Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  The smug cop just kept on talking. On his feet now, moving around the room, working himself up.

  “Usually, see, priest’s rule is, we do one, then we hang back. Hang back in the cut awhile. You can’t be too careful. More things we got going on, more chance there is for the soul catchers to find us.” He paced around the room, making tight circles like a tiger in a cage. “But me, see, I got a different way of thinking. I think people need help, people like you, you know, and if we’re set up, we’re set up, and we should do as much as we can. Get out the whole three million if we can. Now, this here, your woman—what’s her name?”

  A half second I hesitated before I found the name. “Gentle.”

  “Right, Gentle. In Carolina, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Carolina. Bauxite. Yeah, see, that’s all different. Different part of the country. Different kind of job. And you know, I want to do more, to be honest with you. In our organization. And I feel like Barton was hearing you, but he wasn’t really hearing you, you know?”

  He glanced over, and I gave him what he wanted. I nodded vigorously. I was still in the bed. Still had to piss and everything.

  “But Barton, you know, he don’t listen to me. I could plan the whole thing, I could run it myself, but I’m not the one with the purse strings. He’s got the donors, he’s got the cash box, he’s the one running the show.” He puffed up his cheeks, blew out air. “Plus, you know, look at me, right? Look at us. The way he sees it, whites are the ones do the saving. Black folks best hang tight and wait on getting saved. He’s got what I call a Mockingbird mentality.”

  He was talking about that novel: the Alabama runner hiding in a small Tennessee town, the courageous white lawyer who saves him from a vicious racist deputy marshal. That book was one of a hundred or more I read in a Chicago library basement, in the tender, terrified early months of my own freedom, trying to teach myself the world, and I remember how it moved me. The point, though, was that the hero of the book, the hero and the heart, is that good lawyer: the white man is the saver, the black man gets saved.

  “So I’m thinking, I bring you back to the father, I push you on him a little bit. We’re gonna get your wife free and move me up the ranks a little. Show the man what a brother can do, you feel me?”

  “I feel you,” I said. “I feel you, brother.”

  For some reason that caught him by surprise, Jim Dirkson all nervous and confused, saying “I feel you” like that. The cop laughed loudly, and I saw the little pink glob of chewing gum moving around in the dark of his mouth.

  I was startled by a red flash of last night’s dream, Castle’s hovering eyes, the reek of the pile. I shoved it all away with a violent act of mind. I thought instead of my poor, dear, imaginary Gentle, in headlamp and coveralls, shackled to the cart she pushed through the darkness of the mine.

  “All right, so get up, man,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” I said. “Oh, my goodness, thank you.”

  I came off the bed and clasped the cop’s hands in my hands, and he looked away still chuckling while I kept on saying “Thank you” and “My goodness” and “Thank you,” while I was thinking I’m sorry and then I’m sorry, Jackdaw, I’m sorry, and something was giving way inside me, and Mr. Dirkson and me, we couldn’t hold it in anymore, and out came tears, my face just collapsed into trembling.

  “Aw, come on, now,” said the cop, shaking his head, lifting me up off my knees. “No need for all that. Let’s go.”

  But I kept right on saying “Thank you,” I said it over and over while he waited by the door for me to gather myself together, get dressed, use the toilet, brush my teeth. His hand still resting on his gun belt, amused at Jim Dirkson’s puppy-dog earnestness.

  “Now, wait,” I said when I was ready. “Now—I don’t even know your name. What is your name?”

  “Cook,” he said, and pulled open the door. “I’m Willie Cook. Now, come on. We got a meeting to get to.”

  11.

  Officer Willie Cook drove us south in his IMPD cruiser, tapping his fingers lightly on the steering wheel and chewing on his gum. I sat in silence, uneasy in the shotgun seat, while his eyes danced back and forth between the road and the dashboard computer, where crimes in progress scrolled by in alphanumeric cop code. As we crossed Broad Ripple Avenue we passed a small knot of black kids, laughing and walking together on the narrow sidewalk; one of them, a short kid pushing a bike, wore a hoodie pulled low over his eyes. Cook slowed down and gave a blurp of the siren, gestured at the kid to make sure his face was showing. His friends laughed while the boy obeyed, slowly, muttering curses, pissed as hell.

