by Ben Winters
And no black was permitted to travel into any of the states of the Hard Four without a white companion to vouch for his whereabouts and be responsible for his conduct.
I needed a white person.
“I know this is a lot to take in,” I told her.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.” I kept going. I spoke quickly.
“I will provide you with a false identification for the border crossing,” I told her. “When we’re across, clear of the border, you will reenter the North with your real ID and burn the false one. Then you’re done. You go back to Indy and get your money and you’re done. You can do what you had intended with it, or you can—I don’t know. Take your boy and get out of the country. Go to Europe. So—”
“Yes,” she said.
She wasn’t listening to what I was saying about Europe. About leaving. I could see the option sliding past her, untouched. She was going to hand my money over to the clown from Steubenville, Ohio, who claimed he could get her into TorchLight, and that was a foolish move, but that was not my concern. She was an adult, and I was making her an offer, and all I needed was for her to take it, and she took it. She was in.
I handed her the laundry bag. She didn’t look inside. She didn’t count the money. She held the bag carelessly by its thin plastic strap, looking with new interest at my face. “I have one condition.”
“What?”
“You have to tell me your name. Your real name. That’s my only condition.”
It took me a minute. I had to fish around to find it. Castle called me honey and Bridge called me Victor. I’ve hung so many names on myself, one after another. And I actually have a name, a real human name that my mother whispered in my ear when I was four years old, before I was taken from the breed lot and put into the school. Sweet and secret private name.
I almost told it to Martha, but then I decided to give her my service name instead. My Bell’s name. That was fine. That was close enough.
“Brother,” I told her. “My name is Brother.”
That was last night. Now here we were, five hundred miles away, and I was staring out the window, standing in my pants and undershirt, watching red taillights stack up in the darkness. Martha came out of the bathroom.
“Whoa.”
“What?”
She was squinting, coming closer, looking concerned. “Your shoulder.” I realized I was holding on to it, clutching the spot where bands of pain were radiating out into my neck and upper back. “That needs to come out.”
I took my hand away, and it was slick and glittering with pus. “Shit.”
“Yeah. Shit. That is definitely infected.” Martha took a step closer and squinted at the wound.
“Let’s get it out,” I said. “Now.”
We had no extra time tomorrow. No time tonight for a fever, no time for the course of illness. A hospital, obviously, was out of the question.
And Martha, as it turned out, a frequent traveler and an unemployed medical assistant, had with her everything she needed, more or less, to pull a piece of battered metal out of my flesh. Suture kit and bandages, aspirin and gauze, even a small scalpel.
“The only thing I don’t have,” she said, “is any kind of anesthetic. But in the morning I’m sure we could get to a pharmacy—”
“No,” I said. “Now.”
She shook her head and looked at me, a wounded stranger in the dim hotel room. A long way from Jim Dirkson.
“All right, Brother. Go ahead and lie down on the bed.”
She fetched ice from the vending machine, and she wrapped some in a washcloth and held it on my shoulder till it was numb.
“Well, that oughta do something,” said Martha, and I couldn’t say if it did or not: her knife slid into my shoulder, and it hurt like hell.
I winced. I held my breath. My shoulder was on fire; my shoulder and my back.
“You’re doing great,” Martha said in the soft, coaxing tone I’d heard her use with her boy. “You’re doing just fine. Just hang tight.”
She breathed carefully while making her careful incisions, and then I felt her fingers working on and in my flesh, burrowing, sentient things, insects crawling around. I clutched the edge of the thin mattress with both hands and squeezed. I wasn’t born for this, I was thinking. I wasn’t born to be any kind of soldier or spy. This was all a mistake.
“I see it,” she said gently. “I see it already. It’s close to the surface. Just hold tight, Brother. Just hold on.”
Martha began to tug, carefully at first, and then quickly, and I felt the bullet wriggling loose, pulling free. I wondered if this was what it would be like with Bridge. Bridge’s doctor, taking out the chip. That was part of it, part of the deal we had made, the deal I had forced him into. It was deeper down than the bullet, of course, deeper down and more tightly interwoven. Tied in to the base of my brain with a million tiny fibers. Tucked tightly between the two upmost vertebrae.
Then, with one last intake of breath, Martha pulled it out. “Got it!” I craned my head around and saw her grinning. “There! Got the little fucker.”
Her fingers in their thin gloves were covered in my blood. Her face was exultant. I smiled, weakly, and struggled up in the bed. She dropped the bullet into my outstretched palm, and it was small and ugly, smeared with blood and tissue, its black copper head flattened by force. When Martha laid it in my hand it was warm, like a grub or the end of a tongue. I put it on the night table, under the shade of the lamp, and lay back down so she could sew me up.
