I close the drawer and grab the remote for an ancient TV that probably weighs two-hundred pounds. A relic now, it once would have been a prized commodity in the world of tube televisions. The screen flickers on, the color a little off and the image distorted in the middle, making the characters from Frasier seem to bend at the waist and lean slightly to the right. I turn it off and place the remote back on the nightstand.
I reach for the phone book. A slim volume, its contents don’t take up more than one-hundred pages. I look through the names in black and white and when I reach the end, I flip to the yellow business ads and numbers. The pickings are even slimmer here. The list of restaurants in town leaves much to be desired for an out-of-towner used to the big city. I notice, however, that Pizza Hut claims to be open past eight on weekends. And it’s Saturday night in the big town, as beloved Gary England would have said.
I grab my wallet and keys and head over to the free-standing pizza joint across the street. I jaywalk and it isn’t a problem—there aren’t enough cars passing down the main street for me to impede traffic.
Every table in the place holds the maximum capacity of guests. I decide that if I can’t find a table by the time my order is up, I’ll take it back to the motel. Feeling optimistic, though, I stand in the corner and wait for a booth to clear. Finally, one does.
I snag it and scoot in, surprised by the sheer amount of people making the place crawl. It would be nothing for a Pizza Hut in the city to draw a crowd like this. At least back in the 90s. Now, I’m not so sure if it’s a regular occurrence. At any rate, the amount of people inside the restaurant is disproportionate to the amount of people that I saw outside. Guymon is a place where they roll the sidewalks up at a certain hour every night—weekend or not—and I’m willing to wager that most of the people in here with me aren’t locals.
I pull out my cell phone, still able to get a signal out here, and check my messages despite the fact that I didn’t have any the last several times I checked. Part of me hopes that when I open the texting app, there will be a message waiting for me from Wes. Come home. I was wrong. Even though he has no idea that I’m here.
When I don’t find a message, I lock the phone and lay it down in front of me, steeple my hands and look around the restaurant. It occurs to me then that the place is a split crowd: journalists, most likely, and obvious law enforcement still in uniform or sporting polos with their respective agency’s logo on them.
I notice that the booth in front of me holds a group of four, and each of them wears either a half-shed suit or a dark navy shirt with FBI screen printed on the shoulder blades. One of them wipes grease from his fingers as the other three finish off the rest of two large pepperoni pizzas.
“This guy they’ve called in—what did you say his name was?” the fastidious one asks.
“Wyatt Davis,” another says through a mouthful of pizza.
“Real hotshot from Virginia. Still wet behind the ears,” says one of the other two.
“I heard he negotiated a hostage situation in Berlin a couple of years ago. That one that was in the news. Guy driving a van threatening to run it into a café.”
“I heard the same story. Thinks he’s hot shit.”
I don’t know the name; I don’t think anyone would have. But I know the event. Two years prior, a guy had hijacked an airport taxi van full of American tourists and threatened to run it into a café in Berlin. Motivated by his inability to find a woman willing to sleep with him, he identified with the incel, or involuntarily celibate, community. This guy—the one whose name I didn’t recognize—had managed to talk him into surrendering. No one died. The fact that he’s been brought in on this jars me.
I bring my phone up once more and unlock the screen to give me something to do with my hands and somewhere to look other than at the men in the booth in front of me. I want to keep listening.
“This Wolsieffer guy’s a character,” says one of them.
“A real Jim Jones type,” says the clean freak.
“You think he’s gonna have them drink the Kool-Aid?” one of the others laughs.
The rest of them reciprocate the noise, but it is hollow. There is something in the question that makes me think they believe this is a real possibility. Gallows humor goes a long way to combating our ever-present knowledge that annihilation is just a hair’s breadth away.
After a moment of silence at the table, the one who’d compared Tom to Jim Jones speaks.
“If he doesn’t let that pregnant girl out, three deaths will be on his hands,” he says.
The table falls silent. My fingers freeze and hover over the touch screen of my phone. That pregnant girl. Birdie. She has a name and I know it. She has a face that I’ve seen scrunched into concentration or relaxed in a laugh. She is more than just a news headline to me. She’s
