Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  Faye turned to see a man, broad and tall, running at top speed. Based solely on leg length, there was no way she could outrun him, but she only had to stay ahead of him for a few seconds. Once she was through the lonely courtyard, she’d be within sight of the South Tower. Surely someone would see her there. Or maybe someone would at least hear her scream.

  She broke into a sprint. Her large and practical purse, the size of a horse’s saddlebag, slapped against her hip and thigh as she ran. The heavy boots that were her everyday footgear, tight-laced around the ankles, constrained her gait. The man was going to catch up with her, and he was going to do it while she was in the courtyard, hidden on all sides by the gnarled and leafy branches of sasanqua camellia hedges planted when her grandmother was a girl.

  As the sidewalk beneath her feet passed through a narrow opening in those hedges, she was faced with something even more terrifying than a strange man twice her size. The courtyard was hiding still more strange men, four of them.

  They were clearly protesters, judging by the signs they were carrying. Ordinarily, she would have thought, “Great! That man behind me won’t hurt me when he’s got this many witnesses,” but the protesters were throwing hostile looks her way. She couldn’t figure out why. She certainly hadn’t bombed anybody.

  As she stumbled closer, she got her first clear look at their signs, and the inscription on the nearest one explained everything.

  If we had a White Culture convention, you’d be pissed!

  Faye, a person who was inarguably not white, was running headlong into the arms of people who felt strongly enough about their white supremacist views to march in the streets. This was assuredly not a good thing.

  The slapping footsteps behind her drew near. Unexpectedly, the sound passed her and then stopped. The big man stood between her and the sign-carrying men. All four faces were still hostile, but now they were trained on him.

  From behind, all Faye could see of the big, thick-waisted man was a gray T-shirt and a pair of snug, well-worn blue jeans. A single black braid, longer even than Joe’s, snaked down his back. It was streaked with gray, but the man gave no other indication of age. His arms and fists, held in a relaxed position at his sides, were dark brown. If these men didn’t like brown people, then they were predisposed to dislike both Faye and this nameless man standing between them and her.

  One of them said, “We know where you live, Ben. Wouldn’t take long to drive out there.” His sign was graced with a crude drawing of a hand grenade. Wavy lines in red, yellow, and orange radiated from its black outline in what Faye judged was a reasonable way to suggest an explosion for someone with a box of Magic Markers and a limited imagination. Its caption said, “This is what happens when they live among us.”

  The ponytailed man who was apparently named Ben said, “Yeah? Listen here, Graham. You know that I own just as many guns as you do. What exactly do you think is going to happen when you idiots come driving up to my house?”

  “You won’t like it much.” The man who said this seemed to be a man of few words, since his sign said nothing but “White Power.”

  Ben didn’t seem worried. “I’ll like it fine. I’ll meet you at the door with my daddy’s old double-barrel. My wife will be behind me, live-streaming everything you do on her cell phone. Just like she’s doing right now.”

  Faye was afraid to move much, but she turned ever so slightly. Behind her was a stout woman of about fifty, with two black and silver braids that hung over her large breasts and stopped at her waist. She held a smartphone in front of her face, making a video that Graham and his friends wouldn’t want the world to see.

  Graham slapped his left hand against his broad haunch. At this signal, the four of them retreated without a word, backing down the path that led to the convention center until they disappeared around a corner. Faye hadn’t realized that she was holding her breath, but she took a deep one now.

  “Thank you. Your name is Ben?”

  “Yes, Ben McGilveray. And this is my wife, Gloria. Wherever those idiot supremacists and their stupid signs are, we’re there. Us and our friends.”

  “You were following me.”

  “When we saw you walking right into them,” Gloria said, “we knew things could go bad for you pretty fast. Following you seemed advisable.”

  “And I thank you. But why are they here? Was the bomber a person of color, somebody that would draw out the white supremacists? Or was he one of them?”

  “Oh, honey,” Gloria said, as if she thought Faye and her misguided ideas were just so cute.

  “You’re the reason they’re here,” Ben said, as if that would explain everything.

  “Me?”

  Gloria stepped in to explain what her husband really meant. “Not you, personally. Your convention. What’s it called?” She peered at the name tag hanging from a lanyard around Faye’s neck. “The Oklahoma Conference for the Study and Celebration of the Indigenous Arts? Well, that’s a mouthful, but it sounds just awesome. I’m a beader, myself.”

  Gloria held up an arm encircled by an intricately beaded bracelet and gestured at the beaded bands wrapping the ends of Ben’s braids. “And Ben’s a potter. But don’t you know that those guys we just saw spend their time wishing they had girlfriends and griping about how they hate seeing brown people on the front page of the newspaper?”

  And Carson had been so proud and happy about the press coverage of his conference. He’d worked like a devil to land that front page article. It had been below the fold, but still. There had been a picture of Cully and everything. And there had been photos of most of the faculty inside, on the “Arts” page.

  Damn these people’s hate. It tainted everything it touched. Ahua had been right that the conference might have been the bomber’s target.

