Underground

by Craig Spector

  “Oh, hush,” Doris said, waving it off. “Your momma ain’t that bad. She just needs to lighten up a little.”

  “Tell me about it,” Zoe said. “Was she always like that?”

  “Lord, no,” Doris exclaimed. “She was a little hell-raiser once upon a time.”

  “Wow,” Zoe said, having trouble conjuring the requisite mental image of her mom being anything but, well, Mom.

  “You know,” Doris continued, “Caroline was about your age now when she had you. Fresh out of high school. Your Granddaddy about had a heart attack.”

  There was a long pause as Zoe suddenly grew quiet. “Did you know my dad?” she asked. Doris sighed and poured another round.

  “She never said,” she confessed. “We tried everything to get it out of her, but she wouldn’t give it up. She just said it was a mistake.” Zoe winced ever so slightly at the word, and Doris instantly backpedaled. “Not you, dear. Him.”

  “Oh,” Zoe said, nodding. “What about the dead guy?” she asked. “Justin whatsisname…”

  “God, I hope not… for your sake,” Doris looked at her. “That boy was nothin’ but trouble.”

  “Oh well,” Zoe murmured and downed her shot. As she swallowed she looked at the glass more carefully. It was inscribed Down the Hatch! with an African native dancing around a cooking pot as another readied himself to place a comely white girl inside and a third gnawed a human bone.

  “Whoa,” Zoe said, looking at the glass. “What up with that?” She put the glass down as if it were suddenly contagious. Doris looked at her askance.

  “Relax,” she said, holding hers up. “I got burned on a buy; guy said they were period, but it turned out they were fakes from Taiwan. Worth less than I paid for ’em …”

  “You sell these?”

  “‘Black Americana,’” Doris explained. “Big thing now. Check it out…”

  Doris got up and went to the pantry door, produced a key. “I keep this locked, for obvious reasons.” She opened the door, motioned Zoe to enter. Zoe peeked inside, eyes widening.

  “Holy shit,” she murmured.

  The pantry was six by four, with shelves on all sides, filled floor to ceiling with figurines and memorabilia, dolls, toys, banks, old advertisements, tea cozies and kitchen aids: all of them featured characters ranging from painterly to garish, bright eyed and black skinned, with bright white or ruby red lips. A mint condition Aunt Jemima ad, circa 1944, exclaiming WHOO-EE! My tastifyin’ AUNT JEMIMA PANCAKES sure perks up appetites!, stood next to a little black Sambo serving plate inscribed Dat’s MIGHTY FINE Eatin’!; a tin package of spot remover called Carter’s Inky Racer, with a little black boy running around a horse track, was propped next to a ceramic mammy holding a little sign that read Ain’t No Bitchin’ In Mammie’s Kitchin! And of course the ever-popular “jolly nigger” mechanical coin bank: a hinged iron casting of a black boy in a watermelon patch with his hand jutting out, ready to pop a dime into his leering, toothy mouth.

  “Goddam, Doris,” Zoe said reproachfully. “Who buys this shit?”

  “Collectors, historians,” Doris answered, shrugging it off. “I don’t really care, s’long as their money’s green.”

  “I guess,” Zoe said. She gazed at the collection: wall-to-wall images plucked from the fabric of everyday life over one hundred years or more, mammies and sambos, toms and picaninnies, coons and brutes and golliwogs. The figures were all smiling. It was all in good fun.

  But none of it was very funny.

  7

  By the time Amy arrived in downtown Norfolk she felt like a paper cutout of herself, soaked in sweat and diesel fumes and ready to crumple. The first leg of the trek — three and a half hours from New York to DC — had been only mildly discomforting, the morning crush of inter city commuters traversing the Northeast Corridor being no worse than your average midtown subway at rush hour. She had scored a seat by merest chance and sheer chutzpah, but her victory was short lived as she spied the No Smoking sign plastered to the thick Plexiglas window. She sighed and hunkered down for the ride, trying to hypnotize herself with the monotonous view and the rolling motion of steel wheels on rails. By the time she got to Union Station in Washington it was all she could do to avail herself of the two-hour layover by exiting the terminal. Outside she paced the exhaust-clogged street and sucked down smokes, her nicotine jones slated, another, more demanding one looming on the horizon.

