Underground Airlines (15 page)

“You military, Slim?”

“What?”

“Were you in the army?”

“Yes.”

“You see action?”

“Yes. In the gulf. In Texas.”

“Oh, yeah? What side?”

He stopped talking. He stared at me. “America. Our side.”

“So what were you fighting for?” His eyes went down to the gun, then back to my face; my face was set and cruel. He knew where I was going. So did I. I couldn’t stop. “I said, what were you fighting for, Slim?”

“For—for America. For the Union.”

“Yeah, but Texas didn’t want none of the Union. Right? They didn’t want nothing to do with it. With us. With
slavery
. They just wanted to be done with it. Remember?” He tried to move his head, but I had the gun pressed between his eyes, really grinding in hard between his eyes. “But you went and fought to keep the Union together.”

“I got drafted.”

“Coulda run. Plenty ran. They still up there.”

“I was fighting for my country.”

“Bullshit.”

“All right.”

He closed his eyes. He thought I was gonna kill him right there. I was glad. I was tight with rage. My rib cage was a fist clenched around my heart. The sun had gone down. There were no lights in the parking lot. The moon was coming up, pale and disinterested.

“What were you fighting for, Slim?”

He looked down. Mustache drooping down. He whispered. “Slavery.”

I shot him in the knee. While he wailed, while the fat one moaned, I wiped my prints off the rifle with the sleeve of my shirt and threw it in the dirt and drove away.

16.

I drove
away trembling.

What the hell was I doing?

What did I care?

Texas was the Lone Star miracle, the success story of early-twentieth-century activist abolitionism: in an orchestrated campaign, migrant manumissionists from all over the country flooded in, along with tens of thousands of Catholic-abolitionist Mexicans, drawn by the come one, come all immigration policy shortsightedly enacted by a state eager for oil-field hands. Hence the miracle,
el milagro:
the largest state in the union, free by statute in 1939. It wasn’t till twenty-five years later, under the first Mexican-American governor in that or any other state, that they went further, declared their intention to secede, and Washington said, the fuck you will. There was a Texan in the White House by then, one who’d been a schoolteacher, who’d had some of these Mexican sumbitches in his classroom. He took it personally. These folks needs to read their history books, said President Johnson. Secession is illegal under the Constitution—and by the way, that’s American oil under all that sand.

Eleven years of fighting. Battleships in the Gulf of Mexico, swift boats on the Rio Grande. Mexican partisans fighting hicks like Slim on the shores of Corpus Christi.

Not my war. A useless, nasty war, and nothing to do with me.

Eleven years of grueling, bitter combat, ending in nothing. Uneasy detente. Contested status. They call themselves the Republic of Texas, but we keep their star on our flag. We created the Special Economic Zone to protect our oil interests in the Gulf of Mexico, and they formed the Gulf Irregulars to protect theirs. Status quo antebellum.

I was shaking. My arms were shaking. I drove back slowly to the hotel, my hands at ten and two, not even putting in a tape. Eyes on the road, deep breaths, hoping and praying for no checkpoints. I didn’t know what I would do.

Putting a bullet in a man’s leg. Leaving carnage behind me. In the hotel parking lot I sat in the car a minute or more, hands on my knees, trying to get my head right.
Work your case,
I said to myself.
Solve your goddamn case.

Someone was on the phone in the horseshoe driveway of the Capital City Crossroads. There was a copse of tall hedges to the right side of the door, out of range of the streetlights, and someone was hidden by one of them, talking loudly and with emotion into a cellular phone.

I could hear this private conversation as I came across the parking lot, and my instinct was to veer to the right, keep my head down, get to my room as soon as I could. It was 9:20. I had half an hour until Bridge called, and I wanted that time. I needed it. I needed to sit in the room with my hands on the desk until my body quit the shivering it had started up with. The tension of the confrontation at Slim’s—the buck and kick of the firearm. I wanted time for all of it to sluice out of me and leave me empty.

“No, but that’s just not—” said the voice. It was Martha. My white friend from the breakfast area, from the pool. “That makes it very difficult for me to—no—wait, what? No. Wait…”

I had walked past her. She had not seen me. I stopped at the threshold of the building, and the automatic door sensed my approach and whooshed open.

“Fuck!” Martha shouted. She had not seen me. “God fucking damn it.”

I stepped back, let the door whoosh closed again. No. Fuck this. Come on. I stepped forward, and the door whooshed open, then back again. Whoosh.

“You okay?” I said, and she smiled, stepping out from behind the hedges.

“Well, that’s—good question.” She stuffed the phone in her pocket. She was wearing the same jean jacket, the same jeans. She did not look as if she had slept. She twisted her small mouth into a wry grimace. “Are you okay? That’s the million-dollar question, right? My mother always told me to watch out. For that question, I mean. Because, like, are you or aren’t you, right? It’s not usually one or the other, you know?”

“Oh,” I said. “Sure. That makes sense.”

“But no. Not really.” She tugged the phone out again and looked at it, and I studied the side of her face. I had been thinking of her as a girl, a sassy kid who’d become a mother much too early. Now—sighing, frustrated, anxious, in the moonlight outside the hotel—she looked like what she probably was: a woman in the first years of her thirties, with a few worry lines at the corners of her mouth, with some of life’s grief already in her eyes.

“Everything all right with your boy?”

“Lionel, remember? Like the train.”

I remembered. I remember everything. “Oh, yes, of course. Lionel.”

A long, rolling shudder passed through me, and I held myself still till it was gone. I had put a bullet in that man without thinking. Without hesitation or regret.
What were you fighting for?
What was I doing?

