Underground Airlines Read Online Free Page B

her boyfriend is around or—I don’t know. Something or other.” She grinned, sheepish, at Paulsen, who moved not a muscle on his face. Gave her nothing. “Sorry. Too much information, right? But I’m gonna need the room tonight, swear to God.” She shrugged, smiled one more time. “Room comes with breakfast, right?”
    “Breakfast is complimentary, yes. And you will be entitled to one once you are a guest.”
    Other guests had filled the dining area: a pair of pale businessmen, overweight and ruddily jowled, napkins tucked into dress shirts; a trio of college-age kids, all girls, in long prairie skirts, looking like evangelicals. Everyone working hard at not noticing the showdown at the buffet line. And then there was a little boy, tugging on my sleeve. I looked down at him, and he grinned up at me. “Hey. What’s that say?”
    The boy was black. Face full of happy mischief, round cheeks, skin a handsome high yellow, eyes deep, beautiful pools. His shirt had a picture of Captain America on it. He had scooted in next to my elbow and was trying to read the front page, upside down. The situation came into sharp focus, all at once: the white woman’s “we,” Mr. Paulsen giving her the business. Young white mother with her black son, trying to live in the world. This world.
    “You couldn’t, like, front me a breakfast?” she was saying. “Like, advance it to me?”
    “No,” said Mr. Paulsen. “Our policy does not allow for that,” the word policy like a gate coming down, and the next thing would be I am afraid I will have to call security if…
    Her son, meanwhile, who was maybe six or seven, had eased up beside me with no reservations and was peering at my paper, up on his tiptoes. “What word’s that?”
    “Controversy,” I told him. Pointed to the capital C .
    He nodded. “Oh.” Bothering me without qualm, the brave, sweet boy. I wondered that nobody had told him not to talk to strangers. Maybe black strangers were okay. The kid moved his mouth, squinting at the word. “Controversy.”
    “Ma’am. If you please…”
    “Hey, you know what? It’s fine.”
    Slowly and with exaggerated dignity the white girl removed her contraband from her pocketbook: three muffins, one by one; the cereal box; the banana and two oranges; then two plastic spoons and a yogurt. These items she placed in a line along the buffet table, like sacrificial offerings, while her nemesis in his magenta shirt stood with arms crossed.
    And as she came over to my table to retrieve her son, the girl caught my eye and gave me this fleeting, rueful look, the meaning perfectly clear: “This guy, huh? What a dickhead.”
    It is a marker of the kind of relationship I had with white people in general and with white women in particular—having to do not only with the caution that adheres to my profession but also with my upbringing, the way I was raised—that I did not return her look. I made myself busy, reaching across the table for a fresh napkin, and while I was busy she scooped up her boy and bore him away, the front section of my Star dangling from his forefingers across her back like a cape.
    I sat there feeling that for a beat or two, then I folded up what was left of my paper.
    Fussy little Mr. Paulsen strode self-importantly from the breakfast nook, not bothering to apologize for the scene—not to the likes of me.
      
    The white girl’s car was not hard to find in the parking lot: a beat-up South African shitbox with a dented driver’s-side door and a bright pink paint job that was peeling and rust-splotched. The automotive analogue of the denim jacket and scuffed Doc Martens. She was in the driver’s seat filling out the top application on a whole stack of them, the stack balanced atop a hardcover book that was in turn balanced on her lap. She wore a look of troubled concentration, her eyes screwed up, a strand of her hair tucked into the corner of her mouth. Her boy was in the shotgun seat, one leg lodged against the