“We don’t make arrangements, man,” Cook put in, leaning in the doorway, working at his teeth with a toothpick, listening closely. “We make connections.”
“What does that mean?”
Maris didn’t turn his head. He kept his cold eyes on my face while Cook talked. “What Mr. Friendly Sunshine here is gonna do is tell you where to go and how to find the lawyer. What happens after that is up to you and the lawyer. You understand?”
Maris, then, very slow and very low. “We only know what we know.”
“All right,” I said. “All right. And who’s the lawyer?”
Maris said it again: “We only know what we know,” which wasn’t exactly the same as saying he didn’t know who the lawyer was. Mr. Maris, of all those I had met, was the hardest to read. His sharp features a perfect mask. “The town is called Green Hollow,” he said. “Twenty miles northwest of Birmingham. There you find a statue. In the square.”
“What square?”
“It’s a small town, man,” said Cook. “Just the one square.”
“You go to the square. Weekday. Any weekday. Between eleven twenty-five and eleven thirty-five in the morning. You stand beneath the man and his horse. You wait for the lawyer there.”
So here I was: it was 11:28 in Green Hollow, Alabama, in the one square in town. I was sweating now. My papers were good, solid rock, but there had to be a limit to how long you could wander around in public, unaccompanied, in your black skin, papers or no papers. Law enforcement on the square was in two forms: the friendly neighborhood cop from the Town of Green Hollow Police Department, with his hands behind his back, a bright silver whistle around his neck, smiling at children and nodding to passersby; and up on the rooftops an officer of the Alabama branch of the Interstate Colored Persons Patrol, in all-black, body armor, rifle, and helmet. He was either trying to be inconspicuous and failing up there or, more likely, making absolutely sure that his presence was registered by every person on the square—the black ones especially.
I, at least, had a keen awareness of him as I searched that square looking for a goddamn statue of a man and a horse. The only statues I could find, though, were wrong: the first was an ugly gray statue of a man on the prow of a swift boat, a Texas War veteran, stabbing his forefinger aloft as if commanding unseen troops but receiving only the attention of a flock of sickly pigeons roosting on the brim of his hat. The other statue was of a short bespectacled man in a midcentury suit, waving gaily, trailed by a beagle. I had circled the square three times looking for the man and his horse without finding it.
I took another pass around the square. Outside the Cotyledon was a small crowd of blacks, talking quietly, waiting, I figured, for their masters to finish lunch. And inside, alone at a table for two, was Martha Flowers.
What the hell? I thought, feeling a queer surge of anger and—what? Relief? What the hell?
We had said our good-byes on the outskirts of town, in the parking lot of a Qatar Star gas station. All I said was “Say good-bye to that kid for me,” and all she said was “I sure will,” and then I got out of the car and went around the back to use the colored persons’ restroom, and when I came back she was gone, just as we had planned it.
She should have been at the Border House by now, digging her real actual Indiana driver’s license out of her big messy pocketbook.
Instead she was in there, studying the menu of the Cotyledon Café, legs crossed at the ankles like a proper belle, like her own evil twin. I looked twice, making sure it was Martha, and then I stopped looking, not knowing how many times you could look through the plate glass of a restaurant at a white woman before the patrolman up on the roof noticed you looking.
I took another turn around the square. There was a good film of sweat on me now: desperation, confusion, some sour combination of fury and fear. Martha Flowers was enjoying a slice of pie on the town square, and meanwhile where the fuck is this horse? Where the fuck is this lawyer?
I stumbled on an uneven patch of sidewalk and very nearly bumped into the broad back of a slow-walking white man with a cane. I breathed. I slowed my pace. Passed carefully beneath the oak trees and the black lampposts. Passed the general store, the movie house, the Internet café. I saw that, scattered across the lawn of the park, clustered together, were a dozen or more dark-skinned men and women lying about in small groups, dozing and talking and drinking out of paper bags.
And then, finally, for the third time, I walked around that stupid statue before I decided to read the plaque beneath it: HENRY SMITH, TOWN FATHER, AND HIS LOYAL COMPANION, HORSE.
Horse. A dog named Horse. Somewhere, Willie Cook was having a good long laugh on me.
I leaned against the fence that ran around the statue, then immediately thought better of it and straightened up. The clock on the courthouse said 11:35—was it too late? Had I messed this up already?