Dreamland Burning

by Jennifer Latham

  “Now I get how they could have afforded this house,” James said. “I thought it was pretty fancy for a guy who sold record players.”

  I took my computer from him and ignored how the glow from the screen made my eyes ache. “It could explain more than just the money,” I said. “Those headrights were valuable. Maybe William tried to claim his mother’s after she died. If he did, we might be able to track him down through tribal records.”

  James spotted something on the page I was looking at. “Can I see that for a sec?” he asked. I handed him the laptop.

  “Okay, I thought I remembered this,” he said. “A bunch of Osage, especially Osage women, were murdered in the 1920s after the government decided that anyone who was half Indian or more needed a white guardian to manage their money.”

  “Lovely,” I said.

  James sighed. “I know, right? So, anyway, a lot of white men married Osage women just to get control of their fortunes. Then a bunch of those women started dying in weird ways—drowning in shallow creeks, falling out of third-story windows, turning up with bullet holes in their skulls. No one really looked into the deaths until the FBI finally stepped in. After the white guardians had inherited the women’s money and headrights, that is.”

  “Figures,” I said. “But what does it have to do with the skeleton?”

  “Well, I know your anthropologist friend said it’s from a black man, but what if she’s wrong? The DNA tests haven’t come back yet, have they? Maybe she isn’t as great as she thinks at telling Native American skulls apart from African American ones. Or it could be that she’s just completely full of crap about being able to judge someone’s skin color by their skulls in the first place.”

  I shrugged. “That doesn’t change my question: what does any of that have to do with our skeleton?”

  “Well, I was thinking that maybe, just maybe, Stanley Tillman was a cold-blooded bastard and killed his own son to keep him from inheriting Kathryn’s money and headright.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “We know Kathryn didn’t die until 1976—way after Stanley. If he was willing to kill his own son to get her money, wouldn’t he have killed her, too?”

  James clicked back to the family tree. “This says that Kathryn Yellowhorse Tillman died in 1976 in Pawhuska—not Tulsa. And she was there when Stanley died in 1937. That’s more than an hour north of here. What’s to say old Stanley didn’t knock off William, let his wife go out of her mind worrying about her missing son, then ship her off to relatives up north while he stayed here in town? He was in charge of her money anyway. Maybe once the son was out of the way, it didn’t matter to him if Kathryn was alive or dead.”

  I closed the computer. “Don’t you think your theory might be just a tiny bit influenced by the messed-up father-son dynamic in your house?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But maybe Stanley was a racist prick and didn’t want a half-Indian son to begin with.”

  I shoved the computer to the foot of the bed with my toes. “I guess it’s possible, James. But I’m too tired to deal with thinking about that right now.”

  He gave me a guilty look. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

  “I know. But you could be onto something with the Osage connection.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Kathryn didn’t die until 1976, so there’s a good chance somebody in Pawhuska remembers her.”

  “You’re right!” James said. “In fact…” He opened my laptop back up and typed something into the search bar, clicked a few times, and scrolled. “Look.”

  He spun the screen toward me. And there, on the Osage Tribal Museum website, was Kathryn Yellowhorse Tillman, staring out from 1898—where she’d been waiting for us all along.

  I dreamed of Kathryn Yellowhorse that night. That’s how I thought of her, because Tillman didn’t fit the girl in the picture—not the black shine of her hair, or the open kindness of her face, or the way her smile played out in her eyes more than her lips. And even though she may never have lived in our house, it’s where I pictured her, gliding through the halls in a white flapper dress and pearls.

  When my phone went off just after eight the next morning, I was in the dream myself, doing the Charleston at a party in the Philcade Building downtown that would have made Jay Gatsby jealous.

  I squinted at the unfamiliar number on the screen. “Hello?”

  “Ms. Chase?”

  I sat up. My neck was still stiff, but it was better. “Yes?”

  “Ms. Chase, this is Michael Mercury from News-Hacker Media. I was wondering if you could share your insights into Arvin Brightwater’s death. And maybe you’d like to let our readers know how you’re doing, too?”

