Underground Airlines(69)

I drove, and Martha rode in the back. They were watching me; I pictured them watching. Bridge in Maryland, Barton and company in Indy, glued to their screens. My dot moving south, crossing the line.

My own eyes were wide open, waiting to see all the ways the world would change now that we had crossed through, past the limit of civilization and into the dark land, where whites keep their rule by savagery and fear. I waited for the sky to darken, for the crows that would wheel across the clouds. But it was the same winding road, the same spreading green countryside, the same taffy-blue sky. Same on either side of the Fence.

“Hey,” Martha said. Was saying. Leaning forward between the seats. “Brother?” I guess she had been talking for a while. I turned slightly toward her, and it hurt my shoulder.

“You all right?” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You did it. You’re done.” I turned back, kept my eyes on the road. Careful driving, nice and easy. “We’re fifty-seven miles now from Green Hollow. We’ll pull up, like we said, in the town square. Then you’re going to turn around. Find a shoulder you can pull off on and burn those papers, like I showed you. Then you get on back to your boy. Park the Toyota in that Townes Stores lot.”

“Southport and Emerson.”

“That’s right. And you know where the money is.”

Martha didn’t say anything. Black highway rushed beneath us; streetlamps passed us; trees.

“Okay,” she said.

“And thank you, Martha,” I said. “Thank you.”



Two hours later I was walking on a sunlit sidewalk with my head down through the bustling small-town square of Green Hollow, Alabama, looking for a man on a horse, looking for the lawyer.

It was as if I had arrived not just in another part of the country but in another part of the century. Men in fedora hats and mustaches, ladies in short-sleeved flower-pattern dresses pushing big perambulators, smiling. Everybody smiling. The gentle ting-a-ting of welcome bells as these gentlefolk pushed into stores under multicolored awnings that fluttered in the wind. Folks tipping their hats, holding the door for one another as they went in and out of a diner called the Cotyledon Café, a tidy little freestanding pink building with a window box full of peonies along its front glass and a sign with proud curly-cursive lettering: THIS IS A PREJUDICED ESTABLISHMENT.

The other restaurant on the square was General Bobby’s, a fried-chicken chain that, I happened to know, was owned by the same conglomerate that owns Hamburger Stand in Indianapolis, where I’d just eaten a few days ago. That’s how they do it, these big chains that don’t want their customers to know how much business they’re doing behind the Fence: subsidiary companies, parent companies, diversified holdings.

I made my way around the square, beneath the sky of daydream blue, the pure white clouds like drifts of cotton. I passed a couple of white men in hats, men of the world conversing in somber tones about what one of them called “last night’s unfortunate incident.”

“What else could be done is the question,” said the other, while both nodded their heads with solemnity, men of the world. “Oh, yes, I know. What else could be done?”

And while they discussed in their somber tones the tragic necessity of ready assassination, their Negroes stood behind them staring at the sidewalk, unseen and unspeaking. And behind a white lady pushing a carriage was a black woman, much older, lugging a diaper caddy and an armful of boutique shopping bags. And there I was, moving through this watercolor world like a ghost. It was like there were two realities out here, overlaid one on top of the other, like transparencies on an overhead projector.

Where was the lawyer, though? Where were the man and his horse?

“So how do we make these arrangements?” I had asked Mr. Maris back in Indianapolis, back at Saint Anselm’s, in the shabby headquarters. After Barton was gone again, when it was just me and the lieutenants. Cook gave me the backstory, and then he and Maris briefed me on the connection I was to make.

“Arrangements?” he said. “No. Listen. Understand.”

“We don’t make arrangements, man,” Cook put in, leaning in the doorway, working at his teeth with a toothpick, listening closely. “We make connections.”

“What does that mean?”

Maris didn’t turn his head. He kept his cold eyes on my face while Cook talked. “What Mr. Friendly Sunshine here is gonna do is tell you where to go and how to find the lawyer. What happens after that is up to you and the lawyer. You understand?”

Maris, then, very slow and very low. “We only know what we know.”

“All right,” I said. “All right. And who’s the lawyer?”

Maris said it again: “We only know what we know,” which wasn’t exactly the same as saying he didn’t know who the lawyer was. Mr. Maris, of all those I had met, was the hardest to read. His sharp features a perfect mask. “The town is called Green Hollow,” he said. “Twenty miles northwest of Birmingham. There you find a statue. In the square.”

“What square?”

“It’s a small town, man,” said Cook. “Just the one square.”

“You go to the square. Weekday. Any weekday. Between eleven twenty-five and eleven thirty-five in the morning. You stand beneath the man and his horse. You wait for the lawyer there.”