Underground Airlines (12 page)

“I’m Martha, by the way.”

“How do you do? I’m Jim Dirkson.”

“Oh, okay, Jim Dirkson. Sorry. I didn’t know we were doing last names.” She was in her late twenties, early thirties, but she was tiny and laughed like a teenager, big and unself-conscious. “Martha Flowers. And this here is Lionel, like the trains.”

“Mama!” The kid scowled and bumped into his mom, accidentally on purpose. “Like the
lion
.”

Martha rolled her eyes. “Do you know that cartoon?
Lionel the Lion
? It’s terrible.”

“It’s—no, it’s not. Mama!” said Lionel. “It’s badass.”

“Whoa! Hey!” Martha, playfully shocked, knocking her son gently on his shoulder. “Don’t say
badass
.”

“You say it!”

“I’m allowed to say it.”

I smiled at all this, the teasing and admonishment, the affectionate banter. I had learned about the love between parents and children the way I had learned so many other things, by observation. By skulking, by paying attention through what I came to call in retrospect my shadow years: years out of slavery but not yet in civilization. Saving up to buy solid papers, living underground. In Naperville in a church basement; under a train bridge on Chicago’s west side. I’d spend whole days in the reading room of the big library downtown, a shadow in the corner; reading the great slave narratives, reading Ellison, Baldwin, Wright. Learning my own history. I read Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, the one that had, legendarily, been smuggled page by page out of a Florida cane plantation two decades before that state went free.

Slowly drinking water in coffee shops, perching on corners, watching people interact, learning free American language. The way people laughed when they were allowed to laugh out loud.
Ha ha ha,
I said to myself on the basement floor in the middle of the night.
Ha ha ha.

The elevator door binged. “Well, come on, Jim Dirkson,” said Martha. “Come on down to the pool and chat a minute.”

It wasn’t much of a pool they had down there, fifty square feet, maybe, a shallow end and a deep end and no diving board or anything. A list of rules, painted on a wooden sign. No diving. No horseplay. No lifeguard on duty. At the far end of the room was a glass wall revealing the “fitness center”—a couple treadmills and a bowl of fruit and a wall-mounted TV set to CNN.

Lionel dropped his towel and leaped unceremoniously into the pool, cannonballing in, disappearing and then splashing back up a second later, sputtering and grinning, water dewdropping on his brow.

“Hoo, my God,” he shouted. “It’s so cold. Mama, you gotta come in. It’s so cold.”

“No way.”

“Come
on
.”

“I didn’t even wear a suit.”

Lionel blew her a raspberry and wheeled back under the surface, flashed around, a streak beneath the chlorine blue. A second later his feet jutted up from the surface and kicked back and forth.

“Kid’s amazing,” said Martha softly, then, abruptly, “Thanks for the food yesterday morning, by the way. Very decent of you. Extremely human.”

I shrugged. “How was the job fair?”

“Great.” She pushed at her hair. “Really great. Really, really, really great.” She smiled sardonically, but her eyes were anxious and scared, staring into some kind of bad future. “It was the sort of thing, the first day is all applications, meeting the people, then people call you back on the second day if they want you to come in and interview.” I remembered the stack of paperwork on her lap, dog-eared photocopies, ballpoint pen smearing everywhere. “So, you know, anyway,” she said. “Here I am at the pool.”

Well. I had my own thing going. I had my own problems.

A clutch of new kids came in, white kids, shrieking. A girl maybe thirteen plus two twin brothers just about Lionel’s age, the girl with freckles and the boys with flat midwestern crew cuts. They all splashed on in there, and the boys immediately got into some kind of tussle with Lionel, the way kids that age do, making themselves into animals, sliding around each other, surfacing on each other’s shoulders.

“So what’s your story?” Martha asked me, and I lingered, polite as Dirkson was polite. “Business or pleasure? I’m going to guess business.”

“Why do you guess that?”

