Dreamland Burning

by Jennifer Latham

  “I truly am sorry, Addie,” I said once I’d worked up the courage to speak.

  She glanced at me. Barely. Said, “What exactly is it you’re sorry for, Will?”

  “Why, that you’re upset, of course,” I replied.

  Addie stopped and spun towards me, and it’s a testament to my ignorance that I took her doing so as encouragement.

  “What about Clarence?” she asked.

  And though my main concern at that moment was to set things right with the girl I loved, I piped right up: “Oh, sure. Him, too.”

  Addie’s eyes narrowed, but I blathered on, saying it was a shame he’d touched her hand like that, and how I wished he’d known better and hoped there wouldn’t be any permanent damage from the beating he took. “Everyone deserves second chances,” I added magnanimously. “Even Negroes.” Then I stopped, waiting for the warm flood of forgiveness I considered my due.

  Only, when I looked closer to see what was holding Addie up, I finally registered the fullness of the disgust in her eyes and understood that my true love thought me no better than a pile of dog shit on the sidewalk.

  Then Addie walked away.

  Now, I wish I could say her reaction didn’t surprise me, or that the suffering I’d caused an innocent man weighed heavier on my conscience than it did. But that would be giving myself too much credit. The truth of the matter was, I came away from the whole incident believing myself to be the injured party. For shouldn’t my apology have sufficed? And shouldn’t any Negro man with half a brain know that no good could come of messing with a white woman in public? What’s more, I told myself that Vernon and Addie must both have been exaggerating the extent of Clarence Banks’s injuries. Why, he’d probably been no closer to death after his beating than before. Vernon Fish was a braggart, after all, and Addie a hysterical girl.

  With that fool line of reasoning in my head, I spent near a week feeling sorry for myself, licking my imagined wounds and scratching at the dry skin under my cast with a pencil. My path never once crossed Addie’s, making it all the easier to maintain the delusion that I’d been in the right. And after those days of sulking and skulking about had passed, the delusion felt real enough that I let the matter go and moved on like the jackass I was.

  It helped that working in the shop suited me. I wasn’t a natural-born salesman like Pop, but I loved music. Knew all about it, too, so that when people came in able to recall a line from a song they’d heard but not the title, Pop would say, “Let’s see if William here can’t divine what you’re looking for.” And he’d ask them to hum a few bars or sing the words, and most times I’d be able to name the tune straightaway. “Swanee,” “Crazy Blues,” “When My Baby Smiles at Me”—I knew them all. Even when I couldn’t figure out the exact song the customer wanted, I could almost always come up with something close enough to tempt them into buying a record or two.

  But when it came to selling Victrolas, Pop was the man for the job. He prided himself on knowing those machines inside and out, on being able to talk a person up from only thinking about maybe buying a cheap model to knowing they couldn’t live without a fancy one. If he was busy with one customer and another came in, he’d have me entertain the newcomer with records until he could talk to them himself. In terms of brass tack Victrola sales, I kept my mouth shut.

  That went double when colored folks from Greenwood called up, asking if we carried such-and-such a model they’d seen in a magazine or a catalog. “Telephone sales are tough,” Pop told me. “You can’t tempt folks with fancy cabinets and woodwork, so convincing them to spend more than they’ve planned gets tricky. It’s an art, describing different models for a telephone customer well enough that they end up feeling bad for wanting something simple when they could have something fine.”

  Occasionally, though, even Pop failed to close a deal over the telephone. When that happened, he’d have no choice but to invite Negro customers into the shop after hours to look at the different models for themselves. He never did act ashamed of what he was doing, but he sure wasn’t in a hurry to let nearby shop owners in on his secret. Or to stand accused of spitting in Jim Crow’s eye, either.

  I always liked the hushed excitement of those visits. We’d hang the CLOSED sign out front, pull the shades down over the windows, and let our customer in through the alleyway door. The first time it happened, Pop told me, “You have to pretend the back is as good as the front. We know it isn’t and so do they. There’s no need to belabor the point.”

