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When she was in high school, Mazie’s proudest achievement hands down was getting a letter to the editor published in the Coon Creek Citizen Journal. In it, she criticized her school library for removing the book Girl, Interrupted from its collection. Mazie based her argument on three points. First, the librarian did not adhere to due process when she unilaterally removed the book. Second, doing so violated the American Library Association’s Bill of Rights: “A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.” Third, the book had significant literary merit, regardless of how many times its author used the F-word or mentioned blowjobs (in the letter she wrote “sexual situations,” but in her mind she meant “blowjobs”), which she cited several positive reviews to establish. Friends and neighbors congratulated her for her skills as a writer, but not, she noticed, for being right.
To Mazie’s utter astonishment, the school board subsequently intervened and mandated that the library put Girl, Interrupted back on the shelf, albeit with a bright yellow sticker warning parents of “strong language, drug use, suicide, violence, and sexuality.” Whatever. Mazie still considered it a personal victory, a harbinger of the great things she could accomplish through a career in writing.
Suddenly, Girl, Interrupted was the hottest book in Coon Creek, with a long waiting list to check it out. By the time Mazie finally got her hands on the library’s copy, she was outraged to find that somebody had redacted several sections with black marking pen. It was a violation of her inalienable rights. It was a scandal and a cover up. It gave Mazie her first taste of the forbidden fruit of righteous indignation, and it intoxicated her. If that made her a liberal, so what?
Mazie recalled the whole Girl, Interrupted incident when she saw a clipping from the Coon Creek Citizen Journal stapled to a corkboard in the dormitory. She instantly recognized the Olde English banner and eagle-head logo from the CJs editorial page. She did a double take, hoping that she was wrong. Opinions written beneath that banner nearly always pissed her off. The title of the piece, highlighted with yellow marker, was “Be Proud of Our Pioneer Heritage.” She couldn’t stop herself from reading:
In the wee hours of the night of June 10, while we good folks in Coon Creek were sound asleep, some unknown hooligans snuck into our town and assaulted our civil liberties. Like thieves in the night, these cowards vandalized the statue of our founding father, Philander Fink, right in the heart of the town square. This was not just some prank or juvenile hijinks. No, my friends, this crime was planned in advance by thugs who hate us because of our freedoms and values.
We ought never to forget our history. Let the record show that Philander Fink was a truly great man—a frontiersman, an explorer, an entrepreneur, and a born leader—whose pioneering spirit was greatly respected in his time, and we remember him today as an inspiration for all of us to live by. If only everybody was so brave and strong! Driven by his passion for adventure, Philander left a comfortable life in Virginia and followed the wilderness road into Kentucky. There he worked as a hired hand on many farms and homesteads to clear the land, plant, and harvest the crops. People said he was one of the most honest and hardest-working young men in the territory. If he had stayed in Kentucky, he could’ve found a wife and settled down to a nice life.
But that wasn’t good enough for our Mister Philander Fink. He loved the life of a trailblazer, so he crossed the Ohio River into the vast woods of an untamed wilderness full of bears, wolves, and Indians. Living off the land, he pushed farther into the wilds than any white man before him. In November of 1801, while exploring a tributary of the upper Little Miami River, he got trapped by an early blizzard and had to hunker down in the back country, alone and far from civilization. Despite the odds against him, he met every challenge and defeated every foe. According to lore, he lived primarily off hunting raccoons—hence, the name of our home, Coon Creek.
Today, while Coon Creekers have gone through more than our fair share of ups and downs, we’ve always held onto the strength of our founding father. We are all Philander Fink’s children.
Thus and so, when those cowards defiled his statue, they also insulted our whole community. They are trying to rewrite history to conform to their silly political correctness. What they don’t understand is how we revere Philander Fink, even if he was a white, heterosexual, meat-eating male who carried a firearm. We must stick together. Coon Creekers have every right to be proud of who they are.
With Independence Day coming soon, let’s celebrate our freedom in honor of Philander Fink. Let’s make Coon Creek great again.
Respectfully, Burl Slocum.
Burl! Upon seeing his name, Mazie easily envisioned him writing that letter. He always did have a way with words, especially when he went off on one of his famous rants. It was one of the things that had attracted Mazie to him, back when they were in high school.
