|
WikiFiction: Lawton, OklahomaBy Mark Lawley
|
Lawton
Population: About 100,000
County: Comanche
Area: 80 square miles, ringed with ghost towns
Fort Sill
Population: About 53,000
Training: Army, marines.
Field trip trivia: Geronimo lived here
A day in Lawton
By dawnlight, the town is a fever dream of highway mirages, clapboard houses, and dusty streets full of strays. Traffic moves at the pace of daydreams along grid roads, going from neighborhoods laid out like barracks to perfectly rectangular plazas. All that military order a futile barricade against the mirages, against the truth that the mirages tell: that Lawton can vanish like a false oasis, that its order is a pattern writ in the dust of a forgotten plains country. The military men make the town possible, and they have been stationed here and not elsewhere for reasons obscure. Lawton: the violent incarnation of a college town, where honor hangs so heavy in the air that a wrong look can lead to a family feud, that honking your horn in traffic is challenging a man to a duel.
By high noon, the mirages unleash water into every rise and fall of the streets; they shimmer like jet engine exhaust out on the bare red fields, and people wander in the 100-degree illusions. G.I.’s and marines spend their paychecks in restaurants, massage parlors, strip clubs, strip malls, and Wal-Mart. The civilians of Lawton work at these places or fulfill a serviceman’s needs in some indirect way, at some satellite of Fort Sill: schools for the G.I.’s children, salons for the G.I.’s wives, a tire factory for the G.I.’s cars. The illusion that this is all part of the onflowing waters of human activity rather than a dead eddy off to the side of civilization persists, and some have said (for decades now) that one day, Lawton will be better.
By dusklight, the heat loses its weight, and the cool of shadowed creeks takes the town. People sense something atavistic in all the day’s illusion, and as day grades down to dark, the mirages take another form, become some throwback to a prehistoric time, some imagined realm of unfettered primality where flesh may dissolve into flesh and fists may become the leading instruments of diplomacy. Violence. Gun battles play out in the Wild Wild West of apartment complex parking lots. Fistfights and booze gatherings detail the horizon-to-horizon wilderness. In the neighborhoods where desperation is in the crumbling facades and in the child’s broken bicycle upended in the yard, there are yells, then gunfire. The police sirens do not come. An ambulance. Paramedics taking their time because they know nothing is to be done here.
Some neighborhoods can fortify their boundaries against the mirages with wealth. They have community walls and hardy gardens. But though there may be gates and fences, there are no true suburbs in a rectangular town composed of four east-west thoroughfares and some number of intersecting north-south streets. And yet even with this geometrically egalitarian layout, the mirages manage to hold race unto race, direct violence from cousin to cousin, from kin to kin.
Midnight. A man needs purpose. A man finds purpose in the mirages that other men make. They head west, towards the town’s most popular strip club: the Dragon. And then, Lawton’s outcasts, its perpetuators of illusion, its rough-palmed professionals, its cowboys and country boys and Goodyear toughs and west side soldiers and east side gangsters and G.I.’s and marines and farmers and truckers, are all at the Dragon. And because they are the children of mirage and the abettors of mirage and the masters of mirage, they feel like they’ve come home.
Lawton’s economy
If we could turn socioeconomic makeup into geographical elevation, these plains would become hill country with deep basins and sinkholes dotted throughout. Patterns would not obtain. Hills would cluster only occasionally. There would be only a few mountains, and each of these would prove an eccentric solitary height, located for instance over some ramshackle ranch out in the fields. The millionaire versions of Boo Radley. Redneck Great Gatsbys.
The depressions are Third World in depth. They gather around undesirable locations, like near Lawton Regional Airport or along a loud thoroughfare or against the wall separating Lawton from Fort Sill, beyond which artillery explodes continuously through the days and the nights. Many of these houses look like favela shacks, cobbled together out of castaway wood and sheets of tin. I once had to pick up a date from such a neighborhood and got the address wrong twice. Both times, before I even made it to the front door, a gentleman appeared with a shotgun leveled at me and inquired after who sent me and who I was looking for and how much was owed.
