Hell in the Heartland

While Kathy prepared a late breakfast, and Ashley and Lauria got ready in the trailer, forty-year-old Danny Freeman wandered out back, sipping buttered coffee with a shotgun over his shoulder and hunting ancient arrowheads. This was how you’d find him most days. His shadow before him was long, and he couldn’t catch up to it no matter how hard he tried, like he swore he could once when he was a boy. The sun warmed the quilted flannel on his shoulders. As he walked down the slight hill from his trailer to Big Cabin Creek that early afternoon, he paced along the edge of the river and listened for the familiar rasps of prairie rattlesnakes and water moccasins and other venomous pit vipers. To himself, he dared them to come out.

Danny eyed the land around him, bitter, feeling cheated by a little bit of everything: by the world, by God, by lawyers. He paced his way back toward a concrete dam at the top of the crick, where a feed bucket full of soybeans waited. With the sounds of the brook nearby, he spent the morning with fistfuls of the handpicked legumes, attracting rafters of wild turkeys. He even had the local game warden’s permission to do so, provided he kept the routine up, lest they become dependent and later starve to death as a result. Danny agreed, feeding the birds every other day, just to listen to the whishing of their wings as they came close to him. They came with harvest-colored and copper plumage, Danny’s eye catching on brief flashes of purple, red, and green.

But life weighed heavily on his shoulders, more heavily still since the death of his only boy, Shane. And Danny knew that death, once more, was lurking close, hiding out on the prairie. The sharp taste of paranoia lodged itself in the back of his throat, his shoulders winding tight. In those final days of 1999, Danny warned his friends, and warned his stepbrother, Dwayne Vancil, that she’d be a-coming, and that if anything were to happen to him, “you’d be best to look right here.” Dwayne Vancil would repeat this exhaustingly over the years, asserting that in those last days, Danny pointed a finger hard into his stepbrother’s chest and said, “If anything happens to me or my family, anything, look to the Craig County Sheriff’s Office.” Dwayne described that Danny’s demeanor struck him as “fearful” and “absolute,” traits rarely ever seen in Danny.

Some feared Danny’s paranoia was a result of his overt marijuana use. Others feared he was right. Either way, rage seared just under Danny’s skin, like sunburn at the back of his neck, mood fickle like fire. And perhaps, in many ways, the man was just … misunderstood.

After all, who could really understand a man who, once upon a time, had accidentally shot himself in the forehead?

It happened while he was cleaning a rifle, when the breech plug in the rear of the muzzleloader barrel blew back into his head and through his skull. With the plug actually lodged in his brain, Danny drove to the local hospital, waited two hours, got fed up, then drove two hours more to the city hospital, where doctors immediately rushed him in for brain surgery, replacing part of his skull with bone from his hip. The scar was a prominent badge in the middle of his forehead. So when people said that Danny was a tough guy, they meant just that.

Danny Freeman had inherited the rock-hard jaw and the bison-wide shoulders of the men before him, a lineage that emanated masculinity. Now alone, doleful, with an appetite for all things dwindling by the day, he wondered just how long it would take for him to waste away altogether. Unemployed with the exception of the odd welding jobs up in Kansas and cattail scavenges, he felt removed from the American dream of his ancestors. And the accidental injury caused crippling migraines and made steady employment an impossible feat to maintain.

He squatted on the dam, and nearing the bottom of the soybeans, Danny held the shotgun across his knees and pried his lips with a pipe. Fanned by the wings of turkeys, Danny could briefly forget it all, inhaling his grief into the depths of his lungs where it belonged, each hazy day blurring into the next. He’d rise and spend his days smoking, canvassing the riverbed for American Indian arrowheads, a hobby instilled in him since childhood. He didn’t even have to search for them; they’d just catch his eye from the mire. He swore it was a gift inherited alongside that one-eighth of Cherokee hiding somewhere in his blood.

Despite the drug-induced sway in his gait, Danny shot his gun off and caught the leather belly of a cottonmouth snake. It was the same shot that took his wife’s attention from the splinter in her thumb’s knuckle back at the trailer.

The turkeys thundered into the air, yelping against the breeze. He walked over to the snake, tucked his thumb under its jaw like a trigger, and swung it into the creek. “Bastard,” he muttered. Left with the gentle sounds of falling water, he returned to arrowhead hunting.