Somehow this hurt less—the stitching. Maybe I was already feeling better from the bullet being gone. Maybe I was getting used to it, another person’s hands inside my body. Maybe being put back together just hurt less than coming apart.
“You’re like a different person,” I told Martha as she finished up, pulled the black thread through me one last time. “Doing this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean—steady.”
“What do you mean, steady?”
My answer was interrupted by a gunshot, outside, somewhere close. Loud and unmistakable. I yanked the bedside light out of the wall, rolled over onto Martha in the darkness and covered her on the ground, lay there panting on top of her, my shoulder throbbing and burning. There was a second shot, then a third.
“What do you think—”
“Stay here,” I said and crawled to the door. I crept, hunched over, down the hallway to the front office, my gun tucked into the waistband of my pants, blood oozing from my wound. I went down that narrow hotel hallway in the middle of the night with the sure dark feeling that something new and terrible had happened. Something bad was happening.
“Well, hey there, boy,” said the cracker at the desk. “You coming to join the party?”
Another gunshot outside, then loud cheering: shouts, applause. A celebration. They weren’t shooting in anger, they were shooting in the air. I glanced at the man’s TV screen, where CNN had put up a still photograph of Donatella Batlisch, a file photo, a head shot, frozen.
“Was she—” I don’t know why I asked. I already knew. “Did she get confirmed?”
“No, and she won’t be. She got taken care of is what she got.” He mimed the shape of a gun, mimed the squeezing of the trigger. “One shot. Back of the neck. Some boy did his mama proud tonight, that’s for damn sure.”
I didn’t have to tell it to Martha. When I got back to the room the lights were still off, but the TV was on, and she was sitting on the edge of the bed, her face bathed in the glow of the bad news.
I closed the door behind me, and she stood up quietly and turned it off.
I stood at the window with my right hand reached across to my left shoulder, my hand tight on the wound. I wasn’t feeling sorrow, not exactly. Not surprise, certainly. I was feeling again like I wasn’t made for all this. That’s what I was thinking. Born into the wrong life, somehow. Wrong body. Blood seeped from my shoulder, drying in the thin cotton fabric of my undershirt. T
he celebration was growing outside, a crowd of happy Tennesseans clustered in the moonlight around the tailgate of a dull white pickup truck, handing out bottles of beer.
Beyond them, traffic had eased up on I-65, and cars were rushing south toward the Fence.
Martha’s face was set, grim and hard. “Have you ever been down there?” she said.
“Never,” I said. “Never in all my life.”
2.
We cleared the Border House with no problem.
There were six wide lanes of traffic, six guard stations, six mechanical arms rising and falling to let vehicles in one at a time. There was a lane for WHITE (ALABAMA CITIZEN) and a lane for WHITE (OTHER UNITED STATES CITIZEN), and a lane for COLORED IN CAR (ALABAMA PERMIT) and the lane we took: COLORED IN CAR (OTHER UNITED STATES PERMIT).
They’re federal at the Fence, agents of a special division of the Department of Homeland Security called Internal Border and Regulation. IBR is black boots and yellow jackets and mirrored glasses, automatic pistols in shoulder holsters. It was one of these IBR men, deeply tan and sandy-haired, stone-faced and courteous, who motioned for me to roll down the window of the Toyota, who leaned over me to address Martha in the backseat, who flipped cursorily through our papers—papers furnished for me by Mr. Bridge, sterling papers, papers made of solid gold. Who then said politely to Martha, “If you would ask your Negro to step out of the car, please,” who then walked me through a bank of scanners, who ran his gloved fingers under my tongue, passed hands over my scalp, who shined a light up my asshole and lifted my balls, who ran flat palms over all the inches of my flesh. Who removed my body momentarily and completely from my control and then returned it to me with a grunt: “You folks are just fine.” He said it to Martha, not to me. “Go ahead.”
The IBR is federal, but on the other side of the Fence are three more agencies, each its own brick building, bristling with flags and radio antennae: the Alabama Highway Division, the Limestone County Sheriff’s Office, and the Alabama branch of the Interstate Colored Persons Patrol. Each one of these agencies has the statutory right to stop any of the vehicles leaving the custody of the IBR, but none of them chose for whatever reason to stop us that morning in our white Toyota.
There was a Latin motto on the far side of the Border House—AUDEMAS JURA NOSTRA DEFENDERE—bright white on a lavender background, then a cheerful sign in roadway green: WELCOME TO ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL.
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.”
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 frien
dly 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.
