The Gettin Place

Marcus stayed inside his apartment for days, watching the cut through his brow swell and fester yellow. The cuts on his knuckles, from his brother’s teeth, turned as black and scribbled as pen marks.

The box of doughnuts Som had left near the door was translucent with grease. Marcus ate the hard doughnuts, drank coffee, and slept. He didn’t answer the phone. When someone pounded on the door, he didn’t move. He stared at his face, misshapen and under-grayed with ash.

“Marcus?” Natalie Larchwood’s voice rang thin on the machine. “Marcus, as you know, the board has terminated your contract, but I need to speak with you. Please call me.”

“Marcus?” His mother’s soft murmur came next. “Your daddy want to see you.”

“Marcus?” Kurt sounded harried. “Come on to work, man, we need you. I see your Bug’s back, and I hear someone walking in there.”

He wasn’t going anywhere with his face and his head and his heart infected like this. He could see the stares at the restaurant, at the admin building, and at the barn.

And he wasn’t going to SaRonn’s. Because he’d already said he wouldn’t lie, and he didn’t want to start now.

He ran out of food. When he’d taped a bandage over the cut, now a receding lump and a wide black line, he stepped out into the turquoise evening. At the archway, a bulky figure waited.

“Cause I don’t work there anymore,” Marcus said. “You always just start right up, huh? No ‘Hey, how ya doin?’ ”

“I see you ain’t doin all right,” Mortrice said. “Your face tagged up. I heard your brothers talk about you probably wouldn’t come around no more.”

“You need to quit hangin around my building lookin all suspicious,” Marcus said. “Gon get your butt hauled in. Ain’t hot enough for that big-ass jacket. Man, we wanted to show off we were buffed, wear something for the ladies, when I was your age. How’d you guys get into the camping look?”

Mortrice shrugged. “I seen brothas wearin them Patagonia jackets in a video. Boots. Dudes wear this stuff walkin round here in Funkytown.” He frowned. “That old man teachin history class—he sit there and look like he gon die any minute. Show us movies.”

“Yeah, you are,” Marcus said. He drove down Pepper, seeing the blue strip mall, and he remembered the voice. Bye-bye. “Let’s get some doughnuts.”

Samana came from behind the curtain, his dark face sullen, his black hair cut short enough that he looked like a monk. “Can I help you?” he said without glancing up.

“It’s me, Samana,” Marcus said, and the boy’s face was startled. “Where’s your uncle?”

“He get rob, yesterday,” Samana said, his voice bored. “After he give the money, the guy hit him. Like you—the eye.” Samana studied Marcus’s face. “You get rob, too?”

“No.” When Samana was around his uncle, his voice sounded very American. But when he was around Americans, he sounded foreign again. “Who robbed him? They catch the guy?”

Samana shook his head. Mortrice was silent, his arms folded. Marcus said, “How’s school?”

Marcus was uncomfortable asking questions, even more with Mortrice standing there. He didn’t want Mortrice involved. “So, you been hangin out with anybody?”

“If I have money for a Jeep, I don’t stand here all day, right?” Samana folded his arms, too. “You don’t work at school now. Why you care?”

Marcus felt a flush at his neck. “I was just askin. Thought maybe you made some friends, had a nickname and all.”

Samana said, “Shit. People say ‘Semana,’ like Spanish for week. Then call me Week-boy. Say ‘Semen-a,’ they call me Sperm. Shit. Nobody pronounce right. Sa-mana.” Then he unfolded his arms. “Who care? What you want? Glazed?”

Mortrice looked out the window at the Kozy Komfort. “Old sprung fools always hangin out there.”

“They aren’t as old as you think,” Marcus said, seeing Usher Price on his folding chair.

His father and uncle sat near the barn, watching the Bug shudder up the incline. Marcus got out, and Mortrice headed toward the trailers. “Ain’t seen you yet,” Uncle Oscar said. “You fightin in jail?”

When his father had told him about Fulton Chester and the brother who’d sold him the VCR, Marcus stared at the blue walls of the house. The adobe patch was only slightly rougher, less formed, than the rest of the wall near the kitchen door.

A setup, to make them look bad. Marcus told his father about the Cambodian voice he thought he’d heard near the canal. “But how could that be connected? Maybe they were random drug hits, cause I know one of the girls was into speed,” he said.

“Hell,” Marcus said. “It ain’t like I know, like I been hangin around here for years, figurin out all the scams people like to run in Treetown. I was elsewhere, okay?” He heard his voice rising, and he stopped, looking down at the gravel. “I’m thinkin the bodies don’t have nothin to do with the stolen goods. It’s just people fuckin up in Treetown cause they think nobody cares.”

“I sure as hell care,” Oscar said. “Chester know he can’t pull no more shit like he did. I know the man understand that.”

Marcus watched his father twist a piece of baling wire around a pipe. Where you get that pipe cutter? he thought. At the gettin place. “You more worried about the land than you are about me. My name’s fucked up, my job.”

His father shook his head. “You both the same. This place and your name tied together. Whether you like it or not. Remember it or not.”

Marcus stood up, putting his hands on the stone barn wall, glimpsing the pliers and wrench tucked into a crease between rocks. When he turned, his mother was walking up the drive with the mail. “Marcus!” She embraced him tightly. “Who marked up your face?”

“You get that in jail? My only one never been to jail,” she said angrily. “I wanted to go down there and hit somebody myself.” She sat down, rubbing her hair away from her eyes. “My boys fallin apart. If Julius was gon mess up and hurt somebody, why he didn’t get his own self in trouble? Not you. Not Finis.” She rested her forehead on the heel of her hand. “I got my girl back, and now I done lost two more.”

Marcus looked at the barn, at the chains draped over branches. They’d swung from his father’s tires, from ropes and chains, all of them. Family came first. No room for individual fuckups. If I screwed up, they’d cut me off, too. I gotta figure this out.

“Hosea,” his mother was saying now, holding something. “You got a letter from Tulsa.”