Of course, he also caught her eye with his 6’5”, 210 pound linebacker’s physique. His supple ass was the subject of frequent discussion among the cheerleaders, but it was Mazie who got up close and personal knowledge of Burl’s celebrated glutes. On prom night, she’d dug her fingers so deep into them that she took home some of his skin under her nails. At a purely physical level, despite his Neanderthal opinions and his self-righteous attitude, he was still the best fuck that Mazie had ever known. He’d totally ruined her for normal guys.
In retrospect, Mazie attributed her affair with Burl to a learning experience. They taught each other the pleasures of the flesh in the bed of his pickup during a meteor shower, in the press booth at the stadium during marching-band practice, in the Amity Valley Memorial Gardens at midnight during a thunderstorm, and others. Mazie had to admit that Burl had impressive skills in that department. It made her horny just thinking about it.
The last time she’d seen Burl, though, he’d ballooned out like a beluga whale, which was both a relief and a disappointment to her.
“Hola, Mazie. That’s some letter, huh?” El Jefe’s scratchy voice burst the bubble of her fantasy.
She wondered how long he’d been watching her. “Whoever wrote that piece of shit is a total asshole,” she said.
“True. But this letter, it says a lot about the person who wrote it. He hides his insecurities behind that statue. He thinks that you honor history by living in the past. Still, I’d wager he’s not the only person in Coon Creek who feels that way. He isn’t writing to convince anybody. He wrote to validate what they already believe.”
“He’s too stubborn to admit that he’s wrong,” Mazie said.
“Maybe. But it’s better to be believed than to be right.”
“What do you mean by that?”
At that moment, Professor Alolo swung open the doors to the seminar room and sang out, “Enter writers. Come, come, come.”
The professor seemed to be in a good mood. This puzzled Mazie; she had become accustomed to his irascibility and patronization. She excused these attitudes as by-products of his brilliant creativity. In her experience, happiness and intelligence were inversely related. Seeing Professor Alolo with a shit-eating grin on his face did not jibe with her assumptions about the curse of genius.
Before anybody could sit, Professor Alolo crisscrossed his arms and said, “Get into your groups.”
Mazie thought, Fuck me, not again.
The Team of Strangers gathered. Rufus high fived El Jefe. Quang gave a thumbs up and opened his laptop. Taara Ali’s loose dress swished and briefly covered Rufus’s face as she walked past him and sat. The four of them exchanged hugs.
Seriously? Mazie thought. Hugs? She lingered at the end of the aisle, pretending to look for something in her purse.
Professor Alolo pointed to group one. “Have you finished your manifesto?”
“We have,” replied a tall woman in capri pants and a crop top.
“Read to me its title and the first sentence.”
The woman stood tall and read, “’Poets Against Climate Change.’ We write the verse for a weeping planet.”
“Acceptable,” Professor Alolo declared. “Now, go write an ode that will refresh the forests, purify the waters, clear the air, and heal the Earth.”
The tall woman bowed her head, as if to a holy man, then returned to her seat.
Professor Alolo faced group two and made a chopping gesture toward them. “Have you finished your manifesto?”
The group members looked around the room, silently assessing who among them would speak first. Finally, a scrawny young man who looked to be no more than sixteen hopped onto his chair and read, “’Silencing Gun Violence.’ Every ten seconds, somebody dies from gun violence in America.”
Professor Alolo glared at them and said, “Needs work. Don’t give me facts and figures. Persuade me with the power of your words. Are you writers or statisticians?”
“Uh, writers,” the lad stammered.
“Then write a story that readers will feel like a bullet to the heart.”
Next, Professor Alolo turned to the Team of Strangers and asked, “What do you have for me?”
El Jefe stood and spoke: “’Toward a People’s History.’ To change people’s hearts and minds, you must expose the false narratives of history.”
“Explain,” Professor Alolo said.
“History is a fiction written by an elite few to justify the status quo. Monuments are put up by the vested powers to perpetuate that fiction. By their nature, they are oppressive.”
“That’s true,” Professor Alolo affirmed. “I’ve written on that subject myself.”
Rufus jumped to his feet. “And professor,” he continued, “We’re keeping it real, ‘cause we’re writing about a monument that’s standing right now in the public square in a nearby town.”
“Excellent,” Professor Alolo pronounced. “Write as if you’re tearing down that monument with your words.”
