Tomb of the Unknown Racist

by Blanche Mccrary Boyd

  “Cuntsucker? Really?”

  “I’m sorry, but I really was very angry at that particular moment. I am genuinely sorry I said something like that to you, Joe. I’m trying to find a way to stop swearing because your sister told me to.”

  “What the fuck do you want with me, Ellen?”

  “I’m trying to find my brother.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Like you are?”

  “Nobody’s claims I’m dead,” Joe snarled, “but if you find your fucking brother, you tell him I’m going to kill him. And you stay away from my sister. You know I’ll come after you if I have to.”

  He stood by his truck as if he were leaving, but then he changed his mind, left his door open, and walked straight toward me. He was a big man with a bullet-shaped head, his body outlined against his headlights, and there was nowhere to run, so I stepped toward him, not away. He halted about two feet from me, where I could see his dim face. I wanted to say something but couldn’t. I was shaking so hard that I knew he could see it.

  He took a rapid step forward and stiff-armed me in the chest, knocking me down, and then threw his full weight on top of me. I struggled for a few seconds and went passive. He was stronger than me; I was pinned. Up close he smelled like tobacco and acrid sweat. “I always thought you were pretty hot,” he said. “You’re as crazy as your brother, but you aren’t so rotten.” He stuck his rough tongue in my mouth, wiggling it deep, but then abruptly sat back up. “Royce’s sister. I couldn’t fuck you with somebody else’s dick.”

  He rose to his feet, turning his back to me unsteadily. “Go on home, Ellen. You’re messing with stuff you don’t understand.”

  I sat up and shouted at his retreating form, “Were you involved with the Oklahoma City bombing? Whose leg was it they found?”

  He acted as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “Whose leg was it?” I shouted.

  When he got to his truck, he stood on the running board and said in a voice that carried across the distance, “You’re crazy, and your brother is a fucking fool, but you keep this up, you just might get yourself killed.”

  He was driving a big truck, so getting out of the pocked field was a lot easier for him. My rental car had a crinkled fender and a punctured muffler, and it was dawn before I managed to return—very loudly—to the Colcord Hotel.

  5

  A day later I had calmed down, straightened out the mess created by damaging the car, let Blake know a mild version of my encounter with Magnus without pointing out that I was not entirely paranoid, and won $2,300 after someone taught me how to play craps. In Oklahoma, craps tables are as silly as their version of roulette. State law forbids the use of dice or balls in Oklahoma gaming (despite the fact that these casinos are on sovereign Native land), so, for the roulette facsimile, a dealer must spin a wheel with playing cards clicking around it like the ones kids used to fasten to bicycle wheels with clothespins. Craps, amazingly, is played without dice. At the craps table, a large fuzzy imitation die had numbered cards stuck to its sides.

  I went shopping with the extra cash. Oklahoma City turned out to be an excellent source for cut-and-paste classics, and I spent several hours deciding between a 1960 white Lincoln with suicide doors and a 1966 Ford Fairlane. Both were convertibles with reasonably intact tops. The Ford was a slick two-tone green, but Jack Kennedy had been assassinated sitting in the open backseat of a Lincoln with suicide doors, and Jackie Kennedy had crawled across the trunk in her pink suit, trying either to get help or to escape danger, depending on how you read the footage. I bought the Lincoln. The doors fit tight, the top worked fine, and I didn’t care that the bloodred seats were shredded with age. My cash sufficed for a down payment, more money was wired from Charleston, and I drove the car right off the lot.

  Ed Blake had notified the FBI in Oklahoma City about my alleged run-in with Magnus, so that evening a nice young agent came out to the casino to interview me while I was playing roulette. I had abandoned the Colcord and was staying now at the casino’s hotel so I wouldn’t have to drive after dark. This agent was clean-cut, polite, wearing a cheap suit, and treated me as if I were elderly. I continued to play while we talked. Roulette is a slow game, and with bicycle cards on the wheel, it’s tedious. After the formalities—“I’m Special Agent Mintern with the Federal Bureau of Investigation”—he actually said this, as if he were a character on The X-Files, I put twenty dollars on number thirteen.

