Knox A Little Later
“Wait,” Sylvie says. “So—”
“So Cleopatra lived like two thousand years before the moon landing but like twenty-five hundred years after the pyramids were built,” I say.
“Ah, okay, now I get what you were saying. Then she lived significantly closer in time to the moon landing than the building of the pyramids. Is that true?”
“Apparently.”
“Where did you read that?”
“In some big book that you’re supposed to read while you’re on the toilet.”
“Supposed to read?”
“Well, like, it’s intended for that purpose. I shouldn’t say you’re supposed to read it on the toilet. You can read whatever you want; it’s a free country.”
“Did you read it on the toilet?”
“No, I read it in an off-toilet setting.”
“Is that allowed?” Sylvie asks.
“I think that by the same token that you’re not required to read it while on the toilet, you’re also not forbidden from reading it when in an off-toilet setting.”
Sylvie wrinkles her nose. “Don’t say ‘off-toilet setting’ anymore.”
“Sorry.”
“Anyway, I find that weird factoid more credible coming from a book that’s been, like, edited than if you got it from an email forward from your boomer uncle.”
“I feel very fortunate to have largely skipped the boomer uncle email forward phenomenon.”
“You hungry?”
“I could eat. It’s lunchtime-y.”
“I am. And Winslow is acting squirrelly like he needs to potty. I just saw a sign for a rest area. We’ll pull off there.”
After we park, I take sandwich fixings to a nearby concrete picnic table and start making lunch for Sylvie and me—it’s slow-going with my bad hand—while she hitches up Winslow and takes him on a quick walk.
When she returns, her face is pale like she ate something that had spent too much time in a dumpster (I would know) and her energy is flustered and angry.
“Let’s go. I hate this rest stop.”
I set down the plastic knife I’m using to spread mustard. “You okay? You look . . . not.”
“There were these two gross old dudes back there and the one with the bandanna on his head was totally filming me. Like, super obviously, as if ‘yeah? what’re you gonna do about it, little girl?’”
“What? Who?”
Sylvie nods in the direction of a couple of sunburned men in their fifties, leaning on expensive Harleys. Both have beer guts and gray goatees and wear sunglasses and shiny black leather vests. One has a Confederate flag bandanna covering his head. Neither has a neck.
“I’m gonna go talk to them.”
“Knox.”
“Just a conversation.”
“Don’t, dude. They’re bikers.”
“They’re dentists.”
“They look like bikers.”
“That’s how I know they’re dentists.”
“Just let it drop, please, and let’s go. I’m fine.”
I ignore her and start toward the men.
“Knox!” Sylvie calls after me.
I ignore her again, walking fast, and approach the men. “Hey,” I call.
They look up from their conversation. “Help you with something?” Non-bandanna man asks.
My heart is revving and I’m afraid that when I speak my nerves will betray me. “Hey, guys, my lady friend back there says y’all might have been filming her while she was walking her dog. I was wondering if y’all would delete whatever you recorded.” Lady friend?
Bandanna man scoffs. “I think your little lady friend—whoever she is—is mistaken, chief.”
Blood surges in my ears and at the base of my skull. “Thing is, I don’t think she’s wrong. She seemed pretty sure and she wouldn’t lie about it.”
“Not saying she’s lying,” Bandanna man says. “I’m saying maybe she’s so used to thinking she’s a sweet little blond dime piece she just assumes the whole world is her personal paparazzi.”
“See, a second ago, you were acting like you had no idea who I was talking about, but I never said she’s blond.”
“Oh what, we got Inspector Columbo here? You caught me red-handed, I confess.” He fake blubbers and raises his hands in a gesture of mock surrender and he and his companion chortle.
I wait for them to finish. “It means you remember her, which makes me think she’s right about what she saw.”
“If you’re calling me a liar, you may wanna rethink that, big man.”
“I’m not calling you anything. I’m asking you to be cool and delete the video. Please. It made her uncomfortable.”
“Maybe you’re making us uncomfortable with your accusations,” Non-bandanna man says. He and his friend stare hard at me.
For a second none of us say anything, but I don’t retreat.
Finally, Bandanna man says, “Say we did take a video of the area because we’re documenting our ride and she happened to be in it. What you gonna do about it? Work us both over with your good arm?” Both men laugh. Bandanna man hawks and spits on the asphalt in front of me.
“No,” I say quietly. “Here’s what I will do though.
I’ve memorized both your license plates while we were chatting here and as soon as we part ways, I’m going to look them up.
There’ll be information about you attached to them.
Then I’m going to track down your wives—you’re both wearing wedding bands—and I’m going to contact them.
Maybe at their jobs if they have them. And I’ll tell them to check your phones for a video from a rest stop in Illinois of a random pretty blond girl walking a golden retriever.
I’m guessing there’s some zooms you wouldn’t want them to see.
If you have kids, I’m going to find them and tell them too.
Maybe your jobs and coworkers. I’ll tell them today’s date so they know I’m not lying.
So yeah, I won’t be working you over with my good arm. I’ll be using my good thumb.”
As I speak, the smirks fade from their faces, replaced by reddening and scowls.
“Big talk,” Bandanna man sputters.
“Try me.”
