The Dreams of Ada (22 page)

The truth was somewhere in between. Steve Haraway had taken his final exams, had graduated from East Central. He had taken a job as a salesman with a dental pharmaceutical firm that was based in New Jersey. He still lived in the apartment, but five days a week he was out of town, traveling across Oklahoma, selling pharmaceuticals. On weekends he would return, visit with his family, visit with his friends. Some of the time he would sit alone in the apartment. Most of Denice’s belongings still were there.

Alone in his cell, Tommy Ward, too, was thinking of a woman: of Lisa Lawson, the only girl he had loved.

As a teenager he had been shy with girls, had been teased by his friends because of it. He described his first relationships in the long essay he had written for Don Wyatt. He began the passage with a paragraph about his father:

My dad was a good man. He wouldnt let me go some of the places I wanted to go. But it was for my owne safty. He would tell me about the good things and the bad things about the world. I never got to come into town much. The only time I got to come into town was to go to church or to go to the store with him or mom. Sometimes I would sneak off and go over to one of my friends house across the highway. He always knew were to find me and he would punnish me for not telling where I was going. But I knew it was right for disobaying him.

So then time passed and I was learning more about the good and of the evel. And I alwase made shure I was doing good and staying in the house of the lord. Then people at school thought there was something wrong with me cause I never taken out a girl on a date. They would laugh and say he’s almost 16 years old and never taken out a girl. I told them I didnt care what they thought. That when I meat a girl I want to make shure she is the right one for me. And at the time I didn’t care to much about trying to find a girl. But there was a girl I thought was really nice to me and all. So one day I thought I would show them that I will go out with a girl. So I ask this girl if she would go out with me. She said, shure were will we go. I ask her if she would go to church with me. She started laughing at me. I ask her what was wrong. She thought I was crazy. She told me there was no lord or there was no God or no heven. We sit down and I talked to her about there was a lord and God and a heven. And I talked to her and tryed to get her to believe me. She still thought I was crazy. So then I didn’t talk to her much after that day. I went to church and ask the lord to forgive her and that some day she would see that there is a lord and God and a heven.

A year passed after that without Tommy dating. His father became ill, had several operations, was sent home to die. Tommy wrote:

I quit school and got a job at Evergreen Feeds. Then I quit going to church and started running around with the wrong people. I didn’t care about nothing. The truck drivers would come in and give me pills to take. I was working midnight to 8 oclock shift. Then I started smoking pot and staying out late and drinking and I didn’t care about myself. Then one night my boss fired me. Cause I came to work drunk and I was late. But I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was do all these bad things. I met a girl and all I thought about her was to go jump in bed with her. I didn’t love her. Then she broke up with me. Then I started loosing my friends. And started running around with bad ones.

Then one day mom ask me to go to church with her so I did. I went up and ask the lord to forgive me for the foolish ways I been acting. I was loosing my friends and I lost my girlfriend and I ask the lord to forgive me. And he did. I started getting back my friends. And if anyone was in need of help I would help them out the best way I could.

Then time passed and I met lisa lawson. I was madley in love. I would do anything I could for her. She changed my life completly. I caird more about her than I ever cared about a girl. Then she was at me to get a job.

Tommy got a job with his brother Jimmy, in Odessa, Texas. He ran up large phone bills calling Lisa. He was fired and came back to Ada.

I was so happy to see lisa and be back with her. Then one day we broke up. I felt like the world had ended for me. She thought when I was in Texas that I was seeing another girl. Then a cupple weeks later we seen each other and we talked. Then I was happy to get her back. Then we started going to church with her grandpa and sometimes with my mom.

After a time, Lisa enrolled in Seminole Junior College, thirty miles away.

I would go up to the school with her and sit in the car all day till she got out of classes. Then one day she got a apt. So I moved in with her and went out looking for a job. I couldn’t find one up there nowere. So then I came back to Ada and started looking for a job. lisa was mad at me for comming back to Ada. She thought that I came back to run around. So then she broke up with me.

Lisa began dating other people. Tommy kept trying to win her back. Lisa kept refusing.