  “Miss Burns, can I ask why you are certain it was Joe Magnus who ran your car off the road?”

  “The same way I know my own name.”

  “You recognized him, yet you hadn’t seen him in many years? Did he identify himself?”

  “Okay, so I couldn’t have run into Joe Magnus—or, speaking precisely, he couldn’t have run into me—since Joe Magnus is a federal fugitive. Yes, of course I recognized him, and anyway, who else would run me off the road claiming to be Joe Magnus? You think maybe it was Andy Strassmeir?”

  His round cheeks and whiteness made me think of Ping-Pong balls, and his puzzlement revealed that he had never heard Strassmeir’s name. That was what I had wanted to know. He said, “Would you be willing to come down to our office so I could record an interview in better circumstances?”

  “I don’t think so, son. I get very quiet in my head when I’m playing roulette. The canned music is obnoxious, and gambling is really about losing. Gambling is about trying to outrun statistical probabilities. It won’t be any different for me, yet I still want to play. What do you think that means?” The wheel was going click click click while the music blared over the ringing and dinging of the slot machines.

  At first, he didn’t reply. Then he said, “Noncooperation may be unwise, Miss Burns. Joe Magnus remains dangerous, as you have learned, and we are trying to ascertain whether your brother could still be alive, just as you are.”

  “Noncooperation, yes, I suppose that’s what it is. Okay, I’m not going to talk to you unless this wheel hits thirteen.” The wheel turned interminably and finally stopped on five, black. “Oops, not thirteen, sorry. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-four,” he said.

  “You look younger. I get it that you don’t understand what’s going on in this mess, and, if it’s any help, I don’t understand yet either.”

  He maintained his respect-the-elders demeanor. “I’m simply here to ask you to accompany me into town, Miss Burns. The possible reemergence of Joseph Magnus is a significant development.”

  “One more try at thirteen,” I said. “We’ll add twenty-two, the day of the month my sister died. What’s your birthday?”

  He said reluctantly, because he was probably breaking some rule, “The twelfth of October.”

  “Okay, forty dollars on twelve.”

  The wheel kept spinning. “Listen, kiddo,” I said, “someone in BATF or some other agency has known where Joe Magnus is all along, and there might be agents higher on your own food chain who know too. And, nope, I’m not going anywhere to meet with you or anyone else from the FBI. You guys kept a fucking file on me.” The card where the wheel stopped read twelve. “We just won something like fourteen hundred dollars. I didn’t realize you’d be so lucky. Can I give you part of these winnings?”

  “I’ll have someone else get in touch with you, Miss Burns. As long as you understand now that you may be in danger.”

  “Do I seem like someone who would have the sense to quit?”

  It wasn’t Joe Magnus who showed up at the casino later that night; it was Claudia Friedman. I turned my head at the blackjack table, and there she was, standing right beside my chair. “Jesus, Claudia, what are you doing here?”

  She was distraught. “I need to talk to you.”

  “What happened? Did you drink?”

  “No. Can we talk?”

  The dealer, Darletta, showed a six, and I had a seven and a three. I doubled down and got a jack, which gave me twenty, but she hit twenty-one. “Sorry,” she said, confiscating my fifty bucks. I
liked Darletta. “Born and raised in Shawnee, full-blooded Potawatomi, and I’m a betting woman. There’s not much to do in Oklahoma besides sports and gambling.”

  I picked up my chips and tossed two to her. “How long are you on for tonight?”

  “I’m off in a half hour. Back tomorrow at noon.” The look she gave me made me wonder if she was hitting on me.

  “See you then,” I said, and headed for the all-night canteen.

  Claudia said, “Please, can we just go to your room?”

  I stopped and studied her. She was wild-eyed, desperate, and her urgency was repellent.

