You going to Oklahoma?

I am.

What the hell for?

It took me two days to get to Denver. Another day to Tulsa. Better part of a morning to Tahlequah.

I didn’t know much about my father. My mother hadn’t spent any time on the subject. Name, rank, serial number. He had been a soldier in the war. At one point, he had been stationed at Fort Sill, and with me in her arms and my brother in her belly, my mother had taken the train across the country to visit her husband. That was the one and only time he ever saw me, and I suppose it would have been the only time I ever saw him.

All that I knew about my father had come from my mother, and she had barely known the man.

“Where was he born?”

“Tahlequah,” my mother told me, “but he was raised in a town called Clinton.”

Tahlequah was a small town in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. Clinton was one of the many dots along Highway 40.

“Did he have any brothers or sisters?”

“Couple of half-sisters. Why do you want to know?”

“No reason.”

I figured that Tahlequah was going to be a bust, but I wanted to see where his life had begun.

And to make sure that he hadn’t returned.

I started my search in a small café just off the main street with a copy of the Stilwell Democrat Journal. I read it cover to cover over coffee, a bowl of chicken vegetable soup, and a piece of butternut-squash pie.

The top news story was Lake Tenkiller and the determination by the US Army Corps engineers that fishing there had improved.

There was no mention of any Blackbirds in the paper. I was hoping that I might stumble upon relations left behind when his parents had moved out of the hills and onto the flats, aunts or uncles or cousins, extended family who might have been able to tell me if he was still alive and where he might be found.

I asked the guy at the register.

Blackbird?

Melvin Blackbird. Cherokee.

This here’s the capital of the Cherokee Nation, the man said with a smile. Toss a rock.

Do you have a phone book?

Public phone in front of the drug store. How was the pie?

I found the booth and the book hanging from a chain. There was a handful of Blackbirds scattered around Tahlequah. I got a bunch of dimes and began calling the numbers.

I ran out of people before I ran out of dimes.

THE SCREAMING WAKES MIMI, and she rushes into the bathroom.

“Bird, it’s two in the morning.”

The inside of my right thigh feels as though someone is trying to tear tin off a roof.

“You’re going to have to try to be a little quieter.”

“I’m trying!”

“What if I rub your leg?”

“No!”