Butterfly Ways First Three Chapters

Chapter 1

     On a hot and humid afternoon in August of 1987, when I was the state editor as well as the investigative reporter of The Stanton Post-Times in southern Illinois, I drove south to the Shawnee National Forest, a distance of about fifty miles, singing “Crazy” at the top of my lungs. Cicadas were singing along with me, drowning out my song. Our editor-in-chief, Lenny Dudley, had asked me to pursue a story I didn’t want to chase.

     This was the story he wanted: A rock climber, against the law and against all odds, had possibly climbed a protected sandstone tower in an area of the forest called the Garden of the Gods. I say possibly. TV news had the story. We did not

     We could have had it. Our stringer down there phoned it in, but I turned it down. As I drove along the blacktop road, tires singing, me singing along with them, catching the hot breeze, I still felt I’d been right in doing so. To me, a report of a  possible infraction of the rules is no story at all. 

   And of course as soon as I’d said no to the story, WSTV, the area station, made a big deal out of it on their evening news. 

     I watched it (so I can now tell you what I saw).

     A glamorous reporter stands among the tall rocks in the Garden in fading evening light. The place looks mysterious—in fact, it looks like an illustration out of Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. She talks about “violations of these ecological treasures.” She even walks over to stroke the tower that perhaps has been “violated.”

     So, anyway, I got tired of debating with Lenny and said I’d drive down there to see if we could “recoup,” as he put it.

     As I say, we could have had the story, beat televiion news to it, in fact. Our stringer in the area—our “correspondent,” if you will—a high school kid named Daniel Smart, happens to be the son of the forest supervisor, and knew about the possible sighting long before the TV station got wind of it. But no, I’d said. In fact, I gave the boy a journalism lesson featuring my decision:

     “What’s being done about it?” I’d asked him, employing my best Socratic approach.

“Nothing, I guess,” he said.

   “Then it seems to me there’s nothing to it,” I said. “If you want to be a reporter, Daniel, you have to squint at hearsay.”

   “Hearsay? What do you mean, Mr. Morrison?”

   “This is a good example, Daniel. A ranger thinks he might have seen something, and the sheriff puts it in the log. So when you pick it up, it’s gone from the ranger’s suspicions to the notes to you.”

   “Huh. Mr. Morrison, isn’t that what newspapers do? Report what they pick up like that?”

   “But,” I said, “Trust, but verify. Think about it. Isn’t that what President Reagan’s been saying in these nuclear talks with the Russians? ‘Trust, but verify’? And he’s right. The same principle applies in journalism.

   “So I shouldn’t call you with things I find hard to believe?”

   “I didn’t say that, Daniel. That’s what editors are for, to hear what you think might be important and then decide what to do. So it’s right that you called, but I’m turning the story down. You get my point?”

   “Sort of.”

   “Good. What are you going to do now?”

   “I don’t know, Mr. Morrison. How about I look around beneath the tower, see if there’s a body on the ground?”

   His voice was overly dramatic, like he was putting me on.

   “Makes sense to me, Daniel. Talk to that ranger too.”

   But now, here I was in the gears with my boss for turning down the story. He’d liked the darn TV baloney.

   Arriving in the forest to “recoup,” I found Ed Smart, the forest supervisor, standing in the Garden of the Gods, one of its premiere tourist areas, with his son Daniel. Some of the giant sandstone pillars were a hundred feet high. I looked up at them and agreed with the Forest Service: nobody should be climbing fragile towers like those.

   The sounds of cicadas dining on branches of trees surrounding the garden invaded my brain. These critters emerge every thirteen years and collectively create a noise like a buzz saw as they decimate leaves. I could certainly verify the buzz saw part. Yikes.

   I knew Ed, but not very well. He’d been forest supervisor for a couple of years, about as long as I’d been with the Post-Times. The two of us were not only new to our jobs and to each other, but to southern Illinois itself.

   Ed was ranting. Daniel was his audience of one.

   “Now a bunch of rock climbers will come in here.” Ed was lamenting. He cast his arm about. “Climbing sandstone is getting to be a big deal. Or so I’m told. But this sandstone —these rocks in here—they're too soft, too fragile. Climbers are going to wreck this place, maybe get themselves killed.”

  Daniel was nodding like he was listening.

   I had my notebook in my hand.

   Ed stared at it. “You’re not going to print this, what I’m saying?”

   “Not unless you’re okay with it.” The Post-Times was a community newspaper, not The New York Times.

   “Apparently, we can’t even have a ranger say something to a deputy without a bunch of publicity,” Ed whined.

   Publicity? I hate that word. If I was running the Shawnee—not a job I’d want, you understand—I’d tell my rangers that I myself would do the talking to the police establishment.

   I glanced at Daniel. He glanced back. I gathered he didn’t find anything beneath the tower.

   “Do you want to say anything for print?” I said to Ed.

   “No.”