  My small suite on the fifth floor had a seating area and a separate bedroom. I scraped up the clothes that littered the sofa and threw them onto the floor, grabbed the phone for room service, and then realized it was closed. “Want a Coke? I’ve got some in the fridge.” I pulled open the small refrigerator, trying to decide what to do. “I’m not going to bed with you, Claudia,” I said, without even looking at her. “First, I don’t want to, and second, I promised Estelle that I wouldn’t.”

  She sat on the sofa, and I handed her a Coke. “What? You promised Estelle? What has Estelle got to do with this?”

  I didn’t sit down, but I met her gaze.

  She lowered her head and stared at the carpet. “I think I’m falling apart.”

  The chair needed excavating too, so I pushed the pile of newspapers and magazines onto the floor and sat down, keeping the coffee table between us. “Claudia,” I said as gently as I could, “have you ever even been to bed with a woman?”

  Her expression went through several painful and bewildered changes. “No, just a little fooling around in college. But I know this is right. It has to be.” She turned weepy. “I couldn’t feel this way if it wasn’t right.”

  “Yes, you could feel this way, and you’ll understand that better when you’re older. The truth is, it’s not right between us.” I wondered where this kindly person had been hiding inside me. “Claudia, some things can feel very right and still be wrong. I think maybe your capacity for this kind of desire got triggered because I helped you in a big way for no reason that you can figure out. Then you had an enormous professional win, and that combination has knocked you over.”

  “I feel as if you’ve taken some power over me.”

  “I haven’t.” I handed her the box of tissues from the bedside table, and she took it without looking up. “But listen, if we were to get sexually involved, I might actually take power over you. I’ve been on both sides of that. I promise you that staying out of bed with me is the easier, softer way.”

  She glanced up because I was referencing a well-known passage in the AA Big Book: “We thought we could find an easier, softer way. But we could not.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about your interviews with Ruby?”

  She took a long wet breath. “Let me just say one more thing. Then we can talk about Ruby. I didn’t know about feeling like this.”

  “I get that. I understand that.”

  She looked up and held my gaze. “We’re really not? You’re sure?”

  “We’re not. I’m sure.”

  “Because you don’t want to?”

  It seemed wisest to lie. Having someone weep with desire for me had opened the eye of lust inside me, and it was a gelid, amoral eye. I hoped she couldn’t see me vibrating. “I don’t want to.”

  Claudia managed to shift her gears impressively, and the face I knew better reappeared. “What Ruby has told me so far is basically what she told you. I think the ‘Jeremiah, I’m the hand of God, I’m your bad luck’ tale would be pretty hard to make up, but then again so was the kidnapping story. I’m starting to buy the assertion that Lucia looked white when she was born. Do you have any thoughts on that?”

  I tried to appear relaxed. “You know you’re going to have a book out of this, if you want.”

  “It turns out that children with mixed blood sometimes really are born looking white before they darken. And lots of babies have their eye color change. So her account is somewhat plausible.”

  I stood up slowly, looking down at her dark head. “I don’t know if what’s true matters much anymore, Claudia. But here’s something I do know: we need to go downstairs and get ourselves a great big bag of tortilla chips and start playing slot machines. Do you like to play slots?”

  She hesitated as if she wanted to say more. “I do feel better.”

  When we were on the elevator, I suggested that she check in to the hotel, but it turned out she already had. She had been at the casino for several hours and had been watching me while I talked with the FBI agent. “Don’t do creepy stuff like that, Claudia. I mean it. I need to be able to trust you.”

  We ate two bags of tortilla chips and played penny slot machines until my fingers ached so much from punching the buttons that I had to keep switching hands. It takes great stubbornness to lose four hundred dollars on a penny slot. When it was late enough to be getting light outside, I said, “I’m going to bed.”

  “You go up first,” she said without looking at me. “I’ll come up separately.”

  “Okay, but Claudia, I’m speaking as your serious friend. There’s only one thing that matters. Neither of us is going to take a drink or a drug, no matter what happens.”

