In Ponca City, the left tendon, being the more rational, was ready to turn back for Roanoke. It hadn’t wanted to stray in the first place, but out of a long-standing loyalty, it conceded to the right tendon’s request to continue south.
Omar couldn’t name this restlessness. His letters to Roanoke gave wide berth to the issue of his absence and focused instead on the mare he’d chosen. How she could read the delicate contractions and buffeted strikes of his calf muscles was beyond Omar; he’d barely ridden before. He gave little thought to the allograph transplant he’d undergone as a young boy—two Achilles tendons taken from a cadaver to replace his damaged set. The donor had also been a young boy, a descendant of the Chickasaw Indian Nation struck dead by a train.
When Omar reached Robber’s Roost in the Arbuckle Mountains the tendons took in vistas of trembling prairie grass, grazing bison and the Rock Creek corridor winding its way south through the Platt. “I’m delighted,”the right tendon said.“After so many concessions, Indian Territory.”
“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” the left tendon grumbled. “I say we go back.”
“It appears we’re at a crossroads,” the right said frostily.
Omar stood then, stretched his legs. It was beautiful country. The horse waited in a patch of scouring rush, turning its jaw like a delicate rock tumbler.
“Let Omar decide,”the left suggested.
“It’s his life,” the right acceded. “Although this land’s the very last of us.”
But Omar’s gaze had already risen above the Platt, ventured south beyond the Lake of the Arbuckles, alighted on what he imagined were the forks and spools of the river that kept him from Texas.

Shaped like a hatchet or a gun or a pot, flat as a pan or a block or a beach but dry, cracked, cruel, buffeted by wind and yellowing weather, this state is in a state of danger only Mother and Father, sleepless, see until the knock at the door wakes my sisters and me, and the motel manager gravely informs us of what the stillness portends: tornado. He has come to offer us shelter because there are children— we three are children—the only children at the U-Right Motel on this night in May. “Follow me,” he says, and we do, Mother, Father, my sisters and me. Barefoot in blankets, we children follow the bobbing light to the shelter and down the stairs— oldest first, which means I’m last and most afraid, in tears. Mother is saying, It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s ok, we’re safe, when the hatch is yet open and the wind is a whine, and my sister, the oldest, the worst, that brat, says she’s forgotten her jewelry, she needs her jewelry. Her jewelry? Mother asks. Glass beads, brass bracelets, cheap metals that go green are my oldest sister’s valuables, yet Mother goes back even as the wind rubbles doors, tumbles baskets and empty barrels. Oklahoma is rolling over us and over our Mother who is where? She has abandoned us. Later, she will tell us how she saved herself, curled away from the windows and waited it out while I wailed in the shelter, inconsolable. The jewels were found, but for as long as the day, I wouldn’t speak to my mother; I wished she were dead.

Here, all the tears of the trail of tears fell, and now look.

I’d found my vocation.
“Your what?” said Beatrice. “Hold still,” said Mom, hemming
Beatrice’s costume.
“The Clares,” I explained.
“Like Sister Michael of the holy dunce cap?” said Bea. We went to parochial school when we weren’t on the road.
“You’re Bea’s sister,” said Pop.
I didn’t say any more. I was expected to remain in song-and-dance with my family. Next year Mom and Pop lucked into Star and Garter, a long run. Bea and I went back to school.
One afternoon I turned up at Miss de Mille’s. OK she said. She yelled all the time. Flagellation had nothing on her. When she signed on as choreographer for a new show, Away We Go, she took us girls along. Rehearsals were hell. Mr. M was the devil made flesh, Mr. R and Mr. H quiet as martyrs.
Songs like hymns, ballets light as the Virgin’s breath,costumes soft as swaddling.
Out-of-town try-outs? A mess! Numbers got pulled, dances rearranged, the show’s name changed. I figured we’d close the first week in New York.
Opening night every damned one of us did our best. The audience clapped. Clapping is insufficient. Then came the production number. We made a wedge, Curley its point. We waved forward, singing. Backward, singing. Forward… The letters, one at a time, each louder than the one before, spelled a place I’ll never see. But, calling its name, I experienced… ecstasy. The audience likewise. Kept us on Broadway five years.
During 2,212 performances did I fail to serve Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hammerstein? No. I fulfilled my contract and cleared a nice bundle for my grateful family. After my novitiate I took vows. Left the stage behind.
But hollering Oklahoma! 2,212 times—that’s praising the Lord, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