To Hosea Thompson,

Mrs. Geneva Bolton ask me write you when she pass. You have some thing here. Mrs. Bolton service on Friday at Simmons Grove cemetary. I taken care of her the last ten year.

Clara Roberts

“Who’s this?” Marcus said, glancing over his father’s arm to read the letter.

“My father’s cousin Fred,” Hosea said slowly. “Distant cousin. He was a Pullman porter. This was his wife.”

Hosea slid the paper into his pocket, standing up. “I gotta go down to the lot, see about that steerin wheel for that Impala.”

Oscar stood up, too, moving his hat nervously on his head. “Ain’t nothin I need to see back there.” He looked into the eucalyptus trees and spat. “I keep a eye out for you here, if you goin. But ain’t nothin gon happen. Chester know better.”

He watched Oscar turn slowly, his face settling hard under the pushed-back brim. Finally Oscar said, “I don’t know. He kept beatin on her, beatin on me worse cause you defy him. He was gon take us to Chicago, I heard him say. I left, man. I was—eleven, twelve. Hell, I don’t know.” He paused. “I never seen her again.”

Hosea watched him walk, unwavering, into the trees. Marcus said, “Your mother?”

Hosea turned to the always questioning face, his last son, who never sat easy and talked about rims or rain, who came out with a prickly, frowning request every time. “I said I was goin to the lot. I be back.”

The road to the lot was dusty and warm. He knew damn well there was still a steering wheel on the ’64 Impala a drunken Westside boy had wrecked, because Demetrius had given the boy four hundred dollars for the end-smashed vehicle since he knew every low rider restoring an Impala would be begging for the parts.

Hosea stared at the pleated metal on the back of the car, and he walked around the rest of the lot slowly, feeling the sun’s glare off the baking hoods and trunks: the nondescript Pintos and Gremlins and Dusters, and old Fords and Chevys and the few valuable parts, like the ones from the Impala, that Octavious and Demetrius had been guarding lately, still uneasy about the trouble.

He leaned against the hood of the Gremlin closest to the acrid dark earth where the Granada had burned. Staring at his locked gate, looking past the wire to the riverbottom, he could see a homeless man trudging along the cane down past the field. The man was carrying a discarded wicker chair toward the narrow path leading into the tangled cotton-woods and few pecan trees where an encampment had grown this summer. From his chair higher up, Hosea had seen the tent material in red and green flashes among the trees.

He closed his eyes to the sun. The tent someone had finally lifted for his mother, on the ash-muddied ground where the house had burned, was dirty white canvas, like the others squatting like dirty hens on bare lots around Greenwood. His mother had huddled in the damp corner with Oscar, a baby whose constant shriveled cry from cold and anger threaded like dripping strings of laundry through the tent. Hosea watched his mother’s face, the copper gone sallow and smudged with mud and soot from cooking over a fire, her hairline a rumpled cloud of escaped hair, her hands shaking and mouth slack.

He wasn’t a man. He was the reason the feather-haired white woman had made them leave the room over the garage, Retha’s room. He wouldn’t go into the big house and dust, he wouldn’t crouch in the fireplace and sweep out the ashes, he wouldn’t rub the tires on the black car while she stood a few feet away and glared, arms folded under her puffy bosom and trembling neck and knitting teeth.

He wasn’t a man. His mother had no man to help build a shack of scrap wood like the others, to find bricks all the way in other cities when Tulsa wouldn’t sell building material to colored, to keep away the white men who tried to buy the plots of earth with no structures on them. His father… Maceo… ashes and stolen-away bones and not a trace.

The man named Ford Wilson saw her when he came to sell whiskey to the two sisters who were running the choc house from a boxcar salvage shack. He stopped when he saw Hosea’s mother near the fire in the yard, and he came around all the time then. “People gotta drink, baby,” Hosea heard him say. “And they gotta pay.”

His mother took him to Geneva Bolton’s house that spring, when Ford Wilson wanted her to go somewhere with him. She wouldn’t leave the baby, but she took him to the old white frame house Fred Bolton had built himself before the riot, one of the few houses untouched by the burning.

The Tulsa land was gone. His father’s land. His mother had to let it go, to one of the hatted men who told her she had to build or she had to leave.

Hosea touched the flaming hood of the cars he passed when he walked back through the lot. His crop. He knew every wheel and door and dashboard knob on his land. Every gopher hole and orange tree and oil drum. He hadn’t been back to Tulsa since his grandfather’s body was frozen in the far field, and Hosea had watched the box lowered into the red clay at Simmons Grove cemetery. Where they were burying Geneva Bolton, the last person he’d known there. Where his father’s stone-carved name hovered over nothing, all alone, inside the last plot of earth he’d ever owned.

Marcus was inside the kitchen, eating a plate of beans and rice, when Hosea stepped inside. “You gon drive me,” he told his son. “My shoulder still ain’t right.”

“Uh-uh,” Marcus said, looking up at him. “Get Demetrius to do it. He know what he’s doin, everywhere he go.” His voice was as sullen as a teenager who’d been denied. He denied his perfect record, Hosea thought. “I ain’t up for facin Oklahoma cops,” Marcus went on.

Hosea said, “So you mad cause you got arrested. You held out a long time, Marcus, longer than most. But it’s part of the zip code, boy, and it’s over.”

“Like a scar.” Hosea waited, hearing Alma and Sofelia coming back toward the kitchen. “Maybe a scar ain’t your fault—a rock somebody threw. But you can’t be shamed of it forever. Can’t hide it. I need somebody to drive.”

“Feel like hidin my face,” Marcus said, stalking around the kitchen in a rooster circle. “I’m on TV, I’m in the paper, lookin like every worst stereotype.” He looked at Hosea. “You never saw your mother again?”

Hosea touched the thick adobe doorway and turned away. Marcus said, “Hell, I ain’t got a job. I’ll drive if you talk. If you start talkin. You can’t be a shadow man.”