Even the nice neighborhoods can’t aspire to grandeur. The most decadent of homes have a kind of rushed cheapness, a cutting-corners aspect to their construction. This reminds you that you’re still in Lawton, Oklahoma. It promises you that even if you “make it,” well.… The middle-class, manicured suburban sameness that most parts of the country possess does not occur here because it would require planning. Lawton’s homes are erected in a haphazard rush; the foundations sag, the walls crack, the roofs cave in once a strong storm passes through. An oasis, disappearing.
Why you cannot leave Lawton
Towards his death, my father called me and gave a long guilt-trip speech that culminated in: You need to come home and run the Dragon. I was so affronted I said “no” harshly—“I’m not running no….” and nearly said “damn strip club.” He bade me farewell.
I am a “hick,” and so I know that even more than the shotgun, the hick’s primary weapon of choice is family ties. Family ties and the associated guilt. The only way to defeat the hick is to inflict irreparable damage upon your family, upon those ties that he uses. Otherwise, the hick will win.
“Lawton is a black hole, it always sucks you back in.” —Most people from my town. This is the Lawton mantra.
Lawton’s seasons
December January February: Mild, with bouts of extreme, crop-killing cold
March April May: Hot
June July August: Death Hot
September October November: Hot, with tornado season
All year ‘round, there are thunderstorms of the kind most people in the world have never experienced. Wikipedia once assured me that southwest Oklahoma, along with some peak somewhere that mountaineers fear, is the site of the most extreme weather in the world. During a typical storm, hundreds of massive, jagged bolts of lightning connect sky and earth, their glowing afterimages like light bulb filaments burning out. Thunderclaps rattle the windowpanes and sound like they’re coming from beneath your feet. Seams deep within the dark earth ripping apart.
Religion in Lawton
Come Sundays or even Wednesday evenings, certain churches use peer pressure especially well on teenagers. The church fathers make the kids get in a prayer circle in the center of an assembly room and surround them with a community of the already converted, many of whom are family and friends. Then some official will stand up with a mic and say something like:
Oh Lord! You gave your only begotten son for these children.
Please give them the courage to accept you and join our family
so that your sacrifice won’t be in vain.
I call on you to lift the veil from their eyes
so that they may not deny your love
and the love of their families and dear friends
who now look to them to make a choice:
To accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior
or to walk outside of the kingdom of heaven always.
(Pause)
Those of you who now accept the Lord Jesus Christ into your hearts, stand up and go to the back room where members of our church family will guide you in your rebirth into a life of service.
Applause for the kids who stand and go for their indoctrination in the back rooms, where foldout tables, donuts, and patronizing, patient faces await them.
And for those who remain:
Oh Lord, don’t let these blind souls turn away from your light forever…
Please show them the way,
show them your mercy
show them the light of your eternal truth.
Don’t cast them out…
And so on, with the preacher punctuating his impassioned speech every now and then with another invitation to stand and go be converted, and with more kids getting up every time. Not even I could resist by the fifth or sixth call, when the group had whittled down from fifty to just five. But I remember once—and only once—a blonde cheerleader with all the accouterments of Being Popular (low-neck shirt, heavy makeup, bubblegum chewing, light-catching jewelry, back-off facial expression, etc.) sat surprisingly defiant through to the end, her arms crossed, her will pure iron. I never let myself underestimate her again.
When my mother convinces new girls to become strippers, she surrounds them with other dancers and friends they respect and holds the same type of group dialogue, except now the back rooms are the dressing rooms and “the Lord” is replaced with, “the tips, baby!”
Lawton’s layout
Lee Boulevard West: The power lines meet at a hazy vanishing point; the squat neighborhoods are dwarfed by infinity. Here we have the Goodyear tire plant, one of the major employers alongside Fort Sill. Growing up, most kids speak of Goodyear like East Coast kids speak of Harvard. If one isn’t going into the military, this is the non plus ultra of our aspirations. Salaries are rumored to go as high as 60K. Slinging tires all day apparently breaks the body, and some joke that all your savings will eventually go into back surgery. Still, many kids maintain that they want to work at Goodyear when they grow up.