The Team of Strangers nodded in satisfaction. Mazie too, despite her doubts about this project. She agreed with the idea in general, but not so much the specifics. Messing with the statue of Philander Fink was a good way to get shot in Coon Creek. Surely they could find a safer target to make their point, like the statue of Christopher Columbus at the statehouse or the confederate soldier memorial in Franklin County. They seemed fixated on Philander Fink, though.
Professor Alolo folded his arms and puffed his chest. It looked to Mazie like the pose he’d assumed on the dust jacket photo of Impossible to Underestimate. Now, though, fifty years later, he looked more like a defiant scarecrow than a dangerous revolutionary. She also noticed the outline of a flask in his pants pocket.
When he finished interrogating the groups, Professor Alolo asked, “So what are you all waiting for?” He snapped his fingers. “Start writing.”
The Team of Strangers huddled up. Fingers poised above his laptop keyboard, Quang asked, “Are we ready?”
“Ready. Always. For anything,” Taara said.
“Being ready is not the same as knowing what to do,” El Jefe remarked.
“This is how writing should always be! No rules! No restrictions! We can just let our creative juices flow,” Quang gushed. He typed his own words as he spoke them, complete with exclamation marks.
“But this won’t be easy. The professor has some weird-ass ideas,” Rufus said.
Listening to them, Mazie wondered if she could get traded to another team. She muttered “balderdash,” which, she immediately realized to her horror, was the word her mother substituted for “bullshit.” That bothered her, so she modified her comment to, “Oh, fuck.”
“What fuck?” Rufus patted her hand; he looked at her with a deep-eyed expression of concern. “You seem kind of cranky today.”
Now everybody looked at her, and all she wanted to do was disappear. This feeling triggered her default defense mechanism, which was to counterattack.
“We don’t need any fucking manifesto. I don’t give a rat’s ass about a rusty statue of an old dead white hillbilly in some bass-ackwards shithole of a small town in the middle of nowhere. That place, Coon Creek, is like its stupid statue: stuck, standing there watching the world pass it by and powerless to do anything to change it. If the statue of Philander fucking Fink came to life, he’d feel right at home there. People’s attitudes haven’t changed in two hundred years.”
Mazie immediately regretted what she’d said. It was way too personal. Wasn’t a catharsis supposed to make you feel better? Instead, she felt like she’d just lost control of her bowels in front of everybody. Passion was a filthy thing.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “All I want to do is write.”
El Jefe murmured “hmmmm” with an ascending inflection, like he was rising up to catch a thought. When he got it, he tapped his hand against the armrest of his seat. “That’s it!”
“That’s a really dope idea, Maze,” Rufus cut in. “Imagine if that statue did come to life after two centuries. What would it do? What would it think? How would people react? Damn, I think that’s a story just waiting for us to write.”
Yeah, Mazie thought. That’s actually a pretty cool idea. She took out her cell phone, opened a notepad, and started tapping in words, saying them aloud as she did:
“It can go something like this....
“Philander Fink, feeling stiff, achy, and hungover, awakened in a strange place, with no memory of the previous night. He’d drank heavily and could only hope that he hadn’t made a total ass of himself again. But why was he standing on a pedestal in the middle of a park, with a pigeon on his head and a rifle on his shoulder? He looked around and saw he was still in Coon Creek, but somehow everything looked different.”
“That’s what I’m talking about!” Rufus said. “Let’s roll with that idea. So, what does he see?”
“Filth, ignorance, desperation.” Mazie said. “He sees overflowing garbage cans, trash blowing in the wind, squalid puddles of oily water, junk cars parked in front of boarded-up houses, and, in the middle of it all, the blackened shell of a bereft, burned-out factory, a bleak cathedral to the people’s despair, which showed in the dull blankness of their faces.”
Team Stranger listened to her in rapt admiration.
“Epic!” Rufus extolled. “You nailed it.”
El Jefe asked, “Have you ever been to that place, Coon Creek?”
“Never in this life,” Mazie replied.
The hardest thing to get used to was how quiet it got during the evenings in Golden Springs. It was scary. Around sundown things started to get lively in Rufus’s hood on the east side of Cleveland. He grew up in a duplex with the railroad tracks as his backyard and an alley for his front yard, near the corner of Kinsman and E. 93rd Street, where the incessant noises of the city formed the soundtrack of his youth. He used to sit on the crumbling porch by the side entrance to his home and bask in the constant whoosh, rumble, and screech, punctuated by sirens, shots, screams, and collisions. He marveled at how every day’s eclectic cacophony was totally unique. Listening made his senses sharper, his thoughts more alert. Cleveland spoke to him in rugged verse. He fell asleep every night to the drum and pulse of the streets.
