Spring in Porterdale (fiction)

Much appreciation for feedback and editing help from Jard, Sanae, Jesse, and my dad.

Laying sweat-caked in bed, Mal stared at the ceiling. He began this activity at four PM, it was now six. The window A/C rattled out cold air, and he was stripped down to his plaid boxers, but these efforts did little to alleviate the late May heat. 

He wanted to study weather psychology, if that was even something that could be done. Was it? Maybe somewhere out there in the big, old world academics gathered in conference halls, giving papers and lectures about the impact of natural climate on human moods and feelings, how cold and cloudy days correlate with depression; how warm, gentle days offer relief and excitement; and how the hot oppressive ones leave us with overwhelm, sometimes even blurring into rage. In weather psychology, as he imagined it, such elementary observations would be only the beginning of a vast, sophisticated field, one that would come to show the masses that, though we often think of ourselves as autonomous beings, we are as controlled by the natural world as the tide by the moon. 

Mal could have continued his ruminations for some time more, possibly into the darkness of evening, skipping dinner, and dissolving straight into an early and dreamy sleep. A cockroach, however, began to make its merry way across the ceiling, upsetting his peace. For most people, a cockroach can disturb even the most peaceful of peaces, and Mal was no exception. In fact, he had watched a documentary about the little beasts once, hoping to develop more empathy for them. But, instead he had learned that they have essentially three brains, one between each pair of little, spindly legs, and it had had the opposite effect. 

He contemplated rising to meet the roach with a splattering device—maybe a book or flip flop, maybe a bare palm. But he worried that this desire was motivated more by the unbearable heat of the room than an authentic feeling that could be claimed as his own. Eyes locked on the cockroach, Mal got up and turned off the rattling window A/C, filling the room with silence. The cockroach froze, evidently alerted by this shift to its environment, but, determining that the change provided no immediate threat, continued its merry way, upside down, across the room.

Downstairs, the temperature was at least 10 degrees cooler, and Mal wondered for the hundredth time why he agreed to take the poorly-insulated attic bedroom, only to remember, also for the hundredth time, his reasoning: magnificent lighting. The room had a small square window on either end, one facing east and one facing west. The white rays of morning and the golden rays of late afternoon were, in theory at least, fuel for his writing. In reality, his chronic procrastination—staring at the ceiling, doodling sketches—meant that most professional work did not begin until well after midnight.

Still in his underwear, Mal slumped on the parlor couch next to Nicole. 

“I’m journaling,” she said. And indeed, her left hand moved in a flurry across the page of her notebook. Though her motions were speedy, even erratic, her print was small and neat. 

The permits remain stalled, and it’s all we can do to hope that they remain so, to buy us more time. We always need more time, Mal read, peering into her lap. 

“Please don’t read my journal,” Nicole said plainly, but made no effort to move herself or the journal from his line of sight. He respected her wish, scooting away from her on the couch, and resuming what was, perhaps, his default activity: staring at the ceiling. 

Nicole paused in her writing, looking up. “You’ll be ready soon?” she asked, blinking repeatedly at his scantily clad, clearly unprepared body.

“For what?” 

She made a small, exasperated shake of her head. Then, lifting her feet from the ground and putting her hands in the air, she began moving her legs in a ridiculous, pumping, circular motion.

Mal cocked his head quizzically. Running in place? Throwing a tantrum? He did not recall these things being on the agenda.

Nicole added a final revealing touch to her pantomime, reaching up to an imaginary bell with her thumb, pressing it, and voicing in onomatopoeia a “ding, ding.”

“Oh, that’s today?!” asked Mal. By his tone it was clear this was less of a genuine question and more an embarrassed realization. He had forgotten about the bike ride.

“Yes, it’s today, Mal!” Nicole nearly shouted. 

“Okay, okay,” he said raising both his hands up in conciliatory surrender. “Let me put on some pants.” 

“I’m going to have to invent a whole language of head shaking for you,” Nicole said as he turned the hallway’s corner. “Just one kind of head shake isn’t enough.”

To think he might have fallen asleep to the lull of air conditioned rattle! He would have to thank the cockroach for disturbing his peace, if it was still around. 

