Rick Mofina: Whirlwind

So far, her work had received little play, or had resulted in inserts in other peoples’ stories. She’d had her name on only one item that had been picked up nationally. She’d put a lot on the line to be here.

She could not fail.

Kate met the eyes of Grace smiling from her screen saver, and a wave of guilt rolled over her.

Did I make the right decision, doing this?

Grace, Kate’s six-year-old daughter, was back home in Canton, staying with friends. Lord, how Kate missed her; she hated being away from her but she needed a full-time job. She was laid off from the Repository six months ago and this Dallas internship was her best shot at a new start.

But so far, it was not going well. She needed to deliver stronger stories.

Kate’s phone rang. It was Dorothea.

“Got your story. Come see me.”

When Kate got to Dorothea’s desk, the news editor patted a chair she’d rolled next to hers. Kate’s story was up on her monitor.

“Have a seat,” Dorothea said. “I want you to see what I’m going to do.”

Dorothea Pick, second in command at the bureau, was in her late forties. Kate thought she wore a little too much makeup and with her overarching eyebrows, appeared to be in a state of perpetual surprise, or anger. She had a lovely voice that dripped with Southern charm that bordered on condescension whenever she addressed Kate about her work.

“This is well written but it’s not a national news item.” Dorothea’s extension rang. She glanced at the number. “Hang on, I need to take this.” Into the phone, she said, “Where are you? Okay, what do you have? Yes, yes…but did it touch down?” After waiting for the answer, Dorothea glanced to Chuck Laneer’s glass-walled office. They could see him on the phone, standing at his desk, shirtsleeves rolled up, bifocals pushed atop his forehead and pointing a remote at his flat-screen TV. “I’m going to pass you to Chuck.”

Dorothea transferred the call and resumed her work with Kate’s story. Her mouse and keyboard clicked as she removed line after line.

“As you know, this tragedy was reported regionally, so at best this is an updated regional brief and regional briefs are one hundred words, maximum.” With surgical precision, she’d reduced Kate’s story to ninety-five words. “And, as we know, briefs don’t run with bylines.”

Kate watched Dorothea delete her name.

“There we go,” Dorothea said. “How’s that?”

“I don’t understand why this is not a story,” Kate said. “This man was a volunteer firefighter, an ex-Marine who’d done duty in Afghanistan. He stopped to help a woman who’d been visiting her dying husband in the hospital and paid for it with his life. The person responsible for killing him has so far gotten away with it.”

Dorothea nodded and smiled. “Sorry, it’s a traffic accident. Now you should get moving to the assignment I gave you.”

“The one about the meeting on city parks?”

“It concerns Dealey Plaza.”

“But there’s a severe storm approaching, possibly with tornadoes. Maybe I could help cover the outcome? The meeting doesn’t sound like hard news. I could pick it up later.”

“We’re fine with the storm. We need someone at the parks meeting.”

“But-” Kate shot glances at the news assistant monitoring the scanners and Chuck Laneer in his office on the phone “-I really think-”

“Are you refusing an assignment, Kate?”

“No, not at all.”

“Did you read the report on Dealey Plaza that I gave you?”

“Yes. But all it suggests is planting some trees.”

“You’re not from Texas, so you can be forgiven for not understanding that Dealey’s a national historic landmark. Anything concerning the plaza interests editors across the country. You’d better hurry along.”

Kate returned to her desk for her things.

Biting back her frustration, she pulled on her raincoat, unable to dismiss the niggling feeling that Dorothea was attempting to thwart her. In the past week she’d given the two other interns bigger stories that got major national play. It seemed Dorothea went out of her way to feed Kate scraps and soft news.

“Everybody stop what you’re doing!” Chuck’s voice boomed.

He stood in the doorway of his office holding a notebook in one hand and his glasses in the other. Thirty-nine hard years in news were written in the lines that creased his rugged face.

“We have confirmation that tornadoes are cutting across the metropolitan area. We have casualties and destruction.” Laneer glanced at his notebook. “We’ve got people going to Arlington, Grand Prairie and Lancaster.”

Laneer pointed his glasses at Kate.

“I want you to get to Wildhorse Heights, to the Old Southern Glory Flea Market, south of LBJ and Hawn. It got hit. New York wants everything we’ve got and they want it fast, people. Stand down from all other assignments. There is only one story today. Let’s get on it.”

Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, Texas

Kate took the elevator down to the building’s parking garage.

She hurried to her car, a 2007 Chevy Cobalt that started with a rattle, reminding her that she had to get it to the shop one of these days. She reset her mileage counter then keyed the flea market address into the GPS on her dash.

Newslead’s bureau was in Bryan Tower. The flea market was about twelve miles southeast.

She switched on her hands-free speakerphone and wheeled out of the garage. Her wipers swept at the rain as Chuck’s orders echoed in her head.

“Get us the facts, the heartbreak and the heroes.”

Kate got onto the expressway with her stomach tightening, as it always did whenever she’d rushed off to a breaking story. No matter how many tragedies or disasters she’d covered, Kate never got used to it.

No reporter did.

You never knew what you were heading into. But it was up to you to pull a story out of the chaos, to make sense of whatever was unfolding and to do it as a clock ticked down on you. And if that wasn’t enough pressure, Kate knew that she and her two competitors would be judged by their performance on this story.

The prize was a full-time job.

She adjusted her grip on the wheel as she worked through traffic.

I’ll do whatever it takes, she vowed to her daughter’s snapshot on the visor as the radio news broadcasted tornado updates, confirming: “A large number of fatalities,” shifting Kate’s thoughts to the victims and their families. She did not want to land a story, or a job, at the expense of someone else’s pain.

I didn’t mean it that way. Forgive me .

She glanced at the few sparkles Grace had shed from her homemade card onto the passenger seat when she’d taken her to her friend Courtney’s birthday party, a few days before she’d left for Texas.

It was nearly two weeks ago but it seemed like a year.

In her rearview mirror Kate saw Dallas’s skyline, the Bank of America Plaza, the Renaissance and Comerica towers and the Fountain Place prism, all blurring in her rain-streaked rear window.

Would Dallas be her new home?

As the wet road rushed under her car, she considered her life and where she was headed with it. She was a twenty-nine-year-old single mother with a six-year-old daughter. From the beginning, Kate and Grace had been on their own. Grace’s father had never been in the picture. Kate had been a loner most of her life. Her mother and father died in a hotel fire when she was seven years old. After the tragedy, Kate and her little sister, Vanessa, lived with relatives then bounced through foster homes. Two years after her parents’ deaths, she lost Vanessa in a car accident.