A Deeper Love Inside (3 page)

“I’m not afraid of snakes,” Riot said. “I used to lie in the grass right beside them and swim in the lake with the water moccasins.” She used her hand and motioned a snake movement. It looked like she was remembering something that felt good to her.

“I was lying in the long grass on my back late summer when I saw those ‘hell-copters.’ ” That’s what she called them. Then she pointed to the sky. “I didn’t panic. I just counted and watched them flutter in.”

“Our farm field workers dropped down and laid low like locusts,” she said, gesturing dramatically.

“That was
their
first time also, seeing hell-copters over my parents’ place. They were still flat on their bellies after the copters had flown for half an hour before fluttering out.” Riot paused like she was remembering it too clearly and waiting with her workers.

“Some workers didn’t show back up the next day. The workers who did show, my dad paid ’em double. He believed in ‘profit sharing,’ worked the land the same as if he wasn’t the owner, when he was. He hated the word
boss,
didn’t answer anyone who used it. He said workers united are more powerful than any boss, any state or any authority. My mom wasn’t the agreeing type, but she agreed with my Dad. My mom hated the words
boss, authority, state,
and
government.
”

The murder Riot committed, and the weed farm she came from, caught my attention. When she would talk some sentences I didn’t understand or give a fuck about, I’d just listen to the feeling of her storytelling, and watch the intense and swift way she switched her face gestures. Oddly, it felt like her words were filling my belly with a real meal, temporarily at least. And they were flooding my mind with
movie pictures. I thought about how I had not seen even one film since I was seven.

Riot said her parents drove a lavender station wagon with huge yellow daisies painted on. I thought to myself, “Who would buy that shit if they were getting gwop?”

Riot said her parents were caked up but didn’t care about fashion and money. “Mom and Dad were in love with freedom, the land, the soil, the animals, and people.”

She said her whole family was all vegetarians. Yet, they had four pet pigs who wasn’t locked up or fenced in, and roamed around a big area freely.

“I could tell each one of ’em from the other, and they each had names—Weed, Seed, Smoke, and Puff,” she said, pulling a finger as she counted em out. “We treated them like people.” She smiled, remembering. “Seriously, they each had different personalities, and I hope you know for sure that I’m not making none of this up.”

“You like animals?” she asked me. I smiled, remembering myself.

“Something like that,” I said, snatching my smile back. I didn’t want anyone in here to know my likes and dislikes. I knew they would use that shit against me. But I had obviously already given that one fact away by mistake.

“Then you would love Ganjah, my colt. He’s incredible,” Riot said.

“How fast is he?” I asked curiously.

“He could outrun the bullets fired from the tower,” Riot answered, referring to the rumored guards who, everyone said, stood watch from way up high over the lock-up facility for violent juvenile girls, where we are both prisoners. The sky guards were the threat, make one wrong move and they would riddle our little bodies with bullets. None of us saw them, though. At least I didn’t. But I didn’t doubt that they were up there lurking.

“Ganjah’s faster than my brother’s horse, Sensimillia,” Riot added.

I pictured pretty ponies galloping in my mind. I liked the way Riot put her words, like she wasn’t afraid of shit. I liked that she was rich—even if her people didn’t know how to spend or wear it right. At least they had a family, and the pictures in my mind said they was happy.

“Have you ever seen a diamond needle?” she asked out of nowhere.

I had seen plenty of diamonds. Winter had fifty princess-cut diamonds in her tennis bracelet and 125 in the matching necklace. I counted them secretly, since I wasn’t allowed to touch her jewelry or Momma’s and wasn’t scheduled to get my own diamond set until I turned sixteen. I shined Winter’s diamonds after I tried them on and before I placed them back on the black velvet and placed them exactly where they were hidden in her room before I found them.

“Diamond needles are insects with beautiful wings,” Riot said. “They look like a mix between a dragonfly and a honeybee. That’s what the hell-copters looked like the second time they showed way up in the sky, a swarm of diamond needles dancing behind swollen clouds on a rainless, gray day. Our fieldworkers scattered like ants in all directions. I crawled into my hiding place like my parents told me and my brother to do if the copters ever returned,” she said, and I felt in my gut that something real bad was about to happen in Riot’s story.