Bandanna man yanks his phone from his vest pocket, almost dropping it.
With a sneer, he opens a video and waves it in my face.
“Look, jerkoff. See? See me deleting it? There you go. Tell your little girlfriend not to walk where people are filming.” He makes an exaggerated show of deleting the video.
I saw enough to see Sylvie squarely centered in frame.
“From the trash too.” Two days ago I wouldn’t have known to check that.
Bandanna man shows me him emptying his camera roll’s trash. “There. Now you better move along before I delete something else.”
I turn and start to leave.
Bandanna man calls after me. “Hey, tough guy, I hear a word of blowback about this, I’m tracking you down and I’ll make you regret it.”
I turn back and, with a little grin, say, “I’m not easy to find. You’ll need to be a better detective than you are a dentist.”
As I walk away, Bandanna man howls at my back, “You already looked me up, you psycho loser?!”
A LITTLE LATER
“I got them to delete the video,” I crow as I approach Sylvie who’s packed up the lunch stuff and is behind the wheel of the van, the engine running.
“Great,” Sylvie says in a flat voice that instantly deflates my sense of triumph. She pulls out of the rest area. The two men are nowhere to be seen.
“Uh . . . you cool?”
“As ice.” Her voice is indeed icy.
“You sound mad. I thought you’d be excited.”
“I tried twice to get you to drop it and you just ignored me.”
Hearing that knocks the wind out of me. “Oh. Sorry.”
“Like, the two biker dentist creeps at least didn’t disregard me asking them not to film me, because I didn’t ask.”
“Wait, so I’m worse than the biker dentist creeps?”
“No. Yes, in a way. I’m just saying—what if that hadn’t gone as well as it did?
And by that, I mean you returning to the van still with just one broken arm.
What if? What if they’d hulked out on you.
Then what? Another ER? More casts? You in a coma?
What if they’d pulled a gun and decided to ‘stand their ground’ and shot you dead?
I really can’t go through watching—” Sylvie stops abruptly.
I wait for her to finish the sentence but she doesn’t.
“I knew they weren’t gonna do anything. I’ve run into a lot of dudes like that in my life.”
“Yeah, but that isn’t really the point, is it.”
“I said I was sorry. I really am. Can I tell you where I’m coming from on this?”
“Okay.”
“Before we met—like, right before—I was in this situation where I knew about a dude being an exploitative sleazebag. I’d seen him act that way. And I took action to protect myself, but I didn’t take action to protect anyone else. And that’s been eating at me.”
“That sucks.”
“I know, I should have done something.”
“No, I meant it sucks you were in that situation. It sounds like you didn’t choose to be.”
“Yeah, no, not at all. So that’s where I’m coming from. And I really hope you’ll accept my apology because I am sorry.”
Sylvie’s face softens ever so little. “Let’s make a deal.”
“I’m all ears.”
“I’ll be the sole judge of when I need someone to step in and protect me and if I say I don’t need it, that’s the final word.”
“Okay.”
“And you will forgive yourself for whatever you’ve done or not done because it’s really obvious you’re a good person who’s trying to move through this world in the right way. Deal?”
“Deal.”
We drive for a bit in a more comfortable silence. Sylvie says, “I probably just shouldn’t have said anything at all; it’s not like those dudes were upskirting me or something.”
“Upskirting?”
“Knox, I am profoundly glad you don’t know what that is.
And you know what? I refuse to be the one to teach you.
But while we’re talking about how past traumas informed our actions a little bit ago, I’ll reveal this: remember I was telling you about that crustpunk chick and her methy boyfriend who robbed me right before we met? ”
Dawn. This is a topic I would like not to come up again. “Yeah,” I say.
“Well, I kinda understated how that all went down. It ended up getting physical and I got slapped pretty hard and I—”
“Wait, that girl and her boyfriend actually hurt you?” My mind tells me it’s best not to keep poking at this but the seething mass of commingled anger and guilt rising in my gut overcomes my better judgment.
“Yeah, she hit me and pushed me down. Anyway—”
“Like how badly did you get hurt?”
“Knox. Like not severely, okay? Can I finish? Jeez, you sound like you want to track those two down and kickbox them. I think you hate them more than I do.”
“Yeah, well, I kinda do,” I mutter. “Sorry for interrupting.”
“So yeah, I keep replaying it in my mind and I was doing exactly that in the moment I caught the dude filming me and I was just . . . done with being exploited and victimized, you know?”
“I’m the last person who’ll judge your reaction. Remember? I thought your reaction warranted risking them giving me a root canal with no anesthesia. Not that I’ve ever had one, but it sounds like it would hurt.”
“Or the chocolate-flavored fluoride.”
“Those guys were my first encounter with a dentist in a really long time so I’ve never experienced the chocolate fluoride.”
“Nor do you ever want to. So, do I wanna know how you twisted their arms into deleting the video? Will you make me an accomplice to something?”
I laugh. “I told them I’d memorized their license plate numbers and if they didn’t delete the video in front of me, I’d look them up, get their names, look those up, contact their wives and kids, and tell them to check their phone for the video.”
“Do you know how to do any of that?”
“No, but I assume it’s possible.”
“So.” Sylvie snaps a couple times. “What are their license plate numbers?”
“No clue.”