As soon as he graduated from the University of Toledo with a degree in education, he returned to East Cleveland with a mission—to teach poetry to the children of the city. He wanted to be the teacher he wished he’d had, so he took his students on field trips downtown to listen to the urban music. He stood with them on street corners, where they shouted their poetry at the tops of their lungs for passersby to hear. He urged his student to “live poetry out loud,” to fill people’s headspace with art, for free.
Golden Springs, however, had its own built-in volume control.
Sitting with Shabazz inside a gazebo near the alumni house, Rufus worried that the silence might wipe his brain clean. Too much quiet made him restless. How could a poet work in such an audible void? It made him feel like he was drowning. Or, maybe he felt like that because he was extraordinarily stoned.
Rufus scratched Shabazz behind the ears and said, “I’m kind of freaking out.”
Shabazz barked—it sounded like “yes.” Rufus wondered if he’d heard right. The dog started wagging his tail so fast it blurred like a propeller. Rufus imagined Shabazz taking flight.
“Somebody’s glad to see me,” Mazie said, approaching from the main path.
Rufus stood and smiled broadly when he saw her. Mazie walked past him and rubbed Shabazz’s rump. Shit, he thought. I wish I had a tail.
Rufus shushed her. “Listen. Check it out, how quiet it is. Like being on the moon.”
Mazie looked past Rufus to the alumni house, where the curtains to Professor Alolo’s office were closed. “You’re high, aren’t you?”
Rufus winced. “Just a little bit.” He held his thumb and pointer finger in front of him, with just a tiny space between them.
Mazie clicked her tongue. Shabazz squirmed in front of her, as if he couldn’t decide which part of his body to present for her to pet. Watching the dog made Rufus dizzy. He steadied himself by latching onto Mazie’s shoulder.
“Easy, boy,” she said.
Rufus wondered if she meant him or the dog.
“So, what’s going on?” Mazie asked. “Why are you here?”
“Yeah, uh, see, Professor Alolo kicked me out. He said that he was busy and didn’t want to be disturbed. So, he asked me to hand Shabazz over to you for his evening walk.”
Mazie took the leash from Rufus’s hand. “Okay, thanks.”
Before she could get away, Rufus asked, “Mind if I tag along?”
She took a deep breath and exhaled with a single word, “Sure.”
Shabazz led them. Nose to the ground, the dog sniffed a route that took them off the main path, behind the fine arts building, under a windmill, into the Golden Springs Nature Preserve, and up the hill. Mazie and Rufus hustled to keep up with him.
“Shabazz seems in a hurry,” Mazie remarked.
“I think he wants to go to Shawnee Knob,” Rufus said. “I’m cool with taking a hike. You?”
“What Shabazz wants, Shabazz gets,” Mazie panted.
Not watching where he was going, Rufus stubbed his toe against a tree root and tripped forward, skipping and flailing his arms to keep from falling, and stomping through a patch of wild ginger in the process.
“Oops,” he said.
“You’re kind of clumsy, aren’t you?”
“Busted!” Rufus raised his arms. “I’m easily distracted.”
“Distracted by what?” Mazie asked.
Rufus thought, By your earlobes. He simultaneously fantasized about and restrained himself from leaning forward to nibble on them.
“Just stuff,” he replied, hoping she wouldn’t ask for details.
To his relief, though, Shabazz wasn’t slowing down, which made it impossible for them to sustain a conversation. Rufus had a million memes flashing through his mind, but not a single intelligible thought. Nothing is more impotent than a poet at a loss for words. His fear of silence was coming back. The more they walked, the harder it became for him to think of something unfoolish to say.
“You’re sweating,” Mazie observed.
Oh shit, Rufus thought. I must stink.
“Would you like a drink of water?” She offered him her water bottle.
“Yes. Please.”
“Sure. I brought it for the dog, but you look like you need it more.”
Mazie pitched the bottle to Rufus; he caught it, twisted open the cap, and gulped without breaking stride. He thought of Mazie’s lips touching the top of the bottle, her tongue licking the rim.