“Unlike the previous time, the copters cut their way through the clouds and actually landed on our land.” Her fingers were fluttering in the jumpy motion of the helicopters landing.

I glanced at the guards. In here if any of us keep using our fingers, they swear we gang signaling. As Riot described the raid on her property, pictures and sounds of the Nassau County Police, geared up and guns drawn, flashed through my mind from the night they swooped down and barged in on my family. They smirked smiles as they cut open our leather sofas and love chairs, broke vases and dishes, jerked down pictures from walls and pulled furs and fashions out of our closets. Capturing and cuffing my handsome and fashionable father, who was dressed in a thick black suede v-neck leisure suit and sporting black Gucci loafers wasn’t enough for them. They seemed to want to destroy his success and lessen him some in our eyes.

“Jealous motherfuckers,” I whispered under my breath before I tuned back in to the story Riot was still telling.

“Ragweed and gunpowder, that’s all I could smell. I didn’t move. I was frozen by the sounds of war,” Riot said and struck a frozen frightened pose.

“I knew my dad and mom were firing back. After all,
the Feds were the intruders.
The fifty acres and all of our animals were our private property, brought and paid for in full by my parents.”

A slop house guard patrolled by our table. He knew it was unusual for an older girl to be sitting with a young one. Besides I was in my red jumper, so he would’ve been watching closely anyway. Red jumper meant violence. Riot glanced at him.

“You know a shootout is nothing like what you see on television. The speakers in your TV set can’t capture the deafening noise or the thickening of the air or the scent of flesh ripped open and guts and blood bursting and pouring out, till there’s nothing left except for dark stains.”

Riot described the murder of her parents, who were killed defending their freedom, their property, family, and hard work. “They went out the right way. That’s what they would say. ‘Fuck a government that wants to tell you what you can grow on your property and still charge you property taxes for property you already paid for,’ ” she said, imitating what I guessed was either her mother’s or father’s words.

“Live free or die fighting. That’s our thing.” She put up two fingers like a peace sign, but then put her fingers to her lips pretending like she was smoking a cigarette but she wasn’t. There’s no smoking allowed in juvy lockdown. None of us are over sixteen.

Riot and her brother stayed still for days in an underground bunker their father had built long ago. “We had books, blankets, a toolbox and candles, two flashlights, a limited supply of water, a fruit basket, a first-aid kit, flares, emergency items and canned beans, dry snacks and, of course, our guns.”

“When the intruders, cars, trucks, sirens, and voices had ceased for more than forty-eight hours, we climbed out,” she said.

It wasn’t long before their head count confirmed what “our hearts couldn’t handle,” but that they had already suspected. Not only their parents’ bloodied bodies had been removed, but their animals had been seized also. They had heard their cries, their feet and their voices from the underground. “It sounded so sick I forced myself to forget it. Otherwise it would’ve kept replaying in my head. We felt helpless, like cowards. My brother and I both fought and held one another back from coming out of the bunker like our parents told us not to do.” Riot’s face revealed her regrets.

“My collie named Clyde had been taken and his wife, Bonnie. We loved our dogs. We were all family.” Riot spoke as though dogs could actually be married. I wanted to laugh at that, but from her look, she was dead serious and still hurting. So I didn’t.

Her and her brother scrubbed up spilled blood and continued to live on their land. “The harvest had brought us plenty of fruits and vegetables. We could’ve lived off of just the apples and corn alone.”

Riot said that they knew that the two of them being left alone was only temporary. The authorities, school principal, and maybe even friends or neighbors would come looking for them. “How could two children just disappear without a trace?”

“Me and my brother was always the best at hide-and-seek. We used to play it with the workers’ children on some weekends when they’d show up. One autumn, we were playing the most wicked game of hide-and-seek ever. It dragged on from sunup to sundown, when their parents were done for the day.
No one
knew the property better than us.” Riot had her hands on her hips now, looking fully confident.