Lee Boulevard Center: Stores will sell you special chairs for old people, or special cowboy attire for a rancher’s needs, or special Bibles for a dear, dear person. The wooden fences are always the same, the kind that start out sun yellow and turn the same ashgray color that all fences in Lawton eventually become.
Lee Boulevard East: Lawton/Fort Sill Regional airport is nearby, and the homes around here are shanties and lean-tos, with occasionally a house that looks like it can make it through the next storm. No one walks the streets at night. Junk cars pile up in gravel driveways. You know poverty by peoples’ teeth, the way they’ve become yellow-black bone fragments. All squalor heightened by the everglory of a sky so wide it bows into the ends of the earth, a sky sometimes streaked with long eskers and canyons of clouds, a sky whose gravid storms weep with violence and whose stars and sun make a man religious by default.
Gore Boulevard West: One of the barren parks has a swing set surrounded by such a desiccated vastness that no one dares go. The wind rocks the empty swings.
Gore Boulevard Center. Shopping. The neighborhoods branching off this thoroughfare have the same sign at their entrance: Neighborhood Watch Area! Criminals Beware, Residents Watch Out For One Another! With its dapper-hatted, Dick Tracy-like, black-ink criminal icon, the sign promises gunplay for burglars.
Gore Boulevard East. Safe neighborhoods. Cameron University kids.
Cache Road West. In the fields, if you find a stick and break it, you might discover “Indian Gum” inside, a white pulpy material that we used to chew as kids.
Cache Road Center. Plaza after concrete plaza of crooked, ill-formed buildings and the same plastic-letter billboard signs, as if they were all made by the same manufacturer. Home to the Cruise, a north-south loop you’re supposed to drive until you see a cute girl/guy and signal to pull over in one parking lot or another. Fist fights and shootings happen in these lots. DO NOT LOITER signs are displayed everywhere.
Cache Road East. Downtown. Once a rather lovely, historical site; now there are bad restaurants, some brick homes, and narrow roads. The yards are sliced with sidewalks people rarely use. Most of the Dragon’s employees live here, far away from work. That way they can readily tell when someone follows them home from the club, all the way from the town’s west side.
Roger’s Lane West. To the south, houses. To the north, Fort Sill’s fields, which are long, blank, sere stretches of grass, and in the distance, shaping Lawton’s entire northern skyline, are the mountains of the Wichitas. Look that way every now and then to see the bomb smoke from the military base’s guns and artillery.
Roger’s Lane Center. Fort Sill’s long wall runs along the entire length of this thoroughfare. Some parts of it are merely razorwire fence. Some are tall purplish concrete wall. The earthquakes of artillery and the sound of machinegun fire and bomb blasts are common, often daily, and always year-round.
Roger’s Lane East. Trees and wilderness surround the homes. The sound of cicadas is deafening. There are mosquitoes and insects of doom. I once saw what I thought was a hummingbird in the dusk, flittering about an ugly, flower-laden bush. I told my father this was a good omen and snapped a picture. When the picture showed up on the camera’s preview mode, I saw that the hummingbird was no bird at all, but a gigantic, horrifying moth-thing of H. P. Lovecraftian ugliness, its vermiculate horrorshow bulk like some alien torso.
Prairieland Stonehenge
There are many other roads and streets throughout the town. Many of them are flanked by tall prairie grass broken at the stems and crooked. The sight of crooked grass going on and on, the way a Stonehenge-like effect happens when the sun lines up perfectly with a long east-west street and falls burning right at its distance-diminished end, will give a man the impression of a cruel but glorious God, perhaps a barefoot God who sits in a rocking chair on His ramshackle front porch with the largest, most powerful shotgun cradled in His lap.
Many roads go by farms and ranches and fields. There are cows and horses in most of those fields, but some are empty and have no discernible purpose. Beware: rattlesnakes, copperheads, fiddlebacks, scorpions, and tarantulas of incredible variety (I once saw a delicate blue bulbous one with satanic patterns on its dangerous and beautiful body; it ran about frantically as it became a ball of fire when my father sprayed it with some flammable substance and dropped a match on it).
