Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  Ashley ignored the thick smell of breakfast, appetite lost with her youth. She thought of a million things she’d rather be doing than turning sixteen, including, but not limited to, practicing for her driver’s test.

  “You know you’re ready,” her friend reassured her. “You’ve only been doing it since you were five.”

  “It’s different when you’re taking a test,” Ashley replied. “You have to signal and all that crap. That’s why Jeremy’s been driving with me. Showing me all the formal stuff.”

  “Sure.” The friend smiled, making quotation marks with her fingers. “‘Formal stuff.’”

  Ashley threw baby’s breath at her best friend, sixteen-year-old Lauria (pronounced “Laura”) Bible, who planted the flower behind her own ear.

  The best friends had spent the day before preparing for the livestock showings for the county and state fairs, as part of the FFA (Future Farmers of America) and the 4-H Club, community-leadership and agricultural clubs to which they belonged. They knew all there was to know about roughages, dehorning, cattle parasites, castration, cuts of beef. These were country kids who’d spent the morning adjusting the gaits and training the coats of Ashley’s goats, Jack and Jill. (Lauria had her own two pigs and a lamb back home.) They talked about seeding out the competition and making it all the way to the great Tulsa fair, which attracted more than a million visitors annually. Imagine, parades of antique tractors brandishing American flags, pie-eating contests with sun-warmed blueberries exploding on clean cotton, demolition derbies, carnival rides, and bull-riding rodeos. The county and state fairs were the very embodiment of American life in the heartland. But back in the bleakness of winter, they trained with their sights set on summer. Ashley and Lauria wandered around the property that morning, gathering the leaves of dogwoods and bois d’arcs for the goats to eat as the cold made their rough hands ache. While the “crick” babbled at the bottom of the backyard, a weeping willow swished against the ground like the straws of a broom at the west side of the trailer. In fact, that was what helped Ashley decide on leaving her old bedroom on the east end of the house for Shane’s on the west end: the branches that brushed against the windows and filtered dusk through strips of light like honey, a sense of security when the sun went down.

  “Ashley!” her mother hollered from the kitchen. “Grab yer breakfast, birthday girl. It’s already after noon!”

  Ashley rolled her eyes—the picture of teenage disdain. Sometimes she wished that she didn’t have to be the strong one within the family unit. Had it not been for Lauria’s stability and her support, she wondered if she’d have been able to survive that last year of the millennium.

  I spend years sitting with Ashley’s family, friends, and neighbors, ambling her school hallways and stomping grounds, visiting classmates and teachers. I want to know what being Ashley Freeman was really like, and soon, another side of her emerges. Despite Ashley’s outwardly tough persona, there was something tender about her. Back then, the kids in school knew that her family home wasn’t the best, and the rumors as to why had long circulated, coming to a head with Shane’s death. One friend tells of a time she forgot that Ashley was supposed to ride home with her from school and left without her, only for Kathy to show up on the doorstep with a sobbing Ashley, demanding to know why her daughter had been forgotten. While she could hunt for and field-dress a deer by herself, she required validation from others. Though she could lift any grown man, she’d dance in her room when alone. She was never able to throw away her favorite Berenstain Bears books and stuffed animals, yet took no issue in cutting the heads clean off turkeys. She had her feet planted in the manure and her heart in the clouds. There were the face she let others see and the face she reserved for behind closed doors, the real heart of her spirit she’d share with those closest to her, including Lauria.

  “We’re already late,” Kathy yelled.

  “Gimme a minute!”

  Together, the friends got ready to leave, oblivious of their whole lives before them. Ashley slipped on her boyfriend, Jeremy’s, high school ring and slipped into her sneakers, the soles dusty. Out there, the cricks and grain were stitched together with dirt roads that led off the beaten paths. That land breathed under their feet, heart pounding with hunger. In wait.

  3

  * * *

  FATHER, DANNY FREEMAN

  * * *

  December 29, 1999

  The Day Before the Fire

  Out here you’ll find no one, and no one will find you, and that was exactly its appeal when Danny Freeman moved his family from rural Vinita to West of Welch back in 1995: father, mother, son, and daughter striving for a simpler way of living.

