“Toots, hon?” Carol found her voice first. “We’ve been so worried about you.”
Toots stood, staring to the side so we could see only half her face. She looked tiny, poor little thing, no more scrawny than before, but slowed way down. If she was injured I couldn’t see it there in the dim light, but I could hear her hollow breathing. I had to lean on the door jamb and stare at the threshold, so as not to feel dizzy finding this husk of someone I knew well. We stood for one more moment before it was clear she wasn’t going to ask us in.
“We were wondering if you wanted to go to O’Mealy’s with us,” Carol said.
“No,” Toots whispered. “Thanks.”
“You know, Toots, by the time you dress and we get over there, the line’ll be down,” I offered, but she didn’t say anything.
“Would you like just me to stay a while?” Carol asked. I could see Toots breathing big, but all we got was a tiny turn of her head, no.
“Well, okay,” Carol said, “we’ll be checking on you later.”
Of course, we couldn’t go to the cafeteria without them. Right then I’d have had to guess we wouldn’t ever go to O’Mealy’s again.
After we got out of our church clothes, Carol made some tuna salad. I told her I wanted to put mine in a sandwich and take it out in the backyard to the picnic table. She said fine, but she’d stay in the air conditioning.
I made my sandwich and took some paper towel to wipe off the table, but I felt funny, sitting out there in the sun by myself with the bees circling ’round. I don’t think we ever ate Sunday dinner apart before, even if it was only tuna salad. The heat and the bees and the smell of tuna were making me sick. It felt like somebody had died. It just caved me in to think about Ray and Toots over at their house, tiptoeing around each other, completely flung off track. I caught Carol looking out the window above the kitchen sink, and I squinted. The screen darkened her face, so it was hard to make out her expression, hard to know what she was thinking.
§
Hillary O’Brian’s
Cadillac Voices
This writer takes on those who put on airs about their family’s Oklahoma past.
GENTLEMAN?
I’d just like to say a word or two about a certain kind of Cadillac “gentleman.” I won’t name any names, but they will know who they are. I call a person like I’m talking about, “Uncle Alphonse.” And you may know a few yourself.
I hear this type telling new people that they come from one of the “old families” of Oklahoma, descended from the founders. Shoot! Who wasn’t. Oklahoma didn’t become a state until 1907.
Sure, our folks were here—living in a sod house, keeping warm burning buffalo chips. Yet Alphonse will call his relatives cattlemen, just because they owned some cows. And any one of his ancestors who went to the normal schools that trained teenagers to become teachers, Alphonse will call Scholars.
What happened to those early settlers after that break-neck wagon race was a lot of spirit-crushing work and sickness that weeded out some of the folks like Alphonse who can’t call things by their right names.
We laugh and look down on Alphonse. We know he’s weak, trying to lift himself up backwards, painting in a made-up past instead of working toward a better future. In Oklahoma we want you to know just how dirt poor we started out, so you can appreciate how far we’ve come. Who wants to be seen as some namby-pamby fancy pants in a state full of cowboys!
Sam Slocum
Cadillac resident since 1965
DON’T TURN AROUND
2013
“Don’t turn around! I have a gun,” I said and watched my husband of forty-two years place a shaky hand on the hutch to steady himself. I’d come up behind him. He probably thought I was still down at church. His hearing isn’t all that great these days. Mine either.
This is how we always do it. While I run down and do the altar flowers, he sits as long as he wants over his breakfast. He says a man who keeps a store six days a week shouldn’t have to rush on Sundays. He dresses, and then I dash back from doing the flowers to dress, and we go to church together. Afterwards we go to the cafeteria, so I don’t have to cook on Sundays. We worked this out years ago. We also go where he wants on vacation one year and where I want the next. We have a schedule so we avoid running into each other in the one bathroom. It’s what marriage is.