   That being said, I headed over to the Ranger Station to pick up some brochures, and then drove the fifty miles back to Stanton. Another hot trip with my windows down, cicadas and all. My intention was to sidestep the tower issue, but, for Ed’s sake and my own, write a column about the recreational opportunities in the Shawnee forest, cautioning people to obey the rules.

The long stretch of miles back to Stanton gave me time to reflect on my situation. If Lenny was going to second-guess me all the time, maybe I’d quit and look for a job somewhere else. But who would hire me? Rural dailies were folding all over the country. Lots of former reporters were looking for jobs .

   Climbing the steps to the second floor of the Post-Times building, I went to my desk. I was sweaty and tired. My phone was ringing, and I picked up.

   “Morrison.”

   “Mr. Morrison?”

   Daniel’s voice.

   I held the phone away from me for a moment so he wouldn't hear me sigh, then smiled as I brought it back and spoke. “What’s up, Daniel?”

  “I forgot to tell you when you were down here. One of the rangers is missing. She’s been gone for two days. Is that news?”

   I leaned back in my chair and riffled through the papers in my basket. As usual, the stack of stuff in there was getting deep.

   “Tell me about it,” I said.

   “I don’t know,” Daniel said. “She’s been here a couple years, I guess. Dad thinks she’s sharp, kind of a sounding board.”

   “What does he mean, Daniel, ‘sounding board’?”

   “When they talk, she tells him what’s going on.”

   Oh, boy.

   “Do rangers usually open up like that, to your dad I mean?”

   “Sometimes. It depends. There’s team leaders between him and the rangers.”

   “How do you know she’s missing and not just absent from work?”

   “Nobody’s seen her. The lady at her rooming house says she didn’t sleep there last night. She didn’t say she was going anywhere.”

   He couldn’t see me smile.

   Daniel likes this girl or he wouldn’t be bird-dogging this thing.

   “Where does she work? What part of the forest?”

   “She’s on the team that covers the Garden.”

   “Can you describe her?”

   “I don’t know. She’s a couple years older than me. Tall, pretty. Blond. Some red in it.”

   I smiled to myself again. “What’s her name?”

   “Kimberly. Kimberly Ryan.”

   I was scribbling notes on my pad: Kimberly Ryan. Garden. Pretty. Talks to Ed. Absent two days. Daniel likes her.

   “Has she ever been missing like this before?” I asked.

   He was quiet for a few seconds. “No.”

   “Let’s give it a couple a days, Daniel. She’ll probably turn up.” We reported news as best we could, but we didn’t cover people missing from work a few days.

                                                                           Chapter 2

   Next morning I awoke with an uneasy stomach. My ratty little rental still felt sticky, although I’d taken a shower before I went to bed. Well, time to get up, regardless. I needed to do some laundry and clean up the kitchen before I went in to work.

   Easing myself out of bed, I got the laundry going, then got myself a cup of coffee and washed my dishes. I’d been living alone since my wife and I split, and I was learning that taking care of myself was not so easy.

   More than that, I was missing her. Cindy and I had been married for eighteen years. But what was to be done about that? She was going her way, and I was going mine. I’d heard she was involved with some country singer.

   Well, maybe she’ll be happy.

   Oh, oh. I remembered why I had the bellyache. I was supposed to give a talk at Rotary: ‘Exciting moments in southern Illinois history.’ The problem was, I didn’t know any southern Illinois history. I hadn’t been around long enough. If I’d taken the time to look in our morgue—which I hadn’t—I could have found lots of clippings on exciting matters past. I could have been ready. But no. Procrastination is one of my sins. Especially when I have to guve a talk.

   After throwing stuff in the dryer, I picked up around the house, and when the banging in the dryer stopped I drove to the Post-Times building and hiked through the circulation office, raising a hand in silent greeting to folks in there, and ventured up the creaky stairs to the second floor.

Here I was, forty-one years old, father of two grown children—Mallory in college, Allison in high school. So I was grown up enough to handle this talk. Yet, as I watched the clock on the wall across from my cubicle, I had stage fright. Of course, I get that when I don't know what I’m going to say.

   Instead of turning my attention to the talk, I worked on my Outtakes column. The Shawnee forest had seven wilderness areas to explore plus opportunities for camping. Horseback riding was a relatively new attraction; some tourists were even taking guided pack trips.

   To locals, the Garden was a famous place. George Harrison, one of the Beatles, had been on a picnic in there in 1963 while visiting his sister Louise in Benton, right after they hitchhiked about seven miles from there to WFRX in West Frankfort, taking the station a recording of  “She Loves You.” So, some Americans heard a Beatles song for the first time ever on WFRX. There’s a plaque along the highway just outside of Benton commemorating Harrison’s visit.

   I ended the column with an admonition: “For safety’s sake, when you visit the Shawnee, obey the signs, such as the ones that tell you to keep off of things, as for example, the towers in the Garden of the Gods.”

   I didn’t know whether that would satisfy Lenny or not.

   For the rest of the morning I read my mail, which was like trying to clean the Augean Stables.