“The kid is fine.” She gestured inside. “Sleeping like the proverbial…whatever. Do you have kids, Jim?”

“Nope,” I said. “Nope. I never went down that route somehow. Never went down that road.”

“Right. I asked you that. Your traveling.”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, that’s just it.”

The door whooshed, and a couple came out, a man and a woman, arm in arm, whispering together. The man lifted his keys, and we heard the bloop-bloop of a car door unlocking somewhere out in the darkness of the lot.

When I looked back at Martha, her head was tilted back, and she was studying the stars.

“I’m just trying hard. You know? Real hard.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“Trying so hard.”

I saw myself again an hour earlier at Slim’s, wielding that rifle like a lightning bolt. That was a different person who had done all that. Now, this, here—this was Jim Dirkson, speaking softly to a distressed stranger in the parking lot of a hotel. Jim, kind and calm, lending a comforting presence, and me underneath, searching, hunting, pushing. Doing my thing.

“I think you said…” I began, and when she jumped I said, “Sorry, sorry. But I think you said you were from here originally. Like, you grew up here?”

“I’m from Indiana. Not Indy. My sister lives up here, though. Sometimes we come and visit.”

“But not this time.”

“No. This time it’s—” She held up the phone. “Business.”

“All right. Well, I have a question for you. It’s just a number: 1819,” I said. “A year, I’m guessing. Does the year 1819 have any kind of special meaning around here?”

Martha’s expression changed, sharply, completely. She dropped her eyes down to the gravel of the lot, then she looked back up, unsmiling, and spoke in a sad hush. “Where did you see that number?”

“Oh…” I said. “You know…”

It wasn’t right, dragging my problems in front of this innocent bystander, who clearly had problems of her own. I was pretty sure I already knew the goddamn answer anyway.

“Just something I spotted hung up outside somebody’s house.”

“Hung up how?”

“On a flag. A number of ’em, actually. Like pennants. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.” Something like anger was choking Martha’s face. “Because it just gets into everything.”

“What does?”

“It. All this shit.”

“What shit?”

Martha shook her head. “Where did you see them? Downtown? Southside?”

“East side.” All the questions were making me a little uneasy. I felt the need to reinforce my ID, duck under my cover for a moment. “I was at a potential retail location, kind of poking around the area.”

“Oh, all right,” she said. “I see.”

“You know what?” I said, regretting the whole line. It was 9:30. Bridge would be calling in twenty minutes. “Don’t worry about it. The business with the number. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“No,” she said. “No, you’re fine.” She gave her head a little shake, took a deep breath, preparing to bear up to unpleasantness. “It’s the year before…what’s his name?” She squeezed shut her eyes, remembering hard, then popped them back open. “
Lasselle.
The Indiana Supreme Court, 1820.” She closed her eyes again. She looked older with her eyes closed. “‘The framers of our Constitution intended a total and entire prohibition of slavery in this State.’ So 1820 is the year Indiana was officially and fully free.”

I smiled sadly. “Gotcha.”

“So 1819, for these dickwads, that’s the good old days. See?”

“I see.”

She looked at me head-on, tears standing in her eyes. The people with the flags were reversionists—people who as a matter of politics or personal taste regretted that their state had ever adopted its constitution and thereby abolished the practice of slavery. And it made Slim’s Trailer Court, Slim’s Market, and Slim’s Garage the unlikeliest possible place for Mr. Maris to have landed, the unlikeliest possible place for Jackdaw the runner to be squirreled away.

“Mr. Dirkson, I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“Call me Jim. And it’s okay.”

“It’s not. My state is a really nice state, for the most part. It really, really is.”

“Oh, I get that. That’s the feeling I get for sure.”

Mr. Bridge would be calling in fifteen minutes. But here was young, kind Martha in her cheap denim jacket and her long brown ponytail tied back with a pink rubber band standing out here in the parking lot suffering whatever it was she was suffering. She reached up to neaten the ponytail, and the motion caused the top of her white dress shirt to open slightly, and I saw just below the root of her neck a black box, inked in all the way. Not a lot of white people got them, but some did. A mark of solidarity or empathy or guilt.

Martha saw me looking, blushed, and brought her shirt collar together.

“God,” she said. “People think it’s far away, but it’s not. It’s here. It’s everywhere. Clouding over everything. Hanging over everything. Don’t you just feel that way sometimes?”

“I do,” I said. “I guess I do.”

With an effort of will, she made herself smile, made her eyes get hopeful. “But you know what? Maybe this thing with Batlisch, you know, the president sticking up for her and all…maybe it’s the beginning of some real change.”

I smiled. I nodded. I’d read the same article. It had been in my own newspaper. “Sure,” I said. Thinking,
Shit does not change
. Thinking,
It will never change
. “You never know.”

“Listen, Jim,” she said. “Hey. Would you ever…”

She paused. She looked down at her phone, considering something, gathering some kind of quick courage. My heart was a tight, high knot; there was some keening emotion making itself felt that I had never felt before while I stood in the invisible light of those words, hanging and spinning between us,
Would you ever…

Then her phone rang. She opened it, and it rang again, and then we both realized together it wasn’t her phone ringing, it was mine.

I looked at the incoming number and at the time. It was 9:36.

“Mr. Dirkson?”

My phone rang again. Bridge was calling, fourteen minutes ahead of schedule.

“I should get this.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“I need to get this.”

The world was a confused clamor. Bridge ringing in my hand, those 1819 flags flapping in my brain, Jackdaw trembling inside a box, the rifle bucking against my shoulder, and Martha,
Would you ever—
would I ever what?