Outside the cafe, Leo reluctantly regained his saddle. The horses continued picking their way through the plant growth on the old road. A stop at the Lone Dove cemetery gave Otharine another reason to go into the history of the area.
“If you read these tombstones,” she said, “You’ll see the common names of the people in this area. What you can’t tell from the names is the races of the people buried here. You might notice, though, the name “Harjo” appearing a lot. It was a common name among the Creeks, and it was the name of one of their greatest heroes, Chitty Harjo, or Crazy Snake. Some people think the Snake Indians lived around here, but they didn’t. They were a prairie tribe and were resettled, like most of the others, in Western Oklahoma during the Indian Wars. Crazy Snake was so important to the pureblood Creeks during the Civil War, and he was martyred so outrageously, that a lot of Creeks were glad to be called “snakes” just to be associated with Chitty Harjo. It was their descendants, along with the sons and daughters of Black slaves, that rose up with the white sharecroppers to oppose the World War and overthrow the federal government in 1917.”
Leo wasn’t listening very closely, he was far too tired.
When Otharine suggested a stop along a rugged little creek, he was glad to acquiesce. She tied the horses to bushes and quickly pulled the saddles to the ground beside the horses, which were munching the tall grasses.
Otharine continued talking about the history of the area and about her own involvement. Leo felt his eyes closing from time to time.
They lay beside the tiny rivulet, which was just large enough to make a seductive, sleepy, noise amid all the quiet and greenery.
Otharine had been a student at East Central University in Ada when the fighting first came to Southeastern Oklahoma. She had belonged to a rodeo riding club that made annual appearances at the Ada rodeo and at various calf ropings around the area. Her idols had been trick riders and women who competed in cutting horse and barrel riding competitions, although she had never actually taken part in either.
When news of the insurrection came, she and a group of students quickly took over the only armory and thus controlled most of the military weapons in the area. They declared themselves, simply by fiat, the representatives of the revolution. Their first task was to end automobile traffic and enforce the general moratorium on energy use. It was generally easy, because most of the population, sick of air and water pollution, supported these dramatic changes.
At the first parts of the fight, she and her riders took rifles to the roadsides and put an end to automobile traffic forever with pot-shots at automobiles. Mostly, they just targeted the tires, but they were soon able to stop all traffic and automobiles ended their domination.
As deserting soldiers began to return to the area, she recruited the ones that were still armed.
Equestrians ruled, just as they had in that same area over a century before. Unlike many sections of the country, there were still a lot of horses and riding was still a popular sport.
Why was she in charge? Basically because she had been the first to start the process. She converted her riding club into a posse, and eventually, into a band of “regulators.” Before Leo arrived, she could call on hundreds of like-minded armed equestrians from all the rural areas along the Frisco Tracks and the South Canadian River. The urban areas, with train stations, remained outside the reach of her regulators, but they would not be able to hold out long, she felt. Meantime, The Jones Family policed the area around Konowa and Sasakwa.
Leo slept off and on in the soft grasses beside the watery mutter of the creek.
When he woke, Otharine was sitting, naked, in the shallow creek waters. “Here’s your chance at a bath,” she told him, and tossed a bar of soap to the grass beside him. Slowly, Leo cleared his head and decided, why not? The water was surprisingly cold, and it made a wonderful contrast with the sun’s blazing in through the trees overhead. He sat on a gravel creek bed, in just 7 or 8 inches of water, and splashed himself cleaner and cooler.
Dust free, his skin resumed its light tan coloring, and all of his hair was black again. His legs ached.
Leo observed Otharine. With her wide- brimmed hat aside, her hair had tumbled down like lava from an erupting volcano. It was bright red and wondrously spilled over her pale shoulders. Her face, clean for the first time since he had met her, was a great contrast, because it was leather-tanned and covered with close-knit freckles. The same leathery color covered her neck and dipped in a “V” shape toward the orbs of her breasts, which contrasted with youthful white and pink. White and pink described the rest of her young body, including her pubic hair. Leo had thought that she was close to his own age when he only knew her dusty face and utilitarian clothing, but recognized now that she couldn’t be far past twenty.
