by Ben Winters
A police cruiser made its slow way along the avenue, windows rolled up and tinted. The siren was off but the light was on, slowly flashing red and blue, red and blue. Not going to any particular emergency, just rolling through. Someone had spray-painted on the hood THE POLICE IS THE PATROL.
“You know what?” said Martha. “Forget it.”
“Forget what?”
“Just—let’s forget it. I don’t want to…” She looked back at Lionel, who was staring back at her. He had on his uneasy kid face, trying to read his mom, trying to figure out how serious this situation was.
The cop car had sharked past, turned right, and disappeared.
“All right,” I said, thinking, and started the car. “Sure.”
A knock at the driver’s-side window, three knocks, bang bang bang. A massive midsection was filling up the window, blocking out the daylight. Outside Martha’s window was another man, as big as the one on my side, who was now gesturing for me to roll down the window.
I didn’t have my gun. I couldn’t have brought it to my doctor’s appointment. I could see it, imagine the size of it, in the room safe at the Capital City Crossroads. I buzzed down the window and squinted out. A gigantic black man in a golf visor, a leather jacket over a tight T-shirt, his face acne-pitted and moon large. He leaned into the car and talked across me, addressing Martha.
“You Wanda?”
“Yes,” she said. She darted a glance at me—phony name—and said, “Do you work with Mrs. Walker?”
“Sure do,” said the mountain of a man, his voice a heavy rumble. “She’s my mama.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, listen, will you just tell her I’m really sorry, but I actually was thinking forget it? I changed my mind. Okay?”
The dude in the golf visor looked amused. “Sure. Okay.”
“So you’ll tell her?”
“You can tell her.” He yanked open my door, and the other big man, the same size and dressed identically to the first, opened Martha’s. “C’mon, now,” said the new one. The new giant’s voice, not surprisingly, was the same distant-thunder bass. He had two chipped front teeth, the new brother—that was the only difference between them.
Martha nodded rapidly, sure, no problem, and licked her lips. “Hey, Jim?” she said, and put her hand on my knee. “Do you actually think you can stay here and keep an eye—”
“Uh-uh,” said big man number 1. “Everybody comin’. Everybody out the car.” He tugged open the back door and pointed at Lionel. “You, too, little man.”
My manager way back in Chicago, at that Townes store where I worked, was a good-hearted black man named Derrick, and sometimes he would give me a ride home. Every time he drove me, we would be going south on Lake Shore and they’d come into view, the jumbled ugly towers of Freedman Town, and Derrick would shake his head and say, “I wish I understood. I wish I understood why they can’t tear them places down. There has got to be something better we could do for those folks. Don’t you think?”
“Of course” is what I said to Derrick, and I meant it.
Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose—not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town’s purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say Will you look at those animals? That’s what kind of people those people are. And that idea drifts up and out of Freedman Town like chimney smoke, black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation.
We proceeded in a slow parade, one of Mrs. Walker’s big boys in the front and the other in the back, the two of them escorting our strange family, herding us down the wide, rutted street, past graffitied doorways, past broken-down cars and plywood shanties, fire pits with smoke tendrils crawling up, raggedy hammocks strung between trees.
To look at him, Lionel gave no signs of being frightened—he bounced on the balls of his feet, looking every way at once. But about halfway down the block he grabbed my hand, and I held his, awkwardly at first, feeling his tiny fingers moving like curious animals inside my closed fist.
19.
“Now, tell me how I know you again, baby?”
“You don’t,” said Martha. “Not really. My friend Anika, she knows your grandson Wayne.”
“Wayne in Gary?”
“No, ma’am. Wayne down in New Albany.”
The woman seated regally at the end of the long dining room table snorted and held up a wagging finger. “Grandson? Please, baby. That boy Wayne ain’t no kin to me. Godson. He my godson.” She took a long drag of her skinny cigarette and ashed it out in the juice cup at her elbow. “He still down there?”
