Underground Airlines(42)

“My goodness,” I said. “How are you?”

“This is crazy,” she said. “I know. I know this is crazy.”

“What’s crazy?”

“Well. Okay. So—I need to ask you a favor.”

What could I say? What would Dirkson say? What did I want to say? I said sure. She pulled out a booster seat from the backseat of her boxy pink SA hatchback, which we left parked on Meridian Street. Away we went, Lionel settled in the backseat and Martha up front beside me, her fingers laced in her lap.

“Where are we headed?”

“Uh, this way, I guess,” said Martha softly, and I went the way she pointed, straight south down Meridian Street.

“So,” I said, and she smiled, bright but quick.

“So,” she said, as if this was all perfectly normal, as if we did this every day. “You had a doctor’s appointment?”

“Yes,” I said. “I did.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yes, thank you. Just fine.” I was Dirkson. I had my glasses on. I held my hands at ten and two on the wheel. “Just a little thing. Slipped is all. Out last night working, and I just plumb slipped on the sidewalk and twisted my ankle. Not a big deal, but the folks in Jakarta, you know, any little thing…insurance and all…”

I was talking too much, polishing my stupid lie until it practically glowed. She’d stopped listening anyway. She gazed out the window. She had on cheap sunglasses, cat’s eyes, which went perfectly, somehow, with the plastic chopstick in her hair. A vintage day dress, paisleys against midnight blue. Martha also had on this ring, a cheap little shopping-mall band of fake gold, and while I drove she was twisting it on and off, on and off, moving it restlessly from finger to finger, like she was running a shell game on herself. One thing I was used to seeing from young white people, it was confidence, an easy sense that the world belonged to them. This Martha, she had that, too—even now she was going through my glove compartment, examining my tapes, no big deal—but it was only a thin layer, only on the top. Underneath was all kinds of nervousness and fear.

“Do you mind?” said Martha, the tape already half pushed into the player.

“Not at all.”

The Jackson 5 sang “Who’s Lovin’ You,” MJ out front, his four older brothers doing tight, high harmony in the back.

I glanced at Martha, her head turned to look out the shotgun window, and I saw it again, the black box tatted on her neck, and below it a glimpse of cream-white skin and pale pink bra. I flushed, confused and obscurely angry. Lionel danced his head like a robot in the backseat. Storefronts rushed past the window. Medical supply; Oriental rugs; buildings available for lease.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess at some point I’ll need to know where it is we’re going.”

“Of course,” she said. “Yeah.”

Martha took a quick look at Lionel—tuned out, grooving to Michael, a world of his own—and launched in. “Okay, so what I need,” she said, “is, like, like a—an escort, I guess. Like…just—a friend, I mean. I gotta do this errand, kind of meet this lady…it’s—just this thing I gotta do. I thought she was gonna come up to the hotel, but now she said I need to come down to her.”

Straitlaced Mr. Dirkson frowned a little bit. “Is this in relation to a health-care position?” and Martha said, “No, not exactly,” while my mind clicked through possibilities. Drugs? Guns? Easy to imagine Martha, single mother in thrift-shop clothes, lugging around some wagon of debt she was trying to get shed of.

Martha still wasn’t telling me where we were going; we were just going. I turned right on 16th Street. I stopped for a red at North Capitol.

“And I’ve been advised—God, Jesus, that sounds so fancy.” Martha made a fancy voice, uptown lawyer, mock snooty. “I have been advised not to go by myself. You know, as a…” She looked over at me. The light turned green. “As a girl.”

She didn’t say as a white girl, but there it was with us in the car anyway. I nodded.

“But—so…you just…you’re a helper. You’re obviously one of the good guys. So I thought…”

I said nothing, and my silence I knew she would attribute to shyness or modesty when in fact I was muzzled by the horror of it, the dark, grieving irony of the idea that I would be a good person—that I would obviously be such a person. I blinked back to life and turned left on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street. I had an idea already of where we were going. I could feel it coming. Michael came into the last chorus, soared right up into it like a little angel.

“I am not going to even offer to pay you. I have, like, zero dollars. But I could owe you. I’ll pay you—maybe even later today. Maybe even after the meeting.” She took a breath. She looked at me, plucky and anxious, over the rims of the cat’s eyes. “So what do you think?”

The only logical answer was no. I was hot on my case. I was within sight of the finish line. I had Bridge breathing down my neck, I had old ghosts making howling circles in my mind.

“So?” I asked. “Where to?”

She had it on a piece of paper. She dug it out from the pocket of her jeans. She had the address on the silver foil of a gum wrapper. “Here. Uh. Tenth and Belmont.”