Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  He lit a new cigarette with the end of the one he was smoking and shook his head bitterly. “I don’t know why I ever got involved with all this mess. I really, surely do not.” Inhaling, twitching, pulsing. “It all just depends who’s on the gate, you know, and it was supposed to be Murph, but it wasn’t Murph, and there’s nothing I could do, so I’m sorry. Will you tell them? Will you?”

  “Mr. Smith?” I said, real loud, then I slapped my hand down hard on the table and for whatever reason that caught him. He stopped moving. Rubbed his forefingers into his eyes, shook his head, then took a good look at me at last: no shirt, black pants, green wristband.

  “What center you sneak out of?”

  “I’m not part of the population here, Billy. I’m from the outside.”

  “No shit?” His eyes went wide. “How’d you get in?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ.” He rushed over to the window, slowly lifted one slat of the blinds, and peeked outside, clutching his chest. “Jesus.”

  And he was off, a new tense orbit around the apartment. This man had all sorts of cosmic things going on in his mind, some stew of fear and regret and, unless I missed my guess, early-stage narcotics withdrawal.

  “They’re coming,” he said now. “They’re fucking coming.”

  “Who, Billy?”

  “Bosses, man.” He gaped at me. “Bosses always coming, man. It’s not my house, you know what I’m saying? They can come in any time they want to. They got that right, okay? It’s my house, you know, but they own it. Rent comes right outta my check. Everything. Food. Water. Stove gas. Everything.” He had ramped up, he was talking fast, a million nervous miles an hour. “They can come in whenever. My man Jackie Boy in building C, he got jacked for porn. Black-girl porn, too, which they fucking hate. Tossed him right the fuck out. I knew a guy—Bolo, Bowler, Bowser, something—in FW 6, he had a bunch of coke in a Baggie in the toilet tank, you know? They canned his ass in a hurry. They woulda sold him offshore if he had a drop of nigger in him, shit you not.” Billy had made his way back to the window, and he risked another glance outside. “No, man, no: they can come in any time they want to. That’s why I’ve been so freaked out, you know?” He crossed the room in two long paces, sat down across from me, sudden and hard. “So let’s go, okay? What do you want to know?” Banged his fist on the table. “What do you want to fucking know?”

  “You said something about Murph. Who’s Murph?”

  “Fucking no one, man. Murph wasn’t there. He wasn’t fucking there.”

  Murph was one of the gate men, but Murph used to be a driver, just like Billy. Murph owed Billy all kinds of favors. Billy had gotten Murph high more times than he could count—“and laid, too, man—laid and fucked up a hundred times.” And it was Murph, last Sunday night, who was scheduled to be at the large-vehicle exit point doing driver clearance. The trucks and the truckers are checkpointed separately, Billy told me in his special Billy style. Trucks get searched while the cargo goes in, then they get searched again by a whole separate team before they’re sealed. The loaded trailers are towed to one of the seven LVEPs, where they are connected to a tractor. That’s where the truckers show up, at the LVEP; that’s where they get their driver clearance before climbing in the rig.

  “I’m serious,” Billy said bitterly, hissing out a long contrail of smoke. “I do not know how I got into this fucking mess.”

  Maybe Billy didn’t know, but I had my suspicions. Ada guessed it was sex that had roped the man in, a pair of nubile abolitionist nurses, but looking at Billy, inhaling, twitching, pulsing, I figured it had to be drugs.

  “It all depends on who’s doing that hand search, you know, and it was supposed to be Murph. I had the fucking envelope, though. I was holding it.”

  Billy had been directed to leave his jacket slung over his balcony—unit 8, three stories up—and then when he went to put it on that Sunday night, lo and behold, a padded envelope was in the pocket. You would never approach the LVEP with anything remotely resembling contraband, except that on this night it was supposed to be Murph—the whole plan hinged on Murph’s weak vigilance. Then Murph got the flu.

  “You believe that?” Old cigarette out, new one lit. “The fucking flu.”

