Underground Airlines(26)

“There he is. Mystery man. My savior.”

She was out of her jean jacket, and she’d changed into some sort of short-sleeved dress, but the Doc Martens were still on. She had winding tattoos, dark ink on the strawberry flesh of her calves: summer flowers, peonies and roses. Her boy was in a bathing suit, with a Spider-Man towel slung over his shoulder. The white girl fell into step beside me, walking down the second-floor hallway, with the boy trailing behind.

“I’m Martha, by the way.”

“How do you do? I’m Jim Dirkson.”

“Oh, okay, Jim Dirkson. Sorry. I didn’t know we were doing last names.” She was in her late twenties, early thirties, but she was tiny and laughed like a teenager, big and unself-conscious. “Martha Flowers. And this here is Lionel, like the trains.”

“Mama!” The kid scowled and bumped into his mom, accidentally on purpose. “Like the lion.”

Martha rolled her eyes. “Do you know that cartoon? Lionel the Lion? It’s terrible.”

“It’s—no, it’s not. Mama!” said Lionel. “It’s badass.”

“Whoa! Hey!” Martha, playfully shocked, knocking her son gently on his shoulder. “Don’t say badass.”

“You say it!”

“I’m allowed to say it.”

I smiled at all this, the teasing and admonishment, the affectionate banter. I had learned about the love between parents and children the way I had learned so many other things, by observation. By skulking, by paying attention through what I came to call in retrospect my shadow years: years out of slavery but not yet in civilization. Saving up to buy solid papers, living underground. In Naperville in a church basement; under a train bridge on Chicago’s west side. I’d spend whole days in the reading room of the big library downtown, a shadow in the corner; reading the great slave narratives, reading Ellison, Baldwin, Wright. Learning my own history. I read Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, the one that had, legendarily, been smuggled page by page out of a Florida cane plantation two decades before that state went free.

Slowly drinking water in coffee shops, perching on corners, watching people interact, learning free American language. The way people laughed when they were allowed to laugh out loud. Ha ha ha, I said to myself on the basement floor in the middle of the night. Ha ha ha.

The elevator door binged. “Well, come on, Jim Dirkson,” said Martha. “Come on down to the pool and chat a minute.”

It wasn’t much of a pool they had down there, fifty square feet, maybe, a shallow end and a deep end and no diving board or anything. A list of rules, painted on a wooden sign. No diving. No horseplay. No lifeguard on duty. At the far end of the room was a glass wall revealing the “fitness center”—a couple treadmills and a bowl of fruit and a wall-mounted TV set to CNN.

Lionel dropped his towel and leaped unceremoniously into the pool, cannonballing in, disappearing and then splashing back up a second later, sputtering and grinning, water dewdropping on his brow.

“Hoo, my God,” he shouted. “It’s so cold. Mama, you gotta come in. It’s so cold.”

“No way.”

“Come on.”

“I didn’t even wear a suit.”

Lionel blew her a raspberry and wheeled back under the surface, flashed around, a streak beneath the chlorine blue. A second later his feet jutted up from the surface and kicked back and forth.

“Kid’s amazing,” said Martha softly, then, abruptly, “Thanks for the food yesterday morning, by the way. Very decent of you. Extremely human.”

I shrugged. “How was the job fair?”

“Great.” She pushed at her hair. “Really great. Really, really, really great.” She smiled sardonically, but her eyes were anxious and scared, staring into some kind of bad future. “It was the sort of thing, the first day is all applications, meeting the people, then people call you back on the second day if they want you to come in and interview.” I remembered the stack of paperwork on her lap, dog-eared photocopies, ballpoint pen smearing everywhere. “So, you know, anyway,” she said. “Here I am at the pool.”

Well. I had my own thing going. I had my own problems.

A clutch of new kids came in, white kids, shrieking. A girl maybe thirteen plus two twin brothers just about Lionel’s age, the girl with freckles and the boys with flat midwestern crew cuts. They all splashed on in there, and the boys immediately got into some kind of tussle with Lionel, the way kids that age do, making themselves into animals, sliding around each other, surfacing on each other’s shoulders.

“So what’s your story?” Martha asked me, and I lingered, polite as Dirkson was polite. “Business or pleasure? I’m going to guess business.”

“Why do you guess that?”

“Oh, well, you know. A gentleman traveling alone? In Indianapolis? It’s a nice town, but it’s not, like, I don’t know.” She laughed. “Cancun. Right?”

“Right.” I smiled. “Yes. I travel quite a bit for business.”

As soon as I said it, I wished I had held my tongue. It was a foolish thing to say. Unnecessary. Martha was interested, too. “Cool,” she said. “God. I wish I traveled a lot. What do you do? Why are you here?”

“I work for a company called Sulawesi Digital as a site analyst.” She blinked. I smiled. “It’s a cellular service provider. Based in Indonesia.”