We started at the maw of what had been the Murrah Federal Building, though there was little to see now, other than bombed-out rubble and ongoing construction of what would later become the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum. These cranes and craters and trucks and beelike workmen could tell us nothing. The original explosion had sliced off the six-floor facade of the Murrah Building, exposing the interior in layers, and a month later experts imploded what was left of the structure with more explosives. The three bodies that had been missing were recovered. So was an unidentified left leg.
The leg found in the rubble of the Murrah Building was first described in a statement by the medical examiner’s office as belonging to a light-skinned male less than thirty years of age. “This leg was clothed in a black military-type boot, two socks, and an olive drab blousing strap.” A few months later, the chief medical examiner insisted to reporters that “DNA analysis by the FBI has shown conclusively that the leg is not male but female.” And six months after that, experts began to claim that the leg had belonged to a previously identified female victim they had accidentally buried with the wrong leg.
“Who knows what to make of any of it?” Blake said. “What they’re saying now may be absolutely true. I still think it’s hard to falsify DNA analysis, although it sure would explain a lot about your brother.”
There were other factors we speculated about on the three-hour drive east toward Elohim City. The significance of the date of the bombing, April 19, on the two-year anniversary of the governmental destruction of the religious compound at Waco, was already known, since Timothy McVeigh had proclaimed it himself. And the execution of Richard Snell on the same day as the bombing could have been a coincidence. But Snell had connections to Elohim City and to other white supremacists, and he sneered at the warden that “something big” was going to happen that day. If that report was true, then foreknowledge of the bombing must have extended beyond McVeigh and Nichols and into at least some of the terrorist web.
There had also been the complicated business about a man named Kenneth Trentadue, who supposedly hanged himself in his cell a few months after the bombing. Kenneth Trentadue’s brother Jesse, who was a lawyer, had not believed the verdict of suicide, and he had insisted on the release of Kenneth’s body, which, it turned out, exhibited multiple lacerations and bruises. Kenneth Trentadue had received three severe blows to his head, and his throat had been cut; the government’s medical personnel continued to argue that these injuries were self-inflicted, but Jesse Trentadue believed that, in the course of a brutal interrogation, his brother had been murdered. But why? Because his brother looked so much like the sketches of John Doe #2? An inmate named Alden Gillis Baker, reported to have been Trentadue’s cellmate at one time, claimed he actually saw the agents beating Trentadue and now feared for his own life. Later, Baker also reportedly hanged himself.
Except for these troubling conversations, the drive was long and boring, so Blake and I punctuated it with stops at casinos, where I could indulge what began to look like a gambling habit, and I told him more about my life than I should have. He sat beside me at the blackjack table playing absentmindedly with one-dollar chips while I described the night Jordan shot herself and mumbled about Meg leaving me for someone who wasn’t even good-looking. I did turn the stalker episode into an amusing tale, but I couldn’t think of anything funny about Jordan or Meg. I chatted up my visits to Iceland and the Peruvian shaman. I talked too fucking much.
Before we reached the police station in Stillwell, a small town on the edge of the Oklahoma Ozarks, Blake said, “Can I ask you something without making you angry?”
“I hope so.”
“I don’t understand what you mean about being a lesbian. When we were on the mesa at El Morro, I thought …”
“Yes, it was great.” I was glad to be driving so I wouldn’t have to look at him. “And, yes, it did mean something.”
“It was great and it meant something, but …”
Two rabbits hopped alongside the road, but mentioning them would be avoidance. “All I can tell you is that the first time I fell in love with a woman, it was like I had stepped through a mirror into a different reality. In college, there was this woman I wanted to be with so much that my throat ached whenever I saw her. I assumed I was happily married, but I followed this woman around all the time, just so I could look at her. At the time I didn’t understand that this was a sexual attraction because the only feeling I’d ever had that was anything like it was in art history class, when I first saw pictures of all those Greek statues. Maybe it has something to do with art, I don’t know, but a shrink once said to me, ‘You can’t imagine what you’ve never imagined.’ And I had never imagined being able to feel like that.”
Blake didn’t speak again until we were off the highway pulling through deserted country roads. “So you’re saying I’ll never be someone who can make your throat hurt?”
“I suppose it’s as simple as that. I’m so sorry, Blake.”
In the police station, we behaved with flawless professionalism. Blake showed his credentials, and a reluctant young officer phoned the only number he had for the Elohim City compound. When he got finally someone on that phone, he explained that he was bringing out some folks who wanted to speak to a resident, any resident. No, of course no one had to talk to these visitors, but he was going to drive them up to the gate. Yes, of course they were unarmed. One of them was a law officer from New Mexico, but the other was a woman.
We rode silently with this vacant young man through many miles of winding, paved roads, tucked deep into the heavily eroded crevasses of the Ozarks. Then we bumped down six miles of gravel road posted every fifty feet against trespassers. Eventually, we arrived at a red metal gate secured with heavy black chains, where two men holding shotguns stood waiting.
