Riot son, p.1
Riot Son, page 1
Cover
Copyright
Part One: Season of the Son
Part Two: Fall of the Father
About the Author
Landmarks
Cover
Riot Son
L. A. Fields
Published by Lethe Press
lethepressbooks.com
Copyright © 2023 L. A. Fields
ISBN: 978-1-59021-756-6
No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Author or Publisher.
This work is fiction, and any resemblance to any real person, dead or otherwise, is incidental.
PART I:
SEASON
OF THE SON
I. SPARK
1.
While a worldwide pandemic percolated and another election year began in the United States, on Memorial Day a Black man was murdered by police. In broad daylight, in front of a half-dozen cameras, again.
It had happened the week before, the month before, and the year before:
In July of 2014, a Black man and bystander: Eric Garner, age forty-three, a father of six whose dying words, “I can’t breathe,” became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.
In August of 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, a Black teenager walking in the general vicinity of an alleged convenience store robbery: Michael Brown, age eighteen, who liked video games, getting high, creating rap songs, and spending time with his family.
In November of 2014 in Cleveland, Ohio, a Black child, playing outside with a toy gun: Tamir Rice, age twelve, who loved soccer, basketball, drawing, and joking around.
In February of 2015 in Charlotte, North Carolina, a Black woman at home and in need of mental health treatment: Janisha Fonville, age twenty, who had a mood disorder, a history of self-harm, and a girlfriend whose baby she doted upon.
In July of 2016 in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, a Black man in the passenger seat of his fiancé’s car during a traffic stop: Philando Castille, age thirty-two, known as Phil by the children he fed in the cafeteria at J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet School, and whose death was witnessed by his fiancé’s four-year-old daughter.
In September of 2018 in Dallas, Texas, a Black man sitting at home with a bowl of ice cream: Botham Shem Jean (Bo to his friends), age twenty-six, a joyful preacher, singer, and volunteer.
In October of 2019 in nearby Fort Worth, Texas, a Black woman at home babysitting her eight-year-old nephew: Atatiana Jefferson, age twenty-eight, who was caring for her unwell mother while saving up to go to medical school.
In March of 2020 in Louisville, Kentucky, a Black woman woken from sleep by a no-knock raid on her home: Breonna Taylor, age twenty-six, a former paramedic who was defended by her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, with whom she planned to marry and start a family.
In May of 2020, in a Minneapolis, Minnesota neighborhood about fifteen minutes away from where Philando Castile was fatally shot, a Black man accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill: George Floyd, age forty-six, described as a gentle giant, rapper, and father of five, who was suffocated for eight minutes and forty-six seconds as he repeated the same plea spoken by Eric Garner, “I can’t breathe,” and called out for his mother, who’d died two years previously.
In late May of 2020, with summer blooming and unemployment spiking as the regulations surrounding the pandemic shut down jobs, the citizens took to the streets. Self-stylized, hateful militias were ready and raring to go. Conscientious protesters of all ages, from Vietnam to Occupy Wall Street, heeded the call. Suburban moms and dads were also getting energized and ushered into the fold. On-the-ground journalists prepared to suit up once again.
Chicago, Detroit, Portland. Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York. Knoxville, New Port, Pittsburgh. Everywhere was tear-gassed, which is a war crime sometimes, but since crowd control was not technically a war, it was fine to fog the streets of the United States with chemical gas. The press was frequently corralled to show ’em what for, and tear gas devices sometimes sailed directly at their heads. This was a hostile tactic that was not allowed on paper, but still strangely frequent on the streets.
“Incoming!”
A tear gas canister arc’d toward a young man’s head. This was Garrett Robertson: redheaded, slight, and seventeen, going on eighteen. Recently emancipated from a religious cult upbringing, Garrett had already finished high school online, and didn’t have anything else to do that summer but bear witness to the upheaval. Had the canister hit him as intended, he could have lost an eye, broken a nose, gained a scar, but a tall, bearded white man stepped in front of it first.