Sofelia, washing pomegranates in the sink, said suddenly, “Tulsa? Oklahoma? Where Uncle and Aintie—” She glanced at her mother and bit her lip. “Where y’all from?” Her neck was flushed with crimson like the fruit. “Can you take Mortrice and show him? He ain’t never been nowhere.”

Marcus rubbed his eyes. “He can take a few days off. It’s history, right? More history than he’s learnin in class. More than anybody ever told me.”

Hosea looked at the address on the letter, not wanting to meet their eyes. “I ain’t said—” He stopped. He’d never told them anything about Tulsa because his grandfather had never wanted to tell him about Texas. “Too much salt make you bitter,” he used to say when Hosea asked. “Harden up your heart.”

“We probably miss the funeral,” Hosea said finally. “We can leave tomorrow.”

They took a 1989 Nissan Sentra from the lien-sale lot. Hosea told Demetrius to charge him. Mortrice was sullen, silent, in the backseat while Marcus drove. Before dawn, he aimed for the faint glow in the eastern desert. If he held up and Hosea took over now and then, they could drive straight through. Marcus drove into the sun, under the sun, away from the sun.

Mortrice slept through Arizona. Nothin to see but sand and rocks. Look like a alien planet in the movies, he thought. Cowboys and Indians.

When he woke, seeing darkness cloud the car windows, they were stopping for food. He sat across the small table from his uncle and grandfather, trying not to look right at them. His grandfather’s face was like a voodoo mask he’d seen in a book—all slanted eyes and cheekbones and mouth. And Marcus—he was as soft and brown as the grandmother, except his mouth.

I don’t look like neither of em. I look like my daddy. I guess I look like a dead man.

In the dark backseat, he thought, I could be drivin. They don’t know. I done drove Chris’s ride all the way to L.A. He watched the play of light on his hands. He felt naked without his piece and his kit. He’d left them with Chris, with threats about what would happen if he messed either of them up. Teddy was still working on his special gun, the one to give them their marks. Mortrice knew Chris and the others were scared it would hurt. Everything hurt. Especially marks.

In his history class, where the old man showed films whenever he could and the flickering sound of the projector put everyone to sleep, he and Chris talked about the guns. They needed another one, since Arthell from the next building wanted to be down with AK. AK-6.

A white kid had overheard them talking, Mortrice knew, because he’d asked Mortrice after class one day, “You got a piece?”

The kid had yellow hair cut real short all over his head, like bits of thread held up by static electricity. He kept running his palm over his head. Mortrice recognized him—he used to have a ponytail.

“What you care?” Mortrice had answered, walking away. He knew the kid would ask him again. He’d seen who he ran with. Wiggers. Two other white boys and the Japanese kid. The one from the doughnut store. All with short hair now, all with big jackets and listening to Ice Cube.

But if AK needed money, they could always turn a piece around, sell it to the white boys. They had money. They’d pay extra. But they’d have to take care of their own guns. Mortrice only took care of his homeys. His blood.

“When you see Oklahoma, maybe you see why we always been country out here,” his mother had whispered to him. “Country in our blood, I guess. In yours, too. You just don’t know it yet.”

When he slept in the trailer, in the eerie scent of damp stones and porous bone, he didn’t hear a damn thing but birds and scurrying animals. The kind of animals who’d been seeking Paco’s blood, their teeth on his face. In the country.

After the flat, pale yellows and greens of the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma, Marcus saw the red clay earth begin to show itself in furrows and gullies. He drove through the early afternoon toward Tulsa. His father said, “That’s how the ground gon look in the cemetery where they just buried her yesterday. Red scar.”

“So she kept you for a while?” Marcus said. “Your mother was movin around?”

Mortrice spoke from the back, where they’d thought he was asleep again. “He kill somebody?”

Hosea sucked his teeth at the boy. “Maybe. Somebody kill him.” He paused, staring out the window. “Look, now we comin up on it.”

When they began to see the names of the expressways—Creek, Osage, Choctaw—Marcus knew his father was lost. He was murmuring, “Didn’t have none a these last time,” and looking at the address on the letter. “She live on Garrison, but I don’t remember that bein in Greenwood. Get off here and I think I know the way.”

They passed blocks of dingy brick warehouses rimmed with black iron, and paralleling the freeway, they came to an underpass. “Turn,” his father said suddenly, and emerging from the underpass, Marcus saw miles of open space. Grass, flat, hazy fall air, and deep, wide pits like flood basins. “Look like a park,” he said. “Big park, but no bike trails or anything.”

His father said, “Stop here for a minute.” He got out of the car, his shape frail against the empty landscape. “Goddamnit,” he whispered when Marcus stood beside him. “This was Greenwood. The whole damn place gone.”

The small frame houses and the brick buildings, all the stores and pharmacies and cleaners and restaurants that had been built back up after the burning and the years of tents and mud wallows and no materials and city ordinances, all were vanished. Hosea stared at the freeway behind them, at the place where he thought Fred Bolton’s house had been. Fred standing in the front yard, boasting, “They fought a damn war, man! Soldiers, machine guns, gas bombs! I couldn’t get back in on the train for three damn days, them white folks was so scared niggas would come in from Muskogee and help out. And everything back. The black Wall Street back, man.”

In this vague, hanging air between the few scattered trees, he saw no outlines of ash, no houses. Nothing but undulating, overgrown green.

Hosea couldn’t stop the trembling in his back. It was a chill, from the early evening. He got back into the car, and they went north, toward a cluster of houses. Marcus asked at a gas station where Garrison was, and in the grid of streets here, in North Tulsa, where Hosea thought white families used to live, they found the tiny brick house.

The woman named Clara Roberts opened the front door. Inside, the small room was as dark as a cave until she turned on a lamp.

Hosea watched her bring a sheaf of papers into the room. She was broad and sturdy, her shoulders as soft as Alma’s under the dress and coat. “I was just fixin to go home,” she said. “Didn’t have no idea when y’all gon come.”

