“That warbonnet? Completely historically inaccurate. That’s ceremonial headgear for the Plains Indians, like the Cheyenne. The Lenape wore a sort of turban.”
The kids look up at Spider, then at me. I shrug. So the ones who did the headdress start tugging at their pictures with their erasers.
“She got in your head, didn’t she?”
I don’t know how well Spider knows Sun. I don’t know if they’re best friends, or lovers, or just two people who occasionally get high together.
“Dude, it’s obvious. Since your ghost hunt, both you guys been walking around like you did see something.”
“You guys ever hook up?” I just ask him. I would never ask anyone else this, but I ask Spider. He’s too open not to reach in. To not would almost be rude.
“Oh no. I like my ladies tall. I mean real big. You know what I mean?” I have no idea what he means. Sun is at least five ten. “Statuesque,” Spider adds, and one hand goes up, and one hand goes out, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. The guy’s barely five feet, almost all women must be tall to him. But he winks and there really is no possible negative response to a wink, so I say, “A’ight, a’ight,” which is a great Philly way of agreeing without saying anything.
“Well, you need any advice on the woman thing, hit me up,” Spider tells me.
“Okay. Well, thanks,” I say in a sincere yet apparently unconvincing way.
“No really, dude. I know women. I used to be one, in a past life.”
“In a past life?” I look over at Spider to see his joking smile. It ain’t there. This little guy, lined with muscles and little ball naps forming a beard across his jawbone, he’s definitely a man. Specifically, a madman. He berates the class playfully and they hurry. All these little mixie pixies, up and up, through the trees to Mulattopia. He’s so good with them, this carny. Spider even knows the kids’ names. He calls out to them like Santa addressing his reindeer. I can reliably recall one name, Kimet’s, and that’s solely because he’s dating my daughter. Still, I say his name when he walks by. He nods and smiles and is suitably nervous, befitting of a boy being investigated by a girl’s father for signs of normative teenage heterosexual male behavior.
“Let me see your sketch.” It comes out sounding like I’m a soldier demanding documents. The boy stops walking, reaches for his satchel. It’s got a National Organization for Women patch on it. Just to throw me off.
“Kinda needed more time, if you could—” he tries to tell me, but I interrupt him with a grunt. Kimet stares at my face. I stare back. So he starts pulling out the sketch. The other kids are passing us now. Some stop, want to see, I shoo them on. Kimet holds his image to his chest until we’re clear again.
“I don’t think—” he protests, but I quickly get a hand on his paper and he releases it because he doesn’t want it to tear. I start hiking again as I inspect it, and he follows.
It’s good. Structurally, anatomically, the sketch is informed, skillfully rendered. Even the perspective he’s chosen: from the side, completely imagined because we did not get a clear view of the statue from that vantage. And of course, our statue was kneeling, peering into the expanse, not leaning forward as he sat defecating on a large stone toilet, as Kimet depicts.
But the subject is not the wrong-hatted Lenape. It’s me. He even has my jeans in a pile at the bottom of my hairy legs.
I look up at Kimet. Teenagers, they feel everything so distinctly, desire, hatred, and right now I hope, fear. My laughter bursts; I don’t even mean to, it just erupts when I attempt to maintain severity. I find other people’s fears so amusing; I might even enjoy the absurdities of my own if they weren’t petrifying.
“I’m really glad you captured the cut muscularity of my ass.”
“Shit” comes out of Kimet’s mouth. It’s not directed to or at me though, but to the small crowd up by the Mélange Center’s front gate. The door is closed, the metal mesh sealed up, which it never is this time of day. In front of it now loiters our entire art class, two police cars, Roslyn, and Principal Kamau of the Umoja School. Kimet’s father.
“You forget you had to leave early?” I ask, but when I look over Kimet’s already turned around, walking back down the trail again. I call to him, but he ignores me, and it takes a couple of quick hops to catch him.
“Sorry, I can’t. I’m not going.” He tries to pull away, but I have too much of a lock on his elbow for him to do it politely.
“You afraid of going to the dentist or something?”
“My mom sent me here, not him. He’s not even supposed to be here. You know, the divorce.”
Divorce. Yes, I’m familiar with the malady. I don’t even think of mine, but of my parents’. That’s the only reason I let him head around the perimeter, to wait in the woods at least for a little while.
Cop cars aren’t that surprising in the park, they roll up and down the valley road most of the day, checking to see if the leaves are still there. The cops themselves are standing outside their vehicle. One with a phone to his ear, the other farther down the hill, smoking. Cops make me nervous even in casual mode. Kimet’s dad, he makes me nervous too. Here I am in the buttermilk, having chosen this Europeanized blackness when I was offered the full, undiluted glory of Africana. We still cool, right, my expression says, and I attempt to cut off all awkwardness by approaching him directly as he stands next to Roslyn.
“What?” is all he says to me. Then he looks at my outstretched hand as if this is some curious custom the local vagrant population insists on. He takes it, limply, and lets it fall again with only the slightest of nods. I have not joined the Oreos, I want to tell him, but he doesn’t recognize me. No, he does, I see a faint glimmer in his eyes. He just doesn’t care. Somehow, the current status of my racial patriotism, while highly important to me, is of shockingly little concern to him at the moment. He stands with his arms folded and stares down Roslyn, while she types into her phone with her thumbs as if spell-casting. I wait for her to finish, but when she does, no conversation follows. Eye contact brings a flash of a grin my way, but it just says, This is the face I’m supposed to make when I’m happy, and then it’s gone as soon as she turns away again.
“Let’s go for the second leg of the nature hike,” Spider yells over. I look at him, waving at me frantically, the students all huddled around him. But there’s no second leg. That hike was a one-leg beast and we hopped it.
“Excuse me,” one of the officers comes through, breaking the silence. He’s got a roll of yellow tape in his hand. He walks past, heads to the sealed gate.
“Really, do you have to? Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” Roslyn purrs, but apparently he lacks the necessary mommy issues to be swayed by her. And then it says POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS as yellow tape decorates the entry.
—
“The cops are just doing the whole ‘You’re not supposed to be squatting on public property thing.’ It’s no biggie,” Spider tells me. We cut back and walk single file around the side of the perimeter after feigning like we were walking north toward the creek again.
“What do you mean it’s ‘no biggie’? Why are they doing that?”
“Because we’re not supposed to be squatting in a public park.”
The kids trail behind us, Kimet, the oldest, picking up the rear. A few kids actually ask, “Are we there yet?” They just arrived on earth, so lack all consciousness of cliché.