One day when I was walking into town I seen lisa go by. I waved at her and she stoped. I started crying and I ask her to come back to me and she said no.

Tommy kept trying. He heard Lisa was dating a guy he knew named Ronnie Smith. He was very upset by this. He quarreled with Ronnie about her.

Then I apolijized for the way I was acting and told them I was sarry. That I still loved lisa and changed my ways and started back to church. Until I got the job in Norman. Cause I had to work 7 days a week. Then lisa assepted my polligy and I went back to Norman. Then this happened. I was writing a letter to her telling her that I was sorry for the ways I was acting. And I told her that I was leven it up to the lord if he ment for us to get back together he would see us back. Then I was writing to her about this. About Mr Smith questioniong me. And I told her that I was going to take a pollygraph test to prove my innicents. Then I wrote I will let you know what happens after I took the test. I didn’t ever get to finnish the letter cause this happend.

That had been five months before. In jail he had tried to forget her. But now, with spring coming, though there were no seasons inside, he was thinking again of Lisa. He wrote her a letter, enclosed it in a note he sent to Tricia, asking her to see that Lisa got it.

The letter to Lisa wasn’t sealed. Tricia read it. In the note, Tommy told Lisa how much he had been thinking of her of late, how his life had changed, how he was a different person now, how he had gotten a new outlook in jail. He wrote that when he got out he wanted to make something of himself. He was sure he was going to get out of this mess soon. He was hoping that when he got out, Lisa would want to share his life.

Tricia did not know what to do with the note. There was a problem with giving it to Lisa. Lisa had gotten married two months before. Her name now was Lisa Lawson Smith.

Tricia and Miz Ward had decided, when Lisa got married, not to tell Tommy.

On the first day of spring, the Ada Rotary Club held its annual fund-raising pancake fry at the firehouse. The men and women of Ada began lining up at six in the morning to eat their breakfasts in the firehouse, and would continue to arrive until seven in the evening for their lunches, their dinners, their suppers. For three dollars each they ate and drank their fill of pancakes, bacon, sausage, coffee, three flavors of punch. The money raised would be used to support the Rotary Club’s civic projects.

The members of the Rotary Club—businessmen and professional men of all descriptions—wore pink aprons and white paper caps. Though it was a Wednesday, a workday, they each were donating all or part of their day. Some stood behind large grills, mixing batter, pouring it onto the grills, turning the pancakes as they sputtered to the proper shade of golden brown. Others stood behind long tables that held warmers filled with bacon and sausage. Still others stood by large coffee urns, filling paper cups. Behind a table near the pancake makers, handing out packets of butter, dressed like the others in apron and paper cap, was Dr. Jack Haraway, the dentist.

“Surely you can use three of these,” he said to a weather-beaten, wiry man moving past him, his plate laden with pancakes. The dentist held out his manicured hand. The man took the three packets of butter and moved on. There was no exchange of words between them. The man with the pancakes picked up a paper cup of coffee with his free hand and moved among the long tables that had been set up in the firehouse for the occasion—the fire trucks were parked on Twelfth Street, around the corner—until he found an empty seat. He sat and poured maple syrup onto his pancakes from one of the bottles that dotted the tables, and he began to eat.

The man was C. L. Wolf, Bud Wolf’s father, Tricia’s father-in-law; an electrician by trade, a painter at Monday night art classes, a bowler on Wednesday nights, the proprietor of the small farm in Happyland that he was building with his wife, Maxine. C.L.—his full name was Charles Leo, as were Bud’s and Buddy’s, but nobody called any of them that—was fifty-seven, with gray hair and a quiet demeanor. He was not a member of the Rotary Club or of any civic group other than the Unity Baptist Church; a resident of Ada for thirty-five years, he was known only to his friends and business associates. But he was a vital cog in the life of the town, whose untouted skills enabled Ada to function.

