“No.” Walter giggled back artfully.
“Are you college students?”
“Yes.”
“No you’re not. Too young!” But at last, with this interrogation, she put the car in gear. Old but not simple, East observed. “Are you robbers?” she asked merrily.
“No, ma’am,” said Walter again.
“Not here to rob me. Well, what, then?” Martha Jefferson said. Like sweethearts flirting, East thought.
“Together we could rob some other people if it helped you out.”
The old lady creaked with mirth. “Aw, no,” she said. “I be all right.”
Now she’d put her sauce on.
“This morning,” declared Martha Jefferson, “I am headed to the airport in Des Moines. I don’t know if that helps you. But I can take you to the highway if you don’t want the airport.”
“We would ride all that way with you,” said Walter. “With thanks.”
Formally, Martha Jefferson agreed, “Then I will take you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
East looked out. They were passing the Denny’s. Police cars all up and down the lot. Then Martha Jefferson turned at the junction, and it all fell behind them: that van, that everything. East did not turn to look back.
“Chilly day for just a sweater, Mister Walter,” the woman said.
The box of doughnuts wafted their smell into the car’s box of air. Was she ever going to break into them? East thought rudely. Walter broke open his box of granola bars and offered one to Martha Jefferson first before passing one back. East unwrapped his and let a first, dry bite moisten in his mouth slowly, feeling it as much as tasting it, the chunks of it coming apart, turning to starch on his tongue. How something plain could open up like the whole world when you were starved. He was asleep before he could take a second bite.
—
He awoke. The little digital clock stuck to the dash said 9:20. No idea when they’d begun. Outside, the highway flowed by. They’d come through here before on this highway, heading east in the dark.
Walter was saying: “I’m going to study electrical engineering. Electronics. Wiring. Installing. You know. If I’m good, I can get a degree and begin to design. I could work up in Silicon Valley, you know. Not programming but helping on the engineering side. And if not, I can just install and repair. Computer. Cable. Alarm systems.” On and on.
“You got it all figured out,” said Martha Jefferson, admiringly.
“I’ll come out okay either way,” said Walter.
“It’s that kind of world. You have to plan for either way.”
Walter said, “Amen.”
“My grandson lives in California too,” she revealed.
The highway sang under them, and the two of them talked, like relatives, like people sure of their homes, till East felt himself falling away again. Walter was a good boy. East dreamed he was alone in the van, alone in a storm where he could see nothing ahead of him, knew there was nothing ahead of him. No one had seen Walter. Walter was a good boy. He slept until he felt the gentle lift of a ramp, and again he awakened, and a parking garage surrounded them now. Outside, the airport sky, cluttered, gray. A plane arced up behind a gray-windowed tower.
“Let me get it for you,” Walter was saying. “Here’s forty to cover it.”
“No, no,” said Martha Jefferson. “I’m only gone the two days. It ain’t but five a day.”
“Gas too, then,” winked Walter. He tucked the twenties into her purse, and again she humphed silently.
What was the act now? East had missed the whole conversation of lies. Keep his mouth shut.
“I knew,” the lady said, “you was good people.”
Walter. A good boy. East’s stomach felt hard and scraped out. He felt as if he’d been punched in the chin with force. He wondered how he smelled. Shuddering, the old Ford pulled into a space near a ledge that looked down two stories. Walter leapt out, fetching the old lady’s weekend bag from the trunk.
Then East was trudging behind him, the dumb cousin. The airport. Wasn’t this what Walter had said to stay away from? The world was a gray smear. The patterned carpet running forever reminded him vaguely of the casino. Dog-tired on an invisible leash, he just followed.
People crossing his path were thin, wore black and gray, ears clipped to their phones. Long yellow and white lights blared above: they told him nothing.
“You’re meeting at the gate?” Walter was saying.
“My sister? Yes, dear. But we couldn’t get seats in the same row. Couldn’t get that,” the old lady said. “She’s right in front of me, though. Oh. Oh, goodness.” She stopped with a jolt. “We forgot the doughnuts.”
Walter stopped too and grinned.
“She gonna have a fit!” he scolded Martha Jefferson.
Martha Jefferson laughed aloud. “She will!”
Walter turned on East in mock fury.
“Andre! Why didn’t you bring the doughnuts!”
Andre. Right. Wearily East regarded Walter.
Either it was exhaustion or it was being on the outside, but he could see what they were playing at. As if a pair of sunglasses had been removed and now the light of day was bright and strange. Playing three black people, comic and noisy in an airport. Like a skit in school, the boys playing wolves, the girls playing lambs. Acting out what all these people expected them to be. Better than what they were.
He understood it, and yet did not know his lines.
Martha Jefferson said, “She’ll be so frustrated with me.”
“I could—” began Walter.
The old lady, with searching eyes, asked, “Would you?”
Walter said, like a faithful nephew, “I will. I’ll go right now. Andre, walk Mrs. Jefferson through to security now. I’m gonna be back before you go through the line. But you can’t go through the line — you’re not a passenger. Got it?”
East’s stomach rolled. He nodded. Walter took Martha Jefferson’s bag off his shoulder and traded it for her key ring.
“Andre. You can’t go in the line,” Walter said. “You hear me?”
“I won’t go in the line,” East murmured. Jesus. The lady was looking him up and down. Again East wondered how he smelled.
“I can carry your bag if you like,” he offered.
“Very kind,” said Martha Jefferson, but she kept it on her. He was the one she didn’t like the looks of. All right.
Together they trudged off toward the security line.
A smattering of people funneling into line. They paused and shuffled, eyeing phones or conversing in low voices. Steering their luggage, casual but alert, along the switchbacks. East and Martha Jefferson came to a stop just outside the cordoned area.
A few of them watched the old, stern-faced Negro lady and her ragged boy. East was bilious. Acting sleepy was the best he could do.
“You can’t go through, you know. Through the security. Not unless you have a ticket,” Martha Jefferson reminded him.
“I know,” he responded dully. “Walter said.”
How long was the fat boy going to be?
He understood that he was standing by her now not to be quiet and kind, but to hide behind her. He was raw. He could barely stand. And Walter was dashing about, carrying things. Out in the parking lot now without him, a set of keys in his hand. Inventing things. He was standing by her to be the sort of boy who traveled with his great-aunt, who didn’t have blood on his shoes. Late coming to the play, but happy to be in it.
As long as Walter came back.
A black couple inched forward in the line, one midsize son with his face in a video game and a little girl in braids, up on her father’s shoulder. She eyed East with dread.
“I hitchhiked one time,” Martha Jefferson reminisced. “I’ll never forget. Course, it was in Louisiana, long ago.”