The night before, she and Dad had gone straight from work to a charity auction. I crashed early, they got home late. Which meant they didn’t know about my internship falling through, or that I’d taken a job in the glamorous field of medical reception.
I almost told her right then and there, but the thing about Mom is, she’s nonverbal until her first cup of coffee kicks in. Before that, you’re pretty much taking your life into your own hands if you try to engage her in conversation. Which is why I skipped the heart-to-heart and decided to aim for an on-time arrival at work instead.
Other than a few joggers, the streets were still pretty empty at 7 AM. Instead of dodging all the fresh potholes on Peoria, I cut north through the city. Yes, there are lots of one-way streets and traffic signals downtown, but the lights are set up so that once you catch your first green you can avoid reds by keeping your speed at twenty-five. Besides, there’s something about downtown that feels like home to me. The buildings there are different and beautiful and old, and they give off this Art Deco vibe that makes you wish you had a flapper dress or two in your closet.
I didn’t. But I did have a playlist full of old jazz songs that Dad used to make me listen to on the way to school. Which (and I’ll never admit this to him) I loved. So I rolled my windows down and played the music loud, all the way up to the power company’s headquarters at Seventh and Detroit.
When the big brick building came into sight, I heard Dad’s voice in my head: You know, that building used to be Central High School. It was a family joke, because he’d read some book on historic Tulsa buildings one spring break and started repeating that exact same sentence every time we passed the place. Seriously—every time. For a year.
But at five past seven that morning, there were no students gathered outside the building, only a small group of rough-around-the-edges, full-grown men. Two were drinking from foam cups. One was smoking a cigarette. And the fourth looked enough like Arvin, the guy from the clinic who couldn’t get no satisfaction, that I rolled my windows up and slowed down to get a better look.
They stopped talking and watched me. Then the man, who actually was Arvin, got up and waved like he was trying to flag me down.
I waved back but didn’t stop. And I wish I could say it was for a good reason, like I was running late, or I didn’t understand that he wanted to talk to me, or I just plain spaced out. But the truth is, I didn’t stop because even though Arvin seemed harmless and sweet in the clinic, he made me nervous out on the street.
Unfortunately, slowing down had thrown off my traffic signal rhythm enough so that the Sixth Street light turned red just as I got there. Arvin was coming closer to my car. The other men watched him, laughing. I glanced up and down Sixth, hoping to see another driver. A cyclist. Anybody. “Come on,” I whispered to the light. “Turn.” Then Arvin was at my bumper and the light was still red.
I pretended I didn’t know he was there and turned right.
The happy smile on his face faded in my rearview mirror. It’s okay, I told myself. You don’t know him that well. You did the smart thing.
Which was true. But that was the moment I started suspecting there might have been something to what James had said about me after all.
I didn’t tell Tru what happened with Arvin, but I did ask about him.
“Arvin’s a good guy,” Tru said. “He spends most of his time downtown. Dr. Woods gives him bus tokens so he can come up here and check in with her once a week. Between his asthma and his diabetes, he’s in rough shape.”
“Why did he hang around so long yesterday?” I asked.
Tru shrugged. “Out on the streets, most people won’t even make eye contact with guys like Arvin. We talk to him here. Plus, there’s air conditioning.”
Which made me feel so horrible about what I’d done that morning that it was actually a relief when Tru handed me a spiral notebook full of blank message slips and told me to go through the overnight voicemail backlog.
There were a lot of messages to take down. Enough that Tru had unlocked the front door before I got to the last one. After that, the waiting room filled up so fast I barely had time to think.
There were two full-time physicians at the clinic: Dr. Woods, and a community medicine resident named Dr. Barat. There were nurses, too, and a steady trickle of medical students. “The students are the ones in short white coats,” Tru said. “A few of them are arrogant little pricks, most are great. And they’re all scared to death, so be nice.”
At noon I picked up lunch orders, texted NEED TO SEE YOU to James, and read a little bit about the history of my neighborhood to see if I could figure out what was going on there in 1921. And at the end of the day, Tru pulled me aside as I was checking—again—to see if James had texted back.
“Dr. Woods got a call saying you were interested in shadowing her. That true?”
Which kind of surprised me. I’d figured handsome old Dr. Revard from the virology lab had only wanted to get rid of me. But he’d done what he said, and even though there was plenty to keep me busy at the reception desk, I wasn’t about to pass up the chance to learn more.
“It is,” I said. And Tru walked me back to a small office filled with stacks of medical journals and told me to wait.
Two framed diplomas hung on the wall behind the desk: one from OU, one from Stanford Med. Both were summa cum laude, both belonged to Marguerite Doniece Woods. And there was music playing—a deep-voiced woman singing to a tinny guitar.
… haven’t found no eggs in my basket
Since my rooster been gone
“You like Memphis Minnie?”
The tall, dark-skinned woman behind me wore a long white lab coat, jeans, and silver Doc Martens.
“I do if that’s who’s singing,” I said.
The diamond stud in her nose flashed along with her smile. “Still, you’re probably more interested in seeing patients than in getting a lesson in old music. Am I right?”
