Underground Airlines (20 page)

“No, ma’am,” I said quietly, and Martha rushed in: “He’s just a friend.”

“Just a friend,” she said, her voice low and easy, almost a whisper. “Just a friend.” She leaned forward, blew smoke out of the side of her mouth, and patted me on the knee. “Nice to meet you, Just-a-Friend.”

The Walker boys, over by the door, were sharing a one-hitter, silently trading hits.

“So where
is
Daddy?”

“Well…” Martha gave her head a tiny shake. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“You don’t?” Mama’s smile fell away. “And why not?”

“I really just want to uh, to, you know—to cover our business.”

“Oh, all right,” said Mama Walker. “Of course.”

There was the click-click of a lighter by the door, and I glanced over at the sons: son number 2 refiring the skinny pipe, son number 1 staring into space. A cartoon punch line blared from the television, one animated electric eel zinging another one, and the kids all roared. Lionel laughed along with them, perfectly at ease.

“But you know what, I
do
want to talk about it, just for a second. You don’t mind, do you?” She stared at Martha. “How about I just guess what happened to him?”

“Well…” Martha wrung her hands together. Her face was agonized. “I guess.”

“I’mma guess white men killed him.” Mama Walker said this without trouble, almost cheerfully. “’Cause of you. That it? Am I close on that?”

Martha didn’t answer, but Mama said, “I thought so,” as if she had. “That’s how they do, you know. You gotta be careful. North or no north, some things you just gotta be careful about. White man don’t play, you know? Right, Just-a-Friend?”

“Right,” I said.

“I’ll give you a little example, okay? All this shit hole here?” She pointed outside, at the trash-strewn street. “This all used to be green. Verdant. That the word, Marv?”

“Yes, Mama,” said one of her sons, in his thick voice.

Martha suddenly stood up. “I am so sorry that we bothered you,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “Hey, Lionel, honey?”

Lionel looked over from the couch, but meanwhile one of the big Walker boys had gotten up, too—not Marv, the other one. “Have a seat, little girl,” he said. “Mama talking.”

Martha sat. Lionel’s head swiveled back around to the screen. Mama gave no sign of having been interrupted. “It was verdant down here, back in the day. That’s what they say. I’m talking ’bout before I was born, understand. Before my mama was and hers was. There was a stream here. Little creek. I got a map, somewhere, somewhere in here, but you can see it, too, you go hunting through the dog shit and the broken glass out there, you can see, like, the traces of it, where it ran once, all those years ago. But see, the white men who were planning out the city, they didn’t like it where it was. The little river. So they just”—she made a quick gesture with her hands, sweeping the air—“ran it under the ground. Built right over it. You understand? You see?”

She waited. She wanted an answer. Martha whispered, “Yes.” I took off my glasses and wiped them on my shirt. Dope smoke wafted over from the love seat.

“They sent that little river underground, and they built their fucking ugly city over it.
That’s
how they do. Anything they don’t care for, anything that does not please, they use it up or they kill it or bury it, and they never think of it again. You see?”

Martha’s eyes were shut now. “I see.”

“So that’s what they did—open your eyes, sweetheart. Open.” Martha obeyed. “That’s what they did to your boy’s father. Them. White people.”

“I’m sorry.” Martha closed her eyes. She was sorry she’d come here. She was sorry she was white. But there was no undoing either of those things. “I just need some help.”

“Yeah. No shit, baby. Everybody come here need help. Everybody in the
world
need some kinda help, right? Ain’t that right, Just-a-Friend?”

For once Jim Dirkson and I were all synced up, my alias and I equally perplexed. I smiled carefully for both of us. “That’s right.”

“Question being for you, then, okay, what kind of help you need? I’m looking at you, pretty white girl. Pretty white girl don’t come downtown to get something up her nose.” Martha nodded, trembling a little, her hands fussing at the hair at the nape of her neck. “Pretty white girl don’t come downtown to get something in her arm. Sure as fuck don’t need passing papers. Don’t need pussy. Or…” She raised her eyebrows, and Martha shook her head quickly. “No. So pretty white girl ain’t here to get fucked or get high or get free. So what she need?”

