The Privilege of Running Roadblocks

Roadblocks, like Christmas, are an occasional decoration on the landscape of a prison town. A convict escapes, causing police cars with red lights flashing, to quickly appear, and as teenagers we learned to enjoy the holiday from afar. We worked around it. We learned how to navigate around roadblocks with our contraband, and there was an immunity bestowed upon us as town kids. We were the ones they were protecting, after all. Roadblocks added a sometimes inconvenient but exciting and dangerous element to our cruising, especially since there was always potential for drama at a roadblock.

Once at a roadblock on the fringes of our small town a car stopped, and as the trooper approached his shotgun discharged accidentally, the kick knocked him off balance, and he fell to the ground. The other troopers and officers on the scene, thinking he'd been shot by the driver, fired together at the innocent victim in the car and he was killed instantly.

On one intoxicating July afternoon in the midwest Ricki and Mellow Yellow and I drank Strohs beer, my father's brand, and traveled the dusty roads around town. This was Ricki's haunt, and she led us by rich green fields and black soil, pastures of horses and cows, the familiar smell of rich green manure filling our noses through the open windows. We crunched down gravel roads onto the two-tracks, into dark canopies of trees and dense green places.

Pulling the car up to the tall weeds by the pond, we eagerly climbed out of its confines, breathed in the smell of water and earth and surveyed the landscape in an instant, as teenagers do. Dragon flies hovered above the snake grass, the setting sun reflected on the glassy moving water and we were suspended for a moment in the emptiness and quiet of dusk. Mel was first. Pulling off her madras shorts and sleeveless shell, she ran headlong into the water, and soon her head was bobbing and disappearing out in the middle. Ricki and I leaned against the hot car with our beers, enjoying the last of the day's sun on our bare arms and legs. The car doors were flung open, the car instantly transformed into a different space, a bedroom, a kitchen, a living room. The radio softly gave us a soundtrack.

"Come here! You guys have gotta come and see this! Hurry up!" Ricki and I squinted out, not quite ready for the chilling water. But we leisurally stripped and paddled out to where Mel had splashed and disappeared again. Ricki and I took a deep gulp of air and dove down, into the cold depths. I saw Mel's feet moving through the cloudy water and felt goose bumps squeeze my cold white skin. Her body came into focus as I quickly moved down, and other bodies appeared in my vision, against her whiteness. There were stiff arms holding angular lanterns and rigid red jackets set against blue trousers. Chipped heads and faces with vacant eyes stared at me, or beyond me. Gliding closer, I moved my hand over the plaster, slimy and rigamortis-hard. I saw a haystack of bodies resting rigidly, black smooth faces of proud stable boys with jaunty red hats, all in poses of perpetual servitude, on the bottom of the cold spring-fed pond.

Rising fast, our eyes met. "Holy shit!" "Let's get out of here!" We gasped and splashed our way to shore, laughing but drawing our feet up from the cool depths, from the unknown.

Our clothes stuck to our wet skin and our hair dripped onto our shoulders, soaked into the warm upholstery, and the radio softly soothed us as the car crawled out of the two-track, onto gravel, into confident places. From then, the evening was enchanted. "How could a hundred stable boys end up on the bottom of the pond?" "There weren't a hundred, there were like, maybe twenty." "No. There were at least thirty." "Jesus Christ! Who put them there?"

That night, in a house on Washington Street the phone rings in the night. A dad, an employee of the town's prison system, is drugged with sleep, but he puts on his professional voice. Another prisoner has escaped. Roadblocks are quickly set up and the town's "other" self is on alert. The dad touches the door on his clothes cabinet behind which rests, waiting and loaded, a .38 Smith & Wesson snubnose revolver. He's made enemies of some of the prison population - not intentionally, it just comes with the job. He climbs back in bed and eventually finds an unfit sleep.

Black faces float in our heads as the beer goes down and the trees blur by and the sun has long disappeared in the west and the radio softly reminds us who we are. Later, slurring and sloppy, Ricki falls into a carload of boys, with much screaming and laughing. "You guys won't believe what happened!" Mel and I slowly squint our way toward her house, willing the two roads to become one. "Whoa! A little to the left! Okay, here's my driveway. Turn right! Now!"

Alone in my car, I speed down the highway toward home, almost airborne past the campground, past the prison, around the curve and into the city limits. Driving at the speed of light I notice, out of the corner of my eye, flashing red lights as I fly through the intersection. I hear a loud CRACK (a gun?) and I instinctively jerk my head down as I glance out the rear view mirror and see the police car behind me, coming on fast. I pull over, rehearsing how to act "sober". The officer has his gun drawn, and approaches my window.

"Can I see your driver's license and registration?" His flashlight searches the backseat. "Where are you going so fast?" "Open your trunk, please." "You afraid your parent's might be mad you're out so late?" "You're Calvin's daughter, aren't you?" "Come on back here to the parking lot."

They left me sitting there in the empty parking lot next to the intersection for an hour as they communed near their cars. Walkie talkies, blinking lights, barricades, and deep masculine voices. I hear the word "nigger" and my mind goes to the man who has escaped to freedom, perhaps on foot, scared and cold on a back road somewhere. Soft laughter. Finally the officer soberly approaches my window again. "You'd better get home," he says. "And be careful.

Mellow Yellow, Ricki and MJ