  “Right,” she said, pulling the arm of the slot. “I’m not supposed to drink, even if my ass falls off.”

  “Yes, and everything else is gravy.”

  She still didn’t look at me, but I thought I’d worn her out. “Some gravy,” she finally said.

  6

  In the morning, Claudia went missing. Her cell phone clicked straight to voice mail, and the clerk at the desk said she checked out early. I had a bad feeling. It was after eleven o’clock, so I drove the Lincoln back into Oklahoma City to catch the noon meeting. I left the top up so that I could call Ed Blake on the way. “Claudia turned up here at the casino yesterday, but I can’t find her this morning. Something’s off. I feel it.”

  Blake’s silence meant he was digesting this turn of events. Then he said, “She’s been interviewing Ruby. Is it possible she found out something we don’t know?”

  “I don’t see how. She would have told me.”

  “She’s a very clever young woman.”

  “That she is.” Then I described for him the young agent the FBI had sent to interview me.

  “I’d laugh if I thought that was funny. But Claudia saw you talking to him, so let me call over there and see if she’s turned up.”

  The phone rang just as I rolled into the parking lot at the Kelly Club. Blake said, “She was there when the office opened at seven thirty this morning, but now she’s gone again. They don’t know where she was headed.”

  “What did she want from them?”

  “She claimed she just wanted to see inside an FBI office for her research, and she wanted to introduce herself to Special Agent Mintern. He wouldn’t let her come past the second entrance, but they did exchange cards.”

  “I’ve lost my sense of humor, Blake. I wish I knew what she’s up to. Let’s hope it’s something harmless, like research in the library.”

  The AA meeting grounded me a bit, gave me a quiet hour to trust again whatever Rama said is holding the sky up while I’m sleeping. But something significant was going to happen, and I could feel it in my spine. Thy will be done, I kept telling myself. Thy will be done.

  When I got back out to the parking lot, a man I’d never seen before was standing beside my big white car. He was tall and thin and wore a powder-blue suit and string tie. “You’re Claude Dabley, aren’t you?”

  “You do look a lot like Ruby.” He had a thin, gravelly voice, as if he’d had throat surgery. “Miss Burns, I must request that you come with me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’re trying to find your brother, are you not?”

  My heart was slapping hard against my ribs. “My brother is in Oklahoma?”

  “You’re going to have
to trust me.”

  I looked behind me to see if anyone else was in the parking lot. A skinny old man named Tyrell, who had twenty-four years of sobriety, stood beside his rusty van watching us. He’d spoken in the meeting about this van, which now had 265,000 miles on it. He hadn’t wanted to buy it but did so to please his wife. She died soon afterward, and he’d kept the van ever since. Now he thought it was going to outlast them both.

  “You’re kidding about trusting you, right? You left Ruby sitting in that cave and her kids are dead.”

  “Mistakes were made,” he said. “We understand that. But he wants to see you. He wants you to understand better what happened, and he has a proposal for you.”

  “He’s somehow going to make it all better?”

  “He knows how angry you are with him.” Dabley’s green eyes were pale and watery. He did not look like a powerful man or even a smart one.

  “Tell me about the mistakes right now,” I said, “because I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  Tyrell took several steps toward us. “Hello. Are you a friend of Bill’s?” This was a coded question about AA membership. What Tyrell had really asked was, Ellen, are you okay?

  “I don’t know anybody named Bill,” Dabley said. “I’m a friend of Ellen’s family. I was asked to meet her here.”

  Tyrell looked at me, his eyebrows raised.

  “Can you stick around for a few minutes? But let me talk to this man privately.”

  Tyrell nodded. “Nice ride. Suicide doors, right?”

  After Tyrell was out of earshot but still watching us, I said, “Listen, no more of this cloak-and-dagger bullshit. Just tell me how to find my fucking brother. Tell him I promise not to betray him. He knows my word is good. That’s the best deal he’s going to get out of me, and I intend to find him whether he cooperates or not.”

  Dabley didn’t reply.