“No. This time it’s—” She held up the phone. “Business.”
“All right. Well, I have a question for you. It’s just a number: 1819,” I said. “A year, I’m guessing. Does the year 1819 have any kind of special meaning around here?”
Martha’s expression changed, sharply, completely. She dropped her eyes down to the gravel of the lot, then she looked back up, unsmiling, and spoke in a sad hush. “Where did you see that number?”
“Oh…” I said. “You know…”
It wasn’t right, dragging my problems in front of this innocent bystander, who clearly had problems of her own. I was pretty sure I already knew the goddamn answer anyway.
“Just something I spotted hung up outside somebody’s house.”
“Hung up how?”
“On a flag. A number of ’em, actually. Like pennants. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.” Something like anger was choking Martha’s face. “Because it just gets into everything.”
“What does?”
“It. All this shit.”
“What shit?”
Martha shook her head. “Where did you see them? Downtown? Southside?”
“East side.” All the questions were making me a little uneasy. I felt the need to reinforce my ID, duck under my cover for a moment. “I was at a potential retail location, kind of poking around the area.”
“Oh, all right,” she said. “I see.”
“You know what?” I said, regretting the whole line. It was 9:30. Bridge would be calling in twenty minutes. “Don’t worry about it. The business with the number. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“No,” she said. “No, you’re fine.” She gave her head a little shake, took a deep breath, preparing to bear up to unpleasantness. “It’s the year before…what’s his name?” She squeezed shut her eyes, remembering hard, then popped them back open. “Lasselle. The Indiana Supreme Court, 1820.” She closed her eyes again. She looked older with her eyes closed. “‘The framers of our Constitution intended a total and entire prohibition of slavery in this State.’ So 1820 is the year Indiana was officially and fully free.”
I smiled sadly. “Gotcha.”
“So 1819, for these dickwads, that’s the good old days. See?”
“I see.”
She looked at me head-on, tears standing in her eyes. The people with the flags were reversionists—people who as a matter of politics or personal taste regretted that their state had ever adopted its constitution and thereby abolished the practice of slavery. And it made Slim’s Trailer Court, Slim’s Market, and Slim’s Garage the unlikeliest possible place for Mr. Maris to have landed, the unlikeliest possible place for Jackdaw the runner to be squirreled away.
“Mr. Dirkson, I’m sorry you had to see that.”
“Call me Jim. And it’s okay.”
“It’s not. My state is a really nice state, for the most part. It really, really is.”
“Oh, I get that. That’s the feeling I get for sure.”
Mr. Bridge would be calling in fifteen minutes. But here was young, kind Martha in her cheap denim jacket and her long brown ponytail tied back with a pink rubber band standing out here in the parking lot suffering whatever it was she was suffering. She reached up to neaten the ponytail, and the motion caused the top of her white dress shirt to open slightly, and I saw just below the root of her neck a black box, inked in all the way. Not a lot of white people got them, but some did. A mark of solidarity or empathy or guilt.
Martha saw me looking, blushed, and brought her shirt collar together.
“God,” she said. “People think it’s far away, but it’s not. It’s here. It’s everywhere. Clouding over everything. Hanging over everything. Don’t you just feel that way sometimes?”
“I do,” I said. “I guess I do.”
With an effort of will, she made herself smile, made her eyes get hopeful. “But you know what? Maybe this thing with Batlisch, you know, the president sticking up for her and all…maybe it’s the beginning of some real change.”
I smiled. I nodded. I’d read the same article. It had been in my own newspaper. “Sure,” I said. Thinking, Shit does not change. Thinking, It will never change. “You never know.”
“Listen, Jim,” she said. “Hey. Would you ever…”
She paused. She looked down at her phone, considering something, gathering some kind of quick courage. My heart was a tight, high knot; there was some keening emotion making itself felt that I had never felt before while I stood in the invisible light of those words, hanging and spinning between us, Would you ever…
Then her phone rang. She opened it, and it rang again, and then we both realized together it wasn’t her phone ringing, it was mine.
I looked at the incoming number and at the time. It was 9:36.
“Mr. Dirkson?”
My phone rang again. Bridge was calling, fourteen minutes ahead of schedule.
“I should get this.”
“Oh. Sure.”