Dispatch 5 from a Novel Formerly Called Red State: Weekend Fiction
If you’re interested, start with Dispatch 1
The Journalist
Elizabeth Owle--Liza to her friends--looked from her apartment’s small third floor balcony over the city and to the sliver of the Ohio River. The sun was just coming up. This was why she had chosen this apartment, for its balcony with its river view, even if she couldn’t see much in the summer when the trees had leafed out. Though she was in the middle of the city, this was a place in which she always felt alone. Not lonely. Peaceful, free from watchful eyes. When she was awake early, on her balcony, she almost felt that she was in another world, or at least on a farm far from the city. She loved Louisville, but she also loved peace, and the two didn’t often go together. Up here, though, she was surrounded by green, the tree-tops of the smaller trees, the tree line along the river bank further away, the big oak a few lots over. The birds were up, and she kept hearing the loud call of a particularly close and persistent bird but could not find it. She sipped her morning tea. The city was coming to life around her.
An hour later, dressed for work and carrying a small case in which she kept her dictaphone, a few emergency snacks, her current reporter’s notebook and, this morning, the final draft of an entertaining little human interest piece she had finished last night, she exited the building. At the end of last week, she had wrapped up a months-long investigation into a scam involving the duplication of permitting fees. It had taken many hours of painstaking research, including the cultivation of sources in city and county offices. She had attended countless bureaucratic meetings, some less than fully official, and several cocktail parties. She knew it would be quite a while before she would actively seek out another shot of bourbon.
As a break-- and to ward off the sense of flatness that often engulfed her upon completion of a major project--she had taken on a fluff piece about the upcoming release of a contest-winning new glaze pattern designed by a local potter’s apprentice. She had talked with the young potter and written up a nice little article telling how the young man had dreamed of becoming a potter and describing notebooks of potential designs. The fact that his design won a contest delighted him, and it had been easy to write a cheerfully typical “local boy makes good” story to accompany a photograph of his smiling face next to a prototype mug and plate, each featuring the River Bends design, a simple blue line of Commonwealth Cobalt modeled on the curve of the river at Louisville. It was actually a pleasing design, Liza thought. She would buy a few pieces for herself when the new collection was released.
With that story done, she was ready for something to dig her teeth into. Something complicated. With luck, her in tray at the office would contain some provocative complaint or tantalizing incongruity. As she walked into the street, she could tell that the restaurant on the ground floor of the building next to hers was making tortillas, and soon she caught a whiff of charring peppers mixed with the usual warm comfortable and appealing smell of popcorn. It always made her want something to eat, even if she had eaten breakfast. Preferably popcorn with chillies and a couple of tacos. Maybe she would find the time to go to a taqueria for lunch. There was a particularly good one near the government buildings. She could already taste their tomatillo pawpaw habanero salsa. Tangy, sweet, hot.
And their popcorn. Liza was an adequate cook but popcorn was one of those things she preferred to get out. Maybe one day she would get a Cambridge Popper. She always appreciated them when she was visiting family and old friends in New England: A box for popping corn that didn’t burn anything and contained the flying kernels as they exploded! It would be a bit of a luxury, but everyone in New England had them. Unfortunately, export was still illegal, even almost 70 years after the invention of the Cambridge Popper, because of rumored military applications. Liza was skeptical: What did New England think the rest of the states were going to do with a Cambridge Popper other than pop corn?
She was figuring out what she might look into that day, having filed the completed story she had taken home for a final edit. She nodded her greetings to the other reporters who were already at their desks. Her editor was not. Before she had finished sorting through her in tray, he had arrived. Within minutes, he called out “Liza” and beckoned her over to his office. He shut the door.
This was unusual and she waited expectantly. “Busy?” he asked.
She shrugged. Everyone was always busy. But there was nothing that she had to do immediately, unless it was buried in her in tray. Besides, he had closed the door. That seemed to promise something exciting. “Nothing crucial,” she said.
“Right. Something’s just come through. You know Little View?”
She shook her head. “Of course not,” he said. “Small town, corn country. No reason to know of it. Nothing ever happens out there.”
“Until now,” Liza interjected.