Otharine was enjoying his penetrating gaze as much as she was basking in the cold clean waters and the hot sunlight. Her smile was wide, and her earnest eyes had taken on an unusually playful look. A hot-blooded insurrectionist had brought Leo to this place, but a lovely young woman confronted him now.
Otharine looked unembarrassedly at Leo’s rising penis and commented, “Comrade, I see that you’re thinking what I’m thinking. You’re rising to the occasion...” She slithered out of the water and up on the soft grass by the creek bank. She propped on her elbows, with her eyes locked on Leo’s across the length of her pink and white body. Her broad smile uninterrupted, she slowly opened her legs.
Shortly afterward, Leo had the best sleep he had enjoyed in Oklahoma. When he awoke, Otharine was already dressed and the horses were saddled. It surprised him how easily she transformed back into the all-business leader of before. For the rest of the journey back to Spring Hill, Leo learned Otharine’s version of what was going on with Dr. Johns and his laboratories.
“We don’t know exactly what he does there,” She said. He had been here long enough that nobody really paid any attention. Nobody else still lived in Sasakwa. He paid his bills and didn’t bother anybody else, so nobody cared. When we put the energy moratorium into effect, he asked for a variance and I told him no. Why make an exception? I didn’t pay much more attention to him until I realized that he was asking for help from everybody he could think of, including his contacts on the Revolutionary Council, which, eventually, may be one reason for your coming here.”
“After that, I started asking questions. People living the closest to him told me that he bought a lot of food from them and was a good customer. He hired one of them, a Mrs Davis, as a housekeeper. I don’t know if it’s just her way, or if she was specifically forbidden, but anyway, Mrs Davis isn’t talking about what goes on over there.”
“The neighbors tell me that there have been regular guests every month or so since Johns first took over the place. People see them arriving, but never find out who they are. People only know that a car would come in every month or so, and that Johns always seems to have one guest. Anyway, there seems to be only one guest at a time over there. He used to have more staff people, but they have pretty well gone. He keeps on having one guest, though. Whatever it is he does, he wants an electricity generator running for it, and I’m not planning to make an exception for him.
‘Of course, I’m going to work with you on it, as a representative of the Revolutionary Council, but I think you’ll come to agree with me that there’s no need to make an exception just because the guy has college degrees and a friend on the Council. If he could turn on a generator, it wouldn’t be any time at all before people would be wanting to turn on all sorts of things. You probably know that there are producing gas wells here and there over the area. There’s a lot of gasoline around, both drip gas and actual refined gas from the refinery over at Wynnewood. They’d have cars back on the roads in a minute, if they could!”
“Even if Johns brought you out here, there’s no sense in limiting yourself to whatever it is that he needs. This whole area is crying for a serious connection to the new leadership. You’re the first commissioner here, and I noticed that you didn’t even hesitate in the biggest urban area, but came straight to a ghost town. It’s not that we don’t have things in control, the moratorium is one-hundred percent in effect, but there are a lot more governance questions that need to be worked out, and you bring with you the authority to get things going. If you wanted, you could do more than just coordinate things around here. The state needs a governor.”
“People are already very impressed just to have a commissioner out here. If they knew who you really are, if we told them that you’re one of the most illustrious heroes of the entire revolution, if we shared some of the stories that all revolutionaries know about you, you’d have enough personal charisma and authority to bring about whatever is needed.”
Leo wanted to make sure that the conversation didn’t go any further than it already had. “That’s not what they had in mind,” he grumbled, hoping to close off Otharine’s train of thought.
“I just wanted to make sure you knew what is possible. You watch how things develop at the parade tomorrow, and I think you’ll re-adjust your expectations about what you could do here.”
“Besides,” she reached across to pinch him playfully on the forearm, “I’d just like to keep you around.”
Leo thought it best, especially given the danger of a personal entanglement, to keep silent for the rest of the ride to Dr. Johns’ laboratories.