  While Kathy prepared a late breakfast, and Ashley and Lauria got ready in the trailer, forty-year-old Danny Freeman wandered out back, sipping buttered coffee with a shotgun over his shoulder and hunting ancient arrowheads. This was how you’d find him most days. His shadow before him was long, and he couldn’t catch up to it no matter how hard he tried, like he swore he could once when he was a boy. The sun warmed the quilted flannel on his shoulders. As he walked down the slight hill from his trailer to Big Cabin Creek that early afternoon, he paced along the edge of the river and listened for the familiar rasps of prairie rattlesnakes and water moccasins and other venomous pit vipers. To himself, he dared them to come out.

  Danny eyed the land around him, bitter, feeling cheated by a little bit of everything: by the world, by God, by lawyers. He paced his way back toward a concrete dam at the top of the crick, where a feed bucket full of soybeans waited. With the sounds of the brook nearby, he spent the morning with fistfuls of the handpicked legumes, attracting rafters of wild turkeys. He even had the local game warden’s permission to do so, provided he kept the routine up, lest they become dependent and later starve to death as a result. Danny agreed, feeding the birds every other day, just to listen to the whishing of their wings as they came close to him. They came with harvest-colored and copper plumage, Danny’s eye catching on brief flashes of purple, red, and green.

  But life weighed heavily on his shoulders, more heavily still since the death of his only boy, Shane. And Danny knew that death, once more, was lurking close, hiding out on the prairie. The sharp taste of paranoia lodged itself in the back of his throat, his shoulders winding tight. In those final days of 1999, Danny warned his friends, and warned his stepbrother, Dwayne Vancil, that she’d be a-coming, and that if anything were to happen to him, “you’d be best to look right here.” Dwayne Vancil would repeat this exhaustingly over the years, asserting that in those last days, Danny pointed a finger hard into his stepbrother’s chest and said, “If anything happens to me or my family, anything, look to the Craig County Sheriff’s Office.” Dwayne described that Danny’s demeanor struck him as “fearful” and “absolute,” traits rarely ever seen in Danny.

  Some feared Danny’s paranoia was a result of his overt marijuana use. Others feared he was right. Either way, rage seared just under Danny’s skin, like sunburn at the back of his neck, mood fickle like fire. And perhaps, in many ways, the man was just … misunderstood.

  After all, who could really understand a man who, once upon a time, had accidentally shot himself in the forehead?

  It happened while he was cleaning a rifle, when the breech plug in the rear of the muzzleloader barrel blew back into his head and through his skull. With the plug actually lodged in his brain, Danny drove to the local hospital, waited two hours, got fed up, then drove two hours more to the city hospital, where doctors immediately rushed him in for brain surgery, replacing part of his skull with bone from his hip. The scar was a prominent badge in the middle of his forehead. So when people said that Danny was a tough guy, they meant just that.

  Danny Freeman had inherited the rock-hard jaw and the bison-wide shoulders of the men before him, a lineage that emanated masculinity. Now alone, doleful, with an appetite for all things dwindling by the day, he wondered just how long it would take for him to waste away altog
ether. Unemployed with the exception of the odd welding jobs up in Kansas and cattail scavenges, he felt removed from the American dream of his ancestors. And the accidental injury caused crippling migraines and made steady employment an impossible feat to maintain.

  He squatted on the dam, and nearing the bottom of the soybeans, Danny held the shotgun across his knees and pried his lips with a pipe. Fanned by the wings of turkeys, Danny could briefly forget it all, inhaling his grief into the depths of his lungs where it belonged, each hazy day blurring into the next. He’d rise and spend his days smoking, canvassing the riverbed for American Indian arrowheads, a hobby instilled in him since childhood. He didn’t even have to search for them; they’d just catch his eye from the mire. He swore it was a gift inherited alongside that one-eighth of Cherokee hiding somewhere in his blood.

  Despite the drug-induced sway in his gait, Danny shot his gun off and caught the leather belly of a cottonmouth snake. It was the same shot that took his wife’s attention from the splinter in her thumb’s knuckle back at the trailer.

