We’ve been driving about five minutes when the sky opens up and I say “FUCK” and Honey says “UCK” and then I say “SHIT” and she says “IIII” and I say “Sorry Honey, we don’t say words like that, we say SHOOT” and she says “Ool” and I press the gas and we are flying faster but then I think about hydroplaning and take my foot off the gas and my heart is pounding thinking about Alice in the soaking rain trying to make her way to shelter and I have to say “She has the umbrella, we are almost there, we are all going to be fine” and it’s only going to take us thirty minutes now by the safari motel attendant’s reckoning and then I think about the dirt road turning to mud and the Buick sliding down it and I feel my heart start to speed up again and I just keep saying “We’ll be there soon, we’ll be there soon,” and I see Honey looking quizzical in the rearview and I try to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth to still my pounding heart.
I’ve just slowed the car to round a bend in the road and when we clear it and are on to a long straightaway I have the rapid impression of something bad in the nearish distance—an accident, lights flashing big cars a group of people and I slam on the brakes and feel us juddering forward on the pavement, the wheels no longer turning like they should. I make a yipping sound into the car and I hear Honey make an echo of concern in the back and my heart is bursting in my chest but then we are slowing slowing slowing and I feel the brakes working and something floods my body leaving me exhausted and damp and cold and I say “It’s okay it’s okay” and I see now through the rain that it’s four pickup trucks and a giant green banner strung across their beds and a bunch of people in camouflage slickers and are they holding yes they are holding rifles and I think it’s a hunting thing a rural thing some kind of jamboree or something until I see the yellow on the green banner and it’s a flag and it’s the State of Jefferson flag with its two X’s and I say “Jesus fucking Christ.” The Buick is at a stop now and there are three cars on the road between us and the blockade, each one with a camouflaged figure leaning into the driver’s side window. I look in the rearview and there are no cars behind me and I’m not sure what to do so I start up the car and roll slowly toward the red SUV that’s last in line and when I’m about ten yards from the blockade I see it’s about ten or fifteen people and a few of them reach their hands in front of them to gesture slow and stop and one of them starts striding toward me with his gun. I pause for a moment to think Should I be afraid and though I don’t have that feeling, my body in flight as it felt in the Buick hurtling down the road, I know this feeling of surreality is a kind of fear as I watch this man approach the window with a rifle over his shoulder and a sheaf of papers in one hand and I roll the window down unthinkingly and the rain is sluicing into the car and now he’s at the window I give him a smile and hope for the best which I know is my dubious birthright as a representative of youngish reasonably attractive white American motherhood. It’s a tall, stringy white guy with a weathered face a mustache and a high forehead visible under the hood of his slicker.