Clarence, hands still up, wasn’t moving. “Barb?” His voice was hardly recognizable. I thought I’d been kidding about the gun, but some sort of authority had crept into my voice that kept my husband from turning around. Amazing. Did he feel guilty about something, expecting one day I’d catch him? Hogwash! Thoughts of his skimming from the collection plate or having a sweetie on the side were out of the question, though somehow those thoughts were thrilling to me right now—us having a showdown over Clarence’s sins, me about to become a wild-eyed picture on the front page of The Courier—Crime of Passion. But I knew Clarence was guilt free. It was me who felt desperate. Not desperate for money or love. Just desperate. A busting out feeling in my chest. A sense of being a danger to myself.
“Tell me something, Clarence.”
“What, what?” He sounded like he was about to cry.
“Tell me your heart’s desire.” What was I saying? Heart’s desires were for kids. But I waited to see what he’d say. “Come on. Spit it out!”
“All— All my life,” Clarence began and rested his hand back on the hutch, “I wanted to be a singer.” He paused now, his shoulders rising and falling with the effort to get this out. “In a nightclub where the audience is real close, and I could talk to them and sing for them, and they could sing along sometimes or make requests. Just me and the audience in a small dark room, together, singing.”
Good grief! Not being drinkers, we didn’t go to nightclubs. Clarence was tone deaf besides. That’s why I always insisted we sit on the front pew, so there’d be no one in front of him to hear him braying his soul out. I hated the thought of his wanting to be a singer. It was embarrassing. He never would have said this to my face.
“What is your heart’s desire?” he asked, still not turning around.
“I haven’t got a heart’s desire,” I blurted. Did he think this was a game? This was over.
“Ah, sure you do,” he said, more in his old tone of voice.
My heart was pounding. This felt dangerous.
“Just say it,” he said.
“I wish—I wish I had a gun,” I said, and he jerked with laughter. I laughed too.
But already I was dreading the time when this craziness would have dried up into a joke, something so thin and meaningless he would tell friends, “Did I tell you about the time my wife pulled a gun on me.” No! We mustn’t ever talk about this. No one would believe it anyway. It was about as likely as our car veering off the road into another dimension.
“I guess I can turn around now, since you don’t—?” he began.
“No!”
“But I’ve got to get dressed. Can’t show up at Grace Way Baptist in my p.j.’s.”
“You’re going to make a joke of this aren’t you? The rest of our lives you’re going to be asking me if I’m armed. Aren’t you?”
He turned around slowly. “You could tell it,” he said softly. “Tell how at the point of a gun you forced your poor husband to confess his unattainable dream. I think what we have here is a draw.” He made a little smile.
“I guess,” I said. I wanted to shoot us both. “We’re gonna forget this, right?”
“Why would we want to forget this, the most thrilling moment I’ve had in ages?”
“You can’t sing in nightclubs.”
“But I could sing for you,” he said, arms reaching as though he were singing. “We could stick candles in wine bottles the way they do at the Italian place.”
“We are Baptists. We don’t have any wine bottles.”
After Sunday dinner I walked slowly across the parking lot. Clarence had marched ahead as usual to open up the car and s
tart the A/C. I couldn’t do this—live with a man with an unattainable dream. It would be like a virus that lived in his system and flared up unexpectedly like malaria. I wanted him to tell me he’d just made it up about the nightclub just to get my goat. But I knew it was true, and I felt uneasy just knowing it—like a crack in my life through which any kind of cockamamie stuff might creep in.
Had I always known about this side of Clarence? I broke into a sweat and stopped to lift my arm against the blazing sun. I understood now, his awkwardness, fighting that desire to open his arms and sway with the music. He’d lived his life holding that down, not swaggering when he walked, not breaking into song. And he would have gone on, successfully defeating those urges if it hadn’t been for my stupid, imaginary gun.
I saw him now, leaned back against the car, his arms folded, hat pushed back like a kid with his first jalopy. He was grinning at me like I had a camera. Oh, mercy!
