The Long and Faraway Gone (6 page)

“Make hay while the sun shines,” she murmured. “Make hay while the sun shines. Make hay while the sun shines.”

Julianna stepped out of the room and pulled the curtain shut. Donna, magenta scrubs, sneakers squeaking, bustled around the corner looking for her.

“You're off in ten, aren't you?” Beneath Donna's perfume was the tang of nicotine.

“I am,” Julianna said.

“We're getting drinks. Gonna get our hooch on. What do you say?”

“As enticing as that sounds.”

“You're no fun.”

“I'm really not.”

Donna spanked her on the ass with a clipboard and moved past, sneakers squeaking.

YOU SHO
ULD HAVE
seen my big sister, Mrs. Bender.

After twenty-­six years, that was still Julianna's first reaction whenever someone told her she was pretty. Whenever someone, every now and then, told her she looked hot or fine or beautiful, in a bar, on a beach, in the crew cab of a Dodge Ram, let's get those panties off you, babe.

You should have seen my big sister, you want to talk about beautiful.

Awkward. When your first boyfriend is stroking your cheek and leaning in for a kiss and you burst into tears.

Genevieve would have been mortified. She would have disowned Julianna on the spot. Genevieve would have said,
Juli, you
dork,
you make
me
feel like bursting into tears.

You want to talk about beautiful? One time Genevieve had slipped off her sunglasses, just that, nothing more, and a guy passing by on a motorcycle had swerved and almost wiped out.

It was Genevieve. It was the way she slipped off her sunglasses. The way she did everything.

Genevieve said it blew her mind, how Julianna could be such a major dork.

“Does this make me a dork?” Julianna would ask. She'd do her version of Kevin Bacon's big dance in
Footloose,
and Genevieve would have to bury her face in a couch pillow, laughing.

Julianna's first boyfriend, junior year of high school, didn't have a clue why she'd burst into tears. All he'd done was stroke her cheek and lean in for a kiss, tell her she was the prettiest girl he'd ever known.

Julianna's ponytail always gave her a headache by the end of shift, so she snapped off the rubber band and shook out her hair as she walked to the parking garage. She drove the long way home, down Western instead of the Broadway Extension, and stopped to pick up dinner at Whole Foods. It was on Western, not far from where the old railroad bridge used to stand, the one that high-­school kids covered with graffiti every football season. The city had torn the bridge down years ago to extend Classen Boulevard. Julianna couldn't remember what, if anything, had been torn down to make room for Whole Foods, even though the store was barely six months old. An apartment complex, maybe?

The landscape of memory was like that. Sometimes the near seemed far, far away and the faraway was right beneath your feet.

Julianna filled her biodegradable cardboard carton with chicken tikka masala, basmati rice, and some sad-­looking broccoli. A guy with his own carton, and a nice smile, shook his head.

“That broccoli,” he said. “You're braver than me.”

She smiled back and moved on to the lentils.

“The masala looks good, though,” the guy said.

“Excuse me,” she said, and reached past him for a biodegradable cardboard lid.

He had ginger hair and smelled like soap. She guessed he was . . . thirty-­two? Six years younger than her. He wore pressed khakis and a pale blue button-­down shirt. Julianna guessed he worked at one of the big energy companies, Chesapeake or Devon.

Energy. When Julianna had been growing up, it was still called the oil and gas business. And there'd been an old brick mansion at the corner of Sixty-­third and Western, where the Chesapeake campus was now. The mansion, their mother said, was a home for bad girls.

“
Dumb
girls,” Genevieve told Julianna. “They don't know what a rubber is?”

Julianna giggled, but she was only ten or eleven at the time and wasn't entirely sure herself what a rubber was. Or what exactly qualified a girl as “bad.” She had worried that Genevieve might be sent to the mansion on Western, since Genevieve drank beer and cut classes and snuck out at night to go see her friends. One time she'd come home from a party drunk and their mother had thrown a fit.

The guy stepped around Julianna and spooned rice into his carton.

“Doctor?” he said. Probably he guessed by her scrubs that she was a nurse but hoped the question might flatter her.

“Nurse.”

“Cool.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“Right. Oh, right. I can imagine. It's not like on TV, is it? Like that one show.”

“I don't know. I doubt it.”

“It's not glamorous, in other words,” he said.

“Glamour is rare.”

“My name's Ryan, by the way.”

She wondered how often Ryan from Chesapeake or Devon, with the ginger hair and the nice smile, the easy confidence, hit on women at Whole Foods. Should Julianna feel special? There were three other women at the food bar. One had a wedding ring, one was less attractive than Julianna, one more so.

“Julianna,” she said.