Then Danny, this epitome of all things virile, wept for his only son.

When Danny paused a few moments later, his eyes stung with salt as he scanned the unspoiled acreage that waved before him. Once gold from Indian grass and red with Oklahoma rose, today Welch was painted the color of sorrow. He smoked the burned resin of the pipe until there was nothing left. And when the waves of grief passed, as they always did, he swung the shotgun back over his shoulder and climbed the moderate incline back to the front of his house.

As he rounded the side of the trailer in the low winter sun, Danny watched his daughter unintentionally make the sign of the cross with her body spray, a cloud of pink in the afternoon light to smell like Cotton Candy Fantasy and hay. He passed behind her and rubbed the top of her head. “Happy birthday, Ash,” he managed, just as Lauria followed from the front door.

The girls waited for Kathy at the bottom of the precast-concrete steps. Ashley zipped up her coat as Lauria looked under the bleached skull of a longhorn that hung on the front of the house. With the girls’ backs to him, Danny stuffed the pipe deep in his jeans pocket and made his way up to the front door as his wife was leaving.

“We’ll be back in a few hours,” said Kathy as she blew the bangs from her face. “We’ll bring back the birthday cake with us.”

Danny stared her down, as he often did, and she hurried down the steps to avoid the familiar heat of his glare. Even before the night’s events would unfold into one of the most far-reaching mysteries of the Midwest, there wasn’t a person in town who hadn’t heard of Danny’s knee-jerk temper. Some even had their own accounts of how he had wound up with a scar in the middle of his forehead.

Danny leaned in the doorway and crossed his arms. “The big sweet sixteen,” he remarked, and the trace of a smile crossed his daughter’s face.

“You bet,” Ashley responded.

Lauria left her 1989 blue Chevy Cavalier with Danny’s truck and climbed into the backseat of Kathy’s car. Danny watched them drive off down the seven-hundred-foot driveway into the December frost, passing by a JUSTICE FOR SHANE sign at the property’s edge, decorated with a football signed by Shane’s classmates and a few Beanie Baby bears and candles.

Pulling up only a moment after Kathy and the girls left was Danny’s best friend, Charlie Krider, a bald man with a long beard and a bag of grass, to whom Danny waved from the front door. He came from Chetopa, the town just north of Welch but over the Kansas border, just eight miles from Danny’s house as the crow flies but a twenty-minute drive on a rocky country road. Charlie parked in front of the trailer, trying to discern through dust the tail end of Kathy’s car in his side-view mirror. “Perfect timing, I suppose,” called Charlie as he exited his truck.

Danny repeated his daughter’s words. “You bet!”

Charlie lifted his sunglasses and skimmed his eyes across the pastures for his red cattle. His fingers were shaped like spoons and the cold months chapped his lips. “Look at big mama cow and big daddy cow,” he said as he spotted them across the property. “Too bad we gotta slaughter ’em.”

Ready to partake in green communion, Danny dismissed the comment and thumbed over his shoulder for Charlie to start rolling a couple of joints without him inside the trailer. “I’m right behind you,” he said.

But there was something anticipatory about Danny from those porch steps, looking after the road’s dust from Kathy’s car on the other side of the trees. He licked the aftertaste of dope from his lips and turned his attention to the empty ends of the road, away from his missus, where Danny watched a Craig County Sheriff’s Office deputy’s car crawl slowly along the edge of his property. The police officer looked out his window and up at Danny, and Danny stared right back. The deputy’s car stopped. They watched each other without a word, the way Danny silently dared snakes out back. Danny cocked his head with a smirk and pointed his fingers in the shape of a gun, closing one eye and pulling an imaginary trigger at the deputy. The officer sneered back up at Danny, tilted his cap, and drove on after the girls.

4

BEST FRIEND, LAURIA BIBLE

December 29, 1999

The Night Before the Fire

With Ashley at her side, and Kathy driving, Lauria wiped the fog from the car window, scanning the neon lights of Route 66 as they ignited around her. The colors shone wet in her hazel eyes, streaking over the skin that maintained part of its tan from the long summer that now felt far. It was no wonder that Vinita, having been the first city in Oklahoma with electricity, felt brighter than other towns budding along the Main Street of America. Lauria’s curly brown hair was shoulder length, and she came complete with a beauty mark stamped between her right nostril and upper lip like a maker’s mark. Cozy in her blue-and-gold cheerleading jacket, which creaked with every movement, she settled, watching the sun shrink behind the historic art deco storefronts to the smell of car exhaust and deep-fried anything. The days were shrinking, with sundown at only a quarter after five.