My high school
Looks like a big, two-story cinderblock mall with windows. It has a church-style marquee, on which the guidance office puts up various platitudes (Just say no to drugs!) and sometimes a semi-useful announcement, like “Last Day of School!” When I graduated, I drove around the school three times holding my middle finger out to it with extreme relish.
Just four more laps, and who knows? Maybe the Walls of Jericho falling.
Haunted locales
All teenagers in Lawton know of its haunted locations. The most famous is the parallel forest in the Wichitas. Here, an entire forest of trees grows in perfectly parallel lines, and it’s not uncommon to run into a buffalo ranging through the halls of bark. Once when I was in high school, a girlfriend, her sister, and I went hiking out there. We found a pit with a decapitated armadillo laid before a hastily made wooden cross. The cross was two fencepost chunks improbably nailed together. It was moored sideways in the Indian clay, and the armadillo was draped in triangular Blair Witch Project symbols composed of three sticks each tied at their corners with twine. Its bloody head stump was alive with white maggots and iridescent green flies. My then-girlfriend took off running and fainted in the tall prairie grass, but her sister caught her, and I fanned her off and poured water over her head. She came to and said a prayer there in the swaying grasses.
The common dare is to go to those woods at night and shine your lights into its depths. You’ll see the haunting sight of longshadows cast backways by the parallel trees, shadows that extend beyond the penumbra of your lights, and parallax head beams striking futilely into the gloom. Once I was out wallow-driving by myself in my teenage depression, listening to Tori Amos and telling myself I was a feminist, when I decided to take the this dare. I parked behind a culvert at the mouth of the woods and turned my brights on. And staring back at me from the depths of the forest were two hugebrown human eyes full of indifference and malevolence both. The eyes approached, and I turned off the lights in panic, but this made it worse as the head floated through the black towards me. I put the car in reverse just as the decapitated head with its shaggy mane came from the trees, and as I pulled away, I saw it was a buffalo whose body had been graded with the dark.
Fort Sill
If you drive around aimlessly in Fort Sill, the MPs (military police) are guaranteed to pull you over and ask what you’re doing. You do not want this to occur.
The Wichitas
To the west, north, and east of town, there stretch the Wichita Mountains, the only wrinkle in the plains landscape for many miles. They are called “mountains” perhaps out of reverence for their beauty, but most outsiders would no doubt call them hills. They are beautiful in the way very old things are beautiful, and on their slopes, the air itself feels ancient. The mountains have been weathered down by millennia and are covered in witch hazel and cacti. The boulders are called rainbow rocks because they are orange and red, and the lichen that grows on them gives them shades of pale ocean green, yellow, and even a faded velvet blue. The horizon is made of pastel colors, like a smoky rainbow laid flat against the land, and the manmade lakes go blue with the distance even if they’re a shitbrown up close. Vultures hang like pieces of a mobile on the sky, motionless eternally, but then you look away and look back again, and they’ve moved on despite their stillness.
I once found a complete buffalo skeleton behind a boulder off the side of a road. I once found a Bible beneath some rocks. I once found a fairy village made of sticks. Some child’s installation? There are many places out there, and walking the boulder-strewn paths and trails, one thinks that if lush Appalachian forests harbor green sprightly fairies, here is a place that would give home to strange and grotesque and old fairies, ones with brute strength and not entirely kind eyes, though those eyes would be perhaps wise.
Billboards
Many of the billboards on the sides of the road are broken down, but they all have advertisements. Often, the advertisement is of a public service announcement type, but with a religious twist. One gigantic sign on the eastern edge of town that has been there my entire life reads “Jesus Saves.” It depicts a sunray-emanating Christ holding his arms out to you. The icon of a savior in a vast empty plain of nothing.
Read more fiction by Mark Lawley here.
Population: About 100,000
County: Comanche
Area: 80 square miles, ringed with ghost towns
Fort Sill
Population: About 53,000
Training: Army, marines.