  “What?”

  “You’re Rowan Chase, right?”

  “Yes, but…” I swung my legs over the edge of the bed.

  “The seventeen-year-old driver involved in the car accident that occurred prior to Arvin Brightwater’s death?”

  I stood up, wide awake. “How did you get my number?”

  “I can’t tell you my source,” he said. “But if you’ll just…”

  “No. I won’t just.”

  I hung up and sank onto the window seat. With the morning sun glinting off the back house windows, the only thing I saw in them was the reflection of a redbud tree.

  I blocked the number that had just called, then searched Arvin Brightwater. The first hit, a CNN story about candlelight prayer vigils scheduled across the country for that night, was a surprise; I didn’t know anyone outside Tulsa had even heard about Arvin’s death. At the same time, it was good. I liked the idea of people holding flames up against the dark in Arvin’s honor. And if that had been all I’d found, maybe I could have let things go.

  But it wasn’t. And I couldn’t.

  Pages and pages of hits came back.

  Jerry Randall was a racist and pushing Arvin in front of the car was a hate crime. Jerry Randall was the victim and had been defending himself against a crazy homeless man. The mental health system had let Arvin fall through the cracks. It was the teenage driver’s fault for causing the accident that led to the confrontation. If the police didn’t go after Randall, Tulsa would be Ferguson all over again.

  And on. And on. And on.

  Nearly every single person who wrote about Arvin in articles, tweets, and comment sections acted like they knew what had happened. They got it. They were appropriately sad or angry or confused or forgiving or whatever. They understood. Which was funny, because I’d been there, and I was mixed-up as hell. Angry, too, that no one had told me Arvin’s story was blowing up. Mom and Dad, Tru, James—they’d all kept it secret, as if I was too fragile to handle reality.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized that reality was exactly what I’d needed all along. It would have helped to know that people were talking about Arvin, remembering him. It mattered. It made his death matter. And it was exactly the kind of thing I had to know if I was going to make sense of what had happened.

  I took Geneva’s business card down from the bulletin board over my window seat and ran my finger over the lettering next to the five-pointed Oklahoma star.

  It wasn’t even in purple Sharpie like the medical examiner sign in her van.

  Geneva was odd, but she’d been straight with me from the start and had never treated me like a child. Maybe she’d learned more about the skeleton or had ideas of her own about who he’d been. Maybe she didn’t.

  Either way, it couldn’t hurt to find out.

  WILLIAM

  Vernon turned on the overhead lights and lit up a Robusto as soon as I let him inside the shop. He handed one to Clete, too, and Clete near burst from pride as Vernon lit it for him. Then Clete sucked in a big lungful of smoke that turned him green as springtime in the light from Mama’s Chinese lanterns. Vernon cackled and smacked his back, saying, “Ain’t s’posed to inhale, son!” Then he offered one to me. I declined, and Vernon shrugged. Said, “Here’s the story: me and my fri
ends’ve been deputized special to help shut down this Negro uprising we got goin’ on. And as a duly sworn officer of the law, I’m enlisting your help.”

  I must have looked as dubious as I felt, for Clete said, “It’s true, Will. Some old coon down at the courthouse wouldn’t hand over his pistol when a white deputy told him to. Next thing you know, there’s guns firing and seven kinds of hell breaking loose, and all because those Greenwood boys don’t know their place.”

  Vernon grunted, then started in like General Pershing himself, talking about skirmish lines and battle plans and how the Negroes had made their stand just south of Third Street. “Turns out some of ’em fought in the war and picked up a thing or two about combat,” he said. “We aim to show ’em they’d have been better off learning to duck.”

  At that, he took Maybelle out of the holster on his belt and carved two more notches into her with his pocket knife. Clete grinned and looked back and forth between me and Vernon, asking did I know what the notches meant.

  “He knows,” Vernon said, squinting against the wavering column of smoke from his cigar. Then he blew the filings off of Maybelle. Said, “Now that we got the ammo we came for, the three of us best get moving. We got a long night ahead of us.”

