Dreamland Burning

by Jennifer Latham

  It wasn’t something I’d ever considered, but my answer came out before I knew it was there: “I get back up.”

  The skin around her eyes crinkled as she smiled. “Good. Too many young folks these days think life owes them. I was hoping you knew better.”

  She looked around the room. “Arvin was such a gentle soul,” she said. “Loved making people happy. I remember once when he was just a little thing, he walked the two miles between his mama’s place and mine to bring me birthday flowers. Prettiest bouquet of dandelions and poison ivy you ever did see. But he was so pleased with himself, standing there on my front porch, itching, that I didn’t have the heart to disappoint him. So I put on my dishwashing gloves and dumped that poison ivy into an old coffee can with some water and set it out back. Washed the poison off his hands and arms as best I could, too, but by the next morning, he was covered in blisters up to his armpits.”

  It was easy picturing Arvin as a little boy. And I should have laughed at Tilda’s story for her sake, but a tear ran down my cheek instead.

  She handed me a tissue from her big patent leather purse. “Never knew anyone so good at making you laugh and cry all at once as my nephew. He was something special.”

  “I didn’t know him very well,” I said. “But I’m going to miss him.”

  She patted my arm. “We all will, honey. Now, there’s something I need to know, and you’re the only one who can tell me.”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Did he suffer?”

  She sounded strong, but her lips trembled.

  “No,” I said. And I sounded strong, too, and my lips did not tremble. I owed her that much.

  Tilda closed her eyes and whispered a thank-you prayer, and when she was done, said quietly, “Thank the Lord. That boy shouldered more than his share of hurt as it was.”

  Then the softness in her disappeared, and she put her purse strap in the crook of her elbow and stood up.

  “You’re a skinny thing,” she declared. “I’m getting you a slice of my pie before it’s all gone.”

  I thanked her and said I wasn’t very hungry.

  “Oh, you don’t want to miss out on my pie. Took me forty years to pry that recipe out of my friend Opal’s hands. It was her gramma’s.”

  She winked at me.

  “Best peach pie you ever had.”

  WILLIAM

  I knew from my earlier visit to the Goodhopes’ house that it was small but tidy, with tended grass and a dish of pansies on the porch steps.

  When Joseph and I arrived together, clouds blotted out the moon and the street was dark as pitch. It was quiet, too. So much that if it weren’t for the sound of gunshots in the distance, you could have convinced me easy that Joseph and I were the only two people left in the world.

  “Ruby?” Joseph called once we’d got inside.

  No reply came.

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll look around.”

  It didn’t take him long, but in those few lightless minutes, I felt the walls of the tiny house press so close around me that I understood why Joseph wanted a Victrola for his mama. Music opened up space where there wasn’t any, and lit up skies inside you that ceilings couldn’t hold in. Suddenly, I wanted there to be music in that house, too. And not just for Mrs. Goodhope, but for Joseph and Ruby, as well.

  The floorboards creaked, and Joseph was back at my side saying Ruby wasn’t there. I asked where we should look next, and he’d just managed to say “The Dreamland Theatre, maybe,” when lantern light peeked through a side window.

  “Don’t seem worth the trouble, Eugene,” came a loud voice. “These are just shanties.” A second chimed in, “Aw, horsefeathers. Your family’s place ain’t no bigger, Jack. Besides, maybe we’ll find keys to that truck inside one of ’em. I could sure use a new truck.”

  Joseph and I pressed against the wall, standing so close our shoulders touched. Fists knocked against wood next door. The voice that went with Jack hollered, “Kick it in!” Then the lantern light bounced like crazy, and there were thuds and a crack and both those boys set to whooping and hollering, “We got you now! Ain’t no use tryin’ to hide!”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Tyler,” Joseph whispered. I saw anger in the set of his shoulders, heard it in his quick, shallow breathing.

  “Your shotgun loaded?” he asked.

  I said it was, but that I’d left my shells at the shop and only had the one round. “It’ll have to do,” he replied, and told me his plan, asking if I thought I could pull it off.

  I didn’t. But I said yes anyway.