The original plan was for Lauria to return home in rural Vinita that evening, but because they had a later start in the day than planned, and because Lauria wasn’t allowed to drive after dark, they decided they’d later ask Lauria’s parents to let her stay another night; since her house would be on the way to some of their errands, they’d stop there later.

The first stop was at a feed store to fetch food for Ashley’s goats. Lauria helped Ashley and her mother pack the clover and alfalfa into the trunk of Kathy’s Toyota before heading off to Pizza Hut in Vinita for Ashley’s birthday dinner. Lauria was oblivious to the strands of straw stuck in her curls as they squeezed into a booth and enjoyed their dinner. Lauria and Ashley talked about fairs and cars as Kathy looked on in awe, wondering how the raptures of youth were so long ago. After they ate, they crossed the highway and went to Walmart. There, Lauria helped Ashley handpick her birthday cake: white frosting piped with blue. “Chocolate. No. Vanilla. No. Chocolate,” Ashley argued with herself. Lauria, always the problem solver, offered, “Half and half,” relieving Ashley of her indecision. Nighttime fell over Route 66 during the course of their errands and the neon signs kindled. The night remained cold and bitter and would feel this way in all the years since.

They then drove to the lightless outskirts of Vinita to the home of Kathy’s mother, Celesta, and stepfather, Bill Chandler; Kathy would often haul water for drinking from there. (Contrary to several reports, the Freemans did have running water, suitable for laundry and toilets and showers; however, the water came from the Big Cabin Creek in the back of the Freeman trailer and was not drinkable. Therefore, Kathy made frequent visits to her parents’ to collect drinking water for the family.) Lauria’s house was only a few minutes from the Chandlers’, and it was their next stop.

Kathy and Ashley waited in the car as Lauria ran into her house; the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree could be seen from far across the surrounding farmlands. Her father, Jay, had just returned from his job at an auto parts store in Langley. He was a nine-to-five man always topped off with a rugged baseball cap and plaid, a Midwestern man with Jack Webb–ish features and a thick, syrupy drawl. Hurrying so as not to keep her friend and her mother waiting, Lauria dashed for her bedroom, collecting a new set of clothes in her arm.

“Whoa, whoa, where’s the fire?” Jay called out.

“My car’s over at Ashley’s, and we only just fetched the cake,” she shouted down the hall. “Can I stay over just one more night? Pretty please?”

Jay gave in, always having a hard time saying no to his only daughter. “Well, now, you know you got animals you gotta take care of tomorrow, get around and take care of your show animals and stuff. You need to be home by noon.”

Years later, Jay tells me, “Noon never came the next day.”

Lauria squealed, rushing about and stuffing a couple of bottles of nail polish in her coat pocket. She was so rushed that she nearly bolted out the door without saying goodbye. But she stopped and turned around before planting a kiss on her father’s cheek. “I love you, Dad.” They were her last words to her father as she hopped down the steps of her porch, then skipped back into the idling car. The prairie, now dark, took her in with open arms, as it always had. It had something of the delirium of adolescence about it. And I’m sure Lauria’s natural curls bounced off her shoulders, and I’m sure winter was kinder to her skin than to most people’s. As they set off, Lauria’s mother, Lorene, just on her way home from work, slowed her car to a stop beside Kathy’s on the road where the Bibles lived.

“Dad said I could stay another night.” Lauria grinned.

“Make sure you don’t forget about the dentist’s appointment in the morning. Be home at eight o’clock.”

“I will!” Lauria shouted back the last words to her mother. Like with her father, the words “I love you” would be the last words Lorene heard from her daughter. Kathy smiled back at Lorene and slowly started to move the car forward.

The three of them made one more stop, this time at the Jack’s convenience store in Welch, owned by the grandmother of Ashley’s boyfriend, Jeremy Hurst. They picked up some soda and invited Jeremy as a last-minute decision, which he accepted.