  Only I didn’t want to go anywhere with Vernon and Clete and their guns. So I said again how Pop had told me to guard the store, and Clete insisted Pop had sent them to get me.

  “He truly said that?” I asked Clete direct. “He said for you to fetch me?”

  Clete’s eyebrows furrowed. “Well, he didn’t get a chance to come right out and say for us to fetch you,” he said, “but that’s only because we got separated once the fighting heated up.”

  Which told me straight off that Pop hadn’t said any such thing, and that I’d been suckered into opening the shop door in the first place. Though, of course, there would have been hell to pay if I hadn’t.

  After that, Clete yammered on about war and duty and white men needing to stand up for what was theirs. Vernon’s dead eyes stayed on me until Clete finally shut up. Then Vernon said, “Listen to me and listen close, Half-breed: there’s good niggers and bad ones. Good ones know their place. Bad ones don’t. What’s happening here tonight is an old-fashioned purge. We’re gonna flush the bad ones out of Tulsa once and for all.”

  I gave no response, for there was nothing I could think to say. Then Vernon pushed his face so close to mine that I felt the heat from the tip of his cigar against my cheek. “I’ll brook no cowardice, boy,” he said. “Now you quit pissin’ and moanin’ like a damned woman and come fight!”

  I thought of Joseph and Ruby then, and Angelina and her grandbabies, and knew in my heart what I believed.

  “No, sir, Mr. Fish,” I said softly. “I can’t do that.”

  Clete was silent beside me. Vernon’s face went white with fury. He walked to the demo machine Pop and I used to play music for customers and, casual as could be, pushed it over. Wood splintered. Metal twisted.

  “Let’s try that again,” Vernon said. “You’re going to come with us right now or so help me God I’ll destroy every last thing in this place and tell your pa you weren’t man enough to protect it from rioters. Clete here will back me up, won’t you?”

  Clete focused on his boots but mumbled yes quick enough. And though the thought of Vernon ruining the shop was none too pleasant, it was my fear of what he’d do if he found Joseph in the back room that tipped the scales on my decision once and for all.

  “All right, Mr. Fish,” I said. “I’ll come.”

  “Good,” Vernon muttered. Then he spun me about by the shoulders and shoved me out the door. I stopped on the sidewalk, saying I had to lock up. And I went slow as I could, leaning my Springfield against the door, dropping the keys, pretending the bolt was stubborn. So that by the time I looked up and across the street, Clete had got behind the wheel of his daddy’s Cadillac and Vernon was climbing into the seat beside him. Their cigars glowed red in the hot night air. And though darkness cloaked Vernon’s features, I could still picture the smile on his face. The one saying he’d won, and I was nothing but a stupid boy.

  Shots sounded to the north. So many I lost count. Then silence, until Vernon Fish broke it.

  “Let’s go, Half-breed,” he cried. “The night’s young, and we’ve got killin’ to do.”

  The Cadillac’s engine growled to life. My pulse quickened. And without letting myself overthink the matter, I loosed a curse loud and vivid enough to make Vernon and Clete spin around, mouths open in surprise.

  “Forgot my shotgun shells,” I hollered. And before either one of them could say a word to stop me, I was through the door I hadn’t locked in the first place.

  “Joseph!” I yelled, running to the storeroom. But there was no sign of him there, and my heart sank, worrying he’d gone out through the back. I called his name again as I swapped the door keys in my hand for the truck key in my pocket. And just as I was about to go look for Joseph in the alley, I heard my name from the darkest corner of the room.

  There being no time to chat, I shouted for him to follow me to the truck. Then the two of us were outside in the warm night air, running on the balls of our feet to keep our heels from clipping the concrete. I got in my side and jammed the key into the ignition, praying the engine would catch easy. And for once the heavens listened, so that as soon as Joseph had got beside me with the passenger door shut, I hit the reverse pedal and dropped the throttle level hard. The truck bucked and squealed onto Main Street like an unbroke horse. I swung its nose north. Went to neutral. Stomped the clutch. And promptly felt the engine go dead.