  In general, those late-night patrons were people Pop considered to be pillars of Tulsa’s Negro society: doctors, lawyers, merchants like himself. But when push came to shove, he wasn’t about to lose a sale just because someone fell a rung or two short of respectable. And it was that drive in him, that will to make his business succeed, that led to my father being bested by an eighteen-year-old Negro boy armed with nothing more than a hundred dollars and a frown grave enough to shame an undertaker.

  Rowan

  I always train hard, but the morning after my fight with James, my run wasn’t really training so much as self-punishment. I was mad at myself, mad at him, and more than a little scared that maybe he’d been right.

  There’s always been a love-hate thing between me and running. First off, if you don’t get it over with at the ass crack of dawn, the Oklahoma summer sun will melt you into a puddle of good intentions. Plus, it hurts. I mean, have you ever seen a happy jogger? We scowl. We pant and grimace. In fact, if you ever see one of us smiling, you should assume we’re a complete psychopath and run for your life.

  On the other hand, running’s the best way I know to clear my head and get closer to fine. Which is why I was already two miles into an eight-mile run by 6:30 AM, with the Arkansas River on my right and early Riverside Drive commuters speeding by on my left. The temperature hadn’t dropped much during the night, and the humidity made me feel like I was sucking air through a wet sponge.

  It was perfect.

  At the start of mile three, I ditched my warm-up playlist, queued hardcore training songs, and started the fartlek run my cross country coach had posted the night before. Yes, fartlek is a ridiculous word, but it’s basically just a fancy Swedish way of saying “play with your speed.” Which I did, using landmarks along the river to separate each segment.

  The first interval was a hard sprint. I switched to a jog at a downed tree limb. Went to a fast jog at a flock of Canada geese. Cranked into a sprint again at the haunted stone mansion across Riverside. Kept it going until I thought I’d die.

  The sculpture of the bobcat catching a pheasant midflight was my turnaround point. It was also where I tried distracting myself from James by thinking about how I was about to spend the rest of my summer with safety goggles, micropipettes, and the scientists who loved them.

  All things considered, working in a virology lab was better than answering phones and entering data at Chase Oil. And it beat the hell out of doing legal research for Mom while she entertained me with her all-time favorite hits, including:

  Having a Trust Fund Doesn’t Make You a Success.

  and

  What About Your College Essay? You Know, You Should Really Start Your College Essay.

  and

  Black Women Have to Work Twice as Long and Five Times as Hard to Succeed in this World, So Get Used to It.

  All three of which were completely unnecessary, since I’d learned early on that the best way to keep her from putting too much pressure on me was to do it myself.

  Then I got sick of thinking altogether and decided to fly, legs pounding, arms pumping in a dead sprint, until my muscles and lungs screamed for mercy and there was only a quarter mile between me and home. That was the best part of the whole ordeal—the part where I was too exhausted to think about anything except a cold shower, obscene amounts of orange juice, and the post-run buzz I’d have for the next hour or so. For that short, precious quarter mile, I floated along the bike path while the city woke up around me. I didn’t worry
about the skeleton in the back house. I didn’t stress over my sucky summer internship. And I reminded myself that no matter how mad James and I got at each other, we always worked things out. Dark corners and all, we were in it for the long haul.

  “Which doctor?” the receptionist at the front desk asked. Again.

  I told her Dr. Kumar (again) and that my mother had arranged for me to intern with her that summer. The receptionist stared at her computer screen like it was a Magic 8 Ball. “I just started here two days ago, and I don’t know any Dr. Kumar. Was it maybe Dr. Kim? We’ve got one of those.”

  By that point, I’d already pulled up my “Dr. Kumar” folder to show her the forwarded emails from Mom, the three letters of recommendation I’d gotten from teachers, and the waiver my parents had signed so I could work there. The receptionist wasn’t interested.

  “Hang on,” she said, and disappeared into the back.