I wished I knew Martha well enough to take her hand; to pat her knee reassuringly under the table. I couldn’t do it—I didn’t really know her at all was the thing. I was a passenger.

“It’s gotta be money that baby needs. Right, boys?” The Walker brothers nodded in unison, right on cue. It was all performance; this was part of the performance, every time. “So the question is—how much money does baby need?”

Martha placed her hands flat on the table, to steady herself. Past her, out the window, I caught a glimpse of movement—the cop car was rolling past again, slow lights flashing.

“Twenty-nine thousand, five hundred.”

Mama’s thin-line eyebrows arched higher. “Twenty-nine thousand, five hundred dollars?”

Martha nodded, the tiniest mouse motion of a nod. Mama raised her voice, addressed the boys like they were a studio audience. “Twenty-nine thousand, five hundred. Can you all believe that?”

They could not; they shook their heads in shared astonishment, real slow, back and forth. I couldn’t quite believe it, either. I tilted my head to one side, looking with fresh eyes at this girl—this Martha, or Wanda, or whatever her name might have been. Mama leaned back and pulled out a new long Camel.

“Twenty-nine thousand, five hundred,” she said, lighting her cigarette. “That number is very—what is the word I want, Elton?”

“Specific,” said Elton through a mouthful of smoke. Elton was the one with the knocked teeth.

“That’s a lot of dollars.” Mama looked at me. “Ain’t that a lot of dollars, Just-a-Friend?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess so.”

“Question being, baby—you white. What about you get a job?”

“Well, I…” Martha looked down, then away, pained. “I’m working on it. I was actually just at this job fair thing, at the convention center, that’s what I was doing all week…” She looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded, although of course I had no idea what she’d been doing all week. Of course I knew nothing about her. “I’m trained as a medical assistant.”

“Medical assistant.” Mama shook her head and smoked and clucked.

“Yeah. And—and a couple other things. I work. I do. I have money. It’s just—not enough. I have my son, you know. I have bills. I can’t hardly save nothing.”

“Times is tough,” said Mama Walker, waving faintly at the abandoned house visible through the kitchen window. “Times is real tough. And we still haven’t heard what you need it for, anyway, this very specific twenty-nine thousand, five hundred dollars.”

Martha answered right away. “I can’t tell you.”

“You can’t tell me?” Mama Walker’s eyes glittered. “She can’t tell me! Marvin, baby, you hear that? It’s a secret!”

“Look—come on, ma’am. I mean, Mrs. Walker.” Martha steeled herself, looked the older woman straight in the eye. “Is it going to be possible to borrow the money or not? It doesn’t have to be the whole twenty-nine five, okay? Whatever you can do, I will take. And I can pay it back. With interest.”

“Goddamn right you will!” said Mama Walker. She stood up, and a long circle of ash fell from her smoke down to the table. “Obviously you would fucking pay interest. This isn’t fucking Goodwill. I’m not running some charity shop for desperate white girls.”

“Sorry,” said Martha. “Sorry.” More apologizing. I had known this girl Martha for three days and all I’d seen her do is say she was sorry. Abashed before fussy white men and flinty black women alike.

“All right, well, listen, baby,” said Mama Walker, and Martha smiled hopefully, but it was over. Mama wasn’t sitting down again. The boys had shifted their weight. There was a change in temperature, and I knew what it was—I had sat in rooms like this: I had observed negotiations. Gun runners, bent cops, border bribers, slave traders, snatchers. I could tell a no-go when I was sitting with one at the table.

“Listen to me very carefully: when I give out money, I give it on return. I give it on terms.”

“I know,” said Martha. “I said—”

“I know—you’re going to pay it back with interest. Well, how I guarantee that, baby? You won’t tell me what you want it for; I barely know how I know you. You come in here, a black boyfriend, a black son, like I might get mixed up, start thinking you something you not. Like I’m gonna trust you then.”

“But I—I would promise! You would have my word on it!”