  Gloria looked closer at Faye’s name tag. “Longchamp-Mantooth?” She paused for a moment as if to wonder where she’d heard the name before. “I saw in the paper that a couple of the speakers were named Mantooth.”

  “They would be my husband Joe and his very distant cousin Cully.”

  “Take my advice,” said Ben. “Do not look at the signs those people are carrying. And for God’s sake, don’t read the comments on the newspaper’s website. You won’t like what they say about your husband and his cousin and the rest of the faculty for your conference.”

  “The faculty?” Faye said, as if she didn’t understand what he was saying, but she did. Joe and Cully were Creek. Even blond Carson was Creek, because his platinum-haired mother’s ancestry could be traced back to the Dawes Rolls. Sadie Raincrow was Cherokee. Stacy was Chinese. Dr. Jackson was African-American.

  It made no difference that Dr. Althorp and Dr. Dell were as white as the sign-carrying supremacists they had just seen. They were outnumbered, and racists are terrified of being outnumbered. Faye could absolutely see how news coverage of the conference had brought out people who were only happy when their group possessed a comfortable majority.

  This made Faye angry and more than a little scared. The fear must have shown on her face, because Gloria reached out and patted her on the hand. “Don’t worry, pretty one. We’re here and we brought friends. And we’re armed. See?” She held up her cell phone and snapped Faye’s photo. “I’m dangerous with this thing. We’ll keep the peace.”

  “Where are you trying to go?” Ben asked.

  “To the South Tower. That way.” She pointed toward the path on the far side of the courtyard.

  “We’ll get you there,” he said, starting to walk without looking to see if she was following.

  As they emerged from the thick hedges surrounding the courtyard, Faye saw that she had a clear path. Maybe the path had already been clear, or maybe everybody had left when they saw Ben coming. When they reached the sidewalk, there was some hooting that was hard to ignore, but she could avoid the protesters’ eyes if she kept her own eyes straight ahe
ad.

  Once they had run the gauntlet, Gloria held up a hand of farewell and Ben said, “Enjoy your day. If they spoil it for you, then they have won.” And then they were gone.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kaayla sat in her temporary office on the first floor of the South Tower, trying not to think. She had saved the Indigenous Arts conference, but it had required her to work into the night, finding hotel rooms for displaced guests and rearranging the schedule for every meeting room in both towers.

  Her entire staff had clocked a massive amount of overtime, but if somebody from headquarters tried to bark at her about that, she would calmly say, “Bomb. In my lobby. What would you have done differently?” It wasn’t like they were going to fire her. And it wasn’t like she was going to let management do something to hurt her staff, like cut their hours later to make up for all the overtime they were working now.

  Kaayla didn’t have a husband and she didn’t have children, but she had assembled a group of hardworking people and she respected them. Loved them, even. Most of them had led hard lives before they came to the Gershwin—before they came to her—and she took her role as their protector seriously.

  Red-haired Jason was seventeen and supporting himself on the salary of hotel desk clerk. Gray-haired Karen had a diabetic husband whose life depended on Karen’s health insurance. Even Julia, with her long golden curls and the unfurrowed brow of a princess, used her salary to pay the mortgage of the home she shared with her parents. These people were Kaayla’s family.

  And Grace and Lucia? They had worked the longest and hardest of all. They deserved raises and they deserved to be promoted into jobs that wouldn’t wear them out before they were forty, but Kaayla was no fool. She knew that the American passports they had presented as proof of citizenship when she hired them were questionable at best, and so would Kaayla’s bosses if they ever had reason to look closely at them. For one thing, people applying to be hotel maids were a lot more likely to have driver’s licenses and social security cards on hand than they were to have passports. To what foreign country could Grace or Lucia afford to go?

  If anybody ever looked too closely at those documents, Kaayla could say, “How could I have known? They gave me counterfeit documents.” Nothing would happen to her, with her shiny plastic Oklahoma driver’s license and her birth certificate with its government-made raised seal, but Grace and Lucia would be ripped from everything they knew and loved. They would be deported to…somewhere. Kaayla didn’t know and she didn’t want to know.

  For their sakes, they needed to stay out of sight and nobody was as invisible as a hotel maid. If the day came when she could safely promote them to a better position that might still keep them under the radar of corporate management—housekeeping manager for the night shift, maybe, or pantry chef—then she would do it. For now, they wielded mops and her workers with non-counterfeited documents held down the more visible positions.

  Kaayla knew that she was capable enough to move up in the company. The leadership training program would send her to work at a sequence of hotels in quick succession, some of them in glamorous foreign locations that she would love to see, but she could never leave the Gershwin. She knew her calling in life, and it was to take care of people who needed her.

  The next time she needed to make a hire, she would tell Grace and Lucia to ask around and find someone who needed a job, no questions asked.

  * * *

  In front of Faye, people were wandering out of the South Tower, all of them chatting and some of them lighting cigarettes. She supposed that Cully had finished his session and they were on break.

  As she moved toward the door, Cully himself came out and lit up his own cigarette. Glad to see a friendly and familiar face, she called out to him and he looked up with a smile. Then he looked over her shoulder and gave someone behind her a bigger smile.

