by Toni Jensen
My key ring is the shade of green known as Kelly. Webster’s says we’ve been calling this color Kelly green since 1927, that the term stems from the color’s association with Ireland, where Kelly is a common surname.
I know about the Oklahoma City bombing, of course, but I somehow had missed Kingman’s connection to McVeigh. During the two years prior, I’d spent little time watching television, had been living in South Dakota and researching another crime, the murder of a Lakota man, Clifford Hirocke, outside Vermillion at a former scout camp called Camp Happiness. For my master’s thesis project, I wrote a documentary play about Cliff’s death, and then, soon after, just a few weeks after the bombing, I left America for Wales, where I worked waiting tables for almost a year, where I missed most American news and was happier for it.
But most of America in this time had been following the coverage of the bombing and subsequent reporting on Tim McVeigh and his partner in crime, Terry Nichols, as well as his friend-turned-informant Michael Fortier. On April 19, 1995, little more than a year before I arrived in Kingman, McVeigh pulled his rented Ryder truck in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City and detonated the bomb. It killed 168 people, including 19 children, and more than 500 people were injured.
Before 9/11, it was counted in the official record as the worst domestic act of terrorism in our country’s history. You don’t have to leave the state of Oklahoma to find other examples, though—the Greenwood Massacre on what was called Black Wall Street in nearby Tulsa, in which an estimated 100–300 Black men, women, and children were murdered and up to 800 injured in 1921, or the 8,700–17,000 Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole people who died during the Removal Era.
The placard’s gold stars are set around McVeigh’s name like it’s a miniature Hollywood Walk of Fame, right here, just for me, or for any other traveler who’s tired and has stopped for the night. Dennis Schroeder still talks and talks, gesturing over-large for such a narrow hall, asking me again if I’m sure I don’t want to switch rooms, saying, “It’s a rare opportunity. It’s usually occupied.” Just a few years before, in 1990, McVeigh had been in the Army, part of our occupying force against Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. Nichols, Fortier, and McVeigh met in basic training in the Army.
For his actions in combat in Operation Desert Storm, McVeigh earned a Bronze Star, with a V-for-valor device on the ribbon, and I wonder what that means now, what any of it means. I wonder what sort of place it is in which I’ve landed.
Just off Route 66, as the song will tell you, and just off I-40, Kingman is the sort of place where people stop for a night and then drive, drive, drive. I’m not people, though. I’ve taken a job here, my very first professional full-time job teaching. I’m staying.
When I finally enter it, my room holds a floral polyester bedspread and cinder-block walls with off-white paint. A vintage dining table sits in the corner, and I set my bag down on it. It holds the sort of finish on which a glass won’t leave a ring, Formica, maybe, but with a wood look, a simulation.
I listen at the door until Schroeder’s footsteps recede. He’s not creepy, exactly, but I’m about to go outside to my truck, to bring in my husky, Lucy, who is protective, who’s been waiting.
In the parking lot, I’m relieved to see the truck’s still running. I left it locked but turned on for the air-conditioning because June in Kingman is too hot already to behave otherwise. Beyond the parking lot and swimming pool, the view is beautiful in an O’Keeffe painting sort of way. Tall cliff faces in tans and deeper browns hold dots of dark and silver green, cactus and trees I will later learn to name: cholla called buckhorn and teddy bear and Christmas, hedgehog and barrel cactus, Manzanita and Joshua trees, prickly pear of all sorts.
The sky holds only sharp blue, no clouds, over the Cerbat Mountains in the distance. The wind picks up, begins the dust swirl with which I will become so familiar, and Lucy and I hurry into the Hill Top, past the McVeigh Room, to ours. I sleep a deep traveler’s sleep, and Lucy patrols in front of the door, silent as huskies are prone to be when on watch, alert, though, prepared.
II.
My first morning in Kingman, I leave the Hill Top to meet Peggy Bivins, my prospective landlady. She’s wearing slippers and a floral housedress or muumuu covered in enormous pink and green flowers. She waves cheerfully as she walks across the street from her family’s home to the white clapboard house I hope to rent from her and her husband.
She pets Lucy, ruffles the dark fur around her collar, and Lucy swings her tail in apparent joy. I start my job the next day. I’m hoping this will work. I’m extra chatty with Peggy, telling her about my stay at the Hill Top, the McVeigh Room, the plaque.
“We rented to them, too,” she says. “Those boys.”
“This house?” I say.
We’re not through the threshold yet, but now I’m wondering what lies beyond the white clapboard façade, the windows rimmed in ordinary, everyday shutters. Peggy is at the front door, framed by those red shutters, which now seem either jaunty or murderous.
“This house?” I say again.
I’m not so much considering if I can live in a house where such a thing has been plotted, but how. All my possessions are either in storage in my mother’s attic or in the truck that sits in the driveway as if it’s already home.
She turns and squints at me. “No,” she says, “the other one.”
“Oh,” I say. “So you knew him?”
“He paid his rent on time,” she says. “Didn’t give us any trouble.”
