Start Writin{4}

UNWANTED ATTENTION

DaVida tapped me on the shoulder as we were leaving Slow Man’s Coneys.

            “May I see you a moment, Mr. Thibodeaux?” she asked.  “You go on ahead Sam.  We know our way back.”

            DaVida turned to me.  “You realize you have taken on a... well, let’s just come right out and say it: a dangerous task.”

            We began to walk toward the Tishomingo.

            “Well I could tell it won’t be easy.”

            “No, not easy at all Mr. Thibodeaux.  There are people who would consider killing you for telling this story.”

            “I didn’t need to hear that.”

            “Yes you did.”

            “Well, so I’ve been told.”

            “Why do you think no one talks about the Race War, even now, ten years later.  There are secrets, Mr. Thibodeaux, secrets no one wants out.”

            A warm breeze stirred grit and dust from off the sidewalk, around my trouser legs, even stinging my cheeks.  The first storm had blown off and things already had dried out, but another storm was in the offing.

            “Do you know what those secrets are,” I asked, just above a whisper. 

            “Let’s say I suspect I know most of them.”

            “And is it saying too much, that you are alive today because you don’t tell those secrets?”

            “Most likely, yes.  I don’t know how much they know we know.  Probably a lot.  But it doesn’t matter.  We haven’t talked, not openly, at least not until now.  But once we say what we know, out in the open. things are going to happen.”

            “Who’s this ‘they’?”

            “One thing at a time, Mr. Thibodeaux.  This will take a while for you to take in and digest.”

            “The sheriff said something about that being Dodd standing at the hotel door, or no, wait, he called him Dodd’s clown.  Anyhow, is this fellow Dodd someone you’re concerned about in this regard?”

            “Asher Dodd, yes.  You’ll find he carried far more power in 1921 than most people realize.  And he played an enormous part in the Race War.  As far as I know he’s still just as powerful today, although

he keeps this low profile, mostly as a preacher.”

            “He’s a preacher?”

            “He’s a preacher, among other things.  You’d be amazed at what all he’s involved with.  But I don’t follow city affairs all that much these days.  It’s a death system, and I don’t find death all that interesting.  But Asher Dodd, he’s certainly a man to contend with.  As a preacher, we are about as different as night and day.  Black and white, so to speak.”

            “How are you different?”

            “What we worship.”

            “What you worship?  I thought you said he’s a preacher too?”

            “He is.  But there are preachers and then there are preachers.”

            “How so?”

            “Worship is a subtle thing.  Asher Dodd worships real estate.  He thinks real estate holdings can do for him what only God can do.  The fancy name for that is idolatry.  Real estate is his idol.”

            “Real estate.”

            “I could have said he worships Mammon – money, power – but I find real estate more interesting.  It involves money, of course.  It stands for money.  But it takes on a life of its own, and people who worship it will fight to the death to defend it.  They don’t stop and ask questions about the money invested in it.  The property itself has them at its beck and call.”

            “I see.”

            “Do you?  Wars are fought for real estate, Mr. Thibodeaux.  The Great War was fought over real estate.  It’s all about property, getting and having property.  Money is almost an afterthought.”

            “I see.”

            “Do you?  I wonder.  But there you have it.  Real estate.  This whole state was settled and organized around real estate.  Territory.  Territories.  Land Runs.”

            “Same as the paper.”

            “Same as your paper too.  What did you think Sooner meant?”

            “I don’t know, named after the state I always thought.”

            “It means the real estate developers and settlers who snuck in before the Land Runs.  They got here sooner than everyone else.  Illegally, too.”

            “So Asher Dodd worships … real estate.”

            “In a word, yes.  He has another idol, though: Communism.  He is obsessed with the Bolsheviks.  He sees them everywhere, behind every bush, underneath every rock.  He reads between the lines of the most pointless things people write and say.  It’s a negative kind of worship – almost more like giving the devil his due, only too much so – but it’s still worship.  Only God merits that degree of fear and awe.  Only God is that omnipresent.  Do you know what I mean by that?”

            “No, not really.”

            “Present everywhere.  Only God deserves to be seen behind every bush, underneath every rock, between the lines of everything people write and say and do.  Only God is that fearsome.”

            “Well you’re losing me.  What I’m getting so far is, Asher Dodd is a preacher, but the similarity stops there.  Between him and you, I mean.  He worships substitutes for your God – real estate, Communism.  Bolshevism.”

            “Pretty much.”

            “You’re not bothered by those?”

            “I don’t believe they can do for us, or to us, what only God can do.  There’s no other reason to lift them up that way.”

            “Which is?”

            “What only God can do for us.  Or to us.”

            DaVida smiled.  She chewed the inside of her cheek.  She hadn’t answered my question.  Instead, she said: “You let your name get attached to this story, Mr. Thibodeaux, you’ll get yourself a lot of attention.  Unwanted attention.  Some of it from the government, probably, but a lot of it from Asher Dodd and his friends.”

            “Friends.”

            “The American Protective League.  The Ku Klux Klan.  And I don’t know who all else.  Big wigs in government, that’s for sure.  The Bureau of Investigation. The official story of the Race War, Mr. Thibodeaux, is that it was a Negro riot.  It was a Negro uprising, and white folks had to come to the rescue to put it down.  Negro affairs these days, especially that one, draw the attention of the Bureau of Investigation.  So does the major Negro newspaper here, the North Tulsa Crescent.”

            “I’ve heard of it.”

            “It’s being watched by the Bureau of Investigation.  Right up there with W.E.B. Du Bois and everyone else.  They are terrified of a Negro revolution.  The Postmaster confiscates every bundle of the Crescent when it comes out, reads a copy from cover to cover, and decides on the basis of that reading whether to let the rest of the copies go out in the mail.  Same with the Defender, same with every other Negro publication.”

            DaVida had stopped me from asking about God.  “But the Race War wasn’t a Negro revolution,” I said.

            She rolled her eyes up at me and said nothing.

            “May I tell the others what you’re telling me?” I asked, meaning tell Sam and the Slow Man.  “What you said about secrets, I mean?”

            “They know.  So, now it’s time for you to go home.  Go back to the newspaper.  We’re being watched.”

            “Watched...” I started to say but she shushed me.  Then I started to look around but she touched my chin to stop me from turning my head.

            “In the alley across the street, but don’t look now.”

            I summoned my cheeriest goodbye and said it loudly, turned on my heel and started walking back toward the Sooner offices.  I turned in such a way that my gaze swept the alleyway across the street.

            A figure stepped back into the shadows, but not before I got a decent look.  He looked like a corpse, tall and bony, wearing a great coat despite the heat, and wearing a fedora.