Hosea sat on the couch, and she lowered herself slowly onto a chair. “I taken care of Miz Bolton, help her do her shoppin and cookin and all. She ain’t had no children, you know.” The woman settled herself and sighed. “I ain’t sure which one worse. Don’t have no children, ain’t nobody to take care of you. But I got my grandbabies now, cause ain’t nobody takin care of them. Seem like you can’t win.”

The papers held a typed list with items and his name. Clock, wardrobe, letters, and pictures. Hosea saw the tired smudges around the woman’s eyes. “We gon go get a hotel,” he said. “We come back in the mornin and get everything settle. You look like you need some rest.”

She nodded. Marcus said, “I’ll carry the paper, Daddy.” They stood up, Mortrice silently looking at the knickknacks and cabinets and brocaded furniture. “Lotta things,” Hosea said.

“Lord, I know,” Clara Roberts said. “She left me most the furniture, and clothes and all. But my place so small, I don’t know where I’ma put em.”

She locked the small house, and Mortrice looked down the row of homes. “Look like California,” he said, the first time he’d spoken.

Mrs. Roberts shook her head wearily. “Feel like California, with this late heat we havin and all this shootin.”

She winced. “Got these boys call theyselves Crips and Bloods runnin the streets, came back from L.A. to stay with their peoples cause they got in trouble or somethin. Nothin but trouble over by me.”

They drove her to an apartment complex not far away, a seventies-looking brown stucco building that said NORTH LANCASTER ARMS. Hosea saw kids playing in the parking lot and clothes hanging from balconies. “Look like trouble just waitin,” she said.

Mortrice stared at the markings on the walls. “Gangster Loc Posse.” “Rollin Crip Mob.” He slumped back in the seat beside his grandfather so that only his eyes were window level.

Ain’t no difference, except them brick buildings, he thought. Everything the same, wherever you go. They just talk all soft. But they all want to be L.A. hard. Look at them brothas hangin by that one car.

He narrowed his eyes, concentrating on the wide, light-skinned man in a tank-top undershirt, his khakis low, his hands gesturing wide. Capper. It looked like Capper. He felt his throat closing up, and he breathed harder. Capper must got peoples here. He must had to run. Mortrice saw hollow-eyed women dangling over a few balconies, calling down to men in the parking lot. Sprung. Everywhere was the same.

The old woman got out of the front seat slow and painful, Mortrice saw. She said, “Lord, it’s a crime the way they done taken over. But you didn’t come all this way to hear me complain.” She leaned toward his grandfather. “I’ll see you at the house around ten, all right? Take you down to the cemetery. She gonna have a nice stone. She had a policy.”

Marcus slept deeply on the bed nearest the bathroom. Hosea felt he couldn’t breathe in the small motel room, with the two wide beds and small table near the window. His grandson stretched out on the other bed, watching jerky images of women bending over and shaking their butts, of boys with sunglasses and baggy pants like his pulling guns from jackets and shooting from car windows.

Hosea sat in the chair. The whole damn place gone. All of it. Expressways and turnpikes curving and twisting everywhere like stiff gray rivers oblivious to all in their paths. Like the Rio Seco freeway, so long ago. About the same time, he thought. Cut right through the stores and fish market and barbershops between Treetown and the Westside.

The landscape on the television was dark and pitted, smoldering fires in trash cans and brown faces ringed around the flames. He glanced at his grandson; the flickering movements reflected in his wide eyes made his face come alive in the small room.

Marcus woke with the sound of trucks idling in the parking lot. His father was asleep in the other bed; Mortrice was rolled into a blanket on the floor beside the television, still silently on above his back.

Clara Roberts was already in the house when they arrived. She had begun clearing things from the crowded kitchen, which smelled like opened medicine and old people. “Can I help you with some of these?” Marcus said, and she smiled, a rosy smudge of lipstick on one tooth.

She was one of those always coiffed, always made-up, wide-waisted middle-aged women who did the work, he thought. A church sister. One of the women like Bertha Williams, his mother’s friend, who made invisible rounds to old people’s homes and church auditoriums and cemeteries and grocery stores, taking care of everyone. And they were always tired, the opaque hose and thick-soled shoes moving slow and steady.

“Well, you know she were a member of Mt. Zion, way back when they burned it to the ground in the riot.” Marcus frowned, thinking that they kept mentioning this riot, which must have been in one small neighborhood since he’d never heard or read anything about it. “Then they rebuilt that church, and when they cleared out Greenwood, them two old churches bout the only things left. They down there like islands. The university own lotta that land now.”

They stacked boxes on the tiny back porch, since Mrs. Roberts said they’d be stolen from the front if she didn’t watch. She moved through the small rooms like a boat through treacherous waters. “You know, Mr. Bolton hated this house,” she called to his father. “Hated every brick.”

She nodded. “Some a them houses was just shacks. But some was real nice, like the Boltons’. The city said everything had to go, said about the expressway and some other project. But after they put in the expressway, they ain’t done much else.”

When they sat down to rest, Marcus brought his father and Clara Roberts cans of soda. Mortrice was hanging out in the front doorway, staring at the street. “Your daddy died in the riot?” Mrs. Roberts said.

Hosea nodded. “My uncle died then, too,” she said. “Long time before I was born. My grandma had ten children, and he was about thirteen. She use to tell me bout that day. They woke up and heard them planes flyin over, like the war had come over here, and then she was tryin to get the kids dress so they could get away. He run back in the house for somethin, and one a them planes dropped a bomb. Dynamite, I heard. The house went up in fire, and the machine guns was shootin, and they all run. She never found nothin but ashes. Bout five other people in that buildin, too, cause they had roomers.”

Marcus leaned against the wall, not believing what he heard. “This was a riot? And planes were dropping bombs?”

“And you never mentioned it?” Marcus stared at his father, who kept his eyes on the shelf of knickknacks.

Mrs. Roberts pushed herself up from the couch. “Yeah. They said nobody never knew about how many people got killed. White people killed, too, cause the colored was shootin em to protect they homes. But so many colored died like my uncle, and they never found the bodies. My grandma said she seen three men run out a burnin house, and the white men shot two and threw em back in the fire. Said you didn’t know what was in them ashes next day. Nor who.” She paused. “They didn’t low no funerals. They was cartin up bodies and throwin em in the river.”

