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“Ling?” Jericho prompted. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes.” Ling stared out the window at the night coming toward them like a flock of angry birds. “We got the idea from him. From the King of Crows.”
THE ENGINE OF THE NATION
The Timmonses’ shantyboat had made it on the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas-Tennessee border. From there, the family was heading north and east, toward St. Louis first and possibly on to Chicago. Memphis, Henry, and Bill needed to head west, to Nebraska and Bountiful. Moses and Tobias threw their arms around Memphis and Henry for tearful good-byes and gave Bill’s hand a solid shake.
Memphis crouched down to look the boys in the eyes. “You remember what I told you about telling your stories, won’t you?”
They nodded.
“All right, then.”
“Will we see you again?” Moses asked.
“I surely hope so,” Memphis said.
The three men hopped a freight train headed to Oklahoma. Through the spaces between the slats, they watched the country run past like a picture show. There was so much country, and it was all so different. You could practically feel the young nation searching for itself, Memphis thought: In the small towns. The steel bridges spanning the rivers. The railroads stretching out and laying claim to more and more land. The cowboys riding high in the saddle. The reservations pushed to the edges. The triangular oil derricks looming over the distance, great wooden giants announcing themselves with a breath of fire and smoke. The train ticked across a stretch of track slowly enough for Memphis to watch as two men worked to break a horse. They held fast to ropes looped around the wild thing’s neck. It bucked and struggled and kicked, keeping up the fight. Memphis wrote it all down.
They hopped off the train and slept for a night near tribal lands. Henry’s dream walks were filled with the land’s memories. Bullets passed through the air, spinning circles into the ghostly forms of murdered Osage, then pierced the ground, which bled oil from its wounds. When Henry woke, just before dawn, he could swear he saw the faint figure of a man cradling a handful of earth like a newborn and telling it the history so it would never forget. The sun pierced him through with holes till he was filled with light and absorbed into the day.
The Diviners walked under sun, through rain, a diaspora of dust carried upon their soles. They made it to the thriving boomtown of Borger, Texas. Its unpaved streets were congested with cars coated in panhandle mud and parked every which way. Bill didn’t know how anybody could travel on streets so crowded with cars. The clang-and-wheeze of the pumps hung in the air, and for a moment, Henry thought of the Eye’s incessant whine. Everywhere were men burning with the fuel of dreams and get-rich-quick schemes.
“Oil, folks! That’s what runs the engines of the nation—oil!” a prospector called from a soapbox. “Three months ago, this town had four hundred people and some tumbleweeds. Now? Why, there’s thirty thousand here, all of ’em looking to get rich quick. Black gold!”
Though he’d protested mightily, Bessie Timmons had pressed five dollars into Memphis’s hand back in Arkansas—“We got to look out for each other, and that’s that.” They used it now to buy coffee and chicken from a stall, listening to the gossip in line:
“Heard about these Diviners they’re searching for?”
“Yessir. Worth about five thousand clams apiece, they say.”
“Gotta catch ’em alive, though.”
“Aw, now, where’s the sport in that?”
“I heard they can find oil by smell.”
“And take out telephone lines and radio signals if’n they’ve a mind to.”
“That ain’t nothing. I heard they can kill ya just by looking at ya!”
This was how information spread, person to person, rumor to rumor, picking up embellishment, fear, and justification along the way, carrying a little something from each of its tellers until it had a life of its own. Until it became either sickness or legend.
“Hell, I say let ’em alone. If they snaked one over on the gum’ment boys, then they’re proper outlaws, like Frank and Jesse James!”
“You hear that? We’re outlaws,” Henry whispered as they walked away, heads kept low.
“Don’t wanna be an outlaw,” Memphis said. He’d thought a lot about the thin line between villains and heroes, the way the needle moved back and forth, sewing between those two things till they were forever linked. He only wanted to be free to be himself, whatever that was, and to love Theta. He wanted to be reunited with his brother. And he wanted to take down the King of Crows.
There was other gossip in town.
“You hear about that funny business out in New Mexico?”
“How’s that?”
“Oh, some kinda lightning storm, real odd-like. Was a fella passing through said he saw it. Said it done tore up the whole sky near where the oil comp’nies been drilling. Said it was like the sky had caught fire, like it might rip in two. And there was ghosts streaming toward it.”
“Ghosts?”