It is strange, Nicole thought, that the arrest is always so utterly urgent and quick. The police, the government, the state—whatever you want to call them—they give you their professionally-trained, well-resourced, and undivided attention for this brief moment of sonic blur. But once that moment passes, as soon as your back comes to rest against the rear seat of their car—from that moment on—those initial metrics of speed, attention, and resources are dramatically upended. You are dropped from the sonic blur into the bureaucratic molasses, to time that moves at the rate of ice melting at 32 and a half degrees, to attention that must be fought for like scraps. That’s what was most disorienting, Nicole decided—to so suddenly be made the object of fervent, violent desire, and then, just as suddenly, be relinquished into forgottenness, to sit on a cold bench for hours with nothing to see but beige colored walls.

“What time is it?” she asked Estephanie, leaning over towards her.

“No way to know for sure,” the other woman said, “but I’d imagine close to three.”

“Ugh,” Nicole groaned. She would have felt tired had the anxiety not been pricking at the top of her spine at regular intervals.

“We’ll be out of here soon,” Estaphanie reassured, misinterpreting the cause of Nicole’s angst.

Suddenly, the sharp, nasally voice of the woman behind the desk, which they had not heard since its stern direction to “sit down and wait” some hours ago, cut through the early morning malaise. “You can use the phone now,” it announced.  

Nicole leapt to her feet. “I’ll call!” she told Estaphanie. “Anything you want me to tell them?”

“Just to hurry on up and get us out of here.”

Nicole dialed the well memorized digits.

“Porterdale Jail Support,” a groggy voice answered on the fourth ring, “With whom am I speaking?”

“Did they get Mal?” Nicole blurted. “They didn’t get Mal, did they?”

“What?” The poor person on the other end of the line had clearly just awoken. “Who is this? Nicole?”

“Mal,” she said again, somewhat less desperately, but clear and firm. “Did they get Mal?”

“Great to hear from you too, Nicole,” the person chuckled. “And no, I don’t think Mal was among the men, but let me check to be sure.”

Nicole let her eyes run up and down the patterned linoleum floor as the anxiety repetitively pricked her top vertebrae and as the person on the other end of the line, in some far off place, clicked and clacked away on a computer keyboard. She thought of how she called out to Mal in the moment of sonic blur, how maybe this calling had entrapped him too, and how if it had, she would not be able to forgive herself.

“No, his name is not on the list,” the person said at last.

Nicole sighed. “Thank God,” she said. And then again, “Thank God.”

As the group approached the final descent, Mal felt a case of the zoomies coming on. 

The zoomies, at least to Mal’s understanding, were a phenomenon exhibited primarily by the domesticated feline and characterized by the seemingly spontaneous dilation of the pupils and an explosion of instinctual, chaotic energy that necessitates an urgent sprinting through the house at full tilt, jumping on objects low and high, and batting anything that may get in the way.

For whatever reason, this moment felt much the same for Mal; he simply could not resist the zoom, zoom, pedal, pedal of pushing his bike out into the opposite lane of traffic, moving twice the pace of the other bikers, passing the knot of them. Ah! The freedom of moving as fast as one can on a two wheeled chunk of steel, body to the wind, heart rate climbing, the world turning to blurs. 

An oncoming car laid on the horn as it swerved deeper into its own lane to keep safely clear of him, its horn sound bending in pitch as it passed.

“Hey, be careful!” someone yelled from their bike in the crowd. But the zoomies already had Mal well past this yelling soul, his thighs pumping, his head over the handlebars for optimal aerodynamics. Since when has a “be careful” saved anyone?

Ahead on the right lay the forest, the forest under threat. It snaked and weaved its way through the industrial parks and film studios of southern Porterdale—350 acres of old Southern land doing its darndest to bounce back, in both the spiritual and ecological senses, from the terrible, terrible things that had been done to it. He stared into the green mass in awe, finally relenting his pedaling.

His mad dash had pushed him to the front of the entire pack of bikers, to where only Gauge, the ride’s tour guide, remained between him and the open road ahead. 

“Hello,” Mal said, as his momentum carried him abreast of the wiry fellow. He felt suddenly embarrassed, the spontaneous, chaotic energy that had momentarily overtaken his body was draining away, leaving a cold and rational sobriety. All those people, he thought with a flush, had really seen him do that, honking car and all. This must be how the feline felt when its zoomies faded, leaving it long, empty hours to replay in its mind the peculiar things it had done in its altered state. 

“Good tour,” Mal said, shaking himself loose of the embarrassment. “I’d heard a lot of it before in bits and pieces, but it was really helpful to have it presented in one digestible chunk.” 

