Shift: A Novel

“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.”

“Get back to it?” the man scoffed. “You haven’t even started it.”

“How did you—”

“No bookmark. And if I know my Beau Query—and I think I do—I bet you got yourself a personalized bookmark that moves from book to book, and you never start a new one before finishing the last.”

“My name is Querrey. Beau-Christian Querrey.”

“Don’t blame me for that. I only just met you.” The man grinned. “C’mon. Show me the bookmark. Come on.”

Despite himself, BC snorted and reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a wafer-thin rectangle the size of a charge plate. It was made of ivory, however, rather than cardboard or plastic, and had a finely engraved image of —

“Why, that’s just too poignant, ain’t it?” The CIA man snatched the bookmark from BC’s hand. “Huck and Tom rafting down the Mississippi. Poignant and pointed. Practically on—the— nose,” he said, tapping his broad nostrils with the corner of the card. “Well, now, that’s got a edge to it.” He rasped the bookmark over the shiny stubble on his cheek. “Bet you use that to cut pages, too, don’t you?”

BC would have snatched the bookmark from the man’s hand, but it had belonged to his mother, and his mother had taught him not to snatch.