There was no handshake, no chitchat. I liked her right away.
“The music’s good,” I said. “But yes, I would like to shadow you.”
“You’re seventeen?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You go to Booker T.?”
“Aberdeen.”
Her forehead wrinkled a little in surprise. “And you want to go into medicine?”
I should have had an answer for that right away. Namely, yes. Only what I said after a pause was, “I think so.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’d like to find out.”
“Good answer,” she said, and motioned for me to follow her up front.
At the reception desk, Dr. Woods asked Tru if he could dig up a release form for my parents since I wasn’t eighteen yet. Tru made a pained face, handed me a manila folder, and said, “It hurts that you even ask, Doc.”
“Get it signed and you can start tomorrow,” she told me. “Say, two thirty?” She looked at Tru for approval.
He sighed. “I suppose. If she gets her work done and takes a shorter lunch break.”
“You mean skip it completely?” I said.
“Yep.” Tru grinned. Then he spotted a toddler bolting for the door and took off fast to snatch him up by the back of his overalls.
“That’s a good man right there,” Dr. Woods said.
Tru dropped the toddler into the seat next to his worn-out mother, and after he’d said something that made her nod, he picked up her wailing baby in its carrier and took it back to the reception desk. He answered the ringing phone with one hand and rocked the carrier with the other. The baby quit crying. The mother caught her wiggly toddler up and kissed the top of his head.
Dr. Woods stayed put long enough to watch the whole scene unfold. Then one of the nurses called a patient from the doorway, and Dr. Woods was on the move again. “There are some extra lab coats in the breakroom closet,” she said, glancing back just long enough so I knew she was talking to me. “Find one that fits. We’ll start tomor
row.”
James lives out east in a neighborhood full of flat-roofed one-story houses from the 1960s. A lot of the bigger places from back then have been remodeled with shiny wood floors and kitchens that look more like movie sets than places actual people cook. But James’s house isn’t one of those. His is small and cluttered and covered in old wall-to-wall shag carpet that smells like the last owner’s dog no matter how many times he sprays it with Febreze.
I went over there after work even though he’d never texted me back. If I hadn’t spent most of my afternoon hoping Arvin would show up at the clinic so I could apologize to him for driving away, I might not have. Only Arvin hadn’t, and I was sick of feeling small and ugly. It was time to make something right.
Of course, the driveway was empty. C’mon, I thought, ringing the doorbell. Please let Ethel be in the garage. But no one came then, or after my second and third tries, either. I started getting paranoid, imagining James hiding out in his room while I stood there like an idiot. I even thought about going around to the side of the house and calling his number to see if I could hear his phone through the bedroom window.
Yes, I had completely lost it.
The only thing that saved me from utter humiliation was hearing Ethel’s rumble down the street. James pulled into the driveway, cut the ignition, and stared at his hands awhile before he finally got out and stood behind the door.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey yourself. Why didn’t you text me back?”
He stepped out from behind the door and closed it.
“Because apologizing by text is a dick move.”
A relieved whoosh of air hiccuped past the knot in my throat. Then we were hugging, and it was like Mom pulling me out of the fountain all over again.
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the buttons of his shirt press into my cheek.
“Don’t even. I was a complete jerk.”
And that was all we needed to say.
As we pulled apart, James glanced toward his neighbor’s house. “We’d better go inside before Mrs. Beris gets the wrong idea. She keeps trying to set me up with her granddaughter, and I think I finally managed to convince her last week that aromantic asexuals like me really do exist—even here in Tulsa.”
“Too late.” I waved at the droopy woman in curlers peeking out from behind polka-dotted curtains.
“Shit,” James groaned. “Now I’m gonna to have to start all over again.”
“Either that, or you can just tell her you think her granddaughter’s ugly,” I said.
He stroked his chin. “Interesting…”
“You wouldn’t.”
“You’re right. Now that she’s seen me with you, she’d never believe I’m not into ugs.”
I hit him. Hard.
“Bully.”
“Asshole.”
Both of us cracked up.
We were back.
“The skeleton must be W. T. or J. Goodhope,” I said. We were on the rug in James’s room—the nice one he’d bought to cover the avocado carpet—with the receipt from the skeleton’s wallet pressed open in front of us.
James typed Goodhope 1921 Tulsa into his laptop. “It’s all race riot stuff. Nothing with ‘Goodhope.’ But here… wait…”
He typed some more.
“Okay, so the riot started Tuesday, May thirty-first, and ended the next day, June first. That means J. Goodhope made his final payment on May twenty-seventh, four days before then. And hang on… yeah. All the payments were made on Fridays.”
I searched Victory Victrola Shop Tulsa on my phone. Got nothing.
James retried it with the date. “Nope,” he muttered. “But if there was a shop in town with that name, then there has to be a record of it somewhere. We’re just not looking the right way.”
“Nerd,” I said.
He pointed to the stuff on his walls: a TARDIS poster, a wooden PLATFORM 9¾ sign, eight framed Deadpool covers. “I am a geek,” he said. “You, Little Miss 4.0, are the nerd.”
