Underground Airlines(33)

“You seen my friend?”

“I seen no black men.”

I fired. The glass behind Slim shattered, and the whole door jumped and shuddered in the jamb. Slim’s old coyote face convulsed with fear. It felt good; it all felt good. I took another step forward and raised the muzzle to his eyes.

“You seen him?”

“No.” He kept his hands where I could see them, raised them slowly and laced his fingers behind his head, like a man who’d been trained. The interrogation was over. I believed him. He hadn’t seen Maris or anybody else. But I—I don’t know. I wasn’t done.

“You military, Slim?”

“What?”

“Were you in the army?”

“Yes.”

“You see action?”

“Yes. In the gulf. In Texas.”

“Oh, yeah? What side?”

He stopped talking. He stared at me. “America. Our side.”

“So what were you fighting for?” His eyes went down to the gun, then back to my face; my face was set and cruel. He knew where I was going. So did I. I couldn’t stop. “I said, what were you fighting for, Slim?”

“For—for America. For the Union.”

“Yeah, but Texas didn’t want none of the Union. Right? They didn’t want nothing to do with it. With us. With slavery. They just wanted to be done with it. Remember?” He tried to move his head, but I had the gun pressed between his eyes, really grinding in hard between his eyes. “But you went and fought to keep the Union together.”

“I got drafted.”

“Coulda run. Plenty ran. They still up there.”

“I was fighting for my country.”

“Bullshit.”

“All right.”

He closed his eyes. He thought I was gonna kill him right there. I was glad. I was tight with rage. My rib cage was a fist clenched around my heart. The sun had gone down. There were no lights in the parking lot. The moon was coming up, pale and disinterested.

“What were you fighting for, Slim?”

He looked down. Mustache drooping down. He whispered. “Slavery.”

I shot him in the knee. While he wailed, while the fat one moaned, I wiped my prints off the rifle with the sleeve of my shirt and threw it in the dirt and drove away.





16.



I drove away trembling.

What the hell was I doing?

What did I care?

Texas was the Lone Star miracle, the success story of early-twentieth-century activist abolitionism: in an orchestrated campaign, migrant manumissionists from all over the country flooded in, along with tens of thousands of Catholic-abolitionist Mexicans, drawn by the come one, come all immigration policy shortsightedly enacted by a state eager for oil-field hands. Hence the miracle, el milagro: the largest state in the union, free by statute in 1939. It wasn’t till twenty-five years later, under the first Mexican-American governor in that or any other state, that they went further, declared their intention to secede, and Washington said, the f*ck you will. There was a Texan in the White House by then, one who’d been a schoolteacher, who’d had some of these Mexican sumbitches in his classroom. He took it personally. These folks needs to read their history books, said President Johnson. Secession is illegal under the Constitution—and by the way, that’s American oil under all that sand.

Eleven years of fighting. Battleships in the Gulf of Mexico, swift boats on the Rio Grande. Mexican partisans fighting hicks like Slim on the shores of Corpus Christi.

Not my war. A useless, nasty war, and nothing to do with me.

Eleven years of grueling, bitter combat, ending in nothing. Uneasy detente. Contested status. They call themselves the Republic of Texas, but we keep their star on our flag. We created the Special Economic Zone to protect our oil interests in the Gulf of Mexico, and they formed the Gulf Irregulars to protect theirs. Status quo antebellum.

I was shaking. My arms were shaking. I drove back slowly to the hotel, my hands at ten and two, not even putting in a tape. Eyes on the road, deep breaths, hoping and praying for no checkpoints. I didn’t know what I would do.

Putting a bullet in a man’s leg. Leaving carnage behind me. In the hotel parking lot I sat in the car a minute or more, hands on my knees, trying to get my head right. Work your case, I said to myself. Solve your goddamn case.



Someone was on the phone in the horseshoe driveway of the Capital City Crossroads. There was a copse of tall hedges to the right side of the door, out of range of the streetlights, and someone was hidden by one of them, talking loudly and with emotion into a cellular phone.

I could hear this private conversation as I came across the parking lot, and my instinct was to veer to the right, keep my head down, get to my room as soon as I could. It was 9:20. I had half an hour until Bridge called, and I wanted that time. I needed it. I needed to sit in the room with my hands on the desk until my body quit the shivering it had started up with. The tension of the confrontation at Slim’s—the buck and kick of the firearm. I wanted time for all of it to sluice out of me and leave me empty.

“No, but that’s just not—” said the voice. It was Martha. My white friend from the breakfast area, from the pool. “That makes it very difficult for me to—no—wait, what? No. Wait…”

I had walked past her. She had not seen me. I stopped at the threshold of the building, and the automatic door sensed my approach and whooshed open.