I nod, but I do not manage a smile.
“No trouble,” she says, looking me up and down. “No trouble of any kind.”
Later, I’ll find it’s easy to verify McVeigh stayed at the Hill Top for four days right before the bombing; his motel registration card is entered into evidence during his trial. It’s less easy to verify he or Fortier ever were tenants of my landlords, the Bivinses, though I check and work to cross-check references and addresses. They did own multiple rental houses, so it’s plausible Fortier, in particular, may have lived in one at one time, or even McVeigh, perhaps. But in the time leading up to the bombing, Fortier and his wife and McVeigh all lived together in the Fortiers’ trailer.
It’s difficult to imagine anyone would fabricate such a fact only to dismiss its sensational value, only to render the fact and the men so ordinary, so everyday. Over time, I’ll come to associate this trait with the place—an understated delivery of a startling circumstance, an underplaying of the extraordinary and the strange.
Since then, we’ve seen a resurgence of this sort of affect, this sort of underplaying of extraordinary violence. The president calls tiki-torch-wielding men in Charlottesville “very fine people,” even as Heather Heyer dies. At Standing Rock, hired security shoot rubber bullets into a peaceful crowd, blinding a woman. In an Arizona hotel, a police officer shoots to death a man while he’s prone, while he’s already facedown on the ground. In Minneapolis, police officer Derek Chauvin kneels on the neck of George Floyd for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, and Floyd dies, there on the ground, after asking repeatedly for his mother.
That day, back in the nineties, I’ve been in Kingman less than twenty-four hours. I sign the lease. I unpack my one set of sheets, my books, my handful of dishes. I walk Lucy along neighborhood streets rimmed with stone and ranch-style houses. I work to imagine a life for us here. At bedtime, I lock the front and back doors and check them again and stop myself from checking a third time.
III.
Mohave Community College, where I work in Kingman, opened in 1971. The land for the campus, the 160 acres that sit just outside town, was donated by John Leonard and Grace Neal. John Leonard Neal was a rancher, married in the 1930s. He was from a prominent local ranching family who owed their fortune and fame, in part, to the time during World War II when, accor
ding to author and Route 66 historian Jim Hinckley, “a large swath of the Neal ranch in the Hualapai Valley became one of the largest flexible gunnery schools in the nation with assistance from the Herculean efforts of construction crews pulled from the Davis Dam project on the Colorado River.” Hinckley adds, “Listed among the thousands of men trained at the Kingman Army Airfield is Clayton Moore, best known for his role as the Lone Ranger.”
Earlier generations of Neals also owned land in the area around the historic springs that were important to the history of the town, near Fort Mohave. The springs were a source for year-round water, important in this high desert region, and were named for Lieutenant Edward Beale, who surveyed the road to connect Fort Mohave with another fort in New Mexico. According to Jim Hinckley, Beale’s road expedition also was to serve a secondary purpose, “testing the viability of camel transport for military application in the desert southwest.”
I learn about the Neals and Beales straightaway, but it takes longer for anyone to talk about or explain the history of the tribe with the closest reservation, the Hualapai. According to their tribe’s website, the name comes from their words for ponderosa pines and for people, meaning “people of the tall pines,” and their original territory encompassed around five million acres.
The Hualapai War started in 1865 when their leader Anasa was killed by a white man. The Hualapai retaliated and also closed a nearby trading route to white traders. Raiding and killing and more retaliation followed until the U.S. government sent the cavalry in after killing yet another Hualapai chief. After their surrender, the remaining Hualapai were forced to walk nearly two hundred miles to near Parker, Arizona, to an internment camp called La Paz. The La Paz Trail of Tears, much like the better-known Cherokee Trail of Tears or the Bosque Redondo of the Navajo, is commemorated annually by the Hualapai descendants of those who survived the long walk and the internment and then managed to escape.
Already in my earliest days in Mohave County, I know Kingman to be a place of strange facts and oddities, a place that prepares for war camels and the Lone Ranger alike. Already in my earliest days in town, I know Neal and Beale to be considered important names. Already in my earliest days, I know war and enterprise to be intrinsically linked in the mythos of the place, that my ideas of heroism involve walking those two hundred miles versus riding them on horseback, that my allegiance goes, as is usually so, to those who were not armed.
IV.
In my first semester of my first real, grown-up job, teaching English at Mohave Community College, one night, in composition class, a man—I’ll call him Greg—paces the back of the room, sits back down, and then returns to his pacing. He’s over fifty or at least looks over fifty. His eyes dart around the room, never landing on any of the rest of us. His tan, weathered skin holds a light sheen that he seems to want to scratch off the sides of his face.
I do not get close enough to smell him, so I can’t say for certain whether he’s drunk or high or some combination. He has thick-textured salt-and-pepper hair with waves that fan up and out, through which he can’t stop running his hands. He can’t keep them still.
He might be considered good-looking on a better day. My guess, if I had to say, would be that he’s high on meth. A good many people here are.
