TRANSCRIPT - DRAFT
INTERVIEW WITH JUNE BLUE THUNDER (JBT)
LEONARD O'DELL (LO)
JULY 1977
[...]
LO: So you've always been called that?
JBT: Well it ain't a middle name, you know. The whole thing, that's my last name.
LO: But you didn't grow up in Osage, correct?
JBT: No, my ma raised me in Tulsa. Lived there 'til 18, left for a few years, came back after I turned 20.
LO: What brought you to California the first time?
JBT: There's [sic] been a lot of deaths in my family. I didn't think I could stay in Tulsa, knowing what used to be there.
LO: And you left people behind, of course.
JBT: Course I did. You got people everywhere, don't you? Most folks do. My oldest brother, my ma—they're still there.
LO: How's that relationship? With your brother?
JBT: The oldest? It's fine. We're a lot alike.
LO: You don't sound too sure.
JBT: We're too alike. He's out in Tulsa, but our younger brother's here in LA. It's different, [is] all.
LO: There was a third brother, you said?
JBT: Yes. There was.
1966
Celeste dies two weeks after June turns sixteen. The last of the Curtises show up to the funeral, familiar as they are strange. She wonders what they make of her, on this day or any other.
Soda hugs her like he did the morning after Sonny died, brothers next to him looking quiet and serious. June doesn't take it personal—she can tell from the expression on Ponyboy's face that he's sick of funerals, no doubt a bone-deep exhaustion that she, too, recognizes. Darry looks the most uncomfortable, suit-jacket the slightest bit too big. He looks less like their father this way, too out of place here to be mistaken for Darrel Sr. It almost makes her smile.
She wonders what their father would think, or say, or do, if he had been around long enough to see June bury a near-brother and then an aunt. What might he have done to fix it? He was prone to that in life—unable to take things as they were, unable to sit in grief and let it wash over him. Everything was too personal. He might've taken these deaths that way, too, no space for June to let the pain hit her in waves.
"Thanks for coming," June says, because that's how it goes. She didn't make it to the wake when their daddy died; she couldn't even if she had wanted to, really, though she's only recently learned that. Instead her mother took her to say goodbye afterwards, when the cemetery was quiet and no one could wonder why two strangers were standing over a grave.
Unlike Sonny, whose maternal family came flocking around only in death, the rest of June's extended family came out to take care of Celeste in her final weeks. They arrived in shifts, the cousins her mother grew up with and the children that June spent summers racing on foot and by water. In the end, they bring her grandmother, too.
She hasn't seen her in over a year; they have a single photo of her, the day she married June's late grandfather, who died of liver failure before she was even born. June likes to stare at it, sometimes, and turn her head, as if the right angle will make her look more like Stella-Marie and less like a Curtis. She tends to do that more now. She wonders if it would hurt her mother to know it.
Soda says, "How you doing, honey?" and June pretends not to notice Ponyboy's flinch. As it is, she barely manages to contain her own. She hates to be made to feel young. It reminds her of the ways she isn't, and how it feels like a cheat.
"I'm fine," she says, but her voice breaks on the second word, and she coughs into her fist afterwards, too embarrassed to look at the three of them. She's seen them a handful of times in the two months since Sonny died. Just thinking of it like that makes something ugly settle in her chest, a painful feeling like the insides of her lungs are being scraped out. She feels raw anytime she thinks about it, so she doesn't, and if she really can't stop herself, just heads out to Alvarez to buy mota as cheap as it gets.
She's not used to these brothers. A part of her doesn't want to be, for she was used to Sonny at her side and it all went to shit anyway. It hurts to admit she wants something like it back.
She repeats it, after she clears her throat, her eyes flitting from each hollow face to the other, "Thanks for stopping by today. Me and my—we appreciate it."
The silence is uncomfortable, but what should she expect, really? Soda tries, bless his heart, but it's hard to force a relationship where there doesn't seem to be room for one. They grab burgers on weekends, when he gets off from work early on Fridays. Used to be that she would be coming home from school around that time, but—things are a little different now, not that she's been able to tell him the news.
It surprises her when Pony speaks. He says, not quite looking at her, "Who all's going to take care of your cousins now?"
She can't help but stare, but then he meets her gaze and doesn't even flinch. His eyes are green but only just barely. She can't help but remember how Darry looked, that first day the truth came tumbling out between them all, no matter how much things have changed since then. They have the same eyes, June thinks.
She says, voice steady this time, "Me and my ma will."
Soda looks worried. "She still at the hospital?" and June flinches this time.
She had to go back to the hospital, that week after everything fell part, to make sure she hadn't actually hurt herself. The doctor just wanted to double check her head, considering her state when the paramedics had rushed her to the emergency room. The follow-up hadn't uncovered anything, but being back in that sterile building—the same one where Sonny died, just like Celeste did this month—it was enough to make her sick.