  A not-unpleasant-looking man in a white lab coat came out a few minutes later and shook my hand. He seemed too young to be a doctor, but the coat made me hopeful he might actually have a clue.

  “I’m Dr. Revard,” he said. “And you are…?”

  I told him my name and that I was there to start my summer internship with Dr. Kumar. A cute little wrinkle creased his forehead as he motioned for me to follow him to a bench near the research building’s front door.

  “Rowan,” he said, “I’m sorry, but Dr. Kumar had to take a leave of absence a few weeks ago. Her mother’s ill and…”

  I stopped listening then, because no matter what words Dr. Revard used, the message was going to be Blah, blah, blah, you’re screwed. Sure, I hadn’t wanted to work there in the first place, but I wasn’t exactly opposed to racking up volunteer hours and science cred for my college applications.

  I was just wondering if James’s restaurant was hiring when the words opening at the Jackson Clinic snapped my attention back to Dr. Revard’s voice.

  “It may not be what you’d planned,” he said, “but they’re pretty desperate. And I could check to see if any of the physicians up there will let you shadow them after your shift.”

  He jumped up, grabbed a business card from the receptionist’s desk, and scribbled something on the back. “Here’s the address. I can call now if you want and see if they have time to interview you this morning. Wait… scratch that. Why don’t you just head up there and I’ll let them know you’re on your way?”

  I took the card. The address was somewhere way up in North Tulsa.

  Dr. Revard gave me a little grin that, under normal circumstances, I would have considered extremely attractive. “I really think you’d learn a lot there,” he said.

  I smiled and thanked him and told him that sounded great, because even though working at a medical clinic in the part of town voted most likely to get you shot hadn’t been on my summer bucket list, at least it was something. Maybe even something I could get a decent essay out of. Plus, I’d be helping out in exactly the kind of place James goes all gooey over, so he could pretty much suck it on that count.

  Living in a bubble my ass.

  The thing about Tulsa is, it’s really three cities in one.

  The newest is South Tulsa, where the houses are fresh-built and come in Tall, Grande, and Venti. People there might work downtown, but at night they escape the urban wilds and head back to comfortable developments named for the wildlife their construction displaced. Quail Commons. Fox Meadows. That kind of thing.

  Midtown, where I live, is what you get when you squish neighborhoods from every twentieth-century decade together, starting with the 1910s. In a seven-minute drive, you can go from fancy to comfortable to small to meth-house scary.

  Then there’s North Tulsa.

  Cross the railroad tracks and the northern curve of highways built to shunt commuter traffic away from city streets, and you’re there. It’s the kind of place where, if people bother talking about it at all, they either say how dangerous it is, or describe it in their it’s-such-a-pity voice. Mom says North Tulsa actually has the lowest crime rate in the city, and she knows her shit. But it is poor, and full of people with skin a few shades darker than pale. And I can’t lie—until I went up to the Jackson Clinic that day, I’d never driven there on my own.

  I followed the map on my phone north past Greenwood, where businesses rebuilt after the riot but had closed one by one over the years. Beyond that, the streets were wide and quiet. There were no gang fights, no tweakers lurking in doorways or carjackers waiting on corners. It didn’t feel dangerous so much as forgotten.

  I passed the Dollar General store that had been on the news after a seventy-three-year-old reserve deputy shot Eric Harris in the back nearby; a used-tire lot with a hand-lettered LLANTAS BUENAS sign; a trailer surrounded by hundreds of old barbecue grills; a tiny library branch with a sign in front advertising their summer reading program. The clinic was a quarter mile beyond that.

  It was new, with bright yellow siding and a freshly blacktopped parking lot. There was a fence around the perimeter, but only a short one. There were also purple and yellow pansies along the sidewalk, and a girl with a giant rainbow Afro painted on the bus stop shelter out front.

