Underground Airlines(49)

A UPS driver, a thick-armed white man who delivered to the outpatient clinic where Martha was working, had whispered to her after work one day: We’re tryna get help together for this boy. Can you help? “I thought he was hitting on me,” Martha remembered. “The UPS guy!” She went to the meeting, though, and there was this boy—this man. With all the marks of his journey: fingers blistered from the mast, his back a mass of half-healed scars. One eye burned out from six sun-bright weeks at sea.

“He was so beautiful,” she said quietly. “I don’t know what I was expecting. I didn’t know what to expect. Some, like, skinny, ignorant, bald…thing. Like, not a human. Like a monster or something. But he was…” She shivered a little, a shiver of memory, a shiver of awe. “He was beautiful.”

“Did you know?” I said softly. “It is illegal for peebs to be shaved bald.”

“Oh?” Absent. Lost in memory.

“Yeah. State law. All four. Without hair, sometimes, it’s hard to tell who is black and who is white.”

“Oh.”

She turned and looked at her son, who was ignoring his pancakes, dancing back and forth with the headphones on. She mouthed to him: “Eat, honey. You gotta eat.”

He gave her a thumbs-up, kept on grooving.

Martha and Samson fell in love, she and the runaway. It’s so cheesy, she told me now. It’s so stupid. But it wasn’t even love, she said. It was: whatever is next up from love.

“I mean, just, straight up. Hard-core. Love, love, love. Have you ever been in love?”

Castle. Big eyes in the dark, his long arm thrown across my chest. My brother.

And Alix. One woman. In Chicago, during the good years. Alix. A stock girl at Townes Stores. Complicated, gorgeous black woman, fierce and political and romantic. I never told her the truth about me. Never even came close.

“No,” I said. Jim Dirkson was a lifelong bachelor. A mama’s boy. “Not really. Nothing to speak of.”

Martha’s coffee was cold. On TV, the hearings were on a break. Pundits were huffing at each other in a studio, the DC skyline behind them.

Dirkson was listening to Martha with warmth and kindness, his head tilted and his eyes wet with empathy, and I was listening, too, in there under Dirkson, alert and anxious, my heart beating rabbit fast. Waiting for Officer Cook to come in and take his favorite seat, waiting—absurdly—to spot Mr. Bridge in the spectators’ gallery at the Batlisch hearing, although why would he be there? And how would I know his face?

While I listened attentively to the story of Samson’s recapture—how a very clever hidey-hole had been constructed for him above a public men’s restroom, how Martha and the UPS man and the UPS man’s roommate were so, so, so careful to bring Samson food without being seen, how they worked with utter discretion to find a connecting flight—I thought of the faceless man who had been working the file. A man in a New Albany hotel room, listening to phone conversations on headphones, tracking data points from satellite software, a man with no face but my same heart.

“And…” I had to clear my throat. “What happened to him?”

Martha glanced at Lionel before she answered, but he was eating in earnest now, bobbing his head while he shoveled in mouthfuls of pancakes. “I was at the clinic; I was working, you know.”

I could see how this killed her, that she had been at work. She’d been spending every extra moment with Samson, but this wasn’t an extra moment. She was at work, and the UPS man called, talking fast, crying on the phone: there was this van, this white van, and they were dragging him…

I put my hand on her hand.

“Oh, God,” I said. “Oh, Lord.”

It is a very specific skill, pretending to be okay. Pretending to behave as one ought to in a particular situation, leaning forward, giving a small smile of earnest empathy, hiding, meanwhile, a storm of terrible feeling, patting the hand of a friend. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

No, not mine, I thought. Not mine personally.

And meanwhile, all the while, my mind was alive. I could not stop it. I was thinking about one or maybe two things I had noticed during the last three days. Thinking about Mama Walker’s apartment, what Dr. V had said about water. Retracing my steps. The whole time she was telling her story, there I was, I was working my case. I was in my world.

Lionel screamed—“Ah!”—and I jumped. Martha shrieked, turned to him. “Ah!” he said again, but he was laughing and laughing, pounding the table. They had used strips of bacon and two strawberries to build a smile and eyes on Lionel’s pancakes, and he was lifting the features up one by one, de-facing the pancake man. “Ah! My face!”

“Come on, honey,” said Martha, halfhearted, tender. “Be good…”



Lionel ate at last and, having eaten, fell promptly asleep in the car, smudges of maple syrup on both his cheeks. I drove us back to Martha’s car and unbuckled the boy, lifting him up carefully so as not to wake him. Sometimes it’s possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger’s sentence, a green, impossible vision—the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.