  The turkeys thundered into the air, yelping against the breeze. He walked over to the snake, tucked his thumb under its jaw like a trigger, and swung it into the creek. “Bastard,” he muttered. Left with the gentle sounds of falling water, he returned to arrowhead hunting.

  Then Danny, this epitome of all things virile, wept for his only son.

  When Danny paused a few moments later, his eyes stung with salt as he scanned the unspoiled acreage that waved before him. Once gold from Indian grass and red with Oklahoma rose, today Welch was painted the color of sorrow. He smoked the burned resin of the pipe until there was nothing left. And when the waves of grief passed, as they always did, he swung the shotgun back over his shoulder and climbed the moderate incline back to the front of his house.

  As he rounded the side of the trailer in the low winter sun, Danny watched his daughter unintentionally make the sign of the cross with her body spray, a cloud of pink in the afternoon light to smell like Cotton Candy Fantasy and hay. He passed behind her and rubbed the top of her head. “Happy birthday, Ash,” he managed, just as Lauria followed from the front door.

  The girls waited for Kathy at the bottom of the precast-concrete steps. Ashley zipped up her coat as Lauria looked under the bleached skull of a longhorn that hung on the front of the house. With the girls’ backs to him, Danny stuffed the pipe deep in his jeans pocket and made his way up to the front door as his wife was leaving.

  “We’ll be back in a few hours,” said Kathy as she blew the bangs from her face. “We’ll bring back the birthday cake with us.”

  Danny stared her down, as he often did, and she hurried down the steps to avoid the familiar heat of his glare. Even before the night’s events would unfold into one of the most far-reaching mysteries of the Midwest, there wasn’t a person in town who hadn’t heard of Danny’s knee-jerk temper. Some even had their own accounts of how he had wound up with a scar in the middle of his forehead.

  Danny leaned in the doorway and crossed his arms. “The big sweet sixteen,” he remarked, and the trace of a smile crossed his daughter’s face.

  “You bet,” Ashley responded.

  Lauria left her 1989 blue Chevy Cavalier with Danny’s truck and climbed into the backseat of Kathy’s car. Danny watched them drive off down the seven-hundred-foot driveway into the December frost, passing by a JUSTICE FOR SHANE sign at the property’s edge, decorated with a football signed by Shane’s classmates and a few Beanie Baby bears and candles.

  Pulling up only a moment after Kathy and the girls left was Danny’s best friend, Charlie Krider, a bald man with a long beard and a bag of grass, to whom Danny waved from the front door. He came from Chetopa, the town just north of Welch but over the Kansas border, just eight miles from Danny’s house as the crow flies but a twenty-minute drive on a rocky country road. Charlie parked in front of the trailer, trying to discern through dust the tail end of Kathy’s car in his side-view mirror. “Perfect timing, I suppose,” called Charlie as he exited his truck.

  Danny repeated his daughter’s words. “You bet!”

  Charlie lifted his sunglasses and skimmed his eyes across the pastures for his red cattle. His fingers were shaped like spoons and the cold months chapped his lips. “Look at big mama cow and big daddy cow,” he said as he spotted them across the property. “Too bad we gotta slaughter ’em.”

  Ready to partake in green communion, Danny dismissed the comment and thumbed over his shoulder for Charlie to start rolling a couple of joints without him inside the trailer. “I’m right behind you,” he said.

  But there was something anticipatory about Danny from those porch steps, looking after the road’s dust from Kathy’s car on the other side of the trees. He licked the aftertaste of dope from his lips and turned his attention to the empty ends of the road, away from his missus, where Danny watched a Craig County Sheriff’s Office deputy’s car crawl slowly along the edge of his property. The police officer looked out his window and up at Danny, and Danny stared right back. The deputy’s car stopped. They watched each other without a word, the way Danny silently dared snakes out back. Danny cocked his head with a smirk and pointed his fingers in the shape of a gun, closing one eye and pulling an imaginary trigger at the deputy. The officer sneered back up at Danny, tilted his cap, and drove on after the girls.

