Underground Airlines(80)
“All right.” The bored security man broke his silence, straightening up, pulling off his gloves and chucking them into a bin. “Bag now.” Quickly he opened the rolling suitcase I was hauling, rifled through that, too—a change of clothes for Martha, change of shoes, and a laptop turned off, which he opened and closed uninterestedly.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re clear.”
But then before I could lower my arm he wrapped something around the wrist, a thin strip of paper, bright green, which secured to itself, tight as hell, tugging at the small hairs of my arm.
“That is an identification bracelet,” said the man. “That identifies you as a Person Bound to Labor and a member of our staff.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Whoa, whoa.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll come back through here again on your egress from this facility. But every dark-skinned person is required to wear a band while on the grounds.” He showed me his own bracelet, which was a cool red.
“But don’t you have a color for folks like me? Negroes like me, just—just here for a visit?”
“No, man, we don’t.” His voice was dry, humorless. “We don’t actually get too many of those.”
Martha was waiting for me in the lobby, laughing with her hand on the arm of a short, fat white man in a sport jacket, who was laughing, too. This was Newell—instantly recognizable from his picture on the company website, where we’d found him yesterday afternoon on an old laptop belonging to the lawyer’s people, making our plan.
It was Martha who pointed to him—to his weak-chinned, sappy, smiling head shot, his sad-sounding title and anemic history within the company. There’s the guy. There’s the guy we want.
And now here he was, the guy we wanted, dumpy and thin-haired and pink-cheeked, in casual slacks and polished shoes, with one of Martha’s hands on his forearm, the both of them laughing like old pals.
“Well, of course I do,” Matty Newell said hopefully. “You’re not the kinda gal a fella’s gonna go and forget.”
“I do like to think so,” said Martha, her laugh a tinkling falsehood. “I surely do.”
“You caught me in a good mood, too, I must say. A good week for us, darn good week.”
My mind jumped to Donatella Batlisch, to the footage from the motel TV: the woman flying forward suddenly with the gun blast, collapsing, limp. Good news for the southern interest, happy days at GGSI. But no, no. Newell just meant the late frost. “We’re coming up on Halloween, and here we still got acreage coming into flower. Don’t see that every year; no, ma’am.”
And for a second as I approached them across the lobby, my fake smile was real, a smile of appreciation for Martha. I watched her nod admiringly. I watched her touching Newell’s elbow. Jesus. She was a natural.
“Oh, Mr. Newell—”
“Please, please, Jane. Make it Matty.”
“All right, then. Matty.” She made it sound like “Hercules.” He beamed. “Matty, this is my associate.”
Newell peered at me, confusion in his small eyes. He had a lanyard around his neck, dangling an ID card in a plastic sheath. His face was soft, his hairline retreating, just as it was in the picture. Since sitting for the corporate head shot, though, he’d grown one of those little Tommy Jefferson ponytails, and it didn’t particularly suit him.
“Your, uh, associate?”
“Associate, assistant.” She winked at him, mouthed the word servant. “Whatever you want to call it. He does what he’s told.”
Matty sized me up, smiling weakly.
“Just seems like …” He shrugged. “Well. Funny work, for a nigger.”
Grin grin grin. Smile smile smile. “Oh, I know, sir, I know.” I glanced at Martha, at Ms. Jane Reynolds, making sure it was okay to talk. “I guess I’m a funny kind of nigger.”
Matty Newell gaped for a second, then laughed, a nervous, throaty chortle, shaking his head at this strange old world of ours. The flags snapped sharply outside in the brisk wind. The Asian children in the photomontages were frozen in their happy cartwheels.
“Well, come on up to the top floor,” said Newell. “Have a good look at the joint. Then we can talk about whatever it is y’all are selling.”
The whole building had that same pleasing color scheme, easy white and gentle blue, and every wall was lined with more of the glossy enlarged pictures. On the way to the elevator was a housewife of some indeterminate Southeast Asian ethnicity, reaching into her closet for a stack of towels—while reaching through the closet wall from the other side was a black slave, grinning, servile and unseen, as he provided the stack of sturdy cotton towels.
I did not blanch. I did not slow. I walked past, sticking close behind Martha, noticing things.
I noticed the pattern of the light fixtures in the long hallway: a bank of two, then a bank of three, two and then three. I noticed the pants of the slaves in the photographs, black like Marlon’s pants, like the ones I was wearing along with my inoffensive peach sweater. I noticed the lushness of the white carpet. I noticed everything.
The elevator raced us soundlessly upward fast enough for my ears to pop, and I stood clenching and unclenching my jaw, standing in quiet self-erasure at the rear of the car. I looked anywhere but up at the camera mounted in the high corner of the elevator. I studied the button plate on the elevator doors: MURDOCK ELEVATORS, it said. Murdock, Louisiana. Martha laughed and flirted with Mr. Newell.