“Uh…” He was afraid to answer. Afraid to be wrong. “It makes better clothes?”
“It makes money, Mr. Newell!” She spread her hands. “It makes more money.”
Newell chortled. “Well, we sure hope so!”
For a surreal half a moment I became excited at the prospect of making a sale. Ms. Reynolds and I would return to the office in Birmingham and report on our success, log it in the system, get high fives from the other sales teams, arrange a meeting with the tech guys for follow-up. Jane Reynolds would be employee of the month. I’d get-what? What reward would a freedman associate receive? Alternate universes, other worlds.
“I tell you what,” said Martha. “I’ll show you. Can I show you?”
“Sure,” said Mr. Newell. He stood up, as though maybe she was going to lead him somewhere. “Show me.”
“Albert?”
I popped out of the back corner like a jack-in-the-box. “Yes, ma’am!”
“Can we get set up, please?”
She said it with mild irritation, like she couldn’t believe I hadn’t done it already. I saw the small look she gave to Newell, the small look he gave back: these people. I opened the bag, opened up the laptop, and pressed a few buttons. Newell scurried out of my way, stood awkwardly in his own office, hands behind his back, ponytail jutting out over his pink neck.
“Okay,” said Martha. “Away we go. Albert, would you mind hitting the lights for us?”
“They’re just there,” said Newell and pointed, and I hopped over to the light switch.
“What I’m going to show you,” said Martha, calling up the first slide-the logo for Peach Tree, clipped off their website-and beaming it onto the window shade of Newell’s office, “if you’ll bear with me, is just a taste of the proprietary technology that Peach Tree is offering. Just a sense of it. So…”
The slide blinked off, and no second one came.
“What…” said Martha in the darkness. “Albert?”
“What is it?” said Newell.
“Oh, dear,” I said. “Oh, boy.”
“Albert!” Her voice transformed. Sharp as broken glass. “Albert, would you be so kind as to turn on the lights, please?”
I did, and fast. Martha was standing, flustered, with her hands on her hips. Newell was bemused, uncertain. “Ms. Reynolds-Jane, is everything okay?”
“Yes, of course, Mr. Newell.”
“Matty. Please.”
“Matty, it’s just, you know, they send me out here to do this, and they don’t send me with equipment that actually functions. Or a…a…” It was the sole flaw in her performance; the only half a moment’s hesitation. Jane Reynolds would have said “nigger,” of course. “A helper who can do his darn job.”
Newell didn’t notice her skipped beat. He wasn’t noticing anything but a chance to be some kind of man. He was rushing around from behind his little desk. He was handing her tissues.
“I do understand, believe me. Here, Ms. Reynolds-”
“Jane,” she said.
“Jane.”
Matty Newell was smiling weakly with a dim, hopeful light in his eyes. Martha took the proffered tissues and blotted tears from the corners of her eyes. Real tears. I almost laughed. I was still standing back by the light switch, just inside the door, invisible and quiet. But Jesus Christ, she was good at this.
“I have a very good presentation.” She pointed to the laptop. “I mean it. That is an excellent presentation.”
What she was doing was, she was letting it be his idea. She was walking him along, holding his hand tightly enough to lead him, loosely enough for him to be unaware of it. She was an absolute natural. Or maybe all women could do that to all men, if they wanted to.
“I would actually love to just do it alone, just the two of us,” and she gave that quick, simple, businesslike sentence-“I would actually love to just do it alone, just the two of us”-just enough backspin. Just enough.
“I tell you what, Jane,” said poor dumb Newell. “Let’s head up to the cafeteria, and I’ll buy you some lunch. Okay? We’ll have some lunch and…and you can tell me what you got to tell me. Don’t have to fuss around with all the tech and all that. You just lay it out for me, and we shall discuss it. Would that be all right?”
Her look of abject gratitude-Newell the savior, Newell the gentleman-was a thing of wonder.
“Oh, Matty, that would be so kind of you. And we really do have a remarkable product.”
“Of course,” he said. “And I’d sure like a chance to hear about it.”
He stood up. She closed the laptop, which we had loaded with exactly one slide, and followed him to the door.
“Oh, wait,” she said, glancing at me for just one half a second, just a quarter second to make sure that this was still our play. I nodded, a degree of head tilt well below Newell’s notice, and Jane Reynolds said, “Is there somewhere my boy can wait?”
“Oh.”
Newell stopped, flummoxed. I do believe the man had genuinely forgotten that I was in the room. “Well, he can wait right here, as a matter of fact. This door’ll lock behind me, and it won’t open until we come back. That all right with you?”
He wasn’t asking me, of course. Jane Reynolds said that it would be just fine with her, and he guided her with a hand on her back out into the hallway.
I waited five minutes after the door shut. I stood perfectly still and counted. Three hundred seconds.
While I was counting I stood as Jane Reynolds would expect to find her boy standing-in the corner with my head lowered, touching nothing, like a powered-down robot.
At three hundred I sprang into motion and the beautiful new music appeared in my head, the wild rhythms from the lawyer’s basement. It kicked up in me loud, so as I got to work it was with the urgency of that music. I moved through that small office like a drumroll, like an ascending scale.
I rolled Newell’s chair over to the bookshelf and stood on the seat and ran my finger along the topmost row of binders: dust. Same with the second level, and so on down to the floor: dust, dust, dust, all the thick binders and regulatory volumes so much set dressing.
I rolled the chair back to the desk. I already knew where this was going-I knew I would end up having to get into Newell’s computer. This was the twenty-first century: any kind of important document, anything that mattered, would be on the hard drive or on the server. But I did not want to be hacking if I could help it, so I was praying for a break here; I was hoping like crazy. I tugged open the narrow drawer of the desk, rifled past the stapler and the scissors, then I ducked over to the filing cabinet while I bent a paper clip into a twist.
Martha and I had agreed on twenty-five minutes. Fifteen minutes in Newell’s office to get the two pieces of information we were after, one for me and one for her, plus a five-minute margin on either end.
Nine minutes had already passed, five minutes of silent counting and four minutes of work, as I threaded the tip of the paper clip into the chintzy lock of the filing cabinet. I felt as I had at Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise, seven days ago now, Thursday to Thursday and a lifetime in the past. Break into a building, crack a desk: these were the easy assignments, the small projects outside of thought or contemplation, beyond regret or conscience. A hard deadline, a specific task. I twisted, caught the hook of the child’s-play mechanism, twisted again, and felt it give. The music played, jumping, triumphant, in my head.
There were five drawers to the filing cabinet. I worked from the top to the bottom.
Purchase orders, record keeping, maintenance logs-one thick folder with the details of a hundred different trucks and trailers. My forefinger ran along the spines of hanging folders. Forty-five seconds per drawer: pull open, quick examination, push it closed. Accident reports, insurance documents, vehicle registrations. The bottom drawer was financials: purchase orders and invoices, summaries of fuel expenditures quarter by quarter, reports on cost for overall fleet maintenance.