“Goddamn,” Marcus whispered. “How come I never read anything about this?” He tried to imagine the planes, the people running. He’d seen pictures of the Watts riots, but that was stores in flames and people carrying TVs and helmeted men.

“I bet you ain’t,” his father said, rising, too. “Come on. She need some help.”

“She left you this wardrobe, cause your mama always admired it,” Clara Roberts said, pausing in front of an ornate, curved-glass cupboard filled with figurines and glass. She reached inside and pulled out a few plates. “These are from slavery days. She told me her grandma had em, and your mama liked the pattern. They yours, too.”

Marcus looked at the plates in his father’s hands. The tiny flowers surrounded a blank center crackled with veins of brown. “You keep the wardrobe,” his father said. “I can’t haul it. You keep it, or sell it and keep the money.”

She nodded. “It’s old. Mrs. Bolton’s mama had it.” She pushed forward another box. “This the box I was lookin for yesterday.”

His father pulled out a bright gold-toned bullet, larger than anything Marcus had ever seen. Mortrice came forward and said, “That a shell?”

Marcus was amazed to see his father’s eyes gleam narrow gashes of tears when he nodded. The shell was engraved with flowers and words that Marcus couldn’t read in his father’s trembling hands. “How she find this?” his father whispered.

Mrs. Roberts shrugged. “Said your mama give it to her sometime after the riot.”

Marcus watched his father lay it carefully in the box and close the top. “I look at the rest later,” he said, blinking hard. “That a gun in the bedroom?”

They glimpsed the long barrel through the open door. Clara Roberts nodded, and Hosea went into the tiny back bedroom and brought it out. “Mr. Bolton, that belong to him,” she said. “Miz Bolton keep his things in that room. I ain’t sure who get em.”

Marcus took the rifle, feeling the heavy barrel and the wooden stock. He squinted at the year engraved in the metal. “1886?” he said. “That old?”

Mortrice held out his hand for the gun, and Hosea said, “That’s an old buffalo gun. I remember my daddy sayin Mr. Bolton got it from his grandpa. Creek Indian. They used to hunt buffalo with that.” He watched Mortrice handle the gun. “I had my grandpa’s gun, too. Cops still got it.”

Marcus said, “You better put it away before you find out it’s got some ancient bullets in it.” Mrs. Roberts had gone back into the kitchen, and now she came out with a handful of flowers in a jar.

“We better go on to the cemetery,” she said. “You know, I’ma give y’all the key and let you take these. Cause my grandson runnin a fever today, and I want to check on him. Maybe y’all drop me off?”

When they were getting in the car, Mortrice said, “I need to go to the rest room, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

She gave him the house key, and he disappeared inside for a few minutes. When he came back out, he said, “Thanks.”

Hosea was closing the trunk, where he’d put the box with the shell and the clock and the other things. Marcus asked him, “That shell was yours?”

Mrs. Roberts said, “Miz Bolton told me your mama come by after the riot. She had you, that new baby, and that shell. That was all. Then she come back later with a ring, from a sharp-lookin fella, ax the Boltons keep you for a while. Come back after a month, said you goin to your granddaddy place down there in Simmons Grove, cause a blood tie and all. Miz Bolton was so sad, but you know, her husband didn’t never like kids anyway. And your mama axed her keep the shell. You know what else in that box?”

“All the paper stories about the riot, Miz Bolton saved em. You know,” the woman said, looking toward downtown, “if you went over there right now, to the library and the museum, you wouldn’t never find them stories. They tore em out all the copies. Like it never happened.” She paused. “You can’t tear out the truth.”

They drove in silence toward her apartment. In the parking lot, she turned to Marcus’s father. “You know your way down there to the Simmons Grove cemetery? So different down there now. I remember we use to go there for vegetables. Country—I mean they had those picnics and mules.” She had a strange look on her face.

His father nodded absently, staring out the window at the car next to them. “Only ten miles, but it was country.”

She stared at him sadly, Marcus thought. “It ain’t Simmons Grove now. It’s south Tulsa. You see when you get down there.”

Marcus heard the two words everyone used to describe Treetown. Down there. Some things were the same, he was thinking, and his father frowned, getting out of the car.

The baby’s brown face was purple with rage around the ears and eyes, and the tiny fists batted around the screams circling him. Hosea bent to the open car window, smelling the angry pee dampening the car seat the infant was strapped into and the sour odor of the carpet.

Clara Roberts was beside him, her face contorted with anger, too, and she reached inside to snap the buckles loose and take the baby into her arms. “Girl next door to us,” she whispered, her eyes glassy. “She done left him out here again while she talkin in the parkin lot. Lookin for that dope man.”

Hosea stared at the baby, still screaming and stiff, like his nerves had gone rigid. Clara Roberts turned away as if embarrassed and stalked toward the building, the cries winding behind her like rasping smoke.

In the car, Marcus was talking, but Hosea didn’t hear him. Oscar, a baby, screaming in the tent. The woman who’d lost a day-old baby in a shoebox during the riot and roamed the streets searching for him. Hosea walking all that winter, looking for a tiny skeleton, for larger skeletons, for ashes and bones.

He looked at his son’s face. A man. But all the babies in Alma’s arms, crying or fussing or looking hungry, had driven him to the coldhouse. Not that he didn’t love them, but they terrified him. Those glistening, gaping mouths; those toothpick bones. Fit in a shoebox.

He was old when he’d married Alma, when they had the babies. And still they’d frightened him, until their arms grew to size and they smiled when they wanted something.

“Go on down this street,” he finally whispered. “South. All the way down.”

But past the blocks of restaurants, pawn shops, stores, and car lots that he’d expected, he didn’t see the open fields that separated Tulsa from the old Simmons Grove, the city from the black farms. He saw wood-stucco apartments and condominiums lining both sides of the street, and he grew dizzy, confused again, thinking that the baby’s piercing screams had made him forget where he was headed. The complexes had big signs. WOODSIDE. TIMBERCAST. WILLOW GROVE. COTTONWOOD.