“I'm bad at this,” he said. It was meant to be disarming, and almost was.

Julianna assumed her best caregiver face, concerned and sympathetic. “You're bad at picking up dinner?”

Two of the three other women at the food bar, the married woman and the one more attractive than Julianna, kept stealing glances, lingering over the soup tureens so they could watch this little scene unfold.

The guy smiled his nice smile again. He seemed earnest and sweet. On the weekends he played golf, in an OU visor, in a sweater vest with the logo of the Oak Tree Country Club embroidered just above his heart. “Listen. Were you planning to eat in? We could grab a table.”

“Let's go to your place,” Julianna said, and for a second all the soup ladles stopped clinking.

In the parking lot, next to his car, they kissed for a while. Julianna's mind wandered. Two teenage girls passing by giggled at them. Julianna hadn't had sex with a guy since her brief spring fling with one of the radiologists at the hospital six months ago. Six months! Genevieve would be horrified.
You dork!

She guessed that Ryan with the ginger hair would be fine in bed, unimaginative but diligent. He was a nice kisser. Part of her wanted him, part of her didn't. It was a coin flip, really. She kissed him and waited to see where the coin landed.

“Wow,” he said when they finally broke apart.

“You're a nice kisser,” she said.

“You, too.”

When she started to walk away, he said, “Wait, you should—­I'll give you my address, or do you want to ride with me?”

She stopped and turned and watched his face. “Did you think I was serious?” She assumed her caregiver expression again, concerned and sympathetic. “You didn't, did you?”

When she got home, she heated up the chicken tikka masala and ate in front of her laptop. There was a Facebook page she'd discovered: “Remember When in OKC.” It was unbelievably banal. Someone would post, “Remember Springlake Amusement Park over on Eastern Avenue?” And someone else would reply, “Yeah! With that big wooden roller coaster!”

Still, though, Julianna made a point to scroll through the new posts every day. You never knew what you might find, or where, so you had to keep looking. You could never, ever stop looking. That, at least, was her position on the matter.

 

T
he flight to Oklahoma City landed ten minutes late. Wyatt stepped out of the Jetway and into a terminal that bore no resemblance to the airport he remembered. The old Will Rogers World Airport had been cramped and claustrophobic and dimly lit, with low ceilings and floors that seemed always to slope down, down, down, no matter what direction you were headed. The ceilings of the new terminal soared. The walls were glass and pale stone. The light of a clear blue October morning was almost bright enough to blind him.

Times change, Wyatt told himself. It wasn't as if Oklahoma City had been frozen in amber for twenty-­six years, breathlessly awaiting his return. Life goes on. His life had gone on. So get over yourself.

He headed downstairs to the car-­rental counter. The woman working for Avis stared at his driver's license. Wyatt had legally changed his last name when he turned twenty-­one and dropped his first name. He knew that the photo of the man bore little resemblance to the boy he'd been. He couldn't help it, though—­he tensed anyway. The woman was in her forties, old enough to maybe, just maybe, recognize him.

“You thought I was George Clooney, didn't you?” Wyatt said. “Tell the truth.”

The woman smiled and set his driver's license on the edge of her keyboard so she could enter his information into the computer.

“I just haven't seen the new Nevada licenses yet,” she said.

“I knew it. It's the rugged good looks and the . . . what?”

She laughed this time. Wyatt relaxed. You see? Twenty-­six years.
Get over yourself.

He crossed to the parking garage, tossed his bag into the front seat of a black Altima, and called the number that Gavin had given him.

No answer, no voice mail. Wyatt frowned and checked his watch. All morning he'd been fanning the flame of a tiny hope that he might be able to wrap Candace Kilkenny's case in a few hours and be home by dinnertime. A guy could dream, right? But less than fifteen minutes on the ground and already he'd hit his first snag. It was ten forty-­five. He would need to be back at the airport by four, at the very latest, to catch the last flight back to Vegas.

He dug his laptop out of his bag and ran a reverse search on Candace Kilkenny's phone number. He got lucky. The number belonged to a landline, and, even luckier, the landline belonged to an address just south of downtown, five minutes from the airport. Wyatt retracted his original frown. The flame of hope flickered back to life.

Merging onto I-­40, he caught his first glimpse of that familiar downtown skyline, squat and boxy, hunkered down on the prairie like it was riding out a storm. His stomach clenched. There was something so familiar as well about the great blue dome of sky overhead. Having lived most of his adult life in cities like San Diego and Pittsburgh, Oakland and Las Vegas, Wyatt had forgotten just how flat Oklahoma City was. The sunsets, he remembered—­when the clouds racked up on the horizon and the colors turned lurid—­could be epic.