  “Dumb son of a bitch,” said Cook, shaking his head, sighing. I caught the kid in the mirror with his middle finger aloft, a miniature of impotent rage frozen in the side-view as we drove away. “Right now they calling me a Tom, but these kids know the rules. Face has gotta be visible, that’s all. Better he get a warning from me than have one of these crackers roll up on him.” He pointed at the screen of the dashboard computer, where his fellow officers were represented by white numbers on a green screen. “Officer Peele is out here today. Peele’d knock that kid’s head off, hoodie and all, put handcuffs on the corpse. Resisting arrest, no fucking joke.”

  I nodded. I murmured my agreement. I noticed things. The in-car data-communication system, I noticed, was called DPSC. Indiana’s warrant-database system, I noticed, was called IDACS, and it was linked to NCIC, the national system, and to the Marshals Service’s fugitive-database system. I watched that Marshals Service scroll for a moment, waiting for Jackdaw’s profile to come up, until Cook saw me watching.

  “They could reset it, take that feed off of there,” he said, “but I told ’em don’t even worry about it. Shit kinda comes in handy, actually.”

  He winked, and I marveled at Officer Cook: double life, complicated game. He wasn’t obligated to have the names and aliases of runners coming up on his screen because black cops were exempt from enforcing the Fugitive Persons Act under the Moore amendment. But Officer Cook liked having the info so he could push it to his pals in the Airlines. He wasn’t the only one, and plenty of white officers did the same, and plenty of police chiefs and public safety directors were if not sympathetic to abolition at least neutral. One of many reasons why the marshals had more or less stopped relying on local law enforcement. Why they had begun instead to use people like me. Complicated game.

  Officer Cook moved his gum around in his mouth and tapped his fingers on the wheel. He had a big flat gold ring on one finger, catching the sunlight. Class ring. A whole life behind him.

  “So—can I ask you, Officer…” I let my voice, Dirkson’s voice, come out in a reedy tremble. “Where exactly are we heading?”

  “Monument Circle. Old Abe. I texted Father Barton to meet us.”

  “About me?”

  He gave me a look. “I told you, man, we gotta play a little smart on this. I told him I got new information on our open case. The kid is stashed just fine for now, but we’re working on getting him on a connecting flight. Getting him squared away up in Côte Saint-Luc.” He took a stab at the proper French pronunciation, but it sounded silly, and he snorted. “Whatever you want to call it. Little America. We’ve been waiting for word from some folks we work with, some snowmen, and we don’t know how they’re planning to get in touch. So I told Barton I had news on that front.”

  I nodded. I noticed all the details. Jackdaw’s anticipated itinerary (Little America; suburbs of Montreal; a new life); I noticed the offhand status update on him (stashed just fine for now; waiting for a Canadian connection to come through). I knew more than Cook thought I knew. I knew more than he did. I nodded meekly. The wiper blades pushed thin lines of rain off the windshield.

  I framed my questions with care. “So is that how it works, usually? Get a person settled in the North? Would that be—that would be for a woman, too?”

  I readjusted my posture in the seat, sat as
Dirkson would sit, thinking about his beloved Gentle, imagining her in a parka and winter gloves in the snowy reaches of Little America.

  “Yeah, usually.” He frowned. “Well, I think so. Not my department.”

  “Barton handles that part?”

  “No.” Cook rolled his eyes. “Father Barton does a whole lot of nothing, most of the time. A lot of speeches. A lot of passing the fucking hat. But other folks do the rescues, other folks run ’em north, other folks sit on ’em till they ready to move ’em on. See? Nobody talks to nobody.”

  I nodded. This was classic underground: distinct, discontinuous cells. Cutout operations. Everything clean and careful and strictly need-to-know. The road turned into an overpass, spanning a muddy tributary down below, then back into a road, with fast-food chains and small office buildings slipping past my window. Homeless people on bus-stop benches. Storefronts available for lease. Same thing everywhere. Every northern city.

  “And this poor young brother,” I said, hushed and hesitant. “The one y’all just took. How is he adjusting to his freedom?”