I folded the receipt back up and told him to be nice or I wouldn’t tell him about the crazy anthropologist in our back house.
He pushed the laptop away, propped his elbows on his knees, and rested his chin on his hands. “You know I’m all about crazy anthropologists,” he said. “Spill.”
So I told him about Geneva and how she’d taken the body to her lab but managed to get the weird rust spot off the gun while she was still at our place.
“What was underneath?” he asked.
“The word Maybelle, etched into the metal.”
He frowned. “I don’t think I’d name my gun Maybelle.”
“I don’t think you’d own a gun in the first place.”
“Good point. But listen, in related news, I read last night how gangs of white men went through neighborhoods during the riot, banging on doors to make sure no one was trying to hide black people.”
I sighed. “That is seriously messed up.”
“Yes, it is. But what if one of those gangs found a black guy in your back house, killed him, and hid his body there?”
“Why would they bother hiding it?” I said. “It’s not like anyone was going to arrest them.”
James pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and let out a long, frustrated growl from the back of his throat. “Jesus! What’s wrong with people?”
I stood up and stretched. “I don’t know, but I have to train really early to get to work on time. We still on for the concert Friday night?”
James took his hands away from his eyes and blinked fast against the light. “Definitely.”
“Seven o’clock?”
He gave me his you-are-a-control-freak-but-I-love-you-anyway look.
“On the dot,” he said. “Just like always.”
WILLIAM
My knees weren’t any too steady after I escaped the cigar shop. Not that it surprised me to see Vernon with a gun, mind you. I had one, and so did plenty of other folks. A shotgun, at least. Or a rifle. But Vernon had aimed that Colt M1911 dead at my heart and held it there, telling me what a fool the soldier he’d gotten it from had been for not marking his kills on the gun’s side.
He’d set it down on the counter after a while but talked on and on, boasting how her name was Maybelle, and how he’d carved the first of her three notches the day after he got her. “I went to visit a friend at his farm,” he’d said. “Caught this old nigger skulking around their pasture fence, swore he was only passing by on his way home from building pews at church. But I knew from his eyes that he was out to thieve. Weren’t no eyes left in his head once Maybelle finished with him.”
Which scared me good, since the weird shine in Vernon’s own eyes left no doubt as to the veracity of his claim. And then he said how the second notch came after he and his Klan pals tracked down a Negro boy accused of stealing chickens from a farmer way up in Vinita, and the third after an uppity youth on the north side of town sassed him. “That boy I shot as a mercy,” Vernon added with a wink. “Seeing’s how mightily the poor lad was suffering after we dragged him most of a mile behind Elmer Daughtry’s Tin Lizzie.”
I wanted to write Vernon’s claims off as him being a braggart and a liar. Wanted him to stop talking and let me leave. But I couldn’t and he didn’t. So I tried my best to look impressed instead of sick at my stomach, and when the chance finally came for me to excuse myself, I made such a hash of it that Vernon thought I was asking to use his john. Which worked in my favor, for, as he put it, no mongrel was going to take a piss in his establishment.
That was the point at which I stumbled out onto the street, grateful for the distracting smell of coal smoke from the brickyard ovens, and so hell-bent on getting to work that I nearly missed the person I’d played hooky to speak with in the first place.
Joseph was a little ways past the shop, arranging parcels in his bicycle basket for delivery.
“Wait!” I ran up to him, holding my homemade receipt. Joseph’s forehead wrinkled, which I’d begun
to suspect was the only display of emotion he allowed himself in front of people. Ones like me, at least.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A balance sheet,” I said. “To keep track of your payments.”
He asked whether Pop had written it or me. When I answered truthfully, he handed the paper back like the useless thing it was. “Thank you,” he said. “I won’t be needing this.”
Which took me by surprise and set me to stammering how it was proof he was making his payments, and how he should take it because that was the right and proper way to do business.
“The rules aren’t the same for me as they are for you,” Joseph replied, shaking his head. “Don’t you know that, Will?” Which put my nose out of joint so bad that I told him he was being rude, and that I was only trying to do him a favor at no small risk to myself.
Joseph’s face went blank as the cloudless sky overhead. He eyed the receipt. Said, “Thank you, Mr. William. But I can’t accept.” And got back on his bicycle.
“That all you got to say?” I near shouted, frustrated at how easily he’d turned my good intentions into a fool’s errand. And the quickest flash of hate you ever did see danced across the dark of his eyes.
I stood there, feeling awkward and a fool. Joseph put one foot on a pedal and said, real quiet, “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve a funeral to attend.”
Only then did I notice the band of mourning black around his upper arm.
“Who died?” I asked stupidly.
Joseph’s eyes were flat. “Nobody important, Mr. William. Only a Negro boy like me.”
The Dobbs family had been rich once. Oil rich. It was a common enough thing, men born in one-room shacks coming west to dig fortunes up from underneath the hard-packed Oklahoma dirt. But just as fast as the money came in, it could all disappear in the same kind of risky business venture that earned it in the first place.
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