Underground Airlines(34)

“Fuck!” Martha shouted. She had not seen me. “God f*cking damn it.”

I stepped back, let the door whoosh closed again. No. Fuck this. Come on. I stepped forward, and the door whooshed open, then back again. Whoosh.

“You okay?” I said, and she smiled, stepping out from behind the hedges.

“Well, that’s—good question.” She stuffed the phone in her pocket. She was wearing the same jean jacket, the same jeans. She did not look as if she had slept. She twisted her small mouth into a wry grimace. “Are you okay? That’s the million-dollar question, right? My mother always told me to watch out. For that question, I mean. Because, like, are you or aren’t you, right? It’s not usually one or the other, you know?”

“Oh,” I said. “Sure. That makes sense.”

“But no. Not really.” She tugged the phone out again and looked at it, and I studied the side of her face. I had been thinking of her as a girl, a sassy kid who’d become a mother much too early. Now—sighing, frustrated, anxious, in the moonlight outside the hotel—she looked like what she probably was: a woman in the first years of her thirties, with a few worry lines at the corners of her mouth, with some of life’s grief already in her eyes.

“Everything all right with your boy?”

“Lionel, remember? Like the train.”

I remembered. I remember everything. “Oh, yes, of course. Lionel.”

A long, rolling shudder passed through me, and I held myself still till it was gone. I had put a bullet in that man without thinking. Without hesitation or regret. What were you fighting for? What was I doing?

“The kid is fine.” She gestured inside. “Sleeping like the proverbial…whatever. Do you have kids, Jim?”

“Nope,” I said. “Nope. I never went down that route somehow. Never went down that road.”

“Right. I asked you that. Your traveling.”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, that’s just it.”

The door whooshed, and a couple came out, a man and a woman, arm in arm, whispering together. The man lifted his keys, and we heard the bloop-bloop of a car door unlocking somewhere out in the darkness of the lot.

When I looked back at Martha, her head was tilted back, and she was studying the stars.

“I’m just trying hard. You know? Real hard.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“Trying so hard.”

I saw myself again an hour earlier at Slim’s, wielding that rifle like a lightning bolt. That was a different person who had done all that. Now, this, here—this was Jim Dirkson, speaking softly to a distressed stranger in the parking lot of a hotel. Jim, kind and calm, lending a comforting presence, and me underneath, searching, hunting, pushing. Doing my thing.

“I think you said…” I began, and when she jumped I said, “Sorry, sorry. But I think you said you were from here originally. Like, you grew up here?”

“I’m from Indiana. Not Indy. My sister lives up here, though. Sometimes we come and visit.”

“But not this time.”

“No. This time it’s—” She held up the phone. “Business.”

“All right. Well, I have a question for you. It’s just a number: 1819,” I said. “A year, I’m guessing. Does the year 1819 have any kind of special meaning around here?”

Martha’s expression changed, sharply, completely. She dropped her eyes down to the gravel of the lot, then she looked back up, unsmiling, and spoke in a sad hush. “Where did you see that number?”

“Oh…” I said. “You know…”

It wasn’t right, dragging my problems in front of this innocent bystander, who clearly had problems of her own. I was pretty sure I already knew the goddamn answer anyway.

“Just something I spotted hung up outside somebody’s house.”

“Hung up how?”

“On a flag. A number of ’em, actually. Like pennants. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.” Something like anger was choking Martha’s face. “Because it just gets into everything.”

“What does?”

“It. All this shit.”

“What shit?”

Martha shook her head. “Where did you see them? Downtown? Southside?”

“East side.” All the questions were making me a little uneasy. I felt the need to reinforce my ID, duck under my cover for a moment. “I was at a potential retail location, kind of poking around the area.”

“Oh, all right,” she said. “I see.”

“You know what?” I said, regretting the whole line. It was 9:30. Bridge would be calling in twenty minutes. “Don’t worry about it. The business with the number. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“No,” she said. “No, you’re fine.” She gave her head a little shake, took a deep breath, preparing to bear up to unpleasantness. “It’s the year before…what’s his name?” She squeezed shut her eyes, remembering hard, then popped them back open. “Lasselle. The Indiana Supreme Court, 1820.” She closed her eyes again. She looked older with her eyes closed. “‘The framers of our Constitution intended a total and entire prohibition of slavery in this State.’ So 1820 is the year Indiana was officially and fully free.”