  Kevin, meanwhile, in his terrible hiding place: barrel of shit, barrel of blood, barrel strapped to the bed of a truck. The truck in lurching motion, the rattle of the wheels, the slosh of the fluid around him, the sick, close, dark air. And then after all those miles, Billy pops him out of the truck at the truck wash. He’s ready for his connecting flight—and where’s Luna? Where’s the package?

  “Billy?”

  “It was just bad luck.”

  “Billy.”

  “Bad, bad fucking luck.”

  “Billy, where is it?”

  He screwed up his eyes and stared at me. “What?”

  “The package, Mr. Smith. Are you telling me it never went off this plantation? Are you telling me it’s still here?”

  “Yeah, it’s here.” He was close to the point of tears. He gaped at me. He pressed his dirty fingers into his temples. “That’s what I’m telling you; it’s here.” He got up with a jerk, so fast he wobbled and nearly fell down. “It’s in my fucking fridge.”

  My ticket to freedom was exactly as it had been described.

  A padded envelope, five inches by seven inches. A half an inch thick. On the front, the logo of GGSI, and on the back, Kevin’s initials. I traced his handwriting with the tip of my forefinger.

  I felt nothing. I put my palm on it and waited for the rush of feeling I was expecting, the dream of my new life in Little America, maple trees and a frozen lake and the curl of chimney smoke from my small wooden home.

  The envelope felt like nothing. If felt like a small package, five by seven, with a slight bulge in the center.

  The crazy courage of this kid. Jackdaw, born as Kevin. The balls. Lying to those holy fools the whole fucking time. Go and get that girl and I tell you where I put your fucking envelope. When he never even had it. He never fucking saw it. He had never held it in his hands.

  All of it a wild bluff. Tricked Barton, tricked me, tricked everyone, all to get this girl Luna out.

  And now she was dead. And now he was dead.

  And here I was in the inside of his world, mourning him all over again, this crazy courageous kid: he’s down there dead in the water, and here I am.

  Billy Smith was hovering behind me, twitching back and forth on his heels, hands in his hair, breathing heavy.

  “Yeah, man, I’m just glad to get rid of that thing. I mean it. That thing’s been giving me bad dreams, man. Real fucking bad dreams.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah.” His breath was hot and stale. “You know that lady? The lady that got shot? I dreamed that, man. Night before it happened. She was giving her, like, testimony, you know? In my dream. With the long table and the microphones. All those ugly men staring down at her. You know they wear those flag pins on their jackets?”

  I stood facing Billy, holding the envelope, feeling its small weight in my palm.

  “Everybody was just fucking freaking out, you know, calling her this and that, nigger lover and everything, and then someone just came up behind and”—he made his fingers a gun, grimaced as he fired it—“pow, shot her head off, you know? That was in my dream. I dreamed it, and then the next day it happened on the fucking news!”

  I tucked the envelope into my waistband, at the small of my back. Still I was waiting to feel something—the rush of possibility, the thrill of victory—waiting to feel my future coming.

  “So all right, so what the fuck, man?” said Billy. “Somebody coming to get you? You got something set up?”

  “No.”

  “What? What do you—how you gonna get out of here?”

  “We’re going to figure it out, Billy,” I said. “We’ll figure out something.”

  “We?” he said. His eyes bulged in his
narrow face. “Oh, no way, oh, no. No fucking way.”

  We were back and forth on it for a while, Billy and me. He was trying to make me understand what I already knew, what I probably knew a lot better than he did: that it was impossible. People have tried all the ways, man, he told me. Packed in crates. Sewn into seat linings. Wrapped up within a palletized load of cargo. Inside the engine block. Clinging to the chassis.

  “Jackdaw got out,” I told him. “You got Jackdaw out.”

  “Yeah, but that got planned. You hear what I’m saying, man? That got set up for a fucking year. I mean, I was part of it, I don’t even know how long that got planned. And so what do you wanna do? Just, like, what? Fucking ride out shotgun?”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not.”