Sherbert names. Hosea waited for the thick woods, but he saw brick walls, wide, sloping roofs, and wrought-iron gates.

“Check out the money,” Mortrice said from the back. “Like L.A. big-time.”

The homes were palatial, with columns and gray stone and huge garages. Hosea was staring at the largest of the homes, a group gathered behind an arched gate with gold letters that said SOUTHAMPTON ESTATES, when Marcus said, “Daddy—is that the cemetery?”

On the other side of the street, facing the brick wall and towering roofs, he saw the tiny piece of land hemmed in by forest and a chain-link fence. A small sign said, SIMMONS GROVE CEMETERY—EST. 1876.

They got out and approached the fence. Hosea remembered Mrs. Roberts saying, in the kitchen, that few people came out here anymore, that a man had had to put up the fence to guard against kids who’d been vandalizing the cemetery. These rich kids? he thought, glancing behind him at the roofs. He saw beer bottles glinting in the grass near headstones, and a rabbit leaped away toward the back, where the vines and scrub leaned hard against the fence.

Marcus and Mortrice followed him. Marcus read aloud, “Mendoza Aloysius Breedlove. Born 1834. Died 1894. He was a slave!”

Hosea heard the excitement in his voice, and he turned. “He was a Creek slave, and a Creek freedman. He knew my granddaddy.” He pointed. “There.”

His grandfather’s grave, his father’s, his grandmother’s, whom he’d never known. They lay all in a row, the crude hand-carved stones like chipped teeth. Hosea stared at the coarse, mossy rock. They’d never had enough money for good headstones.

POMPEY AURELIUS THOMPSON. B. 1855. D. 1938. “Your grandfather was a slave, too,” Marcus murmured. “I figured, but you never told us for sure.”

ROBERT THOMPSON. B. 1897. D. 1921. Nothing was buried there. Nothing but memory. Hosea’s eyes stung like a child’s, prickling hot. “He died in the riot,” Marcus said, and Hosea couldn’t stop himself.

“Stop talkin,” he said, harsh. “You can talk later. I tell you later. Let the dead rest.” Hosea felt his eyes travel over sandpaper when he looked away from his son’s hollow cheeks, his lips pulled in tight.

MONETA THOMPSON. B. 1862. D. 1897. With his father crying and still slick. Hosea had children now. He saw what he couldn’t imagine back then, when his grandfather had said, “She died givin life.”

He walked abruptly to the closer part of the cemetery, away from the huge oak and these older markers with their uneven scrawls and age-darkened edges.

On the far right, the red clay was mounded, hard crust nearly pink. No stone yet—only the flowers, still fresh, and he added the jar to the gathering. Next to Mrs. Bolton was a marble marker with precise carvings. FREDRICK JAMES BOLTON. B. 1889. D. 1970. BELOVED HUSBAND.

Sitting on the stump of the felled oak, he looked at the clay. He had to start somewhere. He never said the right words to this too tenderhearted son. “Marcus,” he said, and he saw the grandson Mortrice hovering near enough to hear, too. Marcus kept his face to the forest. A question, Hosea thought. One like his. “You thought of dyin yet, Marcus?”

Hosea said, “Old as I am, you see people goin and you wonder when your time up. My time came close as that bullet.” He fingered his shoulder. “Talk to a preacher, Chester or any preacher, he tell you about pearly gates of heaven and rest, sweet bye and bye.” Hosea stared at the pinkish clay, then at the small, leaning Thompson stones.

“I can’t see it,” he said, his voice catching harsh. “I can’t see nothin. What—clouds and people walkin round? All them pictures they shown us when we was little—lambs and grass and white robes. Who? All them white folks from Tulsa was sure they was goin through them gates. Don’t tell em they wasn’t. What I’ma do around them? My daddy laughin and playin with em?”

Hosea stared at his son now, at the short mesh of hair over the vulnerable temples. “I don’t see nothin,” he said. “No hell. But I remember you comin home from college one week talkin about karma and some shit. Reincarnation. Comin back again, but you better do good or you come back worse—a fly or a dog. I can’t picture that directly neither, but…” He stopped when Marcus looked up, his lips parting.

“Wasn’t nothin to do but listen. You talked all day. Never shut up. Hindu and Buddha and all of it.”

Marcus said, “The people at the doughnut shop are Cambodian. Buddhist. That’s how they believe.” He stared at Hosea. “What do you see?”

Hosea shook his head. “I might could see people floatin above the sky, but in the dark. Watchin. But so many of em, like crowds of clothes hung up movin in the wind.” He stopped, thinking of the Dog Star, remembering what his grandfather had told him about that star. And he couldn’t go back that far again.

Marcus’s eyes were swerving from him to the gravestones. Hosea stood up and said, “You can read them newspapers, about the riot. I don’t know what they say. My daddy got killed that night. They burned down the house, and most of Greenwood. Me and my mama went to where they sent us. Then it was like the woman said. I came to the Boltons, I went to the farm. You heard your uncle. Man name Ford Wilson was beatin on her, beatin on Oscar real bad. I stepped in, and I got it, but I made it worse. I took off for two years, and when I come back, Oscar was gone. They was all gone except my grandfather. We farmed for a while, and then he passed. I come out to California.”

Marcus looked away, at the trees, and Hosea looked that way, too, seeing the tangled vines he’d hacked through. His grandson was wandering along the sagging fence line, and Hosea saw a gap torn in the wire. A place where boys wandered in to drink and piss on the dead. Hosea ducked through, scraping his leg on a wild rose. He stood in the woods, hearing a nearby roar and hum.

Oscar’s note was hidden in the earth-pearled flask under the smokehouse, where they’d agreed on. “Mama take me Fred’s,” the scrawl read. But Oscar had run away the first night, and he’d never come back. He had belt-buckle scars like Chinese writing on his back, and knife welts like lodged bullets.