“He’s in Louisville now, I think.”
“Well, you keep well clear of him. He dumb. Dumb and small-minded, too. There’s a difference, but he both. Stay clear.”
“Okay, ma’am. I will. I’ll do that.”
“Stop calling me ma’am, baby,” said the old lady. “Everybody call me Mama.”
“Okay, then.”
Martha smiled, barely, her face and her body rigid. She didn’t call the woman Mama. She wasn’t comfortable with that—she didn’t seem comfortable with any of this. Her sunglasses were folded neatly beside her at the table, like she was playing cards and this is what she was ready to bet with, if she had to. The room was small and stuffed with greenery, potted plants and vases full of flowers, all miraculously thriving in the low-hanging choke of smoke from Mama’s contraband Camels and the dope being enjoyed by her sons, who’d walked us up.
Mama Walker was middle-aged, but no telling how middle: somewhere north of forty-five and south of sixty. She’d been beautiful once and was beautiful now, in a way, an older lady’s leathery beauty. She was dark-skinned, and her face was lined, especially at the edges of her mouth. Her eyes were alert and alive, glittering with awareness, darting every which way at once. Noticing everything.
“Them two are my babies,” she said suddenly, swiveling to me, pointing with her smoke hand at the pair of men. “Twins. Believe that?”
I looked at them, and Mama’s babies nodded in unison from the love seat, two giants side by side, a couple of defensive linemen five years out of the game, old musculature hidden deep within layers of fat. In the apartment’s back room were a bunch of other kids, much younger, arrayed on and around a heavy sofa. Lionel, at Mama Walker’s encouragement, had fitted himself down among them, become instantly absorbed in whatever cartoon garbage was playing on the plasma screen across from Mama’s sofa.
Mama Walker stubbed out her Camel, pulled a new one.
“Misery sticks, I know. But I can’t smoke them Indian things. I feel bad about it and all, but them things taste like cow shit. So how old are you, baby?” The riff on slavery smokes was directed to me; the question was for Martha.
“Thirty-two.”
“Thirty-two. Thirty-two.” She looked at Martha carefully, critically, like a fine piece of jewelry. “Tricky age for us women, ain’t it?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Different for white girls, I guess.”
Martha shrugged uncomfortably. “I guess.”
“Everything different for white girls.”
I wondered again what the hell was going on here. I wondered, too, how I had managed to get myself implanted in it.
“And just so I’m straight on it,” said Mama, tilting her long head toward the back room, toward Lionel on the sofa. “Little man’s yours.”
“He is,” said Martha, looking yearningly toward the boy. “That’s right.”
Mama nodded slowly. She was looking at the kid, judging his complexion, ca
sting as keen an appraising eye over the boy’s color as I had over Jackdaw’s—as I had over every runner I’d ever gone after. Mama Walker, I decided without thinking about it, without wanting to think about it, was moderate pine, red tone, number 211 or 212.
“So you what?” Mama Walker turned her eyes on me. “You Daddy?”
“No, ma’am,” I said quietly, and Martha rushed in: “He’s just a friend.”
“Just a friend,” she said, her voice low and easy, almost a whisper. “Just a friend.” She leaned forward, blew smoke out of the side of her mouth, and patted me on the knee. “Nice to meet you, Just-a-Friend.”
The Walker boys, over by the door, were sharing a one-hitter, silently trading hits.
“So where is Daddy?”
“Well…” Martha gave her head a tiny shake. “I don’t want to talk about that.”
“You don’t?” Mama’s smile fell away. “And why not?”
“I really just want to uh, to, you know—to cover our business.”
“Oh, all right,” said Mama Walker. “Of course.”
There was the click-click of a lighter by the door, and I glanced over at the sons: son number 2 refiring the skinny pipe, son number 1 staring into space. A cartoon punch line blared from the television, one animated electric eel zinging another one, and the kids all roared. Lionel laughed along with them, perfectly at ease.
