Underground Airlines (19 page)

“I am not going to even offer to pay you. I have, like, zero dollars. But I could owe you. I’ll pay you—maybe even later today. Maybe even after the meeting.” She took a breath. She looked at me, plucky and anxious, over the rims of the cat’s eyes. “So what do you think?”

The only logical answer was no. I was hot on my case. I was within sight of the finish line. I had Bridge breathing down my neck, I had old ghosts making howling circles in my mind.

“So?” I asked. “Where to?”

She had it on a piece of paper. She dug it out from the pocket of her jeans. She had the address on the silver foil of a gum wrapper. “Here. Uh. Tenth and Belmont.”

I nodded. Yeah. I was already on my way. “Freedman Town.”

I knew what it was like to get a person to do something and they’re not sure why. To coerce. Give over some information; help you find an address. I did it all the days of my life. I didn’t know what I was stumbling into here, doing some kind of downtown deal or maybe bringing money to some rough boys so they’d teach a lesson to an ex-boyfriend. None of that seemed likely, just from my read on this girl, but people have layers in them. People go down deep. They go all the way down.

We got to the bridge to Freedman Town, a shabby two-lane span running over the slow brown churn of the White River. I was glad to be running Martha Flowers’s mysterious errand. All we do all day long is deal with our own problems, handle our shit some way or other. It felt nice, for a little while, to be dealing with someone else’s shit instead of my own.

“Wow,” said Martha. “God.”

I drove carefully through the streets down here—you had to. Potholes wide as craters, rocks and bottles in the street. The blasted apocalyptic acreage of Freedman Town.

Lionel craned up in his booster seat and peered with wonder out the windows.

I’d been here before. Not to this Freedman Town, but to plenty of others. I’ve been all over the North, and every northern city has a Freedman Town. New York City’s got a few, and Chicago’s got more than a few. Baltimore, Washington. The manumitted have got to go somewhere, and the world doesn’t give them a lot of options. The details are different—some of ’em are built on a high-rise model, bent towers clustered around courtyards, crammed to the gills with the poorest of the poor, living hard, the forgotten children of forgotten children. Some are like this one, blocks and blocks of small ramshackle homes, no sidewalks along narrow roads with the concrete worn and blasted through, the yards between the houses as weed-choked as vacant lots. Ivy growing in wild overlapping networks, engulfing the lower stories and sending menacing tendrils into upstairs windows. Gutters dangling or cracked, porches falling.

Martha, I could tell, had not been here before. Martha had never seen anything like it.

“Here,” said Martha. “Will you just—can we just stop here?”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She gnawed at her pinkie. We were a block, still, from the address she had given me. “Just give me one sec, I think.”

Her anxiety was a living thing, thrumming in the air between us, traveling through the recycled air of the Altima. She fiddled with the nearer stem of her sunglasses, sort of snapping it along the side of her head. A kid rolled slowly past the car on a skateboard, balancing a bucket on his head, while another kid taunted him not to drop it—“Careful, boy…careful, now…nice and easy”—then brayed laughter. There was a woman pushing a stroller, somehow keeping it in motion though she was on the phone and smoking a cigarette; the two- or three-year-old in the stroller was playing happily with a closed bottle of soda. A knot of tough boys sat on a stoop, smoking and staring hard at the street—the real thing, what my friends in Mapleton–Fall Creek had been aspiring to. As we watched, a man approached at a shuffle, opened a shoe box to them, offering whatever was in it for sale, and they shooed him away like they were kings.

A big nasty dog, tall as a wolf, wandered zigzag from side to side, trailing its leash.

“You can’t believe it,” Martha said darkly. “You can’t even fucking believe it.”

“Watch your mouth, Mama.”

“Sorry, bear.” She reached into the backseat and patted her boy on the knee, but Lionel was off on his own trip, staring out the window, tapping his nose with his finger, like a kid concentrating on a math problem.

I didn’t feel it anymore. I had long since stopped feeling it, that feeling you get coming into Freedman Town the first time, the surreal astonishment that such a place can exist. A not inconsiderable swath of a major city, in a wealthy industrialized country, in the twenty-first century, in such a grevious state of disrepair. An invisible city, floating like a dead island, in the wide water of civilization.

A police cruiser made its slow way along the avenue, windows rolled up and tinted. The siren was off but the light was on, slowly flashing red and blue, red and blue. Not going to any particular emergency, just rolling through. Someone had spray-painted on the hood
THE
POLICE
IS
THE
PATROL
.

“You know what?” said Martha. “Forget it.”

“Forget what?”

“Just—let’s forget it. I don’t want to…” She looked back at Lionel, who was staring back at her. He had on his uneasy kid face, trying to read his mom, trying to figure out how serious this situation was.

The cop car had sharked past, turned right, and disappeared.

“All right,” I said, thinking, and started the car. “Sure.”

A knock at the driver’s-side window, three knocks, bang bang bang. A massive midsection was filling up the window, blocking out the daylight. Outside Martha’s window was another man, as big as the one on my side, who was now gesturing for me to roll down the window.

I didn’t have my gun. I couldn’t have brought it to my doctor’s appointment. I could see it, imagine the size of it, in the room safe at the Capital City Crossroads. I buzzed down the window and squinted out. A gigantic black man in a golf visor, a leather jacket over a tight T-shirt, his face acne-pitted and moon large. He leaned into the car and talked across me, addressing Martha.

“You Wanda?”

“Yes,” she said. She darted a glance at me—phony name—and said, “Do you work with Mrs. Walker?”

