The man tongued the end of his cigar until it glistened like a Tootsie Roll. Only then did he reach for his matches, light one (not on the box, but on the back of his thumbnail, which was as rough as an emery board), hold it a fraction of an inch from the cigar’s tip. His lips sputtered like a landed fish as he sucked in a series of rapid inhales. Little rings of smoke erupted between each puff, till at length the cigar’s cherry glowed red as a nickel pulled from a campfire. He took a longer drag, held it in his mouth a moment, then blew a single perfect smoke ring directly at BC. Though it dissipated before it reached him, it still seemed to BC that the ring slipped around his head like a halo, or a noose.
“So, Beau,” the man said in a voice thickened by smoke and satisfaction, “where’s J. Edna sending you today?”
Washington, DC
November 4, 1963
BC’s fingers twitched and the cigar-end shot up in the air. He opened his mouth, remembered it was full of saliva and sucked it down, choked, coughed, managed to get his arm up in time, ended up splattering the sleeve of his suit with a constellation of droplets that coalesced into a black wet patch the size of a beef cutlet. A fair amount of spittle had landed on his companion’s briefcase as well and, after staring at it like a kindergartner regarding an incriminating pool of urine beneath his desk, BC pulled his sleeve into his palm and began wiping at it with slow, mortified strokes. Wool not being the most absorbent of fabrics, all this did was smear the saliva into long smooth arcs. It did, however, bring up a bit of a shine on the worn leather of the man’s briefcase.
When the man finally stopped laughing, he nudged BC’s briefcase with the toe of one of his worn sandals. The tag lay so that the address label was exposed.
If found, please return to:
Beau-Christian Querrey
c/o Federal Bureau of Investigation
Washington 25 D.C.
The man snickered. “I bet it says the same thing inside your underpants.”
BC reached a hand down to turn the address label over, as if this could somehow remove its information from his seatmate’s mind.
“Who do you work for?”
The man puffed on his cigar before answering. “Let’s just say we’re in related but tangential fields.”
“You’re CIA?”
The man’s eyes widened. “Maybe you’re not as green as you look.”
Just then the conductor reappeared with the man’s drink—the spy’s drink, as unlikely as that seemed. The conductor unfolded a napkin on the table and set the drink on it. He had to nudge the man’s briefcase toward the window to do this, and BC could see that his fingers were shaking, half retracted inside his gold-piped maroon cuff like the limb of a frightened turtle. He put his hands behind his back after he set the drink down, then stood there. The hot rum steamed on the table, giving off an aroma of sugar and stale blood.
The CIA man picked up the drink, drained it in one long swallow, set it back in its ring on the napkin.
“That was so good I think I’ll have another.”
The conductor paused, then picked up the glass. “Pardon me, sir …”
“I can’t drink ‘pardon me, sir,’ and you can’t feed your family ’thout this job, so I suggest you hurry if you want to keep it.” He paused just long enough to make his last word gratuitous; then: “Boy.”
“Yes, sir. It’s just that, sir, there’s a, well, you see, sir, there’s a charge—”
“Hell’s bells, boy, why didn’t you say you was buying? Ask my friend Beau here if he wants one too.”
“Of course, sir. But that would be two drinks, sir—”
“It’ll be three actually, countin’ whatever Beau has. Now ask him what he wants, boy, before you end up buying everyone in this car free drinks from here to Pennsylvany Station.”
It seemed to BC that the conductor shrank even more as he turned toward him. He was nothing but a suit now, a pair of frightened eyes.
Before the man could ask, BC shook his head. “I’m all right, s-sir.”
“Oh, I like that!” the CIA man said as the conductor scurried off. “‘S-s-s-s-s-sir.’ Trying to show some respeck to the Negro people, even though it don’t come nat’ral.” The man leaned back in his seat, kneeing BC’s legs toward the aisle so he could stretch out his own. His accent, which came and went with the conductor, shifted once again, from the fields to the Big House. “Lemme guess,” he said in the relaxed drawl of a plantation owner, “you a Southern boy, but just barely. Maryland, maybe DC proper. Maybe even Arlington. But no farther down. If you was from farther down, you wouldn’t-a stuttered when you said sir. You wouldn’t-a said it a-tall.”
BC stared at the man, trying to decide what to say. In the end, manners won out.
“I’m from Takoma Park.”
“Hell, you almost home then.”
With a start, BC realized the train was moving. Had been for some time—they’d crossed the Maryland border already.
“Lemme guess. PG County? You got yourself a little bit of a race problem in PG, don’t you? Darkies moving in, flatbed trucks loaded down with corn-shuck mattresses and pickaninnies. Your people get out in time? Hell, what am I saying? Look at that suit. Of course they didn’t. Stuck with some big old row house, I bet, tall and narrow in the front but stretching way back to one-a them little kitchen gardens that don’t get enough sunlight to grow anything besides beans and lettuce. Couldn’t sell a place like that for ten cents on the dollar right now, what with the character of the neighborhood changing the way it has. Well, you couldn’t sell it to a white family anyway.”
The man’s ability to read BC was a bit unnerving. There was a stunted apple tree in the back garden, but still.
He reached for his book and held it up as if it were a shield. “If you don’t mind—”
“Wuzzat?” the man said, screwing up his face and squinting at the book as though it were a Polynesian totem or the innards of a Japanese transistor radio.
“It’s, uh, a novel. A work of, um, ‘alternative history.’”
“Huh. Not too redundant.”
“Beg pardon?”
“C’mon, Beau. History’s full of alternate versions, depending on who’s doing the telling. What’d your momma call the Civil War?”
BC colored slightly. “The War of Northern Aggression.”
“See what I mean? To good old-fashioned Christians like your momma, the war was all about common Yankees trampling on Southern pride. To Negroes like our overstepping conductor, it was about ending slavery. To Abe Lincoln, it was about preserving the Union. It’s just a matter of who you ask.” Without warning he snatched the book from BC’s hands. “Lemme guess. J. Edna told you to look for ‘anti-American content’ so he can decide whether to put”—he glanced at the book cover—“Mr. Philip K. Dick on a watch list, along with Norman Mailer and Jimmy Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller and Ken Kesey and—stop me if I get one wrong. No? Jesus Chris, Beau, who do you work for? The FBI or the Library of Congress?”
“I’m looking for subversive content. Not anti-American.”
“How in the hell can a novel be subversive? It’s all made up.”
“It can put ideas in people’s heads.”
“Well, golly, we wouldn’t want to do that, would we?”
BC smiled tightly and held out his hand. “Still, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll get back to it.”