The deputy got out of the car and motioned us to follow.
These men were bearded and rough, but they were not unfriendly. “We just don’t want any trouble,” the large one said in a deep, booming voice. “We want to be alone with the Lord.”
“We don’t want to come through the gate,” I said quietly, “though I’d love to see where you live. I heard you even have geodesic domes for houses, like hippies did in the sixties. Is that true?’
There was no answer, so I said, “I brought a letter for Joe Magnus.”
“There’s nobody here by that name.”
I extended the sealed white envelope through the slats of the gate, but neither man reached to take it. “I don’t think he’s here now,” I said, dropping it onto the gravel. “But he was here years ago. Could you spread the word around, please? Say that Royce Burns’s sister is looking for him, and also for Joe Magnus. Let Magnus know that I’m staying at the Col-cord Hotel in Oklahoma City. Tell him I have a cell phone, and the number is in the letter.”
The next day, after more failed sex and silent poker, Blake said he believed Magnus wasn’t going to show up, and there was business he needed to tend to in Gallup. He said he had come to the reluctant conclusion that I was paranoid about my brother and that Royce was probably dead.
“I’m paranoid? You’re just realizing that now?”
“Ellen, listen, if there were some kind of conspiracy about the leg they found in the Murrah Building, don’t you realize that they wouldn’t put out three different stories, they’d simply cover it up? That we’d hear nothing?”
“But the rattles prove Royce is still alive.”
“Even if your brother is alive, you’re on the wrong track in Oklahoma.”
“Then why did you come here?”
He didn’t answer.
“You go on back,” I said. “Magnus probably wants to find me alone. I’ll just try to lose more money.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to return to Gallup with me?”
“I’m sure.”
During my stay at the Colcord, I went to AA meetings twice daily at the Kelly Club, founded in 1947 and visited once by Bill Wilson himself. No one at the Kelly Club had ever heard of my brother or of Ruby, which was a relief. And hardly anyone at the club was white, which was also a relief.
I contacted a reporter from the local paper, and the Oklahoma Independent ran an interview in which I explained that I was looking for Joe Magnus, who had been a friend of my brother’s. And, yes, Joe Magnus was a federal fugitive but “just a minor one,” I said, hoping to bait him.
The casino I liked best was called FireLake, and it was thirty miles east of Oklahoma City in Shawnee. I figured that if Magnus was going to show up, he’d do so at the casino. Instead, the third night after Blake left, Joe Magnus ran me off the road at two o’clock in the morning. I remained calm because adrenaline sometimes makes me calm, and enough adrenaline sometimes makes me beatific. I got out of my car smiling loopily. “Hi, Joe, I was hoping you’d come find me. Just don’t hurt me, okay?”
“Cuntsucker? Really?”
“I’m sorry, but I really was very angry at that particular moment. I am genuinely sorry I said something like that to you, Joe. I’m trying to find a way to stop swearing because your sister told me to.”
“What the fuck do you want with me, Ellen?”
“I’m trying to find my brother.”
“He’s dead.”
“Like you are?”
“Nobody’s claims I’m dead,” Joe snarled, “but if you find your fucking brother, you tell him I’m going to kill him. And you stay away from my sister. You know I’ll come after you if I have to.”
He stood by his truck as if he were leaving, but then he changed his mind, left his door open, and walked straight toward me. He was a big man with a bullet-shaped head, his body outlined against his headlights, and there was nowhere to run, so I stepped toward him, not away. He halted about two feet from me, where I could see his dim face. I wanted to say something but couldn’t. I was shaking so hard that I knew he could see it.
He took a rapid step forward and stiff-armed me in the chest, knocking me down, and then threw his full weight on top of me. I struggled for a few seconds and went passive. He was stronger than me; I was pinned. Up close he smelled like tobacco and acrid sweat. “I always thought you were pretty hot,” he said. “You’re as crazy as your brother, but you aren’t so rotten.” He stuck his rough tongue in my mouth, wiggling it deep, but then abruptly sat back up. “Royce’s sister. I couldn’t fuck you with somebody else’s dick.”
He rose to his feet, turning his back to me unsteadily. “Go on home, Ellen. You’re messing with stuff you don’t understand.”
I sat up and shouted at his retreating form, “Were you involved with the Oklahoma City bombing? Whose leg was it they found?”
He acted as if he hadn’t heard me.
“Whose leg was it?” I shouted.
When he got to his truck, he stood on the running board and said in a voice that carried across the distance, “You’re crazy, and your brother is a fucking fool, but you keep this up, you just might get yourself killed.”
He was driving a big truck, so getting out of the pocked field was a lot easier for him. My rental car had a crinkled fender and a punctured muffler, and it was dawn before I managed to return—very loudly—to the Colcord Hotel.