Field trip trivia: Geronimo lived here
A day in Lawton
By dawnlight, the town is a fever dream of highway mirages, clapboard houses, and dusty streets full of strays. Traffic moves at the pace of daydreams along grid roads, going from neighborhoods laid out like barracks to perfectly rectangular plazas. All that military order a futile barricade against the mirages, against the truth that the mirages tell: that Lawton can vanish like a false oasis, that its order is a pattern writ in the dust of a forgotten plains country. The military men make the town possible, and they have been stationed here and not elsewhere for reasons obscure. Lawton: the violent incarnation of a college town, where honor hangs so heavy in the air that a wrong look can lead to a family feud, that honking your horn in traffic is challenging a man to a duel.
By high noon, the mirages unleash water into every rise and fall of the streets; they shimmer like jet engine exhaust out on the bare red fields, and people wander in the 100-degree illusions. G.I.’s and marines spend their paychecks in restaurants, massage parlors, strip clubs, strip malls, and Wal-Mart. The civilians of Lawton work at these places or fulfill a serviceman’s needs in some indirect way, at some satellite of Fort Sill: schools for the G.I.’s children, salons for the G.I.’s wives, a tire factory for the G.I.’s cars. The illusion that this is all part of the onflowing waters of human activity rather than a dead eddy off to the side of civilization persists, and some have said (for decades now) that one day, Lawton will be better.
By dusklight, the heat loses its weight, and the cool of shadowed creeks takes the town. People sense something atavistic in all the day’s illusion, and as day grades down to dark, the mirages take another form, become some throwback to a prehistoric time, some imagined realm of unfettered primality where flesh may dissolve into flesh and fists may become the leading instruments of diplomacy. Violence. Gun battles play out in the Wild Wild West of apartment complex parking lots. Fistfights and booze gatherings detail the horizon-to-horizon wilderness. In the neighborhoods where desperation is in the crumbling facades and in the child’s broken bicycle upended in the yard, there are yells, then gunfire. The police sirens do not come. An ambulance. Paramedics taking their time because they know nothing is to be done here.
Some neighborhoods can fortify their boundaries against the mirages with wealth. They have community walls and hardy gardens. But though there may be gates and fences, there are no true suburbs in a rectangular town composed of four east-west thoroughfares and some number of intersecting north-south streets. And yet even with this geometrically egalitarian layout, the mirages manage to hold race unto race, direct violence from cousin to cousin, from kin to kin.
Midnight. A man needs purpose. A man finds purpose in the mirages that other men make. They head west, towards the town’s most popular strip club: the Dragon. And then, Lawton’s outcasts, its perpetuators of illusion, its rough-palmed professionals, its cowboys and country boys and Goodyear toughs and west side soldiers and east side gangsters and G.I.’s and marines and farmers and truckers, are all at the Dragon. And because they are the children of mirage and the abettors of mirage and the masters of mirage, they feel like they’ve come home.
Lawton’s economy
If we could turn socioeconomic makeup into geographical elevation, these plains would become hill country with deep basins and sinkholes dotted throughout. Patterns would not obtain. Hills would cluster only occasionally. There would be only a few mountains, and each of these would prove an eccentric solitary height, located for instance over some ramshackle ranch out in the fields. The millionaire versions of Boo Radley. Redneck Great Gatsbys.
The depressions are Third World in depth. They gather around undesirable locations, like near Lawton Regional Airport or along a loud thoroughfare or against the wall separating Lawton from Fort Sill, beyond which artillery explodes continuously through the days and the nights. Many of these houses look like favela shacks, cobbled together out of castaway wood and sheets of tin. I once had to pick up a date from such a neighborhood and got the address wrong twice. Both times, before I even made it to the front door, a gentleman appeared with a shotgun leveled at me and inquired after who sent me and who I was looking for and how much was owed.
Even the nice neighborhoods can’t aspire to grandeur. The most decadent of homes have a kind of rushed cheapness, a cutting-corners aspect to their construction. This reminds you that you’re still in Lawton, Oklahoma. It promises you that even if you “make it,” well.… The middle-class, manicured suburban sameness that most parts of the country possess does not occur here because it would require planning. Lawton’s homes are erected in a haphazard rush; the foundations sag, the walls crack, the roofs cave in once a strong storm passes through. An oasis, disappearing.