“Hey, by the way, I wanted to tell you something,” he said and handed back the bottle. “Yo, you were really on fire today in class. I mean, the way you described that Podunky little town was spot on.”
Mazie flinched. “I’m a writer. That’s what I do.”
“You nailed the little details. The potholes so big that ducks swim in them. Tennis shoes strung by their laces over telephone wires. The plastic flowers in the planters at the mobile home park. People wearing their pajamas at the laundromat. I love it.”
“Thanks.” Mazie tipped her shoulder at him. “I live in Columbus, but I know a lot of people that live like peasants in poor, dirty, shitty little towns just like that one. The funny thing is they’re proud of it.”
“Yeah, I kind of feel sorry for them.”
“Bullshit,” Mazie quickly replied.
Rufus bristled. Had he said something stupid?
“I’m telling you that the one thing you can say that pisses them off more than anything is that you feel sorry for them.”
“Yo, I get it.”
“No, you don’t.”
“But I do. I sure enough do, ‘cause of the way you write about it.”
“Oh. Well, I appreciate you saying so.”
Rufus felt his cheeks throb; he was black blushing.
Mazie continued, “And I never told you, Rufus, but I thought that was a pretty cool stunt you guys pulled with that stupid statue.”
“Too bad you couldn’t come.”
They reached the summit of Shawnee Knob sooner than Rufus would’ve liked. When the clearing came into sight, Shabazz started prancing in frantic circles around Mazie’s legs, getting twisted up in the leash.
“Why not let him run?” Rufus suggested.
“Okay,” she said and dropped the leash.
Shabazz hightailed it to the overlook, barking joyously. Mazie and Rufus slowed to a relaxed pace, taking small steps, drifting from side to side, brushing against each other. High overhead, the canopy of oak leaves soughed in a ghost wind. They stepped into the clearing just as the setting sun touched the horizon. Its aura imbued the valley with vivid tawny colors. Orange rays of light fanned across both sides of Clifton Gorge, casting bright ripples off Elixir Creek in the foreground and lengthening the shadows of the Coon Creek boulder field in the distance. Rufus and Mazie paused to reflect.
Rufus angled his head a few degrees toward Mazie, thinking that if she turned to look at him at that exact moment, he’d make a move to kiss her, or at least ask if he could kiss her, since he’d always heard that rich white chicks were all about consent. All it would take was a glance....
Shabazz made a sound they’d never heard from him before, deflecting Mazie from her reverie and Rufus from his intentions. The dog was on its back, belly up and legs splayed, rolling in the ground at the exact spot where he and Dixie had mated, whinnying like a drunk horse.
“What’s wrong with Shabazz?” Mazie asked.
“I think he’s in love,” Rufus guessed.
By the time she got back to her room, Mazie felt anxious, like the way she’d felt as a little girl and she’d done something wrong but nobody knew it yet. The blended sensation left her rubber legged with worry, hollow stomached with remorse, dizzy headed with apprehension... but also tingly all over her skin with the possibility that she just might get away with something and suffer no ill consequences.
When parting from Rufus, he’d told her that he had a “really good time,” as if they’d gone on a date and not just walked the dog. She simply said “yeah,” but did not specify whether she agreed that she, too, had a good time, or that she knew he’d had a good time. Mazie didn’t mean to lead him on, but he was so willing to be led that it almost seemed like she did him a favor by acting coy. Playing hard to get was a new kick for her.
But Mazie understood that the deeper source of her guilty titillation was deprecating her hometown and mocking her own people. She felt like a child using a forbidden curse word. Sure, Coon Creek was a dump and she’d be fine if she never set foot there again, but it was one thing to feel that way and another to say it out loud. Maybe she’d grown “too big for her britches,” just like her mother had warned her.
Mazie felt so uncomfortable with this feeling that she had to do something to get rid of it, without admitting anything, and there was only one person whom she trusted enough to lie to. She went to the library to use the phone there. She dialed the land line, rather than the cell phone. She counted the rings, determined to quit on the fourth.
“Hello?” Toad answered on the other end.
The sound of her mother’s voice traveled from her ear straight to the pit of her stomach, where it landed like a bomb, sending shock waves of guilt to all corners of her body and a great mushroom cloud into her throat. She could not have spoken a word if she’d wanted to. Mazie hung up.
