Underground Airlines (30 page)

It was as if I had arrived not just in another part of the country but in another part of the century. Men in fedora hats and mustaches, ladies in short-sleeved flower-pattern dresses pushing big perambulators, smiling. Everybody smiling. The gentle ting-a-ting of welcome bells as these gentlefolk pushed into stores under multicolored awnings that fluttered in the wind. Folks tipping their hats, holding the door for one another as they went in and out of a diner called the Cotyledon Café, a tidy little freestanding pink building with a window box full of peonies along its front glass and a sign with proud curly-cursive lettering:
THIS
IS
A
PREJUDICED
ESTABLISHMENT
.

The other restaurant on the square was General Bobby’s, a fried-chicken chain that, I happened to know, was owned by the same conglomerate that owns Hamburger Stand in Indianapolis, where I’d just eaten a few days ago. That’s how they do it, these big chains that don’t want their customers to know how much business they’re doing behind the Fence: subsidiary companies, parent companies, diversified holdings.

I made my way around the square, beneath the sky of daydream blue, the pure white clouds like drifts of cotton. I passed a couple of white men in hats, men of the world conversing in somber tones about what one of them called “last night’s unfortunate incident.”

“What else could be done is the question,” said the other, while both nodded their heads with solemnity, men of the world. “Oh, yes, I know. What else could be done?”

And while they discussed in their somber tones the tragic necessity of ready assassination, their Negroes stood behind them staring at the sidewalk, unseen and unspeaking. And behind a white lady pushing a carriage was a black woman, much older, lugging a diaper caddy and an armful of boutique shopping bags. And there I was, moving through this watercolor world like a ghost. It was like there were two realities out here, overlaid one on top of the other, like transparencies on an overhead projector.

Where was the lawyer, though? Where were the man and his horse?

“So how do we make these arrangements?” I had asked Mr. Maris back in Indianapolis, back at Saint Anselm’s, in the shabby headquarters. After Barton was gone again, when it was just me and the lieutenants. Cook gave me the backstory, and then he and Maris briefed me on the connection I was to make.

“Arrangements?” he said. “No. Listen. Understand.”

“We don’t make arrangements, man,” Cook put in, leaning in the doorway, working at his teeth with a toothpick, listening closely. “We make connections.”

“What does that mean?”

Maris didn’t turn his head. He kept his cold eyes on my face while Cook talked. “What Mr. Friendly Sunshine here is gonna do is tell you where to go and how to find the lawyer. What happens after that is up to you and the lawyer. You understand?”

Maris, then, very slow and very low. “We only know what we know.”

“All right,” I said. “All right. And who’s the lawyer?”

Maris said it again: “We only know what we know,” which wasn’t exactly the same as saying he didn’t know who the lawyer was. Mr. Maris, of all those I had met, was the hardest to read. His sharp features a perfect mask. “The town is called Green Hollow,” he said. “Twenty miles northwest of Birmingham. There you find a statue. In the square.”

“What square?”

“It’s a small town, man,” said Cook. “Just the one square.”

“You go to the square. Weekday. Any weekday. Between eleven twenty-five and eleven thirty-five in the morning. You stand beneath the man and his horse. You wait for the lawyer there.”

So here I was: it was 11:28 in Green Hollow, Alabama, in the one square in town. I was sweating now. My papers were good, solid rock, but there had to be a limit to how long you could wander around in public, unaccompanied, in your black skin, papers or no papers. Law enforcement on the square was in two forms: the friendly neighborhood cop from the Town of Green Hollow Police Department, with his hands behind his back, a bright silver whistle around his neck, smiling at children and nodding to passersby; and up on the rooftops an officer of the Alabama branch of the Interstate Colored Persons Patrol, in all-black, body armor, rifle, and helmet. He was either trying to be inconspicuous and failing up there or, more likely, making absolutely sure that his presence was registered by every person on the square—the black ones especially.

I, at least, had a keen awareness of him as I searched that square looking for a goddamn statue of a man and a horse. The only statues I could find, though, were wrong: the first was an ugly gray statue of a man on the prow of a swift boat, a Texas War veteran, stabbing his forefinger aloft as if commanding unseen troops but receiving only the attention of a flock of sickly pigeons roosting on the brim of his hat. The other statue was of a short bespectacled man in a midcentury suit, waving gaily, trailed by a beagle. I had circled the square three times looking for the man and his horse without finding it.

I took another pass around the square. Outside the Cotyledon was a small crowd of blacks, talking quietly, waiting, I figured, for their masters to finish lunch. And inside, alone at a table for two, was Martha Flowers.

What the hell?
I thought, feeling a queer surge of anger and—what? Relief?
What the hell?

We had said our good-byes on the outskirts of town, in the parking lot of a Qatar Star gas station. All I said was “Say good-bye to that kid for me,” and all she said was “I sure will,” and then I got out of the car and went around the back to use the colored persons’ restroom, and when I came back she was gone, just as we had planned it.

She should have been at the Border House by now, digging her real actual Indiana driver’s license out of her big messy pocketbook.

Instead she was in there, studying the menu of the Cotyledon Café, legs crossed at the ankles like a proper belle, like her own evil twin. I looked twice, making sure it was Martha, and then I stopped looking, not knowing how many times you could look through the plate glass of a restaurant at a white woman before the patrolman up on the roof noticed you looking.

I took another turn around the square. There was a good film of sweat on me now: desperation, confusion, some sour combination of fury and fear. Martha Flowers was enjoying a slice of pie on the town square, and meanwhile where the fuck is this horse? Where the fuck is this lawyer?