  When she detrained in Newport News the sun was just beginning to set and Amy was feeling wobbly and hollow. There was still an hour to go, this time by bus, and as she waited to board her senses had hyperattenuated, sounds and scents becoming oppressive with each ticking second: the cheap perfume of the woman in front of her and the crinkling of cellophane as the boy behind munched Doritos conspiring with the odors of oil, tire rubber, and axel grease to make her vaguely want to vomit, were her stomach not already empty and feeling like a shrunken walnut. As the bus chugged east down I-64, she felt her insides lurch with every shift of the gears; the light of the setting sun glinted off the waters, stabbing at her eyes, as they made the slow crawl through the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, each of the submerged portions feeling like a slow-motion descent into a claustrophobic, fluorescent hell. She leaned back and tried to nap, to think of anything, or nothing.

  The conversation with Josh replayed maddeningly in her mind, long on mystery and short on answers. It bothered her that though they hadn’t spoken for more years than she cared to count, he hadn’t sounded the least bit surprised to hear her voice, like he had been expecting her call. Weirder still, like he knew what she had seen, even though she hadn’t told him.

  Just come, he had said. I’ll explain when you get here.

  That would be nice, she thought. She wanted answers. She wanted resolution. But at the moment, she wanted something else a little more.

  The bus stopped, doors hissing open. Amy opened her eyes and climbed out of her seat on legs that felt like sticks of balsa wood. She paused at the door to the terminal, wavering, when a deep voice sounded behind her.

  “Amy Kaplan?”

  She turned. The man was in his late thirties, clad in a somber dark suit and shades, with mahogany skin, chiseled features, and long braided cornrows pulled neatly back. She nodded warily.

  “This way,” he said and turned, walking. Amy clutched her backpack and followed him to a black Ford Explorer parked by the curb. The windows were tinted. A remote chirped as the door unlocked. As the man climbed into the driver’s side, Amy hesitated, urban hackles rising. The man looked up, head cocked. “Relax lady,” he said. “How you think I know your name?”

  Amy nodded and climbed in. As he keyed on the ignition, the doors automatically locked, sending another ripple of anxiety through her. Amy fought it back and settled herself into the plush leather interior. “So,” she said, “you’re friends with Josh?”

  “Not exactly,” he said, but offered nothing more.

  “You work together?”

  The man shrugged noncommittally. Amy looked at him, annoyed.

  “Okay,” she said. “Got a name?”

  “Louis,” the man replied, then, almost as an afterthought, “Hillyard.”

  Amy nodded as if trying to nudge the conversation forth with the motion. “So, Louis,” she said, starting over, “you mind telling me where the hell it is we’re going?”

  “Josh told me to pick you up and to see to it that you’re comfortable.”

  “I see,” she said. “Did he tell you anything else about me?”

  Louis glanced at her with what seemed like disdain. “Glove compartment,” he replied.

  Amy looked at the dash, thumbed open the glove box; it opened to reveal a plain envelope with “Amy” written on it in Josh’s handwriting. She opened it and saw a half dozen thin glassine packets; her fingers trembled slightly as she pulled one out, dabbed her pinky in the contents and touched it to her tongue. “Damn,” she murmured. It was enough for an extended stay… or one fat OD on a maj
or high.

  “Not here,” Louis warned. “I assume you can wait…”

  Amy dipped her fingernail into the packet, brought it to her nostril, and snorted. “Now I can,” she said.

  She pocketed the envelope and leaned back in her seat, relief coursing through her, with the promise of more to come. As her head cleared and her craving abated, she realized that though he said next to nothing, the vibe she sensed coming from Louis was palpable. It was disapproving with an underlying edge of superiority. It was also starting to grate on her nerves.

  “I take it you have a problem?”

  “My people have a problem,” he said, his tone civil but cool.

  “What,” Amy said sarcastically, “people who talk like hit men and dress like undertakers?”

