Underground Airlines(72)

“Now, listen,” I began.

“Shush, man. You’re in no state.”

“Ah, he all right,” called someone else, a man, from the far side of the room, and someone else said, “He’s just fine,” and then a third voice, a woman’s voice: “Fine and dandy,” and then all the voices were laughing. Not me, not this time. “Now, look,” I said, and the woman told me to shush again, firmly, and I shushed again. The kitchen was crowded with people. A kitchen! I was in a kitchen, in a basement, unfinished and unfancy. One of the men was sitting on a counter, swinging his legs. Another was leaning against a refrigerator, with a girl wrapped up in his arms like they were old-time sweethearts.

Everybody was in black. Everybody was wearing overalls, with a logo at the breast. Everybody was either barefoot or in sandals.

There was music playing. It had taken a while to reach me, but now I could hear it, and it was like sugar. Horns. Trumpets. Saxophones? And drums: snares and cymbals. It was fast and sweet, and it rolled around the room. I tasted that music. It was like hard candy.

“Sorry about the violence out in the square,” said the woman with the dreads. “Two black folks slipping in a car together is a conspiracy. Couple black boys beating the shit out of another one, that ain’t nothing. That nobody cares about. Black folks scrapping, cops ain’t looking. Patrol, neither. They turning away.”

“Turning away?” said the man on the counter. “C’mon, Ada. Placing bets, more like.”

“Yeah,” said Ada. She reached forward, touched the side of my head, and I winced. My head hurt. “But anyway. It’s gotta look real. So. Sorry ’bout that.”

“So okay,” I said. Blinking my eyes and trying to get this lady to come into focus. “Are you the lawyer?”

“Damn. You all business, huh?”

“Are you?”

“No,” she said. “I am not.”

Ada stood up. She was a girl, really—twenty-two, maybe? Twenty-three? She was a slave. They were all slaves. Overalls, shoes or no shoes. House slaves. My body was lurching around inside me. The music was rushing, dazzling: high, squeaking horn lines and rat-a-tats on the drums.

“Who is the lawyer?” I said.

“Listen. Shut up,” she said. “That was a pretty heavy kiss of olanzapine I gave you. You in no state yet to be talking business, fella.”

I shook my head, insistent. I started to stand again and wobbled, and the woman called Ada placed me firmly back in the chair. Close up I saw the logo stitched on one strap of her overalls: a gavel wound with a snake. A peach dangling from a bow.

“Sit, all right?” She turned away. “Someone get the poor boy a glass of water.”

“I—”

“I got it, Ada.” One of the others. How many people were down here?

“Listen—”

“Sit.”



It was a party of sorts, down there in the basement, and I sat amid it for an hour, maybe for two hours, people walking past and around me, these beautiful black people in their overalls and sandals, grown-out scruffed-up Afros or dreadlocks, figures in a dream, while my head swam and swam. There were unlabeled boxes of wine stacked beside a tub full of cold water. A plate of cookies was being passed around, and there was a bucket full of peanuts in one corner, another bucket for shells.

I swayed to the music awhile, tried to catch up to its rhythm. Someone put a glass of water in my hand and I drank it and needed more and someone brought me more.

“You should try to relax,” said the girl who brought me the water, looking at me shyly. I laughed—just the idea, the idea of relaxing. It made me laugh. I tried to think of the last time I had done that: done nothing. Acted without purpose. Barton, Bridge, everybody waiting on me. Indianapolis; Gaithersburg. The whole world waiting.

But I did. I relaxed. I spent the next hour, or it might have been a few, trying to count how many other people were in the room. I had an impression of people coming and going, everybody friendly, laughing loud. Slapping palms. Punch lines hollered, good-natured, grooving laughter. Aw, man, you know that’s true. She ain’t say that! She ain’t say that!

It felt like I was among a huge crowd, a happy, bustling infinity of black folks, but it was only five of them in the room—or at least, only five by the time I got my head straight enough to count. Two women, besides Ada: Maryellen, short and puckish, with very long thick hair hanging in one big braid between her shoulder blades. She was the one who brought me the water. And Shai, a little older, narrow-eyed and observant. The bigger of the men was Otis, very dark, heavily muscled. The last of them was Marlon, who wore a scruffy kind of billy-goat beard. He was the one who had hit me, but he was also the one who came over now with a couple pieces of ice wrapped in a thin paper towel, held it tenderly to the bruise above my ear, hidden in my hair. “I’m a hard-hitting dude,” he said, adjusting the ice pack. “Can’t hardly help it.”

“You all don’t have service names?” I asked Marlon, but it was Maryellen who answered, from way over on the other side of the room, where I wouldn’t have thought she could hear. “Oh, we got ’em. We don’t use ’em is all.”

I smiled. I looked at Maryellen, and I found that my mind would not assign her skin a value. Wild honey, light tones, all that shit. I couldn’t even call it up in my mind, the pigmentation chart that had first been thrust before me in Arizona six years ago. If this didn’t work, all this adventuring, and I ended up back in Bridge’s command, I’d be in some difficulty, and to that I said, “Thank f*cking God,” and Marlon said, “For what?”