It’s dark by the time our tires crunch over my dad’s worn gravel driveway.
Finally, thankfully, the old car heaves to a stop. Exhausted, I allow the engine to die. The silence afterward feels like the vacuum of space.
“Home again, home again, jiggity-jog,” I whisper.
In the passenger seat, Nolan is asleep on Mathilda’s lap, his head resting on her bony shoulder. Mathilda’s eyes are open and her face is set. She looks strong, a tough angel under a mop of dark hair. Her eyes scan back and forth across the yard in a way that worries me.
The details emerge for me, too. There are tire marks on the lawn. The screen door yawns open in the breeze, slapping the house. The cars are gone from the garage. No lights are on inside the house. Part of the wooden fence has been knocked down.
Then, the front door begins to swing open. There is only blackness on the other side. I reach over and take Mathilda’s small hand in mine.
“Be brave, honey,” I say.
Mathilda does as she is told. She clenches the fear between her teeth and holds it there tight so that it can’t move. She squeezes my hand and hugs Nolan’s small body with her other arm. As the splintered wooden door creaks open, Mathilda does not look away or close her eyes or so much as blink. I know that my baby will be brave for me.
No matter what comes out of that door.
Laura Perez and her family were not seen or heard from again until almost one year later. They next appear on the record when registered on the rolls of the Scarsdale forced-labor camp, just outside New York City.
4. GRAY HORSE
Under surveillance, officer Lonnie Wayne Blanton was recorded giving the following description to a young soldier passing through the Osage Nation in central Oklahoma. Without the brave actions of Lonnie Wayne during Zero Hour, the human resistance may never have happened—at least, not in North America.
Them machines been on the back of my mind ever since I interviewed this kid about a thing that happened to him and a buddy of his in an ice cream shop. Gruesome deal.
Course, I never believed a man should keep a ponytail. But I sure did keep my peepers peeped after that fiasco.
Nine months later, the cars over in town went haywire. Me and Bud Cosby were sitting in the Acorn diner. Bud’s telling me about his granddaughter winning some kind of “presti-jicus international prize,” as he calls it, when people start hollerin’ outside. I hold my ground, wary. Bud trots over to the window. He rubs the dirty glass and leans over, resting his old gouty hands on his knees. Just then, Bud’s Cadillac bashes in through the front window of the diner like a deer leaping through your windshield at ninety miles an hour on a dark highway. Glass and metal spray everywhere. There’s a ringing in my ears and after a second I realize it’s Rhonda, the waitress, holding a pitcher of water and bawling her damn fool head off.
Through the new hole in the wall, I watch an ambulance tear by down the middle of the street, hit a fella trying to flag it down, and keep going. Bud’s blood is pooling out fast from under the stalled Caddy.
I light out fast through the back. Take me a walk through the woods. During my walk, it’s like nothing happened. The woods feel safe, like always. They aren’t safe for long. But they’re safe long enough for a fifty-five-year-old man in blood-soaked cowboy boots to scramble his way home.
My house is off the turnpike a hitch, headed toward Pawnee. After I step through the front door, I pour me a cup of cold coffee off the stove and set down on the porch. Through my binoculars, I see traffic on the pike is pretty much dried up. Then a convoy flies by. Ten cars driving inches from each other in single file, top speed. Nobody behind the wheel. Just them robots getting from one place to the next, fast as can be.
Past the highway, a grain combine sits in my neighbor’s north forty. Nobody’s in it, but waves of heat are rising from its idling engine.
I can’t raise a soul on my portable cop radio, the house phone ain’t cooperating, and the embers in my woodstove are the only thing keeping the chill out of my living room; the electricity has officially up and vacated the premises. The next-door neighbor is a mile off, and I’m feeling mighty lonesome.
My porch feels about as safe as a chocolate donut on an anthill.
So I don’t tarry. In the kitchen, I pack a sack lunch: bologna sandwich, cold pickle, a thermos of sweet iced tea. Then I head to the garage to see about my son’s dirt bike. It’s a 350 Honda I ain’t touched for two years. Been sittin’ in the garage gathering dust since the kid joined the army. Now, my boy Paul ain’t out there getting shot at. He’s a translator. Flaps his gums instead. Smart kid. Not like his pa.
Things the way they are, I’m feeling glad my boy is gone. This is the first time I ever felt that way. He’s my only blood, see? And it ain’t smart to put all your eggs in one basket. I just hope he has his gun on him, wherever he is. I know he can shoot it, because I taught him to.
It’s a good long minute before I get the motorbike running. Once I do, I almost forfeit my life on account of not paying proper attention to the biggest machine I own.
Yep, that ungrateful old bitch of a police cruiser tries to run me down in the garage, and she damn near does it, too. It’s a blessing that I blew the extra hundred on a solid steel Tradesman toolbox. Mine’s ruint now, with the nose of a 250-horsepower police cruiser buried in it. I find myself standing in the two-foot gap between the wall and a galdarned murderous vehicle.
The cruiser’s tryin’ to put herself into reverse, tires screeching on the concrete like the whinny of a scared horse. I draw my revolver, walk around to the driver’s side window and put a couple rounds into the little old computer inside.
I killed my own patrol car. Ain’t that the damndest thing you ever heard?
I’m the police and I got no way of helping people. It appears to me that the United States government, to whom I pay regular taxes and who in return provides me with a little thing called civilization, has screwed the almighty pooch in my time of need.
Lucky for me, I’m a member of another country, one that don’t ask me to pay no taxes. It’s got a police force, a jail, a hospital, a wind farm, and churches. Plus park rangers, lawyers, engineers, bureaucrats, and one very large casino that I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting. My country—the other one—is called the Osage Nation. And it lives about twenty miles from my house in a place called Gray Horse, the true home of all Osage people.
You want to name your kid, get married, what have you—you go down to Gray Horse, to Ko-wah-hos-tsa. By the power vested in me by the Osage Nation of Oklahoma, I do pronounce you husband and wife, as they say on certain occasions. If you got Osage blood pumping through your veins, then you will one day find yourself headed down a lonely, wandering dirt lane that goes by the name of County Road 5451. The United States government picked that name and wrote it down on a map, but it leads to a place that’s all our own: Gray Horse.
The road ain’t even marked. Home don’t have to be.
My dirt bike screams like a hurt cat. I can feel the heat blasting off the bike’s muffler through my blue jeans when I finally jam the brakes and crunch to a stop in the middle of the dirt road.