Danny leaned in the doorway and crossed his arms. “The big sweet sixteen,” he remarked, and the trace of a smile crossed his daughter’s face.
“You bet,” Ashley responded.
Lauria left her 1989 blue Chevy Cavalier with Danny’s truck and climbed into the backseat of Kathy’s car. Danny watched them drive off down the seven-hundred-foot driveway into the December frost, passing by a JUSTICE FOR SHANE sign at the property’s edge, decorated with a football signed by Shane’s classmates and a few Beanie Baby bears and candles.
Pulling up only a moment after Kathy and the girls left was Danny’s best friend, Charlie Krider, a bald man with a long beard and a bag of grass, to whom Danny waved from the front door. He came from Chetopa, the town just north of Welch but over the Kansas border, just eight miles from Danny’s house as the crow flies but a twenty-minute drive on a rocky country road. Charlie parked in front of the trailer, trying to discern through dust the tail end of Kathy’s car in his side-view mirror. “Perfect timing, I suppose,” called Charlie as he exited his truck.
Danny repeated his daughter’s words. “You bet!”
Charlie lifted his sunglasses and skimmed his eyes across the pastures for his red cattle. His fingers were shaped like spoons and the cold months chapped his lips. “Look at big mama cow and big daddy cow,” he said as he spotted them across the property. “Too bad we gotta slaughter ’em.”
Ready to partake in green communion, Danny dismissed the comment and thumbed over his shoulder for Charlie to start rolling a couple of joints without him inside the trailer. “I’m right behind you,” he said.
But there was something anticipatory about Danny from those porch steps, looking after the road’s dust from Kathy’s car on the other side of the trees. He licked the aftertaste of dope from his lips and turned his attention to the empty ends of the road, away from his missus, where Danny watched a Craig County Sheriff’s Office deputy’s car crawl slowly along the edge of his property. The police officer looked out his window and up at Danny, and Danny stared right back. The deputy’s car stopped. They watched each other without a word, the way Danny silently dared snakes out back. Danny cocked his head with a smirk and pointed his fingers in the shape of a gun, closing one eye and pulling an imaginary trigger at the deputy. The officer sneered back up at Danny, tilted his cap, and drove on after the girls.
4
* * *
BEST FRIEND, LAURIA BIBLE
* * *
December 29, 1999
The Night Before the Fire
With Ashley at her side, and Kathy driving, Lauria wiped the fog from the car window, scanning the neon lights of Route 66 as they ignited around her. The colors shone wet in her hazel eyes, streaking over the skin that maintained part of its tan from the long summer that now felt far. It was no wonder that Vinita, having been the first city in Oklahoma with electricity, felt brighter than other towns budding along the Main Street of America. Lauria’s curly brown hair was shoulder length, and she came complete with a beauty mark stamped between her right nostril and upper lip like a maker’s mark. Cozy in her blue-and-gold cheerleading jacket, which creaked with every movement, she settled, watching the sun shrink behind the historic art deco storefronts to the smell of car exhaust and deep-fried anything. The days were shrinking, with sundown at only a quarter after five.
The original plan was for Lauria to return home in rural Vinita that evening, but because they had a later start in the day than planned, and because Lauria wasn’t allowed to drive after dark, they decided they’d later ask Lauria’s parents to let her stay another night; since her house would be on the way to some of their errands, they’d stop there later.
The first stop was at a feed store to fetch food for Ashley’s goats. Lauria helped Ashley and her mother pack the clover and alfalfa into the trunk of Kathy’s Toyota before heading off to Pizza Hut in Vinita for Ashley’s birthday dinner. Lauria was oblivious to the strands of straw stuck in her curls as they squeezed into a booth and enjoyed their dinner. Lauria and Ashley talked about fairs and cars as Kathy looked on in awe, wondering how the raptures of youth were so long ago. After they ate, they crossed the highway and went to Walmart. There, Lauria helped Ashley handpick her birthday cake: white frosting piped with blue. “Chocolate. No. Vanilla. No. Chocolate,” Ashley argued with herself. Lauria, always the problem solver, offered, “Half and half,” relieving Ashley of her indecision. Nighttime fell over Route 66 during the course of their errands and the neon signs kindled. The night remained cold and bitter and would feel this way in all the years since.
They then drove to the lightless outskirts of Vinita to the home of Kathy’s mother, Celesta, and stepfather, Bill Chandler; Kathy would often haul water for drinking from there. (Contrary to several reports, the Freemans did have running water, suitable for laundry and toilets and showers; however, the water came from the Big Cabin Creek in the back of the Freeman trailer and was not drinkable. Therefore, Kathy made frequent visits to her parents’ to collect drinking water for the family.) Lauria’s house was only a few minutes from the Chandlers’, and it was their next stop.
Kathy and Ashley waited in the car as Lauria ran into her house; the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree could be seen from far across the surrounding farmlands. Her father, Jay, had just returned from his job at an auto parts store in Langley. He was a nine-to-five man always topped off with a rugged baseball cap and plaid, a Midwestern man with Jack Webb–ish features and a thick, syrupy drawl. Hurrying so as not to keep her friend and her mother waiting, Lauria dashed for her bedroom, collecting a new set of clothes in her arm.
“Whoa, whoa, where’s the fire?” Jay called out.
“My car’s over at Ashley’s, and we only just fetched the cake,” she shouted down the hall. “Can I stay over just one more night? Pretty please?”
Jay gave in, always having a hard time saying no to his only daughter. “Well, now, you know you got animals you gotta take care of tomorrow, get around and take care of your show animals and stuff. You need to be home by noon.”
Years later, Jay tells me, “Noon never came the next day.”
Lauria squealed, rushing about and stuffing a couple of bottles of nail polish in her coat pocket. She was so rushed that she nearly bolted out the door without saying goodbye. But she stopped and turned around before planting a kiss on her father’s cheek. “I love you, Dad.” They were her last words to her father as she hopped down the steps of her porch, then skipped back into the idling car. The prairie, now dark, took her in with open arms, as it always had. It had something of the delirium of adolescence about it. And I’m sure Lauria’s natural curls bounced off her shoulders, and I’m sure winter was kinder to her skin than to most people’s. As they set off, Lauria’s mother, Lorene, just on her way home from work, slowed her car to a stop beside Kathy’s on the road where the Bibles lived.
“Dad said I could stay another night.” Lauria grinned.
“Make sure you don’t forget about the dentist’s appointment in the morning. Be home at eight o’clock.”