Written for TV1_LAS Round 1 challenge five and the Prompt: Corruption
Title: In Black and White
People believe everything they read in the papers. If it's there in black and white, it's got to be true. Like their colleagues, the TV reporters and the weathermen, even when they're proven wrong time and time again, they never apologize for their errors. When a politician turns out to be corrupt, the newspapers act as if they're as shocked as the rest of us.
We'd accompanied the Perlmutter family, husband Jack, wife Janice, and their two moppets, ten-year-old Michael and six-year-old Sally, from central New Jersey to Albuquerque, where henceforth they'd be the Peters family. Janice had been instrumental in uncovering the corruption in the administration of the school district where she taught second grade, and like all the whistle blowers we work with, she and her family had entered the Witsec program for their own protection.
Marshall and I walked with the family through the concourse of the T-shaped Sunport, past the stands and stores selling overpriced souvenirs, to the series of escalators that would take us down to baggage claim.
"What's that?" Michael asked, pointed at the mural over the start of the first set of escalators.
"That's the tram. You can take it to the top of the mountain," Marshall replied.
"You have mountains here?" the boy asked.
"Oh, yeah."
We descended to the lowest floor and waited with the other passengers as bags came up the shoot onto the carousel. "What do your suitcases look like?" I asked Jack.
"Three are black and Sally's is pink."
Of course. So among the sea of black suitcases with the occasional blue or green or red one, we'd have to find three black ones. Much as I hated the color pink, at least Sally's suitcase would be easy to spot.
Once we'd finally culled their bags from all the others, we led the Peters to the garage where we'd parked the minivan they'd be using at least temporarily, and helped them load everything and everyone into it. I drove it out of the garage and to the airport exit.
"What's that?" Sally asked, pointing to the oversized Indian pot placed in the median of the airport road to encourage tourists to buy smaller versions on their way out of town.
"I think it's Acoma, or maybe Santo Domingo pottery," Marshall dutifully replied. Once I turned north onto I-25, he continued with a running commentary on the sights, the cluster of almost high-risers that constitute our downtown, the line of five volcanoes in the distance to the west, and Mount Taylor beyond them, and the Monzano and Sandia mountains to the east.
"Wow, you were right about the mountains!" Michael said. "Where does the tram go?"
"Almost to the top of the Sandias," Marshall explained.
By the time we pulled up in front of the house they'd be living in, on one of the many curved streets, I was ready to throttle him. I don't know why so many residential streets like this curve. The main streets of the city are very wide and straight as an arrow. Maybe they curve trying to avoid the arroyos that are supposed to keep the city from flooding. That is, if it ever rained.
Jack and Janice started to get out and look around.
"The air is so different here," Janice said. "And the sky so blue."
"Wait until you see it when the Spring winds stop blowing the desert sand and the ash from the forest fires across the sky," I said. I must admit, the sky here is usually bluer than what you find in the east and midwest.
"We're at about 5700 feet here," Marshall estimated. It sounded about right, since we'd ascended from the river valley that was just over 5000.
"Here are the keys to the house, and the directions to get to the car dealership," I said, handing both to Jack. He'd been a mechanic back in Jersey and we'd tried to arrange a job at the air force base, but when that fell through, I leaned on my soon-to-be brother-in-law to give him a job in the repair shop of the dealership he owned off I-25. Janice had decided that she wouldn't be working, at least not right away. She'd be too busy getting the kids settled in school and learning her way around the city.
"Call us if you need anything," Marshall added.
It wasn't until four or five months later that we got a call from Janice. "How are things going?" I asked automatically.
"Mary, I think I'm going to need your help," she said, sounded agitated.
"What's wrong?" It could be anything from finding a hairdresser or deciding what restaurant to try next.
"Have you been reading in the paper about the casino that's going up east of the city?"
Albuquerque needed another Indian-run casino like it needed more canyon winds. But a small pueblo in the eastern foothills of the Monzanos had decided that they would join all the other pueblos west, south and north of the city and build one on the east side. They wanted to cash in like all of the big and successful ones within twenty miles of the city. "Yeah, I read about it." I didn't tell her I thought it was a dumb idea.
"You saw that one of the state congressmen was asking for donations and volunteers to help them get it started?" Janice asked.
"Yes." I didn't know where she was going with this, and hoped she'd get there soon.
"Well, I was getting bored with staying home while Jack was working and the kids were in school, so I volunteered to help out," she said.
I could understand her being bored, and I knew that APS wasn't hiring. Like public school systems throughout the country, our schools were cutting their budgets by cutting teachers, not adding new ones.
"Mary, I think there's something crooked about how Congressman Jones is handling this," she finally said.
Once a whistle blower, always a whistle blower, I thought. "Do you have any proof?"
"That's why I called. I'll need your help to get it."
It's one thing baby-sitting people in Witness Protection, so why was I always getting involved in whatever they'd gotten into? But if Janice was right, we had to do something.
Luckily she'd become a trusted volunteer in the organization, and one day soon after her call, she found herself alone in the office. Just as she'd done in New Jersey, she used her phone to photograph the second set of books she'd discovered in the congressman's desk, books that showed how much he'd been skimming off the top of the donations they'd received.
"Mary, I'm sending you the photos I took," she told me when she called.
I looked them over and saw that she was right. I called the district attorneys office and told them what she'd found. They asked for the photos, so I sent copies to them. They immediately began an investigation of the entire organization.
But all this meant was that Janice and her family had to be re-relocated. Just a few months after they'd arrived, after they'd adapted to the dry heat and the winds, and fallen in love with stacked enchiladas and sopapillas with honey, we drove them back to the Sunport, passed that ridiculously oversized Indian pot, to fly to another city where they'd be given still another name, and put under the protection of another set of marshals.
When the papers picked up the story, they practically shouted their indignation that the congressman could be so corrupt. The fact that they'd lauded his good deeds just a few weeks before was forgotten.
Maybe there was a time when what we read in the papers was absolutely true, but those were simpler times. Now, it may be printed in black and white, but what's true one day is fleeting, and easily replaced by the next story. And you have to wonder who is more corrupt, the greedy politicians or the newspapers who report on them.