“After our parents were murdered, it was three months before Con Ed cut off our electricity. Three and a half months before Ma Bell shut down our phones.

“The telephones didn’t matter. We didn’t make or take no calls, and treated the phones like a trap. We’d listen to it ring one, two, seven, eight times. We also rarely used the power and tried to accomplish everything in the daylight. Lights could be seen by any curious neighbor. Lucky for us, out in ‘quiet country,’ neighbors were more than a mile away on both sides. We only had to be on the watch for the extra-curious ones, who now treated our place like an exciting stop on a crime/horror tour, or the land-thieving realtors who had posted a ‘for sale’ sign at the beginning of our land and then at the end,” she said.

“The hell-copter raid had taken place in August. When the power finally shut off in November, we sparked up the backup generator that my parents had used many times in the furious country storm weather. We had gasoline stored, but not enough for more than two weeks’ worth, so we used it sparingly. We put all our blankets in one pile and slept there together underneath them all. We came close to freezing to death but luckily not both at the same time. When I got
sick, my brother healed me. When he was sick, I healed him. We survived the coldest winter ever, my brother and me.”

Riot began howling quietly with her hands cuffed around each side of her mouth. “When the wolves began howling, and the puppies that Bonnie and Clyde had cleverly hidden and left behind went to barking, and the cans began rattling from the trip wire that my brother laid on the road as a warning to us, we were both at different places on the property. My brother was out in the fields putting down some seeds. I was coming from around the back of our house.” Riot’s face turned angry.

“As the stranger’s car rode cautiously up our pebbled dirt road, I saw his car door first and then his license plate. The plates were marked with two of the words that our parents hated most,
state
and
government.
”

The state worker man couldn’t see Riot. Riot saw him. She said she read the words on the side of his car;
Bureau of Child Welfare.

“All I could imagine was the guy trying to hurt or separate my brother from me.” Her eyes were squinted now.

“I grabbed my rifle, shot one clean shot, one time, straight through his forehead.” She gestured as though she was holding and aiming her rifle right there in the slop house.

“Six days later cops flooded our property and made another massive and thorough search, uncovering the murdered guy’s buried body and the state vehicle parked behind closed doors, inside our empty barn where some of our stolen animals would’ve been if they hadn’t a slaughtered them.” She put her hands up halfway over her head.

“I got surrounded in the chicken coop where I was squatting,” she said, finally smiling.

“I’m ten,” I told the police. “Don’t shoot me. I’m only ten years old.” She pushed her hands up in the full surrender position.

Riot was so lucky she was only ten back then. We both knew that juvy was fucked up. But we both heard and believed that grown-up prison is much worser. At fourteen years old, any girl up here in juvy can get transferred out to an adult facility without notice. Sixteen is the oldest anybody in here could be. In juvy, no girl turned seventeen.

“I’m asking you to be one of my sons,” Riot said, strangely.

“Sons?” I repeated.

“It’s obvious you’re younger than me. I’m thirteen,” Riot confided.

“I’m ten,” I revealed.

“So, you be my son. I see you’re always fighting. You are young and slim. But no matter how young, big, or small anyone is, one person can never win alone.”

I was thinking about her words and if they had any point or meaning to me.

“Heard you got beef with Cha-Cha,” Riot said.

“What about it? I fight her. It ain’t nothing.” I shrugged my shoulders.

“Cha-Cha’s a robot. She gives the guards what they want. She starts fights and fucks up the flow. She gives them the excuse and the reason to clamp down on you and everybody in your section,” she said. I was listening.

“Say yes, and you got a crew,” Riot added. I was thinking. I already had a crew.

“The thing is, our crew is smarter than the robots. We don’t act like stupid girls fighting over hair and boys and visits or dumb shit. We all girls who came from families with either land, or money, or both.” She rubbed her fingers together making the make money sign.

“We action figures.”
She gestured like she was about to leap up from the table. “We camouflage.” She squatted back down and relaxed. “We got plans and connections. We make moves.” She pushed her face closer to mine.