  Then Joseph opened the door and stepped onto the porch. I got behind him. Squeezed my eyes shut. Pressed the Springfield’s muzzle to his spine. And shouted: “Make one wrong move and I’ll shoot you dead!”

  Next thing I knew, a big punkin-headed boy not much older than myself was in the Goodhopes’ yard, double-barreled shotgun in one hand, lantern in the other. He had a thick look about him, like maybe his mama had dropped him on his head a time too many. But he was big as a bull, and muscled like a sideshow strongman.

  “That boy giving you trouble?” he asked.

  “Nothin’ I can’t handle,” I replied. “I’m just lettin’ him know what’s what.”

  A jack-o’-lantern grin spread across his face. “’Bout time someone did,” he said. “My name’s Eugene. Wait here.”

  He turned and lumbered back inside the Tylers’ house.

  “We’re fools if we don’t make a break for it,” I whispered. “Couldn’t agree more,” Joseph whispered back. But neither one of us took so much as a step towards the truck. And when the gray-haired couple stumbled out onto the porch, lantern light silhouetting their thin, bowed legs through the cloth of their nightshirts, I knew we’d been right to stay.

  A lean, hollow-cheeked white boy came out of the house behind them. After he and Eugene had forced them to march over to us, Eugene set the lantern down and said his friend’s name was Jack. Jack had a rifle. And even though Eugene was big enough to give anyone pause, Jack scared me more. For his eyes were hooded and blank, and his expression never changed as he pushed the old man hard enough to send him sprawling down the stairs onto all fours.

  “Evening,” Jack said.

  I told him hello, and we all watched Mr. Tyler pull himself onto his knees. Eugene slapped the back of his head when he got there.

  “Lookee what Methuselah here tried to hide,” he said, dangling a gold pocket watch from one hand. “We found it wrapped up in oilcloth and hidden in the flour bin. Thought you were bein’ clever, dincha, boy?”

  He slapped Mr. Tyler again.

  “Answer him!” Jack barked. And Mr. Tyler’s mouth opened to speak, but Jack smashed the butt of his rifle into the man’s temple before he could. His frail body crumpled sideways onto the dirt. Mrs. Tyler cried out and fell to her knees. Eugene planted the thick sole of his boot in the curve of her back and kicked, sending her forehead into the ground.

  Still, Joseph didn’t move.

  Mrs. Tyler whimpered.

  “Shut up,” Jack barked.

  I cleared my throat loud and nudged Joseph’s shoulder with the Springfield, saying, “At least you got somethin’ for your trouble. Ain’t nothin’ in this one’s house. He’s poor as dirt!”

  Eugene laughed a dullard’s laugh. Jack’s lips pulled back from his crooked teeth. “Best take what you can out of his hide, then,” he said. By which I figured he meant I should beat Joseph, or shoot him, or both.

  “Nah,” I said, lies flowing off my tongue like God himself put them there. “I know a fella over to Convention Hall, gives me five dollars for every live Negro I deliver.”

  Which piqued Eugene’s interest enough to make him look at the Tylers like maybe he’d let them live after all. Jack appeared dubious. And though his rifle stayed pointed at the ground, I knew he’d have it at his shoulder quick as could be if he felt the need.

  “Why would anyone do that?” he asked. To which I replied I didn’t know, but
I wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Then a shot rang out nearby, and every one of us in that yard tensed. And there was nothing but threat in Jack’s voice when he spoke into the quiet that followed, saying, “Come to think of it, neither am I. So I’m wondering if maybe Eugene and I oughtn’t just take your truck and deliver these three to Convention Hall ourselves.”

  And I never will forget that moment so long as I live, for it was the first time I ever contemplated taking another man’s life. But there was the small matter of Eugene’s shotgun and Jack’s rifle, and the fact that neither boy seemed opposed to using them. So instead of shooting him from over Joseph’s shoulder, I said I’d advise him against it.

  “Oh you would, would you?” he replied.

  “Yes,” I said, and asked did he remember how a gang of men had dragged that white car thief, Roy Belton, out of jail last year and lynched him while the police kept a lookout.

  Jack nodded. Eugene’s eyes got big in the lamplight.

