Fire Drill Part 4.1- The Deertracker
The Deertracker
March 15th, 2031. 0726h. Brenda Matheson has been the only consistent contributor to The Deertracker, the local newspaper covering the local goings-on in the township, for the last seven years. She reached out to me via email yesterday, after having heard from numerous folks around town with whom I’ve interacted since my arrival that she should have a conversation with me for the local outlet. I replied that I would, of course, be more than happy to chat.
In order to familiarize myself a bit better with Miss Matheson, I hopped onto the Deertracker’s modest website and sifted through its archives for her articles. Preferring to be thorough, I read through the entirety of a dozen different pieces from her desk, and discovered that the Deertracker has a rare gem in Miss Matheson.
Her composition style is what might be best and most adroitly labeled ‘vitals-front, expanded back’. In the classical method, her pieces swiftly summarize her conclusion in the first paragraph, then move on to expounding upon the information used to reach the conclusions she states up front. It’s a classic methodology that doesn’t get much use in the modern age of clickbait journalism, along with another facet of her stories that has also, quite unfortunately, all but disappeared from modern news reporting- her articles, the ones I read through at least, were all absent of editorializing.
The talented Miss Matheson doesn’t appear to go in for conjecture or hypothesizing, rendering her reporting somewhat dry by modern tastes and standards. What it lacks in personality this way, however, it more than makes up for in clarity. Her information is rigorously confirmed, and a brief online search shows that she has earned numerous lesser-known awards for her work in the field. Of particular note, she was apparently fired early on in her career from Vox for refusing to participate in ‘Gotcha’ journalism for the outlet, thus reduced to freelancing for several smaller outfits before landing at the Deertracker.
The small, locally-owned and operated newspaper could not have asked for a better candidate, in my opinion. Though my own work is more broadly read by a much larger audience, I have to wonder if perhaps Miss Matheson deserves the kind of exposure that I have more than I do. If I am any level of honest with myself, I suspect the answer is yes, she does.
Late last night, after doing this background reading, I messaged her to inform her that she could set up a time and place to talk. I’m still waiting to hear back.
**
0835h. Miss Matheson is punctual, if I’m not wrong in my guess that she rolls into the offices of The Deertracker around 0830h during the week. I have just received a brief email asking if I can meet her at the front walkway leading up into Delta Heights High School around 1000h. I’ve still got plenty of time to swing over to Jerry’s for a splash of coffee and a bite to eat before meeting with her. I send back that this will work just fine.
**
[Interview format. Transcription from audio recorder device]
Brenda Matheson [BM]: You don’t mind, do you? [waggles cell phone with audio recording program activated]
MH: Not as long as you don’t. [shows recorder device. There is a shared snicker between us]
BM: Well, nobody can accuse either of us of being unprepared, at least.
MH: I’d say that’s more than fair. That’s a nice camera, too, by the way. Nikon?
BM: Canon. It’s mine. Sal would hit the roof if I tried taking his equipment before he got into the office or if he’s out on an assignment or freelance gig. He’s doing the Hewer-Dalman wedding today, so I didn’t want to bug him.
MH: Wait, Hewer. As in Dennis Hewer?
BM: The very same.
MH: [chuckle] Wow, I never thought he’d settle down! I grew up with that guy, you know. He was always so dead set on getting out of Deertrack, moving to one of the ‘big cities’. How’d he end up back here?
BM: He’s a teacher, over at Saint Mark’s Middle School. Social Studies.
MH: Is that where he met his bride-to-be?
BM: Yes. She’s a science instructor. [Pause as we begin walking slowly along the sidewalk fronting the school, toward the east field where the school’s baseball diamond is set up.] I understand you’re actually from here, originally.
MH: Born and raised, yeah. Haven’t been back in almost ten years.
BM: Well, that isn’t entirely true, is it? Didn’t you come back a couple of years ago when your mother passed away? [Pause as I halt in my tracks, giving her a raised eyebrow] I made a few calls to your employers at the StarTrib yesterday.
