He automatically bowed his head. “Heavenly Father,” he whispered, “just her. Out safe. That’s all I ask.” He heard more footsteps coming onto the roof. Probably one of Debbs’s men with his big rifle. Now his own breath shuddered as he realized he felt outnumbered. Two guns inside. Three guns outside. Jake wished now for the National Guard or the Cavalry or Angels—some righteous, restraining force.
Out on the edge of the crowd Jake saw the blinking light of an ambulance. Reverend Matthews, still in his gym clothes, got out and began pushing his way through, trying to get around people who had their eyes closed and their arms outstretched. Curly, doing something right for a change, ran to meet him and pulled him through the crowd. Jake reholstered his gun, left the kitchen and ran around to the front.
Matthews panted. “Sheriff, I’ve got real bad news. Lena Brandt is dead of a heart attack. She was well loved, a member of my church. There may be a reaction in the crowd when—”
Jake nodded and took out his phone. “State Police? This is Sheriff Hale of Ellis County. I have a class four emergency … You’ve heard. Good. Can you send me some black and whites and at least twenty men?” … Well can you send me ten? … Jesus, can you send me three old ladies and a cripple!” He slammed the phone shut and threw it as far as it would go over the building, high, high, a fly into the outfield. God help me!
The crowd could be heard echoing the close of the prayer: Amen and Hallelujah, Sweet Jesus. But now they began to shout and applaud and whoop.
“Time’s up, okay? Darrell, after I hand over the gun, I’ll come back in to get you. Jake and I’ll stay with you while you talk to Mr. Baird. Okay?”
With eyes to the floor Darrell handed over the heavy gun. Raynelle, still lying on the potatoes, let out a long, loud sigh. “I knew you’d wimp out in the end.”
Darrell hung his head. Judianne spoke softly to him. “I’ll just go get Jake. Everything’s looking up now.” She opened the pantry door. The rush of fresh air was thrilling. She had the gun. Nobody was going to get hurt. She let herself take in two deep breaths in celebration, then called, “Hey, Fred. Fred?” She looked out the back through the trees. Cars were parked every which way as far as she could see down the drive. Someone was on the roof with a bullhorn. Where had all these people come from? She turned back to the kids in the pantry.
“Listen, guys. I don’t know what’s going on, but I think I better find Jake before we make any fast moves. He’s nowhere out back. You all stay here. Don’t show yourselves at the windows.” She began to crawl across the cafeteria toward the front door. The gun in her hand clanked along the concrete floor. She shoved it in her jeans and kept low until she made it to the front door. There was a mass of people praying in the yard and out onto the field, multitudes like something in the Bible. She saw Jake back at the kitchen end of the building. He pulled back his arm and threw his phone high into the air.
“Jake! Jake!” She began to run toward him shouting. “It’s all over. I’ve got the gun.”
“Judianne!” he yelled. The crowd suddenly whooped and broke through the yellow tape to surround her and lift her onto their shoulders like a winning quarterback, the beneficiary of their prayer, exalted on high. “No! Wait!” she screamed, but the crowd was roaring. Their prayers had been answered, and they were headed up the hill to the flagpole.
Jake ran into the crowd, pushing and shoving against this convergence of the two greatest traditions in Cadillac, football and religion. She twisted and reached out her arms to him across the crowd. They carried her farther away, a kid in braids, face bleached by the television lights. He heard the pop of a gun. All his fears burst in his chest and tears blurred the sight of her as he watched her, like a flag losing its breeze, sink below the heads of the mob who marched her around the flagpole.
Alvin Debbs, stationed up on the berm, was far away, though he could tell that the girl had escaped. This was no time to let down his guard. With the eye of a steady, vigilant parent, he had watched the windows of the cafeteria as the crowd had grown gigantic and now went wild. His own beliefs and ideas of heaven were a tangle, but he was clear about his life here on earth and his place as a man in this country. There was a killer inside that building, but all these people could leave themselves wide open by lifting their arms and closing their eyes because he was there, well armed and on high ground.
And when the bastard finally showed his face at the cafeteria window, he got him right in the forehead.
“This is Mira Bartok. I’m still here reporting from the grounds of the Ellis County Juvenile Detention Center. The people are still leaving. It is taking hours on this dark and dreary day for all the cars to exit the single access road to the highway. The Sheriff’s deputies have held back the crowd so that the ambulances could get in and out before these record-setting numbers began to get in their cars. Sheriff Jake Hale still declines to be interviewed, so we don’t know yet what transpired inside the cafeteria. The new medical examiner is awaiting a forensics report on the bullet that wounded Lena Brandt. That bullet was located embedded in a doorframe of the Sugar House we mentioned earlier. We have no confirmation on that unofficial report that said it could have been from the same gun that killed Judianne McCall.