It was six a.m. when the boys came to tell me that my coffin was ready. Up on deck, the sun was brutal, and Tio lunged toward me with sunblock. He was afraid I’d be too pink to look dead.
“For Christ’s sake,” I said, dodging his great coconut-scented hands. “Can’t one of the girls do this?”
Tio ignored me. We’d first met while I was propping up the oil sector in Costa Rica, before I got kicked out for trying to open the machine gun factory. Tio did not take shit, especially from me. I would never have been a good swindler face- to-face; I couldn’t have traveled around gaining the trust of wealthy widows. I emit an aura of disingenuousness even on those rare occasions when I’m feeling genuine. The wife I briefly had in Tulsa— Olivia: a very nice girl, though ultimately our ambitions differed—always told me I had no personal charisma. What I do have is ruthless intelligence and a spirited disrespect for the rule of law. This can get you pretty far in America—but, as I eventually found, only so far.
“It’s going to be too short.”Tio eyed the coffin, which still looked mostly like the pool table it recently had been.
Now the SEC is after me for something like $224 million. They’ve been chasing me around the coast of Antigua for years. Being driven into the sea isn’t so bad if your boat has a sauna and discotheque; let nobody say I complain. And the night sea is beautiful—so much like basalt you half-believe you could walk on it if nobody was watching. But then, also, there’s the corrosive salt, the interminable memories, your spinal fluid heaving always with the sea. Until, finally, I had an idea.
Rosario appeared. “So,” she began powdering my face, pressing bruises under my eyes. “Whatcha gonna do when you’re dead?”
“Read my obituaries.” Shallow, obviously, but irresistible: I knew they’d been pre- written years ago, as is customary for celebrities. I wondered what Olivia would think when she read them.
“Of course.” Rosario was painting lurid colors over my deadness—rouges to resurrect my lips, blushes to give my cheek a girlish, living tint. Once deemed sufficiently ghoulish, I climbed into the coffin.
“Squish down, boss,” said Tio.
I squished, the sawdust curdling in my throat. The waves sounded violent against the hull. I hadn’t told Rosario what I really wanted to do most, because it was defeatist. I wanted get off the boat. Shamefully, I did. I wanted a gleaming summer night. I wanted a city full of strangers.
Rosario bent over and gave me a rose for decoration, a rosary for irony. The sun was making me feel oddly vulnerable. “I can’t keep my eyes open.”
“Don’t,” said Tio cheerfully. “You’re dead. Okay. Ready?”
I thought of land. I thought of tropical bugs like floating gemstones in the air.
“Rosario, no,” said Tio. “Look sad. Like, frown. Boss? Hello?”
“Just getting into character.” There was respectful quiet, and I could feel how sorrowful and rudderless they’d be without me. Maybe this was how Olivia had felt. Maybe I would ask her.
“Fine.” I shut my eyes. “Go.”
I thought of land, but all I saw was ocean. I saw green-gray eels, pulsing pink starfish. I blinked and saw wood-carved groupers. I clenched my eyes tighter and saw the shifting shadows of whales, and when the camera flashed I saw the luminescent bulbs of jellyfish. They glowed like planets, like the shore of a country where the future was happening without me.

I was moving from the mess in Alamogordo to Pine Bluff and needed someone to drive my second car, a coughing ‘90 Volvo. My wife and three children had flown on ahead. I told them that one of my students, a man named Walt, was driving with me, but that was a lie. Walt wasn’t driving —Papercrane was. Papercrane was our twenty-four-year-old neighbor who was now pregnant with a child I had been told was mine. I had my doubts about that fact but the truth is those doubts weren’t very strong.
Just past Broken Arrow the sun had almost set. We were flanked by fields so alive with prairie dogs that I wished my children had been with me to see. We were otherwise alone on Highway 165 when behind me, in a flash, the Volvo jerked onto the shoulder and stopped. I’d been suspect of circumstance here, Papercrane so swollen with child and all, and now, my hands shaking, I felt the worst of my fears had been realized. I executed a slippery crossing of the grass median and turned back.
The Volvo’s front windshield was shattered, a hole the size of a skillet punched in above the speedometer. The driver’s door was open and from it I head Papercrane say “My God!” again and again and again. Shards of glass glimmered across her sweater. Blood trickled down her forehead. In the passenger seat a shivering prairie dog bled onto the map of southeastern Oklahoma and in her hands Papercrane held the intruding agent: a huge white owl.
“He just… boom!” she said. “What the fuck! And he had that!”
“You OK?” I said.
Then the bird lunged out of her hands and onto the heaving prey beside it. He turned. The face of that white beast scared me and I’m ashamed to say it now, but in a rush I kicked the door shut.
“Hey!” Papercrane said, and a strange sound began to emerge: it was the owl fluttering violently from within. There was no exit, though, not until Papercrane opened the door. But Papercrane didn’t open the door. She wasn’t even yelling any more. I didn’t know what she was doing, because I was backing into a cornfield, afraid of the life enclosed therein. It was only the sound of something trapped, something now trying to escape, that echoed out there, dissipating into the darkening landscape around me.

Stand in the sun in a parking lot as if to make an antique photo. Daily the sun shines your shadow, your negative, onto the asphalt. Where it makes no impression. Stand atop this pave for a year and you’d make no impression.
Oklahoma is not sensitive.