  4

  * * *

  BEST FRIEND, LAURIA BIBLE

  * * *

  December 29, 1999

  The Night Before the Fire

  With Ashley at her side, and Kathy driving, Lauria wiped the fog from the car window, scanning the neon lights of Route 66 as they ignited around her. The colors shone wet in her hazel eyes, streaking over the skin that maintained part of its tan from the long summer that now felt far. It was no wonder that Vinita, having been the first city in Oklahoma with electricity, felt brighter than other towns budding along the Main Street of America. Lauria’s curly brown hair was shoulder length, and she came complete with a beauty mark stamped between her right nostril and upper lip like a maker’s mark. Cozy in her blue-and-gold cheerleading jacket, which creaked with every movement, she settled, watching the sun shrink behind the historic art deco storefronts to the smell of car exhaust and deep-fried anything. The days were shrinking, with sundown at only a quarter after five.

  The original plan was for Lauria to return home in rural Vinita that evening, but because they had a later start in the day than planned, and because Lauria wasn’t allowed to drive after dark, they decided they’d later ask Lauria’s parents to let her stay another night; since her house would be on the way to some of their errands, they’d stop there later.

  The first stop was at a feed store to fetch food for Ashley’s goats. Lauria helped Ashley and her mother pack the clover and alfalfa into the trunk of Kathy’s Toyota before heading off to Pizza Hut in Vinita for Ashley’s birthday dinner. Lauria was oblivious to the strands of straw stuck in her curls as they squeezed into a booth and enjoyed their dinner. Lauria and Ashley talked about fairs and cars as Kathy looked on in awe, wondering how the raptures of youth were so long ago. After they ate, they crossed the highway and went to Walmart. There, Lauria helped Ashley handpick her birthday cake: white frosting piped with blue. “Chocolate. No. Vanilla. No. Chocolate,” Ashley argued with herself. Lauria, always the problem solver, offered, “Half and half,” relieving Ashley of her indecision. Nighttime fell over Route 66 during the course of their errands and the neon signs kindled. The night remained cold and bitter and would feel this way in all the years since.

  They then drove to the lightless outskirts of Vinita to the home of Kathy’s mother, Celesta, and stepfather, Bill Chandler; Kathy would often haul water for drinking from there. (Contrary to several reports, the Freemans did have running water, suitable for laundry and toilets and showers; however, the water came from the Big Cabin Creek in the back of the Freeman trailer and was not drinkable. Therefore, Kathy made frequent visits to her parents’ to collec
t drinking water for the family.) Lauria’s house was only a few minutes from the Chandlers’, and it was their next stop.

  Kathy and Ashley waited in the car as Lauria ran into her house; the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree could be seen from far across the surrounding farmlands. Her father, Jay, had just returned from his job at an auto parts store in Langley. He was a nine-to-five man always topped off with a rugged baseball cap and plaid, a Midwestern man with Jack Webb–ish features and a thick, syrupy drawl. Hurrying so as not to keep her friend and her mother waiting, Lauria dashed for her bedroom, collecting a new set of clothes in her arm.

  “Whoa, whoa, where’s the fire?” Jay called out.

  “My car’s over at Ashley’s, and we only just fetched the cake,” she shouted down the hall. “Can I stay over just one more night? Pretty please?”

  Jay gave in, always having a hard time saying no to his only daughter. “Well, now, you know you got animals you gotta take care of tomorrow, get around and take care of your show animals and stuff. You need to be home by noon.”

  Years later, Jay tells me, “Noon never came the next day.”

  Lauria squealed, rushing about and stuffing a couple of bottles of nail polish in her coat pocket. She was so rushed that she nearly bolted out the door without saying goodbye. But she stopped and turned around before planting a kiss on her father’s cheek. “I love you, Dad.” They were her last words to her father as she hopped down the steps of her porch, then skipped back into the idling car. The prairie, now dark, took her in with open arms, as it always had. It had something of the delirium of adolescence about it. And I’m sure Lauria’s natural curls bounced off her shoulders, and I’m sure winter was kinder to her skin than to most people’s. As they set off, Lauria’s mother, Lorene, just on her way home from work, slowed her car to a stop beside Kathy’s on the road where the Bibles lived.