It was to be a night of modest celebration. They settled in, with Ashley and Lauria shifting near the kitchen table by Danny, and Jeremy Hurst following shortly after. Kathy took the cake to the counter and planted seventeen candles in it, including one for luck, using it to light her cigarette. With her back to the rest, Kathy glanced over at the piece of paper on the fridge. One shot. It took her attention long enough that she didn’t notice the wax melting until she felt the heat under her face. She forced herself away from the letter, a manifesto of sorts, and set down her smoke, instructing Jeremy to turn off the lights as he came in.

The lights went out, and Kathy came with birthday cake ablaze. The flames of the candles sparkled in her beady but smiling brown eyes as she set the cake in front of her daughter. They sang “Happy Birthday to You,” Lauria singing louder than the rest, as Jeremy took a seat and playfully pinched Ashley’s side.

Ashley closed her eyes and made a wish.

The birthday candles were extinguished by breath, a breath as long as the prairie’s. Now the unlit home could not be noticed against the nighttime outside, and the cheers of her family and friends rolled in short form from the hills. It is from here, from this jumping-off point, that it is anybody’s guess as to what happened after, between a wish and the dawn’s early light when the trailer was found in flames.

I’ve driven the route between Vinita and Welch more times than I can count, more times than I’ve visited my childhood home. Each trip is slightly brighter and louder than the last, to a place where it takes time for my eyes and ears to adjust. Coming here, to where they were last seen, isn’t something I’m able to resist. I’m drawn. Obsessed. Manic. Sometimes I come up the driveway and think of the five of them here: Danny, Kathy, Ashley, Lauria, and Jeremy. Sometimes I imagine I am them. But as my senses adjust to deep, dark country, I light a smoke there on the Freeman property and imagine that I am the killer or killers who struck the first flame. I blow out my match, adding a pinch of sulfur to the pastures surrounding in the same way as Ashley blew out her birthday candles.

And then the prairie falls silent.

5

ONE BODY

December 30, 1999

The Morning of the Fire

Like the Freemans, Welchans Jack and Diane Bell lived in an area so rural that it didn’t even fall within the city limits of any existing town. Instead, it was referred to as West of Welch; what locals called “the sticks.” It was early morning, and their farmhouse was dimmed, so as not to wake their capricious teenage son. The home, only a few miles deeper into the country than the Freemans’, was all long shadows, the smell of Scotch pine sap, and the emphysemic breathing of a percolator. In the stillness at the bottom of each exhale, the outside sound of handcrafted wind chimes made of hammer-flattened spoons and forks. Every house in Oklahoma seemed to harmonize with the wind.

The pickup warmed up outside. Only a few miles south of the Kansas border, the ranching town was starry and still as the married couple got ready for work. They were employed at the Eastern State Hospital for the Insane, located about twenty miles south in Vinita, where a working farm for the patients once served as an economic factor for the county. Jack dried his chest-length yellowed beard over the woodstove’s heat as Diane fixed thermoses of chili and a side of leftover corn bread. His teeth ached that morning as he tied his beard into a single ponytail with three rubber bands, staring absently into the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree.

“Fetch the coffee,” Diane whispered through the dark. Jack went to the open kitchen and filled two large mugs with Folgers. After Jack pulled the cord of the Christmas tree lights from the wall, they left, clad in their Carhartts and long johns, going on with the hackneyed “just like any other morning.”

It was a wonder that the lightest breeze could find this town, and that morning, it crooned like a raw bow across a cello string, long and low. At approximately 5:40, Jack and Diane climbed into their Dodge pickup, not planning to fully wake until their tires reached the pavement of a God’s honest road. The leather shifted under them, the radio tuned to the local weather.

“You unplugged the tree, right?” asked Diane.

Jack grunted, not a yes or no about him at that ungodly hour, ungodly because of the way he had tossed and turned the night before, prodded by toothache. They headed south over the vast stubble that was the landscape, serenaded by the soft scrape of tires on dirt, fiddling with the heating vents. Nothing but blackness for as far as their sleep-crusted eyes could see, but for the pockets of illuminated grit caught in the truck’s headlights. Had they driven on just a little farther, they would have seen the familiar yellow signs inflamed in the lights, warning: HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES—signs you’ll still find in the area today.

