Underground Airlines(47)
“But I—I would promise! You would have my word on it!”
Mama Walker didn’t even bother to answer that. She stubbed out her cigarette with hard meaning, and the boys at the door opened it. At last Martha saw that this wasn’t happening, and immediately she switched modes; immediately she was ready to get out, out of Freedman Town, as fast as feet could go. “Lionel,” she called, and when he didn’t come at once, captivated by the cartoon show, climaxing in a blur of flash and sound, she said it again, sharp—“Lionel!”—and he bounced over.
“Real nice to meet you,” said Mama Walker. “Real nice to meet all of you.”
The big men stepped aside, then Mama Walker said—so low you almost couldn’t hear her—“I’ll give you the money you give me the boy.”
“What?” said Martha. I pulled her out by the arm. “What did you say?”
I pulled her down the stairs. “What did she say?”
I hustled her and her child along the block, her eyes wild. I stuffed her in the car. I drove her away.
20.
The TV was on at the Fountain Diner. It played with the sound off, attached to the end of a jointed mechanical arm jutting out over the counter. Everybody in the place was watching or half watching the hearings, the special Saturday session of the Senate finance committee: customers with eyes locked on the screen, ignoring their pancakes, busboys rubbing the same spot of dirty table over and over. Our waitress set down our plates in the wrong spots, gazing up at the TV. Batlisch, unflappable, staring back at her tormentors. Her thumb tucked between forefinger and middle finger, her eyes narrowed and stern, and the crawl below the screen: “If the question, Senator, is do I think that my opinions…or my, my ideology, as you put it, although I don’t think that’s necessarily…no, excuse me. If I may finish? If the question is, do those ideas put me outside the mainstream of American opinion, then I think the answer is no. I think the answer is a resounding no.”
The busboy at the next table, a young guy, shaved bald, he liked that answer. He nodded to himself with satisfaction and walked back toward the kitchen, smiling.
Even Lionel, seated across from me at our booth, was rapt: maybe not totally understanding, but thinking somehow, as everybody thought, that this was some big deal. Some kind of watershed moment, as they like to call them. He was coloring on the back of the menu, but he kept stopping, staring for a beat or two at the tough white lady on the screen. I stared at the TV, too, trying to gin up some feeling of excitement, trying to feel what the busboy was feeling, the cooks. Let’s say she did get confirmed. Maybe she does what she says—maybe she brings new vigor to the prosecution of financial firms that trade in blood money. But the firms would find ways around it. The Southern Regional Lobbying Association would send in their K Street shock troops, white papers in hand, and the floors of Congress would ring with the old refrains of popular sovereignty and imperishable tradition. Nothing would change.
Martha was the only person in the place ignoring the TV. She sat very still, staring straight ahead, steam rising off the cup of coffee that was all she ordered.
“You all right?” I said, and she exhaled.
“I guess so.” She shook her head. Her hair had fallen down. The chopstick that had pinned it all together had disappeared, maybe into her cavernous purse, maybe onto Mama Walker’s floor. “I mean, no. This is weird. I dragged you into this thing, and now—I mean, it’s just weird. Aren’t you even gonna ask?”
“Ask what?”
“Are you serious?” Martha peered at me, at Jim Dirkson, trying to figure out this good, gentle businessman, too polite or too dense for this universe. “About twenty-nine thousand, five hundred dollars.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure. Well, I guess I did wonder.”
“I’ll bet.”
She’d wanted lunch, asked for us to go, and here she was not eating. She’d picked the restaurant, too, and I was keenly conscious the whole time we sat there of Officer Willie Cook. It was his favorite spot, after all, and right there was the table where he’d been seated with his white partner, I could see it from where we were sitting, and it was having an effect on me. I felt jittery and unsafe. I kept seeing that overfriendly smile, that knowing expression of his. While Martha sat and stared into whatever dark vistas her life gave her to stare at, I wondered how I might explain to Officer Cook what I was doing here, what bereft, wifeless Jim Dirkson was doing enjoying lunch with his new white ladyfriend—and the other way around, of course. “Oh, yes, Martha, this is Officer Cook—he’s a police officer I know and also an agent of the Airlines…”
On television, Donatella Batlisch finished a point—“considering each issue on its merits, absent any kind of prejudice”—and lifted her water and sipped it and set it down again. C-SPAN then turned the camera on a pair of richly jowled southern senators huddled together, whispering with grave expressions, conscious of the cameras.
What the hell was I doing, anyway? I was in the middle of a case. I had a man I had to find. I had Bridge biting at my heels.
“Honey?” said Martha. Lionel had put his head down on the table. He was crying. “Baby—baby, what?”
It was just the maze, though. He’d been trying to work the maze on the back of the menu, a sea-creature theme, and he couldn’t crack the f*cker, and it was making him weep. This was right—this was good. With all that was happening in his mama’s world, all that was happening in the whole world, he was stymied by the maze. A baby octopus, trying to find the way home to his cave.