  Louis looked at her, fierce but dismissive. “I don’t like drugs,” he said. “I don’t like drug addicts.” He stopped, checking himself.

  Amy looked at him; there was something else in his tone, a further unspoken condemnation that he did not, or would not, voice. Her mind turned over the variants… women drug addicts?… gay women drug addicts?… gay women drug addicts from New Yawk?… when suddenly it clicked.

  “White drug addicts,” she said. “You don’t like white drug addicts.”

  Louis said nothing.

  “Great,” Amy sniffed. “My tour guide is a racist…”

  “Hardly,” Louis said. “In order to be racist one must be in a position to dominate and wield the powers of economic and legal sanction over the dominated race. We have never been in a position to enact such repressive strategies; we’ve always been the victims.”

  “Wow,” she said caustically. “Did you make that up all by yourself, or did someone program it into you back at Robo-Bro Central?”

  Louis glared at her from over his shades; Amy glared back, fatigue and trepidation giving way to an anger that overwhelmed her own instinct that pissing off this angry brother was maybe not the brightest idea in the world. She held her hands up in supplication.

  “Sorry,” she said. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Louis said. “I don’t expect you to understand. You see racism. I see righteous fury.” He said it calmly, like it was the most natural and obvious thing in the world.

  Just then Louis wheeled the Explorer into the entrance of a nondescript Econo Lodge, then parked in front of a room in the back. As he climbed out, Amy caught a glimpse of a gun in a holster, tucked into his waistband. She felt a cold spike of not anxiety but fear as it occurred to her that between the snort and the sparkling conversation she had not really been paying attention to where they were going and had no idea where they now were. Amy reluctantly followed as he produced a key, unlocked the door, and entered.

  The room was bland but clean: bed, dresser, TV, table, chairs, crappy prints on the walls, all anonymous by design, the kind of room that made no impression and left no trace. “Stay here,” he told her. “Don’t go out any more than you have to, and keep a low profile when you do. I’ll be back to pick you up in the morning.”

  He laid the key on the dresser and turned toward the door. Amy stepped forward; it suddenly dawned on her that the only thing more uncomfortable than being around Louis was being alone.

  “Is Josh coming?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Get some rest.”

  “Look, Louis,” she said, “I know I’m tired and bitchy and a little freaked out right now. And I know Josh has a fucked up sense of humor, putting the two of us together. But if you don’t mind me asking…” she paused as though waiting for his go-ahead, “…what the hell am I doing here, and what are you doing hooked up with Josh Custis?”

  Louis turned and removed his sunglasses; his eyes burned with something beyond attitude and rhetoric. “We have mutual friends,” he said. “And mutual interests.”

  Amy met his gaze, and for the first time felt like the ‘we’ included her, if only a little. Louis nodded to a newspaper lying on the table; Amy picked it up. It was a day old and open to page two, where a small headline read Vandals Hit Historic Landmark. She read it quickly, taking in the scant details, but the name alone — Custis Manor — was enough to chill her blood. She felt suddenly weak.

  “Is this where…” she stammered. “…where Justin…?”

  Louis nodded.

  Amy sat down on the edge of the bed, her head spinning with the sounds of distant screaming. “Holy hell,” she murmured.

  Louis looked down at her, his eyes betraying if not compassion, at least wholly human empathy… and something deeper, darker.

  “Holy hell…” she said again.

  “Something like that,” he replied.

  8

  It was just after midnight when a gust of chill air stirred the doors to the morgue.

  Elizabeth Bergen had just come down from the upstairs snack machines, a Coke and little bag of Cheetos in her hands, fingertips yellowed with dusty imitation-cheese coating. To the best of her knowledge she was the last living soul in the joint, and she liked it like that; it was quiet, and she could concentrate without distraction, devoting herself fully to the task at hand. And tired though she was, her brain was firing in high-rev mental overdrive. Her body might have needed to — might, yeah right, she thought —- but her mind just didn’t want to sleep. It wanted to keep going until she had plumbed the depth of the mystery. The question, of course, was as obvious as it was inscrutable: what the hell is that hand, and why is it still moving?