“Oh, well, you know. A gentleman traveling alone? In Indianapolis? It’s a nice town, but it’s not, like, I don’t know.” She laughed. “Cancun. Right?”

“Right.” I smiled. “Yes. I travel quite a bit for business.”

As soon as I said it, I wished I had held my tongue. It was a foolish thing to say. Unnecessary. Martha was interested, too. “Cool,” she said. “God. I wish
I
traveled a lot. What do you do? Why are you here?”

“I work for a company called Sulawesi Digital as a site analyst.” She blinked. I smiled. “It’s a cellular service provider. Based in Indonesia.”

“What was it? Sula—
what
was it?”

“Right, well”—I smiled, apologetic site-analyst smile—“see, that’s what we’re working on changing. The company’s wanting to start opening some American locations. Raise brand awareness. So I’ve been traveling to some cities, investigating available retail properties in storefronts and shopping centers, and then what I’ll do is submit an analysis to Jakarta as to the relative desirability of each potential location.”

I had delivered this short speech, with the same dull Dirksonian earnestness, ten or twelve times in the past. Most people, you could watch them glaze over the minute you said words like
analyst,
words like
relative desirability
. But this girl, this Martha—her eyes were open to the story. She was nodding with fascination, as if I’d announced that I was a contract killer.

She even asked a follow-up question, asked what makes a location suitable or unsuitable, and I gave her the combination of factors: pedestrian traffic, neighborhood demographics, competition, while Lionel shrieked and giggled with his new friends. I could keep this up all day if she wanted to. My identity was researched: backed up, backstopped, and double-backstopped.

Martha sighed. “I’ve been to, like—Vincennes. That’s
my
world travels.” Her eyes were far away. “What’s the best place you’ve ever been?”

“Best?”

“Yeah, best. You know. Most interesting.”

Bell’s Farm. Bell’s Farm was interesting. “Chicago,” I said.

“Aw! Chicago! I would love to go to Chicago. Have you been there a lot?”

“I actually—” My throat felt rusty. The room breathed chlorine. How long had it been since I spoke to anyone this way? “I lived there for some time.”

Lake Shore Drive, the first time, skyscrapers lordly and glass-walled, hovering magisterially above Lake Michigan, reflecting gloriously at one another. My astonishing, terrifying sentinels of liberty.

“I’ve never been,” Martha said. Her shoes were off. Her toes were in the water. Among her tattoos were twin butterflies, one on each ankle, perfectly symmetrical. I noticed. I notice everything. “You believe that? I’ve lived in Indiana my whole life. I even lived in Gary for six months once. And I never got up there.”

“That does seem like a shame.”

“You’re telling me!”

She closed her eyes, like she was picturing it: picturing herself in Chicago. I pictured myself there, too, eating a hot dog. I pictured Castle. I opened my eyes again.

“I don’t know,” Martha was saying. “I never got hold of the right weekend, I guess. And then the kid happened, and—well. You don’t have kids, huh?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, they’re great.” She leaned into me, gave me a big stage whisper. “But they fuck everything up.”

Martha laughed, and her eyes found her boy, goofing around with these white kids, trying to dunk one under, his sleek body spangled with droplets. Another woman had come in, meanwhile, a middle-aged white lady in a black bathing suit, freckle-specked cleavage and sandy hair and big midwestern arms, with a towel wrapped around her waist. She took a look at us, at me and Martha sitting there talking. Then she looked at the pool.

“Watch this,” Martha said. “Just watch.”

“What?”

“Just watch.”

But I knew; I knew what Martha knew. The woman put her hands on her hips. We knew what was coming. Even Jim Dirkson knew.

“Marcus? Dylan? Jamie?” The woman waved her kids in, like a lifeguard when there was a shark. “Time for lunch.”

“What?”
squealed one of the white children.

“We just
got
here,” said another.