The sunsets, the sunsets, the sunsets. His stomach clenched again, but Wyatt ignored it. There was one new skyscraper downtown, twice as high any other building, but it seemed to belong to another city, another world, a different future.

He turned south onto Walker, away from downtown, and started checking addresses. This part of town, unlike the airport, had not been given a makeover during Wyatt's absence. A few old brown-­brick commercial buildings that were boarded up, a body shop in what looked like it used to be a church, a Spanish-­language church in what looked like it used to be an A&W drive-­in, vacant lots filled with sun-­bleached weeds.

Wyatt realized the address he was trying to find was the Land Run, down at the very end of the block.

The Land Run?
That
was the place Candace Kilkenny had inherited?

The Land Run had been an Oklahoma City institution back in Wyatt's day, the best place in town, usually the only place in town, to see the indie rock bands the local radio stations never played. The Beat Farmers. The Replacements. Lone Justice. Bands stopped off on their way from Dallas to Kansas City, from Memphis to Phoenix. There was a rumor—­Wyatt didn't know if it was true—­that once you played the Land Run, you could drink there for free, in perpetuity.

Wyatt himself had managed to sneak into only a ­couple of shows. His fake ID, when he was fifteen, could not have been more woefully unconvincing, and the Land Run had the toughest door in town. Hot girls with hard eyes who just glared until finally you broke down, snatched back your shitty fake ID, and slunk away into the night.

Wyatt could picture that shitty fake ID of his like it was yesterday—­a temporary Connecticut driver's license on green card stock, with a stranger's name, address, and date of birth written by hand in blue ink. It hadn't even been laminated.

He parked across the street. The Land Run occupied a two-­story brown-­brick building that had been beat to hell in 1986 and was beat to hell now. Back in the 1940s, the building had been a public library. When the library closed, some of the fixtures had been left behind. Wyatt remembered how card catalogs had lined one wall next to the Land Run's stage. The custom was, you used a car key to scratch your initials in the cherrywood finish.

The big sign out front was still there:
The Land Run!
in cursive neon set inside a cursive metal trough and beneath that an old-­fashioned marquee with movable letters made of heavy molded plastic, translucent red, so that when the sign was illuminated at night, the letters would seem to glow.

L
IVE
MUSIC AND COLD BEER

F
RIDAY:
R
ED
M
EANS
R
UN

S
ATURDAY:
D
ADDY'S
S
OUL
D
ONUT

Plastic marquee letters like that weighed a ton, especially the capitals, the
M
's and the
S
's. Wyatt could almost feel the weight in his hands. He shook off the memory and climbed out of the car. The Land Run's big black wooden door was locked, so he gave it a bang. He gave it another bang.

“Go away!” a voice called from inside, faint. “We don't open till five.”

Wyatt banged the door again.

“Dipshit!” the faint voice called from inside.

Wyatt took out his phone and dialed. After a ­couple of rings, a woman picked up.

“If you're the dipshit at the door,” she said, “I'm not gonna tell you again.”

“Gavin told me you were a piece of work,” Wyatt said, “but I can't imagine why.”

She hung up. A few seconds later, Wyatt heard the scrape and clunk of a dead bolt, and the big black door swung open, breathing forty years of stale beer and perfume-­scented sweat into his face.

“Hi!” said the woman who opened the door. “I thought you were just some dipshit.”

“I like to think I'm more of a jerk-­off,” Wyatt said.

“You're the private investigator?” She eyed him skeptically. “You don't look like a private investigator.”

“You don't look like a Candace Kilkenny.”

Not even close. She had skin the color of fresh cinnamon, and dark hair pulled back in a ponytail that highlighted the exotic cant of even darker eyes. Wyatt put her at twenty-­three, maybe twenty-­four years old.

“I don't? Wow, really?” she said. She stood with her fists on her hips, legs wide, a colossus astride the world, all five feet, two inches of her.

Wyatt liked her already.

“Everyone always thinks I'm some mail-­order bride from Thailand,” she said, “and I'm like, ‘Screw you! I grew up in Arizona!' I'm all-­American trailer trash! I've never even been to Thailand, not since I was like six months old! Give me a break!”

“I'm glad we've cleared that up. I feel as if it was starting to come between us.”

“I thought you'd be some big tough guy. Like Gavin? Gavin looks like he could kick somebody's ass.”

“Hey,” Wyatt said. “I'm six feet tall and reasonably fit. Almost six-­one. Who's to say I don't kick the occasional ass?”

“Doubt it.” But she reached out and gave his bicep a squeeze. A hard one. “Maybe.”

“My name's Wyatt. Wyatt Rivers.”

“Wyatt Rivers.” She looked doubtful about that, too. “You want a beer? Come on in.”

