“We’re already late,” Kathy yelled.
“Gimme a minute!”
Together, the friends got ready to leave, oblivious of their whole lives before them. Ashley slipped on her boyfriend, Jeremy’s, high school ring and slipped into her sneakers, the soles dusty. Out there, the cricks and grain were stitched together with dirt roads that led off the beaten paths. That land breathed under their feet, heart pounding with hunger. In wait.
3
* * *
FATHER, DANNY FREEMAN
* * *
December 29, 1999
The Day Before the Fire
Out here you’ll find no one, and no one will find you, and that was exactly its appeal when Danny Freeman moved his family from rural Vinita to West of Welch back in 1995: father, mother, son, and daughter striving for a simpler way of living.
While Kathy prepared a late breakfast, and Ashley and Lauria got ready in the trailer, forty-year-old Danny Freeman wandered out back, sipping buttered coffee with a shotgun over his shoulder and hunting ancient arrowheads. This was how you’d find him most days. His shadow before him was long, and he couldn’t catch up to it no matter how hard he tried, like he swore he could once when he was a boy. The sun warmed the quilted flannel on his shoulders. As he walked down the slight hill from his trailer to Big Cabin Creek that early afternoon, he paced along the edge of the river and listened for the familiar rasps of prairie rattlesnakes and water moccasins and other venomous pit vipers. To himself, he dared them to come out.
Danny eyed the land around him, bitter, feeling cheated by a little bit of everything: by the world, by God, by lawyers. He paced his way back toward a concrete dam at the top of the crick, where a feed bucket full of soybeans waited. With the sounds of the brook nearby, he spent the morning with fistfuls of the handpicked legumes, attracting rafters of wild turkeys. He even had the local game warden’s permission to do so, provided he kept the routine up, lest they become dependent and later starve to death as a result. Danny agreed, feeding the birds every other day, just to listen to the whishing of their wings as they came close to him. They came with harvest-colored and copper plumage, Danny’s eye catching on brief flashes of purple, red, and green.
But life weighed heavily on his shoulders, more heavily still since the death of his only boy, Shane. And Danny knew that death, once more, was lurking close, hiding out on the prairie. The sharp taste of paranoia lodged itself in the back of his throat, his shoulders winding tight. In those final days of 1999, Danny warned his friends, and warned his stepbrother, Dwayne Vancil, that she’d be a-coming, and that if anything were to happen to him, “you’d be best to look right here.” Dwayne Vancil would repeat this exhaustingly over the years, asserting that in those last days, Danny pointed a finger hard into his stepbrother’s chest and said, “If anything happens to me or my family, anything, look to the Craig County Sheriff’s Office.” Dwayne described that Danny’s demeanor struck him as “fearful” and “absolute,” traits rarely ever seen in Danny.
Some feared Danny’s paranoia was a result of his overt marijuana use. Others feared he was right. Either way, rage seared just under Danny’s skin, like sunburn at the back of his neck, mood fickle like fire. And perhaps, in many ways, the man was just … misunderstood.
After all, who could really understand a man who, once upon a time, had accidentally shot himself in the forehead?
It happened while he was cleaning a rifle, when the breech plug in the rear of the muzzleloader barrel blew back into his head and through his skull. With the plug actually lodged in his brain, Danny drove to the local hospital, waited two hours, got fed up, then drove two hours more to the city hospital, where doctors immediately rushed him in for brain surgery, replacing part of his skull with bone from his hip. The scar was a prominent badge in the middle of his forehead. So when people said that Danny was a tough guy, they meant just that.
Danny Freeman had inherited the rock-hard jaw and the bison-wide shoulders of the men before him, a lineage that emanated masculinity. Now alone, doleful, with an appetite for all things dwindling by the day, he wondered just how long it would take for him to waste away altogether. Unemployed with the exception of the odd welding jobs up in Kansas and cattail scavenges, he felt removed from the American dream of his ancestors. And the accidental injury caused crippling migraines and made steady employment an impossible feat to maintain.
He squatted on the dam, and nearing the bottom of the soybeans, Danny held the shotgun across his knees and pried his lips with a pipe. Fanned by the wings of turkeys, Danny could briefly forget it all, inhaling his grief into the depths of his lungs where it belonged, each hazy day blurring into the next. He’d rise and spend his days smoking, canvassing the riverbed for American Indian arrowheads, a hobby instilled in him since childhood. He didn’t even have to search for them; they’d just catch his eye from the mire. He swore it was a gift inherited alongside that one-eighth of Cherokee hiding somewhere in his blood.
Despite the drug-induced sway in his gait, Danny shot his gun off and caught the leather belly of a cottonmouth snake. It was the same shot that took his wife’s attention from the splinter in her thumb’s knuckle back at the trailer.
The turkeys thundered into the air, yelping against the breeze. He walked over to the snake, tucked his thumb under its jaw like a trigger, and swung it into the creek. “Bastard,” he muttered. Left with the gentle sounds of falling water, he returned to arrowhead hunting.
Then Danny, this epitome of all things virile, wept for his only son.
When Danny paused a few moments later, his eyes stung with salt as he scanned the unspoiled acreage that waved before him. Once gold from Indian grass and red with Oklahoma rose, today Welch was painted the color of sorrow. He smoked the burned resin of the pipe until there was nothing left. And when the waves of grief passed, as they always did, he swung the shotgun back over his shoulder and climbed the moderate incline back to the front of his house.
As he rounded the side of the trailer in the low winter sun, Danny watched his daughter unintentionally make the sign of the cross with her body spray, a cloud of pink in the afternoon light to smell like Cotton Candy Fantasy and hay. He passed behind her and rubbed the top of her head. “Happy birthday, Ash,” he managed, just as Lauria followed from the front door.
The girls waited for Kathy at the bottom of the precast-concrete steps. Ashley zipped up her coat as Lauria looked under the bleached skull of a longhorn that hung on the front of the house. With the girls’ backs to him, Danny stuffed the pipe deep in his jeans pocket and made his way up to the front door as his wife was leaving.
“We’ll be back in a few hours,” said Kathy as she blew the bangs from her face. “We’ll bring back the birthday cake with us.”
Danny stared her down, as he often did, and she hurried down the steps to avoid the familiar heat of his glare. Even before the night’s events would unfold into one of the most far-reaching mysteries of the Midwest, there wasn’t a person in town who hadn’t heard of Danny’s knee-jerk temper. Some even had their own accounts of how he had wound up with a scar in the middle of his forehead.