The Evening News Read Online Free PDF

was a miracle, Father.”
    â€œWhat?” Father Manning said.
    Gino looked away, then at the priest’s face. “I thought that Maureen and Donna—”
    Father Manning took a deep drag off his cigarette. “There was nothing miraculous about what happened here.” Smoke streamed from his mouth. The priest turned to finish dressing.
    Gino nodded, confused, events still piecing themselves together. He went to the wine closet for the cruets. Father Manning called out, “Full.” So Gino filled one of the cruets with wine, the other with cold water. The water splashed in the sink. He set them next to the dish and cloth and patens that rested on the table next to the altar, and then returned to thesacristy for the long pole used to light the candles, and he lit the center pair, and tears welled in his eyes.
    No miracle. A flush as burning as the flame washed over him. Fool. To try to be special. To believe. For a moment he stood quietly at the altar, holding the flame to the tall candle, feeling the tears drip from his cheeks to the altar cloth. Then a sudden sorrow fell over him. All at once the world seemed very dark and very big.

The Evening News
    Their fears appear nightly, as routinely as the newscaster’s face. Framed by the plastic black rectangle of the portable color television set Maria’s parents had given them, the newscaster’s head and shoulders normally fill two-thirds of the screen, and the man’s face is always calm, pale salmon. Behind him is a soothing gray-blue backdrop. The other third of the picture is left to maps of Poland, EI Salvador, the Falkland Islands. Paul wonders who chooses the colors for the maps. EI Salvador is usually brown; Poland, nearly always red. Argentina is green and jagged. Paul likes to tinker with the knob labeled TONE to make the countries any color he wants them to be. Sometimes when Maria isn’t in the room he turns down the BRIGHT knob and makes everything turn black. Paul’s parents didn’t have a color television when he was growing up. Whenever he watches baseball he likes the colors to be true, but not so gaudy that he is distracted by them. The grass in the infield has to be lime green, the dirt around home plate barely orange. Paul has been to Atlanta. The earth is barely orange in Atlanta. Atlanta is nearly five hundred miles away, but cable picks up all the televised games. The Braves now call themselves America’s Team. During the first week they had the set Paul waited patiently for a shot of the American flag flying out in center field; then he quickly locked in the flag’s red stripes, itssquare field of blue, its crisp wrinkled lines of white, then marked each knob with a Flair pen so he could always return the colors to where they were supposed to be, clearly there on the screen, bright and true, but not so loud as to be distracted by them.
    Maria doesn’t care about the color. When she turns on the TV set, any colors are all right with her, even black and white. Maria is seven months pregnant. The color set was a pregnancy gift. Each day when she comes home from the university library where she works she watches “General Hospital,” her favorite soap opera, usually in black and white. She calls the soaps “the dopes.” She hasn’t smoked any marijuana since she learned she was pregnant. Though the baby wasn’t planned, Maria takes all the right vitamins and eats enough protein and vegetables to make herself sometimes so sick of doing things right that she wants to roll a fat joint and get high, but she doesn’t have any grass in the house and she knows that drugs are probably bad for the baby. She drinks red wine instead. Seldom more than seven glasses a week. Paul drinks a lot of wine, mostly imported, now that they can afford it. He grew up drinking inexpensive homemade wine. None of the expensive imported wine is as good as what he remembers drinking. He thinks of