She led him inside. Wyatt saw that the wooden cabinets that once held the card catalogs were still there. The stage. The battered old bar. The Art Deco skylight that had probably never been cleaned and the rickety balcony that twenty-­six years later still seemed on the verge of collapse. Posters for past shows covered every available inch of wall space.

Wyatt sat on a lopsided stool at the far end of the bar while Candace drew him a draft.

“I want to put in a kitchen,” she said. “Just a little one, for hamburgers or whatever, so we can open for lunch. Can you imagine the lunch business we'd do, all the ­people who work downtown?”

Wyatt reached for the beer and noticed on the wall behind Candace a show bill for the Hüsker Dü show. May 1, 1986. He felt his stomach clench again, not so gently this time. He checked his watch. The last plane back to Vegas left at four. He flipped open his reporter's notebook.

“Gavin says someone has been harassing you.”

“Someone's been totally harassing me!”

“My mistake. Totally harassing you. Tell me.”

“It started a ­couple of weeks ago. Three weeks ago? I get to work, and all the beer kegs out back, the empties, somebody had tipped them over and rolled them around, all over the parking lot. Two days later, totally same thing!”

She waited. Wyatt waited. If that was it, the Case of the Tipped-­Over Empty Beer Kegs, his prospects for making that four-­o'clock flight back to Vegas had just improved dramatically.

She reached across the bar and thwacked him in the sternum with the knuckles of her small, cinnamon-­brown hand. The pain was surprisingly sharp. “Stop it!” she said.

“Stop what? I'm listening attentively.”

“What you're doing with your eyebrow.”

“Ms. Kilkenny,” he said, keeping an eye on her hand in case she decided to thwack him again, “just because your beer kegs—­”

“Shut up, I know,” she said. “Call me Candace. It's not just the beer kegs. There's more. Okay? A ­couple of nights later, the sign—­my big sign out front?—­somebody climbed up there and rearranged all the letters one night. They took the letters and moved them around so they spelled things like, you know, ‘Touch my cock' and ‘Anal surprise.' ­People were driving by and honking all day the next day, until I went out there and looked. And ‘Fur pie delight.' That was another one.”

Wyatt tried to control his eyebrow. “I see.”

“Do you know what a pain it was for me to get on the ladder and move all those letters back where they were supposed to be? It's already a pain, because I have to go up there and change the band names every Sunday night. But this happened every single night for a week! And the church down the street, the pastor, he called to complain. He thought I'd turned the place into a strip club or something.”

“Did you call the police?”

“The police said it was probably just kids. They said there were gangs around here. The Southside somethings. The Southside Locos. They said I was lucky I didn't have gang graffiti coming out of my wazoo.”

“I'll go out on a limb and assume that's a paraphrase.”

But since when, he wondered, had there been Latino gangs in Oklahoma City? Or had there always been Latino gangs and he'd just been too much of a clueless Northside teenager to know it?

And while he was at it, since when did a lot of ­people work downtown, who might flock through the doors of the Land Run if Candace opened them for lunch? When Wyatt had left Oklahoma City for the last time, twenty-­six years ago, downtown had been a ghost town. Tumbleweeds rolling along Main Street, all the businesses moving north to new office parks in the suburbs.

“So the police just blew me off when I called them about the bird poop,” Candace said.

“The bird poop?”

“This was last week. I came out after work and my car was covered with bird poop. I mean totally! You couldn't even see in the windows! It looked like a big piece of candy, that white candy I hate.”

“Divinity,” Wyatt said. He didn't like it either. “But Ms. Kilkenny, Candace—­”

She thwacked him again. He hadn't even seen her hand move. “No! I know what you're going to say. No! The car parked right next to mine didn't have any poop on it at all. Neither did the car on the other side. Explain that!”

Wyatt stalled by taking a sip of his beer. Probably Candace had parked beneath a tree filled with birds. Probably kids had rearranged the letters on the signboard. Probably it was just the wind, sweeping down the plains, that had scattered the empty beer kegs.

This was the kind of case that Wyatt had been forced to take when he first started out in the business. Missing toy schnauzers and nursing-­home feuds and, once, an elderly defrocked priest who was convinced that the mob had put a contract out on him because of a confession he'd heard—­in 1968.

Oh, and cases like that—­nobody ever paid on time. Nobody ever paid in full. The toy schnauzer tried to bite you, and the elderly defrocked priest kept putting his hand on your leg.

Wyatt took another long pull of his beer. He was going to make
Gavin
pay in full for this.

“So who do you think would want to do something like this?” he said. Other than, of course, the wind, the birds, and the Southside Locos. “Why would somebody want to do it?”