The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  Darlene sat down without really meaning to—the ground rose up and caught her. Roy settled opposite, his brow speckled with sweat. In the ravine, the creosote bushes were withering and skeletal, their branches ashy.

  “Are you saying . . .” Darlene trailed off, then tried again. “Are you saying no one else was listening when Cora called me? Nobody is trying to locate her?”

  “My contact told me that the FBI’s resources are needed elsewhere.”

  “I need their resources.” Darlene thumped a fist against her breastbone. “I don’t understand how they can do something like this.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She realized that she was now gripping the ground, her fingers digging into the warm soil.

  DARLENE DID NOT REMEMBER MUCH from the rest of the day. Faces and bodies swirled around her. No. 43 ebbed in and out of focus. People touched her arm, leaning close, their voices muted as though underwater. Jane danced in the background among her girlfriends. Sunlight poured through the windows, turning the trailer into a hotbox.

  At one point, Roy loomed into view. Darlene blinked up at him. He handed her a small, wrapped package.

  “Happy birthday,” he said.

  “No gifts,” she said. “You promised.”

  He shrugged. “Couldn’t help myself.”

  Inside was a gold locket on a delicate chain. Darlene slipped the catch and opened the pendant to reveal a photograph. She expected to see Roy there—a picture of him to carry close to her heart, maybe—but instead there was a snapshot of Cora. Darlene recognized the image immediately, since she was the one who took it: the same photo used in the Amber Alert back in June.

  For a moment, she stood dumbstruck.

  “Put it on,” Roy said.

  A semicircle of people gathered around them, observing this exchange. Somebody whispered, “It’s her sister. The one that’s missing.”

  Darlene tried to smile but could not manage it. She did not need a physical reminder of Cora. She already felt as though she were carrying Cora with her all the time, as a weight on her chest that never lifted.

  “I’ll help you with the clasp,” Roy said.

  “I can’t do this,” she said.

  Darlene threw the necklace into his hands, turned to flee, and collided hard with an elderly man. Roy’s godfather—she could not remember his name. He staggered backward, grunting in shock. Darlene did not stop to see if he was hurt. She bolted toward Jane’s bedroom, the nearest refuge.

  A commotion behind her. Scuffling and voices. Roy was saying something—maybe comforting his godfather, maybe asking Darlene to come back. She slammed the door, leaned against it, and breathed.

  No one had traced Cora’s call. There were no more wiretaps on her phone. Darlene could not quite believe it. Throughout the long, terrible summer, she found solace in the fact that no matter how bad things got, at least she was not alone. The federal government—the experts—were aware of and involved in her plight. She imagined men in suits like guardian angels, aiding and protecting her from a distance, unseen but all-seeing.

  Now they were gone. In fact, they had been gone for some time. There was a breathtaking cruelty in their logic: somebody did the math and decided Cora was a lost cause. There was another kind of cruelty in their silence. Darlene wondered how long she had believed they were watching over her when she was actually on her own. Again.

  On the other side of the door, the music ticked up a notch. Darlene heard footsteps landing in unison as a line dance broke out. Roy had obviously papered over her bad behavior, distracting his friends. It was unlike Darlene to make a scene, but she felt no remorse, only righteous fury.

  The whole situation was absurd. It was ridiculous to throw a party here, in the place where Tucker once hurled insults at her and blacked her eye, where Cora was last seen before being kidnapped, where Darlene had spent all summer suffering and waiting. She wanted to usher everyone out—to throw things and sob—but she knew better. She would not draw additional attention to herself. Instead, she would hide in silence until this crowd, too, was gone.

  Just for a moment, though, she wished that she could scream the house down. There was blood all over this trailer, she wanted to yell at the whole careless lot of them. There was blood right there, where y’all are dancing.