“Thank you,” Gauge said, taking a sideways glance at his new companion. He started to look back to the road, but an internal force pulled his head quickly back to Mal, that peculiar human phenomenon of delayed recognition—a double take.

 “You must be Mal? Nicole’s partner?” 

“Mal?” Mal responded with apparent innocence. He’d been waiting, perhaps malevolently, for such a moment. And it was here. “No. Maybe that’s the other Black guy? I saw one back there in the big group.”

Gauge turned crimson. He started to say something, choked on his words, then began a second, sputtering attempt.

“I’m just kidding!” Mal reached across the space of moving pavement between them to slap Gauge playfully on the shoulder. “Yes, I’m Mal. There is no other Black guy.”

“Dang,” Gauge said, laughing, “You really got me.” 

A moment of awkward silence followed in which Mal listened to the sound of the bikes’ rear hubs clicking, unsure if his joke, in execution, had been as clever and righteous as it had sounded in his internal, mental rehearsals, or if, really, he had just been a dick.

“Well, Nicole is amazing,” Gauge said, attempting recovery. 

“Oh, I know,” Mal replied.

“I mean she is simply vital to this movement.” Gauge shook his head. “Not that any one person can be a movement. But she pulls twenty times her weight, I swear.”

“I believe it,” Mal said. “She’s almost never home.”

“She’s helped build the sits, she hauls the water, she runs the meetings. You name it, any of it, she’s there.”

“She is a wonder,” Mal said, nodding.

“But you? I haven’t seen you down here. Not that I can recall.”

“I’ve never been,” Mal said.

“Never? Not once?!” Gauge was incredulous.

“No, this is my first time. That’s why I am so appreciative of your tour.”

“Jeez,” Gauge said. “And with Nicole as your partner! You must have really been avoiding us down here.” He chuckled awkwardly, side-eyeing Mal, his incredulity turning to nosy curiosity.

Mal didn’t particularly want to engage this conversation. If his cruel joke had not made his difficulties with the movement obvious, Gauge probably wasn’t worth his effort. 

Fortunately, at that moment, distraction arrived. “That’s the parking lot up there,” Gauge said, pointing, suddenly filled with an air of semi-professional responsibility. “I should stop and make sure everyone catches this final turn.” He pulled on his brakes, slowing as Mal rolled on beyond him. “I hope you’ll stick around for the bonfire. You’ve got to see the occupation!”

“I was planning on it,” Mal said.

He turned into the parking lot alone, the first one back. Straddling his bike and catching his breath, he looked up at the trees that crowded in around the parking spaces, backing up into dense groves, eventually giving way to the forest in earnest. He was reminded, unexpectedly, of rural Louisiana in the summer, Grandma letting him run and play in the cool shade of the woods until the sun touched the horizon, not caring how dirty he came home. He was reminded of the feeling when he first stepped into the trees, how the temperature dropped, how the sound got swallowed up, and how he felt himself a part of something that was much bigger than he, certainly at ten years old, could possibly understand.

“Dammit,” he said quietly, biting his lip and willing his tear ducts to remain in a closed position. 

“What on earth are girls like you doing in here at this hour?” asked a new arrival with just enough of a smile in her voice to let Nicole know she was teasing. Behind her, an officer fiddled with the keys to her handcuffs, struggling to get them off.

“Trespassing.” Estephanie spoke without hesitation. She said it as if the crime were an award to be displayed on the fireplace mantle, to be shined up with a good polish on Sunday nights.

“Trespassing?!” the woman seemed genuinely surprised. “I would have had my money more on shoplifting. A DUI maybe. But trespassing?” She crinkled her brow. “Just where were y’all trying to go that they wouldn’t let you in?” The smiling—the tease—was back in her voice. 

Estephanie, seemingly oblivious to the racial humor, plowed right ahead with the same irksome tone. “The forest,” she said in simple staccato.

“The forest? What forest?” 

Nicole felt compelled to jump in. “There’s a big tract of forest down off Walton Drive,” she started to explain, “near where it runs into Clayfield. They’re planning to—”

“Oh!” The woman cut her off excitedly, “Y’all are from that forest. I know just who you are! That's where they’re trying to build that big, new, fancy police training academy.”

“That’s right!” Nicole said, pleasantly surprised.

“The biggest in the country,” Estaphanie added.

“I’ve seen y’all on the news!” the woman exclaimed. “Sitting up in tree houses. Burning their bulldozers. Y’all are serious!”

