They’re federal at the Fence, agents of a special division of the Department of Homeland Security called Internal Border and Regulation. IBR is black boots and yellow jackets and mirrored glasses, automatic pistols in shoulder holsters. It was one of these IBR men, deeply tan and sandy-haired, stone-faced and courteous, who motioned for me to roll down the window of the Toyota, who leaned over me to address Martha in the backseat, who flipped cursorily through our papers—papers furnished for me by Mr. Bridge, sterling papers, papers made of solid gold. Who then said politely to Martha, “If you would ask your Negro to step out of the car, please,” who then walked me through a bank of scanners, who ran his gloved fingers under my tongue, passed hands over my scalp, who shined a light up my asshole and lifted my balls, who ran flat palms over all the inches of my flesh. Who removed my body momentarily and completely from my control and then returned it to me with a grunt: “You folks are just fine.” He said it to Martha, not to me. “Go ahead.”
The IBR is federal, but on the other side of the Fence are three more agencies, each its own brick building, bristling with flags and radio antennae: the Alabama Highway Division, the Limestone County Sheriff’s Office, and the Alabama branch of the Interstate Colored Persons Patrol. Each one of these agencies has the statutory right to stop any of the vehicles leaving the custody of the IBR, but none of them chose for whatever reason to stop us that morning in our white Toyota.
There was a Latin motto on the far side of the Border House—AUDEMAS JURA NOSTRA DEFENDERE—bright white on a lavender background, then a cheerful sign in roadway green: WELCOME TO ALABAMA THE BEAUTIFUL.
I drove, and Martha rode in the back. They were watching me; I pictured them watching. Bridge in Maryland, Barton and company in Indy, glued to their screens. My dot moving south, crossing the line.
My own eyes were wide open, waiting to see all the ways the world would change now that we had crossed through, past the limit of civilization and into the dark land, where whites keep their rule by savagery and fear. I waited for the sky to darken, for the crows that would wheel across the clouds. But it was the same winding road, the same spreading green countryside, the same taffy-blue sky. Same on either side of the Fence.
“Hey,” Martha said. Was saying. Leaning forward between the seats. “Brother?” I guess she had been talking for a while. I turned slightly toward her, and it hurt my shoulder.
“You all right?” she said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You did it. You’re done.” I turned back, kept my eyes on the road. Careful driving, nice and easy. “We’re fifty-seven miles now from Green Hollow. We’ll pull up, like we said, in the town square. Then you’re going to turn around. Find a shoulder you can pull off on and burn those papers, like I showed you. Then you get on back to your boy. Park the Toyota in that Townes Stores lot.”
“Southport and Emerson.”
“That’s right. And you know where the money is.”
Martha didn’t say anything. Black highway rushed beneath us; streetlamps passed us; trees.
“Okay,” she said.
“And thank you, Martha,” I said. “Thank you.”
Two hours later I was walking on a sunlit sidewalk with my head down through the bustling small-town square of Green Hollow, Alabama, looking for a man on a horse, looking for the lawyer.
It was as if I had arrived not just in another part of the country but in another part of the century. Men in fedora hats and mustaches, ladies in short-sleeved flower-pattern dresses pushing big perambulators, smiling. Everybody smiling. The gentle ting-a-ting of welcome bells as these gentlefolk pushed into stores under multicolored awnings that fluttered in the wind. Folks tipping their hats, holding the door for one another as they went in and out of a diner called the Cotyledon Café, a tidy little freestanding pink building with a window box full of peonies along its front glass and a sign with proud curly-cursive lettering: THIS IS A PREJUDICED ESTABLISHMENT.
The other restaurant on the square was General Bobby’s, a fried-chicken chain that, I happened to know, was owned by the same conglomerate that owns Hamburger Stand in Indianapolis, where I’d just eaten a few days ago. That’s how they do it, these big chains that don’t want their customers to know how much business they’re doing behind the Fence: subsidiary companies, parent companies, diversified holdings.
I made my way around the square, beneath the sky of daydream blue, the pure white clouds like drifts of cotton. I passed a couple of white men in hats, men of the world conversing in somber tones about what one of them called “last night’s unfortunate incident.”
“What else could be done is the question,” said the other, while both nodded their heads with solemnity, men of the world. “Oh, yes, I know. What else could be done?”
And while they discussed in their somber tones the tragic necessity of ready assassination, their Negroes stood behind them staring at the sidewalk, unseen and unspeaking. And behind a white lady pushing a carriage was a black woman, much older, lugging a diaper caddy and an armful of boutique shopping bags. And there I was, moving through this watercolor world like a ghost. It was like there were two realities out here, overlaid one on top of the other, like transparencies on an overhead projector.
Where was the lawyer, though? Where were the man and his horse?
“So how do we make these arrangements?” I had asked Mr. Maris back in Indianapolis, back at Saint Anselm’s, in the shabby headquarters. After Barton was gone again, when it was just me and the lieutenants. Cook gave me the backstory, and then he and Maris briefed me on the connection I was to make.
“Arrangements?” he said. “No. Listen. Understand.”