  Although that was among the options I was considering. It was on the list that was writing and rewriting itself in my mind, possibilities arranging themselves in order of plausibility. I could hold Billy hostage or appear to hold him hostage: whittle a wooden gun from one of his sofa legs; build a bomb out of refrigerator parts and strap it to his chest and let the gate men know I’d kill him.

  There were so many flaws in such a plan, so many questions.

  I thought through the map of the place, thought about the buildings that abutted the property’s edge. What about that Institute for Agricultural Innovation? What about the black building behind it? It was marked off somehow; it was distinct. It occurred to me that a building so marked may be operated separately, may have its own separate system of entrances and exits.

  Flaws and questions. Questions and flaws.

  I stood. A quarter of an hour passed, then half an hour. I did my own version of Billy’s dance, pacing a circuit around the small space while Billy took his turn sitting, watching me think.

  Subway tunnels. Delivery trucks. Employee parking.

  I looked out the window. The sun was going down on the plantation, with shadow patterns on the concrete courtyard, with the bright green lawns past the fence turning darker, when the real plan began to form itself in my head—not a good plan, not even close, but perhaps the best of all the bad.

  “Billy, are you allowed to go into the town if you feel like it?”

  “Course. Sure. Yeah.” He eyed me warily from the table, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “I’m not a slave, man. I just gotta sign out, say where I’m going, what time I’ll be back, and then I gotta sign back in.”

  “All right.” I nodded. This was something. I sat across from Billy. “You’re gonna go into the town and find a pay phone, and then you’re gonna dial the telephone number I give you. You’re gonna say exactly what I tell you to say, and the man on the other end is going to say okay. Then just stay where you are. Ten minutes later the Turner Alarm will sound.”

  “What? What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Listen. You’re going to call that number”—a Maryland number; my man in the system; deus ex machina—“and the Turner Alarm will go off. They’ll go to lockdown here and send out the wagons.”

  The alarm was part of the Turner System. It was mutual defense. Every plantation in every county in the Hard Four was required to maintain a reinforced vehicle called a Turner Wagon, with a small armed company of guards, that could be sent out to any other plantation experiencing insurrection: a threat to one being understood as a threat to all. The system is named for Nat Turner, of course, the Virginia slave who with his confederates slaughtered fifty-odd people in 1831, although the system didn’t become common until the so-called Starman Revolt, in Carolina, in 1972.

  “So you got it?” I told Billy. “Sirens gonna wail, wagon is gonna roll out.”

  “And then what?” said Billy. “Where are you gonna be?”

  “I’m going to be on the wagon.”

  That plan might have worked, too. There were still some pieces to figure out, obviously—one more ride on that subway, a few more choruses of “These strong hands belong to you.” A couple more tricks to pull, but I was ready to try it, and I think Billy was, too, but then all the sounds started at once.

  Chopper blades. A dozen automobile engines, roaring in fast. Car doors slamming, boots on the stairs. Billy’s nightmare made real.

  I shouted to him, looking back over my shoulder as I ran for the window, but Billy had fainted—he was flat out. The window was useless. The door was splintering inward. A dozen people were yelling Freeze—yelling Get down; yelling Nigger, get down. A forest of gun muzzles. Me on my knees. Following instructions: hands up, hands laced behind my head, head down…

  I had no gun. I had no knife. I only had that envelope, five by seven and padded and marked, and it was torn from me as they dragged me down the stairs.

  9.

  I knew I was underground, but that was pretty much all I knew.

  I had been battered. Dragged out of Free White Housing, kicked with boots and hit with batons, and thrown into an armored car. Pushed through a door and tossed onto an elevator. Same manufacturer, I noted dully, as the one in headquarters. Murdock Elevators of Murdock, Louisiana. Someone shocked me in the midsection with a Taser or stun gun, and I fell down.

  Now I was lying on a steel floor. There were tender spots, budding bruises, on my arms and legs. The metal I was on was cold. I was naked. My hands were shackled to each other, my feet were shackled to each other, and a loop of chain was drawn between the two sets of shackles and then through a metal loop bolted to the floor.