  “Ah…well.” Cook gritted his teeth, gave his head a quick shake. A passing pain or a reflection of pain. “He’s a special case, that one. A special kind of kid.”

  “Oh, yes?” I said, but Cook didn’t seem to want to elaborate, and I didn’t want to push.

  We parked downtown, across from a tall monument that sat at the center of a traffic circle. It was an imposing white obelisk topped with a statue of a man in an old-fashioned long coat, standing slender and erect, with his arms extended. The man was tall and made taller by his long face and long top hat, and he was surrounded by shorter white columns and tiers of white steps. A nine-foot-tall, bearded, rail-thin white man, stone-faced and stoic, staring out over the downtown, hands out with palms up, as if imploring.

  Oh, Jesus, I thought, studying the statue. Oh, God. That’s right—Indianapolis. Indiana. It was here. This is where they killed the poor bastard.

  “This spot right here is the exact center of the state,” Officer Cook was saying, talking over his shoulder as we crossed the circle and approached the man on his high marble pedestal. “Indy is smack dab in the middle of Indiana, see, and Monument Circle’s the center of the city, and the statue of Old Abe—you get the idea. Plus, of course, the state’s in the middle of nowhere. So there you have it: right now we’re in the exact geographical middle of fucking nowhere.”

  Cook walked briskly up the steps, and I trotted up behind him. Pathetic, desperate little Jim Dirkson, scrabbling and shifting, trailing after tall, striding, confident Officer Willie Cook. He’d told me that Barton would never get it, because Barton’s white, but I knew that Cook would never get it, either. A northern man, a black man who had never been a slave—we were like creatures of a different species. I was as different from him as I was from Barton or from Bridge because of what I had seen, because of what moved still beneath my skin.

  As I thought about it, it came up again, heaving up, and I felt my hand rushing up to my mouth to clamp it shut, keep everything back. The old loud sounds and the stink that always clouded my nostrils, sounds that only I could hear. All I wanted was silence, so I could listen to this cocky young officer and gather up the details he was dropping like fruit from a tree. All I wanted was silence. Silence to do my work. What the slave wants but can never have is not only freedom from the chains but also from their memory.

  We got to the top of the steps, Cook and me. We stood beside each other looking across the traffic circle at the surrounding storefronts: a sandwich shop, a big pretty Presbyterian church, the entrance to the symphony hall. A couple of friends walked into the Starbucks, a black girl and a white girl, both of them in nurse’s scrubs, their arms linked together, giggling.

  The first-thing sun was wavering and uneasy behind a thick bank of clouds. Glimmers of blue making a faint effort around it. I felt the sour acid of anticipation in my gut. I felt the cool mist of rain on my face.

  “Be a few minutes,” said Willie Cook. He tugged out a fresh piece of gum, leaned back on the base of the statue, stuck the dead wad into the foil. A former smoker; traces of old habits in the new.

  Running around the base of the obelisk was a series of bas-reliefs, starting with Lincoln in knee pants, splitting rails.

  I wandered slowly around, tracing the lines with my fingers. I remembered it dimly, all the history I had crammed into my head during my wilderness years, my time in Chicago learning to be human, memorizing the world. It was all here, illustrated in stone, the whole story of Old Abe’s assassination—the martyrdom that saved the union, the murder that remade the country. Here he was, hands raised in humble farewell to the adoring crowd around his train car, the president-elect leaving Springfield for Washington. Here he was on a hotel balcony, eyes wide as he fell backwards from the fatal shot into the arms of his son Robert. Here was Lincoln with a halo, the good angel hovering over the hastily reconvened Congress. Even the members who had thrown down their commissions, who had resigned and stomped off to form the Confederacy in the preceding months—they had returned, moved by the death of a president, wary but willing, ready to start anew.

  They had found a speech in his pocket, sticky with blood, the address he had planned to give that fateful morning, February 12, before the pistol shot laid him low. Secretary Seward read it aloud to Congress, and they wept—even the Confederates wept—when Seward got to the words I traced now with my forefinger, words chiseled into the stone at the base of the statue. I HOPE THAT WE MAY MEET AGAIN UNDER ONE FLAG OF UNION.

