Underground Airlines (4 page)

I was paying close attention, half hidden behind the paper, eating my bagel. It was a novelty, I suppose, hearing that kind of petty authoritarian bullying, that ugly, half-threatening tone, used against a white person. She was a small thing, this young lady, girlish in her form and her face, with warm brown circles for eyes and thin pink lips and a lot of messy brown hair pinned up with the plastic yellow butterfly. And here’s this manager hectoring, and the woman just nodding like a schoolkid taking a scolding, tears coming into her eyes and her cheeks flushing and her eyes slowly widening.

“Yeah. See, okay, I’m up from Evansville. For the job fair. Medical job fair? You know? I’m a—I was a medical assistant. A home health aide, actually. I’m looking for a new, uh—whatever. The point is, my sister said her place was cool to crash, but then I guess her boyfriend is around or—I don’t know. Something or other.” She grinned, sheepish, at Paulsen, who moved not a muscle on his face. Gave her nothing. “Sorry. Too much information, right? But I’m gonna need the room tonight, swear to God.” She shrugged, smiled one more time. “Room comes with breakfast, right?”

“Breakfast is complimentary, yes. And you will be entitled to one once you are a guest.”

Other guests had filled the dining area: a pair of pale businessmen, overweight and ruddily jowled, napkins tucked into dress shirts; a trio of college-age kids, all girls, in long prairie skirts, looking like evangelicals. Everyone working hard at not noticing the showdown at the buffet line. And then there was a little boy, tugging on my sleeve. I looked down at him, and he grinned up at me. “Hey. What’s that say?”

The boy was black. Face full of happy mischief, round cheeks, skin a handsome high yellow, eyes deep, beautiful pools. His shirt had a picture of Captain America on it. He had scooted in next to my elbow and was trying to read the front page, upside down. The situation came into sharp focus, all at once: the white woman’s “we,” Mr. Paulsen giving her the business. Young white mother with her black son, trying to live in the world. This world.

“You couldn’t, like, front me a breakfast?” she was saying. “Like, advance it to me?”

“No,” said Mr. Paulsen. “Our policy does not allow for that,” the word
policy
like a gate coming down, and the next thing would be
I am afraid I will have to call security if…

Her son, meanwhile, who was maybe six or seven, had eased up beside me with no reservations and was peering at my paper, up on his tiptoes. “What word’s that?”

“Controversy,” I told him. Pointed to the capital
C
.

He nodded. “Oh.” Bothering me without qualm, the brave, sweet boy. I wondered that nobody had told him not to talk to strangers. Maybe black strangers were okay. The kid moved his mouth, squinting at the word. “Controversy.”

“Ma’am. If you please…”

“Hey, you know what? It’s fine.”

Slowly and with exaggerated dignity the white girl removed her contraband from her pocketbook: three muffins, one by one; the cereal box; the banana and two oranges; then two plastic spoons and a yogurt. These items she placed in a line along the buffet table, like sacrificial offerings, while her nemesis in his magenta shirt stood with arms crossed.

And as she came over to my table to retrieve her son, the girl caught my eye and gave me this fleeting, rueful look, the meaning perfectly clear: “This guy, huh? What a dickhead.”

It is a marker of the kind of relationship I had with white people in general and with white women in particular—having to do not only with the caution that adheres to my profession but also with my upbringing, the way I was raised—that I did not return her look. I made myself busy, reaching across the table for a fresh napkin, and while I was busy she scooped up her boy and bore him away, the front section of my
Star
dangling from his forefingers across her back like a cape.

I sat there feeling that for a beat or two, then I folded up what was left of my paper.

Fussy little Mr. Paulsen strode self-importantly from the breakfast nook, not bothering to apologize for the scene—not to the likes of me.

The white girl’s car was not hard to find in the parking lot: a beat-up South African shitbox with a dented driver’s-side door and a bright pink paint job that was peeling and rust-splotched. The automotive analogue of the denim jacket and scuffed Doc Martens. She was in the driver’s seat filling out the top application on a whole stack of them, the stack balanced atop a hardcover book that was in turn balanced on her lap. She wore a look of troubled concentration, her eyes screwed up, a strand of her hair tucked into the corner of her mouth. Her boy was in the shotgun seat, one leg lodged against the glove compartment, playing some sort of handheld electronic game.

I thought about rapping on the window, but then I didn’t. I left the food I had gathered up, still on its tray, on the ground just outside the driver’s side and went off to work.

6.

I parked
my car on the street beside a graveyard about a quarter mile west of the address and walked the long couple of blocks as the day got itself going, the sun spreading out slowly onto the blacktop. It wasn’t raining, but it felt like it wanted to, clouds glowering, crowded, low down in the sky.

As I walked toward Mapleton–Fall Creek I crossed Central Avenue, and looking south I could see what appeared to be the smoke from a dozen small fires, rising up and mingling from campsites and cookouts, clustered tents. That had to be Freedman Town, another five miles downtown and a universe away. Maybe it was as simple as that: maybe the man I sought was lying desperate under a torn blanket somewhere in Freedman Town, crammed in among second cousins in an unheated efficiency. The classic move, the fool’s move, the move of a desperate runner.

It wouldn’t be that easy, though. If Bridge’s office thought it was as easy as creeping into Freedman Town and knocking on a couple of doors, that’s what I’d be doing. Or, actually, my services would not have been thought necessary. The white vans could roll up on Freedman Town with no help from me.