Why you cannot leave Lawton
Towards his death, my father called me and gave a long guilt-trip speech that culminated in: You need to come home and run the Dragon. I was so affronted I said “no” harshly—“I’m not running no….” and nearly said “damn strip club.” He bade me farewell.
I am a “hick,” and so I know that even more than the shotgun, the hick’s primary weapon of choice is family ties. Family ties and the associated guilt. The only way to defeat the hick is to inflict irreparable damage upon your family, upon those ties that he uses. Otherwise, the hick will win.
“Lawton is a black hole, it always sucks you back in.” —Most people from my town. This is the Lawton mantra.
Lawton’s seasons
December January February: Mild, with bouts of extreme, crop-killing cold
March April May: Hot
June July August: Death Hot
September October November: Hot, with tornado season
All year ‘round, there are thunderstorms of the kind most people in the world have never experienced. Wikipedia once assured me that southwest Oklahoma, along with some peak somewhere that mountaineers fear, is the site of the most extreme weather in the world. During a typical storm, hundreds of massive, jagged bolts of lightning connect sky and earth, their glowing afterimages like light bulb filaments burning out. Thunderclaps rattle the windowpanes and sound like they’re coming from beneath your feet. Seams deep within the dark earth ripping apart.
Religion in Lawton
Come Sundays or even Wednesday evenings, certain churches use peer pressure especially well on teenagers. The church fathers make the kids get in a prayer circle in the center of an assembly room and surround them with a community of the already converted, many of whom are family and friends. Then some official will stand up with a mic and say something like:
Oh Lord! You gave your only begotten son for these children.
Please give them the courage to accept you and join our family
so that your sacrifice won’t be in vain.
I call on you to lift the veil from their eyes
so that they may not deny your love
and the love of their families and dear friends
who now look to them to make a choice:
To accept the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior
or to walk outside of the kingdom of heaven always.
(Pause)
Those of you who now accept the Lord Jesus Christ into your hearts, stand up and go to the back room where members of our church family will guide you in your rebirth into a life of service.
Applause for the kids who stand and go for their indoctrination in the back rooms, where foldout tables, donuts, and patronizing, patient faces await them.
And for those who remain:
Oh Lord, don’t let these blind souls turn away from your light forever…
Please show them the way,
show them your mercy
show them the light of your eternal truth.
Don’t cast them out…
And so on, with the preacher punctuating his impassioned speech every now and then with another invitation to stand and go be converted, and with more kids getting up every time. Not even I could resist by the fifth or sixth call, when the group had whittled down from fifty to just five. But I remember once—and only once—a blonde cheerleader with all the accouterments of Being Popular (low-neck shirt, heavy makeup, bubblegum chewing, light-catching jewelry, back-off facial expression, etc.) sat surprisingly defiant through to the end, her arms crossed, her will pure iron. I never let myself underestimate her again.
When my mother convinces new girls to become strippers, she surrounds them with other dancers and friends they respect and holds the same type of group dialogue, except now the back rooms are the dressing rooms and “the Lord” is replaced with, “the tips, baby!”
Lawton’s layout
Lee Boulevard West: The power lines meet at a hazy vanishing point; the squat neighborhoods are dwarfed by infinity. Here we have the Goodyear tire plant, one of the major employers alongside Fort Sill. Growing up, most kids speak of Goodyear like East Coast kids speak of Harvard. If one isn’t going into the military, this is the non plus ultra of our aspirations. Salaries are rumored to go as high as 60K. Slinging tires all day apparently breaks the body, and some joke that all your savings will eventually go into back surgery. Still, many kids maintain that they want to work at Goodyear when they grow up.
Lee Boulevard Center: Stores will sell you special chairs for old people, or special cowboy attire for a rancher’s needs, or special Bibles for a dear, dear person. The wooden fences are always the same, the kind that start out sun yellow and turn the same ashgray color that all fences in Lawton eventually become.
Lee Boulevard East: Lawton/Fort Sill Regional airport is nearby, and the homes around here are shanties and lean-tos, with occasionally a house that looks like it can make it through the next storm. No one walks the streets at night. Junk cars pile up in gravel driveways. You know poverty by peoples’ teeth, the way they’ve become yellow-black bone fragments. All squalor heightened by the everglory of a sky so wide it bows into the ends of the earth, a sky sometimes streaked with long eskers and canyons of clouds, a sky whose gravid storms weep with violence and whose stars and sun make a man religious by default.
