Underground Airlines(24)
“I don’t like to, either.”
“No disrespect, brother, but I could give a shit what you like.”
Maris glowered. I bore silent witness, thinking, There is no army of abolition. This is what the world has for heroes. Ordinary men, squabbling and prideful. Hassling each other, doing their best, busting the world free. And men like me, behind fake papers and clear-glass spectacles, keeping it chained.
“This man’s got a woman he loves and nowhere else to turn,” said Cook. “And the other thing is just about put to bed, right?”
“No, it is not yet…” A minor hesitation as Maris furrowed his brow, decoding the idiom. “It is not put to bed.”
“How’s he holding up, by the way?” said Cook. “Our boy? What’s the word from Dr. V?”
I kept my eyes blank while I listened to their conversation with radiological intensity. I noticed “How’s he holding up?” I noticed “Dr. V.” I stood silently just behind Officer Cook, noticing things.
They were done talking before long, and the three of us stood and waited. Cook leaned on Lincoln’s pillar, but Maris crossed his arms and stood erect, his big forearms bulging. He darted out his tongue and licked his lips, and the tip of his tongue was bright pink, like a bit of fruit. And then at last came Father Barton in civilian drag, no collar, just a black overcoat and blue jeans, slightly hunched forward, floating like a shadow up the white steps.
Maris descended one step, raised his hand to the priest.
Barton saw Maris, then he saw Cook.
Then Barton saw me, stopped walking, and turned and went back down the steps.
“Oh, for f*ck’s sake,” said Officer Cook.
Maris hustled down the steps after Father Barton, raising one arm, literally giving Cook and me the back of his hand.
“Fuck’s sake!” Cook called again, and chased after them both. “Hey—hey, come on. Hey—”
I was left at the top step, alone with ugly Abraham Lincoln, with his grim hawk nose and gloomy face, forever president-elect, looking out over his world.
12.
Back in the hotel room, I’d found a long, spidery crack in the corner behind the rickety desk they give you for writing on, and I sat and stared at that crack for a while, clutching my chest at heart level, holding myself still. I had all these leads, the case was wide open, I had Cook and Maris and their conversation leaky as an old boat, I had Whole Wide World to get to, but here all the old stuff was rising up in me like swamp water, the Old Man and the Franklins and Castle and Mr. Reedy and a swamp full of black red blood, all of it coming up until the mud filled the back of my throat, until I was choking—when I had work to do. Castle, Castle’s big eyes in the darkness—so much f*cking work to do.
With a slow, careful motion I opened the laptop and turned it on. While it was starting up I set up my cassette player and put on a mix tape I had. It wasn’t all MJ on that one, but quite a lot of it was, and the first song was “Ben,” nice and easy, gentle and tender. I let that song work its magic a second, let it cool me out, then I opened my laptop to look for Dr. V.
There was no shortage of doctors in Indianapolis, it looked like. It looked, actually, like medicine was one of a handful of bright spots in a dark economic landscape. Like a lot of big midwestern cities, this one had spent the second half of the twentieth century stumbling in and out of recessions, trying to make the best of America’s f*cked-up, piecemeal economy: all that proud but self-defeating unwillingness to do business with the Hard Four; all the blood and treasure wasted in the Texas War; all the industries, from cars to coal to computers, that had bloomed and then wilted in the face of international boycotts and sanctions (while, funnily enough, the slave states prospered, protected by the economic insulation of permanently deflated labor costs).
Everything’s changing in the twenty-first century, of course, thanks to emerging global markets—various former Communist states and economically insurgent African nations wanting nothing to do with the European Consensus—but that tide seemed not yet to have hit Indianapolis. The city, as I saw it from that rickety desk in that cheap hotel room, was a place with a lot of former glories: a used-to-be publishing industry, a used-to-be rail hub, a used-to-be powerhouse in coal and steel. What remained were services: a convention trade, a marketing trade, a handful of technology “start-ups”…and health care. Lots and lots of health care. Drug companies and medical device companies, ophthalmology centers and optometry centers and cancer centers. I counted five general hospitals, three private and two public, plus two children’s hospitals and a vast constellation of outpatient clinics.
I sat at the computer, listening to my music, drilling deeper in. Within the city’s vast population of doctors was a certain number with surnames beginning with the letter V; within that group was a much smaller group, those with V names long enough or unusual enough to be shorthanded down to “Dr. V.”
I pecked at the keyboard. I typed in instructions.
At first I excluded the outlying areas—Carmel, Fishers, Zionsville, Plainfield—but then I reincluded them, expanding my lists, narrowing my lists, playing with my lists. I eliminated psychiatrists and psychologists. I eliminated pediatricians and obstetrician-gynecologists. I did not, after some reflection, eliminate dentists and orthodontists. Who could say? I did not know what I was looking for. I was just looking.