  There we were, ass backwards to Vernon and Clete, motor stalled, Clete shouting, Vernon sputtering, the Cadillac’s engine revving. I stepped on the starter. The truck’s motor churned and refused to catch. The Cadillac backed towards us. I saw Vernon Fish in my rearview mirror, looking angry and exhilarated all at once. Then he caught sight of Joseph next to me, and the look turned into something else altogether.

  At that moment, everything felt far away and quiet. I had no heartbeat. No breath. There was only the heavy night air against my damp skin and the stubborn whine of the truck’s engine. I hovered in that nothingness, suspended somewhere between where I needed to be and where I was, until a bullet stripped the haze from around me.

  It passed by so close that the percussion of it hurt my ears. I turned and saw Vernon’s hand raised, aiming Maybelle’s muzzle at the truck.

  Joseph shook my arm and screamed for me to go. I pressed the starter one more time. The engine rolled and caught and roared. I pushed the clutch in. First gear took. And finally, finally, we were moving north.

  “Faster,” Joseph said, quiet at first, but louder once Clete got the Cadillac moving behind us. Headlamps shone in the windscreen glass. I revved the engine high and shifted into second. Then Joseph was pointing left and saying to turn so we didn’t drive straight into the battle line of white men fighting black. I did as he said at the next street, cutting hard enough that the whole truck tilted into the turn. Our tires held the road, though, carrying us west with the twin orbs of the Cadillac’s headlamps close behind.

  Joseph leaned forward with his hands on the dashboard and said something I couldn’t hear. “What?” I shouted. “Rain,” he replied, which made no sense at all. Only it did make me think on water and how we were heading towards the Arkansas River and the long, flat stretch of road running alongside it out to Sand Springs. On a straightaway like that, the Cadillac would catch us in no time. So I banked hard right at the next street and accelerated, near bouncing out of my seat as we crossed the Frisco tracks.

  The Cadillac stuck tight.

  Then a whistle sounded loud in my ears and Joseph said “rain” again, only that time I heard the t in front of it and understood he’d been saying “train” all along. For there was a train just ahead of us on the Katy tracks, coming fast.

  I knew I couldn’t turn right because of the gun battle, or left because the C
adillac would catch us. And backwards? Well, that was no option at all.

  The Cadillac was gaining. The train whistle shrieked louder. Joseph’s hand was in front of my face, pointing to the freight engine barreling towards us on our left. “STOP!” he screamed. “STOP!”

  Only I didn’t. I mashed the throttle lever down, and gasoline flowed wide open into the truck’s gullet as we barreled towards that oncoming train. And its light shone blinding white into my window, and the roar of its whistle rattled my heart in its cage. Our front wheels hit the tracks, and we were in the air.

  Then we were plunging forward, crashing nose-first into the ground. The rear tires hit after, hard enough so the truck bounced up and down as train cars thundered behind us in a fury of screaming metal and brakes. I eased the throttle back. Joseph slumped on the bench beside me.

  “You’re crazy, Will,” he whispered. There was fear in his voice, but admiration, too.

  I clenched my right hand into a fist and opened it wide, freeing up the muscles that had locked down on the steering wheel. Did the same with my left. And there was no denying the truth in what Joseph had said.

  “Nice evening for a drive,” I said, two blocks later.

  Joseph smiled, which made me smile, too. And it was good that we didn’t have a clue what lay ahead of us. Elsewise we might well have stayed a northward course, driving until our gas was gone and the Oklahoma state line was nothing but a ghost in the dust behind us.

  The first family we saw fleeing Greenwood was on foot: two children, a man, a woman with a babe clutched tight to her chest. The man hunched forward, struggling under the weight of a lumpy, flower-embroidered sack. It was a tablecloth, loaded up, I supposed, with the family’s silverware. China. Pictures. Things they’d worked hard for. Things meant to be handed down.

  More came after them.

  “Where are they all going?” I asked Joseph.

  “Into the hills,” he replied.