§
Hillary O’Brian’s
Cadillac Voices
This seasoned citizen sheds a fresh light on family traditions.
FAMILY
You know around here, really, there are just two kinds of families. Those who know they got troubles and might even tell you about them if you asked. These people always shock me with their let-it-all-hang-out attitude. Talking outside the home was taboo for us. But I guess the talkers are better off than my folks, who pasted over the bad things like they could get finished with the past if they could just sell us, their own children, on the made-up things, flimsy stories to prove how innocent and smart we were.
The problem is, told so often the pretty fib, we began to feel a little flimsy ourselves and put our shoulders to the wheel in the family business of not being who everybody else in Cadillac said we were—a whole family wrapped in layers of cellophane.
I forget how cut off I am and think joy is only motions other people go through, leaving me ashamed even of my loneliness. People will look at me funny, after they read this, but I am old now, and I don’t care.
Marcus Shane
Cadillac Resident since 1952
JAMIE-GWEN
2012
Sheriff Jake Hale sat at his usual table at the Busy Bee Cafe. He was more troubled by the events of the night before than by other cases that involved a gunshot death.
“The usual?” Murleen the waitress asked.
The sheriff nodded without taking his gaze off the worn Formica tabletop. One shot had been fired from the victim’s own rifle, killing him in his bed, possibly when he was asleep. There were no signs of a fight. Jake thought the victim’s fourteen-year-old daughter might have been raped, although her mother, who had been asleep with younger children in another room, said the bloody tights found in a third bedroom were from the girl’s period. The girl herself refused a rape kit. The rifle Jake brought back to the station turned out to have been wiped clean of fingerprints.
The neighbor who’d called Jake said the victim was a violent man. She’d seen him in a rage throw the older daughter to the ground and “wale the tar out” of any of the kids who caught his attention. “And that useless mother—,” the neighbor had sputtered. “That oldest girl was the only real mother those children had.”
Jake had told the other neighbors nothing—routine inquiry, blah, blah. So, except for the body which was on its way to the county medical examiner, it was like nothing had happened. No one was grieving. No one was complaining, insisting he catch a bad guy. The newspaper hadn’t picked it up. Yet. There was only a great silence from that household.
The girl, tall and thin, who had stood in the corner of the bedroom not three feet from the body, was the real puzzle. Still as an inanimate thing, neither breathing nor appearing to have any emotion, her presence had filled the sheriff with a kind of dread. And today, not able to get her out of his mind, he didn’t understand at all what had happened in that house.
Jake didn’t want to talk to his deputies; Curly was like a sieve when it came to spreading gossip. Fred was more discreet or maybe just didn’t have any friends to talk to. If Jake had to get one involved, he’d use Fred.
The only other customer in the Busy Bee that day was Sloane Willard, a widower, who ate here occasionally, a tall, lean man who folks said had a cracker-jack legal mind. After a while Jake, who usually preferred to work out mysteries alone, stood up and walked over to the old man’s table. “Mind?” the sheriff asked.
“Not at all,” Willard said and folded up the newspaper spread on the table. “There isn’t a lot of news in The Courier today anyway.”
Thank God, thought Jake. “You’re a lawyer, Mr. Willard.”
“Retired.”
“That’s good, because I’d like to pick your brain and not pay for it.”
They both chuckled, and Murleen brought Jake’s BLT, french fries and iced tea to the table.
“Do you know the Wainwright family?” Jake asked.
“I once made a will for a grandmother by that name.”
“I got a call from a woman who lives across the yard from a family named Wainwright. She said she had watched the older of the neighbor girls standing in the yard in the middle of the night. The girl looked okay, so the neighbor went back to bed. A while later she heard one shot and called me. I found the victim dead in his bed from a close range shot to the heart. His own rifle had been fired. No prints on it.”
“Did it look like he’d done it himself?”