  She yawned. Her chest felt like someone had strapped a wet cinderblock to it, her stomach burbled from caffeine and junk food overload, her eyes burned from staring into microscopes and at her computer screen. She didn’t care. She wanted to know.

  Even on the most normal case, Bergen liked to get to know her dead. She routinely spent hours sifting through their guts; it seemed only fitting to spend a few minutes crawling into their skins, trying to see the world through their eyes, imagine those last few moments as they shuffled off the mortal coil. Sometimes it helped piece together the puzzle.

  And this… this was beyond strange. She couldn’t resist.

  “Why were you in the bathroom, Justin?” she murmured. At least she knew his name now: the prints had come back belonging to one VAN SLYKE, JUSTIN A.. His rap sheet showed the chronological descent of a small-time loser, a social misfit who had bounced in and out of jail since high school, running juvie to county to even a stretch in the state pen. Nothing special there; every trailer park in the county contained a dozen Justin Van Slykes; certainly not the kind of person to foment a political and racial crusade. “You wanted something…” she continued. But what was it?

  Bergen sat at her desk, a crowded gray metal government issue monster crammed into the anteroom adjacent to the examination room. The glow from her computer monitor and a little halogen desk lamp cast a small circle of light against the shadowed expanse of the room; the only other illumination being the hallway lights refracted through the windows of the big double doors. She leaned forward in her chair and looked at the digital photo JPEGs on her screen: close-ups of the hand from every angle, CSI shots from the scene. Once she had decided to crack this she had put the hand safely away under a John Doe tag; though it still showed no signs of lividity or decomp, it was cool to the touch, even below room temperature, and Bergen didn’t want to risk losing it.

  She studied the images. The glass fragments from the mirror were simply that: plain mirrored glass, antique vintage — indeed, virtually the only glass in the manor that was period accurate and not restored at a later date. Some of the frags were bloodstained, type A positive, but she found it interesting that the spatter pattern corresponded with the pattern on the floor and was consistent with a vertical distance of at least five feet.

  “You were standing when it happened…” she continued. “And you didn’t use the glass to cut yourself. So what did?” This was a total mystery; the incision at the stump was cleaner than could be made by the sharpest surgical steel.
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br />   She clicked her little optical mouse and zoomed on another image. There was a small tattoo at the juncture of the thumb and forefinger: crude, obviously self-inflicted. Jail tat. A name, etched with little curled and spiky vines: MIA.

  Missing in action? She thought at first. No.

  “You had a girl,” Bergen murmured. The tat was old, the ink bled into surrounding tissue. “You thought about her a lot…” She zoomed the photo, comparing ink depth in the skin. “…and you kept going back to it, adding little things, embellishing her name… you had time to kill, didn’t you Justin? Lots of time. And you thought about her…” Bergen sat back.

  “So where is she now?” she wondered.

  The breeze stirred the doors, making a little whuff-whuff sound. Bergen looked up; no one was there. The room was silent, save for the quiet hum of the massive refrigerator compressors that fed the meat lockers. Bergen turned her attention back to the screen, flipping through the digital images. The shattered door. The bloodied floor. The closed window. No signs of tampering.

  “You were locked in, you were bleeding,” she continued. “You checked in but you didn’t check out.” She snickered, punchy with the image of some antebellum roach motel. “So where’d you go, Van Slyke?”

  Out in the main room, the big double doors stirred again — whuff whuff, whuff whuff. Something fell over on a lab counter — a small, sharp crack. Bergen sat up, suddenly alert. She reached into her desk drawer, pulled out a small container of pepper spray. Morgue break-ins were a rarity, but last year some stray brain-dead tweaker, his few functioning brain cells fired up by an old Six Feet Under episode on HBO, broke in looking for embalming fluid to soak his weed in. Anything was possible.

  Bergen gripped the spray and rounded the corner, taking in the whole of the room at a glance. Empty examination tables gleamed dully, their steel surfaces scrubbed clean. The counters were tidy and bare. Everything was in order.

  Not everything, she thought. Something was off. Just then she heard a small grating sound, hard glass on harder surfaces. She looked over and saw a specimen jar tipped over and slowly rolling toward the edge of the counter.