Underground Airlines(32)

A dog barked inside one of the trailers; barked, then growled. Then a squat white lady in sweats came out, her hair in curlers, talking on her phone. She saw me, squinted in confusion a minute, then went back inside. The screen door slammed behind her.

I tried to imagine Mr. Maris inside one of those tin cans, sitting motionless in the darkness, watching me through slatted blinds with his bright golden eyes. I imagined Jackdaw under a bed; I pictured him in the narrow space between a refrigerator and a wall. I would have to go from house to house, trailer to trailer, knocking on doors or climbing in windows.

It was getting along toward twilight, and I squinted in the growing darkness at the bank of parked vehicles. The sky was dense, low, heavy with rain that wasn’t yet ready to come down.

Not right. Something wasn’t right. I turned and walked back up the lane.

“You need something?”

“Let me guess,” I said, raising a hand to the man now standing at the door of the market. “You’re Slim.”

He didn’t answer. He watched me as I walked over. Slim had a long, droopy brown mustache, and his eyes were droopy, too, coming down at the corners like he was born sleeping and never quite woke up. Slim bent his head slightly and spat. My shoe heels crunched on the gravel.

“I asked what you needed, boy.”

I flinched and hid my flinching. I felt my mouth turning up into a scowl, and I ordered it not to do that. The little one-syllable insult, boy, it worked as it always did, like a little chunk of gravel, a pointy rock of disgust and contempt.

I smiled. God forgive me, I did. The word hit the side of my face, and I smiled. I was working. “Not meaning to bother you, sir,” I said. “I’m just looking for a friend of mine.”

“I ain’t seen him,” said Slim immediately. Before I could answer there was a short, blaring shriek, like two pieces of sheet metal scraping together, from inside the body shop behind me. Slim didn’t turn his head, so I didn’t, either.

“Due respect, sir,” I said, nice and calm, “but how do you know you haven’t seen him? Can I tell you what he looks like?”

“Due respect,” he said, “does he look like you?”

I required of my smile that it widen. That it broaden and harden and glaze, become a smile that was like a shield. The answer to the question was no, of course. Mr. Maris wasn’t even close to looking like me. Maris was built like a boxer, and he had metallic skin and distinctly African features, a long nose and wide nostrils, bright golden eyes. He didn’t look shit like me.

“If you’re asking is he black, then yes. He’s black.”

“Like I said. I ain’t seen him.”

“You mind if I come in the store a minute, have a look around?”

“We’re closed.”

My smile was having trouble. I could feel it flickering.

“It’ll just take a second,” I said. “I’d just like to have a quick look. This friend of mine, see, I’m trying to find him. He said he was coming down here.”

“Did you not hear the man?” I turned around and saw a dump truck in mechanic’s overalls. “He said git.”

The man who’d come out of the garage to join us was burly and bearded, with streaks and smears of oil on his chest and fat stomach. Slim sniffed and spat again, while the big fella snorted. They could have been a goddamn vaudeville team, these two, except that the big one was holding not a microphone but a long rifle. He had it clutched across his chest, minuteman style. My smile gave up. It extinguished. Fuck it.

“I don’t know what I’ve done to upset you fellas,” I said. “But I don’t want any trouble.”

“He don’t want any trouble,” said the mechanic over my shoulder to Slim, who harrumphed and stroked his mustache. I turned at the sound of gravel, as fat boy took a step forward and brandished the rifle.

I steeled my jaw. Jim Dirkson wasn’t going to cut it, and I found inside myself a hard man, a stone-cold antihero from one of those 1970s black revenge pictures, from Jim Blackmon’s Slaveland Vengeance or one of its many sequels.

“Drop the weapon, shitheel,” I said. My voice was down half an octave. I was cold and keen-eyed and hard in my shell.

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll wrap it around your fat white neck.”

This was dialogue, I was doing lines, but goddamn if I didn’t mean it. This bearded sack of crap dropped into some kind of firing-range stance, but man, I was just one step too close and he didn’t know what I was and I had gravel in my hand and I was flinging it in his piggy eyes and then I was leaping at him, one big panther leap. I had him by the hair and the gun on the ground and I slapped him with my big open hand—once, twice, then three times, slapped his face back and forth like a cruel father hitting his boy because he hates himself.

The mechanic was down on the ground, his hands feebly defending himself against my superior strength, the rifle at his feet in the gravel. I heard movement on the porch and without turning, still holding fat boy, I said: “Stay where you are, Slim.”

“Hey,” said the mechanic, and I kicked him in the face and his mouth blew open with blood and he turned and started to curl away. I grabbed the gun and wheeled around and was glad to see Slim rooted to his place as instructed. A drool of tobacco spit ran from the corner of his mouth. I came at him now with the rifle, one step, two steps.