  She turned and saw that he was responding to the mob gathered across the street behind her. Based on a lifetime of dealing with crowds that had gathered just for him, it was natural for Cully to presume that this one was for him, too. He patted Faye on the shoulder and moved past her, ready to greet a group of strangers that he presumed loved him because so many other strangers did.

  This was dangerous. If his aging eyes missed the protesters’ signs, he could get way too close to a crowd that wasn’t friendly to a brown man, not even a famous one.

  Faye hurried to stop him but he was moving fast for a man his age, especially one who smoked. His eyes were indeed showing their age, though, because he was much too close to the protesters before he saw the signs and stopped abruptly.

  As much as she hated the idea of approaching that hostile crowd, even feared it, she couldn’t let Cully walk alone into that kind of danger. She rushed to catch up with him. “We need to go.”

  She didn’t have to say, “We are both obviously not white. We may not be safe here.” She just tugged his sleeve and started backing up, hoping he came with her. No luck.

  “Are these people seriously protesting Carson’s conference? I’ve seen assholes like this all of my life and I’ve never understood why they’re so angry.” He shook his head. “It bothers them that people want to come and hear my flute and watch my Cousin Joe flintknap? They feel threatened because people think Sadie Raincrow’s baskets are beautiful?”

  “Apparently so. We should go, Cully. The police will take care of things out here.”

  Faye looked around for Ben and Gloria and their counter-protesting friends, but they were nowhere in sight. She and Cully stood alone, with nothing but a few feet of open sidewalk separating them from an angry crowd.

  One of the protesters raised an arm and swung it hard, lobbing a soda can at them. To Faye, the can looked like it was moving in slow motion, soaring to the top of its parabolic flight path before plummeting to the ground at her feet. It hit hard, opening a crack in its side, and Faye could tell by the thunk that the can had been full and unopened. Root beer spewed out of the crack and drenched her pants from the thighs down.

  Cully reflexively wheeled around, eyes scanning the crowd. “What if that had hit you? Who threw that? Who threw it?”

  Fists ready, he started to advance on the protesters, as if he were about to avenge a wronged buddy in an old Western, but there was no stunt double here to take Cully’s punches for him.

  Faye grabbed the back of his shirt with both hands. “No, Cully. You might get hurt. These people aren’t worth it.”

  “You’re worth it. I’m not going to stand here and watch people like that treat a woman like you this way. Besides, there aren’t that many of them. Maybe eight or ten, don’t you think?”

  Faye was thinking that the headcount was upwards of twenty.

  “They look at me and see an old man. What they don’t know is that the best stuntmen in Hollywood taught me to fight. And they fight dirty, so that’s how I fight. I could take ‘em.”

  Faye wasn’t so sure. Maybe Cully could have taken them in 1978, and Little Girl Faye would have happily munched popcorn while she watched him do it, but not now. And that was leaving aside the likelihood that some of the protesters were carrying guns and knives.

  “Please,” she said, succeeding in getting him to turn his head her way and away from the crowd. She thought maybe his hearing wasn’t what it once was, and she was glad. If Cully were to hear and understand the terrible names they were being called, her fight to keep him from walking into danger, both aging fists swinging, would be over.

  The policeman was nowhere to be seen. She saw Ben and Gloria approaching, flanked by two people that she presumed were their friends. The four of them, plus Cully and Faye, against twenty people did not sound good to Faye. If more of their counterprotesting friends joined them, the odds would be better but the brawl would be bigger. Being arrested for starting a brawl didn’t appeal to her, but it sounded better than being beaten to a pulp.

 
“Please, Cully,” she whispered, succeeding in getting him to keep his eyes on her. She wanted him to focus on her quiet voice. “Getting yourself hurt will not get the root beer out of my pants. Why don’t you help me find a place to clean myself up?”

  His eyes drifted toward the jeering crowd. She was losing him.

  “Listen, Cully. Joe will be talking in five minutes and I want to hear him. It’s important to me to be there. I don’t want either of us to miss his talk because we’re in handcuffs. Because you do know that I would never let you fight those cretins alone.”

  He turned his head away and took one more look across the barricade. “Joe said that you were scary.”

  “Joe’s right.”

  His fists uncurled. He gave the protesters one more look, flashing them the grin that he used at the end of a shootout on the silver screen, when his character had emerged victorious. He pulled himself to his full height, working some magic of charisma that made him suddenly impossible to ignore. The crowd quieted, despite itself.

  Ben and Gloria and their friends stopped in their tracks, watching and waiting.

  Cully waited for a beat to be sure everybody was looking at him. Since he was so totally sure that all eyes would turn to him, they did.

  When he finally spoke, his voice had changed, settling into a timbre that punched through any remaining ambient noise. Faye had heard radio people call this vocal trick “presence.” The protesters quieted at the sound of his full and resonant voice, so they heard Cully’s farewell to them loud and clear.

  “This face has made me millions. I’m not risking it for these losers.”

  Chapter Nineteen