MH: Yeah, I swung through for the funeral. [resume walking] Had to make arrangements for the house to be put on the market, too. I didn’t hang around for very long, though. There wasn’t really much of anything keeping me tied to the town.
BM: Which leads me to ask, what brings you back now, Mister Hayes?
MH: I’m here to cover the ten-year memorial. CNN’s sent a pair of their people here for it, too.
BM: Oh, wow, really? I wouldn’t have thought it would get that level of attention. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’re from here, so I can understand why you’d want to cover it. But CNN? Seems unlike them to cover a story someplace so small, like Deertrack.
MH: I’m still not entirely sure what their angle is.
BM: It could be they’re revisiting William’s Law, how it got rolling.
[Break Note: William’s Law, for those readers unfamiliar, is a Georgia-wide piece of legislation that was introduced in 2022, and named after William Norris. The basic premise of the law mandates that news and media figures must get written permission from a court to come within 50 feet of or send any electronic correspondence to the family members of any suspect of a violent crime. The bill was written after William Norris, suffering a mental breakdown from the constant attention of various media outlets, called for a press conference at the Deertrack Town Hall and summarily shot himself in the head in front of a crowd of roughly two-dozen reporters and law enforcement officers. A postmortem investigation revealed that he’d received scores of emails and voicemails from members of the media and private citizens, including numerous death threats online.]
MH: I think you and I both know how that got started.
BM: Fair enough. [Miss Matheson has brought us to the edge of the soccer field, and we stand together just a few yards to the right of one of the goal nets, looking out over the empty grass field.] What do you remember about going to school here, Matthew?
MH: For the most part, it was great. I enjoyed most of my teachers, had a handful of good friends. I haven’t kept in touch with most of them the way I would have liked, though.
BM: That’s bound to happen, especially with a school like Delta Heights. [She pauses to consult her own OneNote tablet, a model even thinner than my own but without the anti-glare screen cover I invested in. As such, she has to tilt it oddly to look at her notes.] Of the one-hundred and eighteen boys in your graduating class, seventy-four of them enlisted in the military. That’s a high percentage, even by Delta Heights’s historic pattern standards.
MH: [chuckle] Yeah, a lot of guys I came up with were constantly jabbering about how great it was going to be to sign on and travel the world, serve their country. A few of them really surprised me, though.
BM: Oh? Anyone in particular?
MH: Tony Richards. [snap my fingers] Now there was a kid who everybody thought was going to end up in a flophouse in Atlanta somewhere.
BM: What do you mean?
MH: He was what I guess you’d call a ‘classic burnout’, total druggie. He just kind of coasted by on his grades, which I always thought was sort of a shame. I only had a few classes with him in my freshman and sophomore years, but I had three with him in junior year. Let me tell you, that kid had one hell of a sharp mind in his head.
BM: Does anything stand out in particular? [Matheson starts to walk once more, seemingly without aim or specific direction. I am well aware, however, that she has us on a direct course for one of the blast locations from the incident]
MH: World History, junior year. We were reading and discussing the guerilla tactics used by French Resistance soldiers in Nazi-occupied France, and Mr. Fowler asked the class to try and write their own mission scenario, for if we were members of the Resistance. I don’t recall all of the specifics, but Tony worked like a fiend for most of the period, and when he offered to read his scenario aloud, I just remember being completely blown away. So was everybody else, including Mr. Fowler. It was the only ‘A’ Tony got that whole course, I think, but damned if he didn’t earn it.
[We have, at this point, ceased walking. As I suspected, we are standing in the exact spot where, almost ten years ago, one of the explosive devices buried here by Norris and Sitanski claimed the lives of nearly seventy of their total victims.]
BM: Matthew, do you know where we’re standing? [I nod, but do not offer a verbal response. Instead, I squint into the midday sun, casting my eyes over the school itself, some thirty-five yards away.] Brandon Norris and Aaron Sitanski were sophomores during the year you graduated. Did you know the boys at all?
MH: I knew of them, but didn’t know them personally, no.
BM: But you’ve been learning more about them, I imagine. For whatever project it is you’re working on. [I raise my eyebrows at her, to which she laughs, though without much mirth] The memorial isn’t for another month, Matthew. If that were all you were here to cover, you wouldn’t have come here so far ahead of it.