The tear gas canister glanced off the shoulder of Devon Amis to ricochet back the way it came. When asked how to pronounce his last name, Devon would tell people it’s not “ah, me?” but more like “aim, miss.” He was from suburban Dallas, had a deep interest in firearms like the kind that had just wounded him, which could have easily led him to become a soldier. But Devon also had an unbreakable habit of bucking authority, so he became an independent reporter rather than reporting for duty.
“Johnny on the spot, nice one,” said a woman wearing kneepads, wrist guards, a helmet, and water bottles strapped across her back like the opposite of ammo. Tula Callis was third-generation Greek, and an untold-generation democracy preserver. She was her grandfather’s favorite because he felt she had the best concentration of Old-World pride compared to his other five grandchildren, each seemingly more American than the last.
“Thanks,” Garrett said to his new friends.
“Where’d that fucker go, want to get a picture with it?” Devon asked, before holding out his hand to shake. “Are you sure you’re old enough for a press badge?”
“I’m not, but my editor is,” Garrett said.
Tula let out a “Ha!” through her face mask, and Devon smiled under his. Garrett could see it in his cheeks, his eyes; Devon had a smiley, jovial face that neither his beard nor his mask could hide.
“I actually took a nice selfie with a spent canister earlier. Check it out.” On his phone, Garrett scrolled through photos of raised batons, burning eyes, aggressive blockades, and found the one where he looked the cutest: curly red hair with great volume that day, playful eyes over his neck gaiter mask, and an exploded canister held up like someone having a far better day might take a picture with their Starbucks frappe-lappe milkshake.
“Nice,” Devon said, zooming in first on Garrett’s face, before sliding the focus to the canister. “It busted open so evenly it looks like a steampunk poison flower, don’t you think, Tula?”
Tula leaned over to pass her hooded gaze over the image. “I’d accept a bouquet of those from the wasteland warrior of my dreams.”
Garrett would later come to realize that the word “warrior” was gender-neutral (like “comrade” and “co-conspirator”), and that Tula’s dream warrior would be a Furiosa of her own. However, as it stood on that day, in the quiet afternoon light before the curfews came down and those who didn’t disperse were open to brutal assault, these three talked tactics.
Devon and Tula were veterans of melees across the country and world, and wanted to make sure that Garrett, who was at his first rodeo, knew what he was up against. Did Garrett have copies of his IDs on him, a lawyer to contact should he be arrested, the right kind of cell phone with nothing but emergency numbers in it, no valuables on his person, and enough protective gear? Yes to all of the above, and no, he wasn’t wearing contact lenses, which could cause poison gas to fuse against one’s eyeballs.
“Do you rendezvous with anyone if the shit goes to shit?” Devon asked.
“Want to share our spot?” Tula offered.
“Sure.” Garrett had a few friends out on the street already, but they went home when the sun went down, and Garrett stayed every night until the end. Once his new pals each whispered the location to him (to test whether they themselves were in sync), Garrett told them about a neat little trick he had ready to go if he felt the heat was on: save his photos to the data card in his camera, drop the card in a stamped envelope addressed to himself in the nearest post box, and then wipe his camera clean in case he was detained and the cops went snooping.
Tula and Devon looked fondly at one another over Garrett’s head and smiled.
“He’s got the best of us both, dear,” Tula said.
“He really does. I’m so glad we adopted a riot son, darling,” Devon replied, setting an avuncular hand on Garrett’s slender shoulder for a squeeze.
Garrett wondered just how friendly this new friend would be, but he didn’t have time for anything but a flutter of a yearning before the police decided the press punks were too close to something, even though they’d been put there by the cops in the first place. It was time to dance the do-si-do of that old tune, “Get Back, Move Along, Nothing to See Here.”
Garrett would be called “riot son” for the rest of that fateful summer.
2.
