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.

Dispatch 3 from a Novel Formerly Called Red State: Weekend Fiction

Dispatch 2 Dispatch 1

The farmer 

Andrew McCurtain rose early, as was his habit. He liked to make himself a cup of strong sweet tea, watch the mist rise, and check on his fields and his barns before things started happening around the farm. If he had been honest with himself, he would have acknowledged that what he really liked about the early morning hours was that his old father was not yet awake. Once his father,  Andrew Senior, was about, things were crowded on the farm, though it was a generous 300 acre piece, with an additional 100 up the way. Young Andrew, not quite 32 years old, got along well enough with his parents, who lived in the main farmhouse, but he was a busy, industrious young agriculturalist, and he needed some time alone on the farm to do what needed to be done. In his youth, Andrew had no interest in farming, but after some years away, years during which he made the disappointing discovery that he wasn’t as good at baseball as he had hoped, Andrew had begun to see that an ambitious man such as himself could do a lot with a piece of land such as his parents farmed. 

Especially with his family’s ties to the mayoral dynasty of Little View. When the current mayor had first been elected, after her father and grandfather before her, she had succeeded in bringing the fast train line to Little View, and she had done it by purchasing a plot of his family’s land. Having a fast train line come through the station less than five miles away was just what he needed. And having a mayor who owed him was a game changer. 

The soil was rich, the tree lines were crooked, the lightning bugs made a beautiful show in the early summer rising from the fields blinking out their interest in sex. That was how Andrew thought of it. But that wasn’t important. What was important was that the land was zoned for corn. Bourbon corn, of course. Technically. 

Andrew set his empty tea mug, a solid Kentucky stoneware with a cobalt blue lip, down beside the sink in the kitchen. He walked out to the secondary barn, the cat barn as they called it, though now all the cats had switched their allegiance back to the main barn in the mysterious way of cats. Here in his private domain, one of the tack rooms was filled with sacks of corn. The sacks were a smooth sturdy hemp, undyed, with a label “Bourbon Corn,” the date of harvest 20--, and McCurtain Farm with a little sketch of a sprout. The labels were hemp labels, re-usable, and printed with Commonwealth-made soy-based ink. People liked personal touches like that, and all of the local companies he worked with became his friends. Smells of oil and gas mixed with the earthy old barn smell that permeated the place. There was a hint of manure, though cows hadn’t inhabited the cat barn since Andrew was a boy. Andrew turned on the CB radio, listening to the local chatter, both official and unofficial. All was as it should be. 

The biggest news was that a neighbor up the road had lost some chickens in the night. The coop yard was a mess, with several mutilated birds. “Wasteful little bandits,” Andrew muttered. He knew his neighbor’s double latch gate. It should have been enough, especially with plenty of more accessible food sources about. But the coons were getting cleverer and cleverer by the sound of it. Time for a better latching system on his own coop, he thought, as he listened to the distant sound of a single-engine plane. Many of the local farmers shared a crop-duster, a few had their own. Some might fly into Louisville, though it took about as long as the train. The sound was growing louder and louder. The pitch sounded different than he was used to, higher, faster. It didn’t sound right. He went over to his CB, tuned to the main unofficial local station, “Morning. This is Buddy Blue. Are we supposed to have company today?” He heard a rumble and thought he felt the ground shake. “Anyone else hearing this?” 

He tuned his radio to the safety and alerts channel. “Ground to air, Little View,” he said. “Everything OK?”

As he waited for a response, he looked out the open barn door over the field, bright in the morning sun, just in time to see a streak of red and white as the plane skimmed across the top of his ripe corn field. There was a crash, the whomp of aviation fuel as the air rushed in and exploded out as it ignited. Andrew stood, holding his radio, frozen. He didn’t hear a mayday or any other signal from the plane. “Mayday. Mayday,” he said into his radio, but he had forgotten to hold down the “talk” button on his handset. 

Dispatch 2 from a Novel Formerly Called Red State: Weekend Fiction

Dispatch 1

Introduction to the First Victim: Part II

The way the Commonwealth insisted that even gambling boats moored outside Cincinnati and Evansville were Commonwealth property. That was absurd too, and who benefited from that? People said it was good for the bottom line, but Plunkett felt that mutual promotion of gaming would make for better relationships with neighboring states to the north. Obviously. A Commonwealth Gaming Industry unhindered by corruption and stifling rules and partnering with Indiana and Ohio Gaming-- that would be good for everyone. He had tried to involve the new Secretary of Alcohol and Tobacco, too: Trade of bourbon should be opened, if not with Indiana, at least with Ohio. Small batch bourbon distillers should not be subject to impossibly high export taxes if they wanted to expand their markets beyond the Commonwealth. At the very least, the so-called tax trifecta situation, where both the mayors of  Covington and of Newport implemented-- or attempted to implement--taxation of exports to Cincinnati, and Cincinnati exacted tariffs on many goods, needed to be streamlined. But his counterpart at A and T had no desire to fix things, didn’t even seem to understand Plunkett’s careful explanations of what was wrong. Energy was beyond Plunkett’s interest, but he had attempted to sound out his counterpart on Energy as he sought to build support and been met with nothing but equivocation. 