C.L. worked at Luton Motors, a long, dark machine shop set behind a parking area on Twelfth Street. In a small industrial town such as Ada, motors were visibly at the core of life: they ran the pumps in the oil fields, the machines in the factories, the generators at the power plant. Hardly a day went by when a motor—or five motors, or ten motors—did not burn out somewhere in town. C. L. Wolf was the only man in town who could fix them. In the long, dark shop he would hoist the motors by himself onto his work table; small motors might weigh ten or fifteen pounds; larger ones might weigh 250 pounds. Opening the motor, he would rip out the tangled mass of blackened, burned-out wire that was its core. He would take strands of gleaming new copper wire and thread them piece by piece into the motor’s heart, braiding them into the appropriate thicknesses. When the braiding was done, he would soak the motors in chemical solutions and varnishes, coating them, hardening the copper coils. Four or five hours of patient hand labor were required on every motor. Sometimes Solo Cup or Brockway or some other factory that operated around the clock wanted a burned-out motor repaired immediately. At those times, C.L. went home and wolfed down the supper that Maxine had prepared and then went back to the shop, telling her not to wait up; he worked alone through the night and waited for the motor to be picked up at six or eight in the morning; then he went home to get a few hours’ sleep. In thirty-five years he had rewound about fifteen thousand of the town’s motors.

C.L. was not the owner of the shop; he was one of four employees, but the only one who could rewind motors. After thirty-five years he was still receiving humble wages, no paid vacations, no paid holidays; on those rare occasions when his work was caught up and there were no motors in the shop to rewind, he would be sent home, and would not be paid for his time until additional motors came in. The only fringe benefit known to exist at Luton Motors was that every year the boss bought several tickets to the annual Rotary Club pancake fry and gave them to his employees, so they could have a free pancake lunch.

So it was that C.L. came to the firehouse and filled his plate and took the three butters from Dr. Haraway and sat on a metal folding chair and began to eat. As he did, he recalled how he and Jack Haraway had grown up together in a town called Atoka, fifty miles south of Ada; how they had played football together. It was during the Second World War, and after graduation C.L. joined the Army Air Corps, went off to be a radio operator in the South Pacific. After the war, in 1950, he moved to Ada, because his parents had, and went to work for Luton Motors. At about the same time, Jack Haraway completed dental school and opened his office in Ada; eventually he acquired a large house east of town, and became active in church and civic affairs.

The two men, despite their boyhood together, had never become friends in Ada. When they passed on the street, they would nod. C.L. well knew who Jack Haraway was, but the dentist usually acted as if he could not quite place C.L.

As he drank his coffee, people passing among the tables said hello to him, and he said hello back. He knew a lot of the pancake eaters through the motor shop.

“Most everybody in town has motors,” he said. “Even dentists have motors. On their drills, you know.”

He did not recall Dr. Haraway ever sending him a motor to be fixed.

That same afternoon, the first day of spring, Bud Wolf, on vacation from the feed mill to allow Tricia to rest, needed to get out of the house for a time. He decided to take a brief hike: to go look at the site where, in his taped statement, Karl Fontenot said he and Tommy and Odell Titsworth had raped and killed Denice Haraway and burned her body.

Bud knew the area well. He and Tommy used to go hunting there often, years ago. They had been close then, when he and Tricia were newly married and Tommy was growing into his teens. Tommy had become for a time the brother that Bud never had. (He had one sister, who’d left Ada years ago.) Bud had become Tommy’s idol; unlike Tommy’s brothers, Bud didn’t treat him as a runt.

It was a gray day, with intermittent drizzle. Bud drove his old green Pontiac to the edge of town and parked beside the power plant just outside the city limits, at the very spot where, on the tape, which Bud had seen at the preliminary hearing, Tommy had said they parked that night. As Bud got out of the car, his boots sank into mud made thick and soft by several days of rain. He opened a gate in a wooden fence, closed it behind him, began to follow a double path of tire tracks down a sloping meadow of wild grass and underbrush studded with thickets of trees.

As he slogged through the wet grass, Bud recalled pleasant days of hunting here with Tommy, hunting rabbits, squirrels, coons, doves. He came to Sandy Creek, swollen and muddy now, and recalled that one time as they walked along, Tommy, about twenty feet ahead of him, still a boy, had seen a cottonmouth water moccasin, about six feet long, an inch and a half across. Tommy had begun jumping up and down on the snake, yelling, “Shoot him, Bud! Shoot him!”