Mapleton–Fall Creek, by contrast, looked to be a tidy little neighborhood of one-story aluminum-sided bungalows, their trim green front yards like welcome mats. The homes were old but well tended, their small wooden porches cluttered with outdoor furniture—rocking chairs and love seats. Every house was painted some bright color, and it looked like the block association had gotten together to make sure nobody came dressed to the party the same: a powder-blue house, a chipper yellow house, one of green, and one of pink. One house had a black-and-white dog yipping behind a short chain-link fence; the next place had a string of Christmas lights dangling from the gutters, put up either early or way too late.

Up on one of these porches was a very old black woman, her hair in curlers for the day to come, rocking slowly on her rocking chair. She waved, and I waved back. A nice little neighborhood was the vibe that I was getting, a black neighborhood, working people, poor but proud. The kind of place a white person might drive through with the doors locked, thinking it’s dangerous for no reason except for the color of its occupants.

I came out onto 38th and turned right, passed a run of businesses, everything closed up tight this early morning. A clothing shop called The Big & The Tall; a barbershop called Men & Ladies; a steak-and-lemonade place called just Steak & Lemonade. One sad liquor store with the paint peeling from around the door frame, with a solitary drunk smoking in an oversize warm-up jacket, playing it cool, dying for the place to open. This is where he had come, cherry-cheeked Father Barton, on Sunday afternoon. He was down in this unlikely neighborhood for some reason, and he had stopped at that bank right over there—the one next to the gas station that’s next to Captain D’s Fish Fry—to take out a couple hundred bucks, which was gone from his wallet by suppertime last night.

The ATM stood under a little green awning, just to the right of the front door of the bank proper. As I ambled toward it I felt my body take on the young father’s spirit, the righteous white man, walking upright and unafraid in a black neighborhood, a man of the people, wearing his serious, sacred expression. I stood at the cash machine a second, then I did a slow 360, even going so far as to mime the action of taking out a wallet, tucking bills inside it, putting it away again. Halfway through my turn, I was looking down the cross street, Central Avenue, toward the south. Down there, a block down, a streetlight was blinking, reflecting itself back murkily in a pothole full of rainwater. On one side of the road was a weedy vacant lot, and across the street was a small white-painted building with a wooden cross hanging above the door. The sign beneath the cross said
SAINT
ANSELM
’
S
CATHOLIC
PROMISE
:
COMMUNITY
WELCOME
.

“All right, now,” I said, hastening my step, bobbing my head. “All right, all right.”

Approaching the building, I heard the rush and roar of a small engine, and then I saw him: a groundskeeper, hunched over and focused, working a leaf blower in an even line along the curb, throwing clouds of dirt and detritus off the sidewalk into the road.

“Hey, hey, man,” I said, waving my hands as I came up the sidewalk. “Hold up a sec.”

The groundskeeper looked up, weary and wary, but he killed the engine.

“Oh, yeah, hey man. Hey.” I rolled into the character as I came up on him, taking on a little decrepitude, a little stagger in my walk, a little grit in my eyes. Drifter, knucklehead, working on that good early-morning drunk. “How you feeling, brother?”

“What can I help you with?”

The gardener was a tired middle-aged black man, a dozen lifetimes of this kind of yard-work bullshit already behind him. Not old, but getting there fast. Tired this morning, bones and fingers tired. Wanting to get this job done, get back in his truck before the rain came, if it was coming.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, talking quickly, licking my lips, addled and rapid. “Yeah, I tell ya, man, I been
wandering
. You feel me? Been
wandering
today.”

He raised his eyebrows just the tiniest bit. He wore forest-green coveralls with the name
RUBEN
stitched into a white oval above the breast pocket and
CIRCLE
CITY
LAWNSCAPING
in big stenciled block letters on the back.

I hustled out my words. “Yeah, so I saw this was a church, okay, and I just felt like I had to come on down here. ’Cause listen, man, it just happens I been hearing the angels, man, and they been saying I need to get right. Get right with God. Angels been saying what I need to do is go on and get right
today
.”

“Well, you won’t be doing it here, man.” Ruben turned his cracked lips up for a brief smile. “This is not a church. It’s a community center.”

“What?
Oh
.”

“Church own it, but it ain’t a church. And it’s closed, man.”

“Well,
shit
.”

Ruben liked that. He ground out a laugh, gravelly and low. “Sorry, boss. The what-you-call-it—you know, the diocese—they closed this place up a while back. Six months ago, something? They got us coming by once a week to keep it from getting overgrown and all. That’s it.”

“Oh, wow. Wow, wow. Guess my angels got they wires crossed.”

“I guess they did.”

We both laughed a little then, me and my man Ruben, and I stood and swayed in my drunkenness and shook my head and took a good hard look at that building. Not so grand a structure as Saint Catherine’s up there on Meridian Street, not by a long shot: old, wood-sided, one-storied, a flat black roof. The front of the building had but one door, up a short walkway lined with box hedges and ivy. One of the windows was broken, a shatter scar down the middle of it like an unhealed wound. At the door handle, though, was a bright glint of gold.

I held my eyes to that door for a second, squinting hopefully, as if to open it by force of will and get the salvation I was seeking.

“All right, well.” Ruben raised his leaf blower. “I better get back to it.”

“Hold up a sec,” I said, in a burst of inspiration. “Y’all hiring?”

His brows arched with fresh skepticism. “I dunno. You gotta ask Rick about that.”

“Rick?”

“Yeah. Rick or I guess—Rick or Tiny.”

“Tiny?”

“That’s right.”

“You got a number?”

“It’s on the truck, man.”

Ruben was done with me. He turned away and fired up his leaf blower and called “Good luck” over its roar as I tippled over to that truck, a Pakistani pickup on high wheels towing an enclosed flatbed trailer cluttered with mowers and rakes and shit. Both the truck and the trailer had
CIRCLE
CITY
LAWNSCAPING
painted on the side, and under the name was the number.