Underground Airlines(4)

I drove north on Meridian Street carefully, away from the Fountain Diner, away from Father Barton and his empty apologies. The world I heard described on the radio was the same as the one I could see through the streaky window of the car: gray and ugly, redolent of violence and the fear of violence. This was the week of the Batlisch hearings: fulminating in the Senate, furor in the streets. This woman’s nomination had “ignited a firestorm,” as the radio liked to hype it. Protests and counterprotests in Washington, DC, in the nominee’s hometown of Philadelphia, and in plenty of other places besides. Violence—violence and fear.

There was some little local controversy, too, about a fund-raising effort called Suzie’s Closet: folks getting together in church basements to make care packages for the plantations—blankets and candy bars and all that kind of thing. First they interviewed a local advocate for the homeless, asking why our attention should be down there “when there’s so much suffering right here at home!” Then came a spokesman for the Black Panthers, denouncing the campaign as “mere ameliorationism,” calling Suzie naive. Which struck me as a little harsh, the girl being nine years old and all.

It was the usual stuff—all the new stories are just the old stories over again.

I turned off the radio and fished a Michael Jackson cassette out of the glove box. The tape hissed when I pushed it in. It was a mix tape that I had made myself, many, many years before. Soon, they were saying, new cars wouldn’t have tape decks anymore, since the American market was finally catching up with CDs. Not yet, though.

I turned up the volume. MJ sang “Human Nature,” from Thriller, and I sang along.



I was stopped at a checkpoint on my way back to my hotel, which I’d been expecting. Tensions were high because of the Batlisch business and because of a couple nasty incidents up along the 49th parallel. Indianapolis, like a lot of cities, had declared a “heightened security environment,” so cops were free to pull over black drivers when they felt like it—not that they ever needed a reason in particular. It was at 79th Street and Ditch Road that I heard the bloop-bloop of the sirens, and I got out slowly, giving no trouble, showing my hands, standing where they told me to stand, staring blankly into the doorway of a grocery store while I got frisked by a beefy patrolman with bad breath and razor burn.

He looked closely at my papers. My papers held up just fine. The sun was almost done sinking. A yellow smear against a dishwater horizon.





3.



At the tail end of our dinner together, while we were tussling over the bill, I lifted Father Barton’s wallet. This small and seamless maneuver caused me no difficulty or concern: I had performed the same quick action dozens of times in the past. There he was, poor man, embarrassed by my grief, flustered by my adamance, anxious to escape an emotionally charged moment. It would be a lot to ask, in such complicated circumstances, to keep track of something so prosaic, so secular, as a wallet. In the bathroom I photographed its contents, utilizing a tiny device that attaches to my cell phone, then I slipped the wallet back into his pocket when I embraced him good-bye.

And now, back in the Capital City Crossroads Hotel on 86th Street, with the door locked, with the shades pulled, I opened my laptop and began entering data into the remarkable mapping program I had on there. I entered the home address from Father Barton’s driver’s license. I entered the addresses of three restaurants and five gas stations he had recently patronized and from which he had helpfully held on to the credit-card receipts. I entered the address of his gym, his local branch library, and the Sport Clips where he got his hair cut. I entered, too, the Meridian Street address of the restaurant where we had just eaten at his suggestion and that of the parish church of Saint Catherine’s, where I had accosted poor old LuEllen a few hours earlier.

I had never been to Indianapolis before, but I had been to lots of other cities, and every city is the same. Neighborhoods and waterways, big roads and side roads. A circle of downtown in the middle, a circle of highway around the perimeter, like a dog fence. Rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods. Black areas, white areas, mixed. CVS and Starbucks, Walmart and Townes Stores. The world is the same everywhere you go.

In the North, I should say. The world is about the same in every northern city. I’m a lot less familiar with the South these days.

What the mapping software did was turn each of the addresses into a blinking red dot. When I was done with the data entry and could take a look at the map, one of the dots sang out to me right away. It called my name. Most of the other dots were clustered together, centered around the priest’s church up there on Meridian and just north of it, along the crowded shopping corridor of 86th Street, a mile or two west of where I was sitting. But this one dot was way, way down, in a different part of town. It sat at the intersection of 38th and Graceland, in a neighborhood the map called Mapleton–Fall Creek.

“All right,” I said out loud. “Well, all right.” I laid a fingertip on that dot, as if to feel it, to measure its strength.

My name is not Jim Dirkson.

Neither is my name Dudley Vincent, the identity under which I’d been staying at the Hilton Garden Inn near the Cleveland, Ohio, airport until last night, when Mr. Bridge called me and woke me and told me to start packing. Mr. Vincent’s driver’s license and American Express card had since been cut to pieces, and those pieces were now buried in a construction-site Dumpster behind a Cleveland shopping mall.