Gore Boulevard West: One of the barren parks has a swing set surrounded by such a desiccated vastness that no one dares go. The wind rocks the empty swings.
Gore Boulevard Center. Shopping. The neighborhoods branching off this thoroughfare have the same sign at their entrance: Neighborhood Watch Area! Criminals Beware, Residents Watch Out For One Another! With its dapper-hatted, Dick Tracy-like, black-ink criminal icon, the sign promises gunplay for burglars.
Gore Boulevard East. Safe neighborhoods. Cameron University kids.
Cache Road West. In the fields, if you find a stick and break it, you might discover “Indian Gum” inside, a white pulpy material that we used to chew as kids.
Cache Road Center. Plaza after concrete plaza of crooked, ill-formed buildings and the same plastic-letter billboard signs, as if they were all made by the same manufacturer. Home to the Cruise, a north-south loop you’re supposed to drive until you see a cute girl/guy and signal to pull over in one parking lot or another. Fist fights and shootings happen in these lots. DO NOT LOITER signs are displayed everywhere.
Cache Road East. Downtown. Once a rather lovely, historical site; now there are bad restaurants, some brick homes, and narrow roads. The yards are sliced with sidewalks people rarely use. Most of the Dragon’s employees live here, far away from work. That way they can readily tell when someone follows them home from the club, all the way from the town’s west side.
Roger’s Lane West. To the south, houses. To the north, Fort Sill’s fields, which are long, blank, sere stretches of grass, and in the distance, shaping Lawton’s entire northern skyline, are the mountains of the Wichitas. Look that way every now and then to see the bomb smoke from the military base’s guns and artillery.
Roger’s Lane Center. Fort Sill’s long wall runs along the entire length of this thoroughfare. Some parts of it are merely razorwire fence. Some are tall purplish concrete wall. The earthquakes of artillery and the sound of machinegun fire and bomb blasts are common, often daily, and always year-round.
Roger’s Lane East. Trees and wilderness surround the homes. The sound of cicadas is deafening. There are mosquitoes and insects of doom. I once saw what I thought was a hummingbird in the dusk, flittering about an ugly, flower-laden bush. I told my father this was a good omen and snapped a picture. When the picture showed up on the camera’s preview mode, I saw that the hummingbird was no bird at all, but a gigantic, horrifying moth-thing of H. P. Lovecraftian ugliness, its vermiculate horrorshow bulk like some alien torso.
Prairieland Stonehenge
There are many other roads and streets throughout the town. Many of them are flanked by tall prairie grass broken at the stems and crooked. The sight of crooked grass going on and on, the way a Stonehenge-like effect happens when the sun lines up perfectly with a long east-west street and falls burning right at its distance-diminished end, will give a man the impression of a cruel but glorious God, perhaps a barefoot God who sits in a rocking chair on His ramshackle front porch with the largest, most powerful shotgun cradled in His lap.
Many roads go by farms and ranches and fields. There are cows and horses in most of those fields, but some are empty and have no discernible purpose. Beware: rattlesnakes, copperheads, fiddlebacks, scorpions, and tarantulas of incredible variety (I once saw a delicate blue bulbous one with satanic patterns on its dangerous and beautiful body; it ran about frantically as it became a ball of fire when my father sprayed it with some flammable substance and dropped a match on it).
My high school
Looks like a big, two-story cinderblock mall with windows. It has a church-style marquee, on which the guidance office puts up various platitudes (Just say no to drugs!) and sometimes a semi-useful announcement, like “Last Day of School!” When I graduated, I drove around the school three times holding my middle finger out to it with extreme relish.
Just four more laps, and who knows? Maybe the Walls of Jericho falling.