  Then I said how the man paying me for live Negroes had been the leader of that gang, and that he knew me and my truck since we’d delivered ten to him already. “And he don’t take any more kindly to car thieves now than he did back then,” I added. After which I pulled all five of Mama’s ten-dollar bills from my pocket and fanned them out for Jack to see.

  The money shifted something in Jack.

  “Here’s the fifty he gave me already,” I told him. “Cash. And since I’d hate to see the two of you get your necks stretched for stealing my pop’s truck, what say I just give you the fifteen dollars I’ll get for these three Negroes, right here and now, with five more thrown in for good measure?”

  Eugene glanced at Jack. I shifted the Springfield’s muzzle higher on Joseph’s back. Jack saw, and tilted the barrel of his rifle with his left hand, making ready to shoulder it.

  “What say we make it fifty?” he asked. Only he wasn’t really asking at all.

  Joseph’s hand twitched. Jack lifted the rifle higher.

  I nodded big. “Fifty, then. Fifty sounds fair to me.”

  At which point Jack shouldered his rifle all the way and dropped his cheek down and squinted at me through the sight.

  “Get it from him,” he told Eugene. “And don’t block my shot.”

  Eugene came around Joseph and swiped the bills from my outstretched hand. “Got it,” he said.

  Jack told him to get back. I poked Joseph with the Springfield, saying, “Help ’em up, boy.”

  Joseph hesitated. I prodded him again. “Help ’em up, I said!”

  Which changed the feel of the air between me and Jack and Eugene enough so all three of us could feel it. Joseph must have, too, for he helped Mrs. Tyler to her feet, then gathered Mr. Tyler into his arms. And he lifted the old man’s body out of the dirt as if it were a child’s, and carried him to the truck with Mrs. Tyler limping alongside.

  I followed, gun to their backs. And I never did look behind me. Not as I walked. Not as I waited for Mrs. Tyler to pull herself into the truck. Not even as I made a show of binding Joseph’s wrists together in front of him with a length of the twine Pop kept in back. For by the secondhand glow of the lantern on the porch, I’d seen Mr. Tyler’s eyes open and blink against the blood from his temple and stare up at the inky sky.

  He was alive.

  We were all alive.

  And for that one brief moment, alive was enough.

  Ghosts walked the streets of Tulsa that night. Banshees, too. Back when she’d been alive, Granny Tillman loved telling me how her family’s banshee in the old country would keen warnings two days prior to a death. The ones haunting Tulsa weren’t so generous, for not a block after an ice water wail had pierced the warm air around me, I found a dead man on the street.

  Judging from the swatch of uncharred skin between his shirtsleeve and the burned stump of his right hand, he’d been a Negro once. A length of rope looped around his neck and snaked along the street behind him. His body was broken, his suit in tatters. Someone had dragged him behind an automobile, though whether or not he’d been alive when it happened was a detail I chose not to ponder overmuch.

  His killers had left him splayed across the middle of the street so that there was no way to pass without hitting him. And though my main worry was getting the Tylers to a doctor, driving over a dead man was something I could not do. So I stopped the truck and got out, and not thirty seconds later, Joseph was kneeling at my side, praying aloud as he shucked off the loose-bound length of twine I’d wrapped around his wrists. I bowed my head and listened.

  “We have to move him,” Joseph said when his prayer was done.

  “Where?” I asked, and we searched each other’s faces in the glow of the headlamps for answers neither one of us had. Then I climbed into the back of the truck to fetch one of the oilcloth tarps Pop kept there. Dark as it was, I couldn’t see the Tylers. But I could hear the missus gently shushing her husband’s groans.

  “Won’t be long now,” I whispered. “We’ll get you somewhere safe.”

  “Ain’t no place safe for us,” she whispered back. “But I heard tell there’s a white church on Boston Avenue giving sanctuary.”

  I told her I’d do my best to get us there. Then I carried the tarp back to the burned man, and me and Joseph rolled him onto it and wrapped the fabric around him twice. After we’d lifted him into the truck, Joseph handed me the twine and said I should bind his wrists again just in case. “Makes me a more credible prisoner,” he added, ignoring the way both our hands shook.