“Again with the milk,” grumbled Devon’s voice that first night. Already Garrett knew it from the rest, even with his eyes closed and day-temperature milk drooling down his neck. “Are you guys out of water?”
“The cops slashed open the water bottles,” said the medic who was pouring milk, the only resource left, over Garrett’s face. She’d said her name was Hazel.
“How heroic of them,” Devon said, which made Garrett snort some milk up his nose. “Here, I’ve got a couple of water bo ttles left, you guys and gals can have them, my night’s about done unless I can help.”
“We’ll take the water,” Hazel said, letting up on the milk pour and splashing some water on Garrett’s face as a final rinse. “The cops stomped and slashed as many water bottles as they could, slit open our saline bags, threw sutures and bandages into the dirt, threw us onto the pavement.”
“Did anyone film it?” Devon asked, just as Garrett opened his eyes and said, “Did they even give you a reason why?”
Hazel blinked at them. “Yes and no. Yes, several people filmed it, one was my friend Lena, she’s over there if you want to talk to her about it.” Hazel pointed.
Devon clocked Lena, and nodded, but didn’t leave. Garrett blinked around to see that Lena was using a headlamp intended for camping to assess a cut on someone’s scalp.
Hazel turned to Garrett and checked his pupils with a penlight. “They didn’t give us a reason why, they just destroyed over $500 in medical supplies and caused a few more scrapes and bruises on people they knew were only medics. I mean, we’re all wearing crosses on our front, back, and sides that say MEDIC in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese — I added that. If any of us tried to ask why, we got shoved.” Bitterness was likely keeping her awake better than black coffee.
“Are you alright from the shove?” Devon asked.
“I am, thank you for asking.” After snapping off her light, she said to Garrett, “If you’re feeling better, I’m going to check on others, okay?”
“I feel much better, thanks,” Garrett said.
Hazel nodded. “Any time, stay safe.”
When Hazel got up from Garrett’s side, Devon sat down. Garrett gave him a hello smile before raising up his mask again.
“Breathing that spoiled-milk goodness off your mask aren’t you? Feeling it congeal against your skin? I really wish people didn’t insist on bringing milk to a tear gas fight, water works just as well if not better. I mean, if you splash milk in your eye at breakfast you’re not like, ‘wow, great, refreshing,’ you run to the kitchen sink to rinse it out with water.”
“Plus there’s no cruelty-free way to get cows’ milk, really,” Garrett said, “but that’s a different rant entirely for those thinking about becoming vegan.”
Devon laughed, a delightful sound that Garrett would soon find all the more wonderful when he learned about the things that haunted Devon. In this moment, Garrett was merely glad that his joke had landed.
“I live nearby if you want a shower and change before you head home,” Devon said. “Or you’re welcome to crash for the night if you’re just going to come back out here tomorrow.”
“That’s an awfully trusting offer,” Garrett said, again unsure if this was a come-on or just a Samaritan-style offer, or perhaps six of one and half a dozen of the other.
“You haven’t seen my place. It’s full of knives, guns, and ammo, and I’d have the home-court advantage. See, there’s the catch to the offer: it’s a dangerous-looking place.”
Garrett had seen his share of weapon caches, there’d been a whole walk-in closet’s worth in the compound he spent his formative years on. He was not interested in disclosing that information quite so soon, but he was most assuredly not intimidated by a claim of “full of weapons” — one man’s “full” was often another person’s endless vast of disappointment.
“But it’s got hot water?” Garrett asked.
Devon’s apartment was empty in a lot of ways. There was no Fengshui, no hard divide between kitchen and living and sleeping space, no art on the walls that wasn’t practical somehow: a rack of guns, machetes up against magnetic strips, empty liquor bottles on top of a bookshelf that was also populated by sci-fi dystopian novels, political texts, biographies of history’s best bastards, and old nut tins that may or may not have still contained nuts. Maybe those tins were full of bullets, or loose change, or thumb tacks, or teeth of former victims … who could tell without giving them a shake? Garrett didn’t plan on snooping.