  The inside was nice, with cheap but decent waiting room furniture, a stack of fresh coloring pages on a kid-sized plastic picnic table, and crayons that still had points. An old man with dirty fatigues and a nicotine-stained beard waved at me like a Walmart greeter. “Sign in, darlin’,” he said. “I forgot to when I showed up last week, and they still haven’t called my name!” His laugh was wheezy and strained, and ended in a coughing fit. I started toward him to make sure he was okay, but he waved me on. “I’m fine, young lady,” he said between gasps. “You go on.”

  I worked my way through the crowded room toward what was apparently the reception desk. It wasn’t behind glass, and there was no annoyed-looking lady waiting to check people in. There was just a man. A really tall one who looked like he’d taken a long walk through hell and survived. His skin was pocked, his nose was crooked, and a thick, jagged scar ran from his chin down into the neckline of his shirt.

  Still, his eyes were calm. His face was relaxed. And the anarchy symbol tattooed on the left side of his neck was a nice counterpoint to the praying hands on the right.

  “Sign in.” He pointed to the clipboard on the counter.

  “I’m not sick,” I said. “I’m…”

  He looked up and smiled a black-toothed meth-addict smile. “Family planning clinic runs Wednesdays and Fridays. You need an appointment?”

  My face got hot. “I’m not pregnant—”

  He cut me off with a raised eyebrow. “Thus the term family planning.”

  That’s when I realized he wasn’t serious. He was giving me shit, and I liked him for it. So I grabbed the sign-in sheet and the pen chained to the desk with a string of paperclips and wrote:

  NAME ARRIVAL TIME APPT. TIME CARE PROVIDER

  ROWAN CHASE NOW DON’T HAVE ONE HIRE ME

  He took one look and burst out laughing.

  A woman in pink scrubs called out, “Crystal Montoya?” and waved over the anxious-looking woman who stood up. Then the two of them disappeared behind a door.

  The desk guy was still chuckling when he spoke. “Rowan Chase, I’m Truman Atwell. People usually just call me Tru. Can you type?”

  “Pretty well,” I said, getting the distinct impression I was being interviewed for a job I wasn’t even sure I wanted.

  “Can you answer phones?”

  “Yes.” I looked around at the waiting room full of people.

  “Can you get your bright-eyed self here by seven thirty sharp, Monday through Friday, and not complain if I make you stay past three from time to time?”

  “I guess…”

  He took my right hand in both of his and shook it solemnly. “Then, Rowan Chase, I think you and I are going to get along just fine.”

  WILLIAM

  In a way, everything that came next was my own doing. After all
, I was the one who watched that boy stare at the Model 110 in our window every day for a whole week. At first he only slowed on his delivery bike and craned his neck towards the shop. But come Wednesday, when the street was quiet, he got off that bike and walked right up onto the sidewalk to look in. He was tall, with a sturdy build, a baby face, and the look of someone who’d stop to put fallen baby birds back in their nests.

  On Thursday, I happened to be watching passersby from a corner at the front of the store when he arrived. He must not have noticed me there, for he leaned so close to the shop window that I saw his eyes and recognized the look in them straightaway.

  It was want. Pure, simple want.

  Come Friday, his forehead bumped the glass. He’d leaned his bicycle against his hip and was so intent on our window display that he didn’t notice when I walked outside.

  “How d’you do?” I inquired.

  He jumped back like I’d lit a match under him. I pointed out how there was a trolley rolling towards us along the Main Street tracks and suggested he might not want to end up in front of it.

  He took off his cap and gave me a lopsided grin. Said, “That wouldn’t be pretty, would it?”

  I laughed and replied I didn’t suppose it would.

  Then the two of us stood there, unsure if our conversation had come to an end, until he put his hat back on and said, “You work here, don’t you?”

  “Surely do,” I replied.

  He toed a crack in the pavement. Looked up and down Main Street, all nerves and worries. Apart from an old man hobbling along on a cane and a nursemaid pushing a fancy baby buggy, there wasn’t a soul in sight.

  “Well, I was… I was just…”