Dispatch 6 from a Novel Formerly Called Red State: Weekend Fiction

If you’re interested, start with Dispatch 1

“Test test test test news…”

Liza spoke into her pocket dictaphone with her formal practiced newsreader diction recording every detail of the scene. Her parents had started sending her to diction lessons when she was nine. Every afternoon, after normal school, she would walk to Miss Scutton's house to recite old newspaper cuttings while the strict old widow listened carefully to correct any slip ups. If you wanted to get anywhere in journalism or politics, you had to be able to speak Commonwealth diction. It was a voice you could trust. You'd never hear a bark of a yankee or the honk of a midwesterner on the radio. You'd certainly never hear a southern drawl. Being only half-Kentuckian and having spent her early childhood in New England, Liza would need to learn to be a Commonwealther. But not just a normal Commonwealther. That was the point of Miss Scutton.

 "'Looavuhl', not looiville" corrected Miss Scutton. She had seemed ancient with her piles of old browning newspapers and shelves of old books. She served tea in a cup and saucer, and you didn’t drink your tea — you sipped it.  It was good for your voice, she said.

Those newspaper clippings. Some of them had been ancient, dating back even to before Kentucky separated from the Virginias. She even had some out of state newspapers. Why would you want to read those? Liza had wondered. She had quickly learned that you couldn't trust what other states wrote about us in Kentucky.  They couldn't possibly understand anything. They were foreigners. But she read them, because she had to. Every day Miss Scutton had a new pile of cuttings selected and every day, Eliza read through the pile, stumbling over the carefully chosen words and trying hard not to say them wrong.

Now Eliza had her own collection of news clippings. She cut out anything that might lead to a new story. And of course, she cut out any of her own wires or stories that made it into print.

Morning Post

Extra

Commonwealth of Kentucky Aug. 2, 20__

Tres Amigos Dead in Crash

Little View, Kentucky

By Elizabeth Owle

We can now confirm that the three highest ranking party members of the Commonwealth of Kentucky are dead in a small plane crash. Their plane crashed into a dry corn field and they were found in the early hours of the morning, their charred bodies surrounded by popped kernels.

Little View resident Andrew McCurtain, a local corn and soy farmer, saw smoke coming from his corn field and, upon making his way through several other corn fields, came upon the crash site. "I was just heading toward my tractor barn," he explained.  "It was ‘bout time for me to get started for the day. Saw the smoke rising. So I went over to it." 

Why was there so much popped corn? Eliza wondered to herself. You would expect just the area around the streak where the fuel was  and where the plane itself was to be burned. Of course she hadn't put that in. She hadn't described McCurtain's stammers and anxious glances, either. He was obviously afraid, though his fear could be due to any number of unrelated factors. Eliza was a slick and intimidating city reporter. Maybe she was attractive enough to make a successful country farmer nervous. Or maybe McCurtain had been doing something questionable that morning. Maybe he had something unofficial planted in one of his corn fields.

"I saw the smoke,"  he repeated stubbornly, regardless of what Eliza asked him. There was no reason for him to say more to her, and really, Eliza told herself, there was no reason for her to be bothered.  

If she put any of this in, it would never get printed and she would find herself suddenly promoted to a job that sounded better, but wouldn't actually let her do anything. She kept her theories to herself.

The Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of Alcohol and Tobacco, and the Secretary of Gaming were universally recognized as the three most powerful posts in Kentucky. The current three were colloquially known as the Tres Amigos because they came to power at the same time in the recent take-over of the Party and were thus assumed to be friends. Somehow, they had managed to secure support from enough distillers, tobacco men, coal runners, and casino owners. From White Hall, too. Liza was in a position to know that White Hall pulled strings, but she didn’t know quite how, and, in this case, she didn’t know why. Why would White Hall want the Tres Amigos in? Or did he just want the Mountain Boys out? 

Liza knew that the Tres Amigos had editorial support, too. So it was not exactly a surprise when, out of nowhere, as it were, the eastern-commonwealth-based Mountain Boys were out of the top posts, and three relative unknowns from the central knob region, rose to prominence: The Tres Amigos. They were suspected of blackmail. They were suspected of smuggling and murder. At first, they were suspected of being the pawns of a Hoosier railway magnate with designs on the commonwealth’s stellar, state-subsidized rail system. There were rumors of all kinds. Then the Tres Amigos announced a new state holiday for the Monday before the annual Derby race. It would be the one day of the year during which Commonwealthers could gamble at the casinos, and the rumors stopped. Liza noticed these kinds of things. She couldn’t help it. But she had earned the right to cover this crash. She wouldn't jeopardize that. 

Almost anyone could want these power brokers dead—mainstream political rivals from within their branch of the Party, or it could be the recently ousted Mountain Boys, or other domestic terrorists. Or a neighboring state trying to destablize the commonwealth in order to step in. Or it could in theory be an accident. Until she knew the whole story, she would play it straight.