“We can’t let them build it,” Estephanie said plainly. “We can’t.” 

“Well I’m with you there,” said the woman, sitting down across from them. “I live less than a mile from that site, and let me tell you, more police is the last thing we need in Southern Porterdale.”  She rubbed her wrists where the cuffs had cut in. “Not that you’re going to see me in the forest with y’all.” She laughed out loud. “No, you won’t catch me in there. No way, no how.” She laughed again, as if the idea of her in the forest was so self-evidently preposterous that there was nothing to do but slap a knee. “I appreciate what y’all are doing, though. Really, I do.” 

In her periphery, Nicole saw Estephanie puff with pride. “I’m Estephanie,” she said, putting out her hand to the woman.

“Janice,” the woman said taking it warmly. 

“And I’m Nicole,” Nicole offered, but weakly. She was thinking about something. She was thinking about how, not long ago, when rifling through papers on her downstairs coffee table in search of the gas bill, she came across a sketch in Mal’s unmistakable style. Out of a hastily drawn forest, a single, massive tree took the foreground, to the base of which a white woman had chained herself. She smiled broadly, as if being chained to this tree was the single thing she liked most in the world.

From the tree, the sketch carried Nicole’s eyes to the right, across a two lane road, to an apartment complex. Little Black boys and girls played in the courtyard, footballs and basketballs whizzing through the air, wispy lines emphasizing their movements. It would have been a happy scene, only that, if you looked closely, you noticed a broken pipe protruding from one of the apartment buildings, something nasty spilling out. If you looked closely, you noticed garbage piled far too high in the courtyard’s dumpster. And, again, if you looked closely, you noticed a police car lurking in the far right corner, barely on the page. The face inside looked over the whole scene—the children—with the serene confidence of authority. 

“Is this me?” she demanded as Mal came down the stairs, her finger resting on the tree-chained woman.

He came across the room to see what she was pointing at, and, realizing, froze. He seemed to think with delicacy. 

“No baby, it isn’t you,” he said, meeting her gaze, “but it is y’all.”

Nicole let her eyes fall from the phosphorescent lights to the beige walls and finally down to the floor, in all its checkered linoleum glory.  She rubbed the top of her neck, where the anxiety was still pricking. “Janice, do you know what your bail is set at?” she asked.

Mal could not stop staring at the tree houses. He marveled at how, a mile’s hike into the woods, 50 feet into the air, anyone had been able to assemble such sophisticated looking structures, complete with solid wooden floors, plastic rain covers, and even glass windows, providing views into the forest canopy that he could only imagine as spectacular.

“See,” Nicole leaned over and whispered in his ear, “I told you it was cool.”

“I never denied that is was cool,” he replied. But he had to admit to himself, that he did not expect it to be this cool. In all directions from where they sat at the campfire, tents covered the ground. A makeshift kitchen, complete with sinks and stoves, was set up under a tarp. There was even what appeared to be a latrine, shovels next to deep ditches and high piles of red Georgia clay, ready to cover up whatever mess and smells may come.

So impressed was Mal that he began to wonder if he’d been wrong in his adamant resistance to coming to this place, if he shouldn’t have let it all put such a strain on his relationship. 

“Pigs!” someone yelled, as if in response to this wondering. The voice came from way up in one of the treehouses, like a sailor from a previous era calling down from the crow’s nest to mates below. Again, louder and more severe this time, the voice yelled: “Pigs!”

Into Mal’s mind popped the image of a herd of feral boars charging his way, chests out thrust, tusks held high to the wind. The creatures were known, in certain parts of rural Georgia, to wreak havoc on farmlands, destroy entire fields in a single night. 

But these, of course, were pigs of a somewhat different sort, pigs with high beam LED flashlights, static-crackling radios, and 9mm pistols clipped to their hips. Beams from their flashlights cut intrusively through the dark forest night as people, with the adrenaline of crisis, scattered in all directions of chaos. Mal too was amongst them, crashing and crunching out of the carpeted pine forest and into the underbrush in dizzying confusion. The darkness away from the campfire was so complete that Mal could not tell who was around him, just bodies swirling in directionless dance.

“Mal!” cried out a voice with a desperation that rang through his heart like a clanging bell.

He looked back to see a figure pinned down by two policemen, with a third wrenching white plastic zip-tie cuffs onto her wrists. Yet a fourth officer shone a beam of light down on the scene, illuminating the tableau of horror, so that Nicole’s prone body was the only thing clear and visible in a world that was otherwise dark.