“Not really. One of the victim’s daughters was standing in a corner of the bedroom looking, I don’t know, like nothing had happened. Vacant. Not just a teenager with no opinions, but convincingly empty.”
“Did she say anything?”
“I think she’s retarded or just mute.”
“Did she look shaken? Were her clothes torn?”
“What she was wearing when I got there looked okay. I found a bloody pair of tights in another bedroom. Her mother said they were hers. There are other children, three younger brothers and a younger sister, age eleven or twelve.”
“What was the older girl’s name?”
“Hyphenated.” Jake fished the notepad out of his hip pocket. “Jamie-Gwen.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that girl,” the lawyer said. “She was the heir to the grandmother’s will. The grandmother brought her to my office. She was only about seven then, clearly smart and happy as could be about what her grandmother was doing for her, the only one of those children the woman left anything to. The grandmother had very little. She said she was going to ‘put it all on the fastest pony.’”
Mr. Willard had finished his lunch and Jake gave the second half of his sandwich to Murleen to wrap up so he could take it with him.
“Thanks, Mr. Willard.” Jake stood up.
“If you don’t start calling me Sloane, I’ll have to start billing you.”
Jake drove to the Wainwright’s house, a ramshackled two-story that might have been grand once but now in the light of day he could see nearly all the paint was gone, the gutter above the front door had buckled, and others were sprouting weeds. He knocked and waited. Finally Mrs. Wainwright opened the door a crack. “May I come in?” Jake asked.
“Oh no, Sheriff. I’m really not decent.”
“I actually wanted to speak with your daughter, Jamie-Gwen.”
“Oh, she can’t talk. She’s upset about her daddy.”
“Mrs. Wainwright, I don’t want to have to subpoena your daughter. Bring her to the door.”
After an angry sigh, the woman stepped aside to reveal that her daughter had been right beside her.
“Let’s talk out here,” Jake said. “Mrs. Wainwright, you should join us because Jamie-Gwen is a minor.”
She shut the door. The yard offered only a broken swing for seating, so Jake invited Jamie-Gwen to sit on the brick front steps. “I’m sorry for the loss of your father.”
The girl said nothing. Tall and bony with dark, unwashed, tangled hair, she sat on the step, knees up, angular as a stork, h
er thin dress sliding up her thighs. Her vacant gaze focused on the crumbling brick walk in front of her.
“Until your mother comes out, I can’t really interview you.”
The girl didn’t move and Jake could feel her growing even more remote. “So where are you in school?”
Not a peep. Jake looked at the girl’s long hands, nails chewed to the quick, but no other hints that anything unusual might have happened to her last night. Jake looked up into the bright sunshine. Above their head in an ancient willow, birds chirped like the world wasn’t dark and ugly down here.
“She’s not coming,” the girl whispered.
“Why not?”
“She doesn’t—” The girl continued to stare at the brick. Finally she said, “—participate.”
“Does your family have a lawyer they prefer?”
Jake could see the girl’s shoulders rise with an inhale, but she said nothing.
Jake didn’t want to arrest her, at least not until he got the forensics on those bloody tights which he’d sent, along with the body, to the medical examiner.
When Jake got home he called Sloane Willard. “What kind of law did you practice?”
“Oh, I was your legal jack-of-all-trades—estates, civil, criminal. Cadillac was small when I started out. My name used to be scrawled on plenty of jailhouse walls around the county.”
“I think Jamie-Gwen Wainwright may have shot her father after he raped her.”
“Really?” Old Willard sucked air. “How old is she now?”
“Fourteen.”
“Hell. Oklahoma’s new Youthful Offender law says if the charge is murder one, a fourteen-year-old suspect has to be tried as an adult. But you know that.”
“Yeah.” Jake made a dry cough. “You’re not my lawyer, but I hope you’ll keep a confidence.”
“Go on.”
“I’ve been thinking about this case. And I’m going to keep on thinking about it. But right now I sure would like to call this a suicide.”
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