Free Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead Page A

“Can’t stop progress,” without thinking. It was a catchall phrase of his, something to put out there when he felt too indifferent to come up with a more engaged response. He instantly regretted his mistake. He looked back into the car. There sat Albie, pooled in the front seat: privilege gone soft in its own juices.
    “No, you can’t stop progress, can you?” Albie sighed. Did his eyes glisten, or was it a trick of the light? “Listen,” Albie said, “I know you have responsibilities. You got your job. But you’re here to be objective, right? You can see what they’re trying to do, can’t you? They’re trying to take away something that means something.”
    They left it at that.
    He found himself walking automatically to the hotel bar and stopped. He considered the situation, and then permitted his subconscious to have its way. He had only been away for a few hours, but there was no reason his afternoon could not be categorized as a hard day’s work.
    The joint was packed. He shuffled through. You could have called it Happy Hour, had Muttonchops not been glowering behind the bar. The bartender poured him a beer as soon as he sat down on the single empty barstool. He pictured the shuttle buses, one by one, as they navigated the twisty roads from the big city, full of Lucky’s recruits, buckled up and secure. The visitors dispersed once they hit the elevator, but only briefly. They washed their faces and flossed and then they made their way down here.
    Freedom. He whistled. If he’d offered up Freedom in a meeting, he’d have been run out of town, his colleagues in full jibber behind him, waving torches. It was like something from the B-GON days, an artifact of the most pained and witless nomenclature. Roach B-GON, Rat B-GON. Hope B-GON. Freedom was so defiantly unimaginative as to approach a kind of moral weakness.
    He didn’t hear the punch line. Only the laughter. Like everyone else at the bar, he turned to find the source of the racket, and there was Lucky, in the back of the room, in his Indian Vest, surrounded by his weekend guests. Lucky was in raconteur mode, he could tell by the job-well-done smirk on the man’s face. The laughter continued as one man initiated another round of braying; no one wanted to be the first to stop. They were a pretty mixed group, Lucky’s future business partners and incipient flunkies—put a picture of Sterling Winthrop’s laborers next to a picture of Lucky’s multiculti crew and caption the tableau CHANGING TIMES . Jack Cameron, the man he’d met last night, hadn’t been a representative sample. The crowd in the corner could have been an Apex ad, to tell you the truth, so well-hued were they.
    Lucky spotted him at the bar and winked and started over. The Help Tourists stepped aside, each one attempting to catch Lucky’s eye. This was how people reacted when you had the touch. It was how he’d pictured Albie Winthrop on his walks through town, before he’d met the man. Not that diminished thing whose empty kingdom he had just departed. He despised himself his earlier generosity toward Albie. Be a man, for Christ’s sake, he should have told him. Not indulged his weakness.
    “Hello, friend!” Lucky said. “I can tell from your face that you met with our favorite son.”
    “You’re right.”
    “You need a drink, then,” Lucky opined, and invited him to join their table. Without instruction, Muttonchops placed six cans of Brio on a platter, which Lucky carried to the back of the room. Man of the people. He followed. As the two men jostled their way through, the assembled surreptitiously checked him out, trying to gauge his importance, and what was with the limp. Lucky dispensed the cans of Brio and introduced him with a chipper “This is the man who’s going to put our little town on the map—literally!”
    He endured the usual round of questions about the nature of his profession before the subject turned to the new wireless standard. Apparently the