Foley was the managing editor and his opinion did matter. When Thrugood walked through our doors, I wouldn’t say it was love at first site for Foley. No, it was rather a if-the-shoe-fits feeling. What impressed Foley about Thrugood wasn’t Thrugood’s credentials, which make some of yours look like paddy-cake. It was far simpler than that. What knocked Foley out his chair was that Thurgood wasn’t local, wasn’t rural. Understand? He was an all-around stranger. And Foley thought getting an outsider’s perspective on our small town was exactly what the Kadoa Register needed. You see, Foley was in the midst of some existential crisis or whatever with dreams of grandeur swimming around his head like little goldfish darting this way and that. The walls of this office, my office, were closing in around him, and he figured that if he couldn’t go to the big leagues, he’d bring the big leagues to him. His mistake in hiring Thrugood was that he put a big fish in a small pond. And do you know what happens when you put a big fish in a small pond?”
They kill everything, Jack thought, with a pang of regret he tried hard to hide from George.
Jack said, “I’m a solid photographer, Mr. Bobbins, with strong integrity. I simply shoot what I see. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“I don’t doubt it. But there’s the problem. I need to know we see the same way.”
Jack cut in, “If you’re implying that I look the other way, then I’m not ...”
George threw his palm up, commanding Jack to stop right there. He immediately knew his implication was the wrong thing to say and still holding the file folder withdrew into his chair. He found George’s composure oddly intimidating. Some editors he knew would have thrown him out of the office at even the slightest hint of loose journalism morals.
“Do you know what the Kadoa Register’s motto is? It’s ‘A newspaper with heart.’ That’s been our motto for seventy-five years, since my grandfather stepped off the train and printed the first word in this town. My grandfather was whimsical, but don’t mistake his motto for fluff. Accuracy, truth, takes heart, good or bad. He started the Kadoa Register on a single principal: you have to give as much of yourself to a story as you expect to take away from it. That’s what Thrugood didn’t understand. And Foley simply forgot all about. Thrugood took everything and didn’t give a damn in return. For all intense and purposes, Jack, Thrugood was a devil behind the camera. Is that what you are, Jack? A devil? Or a man willing to expose himself as much as you’re asking people to expose? These are farm people here, conservatives, who’d rather dive into a hay baler than have their photo taken. Just something to think about.”
An apology seemed trite, but without one, he had nothing to say. Worse, he thought an apology would make him sound arrogant.
“I’m inclined to hire you,” George said. “I’d be shortsighted not to, but my decision to hire you would have nothing to do with your credentials. We don’t give a damn about awards and accolades here. The Illinois Press Association be damned. I’d be stupid to not hire you because you’re a photographer, and judging by your clips, you’re a damned good one. And if there’s one thing I’m plumb out of in this office it’s a good photographer, especially one that comes with his own equipment and won’t break my budget outfitting him.”
George rose from his chair. He was a tall man, a giant really, just over seven feet. According to his research before coming into the Kadoa Register, Jack learned that George had played professional basketball for 10 years before, like many athletes, retiring into journalism. His height had earned George a certain level of notoriety during his time on the court, but after his retirement, the name George Bobbins completely fell off the cliff of sports history. Jack had a hard time picturing George as a professional athlete. He didn’t seem to have the mannerism or temperament for the gloss of the sports page. There wasn’t even a single piece of sports memorabilia in George’s office.
“Follow me,” George said, and walked Jack through the newsroom to the front door. They went outside onto Kadoa’s Main Street.
“The simple fact of the matter, Jack, is not a whole lot goes on in Kadoa unless you want it to,” George said.
For a small town, the downtown area of Kadoa was surprisingly busy, but unlike the grey currents of city masses Kadoa was quiet with room to breathe, the flow of people more like single drops rolling down a canopy, willing to land wherever they fell. Perhaps that was an unfair assessment, that the people here were directionless, but he sensed they were more accepting of life’s shifts. In cities he’d seen mayors try to control all movement. He thought about this, remembering how the Illinois General Assembly in the late 1800s actually reversed the flow of the Chicago River. One tick mark for the grey suited Gods of industry.
“Then,” George continued, “like a magician pulling a black bunny out of his hat, shit starts popping up right out of thin air. And like all magic tricks, Jack, it’s nothing more than fluff that you give more power to than is necessary. Real magic comes from the heart. Remember that and you’ll do well here.”
“Does that mean I’m hired?” Jack said.
George took a long look down Main Street and his answer was a longtime coming.
“We’ll see,” he said. “Be here tomorrow morning at 8 a.m.”
Jack offered his hand to George, and it wasn’t until he did this that he realized he was still holding the file folder. George took Jack’s hand. It was as small in George’s grip as a toddler’s in his own.
“What about this?” Jack said, motioning to the folder.
“Look at it later,” George said. “Consider it homework.”
With that, George went back into the Kadoa Register office, his bulk disappearing behind the reflection on the door like, well, a magic trick, Jack thought, and strolled down Main Street, uncertain of about everything in his life, especially his life here in Kadoa.
