Underground Airlines(70)

So here I was: it was 11:28 in Green Hollow, Alabama, in the one square in town. I was sweating now. My papers were good, solid rock, but there had to be a limit to how long you could wander around in public, unaccompanied, in your black skin, papers or no papers. Law enforcement on the square was in two forms: the friendly neighborhood cop from the Town of Green Hollow Police Department, with his hands behind his back, a bright silver whistle around his neck, smiling at children and nodding to passersby; and up on the rooftops an officer of the Alabama branch of the Interstate Colored Persons Patrol, in all-black, body armor, rifle, and helmet. He was either trying to be inconspicuous and failing up there or, more likely, making absolutely sure that his presence was registered by every person on the square—the black ones especially.

I, at least, had a keen awareness of him as I searched that square looking for a goddamn statue of a man and a horse. The only statues I could find, though, were wrong: the first was an ugly gray statue of a man on the prow of a swift boat, a Texas War veteran, stabbing his forefinger aloft as if commanding unseen troops but receiving only the attention of a flock of sickly pigeons roosting on the brim of his hat. The other statue was of a short bespectacled man in a midcentury suit, waving gaily, trailed by a beagle. I had circled the square three times looking for the man and his horse without finding it.

I took another pass around the square. Outside the Cotyledon was a small crowd of blacks, talking quietly, waiting, I figured, for their masters to finish lunch. And inside, alone at a table for two, was Martha Flowers.

What the hell? I thought, feeling a queer surge of anger and—what? Relief? What the hell?

We had said our good-byes on the outskirts of town, in the parking lot of a Qatar Star gas station. All I said was “Say good-bye to that kid for me,” and all she said was “I sure will,” and then I got out of the car and went around the back to use the colored persons’ restroom, and when I came back she was gone, just as we had planned it.

She should have been at the Border House by now, digging her real actual Indiana driver’s license out of her big messy pocketbook.

Instead she was in there, studying the menu of the Cotyledon Café, legs crossed at the ankles like a proper belle, like her own evil twin. I looked twice, making sure it was Martha, and then I stopped looking, not knowing how many times you could look through the plate glass of a restaurant at a white woman before the patrolman up on the roof noticed you looking.

I took another turn around the square. There was a good film of sweat on me now: desperation, confusion, some sour combination of fury and fear. Martha Flowers was enjoying a slice of pie on the town square, and meanwhile where the f*ck is this horse? Where the f*ck is this lawyer?

I stumbled on an uneven patch of sidewalk and very nearly bumped into the broad back of a slow-walking white man with a cane. I breathed. I slowed my pace. Passed carefully beneath the oak trees and the black lampposts. Passed the general store, the movie house, the Internet café. I saw that, scattered across the lawn of the park, clustered together, were a dozen or more dark-skinned men and women lying about in small groups, dozing and talking and drinking out of paper bags.

And then, finally, for the third time, I walked around that stupid statue before I decided to read the plaque beneath it: HENRY SMITH, TOWN FATHER, AND HIS LOYAL COMPANION, HORSE.

Horse. A dog named Horse. Somewhere, Willie Cook was having a good long laugh on me.

I leaned against the fence that ran around the statue, then immediately thought better of it and straightened up. The clock on the courthouse said 11:35—was it too late? Had I messed this up already?

I rehearsed in my mind the call and response, the password and echo, that Maris had given me.

“Some fine day, ain’t it?” this mysterious lawyer would say when he spotted me, and I then would say: “Fine and dandy, like sugar candy.”

Three times we had practiced it. Maris: “Some fine day, ain’t it?”—the country slang made mildly comical by his African accent—and me: “Fine and dandy.”

The lawyer will spot you, Maris said. He will know you by where you stand and when. You will know him by what he says. Now say it again. We practiced it three times, simple as it was: “Some fine day, ain’t it?” “Fine and dandy, like sugar candy.”

I stood beside the statue and waited for the lawyer. I couldn’t see Martha from here. The diner was on the other side of the square. I thought of my future. I thought of a home in Canada, a small fairy-tale house, smoke coming up from a cookstove chimney. Snow on the eaves and on the branches of maple trees. A view across a frozen lake.

I did not try to calculate how close or far I was from Bell’s Farm, neither as the crow flies nor on the roadways that could be crossed by a transport van.

When I looked up again at the people of Green Hollow, going about their bustling midday business, shopping and eating and chatting, I did not see the white people, only the black: and as I watched I swore I could see fumes rising from their mouths—fumes rolling out of their mouths like exhaust, and I could see that every black person had the same small cloud of angry smoke coming out of his or her mouth and nose, a haze rolling up off the street like exhaust, filling the air, the white people breathing all that and not knowing it.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned. He was black, wiry, wearing overalls, carrying a shovel.

“Some fine day, ain’t it?” said the man with the shovel, and I said, “Fine and—” and he caught me on the side with the handle of the shovel, a hard smash that knocked me right off my feet. I reeled back into the arms of a second man, a man I hadn’t seen, who caught me and held me tightly by the arms.