June says, "Yeah. Y'know how it is. She works doubles a lot."
"Double shifts are rough," Soda offers, and he glances sidelong at Darry, whose brow is furrowed as he watches folks leave and enter the funeral home. "She doing alright?"
They're all standing near the entrance, away from the gaggle of extended family and friends that June can't bring herself to speak with. Her grandma is somewhere in there, and she should be standing at her elbow like she always used to, when she'd come down to visit when June was little or when they'd go up for a visit, but Celeste looks—looked so much like her that June's afraid of what she'll see in her grandmother's face. Two children dead before her, the last one working herself to nearly nothing. She can't stand it.
Instead she stays with these three brothers that happen to be hers, too. She says, "Yeah. I figure if I find some work during the day when they're at school we'll be okay."
It should be like ripping off a band aid, this admittance that she's dropped out. She turned sixteen and marched down to the office at Hale and called it a done deal. Her mother put her face in her hands and said nothing, because by then Celeste was needing round-the-clock care that she couldn't provide, to say nothing of the bills that would soon pile up to join all the rest.
Dying is an expensive business, June's realized. Who else but her could step up?
Plenty of folks need a sitter or a girl to clean up after homes, if not here on the East side then further West, where some of the middle class types still liked to hire girls and pretend their husbands weren't eyeing the barely legal ones. She has plenty of time now that she's not keeping Celeste comfortable between this life and the next; June knows what she's getting into, and knows that her diploma was just putting off the inevitable, anyway.
"What d'you mean?" Soda says, and she blinks. "What about school?"
She feels her own expression screw up; she wonders, briefly, if it makes her look like Darry. "I dropped out," she says, and flinches at the hurt look on his face.
She expects to find something like smugness in Ponyboy's expression, when she look to him, but he just looks confused. Darry's the only one she think she can really understand in that moment, once she finally settles her gaze on him. There's sadness in his face, but he looks like he gets it, no matter that he seems as exhausted as June feels. Twenty and working two jobs to support two kids. June, sixteen, who will need to find something full-time now to keep her cousins fed.
(Well, not just her cousins. She needs to eat, too.)
"You just barely turned sixteen," Soda says, like she doesn't know, and she frowns. "You ain't got much of the semester left, besides. Does your ma—"
"She knows," June interrupts, and then Darry speaks.
"It's tough at first," he says to her. She can't remember the last time she held his gaze like this, and it bothers her. It's like he's asking a question he won't say aloud. "Leaving school. You working out in Brumly?"
There it is. Like they let girls push, anyway.
"No," she says, and squares her shoulders a little bit. It makes the corners of his mouth twitch, and she wonders what he sees when he looks at her. "Been asking around, to see if'n someone'll need a sitter during the day. Might start cleaning houses, if that don't work out. Gotta make sure I'm home when the boys get home, since they're little and all."
"Middle school ain't that little," Ponyboy says, and June fixes him with an unimpressed look that, were it one of the boys she's now tasked with raising, would have gotten the job of cowing him down pat.
She's a little annoyed to find that it doesn't work, and for a second she forgets they didn't grow up together. She says to him, "You're the baby, 'course you think that," and it makes Soda laugh startlingly loud, out of place as they are, Ponyboy's expression somewhere between amusement and annoyance.
It's then that her mother shows up, turning the corner and freezing when she sees the four of them gathered near the entrance. It takes a second for June to make sense of the look in her mother's eye, and in that second it disappears.
She looks from her to Darry, wondering what it is Faye sees. It makes her feel heavy, stomach like cement. Does it hurt to see him and know he's not their father? She's long passed wishing she could turn back time and get him back, but it's one thing to miss a dead daddy and another to have a dead man's near-twin at a sister's funeral.
She says, "Boys," and her hand on June's shoulder is oddly cold. "Thank you for coming by."
"It's no trouble, ma'am," Darry says, perfectly polite, and Faye's smile is the slightest bit strained.
"We appreciate it," she says, so much like June she nearly can't stand it suddenly, and then, "C'mon now, honey, your grandmother's looking for you," and together they step away, the Curtis boys watching in their wake.
1973
Angela as good as sprints down the apartment complex's stairs when the buzzer goes off.
"You don't know it's him," June says where she's got Lottie on her hip, stirring a pot of garbanzos at the stove. She knows it probably is him. There's a sense to it, somehow, the knowledge that a person's brother was right around the corner. Growing up, she had it—not with her then-unknown brothers, no, but with Sonny, who had been as good as her mirror image, running the streets of Tulsa until he couldn't anymore.
Angela and Curly are like that, the same way Angela and Tim are, the same way Tim and Curly are. They get each other in ways that June can't pretend she isn't jealous of. She still thinks it would be nice to have someone like that: in her corner no matter the yelling or the fighting. She thought getting married would get her there, but maybe she was as foolish as everyone always said she was, back when she was getting clean and falling in love with a no-good hood who still had six months left in the pen.
