THIRTEEN

CAMERON WILLIAMS was a bit of a loner. He had his friends on the Princeton campus, primarily international finance student Dirk Burton of Wales, whom he had interviewed for a school-paper feature. But Cameron had finagled his own private room as soon as he could manage it, and by the time he was an upperclassman with his sights on an internship—and eventual position—at Global Weekly, he had become one single-minded young man. Literally.

He still enjoyed dating, but he ran from any girlfriend or even acquaintance who hinted at caring for him in a real way. Girl pals accused him of fear of commitment. Maybe they were right, but he didn’t think so. He had a one-track mind; that was all. There weren’t many Princeton students with as modest a background as his, and had it not been for his stellar college test scores, his high school journalism awards, and his extensive extracurricular involvement, he likely never would have gained admittance to an Ivy League school. He had been involved in every club and activity he could find—except the choir, because he couldn’t carry a tune in a barge.

Once at Princeton, Cameron had become determined not to just stay, but to make and leave his mark. He had to work, of course, but to kill two pigeons with one pebble, he took a job as a stringer for a local paper. He shone there so early that they kept offering him a full-time job. Cameron didn’t want to offend his boss, so he brushed aside the offer with the excuse that he had to finish college first.

The truth was, his sights were set much higher than a local paper. He told Dirk Burton, “If I graduate from Princeton and have no other offers, I will feel like a colossal failure.”

“No worries,” Dirk said. “Somehow I think you’ll succeed all right.”

That said, Cameron Williams threw himself into every assignment for the little rag. He started covering high school sports and school-board meetings, of all things. The full-timers resented the attention he got from editors when his little stories seemed to gleam with import. He eschewed the standard who, what, when, where, why, and how inverted-pyramid formula and got to the point in the first paragraph.

Old-timers on the staff would start a high school basketball story with something like: “The Arlington Cougars extended their win streak last night with a 64–60 victory over the visiting Wheeling Falcons behind a 20-point effort from senior guard . . .”

Cameron’s bosses would circulate his story of a similar game for everyone to see, especially with a lead like: “Jim Spencer’s four-point play with less than a minute to go in the third quarter proved the turning point in last night’s basketball game between . . .”

“You see?” the grizzled sports editor would tell the rest of the staff. “Get to the heart of the matter right away. These other stories are fill-in-the-blanks, and I’ve seen ’em a thousand times.”

Cameron peppered his pieces with quotes not only from the coaches and players but also from fans and even referees. And his coverage of what might otherwise have been dead-boring school-board meetings crackled with drama, even if he had to embellish it.

The fly vigorously rubbing his forelegs together on my knee during last night’s meeting of the District 211 school board was the highlight until council member Fred Kinsella referred to the chairwoman with a gender-based epithet. That woke the rest of the board, the fly, and me. The inciting issue was . . .

But the story that launched Cameron Williams’s career was one of those serendipitous events that falls into the lap of the person who finds himself in the right place at the right time. He found no joy in the circumstance, however, because the event was tragic almost beyond words.

He had been lounging in the editorial office, gassing with a couple of photographers, when one was summoned to the scene of a horrible accident. “Wanna come, Cam?” the photog said, strapping on his cameras and grabbing his coat.

Cameron checked his watch. His ball game didn’t start for another hour, and the scene of the accident was on the way. He followed the photographer to a tiny suburban subdivision that had seen better days. They picked their way around and through emergency vehicles to where an ambulance waited, its lights off. A man leaving for his evening shift at a local factory had backed over and killed his own toddler son in the driveway.

Cameron immediately began interviewing the first cops on the scene. He was informed that the victim and the father were in the kitchen, and everyone was just giving him a moment before they transported the body to the morgue.

He signaled the photographer, and they slipped in the kitchen door. The curtains were closed and the room was dark, save for a light directly over the kitchen table, where the tiny body lay, wrapped head to toe in a dirty white sheet. The father sat before his child with his back to Cameron and the photographer, his forehead on the table, shoulders heaving. It was clear he had not heard them enter.

Cameron glanced at the photographer, who lifted his camera and aimed at the poignant scene. Just then the father slowly lifted his hands and put one atop the covered head of his son and the other over his ankles. Cameron could only imagine the perfection of the composition in the frame of the camera.

The picture would tell the whole story. The room was dingy; the overhead fixture isolated the dead boy and his grieving father, abject with guilt, gently touching—blessing—the child he had killed. Cameron waited and waited for the click of the shutter and hoped it would not interrupt the man’s reverie.

The photographer stood there for what seemed hours while Cameron remained transfixed, thinking only how sensitive he would have to be to ask the man a question or two once the boy was carried away. It was awful work, a terrible obligation, and yet it was his job.

Finally Cameron turned and noticed the photographer frozen in the moment. The man lowered his camera, lips pressed tight, and slipped behind Cameron and out the door. He had never pressed the shutter.

Cameron followed him out. They could fire him, but there was nothing to ask the father. Rather, Cameron followed the photographer all the way back to the office and interviewed him. His short feature entitled “The Greatest Photo I Never Took” was picked up by wire services and papers all over the country, won nine journalism awards, and was a Pulitzer finalist.

__

A month later Cameron stood at the window of his dorm room taking in a spectacular lightning-and-thunder storm that threatened to flood the quad. There was little he enjoyed more than such displays of natural phenomena. He would soon have to make his way across campus to the student newspaper office, and if the rain didn’t let up, that would be fine with him. To actually be out in it with only an umbrella and a jacket, that was best of all.

As he was gathering up his stuff to leave, he took a call from his brother, Jeff, in Tucson. Jeff was the homebody, the commoner, the sensible one, not off chasing dreams out of his league on the East Coast. He was already married and had two young kids.

“Hey, Jeff,” Cameron said, ever trying to ignore the tension and maintain family ties. “How’re Sharon and my niece and nephew?”

“Oh, you know. Good, but Sharon’s still trying to get me saved.”

Cameron laughed. He’d wondered, as had many others, when Jeff married a thoroughgoing church woman. Jeff and Cameron had been church and Sunday school kids all their young lives but quit going as soon as they had a choice. On that they were agreed. It just didn’t seem to make sense. They saw no connection between what was being taught and how the family conducted itself at home. Their parents were honest and pleasant enough, but whatever they got out of church seemed for Sundays only. It wasn’t even discussed during the week.

Cameron’s parents were still faithful attendees, but they resented that their church was apparently not good enough for their daughter-in-law. Sharon continued to go to the church of her youth, and she took the kids. Jeff went on special occasions, and it was plain to all that Sharon, wonderful as she was, considered him lost.

“I’ve got to get going, Jeff. What’s up?”

“It’s Ma.”

“What about her?”

“Looks like cancer, Cam.”

“Cancer? I didn’t even know she was sick.”

“She wasn’t. It was sudden, but it’s also bad. I’m pretty much running the business now so Dad can be with her most of the time, but they’re giving her only a few months.”

“A few months!”

“You’d better plan on being here over the holidays, Cam. Probably be the last time you’ll see her.”

“Oh, man.”

“What?”

“I’m dead broke, Jeff. Maybe you or Dad could lend—”

“Things are no better here, Cameron. I’m driving one of the trucks myself, the Oklahoma run, every week. Gas prices are eatin’ us alive, ironically.”

It was ironic because they were gas-and-oil haulers, running crude from Texas and Oklahoma into Arizona for refining. Many Arizonans resented importing the crude from other states.

“I’ll do what I can, Jeff, but I don’t know how I’m going to pull this off.”

“Your own mother, Cam.”

“I said I’ll try.”

“You’d better call her.”

“Jeff, I’m not a complete idiot.”