I stumbled on an uneven patch of sidewalk and very nearly bumped into the broad back of a slow-walking white man with a cane. I breathed. I slowed my pace. Passed carefully beneath the oak trees and the black lampposts. Passed the general store, the movie house, the Internet café. I saw that, scattered across the lawn of the park, clustered together, were a dozen or more dark-skinned men and women lying about in small groups, dozing and talking and drinking out of paper bags.

And then, finally, for the third time, I walked around that stupid statue before I decided to read the plaque beneath it:
HENRY
SMITH
,
TOWN
FATHER
,
AND
HIS
LOYAL
COMPANION
,
HORSE
.

Horse. A dog named Horse. Somewhere, Willie Cook was having a good long laugh on me.

I leaned against the fence that ran around the statue, then immediately thought better of it and straightened up. The clock on the courthouse said 11:35—was it too late? Had I messed this up already?

I rehearsed in my mind the call and response, the password and echo, that Maris had given me.

“Some fine day, ain’t it?” this mysterious lawyer would say when he spotted me, and I then would say: “Fine and dandy, like sugar candy.”

Three times we had practiced it. Maris: “Some fine day, ain’t it?”—the country slang made mildly comical by his African accent—and me: “Fine and dandy.”

The lawyer will spot you, Maris said. He will know you by where you stand and when. You will know him by what he says. Now say it again. We practiced it three times, simple as it was: “Some fine day, ain’t it?” “Fine and dandy, like sugar candy.”

I stood beside the statue and waited for the lawyer. I couldn’t see Martha from here. The diner was on the other side of the square. I thought of my future. I thought of a home in Canada, a small fairy-tale house, smoke coming up from a cookstove chimney. Snow on the eaves and on the branches of maple trees. A view across a frozen lake.

I did not try to calculate how close or far I was from Bell’s Farm, neither as the crow flies nor on the roadways that could be crossed by a transport van.

When I looked up again at the people of Green Hollow, going about their bustling midday business, shopping and eating and chatting, I did not see the white people, only the black: and as I watched I swore I could see fumes rising from their mouths—fumes rolling out of their mouths like exhaust, and I could see that every black person had the same small cloud of angry smoke coming out of his or her mouth and nose, a haze rolling up off the street like exhaust, filling the air, the white people breathing all that and not knowing it.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned. He was black, wiry, wearing overalls, carrying a shovel.

“Some fine day, ain’t it?” said the man with the shovel, and I said, “Fine and—” and he caught me on the side with the handle of the shovel, a hard smash that knocked me right off my feet. I reeled back into the arms of a second man, a man I hadn’t seen, who caught me and held me tightly by the arms.

“What the fuck?” I said, or started to say, but the first man said, “Shut up, boy,” while he dropped the shovel and punched me in the stomach.

I would have doubled over, but I was held too tight. The fresh gash in my shoulder threw up a hot flash of pain, and my guts hurt where I’d been hammered. I kicked my legs out and wriggled like a bug in the air while the first man danced backwards, fists clenched, and the huge man holding me whispered, “Almost done.”

“What?” I said.

“Shut yo mouth, nigger,” the first one shouted and punched me on the side of the head.

Through a haze of pain I saw the Alabama patrolman, up on the roof, watching us impassively.

“Hey,” I said, but then they were all in on me, punching me again, throwing me down, landing their boots in my chest. I convulsed, moaning, closing in on myself like a fetus, and from the far corner of my eye I saw the merry beat cop on the other side of the square taking this all in with mild amusement, shaking his head as though I and the men beating me were rambunctious kids on a playground. I saw two white men in fedoras in front of the pharmacy, murmuring to each other and laughing. I saw all of them, all the good people of Green Hollow, the men and the women and the kids; all the fine folks had stopped to take in the show.

They kicked at me a few more times, though I writhed enough, wrenching my body this way and that, to take most of their shots in the shins or in the back, on the hard surfaces of my spine. I spat pink into the dirt and hauled up onto my haunches, steadying myself on my arms with my hands palm-planted in the scrabble grass. Above me the two men stood with fists balled, staring down.

I wondered if a rumor was flying around town. I wondered if it had reached Martha’s table at the Cotyledon. I hoped she’d have the sense to stay where she was. Not to give herself away, not to rush out and cry my name—Jim, or Brother, any name at all.

“Stay
down,
” the bigger of the two men hissed, and I did, I stayed down, and the two of them leaned over me glowering and godlike.

The one who hissed at me had a fierce, cold look about him, like he was wrought from iron. I let the strength of my arms go slack and fluttered my eyes shut and the two men heaved me bodily out of that dirt. I was carried between them like a bag of soil, aft and end, my head lolling back to one side. My ears were ringing, and a thick knot of pain was gathering in my stomach where the one man’s boot had first connected.

They bore me that way, body slack and head hanging backwards, across the patchy courthouse lawn toward a big car waiting, pulled up to the sidewalk. A woman fell into the pack, walking along with us, a pace or two behind. Her hair was wrapped in a tight-fitting orange cloth. She had thick arms, a powerful striding body. She scowled at me as we progressed across the lawn, her hands clenched into fists, her eyes like two stones deep in her head.

“Are you the lawyer?” I said to her.

“Do I
look
like a fucking lawyer to you?”

She stepped close to me. To me, being carried as I was with my head thrown back, she was upside down. With swift, precise movements, she took out a hypodermic needle and a small vial. I struggled, but there was nothing to be done—the men held me tight while she filled the needle and jabbed it into a vein in the side of my neck. My vision swayed. They dropped me into the trunk of the car.

“Welcome to the Hard Four,” said one of the voices, gruff and full of laughter, while the world slipped away from me. “It don’t get a lot better.”