I learned how to identify an Oklahoma accent on a date. My mom’s from Corpus. It’s a subtle difference, but you can definitely tell. I was anxious. It wasn’t the guy, it was a bad time, my entire twenties. I wasn’t on venlafaxine and benzos yet. People talk about being in a drug haze.Iwasinahazefromalackof drugs. Not a haze—hyperkinesis, agita, bad judgments. It was summer in D.C., hot and humid. I can’t remember the guy’s name. I think we’d met at JR’s. He was handsome like Steve McQueen. He was shorter than me, maybe 5’8” and with a lanky build. I’m 6’1”. He had gray hair at twenty-whatever. I couldn’t believe how normal and masculine he was. It was so what I was looking for, but bipolar II took away, among other things, my ability to manage my own mind. We must have gone to dinner, in the Dupont Circle area, it’s where we clustered than. It is 1988 And Clinton hadn’t been elected yet. I was living there because by coincidence my grad school was on Mass Ave and 17th. Japanese political economy. Nihon no seiji-gaku. $20k a year.
I have this image of us walking on Connecticut Avenue. He was easy- going. I focused on his accent. I’m great at reproducing accents.
He invited me back, or else we sort of drifted back to his place. It was still light out. He had the air blasting. We did a little of that yes-no-maybe dance but got to making out pretty fast. Anything I wanted in those days, I somehow screwed it up. I’d gotten him down to just his jeans. He’d been drinking a Coors. His frame felt even slighter now my hands were on him, but he felt strong. He grinned. “You wanna try and take me?” The Oklahoman accent is very slightly looser than Dallas and palpably slower.
“Try”is a manly bet and a provocation both. “Take me,” a formulation antiquated since the late 19th century, erudite and elegant as hell.
I think I didn’t do it. I think it was too much. I just don’t remember. How can you remember some things so clearly and not others? I think that’s how it worked, the disease just leached away from you everything that was good, everything you would have loved and, being able to love it, been happy.

In the old shed, behind the old chicken house, across the old garden which had grown nothing but sawgrass for years, Clara found the girl sawing the left leg off the old doll. The doll had been Clara’s mother’s, old but well-preserved, her painted eyes still a startling blue.
Clara had heard the sawing from the house. Now she heard that the girl was humming, too, a song her mother hummed as she mopped Clara’s floors.
The humming stopped when the girl noticed Clara. Lucia was her name. She was only nine or ten but she looked at everything as if she’d seen it before. She set down the saw and waited.
Even the saw was old. It had belonged to Clara’s brother, who lived in Phoenix now with another man and a whirlpool. The others had gone east. There was only Clara left, and her husband, whose job at the U was too good to give up.
The girl waited. Clara had blamed her mother, Carmen, for the doll’s disappearance. She had accused her then not fired her. She felt sorry for Carmen, and she was used to her, and the other women who cleaned were full-blooded Mexicans whereas Carmen was known to have some Creek in her. Clara had been raised with the idea that Indians were drunk but kind—susceptible—whereas Mexicans, rarer in those days, were drunk and mean.
Clara would have to apologize to Carmen. She would have to tell her not to bring the girl anymore. The girl made Clara nervous anyway, surprising her from corners, just sitting there staring back, her brown eyes refusing to be sorry or afraid.
Clara grabbed the doll, but the girl let go so easily she tripped backward—Clara’s shoulder hit the shed’s doorframe and the dead weight of the doll repulsed her suddenly, the painted arm in her hand a stiff, shabby shell. She took the thing by the hair instead, turned, and left, and Lucia, who knew that the woman had tried to have babies, whose mother had stayed working for her only because she pitied her this trying, kept her eyes on the woman’s back, which began to shake, and on her ankles, which turned in the divots between the old garden rows.

Despite taking its name from the first postmaster’s daughter, Ada earned a reputation as one of the roughest cattle towns in the Southwest. Gun slinging, cattle rustling, frontier justice, Ada withstood 36 murders in 1909, as well as threats of range war between the area’s two largest ranches, one run by former U.S. Marshall Gus Bobbit, the other by Joe Allen and Jesse West.

Early April 1909, as Bobbit and a ranch hand drove two wagons into town, a hired killer shot the men dead with a shotgun. After years of corrupt officials, bribes, unpunished murders, Adans took the law into their own hands and started a manhunt for James Miller, a cool killer with more than 30 deaths to his credit. They caught him in Texas, brought him back, and at 2:30 in the morning, sheriff and deputies conveniently absent, vigilantes took the prisoner to an old livery barn. Before the inevitable, there was a hushed pause as the crowd tried to get Miller to talk about the murder. “Come on, come on,” he said to the crowd, “let’s get this over with as soon as possible.”

The busy undertaker who cared for these dead was A.L. Mossman. In the window of his mortuary shop, Mossman displayed his equally rememberable passion: rock collecting. The reputation of his geological specimens spread as far as Indiana, and Adam Beck ventured west to peruse Mossman’s stones. The mortician led the industrialist on a prospecting survey of Pontotoc County, in the Chickasaw Nation. After the tour, Beck decided to locate a cement plant in the rich limestone region and purchased a quarry just outside Ada.

Thus, Beck organized and founded the Oklahoma Portland Cement Company. The original, dry-process plant consisted of two kilns, 125 feet long, with a daily capacity of 1000 barrels. On Christmas Day 1907, little more than a month after statehood, almost two years before the infamous hanging, the Ada plant burned its first clinker. Cement soon shipped out by train, in large wooden barrels, to Texas and points east.

William Lychack is the author of a novel, The Wasp Eater, and a collection of stories, The Architect of Flowers. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and on public radio’s This American Life.