  32

  Hours later, Darlene sat alone in the living room of No. 43. Jane was asleep in her bedroom, Roy shooed back to his own house, the partygoers long gone. Darlene had scrubbed away all evidence of the festivities, stripping the streamers from the mailbox and mopping the footprints from her kitchen floor. Now she lay on the couch, buzzing with anger and energy, listening to the cicadas shriek.

  She was thinking about the Sooners, her ancestors in this place. She remembered the stories from history classes long ago. Before Oklahoma was a state, it had been known as the Unassigned Lands. It was a barren, treeless desert then, considered unfit for agriculture and livestock, and unsuitable to house the Indian tribes who had been forced from their homes elsewhere. (They were marched to the Osage Reservation in the northeast instead.) Only after extensive irrigation and a great leap forward in agricultural techniques did the territory become habitable. Human intervention transfigured it over decades into fertile ground.

  Darlene rose to her feet and went to the window, looking out over the dark trailer park. Eventually the government had decided to open the Unassigned Lands to white settlers heading west, folks who were dreaming of adventure and a new home. There was a fever of anticipation. The plan was simple: a cannon would sound and everyone would rush in at the same time. Whoever staked a claim—and could hold it—would own it. First come, first served. It was supposed to be an equitable arrangement. Thousands of hopeful settlers gathered at the border of the Unassigned Lands to wait.

  But the Sooners snuck in ahead of the deadline. They were the clever ones—the rule-breakers and rebels. When the cannon fired and a clamor of hooves filled the air, the Sooners emerged from their hiding places and pretended to have arrived with the rest of the crowd. Families in covered wagons came upon new, verdant fields only to discover other people already there, digging wells, planting seeds, and waving their guns to dissuade trespassers. Darlene remembered a story about a man who was found hours after the cannon blast on a patch of ground that had been tilled and plowed, his crops already sprouting, a log cabin half-finished behind him. He had clearly been there for days, but he claimed that the rich Oklahoma soil allowed him to start his farm in no time.

  Darlene was proud of this heritage. The Sooners flouted the rules with brio, resourcefulness, and, ultimately, success. Perhaps there was a lesson here. She touched the chilly glass of the window. Shady Acres was a moonlit ocean tonight, the trailers bobbing in the pale gray sea like ice floes.

  The FBI had let her down. It was a faceless bureaucracy, and it followed a set of arbitrary regulations. But Darlene did not have to blindly accept her fate. The Sooners, too, had come up against the rigidity and impassivity of the government. Maybe Darlene could do what they had done. When the chips were down, the Sooners did not fight fair; they did not fight at all, sidestepping the law and forging their own paths with gusto and guile.

  Darlene fished her phone from her pocket and began scrolling through her call history. It did not take long to find what she was looking for. She dialed and hung up immediately, chewing on her thumbnail.

  Then she dialed again and let it ring. A man’s voice answered, speaking so fast that Darlene did not catch any words. A staccato blast. Something about a newsroom. The man was Tobias Morgan, a reporter from Chicago.

  “This is Darlene McCloud,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Darlene. The McCloud family. You know, the . . . the orphans.”

  “Oh,” he said. “The saddest family in Mercy, right?”

  His voice was sharp and nasal, absent of any Southern softness.

  “That’s right,” Darlene said. “You cal
led me a few weeks ago when my sister . . .”

  “Of course,” he said. “I remember. Big story. What’s shaking?”

  “I’m ready to talk now,” she said.

  “About what?”

  Her nerve almost failed her. She had vowed never to speak to any of these people again. But there was no other way forward. She took a deep breath and spoke in loud, determined tones.

  “My little sister was kidnapped by my brother,” she said. “Tucker blew up Jolly Cosmetics and took Cora with him.”

  “I know all that,” Tobias said impatiently. “What’s happened since then?”

  Darlene touched the familiar, homey objects on the kitchen counter—the toaster, the spatula, a wooden spoon.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “You called me six times after the Amber Alert. You said you wanted to interview me. I’m ready now to be interviewed. Cora has been missing all summer, and the FBI are getting nowhere.”