Someone pulled sharply on Mal’s sleeve, tugging, tugging him deeper into the forest. 

“Let’s go.” It was Gauge’s voice, in a stage whisper. “She’ll be okay, I promise.”

There was nothing about anything that seemed like it would be okay, but Mal let his body be carried by Gauge’s persistent tug, his brain whirring and whirring and whirring, his stomach on fire.

Estaphanie pushed open the glass door, and sticky, hot air from the Porterdale night flooded into Mayson County Jail. The sensation delighted after the long hours of virtual refrigeration, the warmth raising hairs on Nicole’s arms, spattering them with goosebumps.

As she descended the jail steps with Estephanie and Janice by her side, applause and shouting erupted in the early morning. Porterdale Jail Support never did disappoint. There they were, across the street, in the mostly empty parking lot of Last Straw Bail Bonds, a motley, sleep-deprived crew, whooping and hollering.

 

Nicole’s eyes fell quickly, heavily, on Mal. He leaned up against their old, busted sedan, the bikes still strapped to the back from the ride that, though it felt like ages ago, had taken place just a handful of hours before. He smiled as her eyes met his, but he looked haggard, his arms crossed, sleep deprivation and worry etched across his face. 

“Hey baby,” he said, pulling her into him. In his arms, in his smell, he played through her mind like a movie: how he spaced off at the ceiling when he had nothing else going on, how he procrastinated his writing late into the night, and how, when he finally started it, he chewed on the tail end of a pencil though he never wrote a word by hand. Most of all, she saw all the moments in which he had patiently explained to her—over teeth brushing sessions before bed, while eating breakfast toast, while carpooling to work, during post sex cuddles— what it was like, being Black in America.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered in his ear. 

He did not reply, per se, but he did squeeze her a little tighter, pushing his nimble fingers into the muscles of her lower back in the way that had always been a language between them. It was a kind of severe forgiveness, one that said, “I love you, but for the love of God, don’t do this to me again.”

“This is Janice,” Nicole said, stepping out and away so that Jaince and Mal could get a look at each other and shake hands.

“A pleasure to meet you.” Mal took her hand, though he looked somewhat perplexed. “I’m Mal.”

Behind the hand shake, Nicole saw forest dwellers embracing Estaphine, thumping her on the back, handing her snacks and cigarettes.  

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

Back in bed, Mal stared at the ceiling again. He was grateful that he and Nicole had taken separate rooms in the old house, for there were times, such as this one, in which he simply had to be alone. There were no cockroaches making upside down journeys across the ceiling this time, only the usual splotchiness of paint covering paint, covering paint, a record of time layered in the thinnest of sheets. 

He would not be going back to the forest. While it worried him as much as ever to leave all those white kids to their own devices, running around trying to save the world, that didn’t mean that he had to be out there with them. Let them camp in the forest, sticking their necks out, preparing for the next raid. 

He knew what his part in all this was. That had never been a question, not to him at least. He was a writer, and what does the writer do but write? His first story had already run in Porterdale Magazine. The second, for the more prestigious and far-reaching Southeasterner, had been moving in fits and starts, stuck in the procrastination phase, the chewing-on-the-ends-of-pencils and staring-at-the-ceiling parts of the process. 

But now, with Janice as a willing principal source, the ball would get moving right along. He could hardly wait to meet with her, pick her brain, hear her side of things. What a breath of fresh air she would bring! A break from the media obsession with the occupation, the raids, and the heroic tree-sitters. A Black woman who actually lived by the forest, who, more than anyone, this whole thing was really and truly about, would at last get her limelight, her story told. Perhaps he could even convince the editor to run her photo on the magazine’s cover.

When the story finally ran in July, the magazine would send him a few thousands dollars, some people would read it, and he’d put a copy of the thing on his bookshelf with his other publications, feeling, for a little while at least, rather pleased with himself. Maybe by that time there’d be a giant police training academy breaking ground where the forest had once stood. Or maybe, just maybe, there wouldn’t.

The air conditioning unit cut off with a clatter, interrupting his thoughts. There’s nothing quite like the quiet that follows the sudden cessation of a great noise, absence where there has just been such presence. It was like, at ten years old, walking into the Louisiana forest from the loud, peopled world, and the trees swallowing up all that he’d left behind. Into this abounding silence, Mal closed his eyes.