“But you know what, I do want to talk about it, just for a second. You don’t mind, do you?” She stared at Martha. “How about I just guess what happened to him?”
“Well…” Martha wrung her hands together. Her face was agonized. “I guess.”
“I’mma guess white men killed him.” Mama Walker said this without trouble, almost cheerfully. “’Cause of you. That it? Am I close on that?”
Martha didn’t answer, but Mama said, “I thought so,” as if she had. “That’s how they do, you know. You gotta be careful. North or no north, some things you just gotta be careful about. White man don’t play, you know? Right, Just-a-Friend?”
“Right,” I said.
“I’ll give you a little example, okay? All this shit hole here?” She pointed outside, at the trash-strewn street. “This all used to be green. Verdant. That the word, Marv?”
“Yes, Mama,” said one of her sons, in his thick voice.
Martha suddenly stood up. “I am so sorry that we bothered you,” she said, her voice thick with tears. “Hey, Lionel, honey?”
Lionel looked over from the couch, but meanwhile one of the big Walker boys had gotten up, too—not Marv, the other one. “Have a seat, little girl,” he said. “Mama talking.”
Martha sat. Lionel’s head swiveled back around to the screen. Mama gave no sign of having been interrupted. “It was verdant down here, back in the day. That’s what they say. I’m talking ’bout before I was born, understand. Before my mama was and hers was. There was a stream here. Little creek. I got a map, somewhere, somewhere in here, but you can see it, too, you go hunting through the dog shit and the broken glass out there, you can see, like, the traces of it, where it ran once, all those years ago. But see, the white men who were planning out the city, they didn’t like it where it was. The little river. So they just”—she made a quick gesture with her hands, sweeping the air—“ran it under the ground. Built right over it. You understand? You see?”
She waited. She wanted an answer. Martha whispered, “Yes.” I took off my glasses and wiped them on my shirt. Dope smoke wafted over from the love seat.
“They sent that little river underground, and they built their fucking ugly city over it. That’s how they do. Anything they don’t care for, anything that does not please, they use it up or they kill it or bury it, and they never think of it again. You see?”
Martha’s eyes were shut now. “I see.”
“So that’s what they did—open your eyes, sweetheart. Open.” Martha obeyed. “That’s what they did to your boy’s father. Them. White people.”
“I’m sorry.” Martha closed her eyes. She was sorry she’d come here. She was sorry she was white. But there was no undoing either of those things. “I just need some help.”
“Yeah. No shit, baby. Everybody come here need help. Everybody in the world need some kinda help, right? Ain’t that right, Just-a-Friend?”
For once Jim Dirkson and I were all synced up, my alias and I equally perplexed. I smiled carefully for both of us. “That’s right.”
“Question being for you, then, okay, what kind of help you need? I’m looking at you, pretty white girl. Pretty white girl don’t come downtown to get something up her nose.” Martha nodded, trembling a little, her hands fussing at the hair at the nape of her neck. “Pretty white girl don’t come downtown to get something in her arm. Sure as fuck don’t need passing papers. Don’t need pussy. Or…” She raised her eyebrows, and Martha shook her head quickly. “No. So pretty white girl ain’t here to get fucked or get high or get free. So what she need?”
I wished I knew Martha well enough to take her hand; to pat her knee reassuringly under the table. I couldn’t do it—I didn’t really know her at all was the thing. I was a passenger.
“It’s gotta be money that baby needs. Right, boys?” The Walker brothers nodded in unison, right on cue. It was all performance; this was part of the performance, every time. “So the question is—how much money does baby need?”
Martha placed her hands flat on the table, to steady herself. Past her, out the window, I caught a glimpse of movement—the cop car was rolling past again, slow lights flashing.
“Twenty-nine thousand, five hundred.”
Mama’s thin-line eyebrows arched higher. “Twenty-nine thousand, five hundred dollars?”