When his sons had begun to walk, he’d watched the fights and transgressions, but he’d vowed never to beat them. His throat would close in fear of his own fists, and he didn’t touch them at all. Instead, he was perpetually intimidating, keeping his eyes stone or spark, lips held still, arms folded.

No hugs, no knuckles against resting cheeks. No holding hands. But he could watch Alma do all that, and he could sit in his chair, knowing they wouldn’t run. And they hadn’t, except for Marcus, who hadn’t gone far, although downtown was worlds away.

“You kept wantin to know,” Hosea blurted out. “I told you. My history all bad. You hear any more, it ain’t gon be no better.” Before Marcus could answer, or ask, he turned to hear the rushing hum, closer now, and when he pushed his foot through a stack of berry vines, he touched wire again. Another fence. Peering past the narrow-trunked scrub oaks, he saw the expressway down a steep slope.

Toward the north, he saw where the asphalt now ran over the river. Hosea’s eyes stung from heat and drifting exhaust, from the stream of cars heading home. “Let’s go,” he said, seeing them come knee-deep in brush beside him.

When they went to the woman’s apartment to thank her, Mortrice stayed in the motel room. He told them he was tired. But he didn’t want to see the one who could be Capper and the other eyes in the parking lot. The hands in the jackets. Maybe Capper had killed Kenneth, and had to come out here to start over. New territory. No place was different. That’s why he needed more toast. Harder toast. The buffalo gun was the biggest he’d ever seen, the barrel heavy and long enough to hold real power.

He opened the box and examined the shell. Some flowers and names. 1918. Like all those years on the graves today. Long ago and far away, in another galaxy. The old plates looked dirty and cracked.

He glimpsed newspapers folded neatly, as yellow as mustard, they were so old. Taking one out carefully, he saw a photo of smoke rising from buildings and men with their hands up marching in lines. Dark men. “Race Riot,” the headline read.

Mortrice stared at the photos for a while. When you were in a building on fire, even a piece wouldn’t help. He remembered the stories some of the men who hung around Soul Gardens told about the riot in 1965. The cops, the National Guard. Mortrice had seen blank spaces where people said nothing had ever been built again after it had burned.

The moon was as bright as a sunlit coin, hanging in the slash of window framing the southwest sky when Hosea woke at three A.M. He sat up in the bed nearest the glare of light.

Hosea parted the curtains further, seeing the full light. He remembered the nights working in the fields, the hard silver glare on the crops he picked. Even in California, he would wake on his own land and work in the edging light. Sometimes his sons did, too. Especially Demetrius, who’d picked oranges more than the others. Never Marcus.

The only place to sit and wait was the hard chair at the small table, where he lit matches and dropped them into the ashtray. He smoked a whole cigarillo, thinking about the vast spaces of Greenwood, empty, about Simmons Grove houses cleared for rubbish, and only the detritus buried underground, still breathing beneath the huge garages. Trash, pottery. Animal bones. Human bones, if they were in the wrong place.

When the Nissan pulled slowly into the parking space, lights off, tires creaking over grit, Hosea put out the cigarillo. His grandson opened the door as quietly as he could.

“Bet not be no drugs in that car,” Hosea said. “I’ll take your young ass to jail myself.”

But the boy stared back, his eyebrows like frost. “I don’t like none a them kind.”

The boy loaded the box into the trunk with the suitcases early in the morning. Hosea didn’t see any signs that he was higher, or lower, than he’d been before. The boy slept hard in the backseat, and Hosea thought maybe he’d gone to see a girl in Clara Roberts’s building.

Marcus drove silently for hours through the reddish fields and pale haze. Hosea knew he was still thinking about yesterday. When they crossed into Texas, the panhandle soil faded to rose and then sand; Hosea felt cold air massing. Toward evening, when they stopped for food, Marcus slumped over the steering wheel and said, “You tripped on Texas when I told you about the voice by the canal. Texas means something. You gon tell me now, or wait till one of us gets fucked up again?” Hosea leaned his head back and tasted the dust on his teeth. His son’s voice was hard. “Shit, let’s go south right now and find out.”

“Nothin to find.” Hosea tasted ice on the moving air current. He looked for the Dog Star. Sirius. “I went to Texas lookin for work. Lookin for a place my grandpa tell me about.”

“To him?” Hosea stared through the windshield at the cold glitter of the stars, heightened by the coming ice. “What happen to him he ain’t wanted to tell me, no more than I want to tell you.”

After a long time, Marcus said, “That was his gun, your grandpa’s gun, you shot at the Jeep.”

Hosea remembered the first time he’d felt the wooden stock. “Cause of this—I lost his gun,” he said softly. “You right.” He leaned back in the seat again, hearing the highway traffic from this parking lot. “He said his daddy name Augustus Thompson. The name he got in South Carolina. He was from Africa. Said his mama name Persephone. She was born there, where they was. He was the only son. Pompey what the owner call him. The daddy can’t name him.

“His daddy hardly never speak. Only whisper to him at night. Never in the day. Only whisper in the dark, inside they place.

“One morning the master say he hear the army comin, and he make em walk. They got a few wagons and walk across South Carolina, walk all the way to Georgia. My grandfather eight, nine. They start buildin, clearin land to farm, and then the master hear the army comin there, too. They start walkin again, in winter. Walkin to Texas.

“They was near the border, and the mama feet was bleedin and swole, from the snow. She said she couldn’t walk no more. The master didn’t put nobody on the wagons, cause they materials was on there. She lay down in the road, say she can’t go no more. The master said he hate a nigger what moan and cry and give up. Augustus go to try and pick her up, and the master come up behind and shoot her in the head.

“Augustus, he stop, he want to reach for the gun, my grandfather say he can see that in his hand. He ain’t said nothin. Then the master point the gun, say, ‘Can’t trust you noway.’ Shoot the daddy, too. Swing that barrel round at my grandfather. Say, ‘May’s well clean out the bad blood. You the only one left with it. No-good nigger bloodline.’ But then he poke him and say, ‘Walk, goddamn you.’