  Tobias did not answer. There was a rustling on the other end of the line, as though he was rifling through a stack of papers. Darlene pressed on, saying, “I want to bring some attention back to what’s happening. I don’t want everyone to forget about us.”

  “It’s August,” Tobias said. “You’re calling me about something that happened back in June.”

  “It’s still happening,” Darlene said, her voice rising. “Nothing has changed. I can go on the record. With photos. Whatever you need.”

  Another pause. More shuffling of papers.

  “Nothing has changed,” Tobias repeated back to her, each word distinct. “That’s the problem. I’m sorry. There’s no longer a story here. Not now.”

  Darlene closed her eyes.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll just call a different reporter.”

  Her voice came out fainter than she meant it to be. On the other end of the line, Tobias snorted—almost a laugh.

  “Good luck,” he said. “Nobody’s going to be interested.”

  DARLENE CALLED THREE MORE. ONE did not remember her. Another told her to call back as soon as something interesting happened. The third answered in a bleary mumble, as though his phone woke him. He informed Darlene curtly that after layoffs at the paper he was currently between jobs.

  At last, she turned her phone off. Then she lay down on the linoleum, flat on her back. She felt as though she had just run a marathon—heart pounding, legs weak, breath chaotic. Her hair fanned around her face as she stared at the ceiling. Perhaps this was rock bottom. But then, she had thought that before, and there was always a little farther to fall.

  33

  At dawn, Darlene stood outside No. 43, waiting for the sun. The eastern sky was freighted with clouds, blocking and diffusing the raw light. Her feet were bare and she was still in her pajamas. She had not slept at all.

  Her thoughts were on the Sooners again. Thieves and renegades. Scrappers and outlaws. Darlene imagined the ghosts of her predecessors moving around her, shadowy figures with shotguns and farm implements, guarding and cultivating their patches of earth.

  Yet there was a contradiction here. This land, once so coveted and prized, was now used carelessly, even wantonly. Mercy was small in population but vast in acreage. Houses straggled down winding lanes that led nowhere. Huge swaths of prairie stood empty. Even the trailer park was twice the size it needed to be for the amount of units it contained. The same tendency toward sprawl extended across the state. Oklahoma City was the largest town in America in terms of square footage, though its population was dwarfed by many of the Northern metropolises.

  The sun’s corona mounted above the scrim of clouds—a fiery sliver, as thin as thread but bright enough to blind. Darlene stepped cautiously across the dirt in her bare feet, avoiding pebbles and the occasional piece of glass. Something scuttled away from her inside the ravine. An animal, maybe a snake.

  Oklahoma was supposed to be a desert, a dustbowl, a landscape of thirsty, broken ground. You could still feel the wildness of it under everything. The Sooners had been avaricious, but they were not fools. The lush farms around Mercy were nothing more than an illusion. All the hallmarks of industry and agriculture—the granaries and barns, the restaurants and trailer parks—were as ephemeral as a dream. To the untrained eye, they might appear permanent, but Darlene knew they were on borrowed time. She knew this all too well. If the irrigation systems failed, if a bad drought settled in, if the cattle sickened, if the crops withered, Oklahoma could revert to its inherent condition. Human civilization was tethered insecurely here, as though a strong storm—say, a tornado—could blow it all away, leaving nothing but heat and dust.

  The sun detached from the bank of clouds. Darlene watched it float and burn. She understood her mistake now. Reaching out to the media, calling reporter after reporter—she had absorbed the wrong lesson from her ancestors.

  More than anything, the Sooners were self-reliant. They did not obey the government’s rules because they knew those rules were arbitrary. Last night, Darlene had imagined that she was rebelling against the system when she called Tobias Morgan, but in truth she was just putting her faith in a different system. The FBI and the media were both bureaucracies: impassive, unyielding, autocratic, and capricious. They were different in character, not kind.

  Her mistake had been to trust in human systems at all. That was what the Sooners understood. They relied only on their own strength, their own vigor and industriousness. Darlene felt the hint of a smile touch her lips. She stood still, letting the new sunlight warm her skin.