  I passed in and out of consciousness one or two times.

  Who did I think I was? I was just gonna waltz out of there? Ride out shotgun, like the man said?

  Who did I think I was?

  For a while I kept thinking there was someone else in the room with me. A dark figure, huddled in the corner.

  “Is that you?” I even said one time, whispering, reverential, but nobody answered, and when I managed to move my head around, there was no one. I was alone.

  When I woke again, though, I could hear someone breathing. Shallow breaths, and a light tapping—tap, tap, tap.

  “You up?”

  I shifted my weight, and the chains rattled.

  The man who spoke, whoever he was, was on the far side of the room. Still making that soft noise, tap, tap, tap.

  I turned my head, fought back a rolling spasm of pain, and saw him. He was inside my cage with me, leaning against the thick steel door with his arms crossed, bored. In one hand he held my envelope, Kevin’s envelope, five by seven, with a small bulge in the middle. He was holding it in his right hand and tapping it, tap, tap, tap, against his left bicep.

  The man was familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place him. A wide neck, very pale skin. Dull eyes.

  “Come on,” he said. “Get up.”

  I knew where I’d seen him. The Fountain Diner, my first meal in Indianapolis. Cook’s partner, thick-necked and red-faced. Officer Morris, who wouldn’t know he was on fire unless a pretty girl told him so. I guess someone had told him something.

  “Up,” he said again. “Time to go.”

  Part Three

  North

  Compromise is not the worst of sins, but it is the busiest. The only one we’re all of us doing, twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week.

  —Reverend Kevin Shortley,

  On the Urgent Necessities, 1982

  You are not alone

  I am here with you

  Though you’re far away

  I am here to stay

  —Michael Jackson, “You Are Not Alone,” 1994

  1.

  One more hotel room.

  Motel, maybe. I don’t know. Morris drove for a while, some dull collection of dark hours, with me in the back of the unmarked silver sedan he had shoved me into by the top of my head, and then I saw neon that said VACANCY. I saw a squat one-story building, and then I was at a door with a number 4 on it. One more ugly hotel room, facing one more deserted parking lot, in one more invisible town.

  Morris knocked on the door
marked 4, and it was Willie Cook who answered—Cook with his shark’s smile, his dancing eyes. He was out of uniform, sleeves rolled up, chewing a piece of gum and holding up his hands as if to welcome an old friend.

  “Well, all right,” he said. “You made it.”

  “Oh, my God,” said Martha behind him. “Oh, my God…” Her voice reminded me what I must look like, battered and bandaged and chained. Cook, without turning, said, “Now, you stay where you are, baby.”

  I watched Martha sit slowly back down on the edge of the bed. I formed my mouth into a smile. It’s fine, I thought, just as loudly as I could. Not as bad as it looks. Morris had taken me out of the leg shackles, at least. At least I had my pants back on.

  I let Morris push me into the room, and I stood where he placed me: in front of the rickety little motel table between the kitchen area and the bed area. Cook settled into the table’s one wooden chair and put his feet up, like a working man relaxing at the end of his hard day. There was a gun on the table, too—not his service weapon; some snub-nosed thing—and a laptop showing a screen saver of the Indy 500, colorful race cars moving in patterns on the sleeping monitor.

  Morris tossed Cook the envelope, and he caught it, held it a second, then set it down on the table. His big gold class ring made a hollow knock on the cheap wood.

  “Well, all right,” he said again. “Nicely done.”

  Morris fetched himself a beer before settling with a sigh into an overstuffed chair beside the window. He had the bottle in one hand and his service weapon in the other, pointed at Martha.

  She looked bad. She looked half out of her mind with weariness and confusion. There were, at least, no bruises on her face, no blood at the corners of her lips. Her eyes were dark and panicky, roving back and forth between Morris and Cook, Cook and me.

  God, that girl should have run. She should have run from me in Indianapolis; in Green Hollow, Alabama; at Garments of the Greater South; she should have run. She should have run from me a million different times.