Haunted locales
All teenagers in Lawton know of its haunted locations. The most famous is the parallel forest in the Wichitas. Here, an entire forest of trees grows in perfectly parallel lines, and it’s not uncommon to run into a buffalo ranging through the halls of bark. Once when I was in high school, a girlfriend, her sister, and I went hiking out there. We found a pit with a decapitated armadillo laid before a hastily made wooden cross. The cross was two fencepost chunks improbably nailed together. It was moored sideways in the Indian clay, and the armadillo was draped in triangular Blair Witch Project symbols composed of three sticks each tied at their corners with twine. Its bloody head stump was alive with white maggots and iridescent green flies. My then-girlfriend took off running and fainted in the tall prairie grass, but her sister caught her, and I fanned her off and poured water over her head. She came to and said a prayer there in the swaying grasses.
The common dare is to go to those woods at night and shine your lights into its depths. You’ll see the haunting sight of longshadows cast backways by the parallel trees, shadows that extend beyond the penumbra of your lights, and parallax head beams striking futilely into the gloom. Once I was out wallow-driving by myself in my teenage depression, listening to Tori Amos and telling myself I was a feminist, when I decided to take the this dare. I parked behind a culvert at the mouth of the woods and turned my brights on. And staring back at me from the depths of the forest were two hugebrown human eyes full of indifference and malevolence both. The eyes approached, and I turned off the lights in panic, but this made it worse as the head floated through the black towards me. I put the car in reverse just as the decapitated head with its shaggy mane came from the trees, and as I pulled away, I saw it was a buffalo whose body had been graded with the dark.
Fort Sill
If you drive around aimlessly in Fort Sill, the MPs (military police) are guaranteed to pull you over and ask what you’re doing. You do not want this to occur.
The Wichitas
To the west, north, and east of town, there stretch the Wichita Mountains, the only wrinkle in the plains landscape for many miles. They are called “mountains” perhaps out of reverence for their beauty, but most outsiders would no doubt call them hills. They are beautiful in the way very old things are beautiful, and on their slopes, the air itself feels ancient. The mountains have been weathered down by millennia and are covered in witch hazel and cacti. The boulders are called rainbow rocks because they are orange and red, and the lichen that grows on them gives them shades of pale ocean green, yellow, and even a faded velvet blue. The horizon is made of pastel colors, like a smoky rainbow laid flat against the land, and the manmade lakes go blue with the distance even if they’re a shitbrown up close. Vultures hang like pieces of a mobile on the sky, motionless eternally, but then you look away and look back again, and they’ve moved on despite their stillness.
I once found a complete buffalo skeleton behind a boulder off the side of a road. I once found a Bible beneath some rocks. I once found a fairy village made of sticks. Some child’s installation? There are many places out there, and walking the boulder-strewn paths and trails, one thinks that if lush Appalachian forests harbor green sprightly fairies, here is a place that would give home to strange and grotesque and old fairies, ones with brute strength and not entirely kind eyes, though those eyes would be perhaps wise.
Billboards
Many of the billboards on the sides of the road are broken down, but they all have advertisements. Often, the advertisement is of a public service announcement type, but with a religious twist. One gigantic sign on the eastern edge of town that has been there my entire life reads “Jesus Saves.” It depicts a sunray-emanating Christ holding his arms out to you. The icon of a savior in a vast empty plain of nothing.
Read more fiction by Mark Lawley here.
After graduating from Dartmouth College with a B.A. in creative writing and music, Mark Lawley received his M.F.A. from New York University under the tutelage of E. L. Doctorow, Kamau Brathwaite, Brian Morton, and Darin Strauss. His fiction has won prizes from ZOETROPE: ALL-STORY, GLIMMER TRAIN, NIMROD, PLOUGHSHARES, and the SOUTHWEST REVIEW, along with writing fellowships and awards from New York University, the Summer Literary Seminars, and Dartmouth College. He has been a lecturer in fiction and poetry at New York University, an adjunct professor at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, a guest lecturer at Stony Brook University, and the founder of Ivy Scholastic, a tutoring company. When he's not writing fiction, he plays the piano, does martial arts, dances tango, and comes up with tough math questions so his students can beat standardized tests. He splits his time between NYC and Charlottesville, VA, where his wife is pursuing her Ph.D. in clinical psychology.