  “You think Ruby might be at the Dreamland?” I asked, mostly as a means of distraction.

  “Might be,” he replied. “But if she is, there’s men better than us looking out for her. Trained gunmen and soldiers, I mean to say. For now, I suppose we’d best get the Tylers somewhere a doctor can tend to them.”

  I asked was he sure. He said yes, so I told him I knew a place. Then Joseph climbed between the Tylers and the burned man, and without so much as asking me where, said, “I trust you, Will. Let’s go.”

  We traveled east, far enough that the buildings got sparse, the streets turned dusty, and soft smells of hay and manure replaced the sharp edge of city air. I figured then that it was safe to turn south.

  I was wrong.

  For where the Frisco tracks crossed Kenosha, a line of cars and white men with rifles and flashlights and bike lanterns blocked the road completely.

  They were rough and refined by turns; nine in number, alike only in the whiteness of their skin. Two wore old US Army uniforms. Several had written DEPUTY on scraps of cloth and pinned them to their shirts. And while none wore Klan hoods, a thick whipping strap hung from the belt of the best-dressed man among them.

  “We got trouble, Joseph,” I said, doing my best not to move my lips.

  One of the men flagged me down.

  “Evening,” I said as he ambled towards me. The hand-rolled cigarette between his lips waggled as he responded in kind, then asked why a young man such as myself might be out and about in that part of town.

  “I’m hunting Negroes. And yourselves?” I said, with nary a blink nor a stutter.

  He laughed at that, and took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the inside of his sleeve. “Hear that, fellas?” he hollered over his shoulder. “Boy says he’s hunting Negroes!”

  Then the men behind him were laughing, too, all except the fancy one in the pressed white shirt and fresh-shined Florsheim shoes. I knew that’s what they were because Pop had purchased a pair just like them not two weeks prior, saying no one wanted to buy high-end items like Victrolas from a man in cut-rate shoes.

  I touched the brim of my cap, first to the laughing man nearest me, then to the Florsheim man direct.

  “Just stating my business,” I said.

  The laughter died quick.

  “Any particular reason you’re alone?” the man beside me asked. I replied that I preferred it that way.

  “You find any?” the Florsheim man
said, his words clipped.

  “Any what?” I replied, feigning stupid.

  Then he was striding to the back of the truck so fast that by the time I’d scrambled out and caught up with him, he was already shining his light inside.

  Joseph and the Tylers were pressed up against the rolled tarp, which Joseph must have pushed behind them. Mr. Tyler’s eyes were closed. Joseph and Mrs. Tyler shielded theirs from the lantern’s glare.

  “Where’d you find ’em?” the Florsheim man asked. I replied they’d been in the root cellar of the old folks’ shack. He narrowed his eyes and peered back so that I was sure he’d see the tarp and want to know what was inside. Only it turned out he was looking at the gash in Mr. Tyler’s temple. “You responsible for that?” he asked. And I replied that I was, adding, “He tried to run.”

  The Florsheim man clapped me on the shoulder. Said, “Well done.” But then something new caught his eye, sending him straight into the truck to snatch Joseph up by the collar.

  Joseph didn’t resist being dragged. His body fell like deadweight from the back of the truck onto the hard-packed dirt street.

  “Didn’t anybody ever teach you how to tie a proper knot, boy?” the Florsheim man growled. Then he kicked dirt into Joseph’s face so that Joseph couldn’t help but bring his hands to his eyes, and he pointed at the loose strands of twine around Joseph’s wrists, saying I was lucky I’d caught a stupid one, elsewise he would have escaped. The Florsheim man knelt down and yanked the twine tight, handed the loose end of it to the nearest of his friends, and stuffed his handkerchief into Joseph’s mouth.

  Then the Florsheim man nodded at one of the makeshift deputies, who took out his pocketknife, slit Joseph’s shirt clear up the back, and jerked the fabric wide onto his shoulders. The Florsheim man pulled the strap from his belt, slow enough for me to make out the three Ks burned into its handle. And he ran the side of that handle down Joseph’s cheek, saying, “String him up, boys.”