Mama Walker didn’t even bother to answer that. She stubbed out her cigarette with hard meaning, and the boys at the door opened it. At last Martha saw that this wasn’t happening, and immediately she switched modes; immediately she was ready to get out, out of Freedman Town, as fast as feet could go. “Lionel,” she called, and when he didn’t come at once, captivated by the cartoon show, climaxing in a blur of flash and sound, she said it again, sharp—“Lionel!”—and he bounced over.

“Real nice to meet you,” said Mama Walker. “Real nice to meet all of you.”

The big men stepped aside, then Mama Walker said—so low you almost couldn’t hear her—“I’ll give you the money you give me the boy.”

“What?” said Martha. I pulled her out by the arm. “What did you say?”

I pulled her down the stairs. “What did she say?”

I hustled her and her child along the block, her eyes wild. I stuffed her in the car. I drove her away.

20.

The TV
was on at the Fountain Diner. It played with the sound off, attached to the end of a jointed mechanical arm jutting out over the counter. Everybody in the place was watching or half watching the hearings, the special Saturday session of the Senate finance committee: customers with eyes locked on the screen, ignoring their pancakes, busboys rubbing the same spot of dirty table over and over. Our waitress set down our plates in the wrong spots, gazing up at the TV. Batlisch, unflappable, staring back at her tormentors. Her thumb tucked between forefinger and middle finger, her eyes narrowed and stern, and the crawl below the screen: “If the question, Senator, is do I think that my opinions…or my, my ideology, as you put it, although I don’t think that’s necessarily…no, excuse me. If I may finish? If the question is, do those ideas put me outside the mainstream of American opinion, then I think the answer is no. I think the answer is a resounding no.”

The busboy at the next table, a young guy, shaved bald, he liked that answer. He nodded to himself with satisfaction and walked back toward the kitchen, smiling.

Even Lionel, seated across from me at our booth, was rapt: maybe not totally understanding, but thinking somehow, as everybody thought, that this was some big deal. Some kind of watershed moment, as they like to call them. He was coloring on the back of the menu, but he kept stopping, staring for a beat or two at the tough white lady on the screen. I stared at the TV, too, trying to gin up some feeling of excitement, trying to feel what the busboy was feeling, the cooks. Let’s say she did get confirmed. Maybe she does what she says—maybe she brings new vigor to the prosecution of financial firms that trade in blood money. But the firms would find ways around it. The Southern Regional Lobbying Association would send in their K Street shock troops, white papers in hand, and the floors of Congress would ring with the old refrains of popular sovereignty and imperishable tradition. Nothing would change.

Martha was the only person in the place ignoring the TV. She sat very still, staring straight ahead, steam rising off the cup of coffee that was all she ordered.

“You all right?” I said, and she exhaled.

“I guess so.” She shook her head. Her hair had fallen down. The chopstick that had pinned it all together had disappeared, maybe into her cavernous purse, maybe onto Mama Walker’s floor. “I mean, no. This is weird. I dragged you into this thing, and now—I mean, it’s just weird. Aren’t you even gonna ask?”

“Ask what?”

“Are you serious?” Martha peered at me, at Jim Dirkson, trying to figure out this good, gentle businessman, too polite or too dense for this universe. “About twenty-nine thousand, five hundred dollars.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sure. Well, I guess I did wonder.”

“I’ll bet.”

She’d wanted lunch, asked for us to go, and here she was not eating. She’d picked the restaurant, too, and I was keenly conscious the whole time we sat there of Officer Willie Cook. It was his favorite spot, after all, and right there was the table where he’d been seated with his white partner, I could see it from where we were sitting, and it was having an effect on me. I felt jittery and unsafe. I kept seeing that overfriendly smile, that knowing expression of his. While Martha sat and stared into whatever dark vistas her life gave her to stare at, I wondered how I might explain to Officer Cook what I was doing here, what bereft, wifeless Jim Dirkson was doing enjoying lunch with his new white ladyfriend—and the other way around, of course. “Oh, yes, Martha, this is Officer Cook—he’s a police officer I know and also an agent of the Airlines…”