Underground Airlines(8)
Fussy little Mr. Paulsen strode self-importantly from the breakfast nook, not bothering to apologize for the scene—not to the likes of me.
The white girl’s car was not hard to find in the parking lot: a beat-up South African shitbox with a dented driver’s-side door and a bright pink paint job that was peeling and rust-splotched. The automotive analogue of the denim jacket and scuffed Doc Martens. She was in the driver’s seat filling out the top application on a whole stack of them, the stack balanced atop a hardcover book that was in turn balanced on her lap. She wore a look of troubled concentration, her eyes screwed up, a strand of her hair tucked into the corner of her mouth. Her boy was in the shotgun seat, one leg lodged against the glove compartment, playing some sort of handheld electronic game.
I thought about rapping on the window, but then I didn’t. I left the food I had gathered up, still on its tray, on the ground just outside the driver’s side and went off to work.
6.
I parked my car on the street beside a graveyard about a quarter mile west of the address and walked the long couple of blocks as the day got itself going, the sun spreading out slowly onto the blacktop. It wasn’t raining, but it felt like it wanted to, clouds glowering, crowded, low down in the sky.
As I walked toward Mapleton–Fall Creek I crossed Central Avenue, and looking south I could see what appeared to be the smoke from a dozen small fires, rising up and mingling from campsites and cookouts, clustered tents. That had to be Freedman Town, another five miles downtown and a universe away. Maybe it was as simple as that: maybe the man I sought was lying desperate under a torn blanket somewhere in Freedman Town, crammed in among second cousins in an unheated efficiency. The classic move, the fool’s move, the move of a desperate runner.
It wouldn’t be that easy, though. If Bridge’s office thought it was as easy as creeping into Freedman Town and knocking on a couple of doors, that’s what I’d be doing. Or, actually, my services would not have been thought necessary. The white vans could roll up on Freedman Town with no help from me.
Mapleton–Fall Creek, by contrast, looked to be a tidy little neighborhood of one-story aluminum-sided bungalows, their trim green front yards like welcome mats. The homes were old but well tended, their small wooden porches cluttered with outdoor furniture—rocking chairs and love seats. Every house was painted some bright color, and it looked like the block association had gotten together to make sure nobody came dressed to the party the same: a powder-blue house, a chipper yellow house, one of green, and one of pink. One house had a black-and-white dog yipping behind a short chain-link fence; the next place had a string of Christmas lights dangling from the gutters, put up either early or way too late.
Up on one of these porches was a very old black woman, her hair in curlers for the day to come, rocking slowly on her rocking chair. She waved, and I waved back. A nice little neighborhood was the vibe that I was getting, a black neighborhood, working people, poor but proud. The kind of place a white person might drive through with the doors locked, thinking it’s dangerous for no reason except for the color of its occupants.
I came out onto 38th and turned right, passed a run of businesses, everything closed up tight this early morning. A clothing shop called The Big & The Tall; a barbershop called Men & Ladies; a steak-and-lemonade place called just Steak & Lemonade. One sad liquor store with the paint peeling from around the door frame, with a solitary drunk smoking in an oversize warm-up jacket, playing it cool, dying for the place to open. This is where he had come, cherry-cheeked Father Barton, on Sunday afternoon. He was down in this unlikely neighborhood for some reason, and he had stopped at that bank right over there—the one next to the gas station that’s next to Captain D’s Fish Fry—to take out a couple hundred bucks, which was gone from his wallet by suppertime last night.
The ATM stood under a little green awning, just to the right of the front door of the bank proper. As I ambled toward it I felt my body take on the young father’s spirit, the righteous white man, walking upright and unafraid in a black neighborhood, a man of the people, wearing his serious, sacred expression. I stood at the cash machine a second, then I did a slow 360, even going so far as to mime the action of taking out a wallet, tucking bills inside it, putting it away again. Halfway through my turn, I was looking down the cross street, Central Avenue, toward the south. Down there, a block down, a streetlight was blinking, reflecting itself back murkily in a pothole full of rainwater. On one side of the road was a weedy vacant lot, and across the street was a small white-painted building with a wooden cross hanging above the door. The sign beneath the cross said SAINT ANSELM’S CATHOLIC PROMISE: COMMUNITY WELCOME.
“All right, now,” I said, hastening my step, bobbing my head. “All right, all right.”
Approaching the building, I heard the rush and roar of a small engine, and then I saw him: a groundskeeper, hunched over and focused, working a leaf blower in an even line along the curb, throwing clouds of dirt and detritus off the sidewalk into the road.
“Hey, hey, man,” I said, waving my hands as I came up the sidewalk. “Hold up a sec.”
The groundskeeper looked up, weary and wary, but he killed the engine.
“Oh, yeah, hey man. Hey.” I rolled into the character as I came up on him, taking on a little decrepitude, a little stagger in my walk, a little grit in my eyes. Drifter, knucklehead, working on that good early-morning drunk. “How you feeling, brother?”