Underground Airlines Read Online Free Page A

girl in blue jeans and a blue-jean jacket and massively scuffed black Doc Martens–type shoes. She had an oversize leather pocketbook, this young lady, and as I watched she began casually dropping items into the bag’s big maw. This little white lady needed to refine her thievery skills, that was for sure. With each act of petty pilferage she looked first right and then left, like a cartoon mouse about to grab a hunk of cheese, before dropping whatever it was—a banana, a single-serving box of muesli—into the big purse.
    A hotel man came in, khaki pants and polo shirt, treading silently enough on the thick carpeting to escape the girl’s attention—although I, a great noticer of small sounds, heard him fine. He waited, watching, arms folded across his chest, as the girl helped herself to one of the paper cups stacked beside the coffee machine and began to fill it with the two-percent milk meant for cereal.
    “Miss?” he said suddenly, loudly. “May I help you?”
    “What?” The woman turned quickly, jerked the paper cup from the milk dispenser, sloshed some over the sides. “No. No, you’re fine. I’m good. Thanks.”
    The hotel man walked over to her, brisk and self-important in his slacks and magenta shirt with CROSSROADS HOTEL sewn on the breast pocket. I turned my eyes back to my newspaper, studied the headlines. The Batlisch hearings. The Pacers win a close one. Wilmington joins Syracuse and Detroit in bankruptcy, and what cities will be next?
    “The food set out for breakfast is intended for use during the breakfast hour only.”
    “Oh—wait.” The girl tried on a smile, looked around. She couldn’t even figure out a lie for it. “I mean, yes. Oh. Of course.”
    The man studied her. “I’m sorry—would you remind me what room you are staying in?” He had that voice that hotel managers must learn in hotel-manager school, smooth and fussy and disapproving. The girl’s smile was flickering, fading.
    “Ah. Okay,” she said. She fiddled with a barrette she had in her hair, a bright yellow butterfly. “I’m not—I’m not remembering right this second.”
    “Well, perhaps if you showed me your key card?”
    The manager’s clipped-on name tag said MR . PAULSEN , but I already knew his name. I recognized him, a gleaming bald scalp and small features—too small for his big head—that made him look blandly sinister. He was the guy who’d checked me in yesterday, given me my key card, and had me sign the register for “guests of color.” “Just go ahead and jot down your full name and date of birth and Social Security number, if you don’t mind.” Giving me the old standby, “It’s the corporate policy, but if it were up to me…” I didn’t take offense. I was very used to it. I stayed at a lot of hotels.
    “Okay, so…I don’t have a key card,” the white girl was saying, shifting from foot to foot on her big shoes. “See, so, we are staying here, or I mean, we are going to be.” Before the first of the we’ s she stumbled, just a little bit.
    “I’m sorry?” said Paulsen. “You’re going to be staying here?”
    I was paying close attention, half hidden behind the paper, eating my bagel. It was a novelty, I suppose, hearing that kind of petty authoritarian bullying, that ugly, half-threatening tone, used against a white person. She was a small thing, this young lady, girlish in her form and her face, with warm brown circles for eyes and thin pink lips and a lot of messy brown hair pinned up with the plastic yellow butterfly. And here’s this manager hectoring, and the woman just nodding like a schoolkid taking a scolding, tears coming into her eyes and her cheeks flushing and her eyes slowly widening.
    “Yeah. See, okay, I’m up from Evansville. For the job fair. Medical job fair? You know? I’m a—I was a medical assistant. A home health aide, actually. I’m looking for a new, uh—whatever. The point is, my sister said her place was cool to crash, but then I guess