Rashad laughed and popped the gum into his mouth…
The strong taste of sour purple-approximating-grape flavor still on his tongue jarred Rashad back to the present reality of the road. He had traveled back to that time. He saw it. He heard it. He touched it. The olfactory memory of the fading scent of Right Guard and armpits clung to his nostrils. The episode reminded him of microdosing mushrooms.
“Could you warn me next time?” Rashad lowered Jerald’s window to allow in more fresh air.
“It’s not like I can control it. I was thinking about how we first met.” His face pallid and drawn, Jerald kept staring out the windshield.
Slipping the SUV back into drive, Rashad continued down the road. He thought about their strange journey together. The good old days. Having fallen in love with it after watching theDef Poetryshow, Jerald wrote and performed poetry. Leaving to study at Tuskegee University, he thirsted to taste life on his own terms, though he returned to Indianapolis every few years. During one of his open mic blitzes, Rashad volunteered to be part of a film crew to document his shows. From the moment a camera touched his hand,hefell in love. Filmed every poem in the competition. Unable to afford a hotel room, they slept in his car for the tour, nothing as nice or roomy as the SUV.
It was easy to romanticize the past.
At the entrance of the park, dogs ran up to the car as it slowed to a stop near a secluded parking lot. Rashad shifted the SUV into park. “We here.”
“Snakey Point?” Jerald pointed to a wooden sign.
“I’m sure it’s named after a person. There aren’t even that many snakes around here.”
“Oneis too many. And we in their house. What do I keep trying to tell you?”
“ ‘Nature is designed to kill us,’ ” Rashad recited with fake annoyance. He opened his door, the dogs sprinting off before his heavy foot hit the ground. His stomach grumbling, sweat trickling down his back and legs, he strode to the rear of his SUV. His body was mostly torso, a barrel of a chest over spindly legs. His ears were too tiny for his head; for that matter, so were his eyes. His full black beard trailed into a bald scalp.
Two stickers marked the door: one in the outline of Indiana filled with prismatic colors; the other,Star Warslightsabers arranged in a rainbow array. He unlocked a case and tucked his holstered IFG Stock Master Defiant 9mm into the back of his pants. “On your six.”
“You can’t just say ‘I’m behind you’?” Jerald asked.
Rashad stalked well-trodden paths along the sun-dappled ridge of a ravine. He wanted to capture the last riot of color from the springtime bloom. A distant train whistled as it passed. Birdsong continued, unbothered by his presence. He stopped at a pond with ambitions of being a lake. Unpacking a protein bar, he had it almost all the way to his mouth when he caught Jerald’s disapproving face. He pointed to a sign.No Hunting Zone—U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“Don’t act brand-new. ‘What we bring in, we take out.’ ” Rashad crumpled the wrapper and pocketed it. “And ‘what’s out here stays here.’ I know the rules.”
“We have signs for a reason.”
“It means people done went and fucked something up.”
A breeze barely rustled the branches. The leaves crunched softly underfoot. Sunlight filtered through the thick canopy. Three turkey vultures picked at a nearby carcass. As he searched for something to catch his photographer’s eye, he noted how Jerald moved as if pressed under a weight, like he needed to get something off his chest. Rashad recognized the burden and gave him space: they were ten years into their friendship before he came out to him.
“Picking up pawpaws, puttin’ ’em in a basket.”Jerald began singing the folk song when Rashad lifted up a piece of fruit he described as an Indiana banana. “I hope you know how to get us out of here. I’m already lost.”
“If there was one thing I picked up in the military besides shooting, it’s land navigation.” Soon after Jerald left for Tuskegee, Rashad joined the Army, becoming a member of 91 Whiskey Combat Medic, a combat support hospital. While they never deployed, his unit set records for getting stations up and running. But that didn’t mean he never saw action: having grown up on the east side of Indianapolis, he’d seen enough real combat. “We did regular exercises. Just a compass, a map, and the terrain.”
“I get it. You’re a Boy Scout.”
Rashad knelt to better take a close-up of a flower from a tulip poplar, its lone huge leaf, bell-shaped and greenish yellow with orange petals. The chittering calls of insects and deep burbles from tree frogs ceased. The gaze of Rashad’s camera caught an old forester approaching. His dirt-caked black pants shed dust with each step. His boots were military surplus. Across his T-shirt, the words “When tyranny becomes law rebellion becomes duty” were emblazoned over a Betsy Ross flag: a white Romannumeral three above “1776” surrounded by a circle of thirteen stars against a black background. He had to be a Three Percenter, one of those Far Right anti-government militia types who believe that only 3 percent of American colonists fought against the British during the American Revolution. A new name for the same old hate and their campaign of menace. The name “Monteleone” stitched across his unbuttoned vest, he had gray hair and skin blanched to the color of overripe rhubarb. A perplexed look crossed his rugged and intense face, hardened from playing soldier all day.
“Damn. Even out here, we are never alone,” Rashad muttered.
“Because when you’re black, white people will always be all up in your business,” Jerald said, finishing the adage.
Not overtly hostile, Monteleone stopped well shy of being welcoming. He affected a dull, subtle Southern drawl, his tone attempting to remind them of their place. As if they were somehow trespassing despite this being public land. His suspicious eyes, the shade of frosted wastewater, cast over Rashad. “Are you lost?”
“We…I can’t be. I was just thinking about how I was good at two things, one of them being land navigation.” Rashad thickened his code-switched tone with extra congeniality.
“What’s the other?” Monteleone asked.
“Being black.” Rashad searched the man’s eyes for any signs of ill intent, adjusting the back of his shirt in case he needed to draw his Defiant. Though all about nonviolence, he was also all about self-defense and wasn’t going to be made to feel afraid. Or unsafe. Never again.
“What brings you out here?” Creases deepened along Monteleone’s forehead. Irritated, he tensed his jaw.
Rashad swatted at whatever buzzed by his ear. Something about Monteleone made Rashad’s ass itch. Ready to deploy “What’s it to you?” energy while fixing his mouth to cuss the man out, heinstead opted for something less confrontational. This was still southern Indiana, he was still all alone, and there were still a lot of trees.