“Pompey never say nothin again. They walk in the snow, walk to Texas, and the master say build a big house cause they stayin. A man teach Pompey how to cut stone, and they cut limestone blocks for a big house. If they don’t work, he chain em to a tree and starve em. They farm cotton. Pompey was eleven, twelve, he think.

“They was so far out they didn’t know they was supposed to be free. Some soldiers come through in 1868, and the man chase em off. He tell all the slaves come in the big yard, he gon tell em somethin. About thirty, forty people. He stand up there and say they supposed to be free, ain’t nothin he can do about it. And they start movin around, talkin, some get to laughin, he bring out his shotgun and start shootin. Holler a free nigger ain’t no use in the world. He shoot for a long time, and Pompey fall under some bodies. He can feel blood all in his clothes. In his ears. He don’t move for a day and a night. Then, before the sun come up, he crawl out from the dead people and start runnin.

“His clothes like leather. He went in the creek, and leave a trail a red behind him for hours. He was a wild boy for two, three years. He ate pig. He could see the pigs breathin steam in winter, hidin up in the creek banks, and he kill em with a knife. He lived in the woods and on the creeks till he meet some people goin to Oklahoma. Indian Territory. And he go with a family to Simmons Grove.”

Hosea lifted his head and looked at Marcus now. “When did he tell you all that?” Marcus whispered.

“I ain’t never told him where I been,” Hosea said slowly, remembering the fire, his grandfather’s seamed, impassive face. “Told him I been walkin, and he didn’t ax nothin else. We was workin in the field one day, and this white woman come out there in a car, with a notebook. Work for the WPA. Said since my grandfather been a slave, could he talk to her; she ax him real sharp, like she gon get mad if he don’t.”

“The Slave Narratives,” Marcus said. “The book’s in the library.” When Hosea was silent, Marcus said, “You never wanted to tell us any history.”

“I taught you how to build a fire. Fix a car. You ain’t wanted to know that.” Marcus shrugged. “I ain’t beat you. I ain’t talked to you much.”

“You can go to the library. Read it.” Hosea opened the car door and went outside. “Best wake that boy up if he gon eat.”

“You ain’t told me about your part of Texas,” Marcus said over the hood of the car. “What I need to know.”

Hosea could smell the red dust coating the car roof. No more. He touched the dull powder they’d taken with them. “When we on my place. My piece a ground. Then I tell you what I can.”

Mortrice lay in the backseat, his head against the door, the cool air fingering his neck. He could see the long barrel of the shotgun the white man would have been swinging around when he leveled the crowd of people in the yard. He imagined the buffalo gun across his own legs, his fingers traveling over the stock carved with swirls and curving designs. Boo-yaa. If the African had been strapped with the necessity, he could have stopped all that shit before the boo-yaa.

When the shooting got too wild back at Soul Gardens, when the night rippled with explosions outside the doors and windows, the mamas used to say, “No. Uh-uh. I’m tired a this. Tired a bein scared all the time. I’ma send his young ass away. I got people in Fresno. Georgia. Tulsa. Greenville. Rio Seco. I’ma send him out there to the country where it ain’t so much trouble. Ain’t all this killin.”

Like the boo-yaa hadn’t already happened there. Wherever. Over and over. The olden days. The new days. All the same.

In New Mexico, Hosea watched the full moon, suddenly veiled by black lace. Thunder sounded across the sky, but only scattered raindrops fell hard on the car roof like tap-dancing beetles.

Archuleta had come from here, from a small mountain town where all the houses were adobe and the men carved santeros like old Feliciano Salcido. Hosea had hitched a ride with a man from Greenwood named Walker, and the car had broken down near here. The mechanics spoke Spanish, handing Hosea black coffee and cold tortillas in the gathering snow around his feet. A young man hanging around the garage, black hair as thick as paintbrushes over his ears, heard where they were going.

“California?” he had asked, his voice lilted and quick. “I give you a few dollars if you leave me by Rio Seco, no? My tío, my uncle, he’s there.”

Marcus drove silent and fast, the radio buzzing static for company. He done heard that story over and over from Salcido, Hosea thought. That’s a story everybody know.

He and Walker had taken Teodoro Salcido to Agua Dulce, to the small adobe house on the hillside where they gave Hosea chili and rice and a thick mud-walled room for sleep. “Come on back, you want trabajo,” Salcido said. “Always work here. Not much money, but you can find food, no?”

When Hosea had reached Los Angeles, there was nowhere to grow anything among the palms and cement. But Rio Seco had dizzying rows of lemon trees, rich, furrowed earth along the river.

His piece of land. When Marcus crossed the border into California, hurtling them through the jagged moonscape of desert, Hosea said, “Nobody bet not left no more bodies in them trees.” He watched the mountains rise in the pale dirt like crusted burnt sugar. Lava. He asked suddenly, “Who you think I’ma leave the land to?”

“Yeah,” Hosea said, staring at the twisted ridges of sand. “But people take him in, feed him. Somebody takin care of him right now. A woman can’t go round like that,” He paused. “I’m leavin it to Sofelia. After me and your mama and Paz all pass. Sofelia.”

Marcus was silent. “Then the land gon be his someday,” he said finally, tossing a grin toward the backseat. “What you think he’s gon grow?”

Hosea glanced back at the boy, whose eyes were closed. “Long as he grow old, I don’t care what he do with it.”

Mortrice heard them talking. He kept his eyes shut for a long time. Grow more than old cars and bones, he thought. Grow me some… shit, I don’t know.

They talkin bout bodies in the trees. A body with no face? He felt traces of cold along his shoulders. All them trees on that place. You could grow chronic, or sell whatever you wanted, in them trees. Nobody would see.

He opened his eyes in time to watch the moon sliding down the windshield. The highway was molten lead, the telephone wires sagging like trashed cassette ribbons. He tried to see the signs, to tell where they were now, but each sign whipped past in less than a moment, too fast to read, and the bullet holes let through slanted needles of light.

CHAPTER TWELVE