MH: Off the record? [She shows me that she has had her voice recorder program on pause for the last few minutes; whatever she’s going to be writing, she has the ethical integrity to hold herself back from making it something salacious. I immediately gain an even greater respect for her] I’m still not entirely sure what this is going to end up being. I was originally going to be doing a lengthy essay for Lookback Magazine, about the Massacre.
BM: That’s an excellent publication. I like them. But now you’re not sure?
MH: No, I’m not. [I take another moment to look around, sweeping the school itself and the surrounding area visually, taking in as much of it as I can before returning my attention to her.] Whatever it ends up being, though, it’ll be bigger than me.
BM: Isn’t that what all of us hope for? To write something meaningful? [She shows me her turning the recorder program back on, very deliberately] So, what’s it like, working for an outlet like the StarTribune? Must be a pretty sizable leap, coming from a humble little town like Deertrack.
MH: [As she begins walking us back toward the sidewalk] At first, yeah, it was a little disorienting. Plus there’s the whole ‘Midwestern’ thing. People in Minnesota are a little different than folks here in Georgia, though not so much as you might assume.
BM: How so?
MH: Well, there’s a common sense of etiquette, being polite to total strangers, that seems to be pretty key to both regions. Patience in public places is another big one. [Pause as I think of a response to her raised eyebrow] Like at restaurants and such. People in Minnesota aren’t in the kind of rush that people in, say, New York or California are kind of famous for. That’s something else I always liked about growing up around here; people take their time with things, they don’t get hugely impatient with each other. It’s really nice that way.
BM: I know what you mean. I spent a summer visiting my sister, she lives in Brooklyn, and the people in the city there are almost staggeringly rude. When were you in California?
MH: Back in ’28, covering the Democratic Primaries. Occasio-Cortez had huge numbers going in there, and I was on the ground when she had her, ah, gaffe, as it were.
BM: A lot of people still think that’s when she lost the whole thing.
MH: And you can count me among those people. It was more than just what she said, it was what she did on top of it. I honestly think she’s lucky she didn’t end up in prison.
BM: People still talk about a possible trial. Of course, around here, you know how much of that talk goes.
MH: I can imagine. Deertrack’s been a Republican stronghold since before I was ever born, and I don’t see as it would’ve changed at all in the last decade. That’s one of the major differences between here and out where I live and work now, though. Minnesota’s pretty decidedly a blue state.
BM: And you’ve spent most of your time with the StarTribune covering regional politics, occasionally law enforcement and court stories, correct?
MH: Overwhelmingly, yes. One of my favorite stories I ever covered was for one of the suburbs, in Blaine, Minnesota. The city council there were holding a work session to discuss a possible redrawing of the school district lines, and this group of parent protesters broke into the conference room at Town Hall where they were holding the meeting. I’d been specifically requested to attend the session to video record and report on the session, so I was just as surprised as they were.
BM: What were these parents protesting?
MH: They claimed the city council wasn’t taking the community’s concerns into account, accused its members of being racist. And that kicked off something that a lot of people hadn’t experienced up to that point; when one of the parent protesters called council member Jacob Halloran racist, he took his microphone and said, ‘Okay, you’ve just made a claim. Now if you’d be so kind, please provide evidence for your claim.’
BM: What did the protesters say to that?
MH: Well, at first, they were all trying to talk over one another, but finally one of them stepped up to the public mic and said, ‘We don’t have to prove it, we know it’s true’, and he just shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘That’s not how logic or courts of law work. If you make a claim, you have to provide evidence to show that it’s true. Until you can do that, I move to suspend all further council business. Either prove your claim, or withdraw it and apologize.’
BM: [Shakes her head in disbelief] So, what happened? I mean, in the long run?
MH: Nothing happened, quite literally. Five months went by, and every public works project was kept on hold. People in Blaine were screaming bloody murder, saying the city council was holding the town hostage over some hurt feelings. Halloran wrote an open letter to the StarTrib, explaining exactly what had happened, why nothing was getting done. Eventually, the guy who had called him racist apparently sent him an apology, but it was private, and that wasn’t good enough for Halloran; he had the StarTribune publish the apology email.
