Underground Airlines(13)
The photo page was still on the bed. That description, “late-summer honey,” you know, that sounds like poetry, but it’s not. “Late-summer honey, warm tone, #76” is one of 172 varietals of African American skin tone delineated in the US Marshals Service field guide in a chart called “Pigmentation Taxonomies,” located in chapter 9 (“Identifiers/Descriptors”). I, myself, am “moderate charcoal, brass highlights, #41.”
8.
“Hoo, shit! What is this?”
“Hey, yo—stop, man. Hey, yo, slave. Stop, slave.”
I stopped. I turned, but slowly, slowly. I didn’t turn my whole body: just my head.
“Come on, now, PB, slow it down.” The boy said the letters with singsong double emphasis, Pee-bee; pee, then bee. There were two of them, two boys hollering from the top step of a wooden porch. I was back down in the same neighborhood, a few blocks from Catholic Promise, in uniform, ready to go. Getting on now toward twilight. The same no-weather weather it had been all day: it was cloudless, or maybe there was just one large cloud, a blanket across the whole of the sky.
“Slavey be rushin’, man.”
“Shit, yeah, he be rushin’. Get back to the field before Massa scan him in late.”
They howled. They bumped fists. Hip-hop music blasted from a portable stereo beside them.
I ground my teeth and fought back a rush of bad, bad memories, my life behind the Fence coming up all together in a red flash: dangling flesh and blood guttering down into the drains. I pushed it down. I choked it back.
“Y’all talkin’ to me?” I said to the boys, very slowly, very mildly, palming my chest.
“Yeah, man.”
“Yeah, son.”
They prowled down from the steps they’d been sitting on, a pack of two, and flanked me. I stood military straight. There was nothing to be concerned about here. They hadn’t seen through me, no way. Not these two. These were just boys, mischievous children of good, hardworking free people, a couple teenagers throwing poses, pants down around their nuts, playing at gangster. There were wind chimes tinkling on that porch behind my tormentors. This was some long-suffering mama’s porch.
But one of them, skinny with bare arms and a head shaped like a peanut, hitched up his T-shirt to show me the handle of a Saturday night special. I stood quietly between them at the foot of the wooden stairs. The rap song on the stereo ended, and another one began, a shouted lyric and a ropy bass line snaking between beats. It was not a song I knew, but I don’t listen to a lot of rap. It’s that power in it—that danger that scares a lot of white people, that’s gotten it banned outright in some places—that power that’s right up there on the surface. It’s too much for me sometimes. It batters at me. It catches me in the rib cage.
“I am afraid you fellas have me mistaken,” I said, still mild, even smiling slightly. “I have never even been behind the line.”
“Oh, yeah?” said the other of the two boys. He was larger, dense, thickly muscled arms in a sleeveless Colts T-shirt. He had beady little eyes. Medium-red pigment, somewhere in the mahogany range; his friend, with the peanut head, he was brighter-skinned, almost Caucasian. “I think you lyin’,” said the thick one, but then turned, uncertain, to his boy. “He lyin’, right?”
Peanut Head ignored him, pushed a flat hand into the center of my chest. I didn’t flinch. I kept my cool.
“You a hardworking man, PB?” he demanded. “You got good years in you, yeah? How much you think you worth?”
“Yeah,” said the other. “How much we earn, we call you ass in?”
“Call it in?” Peanut Head turned to his friend, incredulous. “Shit, Bernard. We ain’t calling the f*cking tip line. We call Elron, he call his cousin what’s-his-name, that snatcher. We make some real bread on this f*cking runner.”
I contemplated my options. I wondered about Elron, about the cousin. There are real snatchers, of course, man takers cruising the back alleys of black neighborhoods and Freedman Towns, looking for men to peel off the fringes of life: parolees, the homeless, sex offenders living low—anyone who can be thrown in an SUV, shorn of papers, and sold to some bargain-hunting middler who’ll turn him around on a no-auction sale. It happens rarely, but it happens. Everything happens.
“Hold ’em,” said the littler one to his friend, but Bernard hesitated. “Grab him, son, go on.”
Bernard cornered me against the porch rail, wide body blocking my exit, and I thought about my move. If it came to it, I’d catch them both before either could draw. Quick, easy martial-arts throat chops to bring them down, slam their heads together to make them still. Drag them down the stairs quickly and put them in the trunk of the Altima. Drive back north toward the hotel, call Bridge from the car. There was a man he used, I knew, to handle these kinds of situations. His name was Ferdinand. He was a Cuban. I didn’t have the number, but I would call Bridge, and Bridge would call Ferdinand. Unavoidable, I would say. Nothing I could do.
“Go on, Bernard,” said Peanut, one hand on the butt of his gun, the other calling Elron with his phone. “Grab that bitch.”
Bernard raised his hands as if to seize me, but he wasn’t quite sure on this thing, not quite yet. I took the moment. I spoke, slow and low and clear. “I would not do that.”