“Right. Until now,” he said. “Here’s the deal. I’ve just heard over the wire that a small plane has gone down out there.”
Liza looked at him sharply. A small plane crash was hardly reason enough to send someone way out to Little View, wherever that might be. Especially someone like her. Liza was modest, but not unduly so. She was an investigative reporter, not someone to spend her time running from Pikeville to Paducah covering small-town crop-duster crashes.
“Right. You’ll want to know why I’m sending you out there,” he said.
The fact that he kept saying “right” was not lost on Liza. It was what he did when he was excited or nervous. She nodded, all thoughts of the popcorn and her possible taqueria lunch banished. It wasn’t that Liza relished a plane crash. She wasn’t bloodthirsty, after all. But though she had been told she was too nice to be an investigative reporter, she relished a big story as much as anyone in her profession.
“What I’m hearing is that the Tres Amigos were on that plane,” he said. Liza’s heart skipped a beat. She had spent months watching the new gaming secretary before he had been appointed out of nowhere to fill the role. Nothing definitive had come of it, except that when Plunkett’s name came up, she was the one in the newsroom to whom everyone turned.
Of course once Klair Plunkett was named the Honorable Secretary of Gaming, she knew she would never get to publish a real explanation, even if she got to the bottom of anything. She might do a personal profile, but she did not care for that kind of story. It wasn’t why she had gone into journalism. She had gone into journalism to watch people, to figure things out. And Liza had known Plunkett was a figure to watch as soon as she first saw him across the room at a Derby party at Churchill Downs that she had begrudgingly attended. The celebrity beat was not for her. But she had gone, and there, she had watched with interest as dapper business men and beautifully dressed young women were seemingly drawn to Plunkett. He was so warm, so down to earth, so expansive. He had implausible crowd-pleasing ideas: A Bubbleland outpost in Louisville! He was playing the crowd, playing the slightly hapless fool to draw them all like moths to the flame, or that is what she’d thought then. So she had kept an eye on him, and had taken her “vacation” to Bubbleland when she knew he would be there. She had ruthlessly expensed an evening at the high stakes Blackjack table to get closer to him, and she had been rewarded by the realization that the dealer was handing it to Plunkett. But Plunkett had no idea. He was just having fun, a night of Blackjack and bourbon. That Liza would bet on, with her own money, if she were a betting woman. And that is when she revised her assessment of Plunkett: A pawn. That’s what Plunket was.
Things were starting to make sense, but Liza’s investigation was cut short by one of the sudden shifts in Commonwealth politics: An ostensibly bloodless coup. White Hall would be behind that. Obviously. Well, if the coup had been bloodless, here was some blood.
Plunkett was in a plane crash. Injured possibly, dead probably. And not just Plunkett--the Tres Amigos. Liza could feel her heart beating in her chest. This wasn’t anxiety. It was gratification, excitement, pride that she was being given this story. There could hardly be bigger news. As much practice as had she projecting professional unsurprise, she knew that shock registered on her face.
“Right. That’s what they’re saying.” Her editor paused. “And now you know as much as I do. We’ve got to get on this now. Obviously.”
“Right,” Liza said over her shoulder, wondering whether he would notice her use of his favorite all-purpose word. She was already on her way out of his office. This was precisely the kind of story she lived for. Her notebook and dictaphone were still in her bag, ready. Back at her desk, she checked her train schedule and found that she had a little bit of time before she needed to go to the train station to catch the first train from Louisville that would take her to the Little View station. She went to the politics board and checked the current whereabouts of the Tres Amigos: Yesterday they were to have been in Lexington for a ceremonial baseball game. Today they were to give a press conference in Central City. No other details were listed.
So they were en route from Lexington to Central City. It must have been a very early flight. Ridiculously early. She checked a map. Yes, it could make sense that they would fly over Little View. She checked her watch. She still had a few minutes if she hurried. She went to the research room. The front desk was unoccupied. The support staff wouldn’t arrive for another ten or fifteen minutes. She found a pamphlet on corn and one on the history of the Little View region. She would read them on the train. She signed for them and left the newspaper office for the train station.