   I looked at my watch. Yikes! The chicken and peas would be served in forty-five minutes! I had to think of something.

   I finally went into the morgue to look around. It was in a mess because we had “let our librarian go,” as our publisher, Gradison Ritchie, put it, and people just tossed stuff to be filed onto the tops of the cabinets. I scanned some clippings I found in a drawer. They were about bootlegging. Our area had a long history of that. Some of the bootleggers had been bad people. A couple of them, guys named Shelton and Birger, had been very bad people.

   12:30. Oh, boy. Off to Rotary.

    I was heading out just as the first copies of the paper were coming off the press. In my absence, Kali Nilsson, my new associate on the state desk, was to perform my ritual function—go down to the pressroom, scoop up a copy, and scan the state page, looking for obvious errors.

Sometimes there were particular things to watch for. Today, for example, a grade-school girl, Emma Shilts, was headlined on the state page as the winner of a prize for baton twirling. If Emma’s last name was misspelled, Kali was to get a pressman to touch a hammer to the plate.

   I still didn’t understand why Kali had joined us. She’d been a newsreader for a TV station in Urbana, about fifty miles north of Stanton. Why would a young woman quit a job that commanded the attention of a vast television audience to join the state desk of a collapsing community daily at what was probably a big cut in pay? I didn’t know. TV news was on the rise. Community newspapers were in the dumps. 

   At the TV station Kali had been known as “Sarah Albright.” Why she’d had a professional name was a mystery to me. Joining us, she’d resurrected her real name, Kali Nilsson. People in the newsroom seemed to like her, some of the younger guys coming around to ask her questions they could have gotten answers to in the morgue. 

   While I was cogitating, Kali slipped into my little cubicle to try to get my attention.

“Hey, boss,” she said, somewhat hesitantly, like she didn’t want to bother me with a trifle right now, “we have a visitor coming in a few days. She’s from the East Coast. I know you’re busy, but I thought I ought to tell you about it.”

   “What? A visitor? Who?”

   “Her name is Eppie Lederer. She’s a columnist.”

   “Kali, I really have to think about this talk. Is this something that will keep?”

   “Yes sir.”

   “Good.”

   That’s all we needed, I thought. One more columnist trying to get added to our Op-Ed page. Frankly, I thought some of the writers we already had would not be missed. Anyway, it sounded like an issue for someone else to deal with. What did I care about another columnist?

For that matter, why did Kali care? She had nothing to do with the Op-Ed page. That was Lenny Dudley’s domain.

                                                                        Chapter 3

   It took me about ten minutes to hike over to Tony Spuds to give my talk to the Rotary Club. I had no time for the chicken and peas and went to the guillotine with the exterior calm of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities.

   As I stood at the lectern I took a sip of water and shuffled a few of my blank pages.

“You probably know,” I began, as I stared back at about a hundred expectant eyes, “that a couple of criminals ran things around here in the Twenties. Who can name those two guys?”

   Silence. Silence. Oh, oh.

   “Carl Shelton?” somebody called out.

   “Charlie Birger,” came a louder voice from farther back.

   Hallelujah!

   “The very guys!” I exclaimed. “And what were they famous for—or should I say ‘infamous’ for?”

   “Bootlegging,” came a chorus of cries.

   There were a couple of different answers—like “killing people”—but I focused on the bootlegging.

   “What started the bootlegging?” I asked.

   “Prohibition!” cried several people.

   “When was that?”

   “1920’s when it started.”

   “How long did it last?”

   “Thirteen bloody years,” somebody called out.

   “Everybody was making booze,” a guy up front said.

   “Hey, they still are!” somebody shouted.

   This was followed by much raucous laughter. The way my fellow Rotarians got into it, you had to wonder if it was still going on, and if maybe some of the people in front of me were among the culprits.

   Although I wanted to stick with moonshining and bootlegging, people in the audience began to share murder stories they heard growing up in backwater southern Illinois.

One guy said something that broke my heart. A young couple from up north—honeymooners—went for a hike in the forest on their wedding trip and were never heard from again.

“That was just a couple years ago,” somebody called out.

   The references to killings kept coming.

   Innocent people, including wives of men in opposing gangs, were shot dead, their bodies thrown down mine shafts and wells. As someone said of incidental victims, “they knew too much.”

   Apparently, it had been worth your life to know anything—or for someone to think you did.

In forty minutes or so I learned a great deal about the business of making and selling illegal booze—and the brutality that went with it.

   As I was wrapping up my talk I learned that Birger was hanged for murder in 1928, saying only a few words before the noose was slipped around his neck. Carl Shelton, on the other hand, said a mouthful years later when he was shot full of holes in a ditch near his farm.

   “Please don’t shoot me, boys. I’m dead already.”

   To scattered applause, I lifted my blank pages from the lectern and stepped down from the podium.

   That was to be the end of my consideration of local bootlegging. Or so I thought at the time.

You never know what’s going to happen next.