Excerpt from Potential Weapons

Holding the road map at arm’s length, Abi Leong’s mother, Alice, frowned over the edge of her glasses as though the crisscrossed lines contained a hidden message that would be revealed if only she could stare them down. Without her thick lenses, her blue eyes looks unnaturally small. Alice was so nearsighted as to be legally blind. Over the yeas she’d grown farsighted as well, yet she refused to give in to bifocals. “It’s not vanity,” she’d told Abi. “It’s another form of resistance. One day you’ll understand.”

Abi gazed out the windshield at the empty road and gray sky. Winter had given way to a cool, rainy spring. Some of the fields were newly plowed, and the disturbed earth gleamed black and wet. This was the kind of country –flat, fertile, serious –where you could actually feel the gravity hold you to the ground. Although it had been eight months since she’d moved to Indiana, Abi still wasn’t sure why she was there. At the moment, in the Subaru with her mother, who was visiting from New York –the city Abi never should have left –being there had the claustrophobia feel of fate.

They were driving to a Ku Klux Klan rally in a town called Clarion. Going hadn’t been Abi’s idea. For her, protest was a thorny business with no real right or wrong. Besides, she was afraid –not of the Klan, exactly, but of the possibility of violence and other possibilities she hadn’t yet named. Not that her fears mattered. At breakfast on the second day of her visit, her mother had read about the upcoming rally in the Tippecanoe Courier. Rattling the newspaper in Abi’s direction, she’d said, “Look at him, will you? A Grand Dragon for the new millennium.” Abi peered at the photo of a plump-cheeked white man in a gray jacket, black slacks, and striped ochre tie. The man –who, like her, was in his early thirties –stood on the county courthouse steps, clutching an ungainly briefcase. Grand Dragon. He could just as well have been a junior-level executive in a company that manufactured wall anchors or venetian blinds.

“Let’s go, hon. Don’t you want to look evil in the face?” Alice’s eyes, for the first time since Abi’s father had died, had shone openly with joy.

“I think I’ve solved the mystery,” she said now. “Stay on this road. Keep heading south. It’s simple. Once you figure it out, everything in this state of yours is simple.”

Abi knew that the moment you left the highways, north-central Indiana dissolved into a frustrating web of back roads. Maps were useless. Roads could unexpectedly circle or dead-end at bridges that had been washed out for years.

“My state? Who says it’s mine?”

“Well, one of us lives here, and it sure isn’t me?”

Grinning, Alice refolded the map. She was no stranger to what she called the Dark Heartland of America. Before moving to New York at the age of eighteen, she had grown up on a farm ear Hutchinson, Kansas. There was a whole side of the family Abi knew only from photographs: light-haired, smiling strangers who began in sepia and ended in the faded colors of the first Kodak snapshots. The summer she was five, Abi actually visited Kansas with her mother. In Kansas, the clouds were large and silent. One afternoon, a hawk flew into the picture window. Her grandfather wrapped the stunned bird in a towel and laid it on the kitchen table. Abi’s grandmother said, “She’ll remember this for the rest of her life,” and so far she did, but she barely remembered her grandparents. Soon they became photographs again, and after they’d died –within a year of each other –and the farm was sold and debts paid, Abi had received a check for two hundred twenty-six dollars, their legacy.

“Mom,” she said. “maybe it’s better to stay away. There’s that other rally across town. I think they’re calling it a unity celebration.”

Alice withdrew two rubber balls from her bag. Squeezing them helped fend off the rheumatoid arthritis that assailed her hands. Although they’d been reunited for only three days, the habit was already wearing on Abi’s nerves.

“Unity,” her mother murmured.

The balls were Spaldings, the same kind Abi had played handball with when she was a kid.

“Unity celebration. Sounds dull as dishwater.” Alice’s fists closed over the hard pink globes. “What does one do at unity celebration. Unify?”

Abi directed her gaze back out at the gray and black world. A ray of fast-fading light fell on three squat white silos, making them glow like obese angels. Here was a life her mother might have lived if she’s stayed where she’s been born, a life of houses with pitched roofs and a single tree in each yard –a stick-figure dream of a world that Abi had drawn over and over when she was a child, despite the fact that the Leongs had lived in an apartment on the Upper West side. In her pictures, the skin of the mother, father, and child was always the crayon color they used to call flesh.

“Eyes on the road, honey,” Alice said. “Tired? Want me to take over? It’s been awhile, but I think I can still pilot one of these things.”

“Mom, I’m fine.”

They passed a few moments without speaking.

“You sure we want to do this? Abi said at last. “I mean, what if it gets ugly?’

Her mother’s stiff fingers squeezed. “People can get ugly. That’s certainly true.”

Suddenly, Alice turned and stared at Abi as she’d remembered something she was horrified to have forgotten.

“You’re afraid, hon.”

Abi smiled. “I’m not. No more than I should be, anyway.”

“Of course you are. This is your first real demonstration. You’re like a soldier going into matter for the first time, not only afraid of injury and death and enemies and all, but of your own reaction.” She nodded knowingly. “This will be nothing, I promise. And even if it does turn into something, we’ll live through it.”

The horizon ahead was broken by a low line of trees, which meant they were approaching Clarion. A dark blot hovered in the sky. At first Abi thought it was a hawk and, grateful for the chance to change the subject, was on he verge of pointing it out until she realized it was a helicopter.

The police helicopter slowly circled. Was her mother right in naming her fear? Was she, in effect, afraid of herself? Before the though could take hold, she pushed it into the edge of her consciousness, where she had deposited many of her mother’s other ideas.

When they came to the sign that said they were entering Clarion, Population 4,508, Alice tucked the handballs back into her purse.

“I’m not interested in your unity celebration,” she said. “In my time, I’ve heard enough talk about what’s good and right. I know it’s hard, hon, but make your old ma happy. Take her to where the action is.”

Copyright 2004 by Jocelyn Lieu. All rights reserved.