As Diane sipped her coffee, she noticed a glow in the eastern sky just beyond a hill, a moving shade of tawny blotting out the stars. She nudged her husband’s arm, pointing his attention due east to this little light that danced on the world’s edge. For a split second, she wondered if it were the first flash of day, a brief panic at the idea of being late for work, but that couldn’t have been right. Jack tilted his head and let a silent profanity fall down his ponytailed beard.

He turned the car east toward the light, his headlights streaking the hand-painted sign that read JUSTICE FOR SHANE at the end of the long driveway. The town being small enough, they knew the farm belonged to the Freemans, a family of four. A family of three now, Jack had to mentally correct himself, since the Freeman boy had been found near a ditch about ten miles west the winter before. Suddenly the couple was wide-awake, turning north up the moderate incline of the seven-hundred-foot-long driveway and edging closer. The Freeman trailer was engulfed in flames.

Jack slammed the gears into reverse and raced in the direction of the highway, stopping at the first house he saw: the Sherricks’.

Today, Wade Sherrick is a cattle rancher who lives at the end of that dirt road, he on the south end, the Freemans once at the north. “And you thought I was dead, eh?” he laughs when I mention that it took me three years to see him, because I had been misinformed; I thought he was an elderly man who’d died some years before. “Not sure what that says about me.” It was only out of curiosity that I stopped my car by his barn in early 2019 when seeing two young men doing farmwork from the sheds. I knew by their young faces that they probably didn’t have much firsthand information about the 1999 fire up the road, but I ask about the late Wade Sherrick, only to learn that Wade was alive and well, and just over there. Wade comes from the barn, winter pale from the shadows, middle-aged but still handsome in that callused-hand way you’d find around Welch. I follow him across the street to an office connected to his farmhouse, a cluttered room filled with agricultural newsletters and dusty trophies and belts from his days as a rodeo rider, a hobby that his two sons inherited (they all had a laugh at my thinking Wade was dead). I ask to wear his cowboy hat before inquiring about the morning of the fire. He and his sons are kind. Wade’s wife, Kim, a local mail carrier, is working that day.

“Well, somebody’s beatin’ on the door,” Wade says about the morning of the fire. “I could sleep through a bomb, but Kim wakes up and goes to the door. I stumble out and see it’s that Bell.”

Back in 1999, the blue heelers stood by their masters, keeping quiet when the door opened to Jack Bell and the moonlit ranch behind him, one of Charolais and Angus breeds of beef cattle.

“Hey, I’m on my way to work,” Jack calmly started. “But the Freemans’ house is on fire up the road there.”

Kim Sherrick called 911 at 5:50. At this time, Jack and Diane Bell continued to drive to their place of work.

They’d not speak of the incident publicly again.

Wade and Kim went to their children’s bedrooms. They wrapped their six- and four-year-olds in the covers they still slept in, the parents slipping on their boots quietly in the dark by the front door with their sons’ heads in the crooks of their necks. “It’s five something in the morning. We get the kids up and throw ’em into the truck and get up there.” The family of four squeezed into the cab of the family truck, summoned by the tiny light at the top of the road that shone red like the sun. The sleepy boys rubbed their eyes to inspect the sight ahead. When they reached the home, only half of the trailer was on fire (Kim remembers the east side while Wade remembers the west side). But the Sherricks couldn’t leave their truck on account of the Freeman family dog, Sissy, a brute of a Rottweiler, jumping on the car doors and barking her jowls off. Helpless, all they could do was watch when a sudden swell of fire whooshed and washed over the other half of the trailer within the matter of a second. “We were, like, ‘Whatta we do? Whatta we do?’” Wade recalls. Today, the Sherrick sons, now working on the family farm, remember not the fear of the fire, but the fear of the dog in their long-ago, hazy memories.

The Welch Volunteer Fire Department showed up at 6:10, twenty minutes after the call to police. The Sherricks knew the firemen as they came one by one, all of them bread-and-buttered on the same ol’ farms. The pair rolled down the windows and shouted to them from the truck. “We told them that all the cars were accounted for,” says Wade. “We knew that much about the Freemans.” The Sherricks stayed for less than an hour, with Kim having to be at work by seven o’clock.