It doesn't matter, she tells herself. She pretends not to listen for Angela, but that's second nature these days, too. Like her ears were suddenly working after a lifetime of static, motherhood making her easy to jolt awake from sleep at the slightest suggestion that her Lottie was ready to wake, too. If she strains herself just right—heat down on the stove so the water isn't boiling so loud—she can hear voices coming up the complex's stairs, their echoes bouncing off the concrete almost harmoniously.
"Where's my niece," comes a familiar voice just a scant few minutes later, and if June were to close her eyes, she knows, she could pretend that it was Tim and not Curly.
"What's this I hear 'bout a thirty-hour bus?" June says, turning to find Curly Shepard in the doorway to the kitchen. Behind him, he's already made a mess: luggage in a pile near the door, shoes in the corner (still tied), a smudge of grime on the door where he must have let his stuff drag against it. He grins like he's got a great story to tell, but Angela has sixth sense for his nonsense, shoving past him with one bony shoulder.
She says, "How's the atole?"
"Come try it," June says. She makes pointed eye contact with Curly, who looks like the cat that caught the canary.
"You made atole?" he says. He looks to Angela, smiling even wider. One of his canines is chipped where it didn't used to be.
"I'm making atole," June corrects him, "Angela asked me to. Didn't know y'all eat it with garbanzo, I've only seen them little grandmas peddling it with chocolate."
"Garbanzo's good for you," Angela says, and nudges June out of the way instead of asking. June wonders if she realizes how obvious it is, the way she's looking away from both of them, avoiding eye contact and moving nervously.
Curly starts laughing. "Angel, you got a bleeding heart, don'tcha?"
"Shut your trap, Curly," she says, not looking up from the apparently-captivating pot of boiling garbanzos, water, and brown sugar.
"It's my favorite," Curly says to June, and makes grabby hands at the baby. "She likes it with just piloncillo, always said garbanzo tasted bad."
Lottie looks from him to June with wide, dark eyes; June pretends it doesn't make her heart hurt just a little, to see how much they look alike. Those damned Shepard looks. They turn everyone into fools, June knows, but she hands Lottie over anyway, knowing it's been nearly five months now since Curly got to see her in-person.
He also didn't get to say goodbye, given that June stole his car in the middle of the night to make the trek to California. Maybe if she doesn't fuss over his holding Lottie like an alter-server does a candle, he won't bring up her vehicular-related crimes.
Of course that's just what he does.
"Your mama owes me a car," he says, sing-song, to Lottie, whose brow furrows like she knows what he's talking about. He turns his gaze to June, a glint to his eye that, back when they were teenagers running with different crews—Curly always with Tim's guys, June lingering around Alcaraz and the rest of Milagros' River Kings. Not that June was pushing; she was just prone to bad behavior, those years after Sonny died, behavior that spiraled enough that she was sleeping with Alcaraz by the time she hit eighteen.
She wasn't proud of that. She wasn't proud of a lot of things. She was a little proud of stealing Curly's car, though. Didn't even have to hot wire it: Curly hid the keys under the passenger seat.
"How 'bout we call it even, since I took your brother off your hands and gave you a niece to boot?" June says, taking a seat at the little table they can never keep free of mail or dishes or Lottie's toys.
"You think marrying Tim was a favor?" Curly laughs again.
Behind June, Angela snorts. She says, "Marrying him was maybe the second stupidest thing you ever did."
"What's the first?" June drawls, though she fears what she might say: running with the Kings in the first place; reaching out to her brothers after their daddy died; moving from mota to harder drugs when life on the Eastside became too much for her.
She's not eighteen and coming to terms with outliving a brother and cousin alike. Five years is a long time. She knows it in about a thousand different ways.
Angela sniffs: "Heading back to Tulsa when you'd already gotten out wasn't too smart of you, Blue Thunder. If I was you, I wouldn'ta gone back for anything."
"Ah, that's different, Angela," Curly says. "It took you getting a nice alimony set up to get you here. At least she's got you as her built-in best friend now, huh."
"Yeah," June says. "You Shepards, you're the best company I ever had."
THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA v. SHEPARD, TIMOTEO F.
OXXXXXX
FILED 4/14/1973
[...]
DIRECT EXAMINATION
BY MR. RANDOLPH
Q. Could you please state your name for the record?
A. Tim Shepard.
Q. Tim, how are you employed?
A. I work for Conoco, out at the refinery.
Q. And how long have you worked there?
A. 1971.
Q. Is this a full-time position?
A. Yes.
Q. With regular hours?
A. I work three weeks on, two weeks off.
Q. Tim, could you tell the Court in what capacity you were working on February 5th, 1973?
[...]