“I don’t have any clean towels, but I can do a quick load of laundry with your stuff if you want, or you can dry off with, let’s see …” Like a magician, Devon pulled out one, two, then three dish towels from a cabinet above his microwave. “Doable?”
“Absolutely,” Garrett said, and was he partially talking about Devon when he said it? Yes, but he wasn’t entirely sure this was a flirtation quite yet. When one grows up in a cult, one understands that some men just like collecting acolytes.
Garrett brought his bag, pants, and jacket into the bathroom with him, just in case, but let Devon wash his layered shirts (they did smell of spilled milk, after all). Garrett emerged from the shower with his skin pinked by the steam and his hair in drippy ringlets like melting copper coils. He slowly redressed, putting on a shirt that Devon lent him. It featured McGruff the Crime Dog in his Bogart-looking coat over the words “Take a Bite Out of CRIME.” Garrett turned out the bathroom light first so he’d be acclimated to the darkness without before opening the door. Again, this was done just in case of sudden ambush.
The caution was unnecessary. Devon was dead-asleep in his bed. A note taped to the bathroom door read: Dear Son — Zonked, sorry. Your shirt’s in the dryer. You’re welcome to sleep on the couch and to anything you find to eat/drink in the fridge. If you leave, please lock the door behind you. — Dev.
Garrett felt too clean to hit the streets again, so he decided to stay. He found a jar of large olives in the fridge, ate three. He found a few unopened hard seltzers in the crisper drawer and selected one, knowing that just a little bit of booze and sugar would put him to sleep like a baby. He unfolded a blanket he found on the armrest of the couch that looked like it was stolen or otherwise obtained from a hospital, and he got comfy. He plugged his phone into an outlet and used it to search for the inspiration of McGruff (not a Bogie character, but instead based on Peter Falk’s Columbo, which made sense since Columbo had a hunting hound in the show, a basset).
When he finally felt his eyelids getting droopy, Garrett put his phone down and turned to his side. There was a fiery-red kimono draped over an old recliner, either as a sort of slip-cover or because that’s just where Devon last disrobed from it. Garrett watched the fabric’s patterns of birds and blossoms appear to swirl in the room’s shadows. Under the spell of that kaleidoscope, he fell asleep.
3.
Garrett awoke to a brilliant set of staring eyes, a heavy weight on his chest, a moment of panic … until he realized he was being examined by a kitty cat. A large, shrewd tabby, holding him down, checking him out.
“You’re awake?” Devon peered out from the kitchen, where he was mixing something in a bowl with a whisk. The smell of bacon sizzling made Garrett’s stomach rumble, which prompted the cat to launch from his chest.
“Good morning,” Garrett said, then sneezed.
“Oh, shit, are you allergic? I should have asked that before inviting you, dude. I can open a window and I think there’s some antihistamine stuff in the medicine cabinet.”
“I’m good.” Garrett sat up and felt pleasantly dizzy, a combination of the sneezing, the rapid rise from a reclining position, and probably hunger. Breakfast was going to be awesome. “Not allergic, just some dander and dust up the nose or something.”
“Phew! Not trying to rescue people from tear gas just to give them anaphylaxis,” Devon said, ducking back into the kitchen. “If you’re vegan or kosher I’ve got some food, if you’re not, there’s bacon.”
Garrett checked his phone to clear the cobwebs of sleep: a text from his current landlady, Aunt Lilith, hoping Garrett was still alive since he didn’t come home (reply was, Found shelter, all good); trash news bulletins about who was arrested and in need of bail money (response was the action of re-tweeting); marketing emails revealing how his movements were tracked all night and all the time (How about that bank you were herded towards, huh, what about this smoothie chain you hid behind?). Garrett got out of his sofa bed and did a few toe touches to wake up his blood. Then he went to see about breakfast.