  What emerged from that fraught session of Congress, in the spring of 1861, was a revised version of Senator Crittenden’s complicated compromise, one of the last-ditch failed union-saving efforts from the year before, seen in fresh light and taken up with fresh energy, while the new Confederate government was suspended, then abandoned.

  Six amendments and four resolutions, preserving slavery where it was, preventing its extension elsewhere; balancing northern sentiment and southern interest, northern principles and southern economic welfare. And the clincher, inscribed here in marble as it is inscribed in the Constitution: the Eighteenth Amendment, making the whole rest of them permanent and everlasting. Eternal compromise. The great legislative Hail Mary: No future amendment of the Constitution shall affect the five preceding articles…

  I read it in Lincoln’s shadow that early morning, and it seemed as it always did to me: impossible, illegal—childish, even, like the child who wishes for infinite wishes. And yet it has worked, so far. It has held.

  Cook yawned. The nurses came out of the Starbucks, chatting happily, steam rising from their cup lids. I craned my neck and stared up at him, at Old Abe, Honest Abe, Abraham the Martyr. Big hands palms up, long fingers outstretched, his homely features solemn and beatified, looking south down Meridian Street.

  “You see how they posed him, looking down the street? That’s where the hotel was.” Willie Cook pointed south on Meridian Street, then jerked his handsome face up at Old Abe. “Poor guy’s gonna stand there forever with birds shitting on his head, looking at where he got killed.”

  I mustered a hollow laugh, but Officer Cook wasn’t paying attention: he was watching the man who was coming now, a powerfully built black man crossing Market Street with his hands jammed in the pockets of gray slacks.

  “All right,” murmured Officer Cook. “Here we go now.”

  He stood up straight as the man came up the steps toward us. He was very tall and very dark-skinned—midnight, I calculated automatically, offhandedly: midnight, purple tone, a number 121 or 122. His eyes were bright and yellow, hidden deep in his head, shifting questioningly back and forth from Cook to me, me to Cook, taking us in. I read the man as muscle, a body man; what was called, in Airlines slang, a baggage handler. I looked down Market to see what kind of car he’d come out of, but wherever he had parked was out of view.

  Cook raised his hand cheerfully, but the newcomer spoke first.

 
“Who is this?”

  “This here’s Jim. Jim’s new business. Jim, meet Mr. Maris.”

  Maris nodded at me once, not impolitely, then turned back to Cook, repeating the words new business in mildly accented English. I couldn’t tell if he was upset or uncertain of the expression or what. My mind chewed on the accent. African. West African? He wore a cheap blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he had the thick forearms of a prizefighter. I’ve known tall men before, but there was something about this Maris’s tallness that made you want to turn around and run.

  “You must spread your legs and raise your arms, Jim.”

  Cook looked with amusement at me, soft-bellied Jim Dirkson, then back at Maris. “Does he look like he’s carrying a gun to you?”

  Maris stepped forward into the shadow of the statue and efficiently ran his big hands over my body. “I am sorry,” he said. “It is necessary.” I shrugged. “Oh. It’s okay. I understand.”

  Right as I said it, though, he came out of my back pocket with my butterfly knife, which at the last minute before leaving the hotel I had taken out of my toiletries bag and jammed into my back pocket. Maris held it up to me with a grave expression, then showed it to Cook, who looked at me with eyebrows raised. I blushed, looked down.

  “I’ve uh—I’m sorry. I’ve been advised to be careful.”

  Cook looked steadily at me for a second, but then he laughed. Maris did not laugh. Wordlessly he slipped the knife inside his breast pocket, then cocked his head, considering me.

  “And what of Jim, if anything, is known by our favorite?”

  Maris delivered this inquiry to Officer Cook with a solemn expression, pronouncing the word favorite with three syllables: fave-o-writ. The slight lilt in Maris’s voice contrasted pleasantly with the formality of his speaking style, like violet flowers in rich, dark soil. Definitely West African. I wondered if his prints were on file somewhere, if his name or alias was on a watch list. In Bridge’s building in Gaithersburg or in Washington, at Counterterrorism. A Liberian; a friend to the cause.