BM: Did that work? Did the council get back to work?
MH: They did, though Halloran lost his seat about six months later in the next election. People don’t take kindly to that sort of thing. Personally, I admired him, a little.
BM: Really? You didn’t think it was a little petulant of him to behave that way?
MH: Oh, I absolutely do think it was borderline to react the way he did there in the conference room. I mean, you should have seen his face- bunched up, beet red, he looked like a little kid who was holding his breath in a tantrum to try and get his way. But when he actually opened his mouth to speak, he was level, calm, considered. And I think he said absolutely the right thing, given the circumstances.
BM: I’m not sure I agree. People say all kinds of things to get the attention of elected officials, to call them to account for their actions or statements.
MH: True, but what this protester threw out there was a label, one that doesn’t have anything to actually do with the matter at hand. It’s just a verbal landmine people put in the way to shut down all conversation, to put all the heat on whoever they’re applying the label to, to derail whatever else they’re attempting to get done. Most politicians or public figures, they’re forced to spend a bunch of unnecessary time and effort deflecting the charge of those labels, instead of focusing on their actual job. So what Halloran did, he turned that back on its head, using a principle of scientific logic.
BM: I’m not sure I follow.
MH: [sighs] In scientific logic, if someone makes a claim statement, they must provide demonstrable evidence to support that claim. In other words, for Halloran, since someone claimed he was a racist, he requested that they gather and show evidence for that claim. He refused to be put on the defensive, and the rest of the council backed his play. The moment someone is slapped with a ‘-phobe’ or ‘-ist’ label, it becomes almost impossible for them to get anything else done. And think about this; that was three years ago. How many times since then have other public figures taken that kind of stand?
BM: Not a lot, that I can think of off the top of my head.
MH: There haven’t been a lot, not on a national scale. But we’re starting to see it more and more in the Midwest. I personally applaud it.
[There’s a minute or so of quiet between us as we walk down the sidewalk, away from the school. I can just make out the trill of bells inside the building, as students and staff are alerted to the end of a classroom period. Curious, I pause to pose a quick inquiry to my local counterpart.]
MH: Does Delta Heights still use standard periods? Or did they finally shift over to block scheduling? They’d started talking about that back when I was here.
BM: [chuckles lightly] No, they still use the 45 minute periods. The school board went back and forth on that idea for about another four years after the Massacre, until they finally just dropped it. You won’t find a single school district around uses block scheduling until you reach Atlanta. People don’t like a whole lot of change here.
MH: Ah, figured I’d ask.
BM: So, Matthew? I have to ask; how many of the 26 have you talked to?
MH: Three. I’ve also spoken to Chief Carlyle. He was one of the responding officers, and the one who transported Sitanski to the station.
BM: Have you talked to Parker Edmunds yet? He and his brother Jeff kept Edmund’s Hardware going, after their father passed six years back.
MH: Over on Grand Street? [BM nods] I haven’t talked to him yet, although I did reach out a few months back, when I was planning this visit.
BM: I can talk to him, if you’d like. He comes in every couple of weeks to submit ads for the Deertracker.
MH: That would be much appreciated, thanks.
[Brenda and myself fell into meandering small talk at this point, until finally we arrived at my rental car. We exchanged phone numbers at this point, so that we could keep in touch while I was around in a method more convenient than emailing back and forth. I briefly considered telling her about the shrine I had discovered at The Last Place on Earth, but withheld, in the end. I had begun to suspect that whatever piece she was going to end up publishing in the Deertracker, it was going to be more of a quick bio piece about yours truly, and that information would just cloud things. For now, it’s back to the hotel for me.]
I hope you folks are enjoying this non-genre fiction tale, as well as the other works I’ve been sprinkling in here and there. I’m hoping to remain primarily a free Substack for the foreseeable future, and something that might help keep that going would be an occasional bit of support. Such a thing is easily accessible over at www.buymeacoffee.com/byronofsidius
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