  ON HER LUNCH HOUR, DARLENE drove to the police station at a breakneck pace. She found Roy at his desk on the phone, leaning back in his chair with his feet propped up. Darlene stood over him, drumming her fingers impatiently on her hips until he finished the call.

  “We have to take action,” she burst out as soon as he hung up. “If nobody else is going to do anything, then it’s up to us.”

  He ran a hand over the bald crown of his head. Then he looked up at her with an expression she wasn’t expecting—a gratified, eager grin.

  “Come for a walk with me,” he said.

  As they stepped outside, Darlene saw her reflection in the glass door—gaunt, waxen, and restless, her ponytail a shambles. She looked both unwell and vibrantly alive.

  “I’ve been thinking the exact same thing,” Roy said.

  “Really?”

  “Damn straight. The Lord helps those who help themselves.”

  Darlene felt a wrench in her chest. He was saying just what she wanted to hear, and the relief was almost too much after everything—the party, the humiliating phone call to Tobias Morgan, and her sleepless night.

  Roy threw an arm around her shoulders, pulled her close, and kissed her forehead.

  “I had an idea about Tucker,” he said.

  They turned down a side street. There was a car parked on a nearby lawn, all four tires replaced with cinderblocks.

  “I’ve been trying to think outside the box,” Roy said. “Like Tucker. I didn’t sleep much. I was at the station all night, actually. After the party, I—”

  He broke off, shaking his head.

  “I messed that up,” he said. “Right?”

  She shrugged. “It’s over now.”

  A silence fell, awkward yet companionable. It occurred to Darlene that this was her first real disagreement with Roy. She wanted to make it through to the other side.

  “Anyway,” he said. “After I left your place, I was thinking about the FBI, and what the guy said to me on the phone . . .” He grimaced. “I couldn’t believe they just went and gave up on us.”

  Darlene reached for his hand, interlacing her fingers through his. There was such compassion in his voice. For a minute, she considered admitting what she had done last night. On balance, though, she decided against it. No one ever needed to know about her moment of weakness.

  “I looked through Tucker’s file again,” Roy said. “He’s not careful. He’s not t
he kind of guy to lay low. But he’s smart, isn’t he?”

  “Too smart for his own good.”

  He nodded. “I started looking into unsolved crimes. Anything recent. Anything that falls inside Tucker’s range of interests but outside his previous pattern of behavior.” Roy cleared his throat. “I even put out a few feelers to other jurisdictions. Called in some favors. My phone’s been ringing all morning, actually.”

  They passed a house with loud checked curtains glaring in every window. The laundromat on the corner perfumed the air with starch. Roy stopped walking and took a deep, steadying breath.

  “There was a shooting in Amarillo,” he said. “Somebody went right up to a chicken farmer on the street and shot him dead.”

  Darlene felt her stomach twist.

  “This happened in July,” he said. “A couple weeks back.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” she said.

  “They never caught the perpetrator. At the time, they figured it was a random thing. An accident, or some teenager with a grudge and a gun. Last night, I reached out to a contact of mine out that way. He just got back to me. That’s who I was talking to when you came by the station.”

  “Was it . . .” she whispered. “Are you saying . . .”

  Roy leaned close. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “Yes.”

  “A few witnesses to the shooting mentioned seeing a child nearby,” he said.

  “Oh my God.”

  There was a taste of bile in her throat. She pressed her fingers over her mouth.

  “There’s more,” Roy said.

  “More than murder?”

  He was staring at her with ferocious intensity. She could almost feel the brush of his gaze against her skin.

  “A case of arson,” he said. “This happened a week or so before the shooting. Somebody burned down a taxidermy shop in Argon, Texas. A little tiny town. Smaller than Mercy, even.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Nobody was hurt. Just your average property crime. I heard about it at the station when it happened, but I didn’t think anything of it. But now . . .”