The boys treaded water, their freckled faces twisted at the injustice. Lionel bobbed beside them. The teen, sitting on the pool steps, wrinkled her nose. “I thought we were gonna swim first.”

“Nope,” said the mom. “After. Come on. Now.”

The family climbed out, and the woman toweled them off and hustled them out. Lionel was left alone, treading water, a solitary buoy. Martha raised both middle fingers and pointed them at the lady like guns. We heard the children, their complaining voices growing dimmer as they disappeared down the corridor.

Lionel went under and then came up, crested the blue surface with a harvest of sparkling droplets across his curls, his mouth a small disappointed line, watching the other kids trudge away.

“Do we have to go, too?” he said softly.

“No, sweetness. We’re good. You’re good. I’m just chatting with Mr.—God, I forgot it.”

“Dirkson,” I said quietly.

“Right, right. It’s a nice name.”

“Thanks.” I muttered it. Murmured it. I didn’t know where the name Dirkson came from. It came from Bridge, or from Bridge’s people. It probably came from a Gaithersburg phone book. Martha was still talking, small talk, talking about the Batlisch hearings. “Have you been watching my girl Donatella, by the way? Squaring off up there? She is my
hero
.”

“Well, anyway,” I said suddenly and stood up. “Anyway.”

I was walking fast. Behind me I heard Martha saying “Jim…” and the boy, too, I heard him calling after me from the water’s edge, giving me back the word I gave him—“Controversy!”—but I was gone.

13.

Day three
of the investigation, and possibilities were fanned out in front of me like playing cards. At some point, Cook would make contact with me again, or maybe I with him. I had his car number, after all, and his badge number. I had his face emblazoned in my mind, a row of white teeth and a wink and a smirk. I had an appointment for tomorrow morning, the first available slot, with the famous Dr. V. And there was Mr. Maris, freedom fighter, soldier, a blip on my screen, a man on the move. I drove with my laptop open on the shotgun seat, so as I cruised the city I could watch him cruising it, too. At some point he’d stop his car, and maybe that would just be that. Maybe Maris was the body man, the baggage handler, and I would go where he was and there would be the boy.

Get this done. Get out of here. On to some other northern city.

Whole Wide World Logistics was in an office park off Binford Boulevard in an industrial section of the northeastern part of the city; one in a row of identically unimpressive gray storefronts lined up like prisoners, with smudged plate-glass windows and doors of streaky glass. Across the parking lot, casting its vast shadow over this dingy arrangement, was a massive converted warehouse painted with bright jungle murals and a cheerful cartoon sign:
COME
AND
PLAY
IN
INDY
’
S
BIGGEST
INDOOR
TRAMPOLINE
PARK
.

I got out of the Altima already working, crossing the lot in a hustle with my face anxious and my body tense. A rush of noise washed over me from behind my back, a laugh and a delighted squeal and the celebratory ding-ding-ding of an arcade game. Someone had opened the door of the trampoline park, let its noise filter out across the parking lot, from a universe away.

I pushed into Whole Wide World and got right to work, thinking,
Here we go,
breathing hard, saying “Hey, I’m sorry, hey,” as the door made its little bing-bong noise and eased closed behind me.

The woman behind the long counter was looking at me, already skeptical. She checked me out, and I checked out the room, the tottering stacks of papers and file folders all along the counter, the window letting in smudged sallow light, the tile floor in need of a sweep and a mop. High on the wall was a row of clocks, Manila and Mumbai, San Francisco and Paris. Distant cities, foreign lands. Under the clocks was the globe logo I’d seen in the picture, purple and green and radiating lines of speed. Closest to the door was a giant dry-erase board cluttered with handwriting, different colors, a crosshatch of numbers, dates, account numbers, and order numbers—and in the lower left-hand corner, a little purple heart and the words
DEAR
DAY
SHIFT
:
HAVE
A
GREAT
DAY
!
LOVE
,
NIGHT
SHIFT
.