“That will be no surprise to all of us who have been watching the unfolding of this tragic story which began in the early morning with the wounding of Lena Brandt, an aide at the Juvenile Center for thirty-six years. Ms. Brandt died at Cadillac General Hospital of a heart attack after being wounded by Darrell Sturm. Interviews with some of the youths here attest to Ms. Brandt’s great size and physical strength. Some boys said they were afraid of her, but as one boy put it, ‘She was on our side.’ Melvin Baird, director of the Center, said, ‘Lena will be sorely missed. She ran the Sugar House, a snack place for the kids. She was going to retire this year.’
“The second victim was hostage Judianne McCall, former wife of prominent lawyer, Gavin McCall. She was a reading specialist who came to the Center once a week. All we know at this time according to Chief of Surgery, Arthur Woodall, is that she suffered massive blood loss from a wound to the upper thigh. As far as it can be explained tonight, the seriousness of her wound must not have been understood when she escaped the cafeteria and was hoisted onto the shoulders of the crowd and paraded around the flagpole. The gun has not been found. Judianne McCall died in the arms of those who had prayed for her.
“A second hostage, Raynelle Watkins, 17, was found by Deputy Fred Welcher in the kitchen pantry. ‘Her grueling hours of trauma left her in a mute state,’ he said.
“The shooter, Darrell Sturm, was a recent transfer to the Ellis County Detention Home from Custer County. He was being held on a drug charge. No one has come forth with any information about how he obtained the gun that killed Judianne McCall and wounded Lena Brandt. Sturm was downed by Alvin Debs, a decorated sharpshooter who had served as a U.S. Army Sergeant in Vietnam.
“It’s now raining pretty steadily here in Cadillac, which has slowed the progress of the cars driven by people who came to the scene of this tragedy to pray for a happy outcome.”
That night, alone in his house, Jake sat in front of the small, dark television. He and Judianne had kept their romance quiet. They went out to dinner and the movies, but Jake had never confided to anyone in town how deep he was into wanting this woman, so there was no one to rush to comfort him. Not that any of his buddies were the kind of men who’d know what to say to him tonight.
Automatically, he started to get a beer from the fridge. But he was afraid of falling and fell back onto the couch. He knew where to look for the gun that had blasted a point blank hole in Judianne’s thigh. After the shot she must have dragged it out of her pocket and let it drop, to be trampled into the mud by hundreds of shoes, the same mob so full of their righteous cheering, no one heard the pop, so exhilarated to have shouldered a woman they thought they’d rescued, they weren’t careful with her. Damn them all.
He covered his face with his ha
nds and let his head drop back onto the couch. She had become the focus of every plan, every fantasy, every hope he had for his best self. He had wanted to be a better man for her, to step into her dreams, to work beside her taking care of this kid and that kid, bucking them up, trying to give them some hope.
But everything that had happened since getting that call from Baird this morning, said he wasn’t up to being a leader. He was a lightweight, a man no one would follow. But in Judianne’s dreams he was the model for her students, the one they would look up to and pattern themselves on. She’d said he would be their hero.
§
Hillary O’Brian’s
Cadillac Voices
I’ve been holding onto this piece ever since the death of Sloane Willard. Perhaps I wanted to keep for myself this message from a man I admired for his intelligence and moral courage. I took this Voice from the drawer again this morning and knew I should share it.
TREES
This spring my town seems to be filled with more yearning than usual—not just our chronic thirst to preserve the spirit of Oklahoma’s gloried hell-for-leather past—but a deep hunger for a past we imagine other Americans to have had. Cadillac is yearning for an ice cream parlor.
From what I read in The Courier this dreamed-of establishment would be the centerpiece of a town green shaded by ancient elms and willows. Perhaps the ladies will carry parasols, and the carefree children will all wear white.
Like many of man’s ambitions, this dream is not only out of time but out of place. Although our man-made ponds and lakes have manufactured a sticky humidity, the drizzly damp that nurtures forests is limited to Oklahoma’s eastern regions. We are in the west, Dust Bowl territory, with spirit-killing droughts in our past and undoubtedly in our future.
In spite of this, I am on the side of the dreamers. I grew up in Cadillac. My summer job was pedaling a bicycle through merciless heat to make grocery deliveries. What a splendid image a tree-shaded ice cream parlor would have been to the crazed and sweaty adolescent I was.
If only I had planted the trees then, sixty-five years ago. It would take that long and more water than it took to float the ark to grow the shade envisioned for a town green. So plant now. Water generously. Don’t let the inevitable droughts stunt the saplings. Close the swimming pools if you have to. Let the lawns die. Plant now. Plant for your grandchildren. Plant for theirs. Make an oasis in the heart of Cadillac. A refuge, a park, a place to play and fall in love.
I would not like to live in a town that had no dreams, even ones so gingerbread as this. In this old lawyer’s opinion, it is dreams that keep a place from being merely what it is.
Sloane Isaac Willard
Cadillac, Oklahoma Page 18