Plunkett’s attempts to improve things were getting nowhere, and he was not recognized as significant in his own right. The work was disappointing. All he did was go to meetings arranged for him by his adjutant, a sharp-dressing youngster who was carefully deferential, but who possessed an alarming confidence and self-contained energy. 

He remembered the surge of triumph he had felt on the morning of his swearing in, the taste of success, the chance to implement his long-cherished dream of what Gaming could be. To become the Gaming Secretary had been a worthy ambition, one anyone had a right to be proud of achieving. He had dressed with care, with the help of his adjutant, and he knew he looked the part. He had been pleased then to have a former military man at his side, a man who knew his way around a razor and effortlessly selected the right socks for the suit.

 For the swearing in, and even into  the early days of his prominence, as he worked to avoid the mistakes he would have made as plain “Mr. Plunkett,” the grandson of a farmer. He had been grateful to have a military man assist him in his toilette. Now, he felt himself to be cowed by his adjutant. He had thought that, with time, he would gain sartorial confidence, and his adjutant would recognize that competence and find a new job. Then, too, Plunkett himself would know what to do in any situation. 

At first, when people came to him at cocktail parties with requests for favors -- special permits; exemptions; a faster, smoother route through the stifling bureaucracy and whatever arcane legislation stood in their way -- he found himself stumbling along, as unsure of himself as he had always been. He didn’t want to master the machinery of the bureaucracy. He just wanted it gone. Its machinery was stubborn. Well, Plunkett was stubborn too. And if he had been clueless and naive when he stepped into the role, he was no longer. 

Now, he would be wearing a beige and white seersucker suit, spit-polished spectators, and appropriately dashing pink bow-tie and matching socks. He was the gaming secretary, after all, and a bit of flair was just the ticket. He was no longer an imposter. He had picked out his own clothes, and he was learning what to say, who ought to be given special treatment, and who deserved to be left to muddle through paradoxical rules. 

Sometimes he thought his wife was right: He was a fool, in over his head. But he was catching on. Just because he liked a good time didn’t mean he was unable to figure out how things worked, he told himself. It was no accident of Fate that he was the Honorable Secretary of Gaming now. He finished his grits and mentally steeled himself for the arrival of his adjutant. It was an unreasonable hour. Why hadn’t he put his foot down and refused to be talked into this painfully early departure? It was definitely time for his adjutant to move along to a new client. 

Thus it was that his adjutant found Klair Plunkett in an unusually belligerent mood when he arrived at 5 am sharp. 

Nevertheless, being good at his job, he cajoled his reluctant charge and master onto the plane. The Tres Amigos were ready. After a pleasant evening of baseball and bourbon, they were going out to Central City to do a press conference. Flying over the horse fields, even Plunkett felt a sense of satisfaction. Take-off was smooth.  Once he had only dreamed of flying all across the Commonwealth from his Lexington home. Now, that dream was a reality. Here he was, up and flying, while lesser folks slept below him or blearily stumbled home from nights of debauchery he tried to convince himself held no appeal for him any longer. He fell asleep almost as soon as the plane reached its cruising altitude.

When Plunkett was awoken about forty minutes later, the fields and trees below were illuminated by a warm and delicate morning glow. For a moment, he felt the optimism of a new day, but then everything shuddered and a loud buzz filled the plane, which picked up speed. “Buckle up!” called the pilot, his voice tense and hard. 

“S____ ” muttered the adjutant. Plunkett looked up in alarm and the men met each other’s eyes. The usual curated expressions were wiped from their faces by the exigency of the situation. It gave Plunkett pause to see the man’s expression, eyes wide with a terror he could feel reflected on his own face. The adjutant was never alarmed. Things must be bad. 

There was a rumble. “Duck” someone yelled. As if that would help. “Impact in 6” said the pilot “prepare to brace” he added mechanically, certain that the angle was too steep for it to make any difference. 

Plunkett sat bolt upright, as he realized that none of the pilot’s adjustments were doing any good. They were going into the ground. He might be a pathetic gaming secretary and a weak man who would never achieve his dreams, but he would not duck like a coward. He looked out of the window at the cornfields and his eyes fixed on the green leaves on the corn stalks, bending in the breeze and reflecting the morning sun. Despite the icy sweat running down his back, he noticed that his skin felt uncomfortably hot, numb, tingly.

It was the last conscious thought of his life.