Martha nodded, the tiniest mouse motion of a nod. Mama raised her voice, addressed the boys like they were a studio audience. “Twenty-nine thousand, five hundred. Can you all believe that?”
They could not; they shook their heads in shared astonishment, real slow, back and forth. I couldn’t quite believe it, either. I tilted my head to one side, looking with fresh eyes at this girl—this Martha, or Wanda, or whatever her name might have been. Mama leaned back and pulled out a new long Camel.
“Twenty-nine thousand, five hundred,” she said, lighting her cigarette. “That number is very—what is the word I want, Elton?”
“Specific,” said Elton through a mouthful of smoke. Elton was the one with the knocked teeth.
“That’s a lot of dollars.” Mama looked at me. “Ain’t that a lot of dollars, Just-a-Friend?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess so.”
“Question being, baby—you white. What about you get a job?”
“Well, I…” Martha looked down, then away, pained. “I’m working on it. I was actually just at this job fair thing, at the convention center, that’s what I was doing all week…” She looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded, although of course I had no idea what she’d been doing all week. Of course I knew nothing about her. “I’m trained as a medical assistant.”
“Medical assistant.” Mama shook her head and smoked and clucked.
“Yeah. And—and a couple other things. I work. I do. I have money. It’s just—not enough. I have my son, you know. I have bills. I can’t hardly save nothing.”
“Times is tough,” said Mama Walker, waving faintly at the abandoned house visible through the kitchen window. “Times is real tough. And we still haven’t heard what you need it for, anyway, this very specific twenty-nine thousand, five hundred dollars.”
Martha answered right away. “I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t tell me?” Mama Walker’s eyes glittered. “She can’t tell me! Marvin, baby, you hear that? It’s a secret!”
“Look—come on, ma’am. I mean, Mrs. Walker.” Martha steeled herself, looked the older woman straight in the eye. “Is it going to be possible to borrow the money or not? It doesn’t have to be the whole twenty-nine five, okay? Whatever you can do, I will take. And I can pay it back. With inter
est.”
“Goddamn right you will!” said Mama Walker. She stood up, and a long circle of ash fell from her smoke down to the table. “Obviously you would fucking pay interest. This isn’t fucking Goodwill. I’m not running some charity shop for desperate white girls.”
“Sorry,” said Martha. “Sorry.” More apologizing. I had known this girl Martha for three days and all I’d seen her do is say she was sorry. Abashed before fussy white men and flinty black women alike.
“All right, well, listen, baby,” said Mama Walker, and Martha smiled hopefully, but it was over. Mama wasn’t sitting down again. The boys had shifted their weight. There was a change in temperature, and I knew what it was—I had sat in rooms like this: I had observed negotiations. Gun runners, bent cops, border bribers, slave traders, snatchers. I could tell a no-go when I was sitting with one at the table.
“Listen to me very carefully: when I give out money, I give it on return. I give it on terms.”
“I know,” said Martha. “I said—”
“I know—you’re going to pay it back with interest. Well, how I guarantee that, baby? You won’t tell me what you want it for; I barely know how I know you. You come in here, a black boyfriend, a black son, like I might get mixed up, start thinking you something you not. Like I’m gonna trust you then.”
“But I—I would promise! You would have my word on it!”
Mama Walker didn’t even bother to answer that. She stubbed out her cigarette with hard meaning, and the boys at the door opened it. At last Martha saw that this wasn’t happening, and immediately she switched modes; immediately she was ready to get out, out of Freedman Town, as fast as feet could go. “Lionel,” she called, and when he didn’t come at once, captivated by the cartoon show, climaxing in a blur of flash and sound, she said it again, sharp—“Lionel!”—and he bounced over.
“Real nice to meet you,” said Mama Walker. “Real nice to meet all of you.”
The big men stepped aside, then Mama Walker said—so low you almost couldn’t hear her—“I’ll give you the money you give me the boy.”