For the first time since the Cessna crashed the night before the election in ‘94, Phil DeLinz was really what the average person would call busy.
He didn’t even have time to talk to the mail carrier, Seline, who was retiring in a month.
He just waved as she threw a small stack of mail on his desk at the Beacon.
Phil hit a nicotine vape he got from his nephew and wished he could go outside to smoke a real smoke, but he was waiting on maybe the most important email of his career.
Truman High had been hit with an alleged academic fraud scandal.
It would have been big news in Dusty Pansy, Illinois, but the kids involved could make it big news in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Seattle, Washington.
It wasn’t alchemy to Phil that kids who grew up in a town called Dusty Pansy would overcompensate in some way, like say football.
And they did just that.
Truman High was Division 8 Champ or Runner Up fifteen of the last seventeen years.
Religion was big in Dusty Pansy. Football was bigger.
Oscar Davis made the NFL and built a football stadium for Truman that held almost the entire population of the county, though soybeans outweighed the people by about a million to one.
Still no email from the man who would be his Deep Throat, if Phil chose to be brave enough to blow the whistle on his alma mater, in his hometown.
Phil picked up the snail mail.
Press release for a homemade banjo contest in Makanda.
Heartland Used Auto was having a sale. Yeah, Mike, every day of the year except Christmas.
The third letter on the stack froze Phil.
Penmanship, if it could be called that, was utterly unique.
The letters seemed to grow from the other letters. Not cursive, block printing but with an obsessive way of touching each other, then leaning to the right as though they were in wind tunnel.
Phil had gotten the first letter two days before the first wisp of smoke in the Truman academic/football impropriety.
Of course the odd penmanship stood out, all the letters touching, leaning, like a drunken conga line that went for four pages.
And Phil, swear to God and Geoge Halas, didn’t know what it said.
They were English letters, but they strung together with no breaks, gaps, punctuation or anything else of note. Not a smudge.
Phil could have dug deeper, but he knew this about the sender: If they wanted to talk to him, they could walk through the door of the Beacon office, right in the center of the little downtown area of Dusty Pansy.
You could look through the window and see Phil’s desk from the street.
The fleeting moments Phil had spent thinking about the letter had either resulted in profound sadness for someone who was obsessive and mentally ill, or a bewildered chuckle that it might be salvo number one in an elaborate prank from some of his Phi Delt fraternity buddies.
He had been far more interested in pursuing the angle of the latter, when the Truman High thing started to look like more of a forest fire than a smoldering trash can.
Now there was a second letter.
Phil ripped it open.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Jimmy Doom's Roulette Weal to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.