Since I grew up in a house with a violent, drunken father, I know the voice to use. I know how to say, “That’s interesting,” and “You should talk more about that once Angela’s done,” and “I can hear you better from the chair, though. It’s closer.”
The combination of soothing voice and flattery works for about thirty-five minutes, and the class is three hours long. We don’t usually break till the ninety-minute mark, but some of the women’s bodies are stiffening. Some look at their shoes; some begin to get that faraway look on their faces, the dissociated look—though I don’t know that anyone was calling it that back then.
This class, like many I teach there, is a night class geared primarily toward women aged thirty to fifty-five whose lives have changed through divorce or being fired from their jobs or worse. They’re parents or grandparents. They want jobs or better jobs. They do their homework and bring their best selves to class.
At twenty-five years old, I’m often the youngest person in my classroom. Still, they all treat me with dignity and respect. I have not one but two degrees. They’re impressed by this—something I’ve almost never encountered since.
Our classroom is in a modular building, otherwise known as a trailer. This is before cellphones are common, and there’s no wall phone either since the trailers are supposed to be temporary.
I call break early. I say I’m hungry and can use a candy bar. I smile at the aggressive student. I make prolonged eye contact with all the women in the class who are paying attention, and together we head straight for the main building, the commons building.
All the women in the class know what to do—they read my eye contact correctly. They get up and head out to break, walking fast and efficient. No one gawks at Greg or speaks with him; no one acts like our early break is in any way irregular.
Mary is working at the front desk at the commons. She’s middle-aged and both competent and kind. I like her very much and am grateful to see her.
“Call security,” I say, and she does not hesitate. I buy a Snickers and go out in the hall to check for Greg, to check on the other students.
Greg does not return to class when we return from break. The security guard patrols around more than usual and close to our trailer. We continue our class, each of us positioned to keep one eye on the door, but Greg doesn’t return that night.
The next day, I learn Greg had enrolled in the class under a false name. A few years back, he’d brought a gun onto campus—he’d made threats. He was not supposed to be there in my class, or in any other class, having been permanently barred from the college.
After, from the administrators to the staff to the students, everyone is kind. Everyone praises my handling of the situation in a quiet way, using humor or their own stories. Everyone is competent. We all go about our business.
If he had come back into our classroom that night, I suppose it would have been considered or labeled a school shooting, but it also would have been for me a workplace shooting. It’s my first real workplace, and I feel protective over it, over the people who share the space with me.
I know, though, if Greg had come back with his gun, what likely would have happened also would have been a shooting in a place with connections to one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism, the Oklahoma City bombing. Michael Fortier had taken classes here in the years before, as his friends planned the bombing. And just like with Greg’s return to campus, no one had any idea what Fortier knew; no one had any idea what was being planned at his trailer outside town.
Already, I love the people here and the landscape, especially at night when the stars come out on campus and the coyotes call to each other through the desert. Already, I’m learning to be wary of giving away too much of this love, this good feeling, to a place that seems to embrace or, at least, to not wholly shun all these men whose lives partake in both everyday and extraordinary violence.
V.
We’re hiking with the dogs, a friend and I, just outside Kingman, on a sunny weekend day. The landscape still is novel to me—the land so flat and wide, broken only by tall rocks and cliff faces, the twisting spines of cholla or long-limbed cottonwood, the bright blue sky the stuff of picture books.
Our path curves left, and we walk along a tall row of rock facing before we curve further and come upon the men. The rocks till that moment had obscured them from us, us from them.
It’s clear they’ve just finished setting up their targets, have just finished jerking off. One zips his fly, and the other rips a picture from a magazine, a woman with enormous breasts, her legs positioned into a sharp V.
Jack, the bi
gger and newer of the two dogs, snarls and yanks his leash, and I nod to the man nearest me—the one who’s just tucked himself in—making eye contact, before I pull the dogs past.
There isn’t another way to exit, except back the way we came, so we keep walking. We talk low to each other, my friend more unnerved than I am, but neither of us surprised. As we walk, our view consists mainly of cholla and prickly pear, the sky shifting from its brightest blue to blue streaked with pink. My friend points out interesting cactus, lizards, and what she says is the tail feather of a roadrunner. We walk also accompanied by the distant sound of the men shooting their guns.
We walk until we’re tired, until the gunshots stop. We sit and drink water on a rock, and when we make our way back, Lucy, the smarter dog, the quiet one, has her hackles raised as we near their campsite. But even their camp chairs are gone.
They’ve left behind only the spent shell casings and bits of target magazine girls.
I come into the desert that day with only the most rudimentary knowledge of its plants and insects, its snakes and storms. I leave having acquired so much knowledge of the flora and fauna. I leave having confirmed so much unwanted knowledge about men.
My time in Kingman, all three years, is spent like this, on deciding. How does a person live a life filled with these sorts of interactions with men like these—in the world, in the wild, in the classroom. I write “men like these,” but Kingman also will be the place where I learn to trust wholly my instincts about when “men like these” can be abbreviated to “men.”
