fault.
Fifteen years later Jim had taken this to heart. You could do things the hard way or the right way, and it was always someone’s god- or government-given job to make sure you did like you’d been told. There was something else to be learned from this, a way of living your life. You took your pleasures where you could, and you made sure you were king of your own domain. Amen.
Jim’s domain was the Portland airport security line. He ran a tight ship. People stood where and how they were supposed to stand, or they faced Jim’s wrath – he had no problem with stopping the checking process and walking slowly down the line of fretful travellers to tell the assholes at the back to keep the line straight. Jim had a system at the front too. The person he was dealing with was allowed to approach. All others (including that person’s spouse, business partner, mother or spirit guide) stood the hell back at the yellow line and waited their turn. Failure to comply would cause Jim to again stop what he was doing and step forward to explain it at uncomfortable length. He actually did have all day to spend on the matter, or at least a set of three two hour shifts. The people in line weren’t on the side of the troublemaker at the front. They wanted to get on with their journey, buy a magazine, take a dump. Anyone obstructing these goals became an enemy of the people. Jim’s philosophy was ‘divide and rule’, or it would have been if he’d ever thought to articulate it. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t his job to explain things. His way was just the way that it was.
At 16:48 all was well in Jim’s world. He had his line moving in a well-ordered manner. It was neither too long (making Jim look inefficient) nor too short (suggesting he was insufficiently thorough, which would be far worse), and it was very straight. Jim nodded curtly at an octogenarian from Nebraska who – he was now confident – was unlikely to be carrying a cigarette lighter, hand gun or atomic weapon, and waved her on to the X-ray machine. Then he took his own good time about turning back to the line.
A little girl was standing there. About nine, ten maybe, long hair. She seemed to be alone.
Jim cupped his hand, indicated she should come forward. She did so. He raised his head, the signal for ‘turn over your documentation and make sure it’s in the right (though unspecified) order, or I’m going to make you feel a dork in front of everyone.’
‘Hello,’ she said, smiling up at him. It was a nice smile, the kind that secured second or third visits to toy shops, the smile of a little girl who had always been pretty good at getting people to do what she wanted.
Jim did not return it. Security was not a smiling matter. ‘Ticket.’
She handed it to him promptly. He looked it over for his standard period, three times longer than was necessary. With his eyes firmly on the self-explanatory piece of paper, he demanded: ‘Accompanying adult?’
‘Excuse me?’
He looked up slowly. ‘Where is she? Or he?’
‘What?’ she said. She looked confused.
Jim prepared to deliver one of the stock phrases to deal with diversions from set procedure. His versions were famously brisk. But this was just a kid. The two guys behind her in line were now taking a mild interest in the proceedings. Jim couldn’t just chew her out.
He smiled inexpertly. ‘You need an accompanying adult to get you to departure,’ he said. ‘It’s the law.’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Uh-huh. “Unaccompanied minors must be brought to the gate by a parent or responsible adult”,’ he added, quoting, ‘“who must remain at the airport until the child boards and the airplane departs the gate.” You need all this arranged and booked ahead of time, too. You can’t just turn up at the gate and fly, kid.’
‘But … I’m going to visit my aunt,’ the girl said, sounding slightly panicky. ‘She’s waiting for me. She’s going to be worried.’
‘Well, maybe your momma should have made sure you …’
‘Please? I do have someone with me. They … had to go outside to smoke. They’ll be here in a minute, really.’
Jim shook his head. ‘Even if I let you through here, which I ain’t gonna, they’ll check again at the gate. You’re not getting near that plane without an adult.’
The girl’s smile slowly faded.
‘Sorry, kid,’ Jim said, making what was for him quite an effort to hide the fact that he was not.
She looked up at him for a moment. ‘Watch your back,’ she said, softly. Then she ducked under the rope and walked away across the concourse, where she was quickly lost amongst the other evening travellers.
Jim watched her go, open-mouthed. When it came to kids he was phoning it in from the land of Who Gives A Shit, down a really bad line. But … shouldn’t he maybe go after her? Check she really was here with someone?
On the other hand the line was getting long and some of the people in it looked bad-tempered and if the truth be told Jim just didn’t really care. All he wanted was to close out his shift, get home and drink a series of beers while watching the tube, then get on the net and find some porn. There was that, plus …
Of course it was absurd, just a little girl using a phrase picked up from a movie. But there’d been something in her tone that made him think if she’d been a couple feet taller he would have taken the threat seriously. Even from a woman. He didn’t want to have to explain this to anyone. So he went to the next person in line, who turned out to be French, so while he had identification it wasn’t American identification, which mandated Jim to stare even longer and harder than usual at his documents and to look up at the guy’s face in a suspicious and ‘Don’t think we’ve forgotten about you punking out over Iraq’ kind of way. By the end of this he was King of the Line again.
He didn’t think about the little girl until the detectives turned up the next day; and it wasn’t until he realized he’d missed the opportunity to prevent a nine-year-old girl from vanishing into thin air that he understood there were smaller holes than he’d ever realized, and he was about to spend a while being pulled back and forth through one of them.
Meanwhile Madison had made her way back outside the airport building, and was standing forlornly on the sidewalk.
Now what?
Frowning, trying to remember why she’d been so convinced she had to fly when getting a cab to the house and her father would make most sense, Madison noticed a guy standing ten feet away having a cigarette. He was looking at her as if he was wondering what she was doing here by herself. He seemed like a nice man and the kind who might ask her if she was okay and Madison was not sure what the answer to that was. She wasn’t sure she trusted herself to speak, either: she’d been almost rude to the man in the airport, which was not like her at all. Maddy was very polite, always, especially to grown-ups.
She crossed the street quickly and went into the multistorey parking lot, as if that’s where she’d been going all along. Seeing the smoking man stirred a memory from the blank period earlier in the day. Another man had looked at her, she thought, after she had … of course.
That’s how she’d got to the city.
By bus, duh. She’d arrived at the Greyhound station on NW 6th Avenue. Then she’d walked for a long time, she remembered, looking for an address. It was in a place she knew but somehow she didn’t know where that place actually was. The area was not very nice. A lot of the store fronts were boarded over and had letters above them that did not make words in English. There were cardboard boxes all over and the smell of rotting fruit in gutters. The parked cars looked old. It had been different also to the parts of Portland that Madison knew in that it seemed to be a place where only men lived. Men, standing in dirty grocery stores. Men leaning in doorways, by themselves or with someone just like them, not talking to each other but watching everyone who went past. Men, on street corners, shivering. There were white men and black men and Asian men, but they all looked more or less the same