“Sure do,” said the mountain of a man, his voice a heavy rumble. “She’s my mama.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, listen, will you just tell her I’m really sorry, but I actually was thinking forget it? I changed my mind. Okay?”

The dude in the golf visor looked amused. “Sure. Okay.”

“So you’ll tell her?”

“You can tell her.” He yanked open my door, and the other big man, the same size and dressed identically to the first, opened Martha’s. “C’mon, now,” said the new one. The new giant’s voice, not surprisingly, was the same distant-thunder bass. He had two chipped front teeth, the new brother—that was the only difference between them.

Martha nodded rapidly, sure, no problem, and licked her lips. “Hey, Jim?” she said, and put her hand on my knee. “Do you actually think you can stay here and keep an eye—”

“Uh-uh,” said big man number 1. “Everybody comin’. Everybody out the car.” He tugged open the back door and pointed at Lionel. “You, too, little man.”

My manager way back in Chicago, at that Townes store where I worked, was a good-hearted black man named Derrick, and sometimes he would give me a ride home. Every time he drove me, we would be going south on Lake Shore and they’d come into view, the jumbled ugly towers of Freedman Town, and Derrick would shake his head and say, “I wish I understood. I wish I understood why they can’t tear them places down. There has got to be something better we could do for those folks. Don’t you think?”

“Of course” is what I said to Derrick, and I meant it.

Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose—not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town’s purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say
Will you look at those animals?
That’s what kind of people those people are.
And that idea drifts up and out of Freedman Town like chimney smoke, black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation.

We proceeded in a slow parade, one of Mrs. Walker’s big boys in the front and the other in the back, the two of them escorting our strange family, herding us down the wide, rutted street, past graffitied doorways, past broken-down cars and plywood shanties, fire pits with smoke tendrils crawling up, raggedy hammocks strung between trees.

To look at him, Lionel gave no signs of being frightened—he bounced on the balls of his feet, looking every way at once. But about halfway down the block he grabbed my hand, and I held his, awkwardly at first, feeling his tiny fingers moving like curious animals inside my closed fist.

19.

“Now, tell
me how I know you again, baby?”

“You don’t,” said Martha. “Not really. My friend Anika, she knows your grandson Wayne.”

“Wayne in Gary?”

“No, ma’am. Wayne down in New Albany.”

The woman seated regally at the end of the long dining room table snorted and held up a wagging finger. “Grandson?
Please,
baby. That boy Wayne ain’t no kin to me.
Godson
. He my godson.” She took a long drag of her skinny cigarette and ashed it out in the juice cup at her elbow. “He still down there?”

“He’s in Louisville now, I think.”

“Well, you keep well clear of him. He dumb. Dumb and small-minded, too. There’s a difference, but he both. Stay clear.”

“Okay, ma’am. I will. I’ll do that.”

“Stop calling me ma’am, baby,” said the old lady. “Everybody call me Mama.”

“Okay, then.”

Martha smiled, barely, her face and her body rigid. She didn’t call the woman Mama. She wasn’t comfortable with that—she didn’t seem comfortable with any of this. Her sunglasses were folded neatly beside her at the table, like she was playing cards and this is what she was ready to bet with, if she had to. The room was small and stuffed with greenery, potted plants and vases full of flowers, all miraculously thriving in the low-hanging choke of smoke from Mama’s contraband Camels and the dope being enjoyed by her sons, who’d walked us up.

Mama Walker was middle-aged, but no telling how middle: somewhere north of forty-five and south of sixty. She’d been beautiful once and was beautiful now, in a way, an older lady’s leathery beauty. She was dark-skinned, and her face was lined, especially at the edges of her mouth. Her eyes were alert and alive, glittering with awareness, darting every which way at once. Noticing everything.

“Them two are my babies,” she said suddenly, swiveling to me, pointing with her smoke hand at the pair of men. “Twins. Believe that?”

I looked at them, and Mama’s babies nodded in unison from the love seat, two giants side by side, a couple of defensive linemen five years out of the game, old musculature hidden deep within layers of fat. In the apartment’s back room were a bunch of other kids, much younger, arrayed on and around a heavy sofa. Lionel, at Mama Walker’s encouragement, had fitted himself down among them, become instantly absorbed in whatever cartoon garbage was playing on the plasma screen across from Mama’s sofa.

Mama Walker stubbed out her Camel, pulled a new one.

“Misery sticks, I know. But I can’t smoke them Indian things. I feel bad about it and all, but them things taste like cow shit. So how old are you, baby?” The riff on slavery smokes was directed to me; the question was for Martha.

“Thirty-two.”

“Thirty-two. Thirty-two.” She looked at Martha carefully, critically, like a fine piece of jewelry. “Tricky age for us women, ain’t it?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Different for white girls, I guess.”

Martha shrugged uncomfortably. “I guess.”

“Everything different for white girls.”

I wondered again what the hell was going on here. I wondered, too, how I had managed to get myself implanted in it.

“And just so I’m straight on it,” said Mama, tilting her long head toward the back room, toward Lionel on the sofa. “Little man’s yours.”

“He is,” said Martha, looking yearningly toward the boy. “That’s right.”

Mama nodded slowly. She was looking at the kid, judging his complexion, casting as keen an appraising eye over the boy’s color as I had over Jackdaw’s—as I had over every runner I’d ever gone after. Mama Walker, I decided without thinking about it, without wanting to think about it, was moderate pine, red tone, number 211 or 212.

“So you what?” Mama Walker turned her eyes on me. “You Daddy?”