Underground Airlines (31 page)

3.

When the
world and I found each other again I was swimming through some kind of pink-hued southern sea. I was a gone goose. I was flying, but I was underground, too. I was under the city of Indianapolis, back in Jackdaw’s miserable tunnel, surrounded by dripping clay walls, by darkness and illness and cold. I was in Bell’s Farm; I was in the shed buried underneath the earth, a Franklin’s black government boots just visible through the slit, and I had done something, but what had I done? And I was also at the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, in the basement, where the pool and the gym were, and I was on that planet that Castle used to murmur in my ear, the planet called the future.

I got up, and I fell down. First onto my knees, and then, after a moment’s consideration, the rest of the way, down onto my back. I felt something alien on my thigh and looked down and it was my dick, flopped over like a scrap of rope. I was bare-ass naked, which was hilarious, and some people were laughing, so I went ahead and laughed, too. My voice was a creepy giggle, unfamiliar to me, so I stopped.

“Get back up on the chair now,” said a woman’s voice, stern but not unkind. A little tremor of humor in the voice. “Go on. Come on.”

I obeyed instructions as best I could. First I put my forearms onto the seat of the chair, then I heaved myself up and twisted myself around. I had to stop halfway through and get a couple breaths in me, paused with my ass in the air, gulping the smell of basement—what the hell basement was I in?—and hearing more laughter swimming all around the corners of my brain.

The jab and the sting. That vial, that stubby little pot full of poison. Someone caught me with a shot of something. Whatever it was had me all cooked up for sure. I was out on the ice—I was out on the dance floor no question.

“Siddown, honey,” said the voice, then the face that belonged to it came into focus—it was the woman from the square there, the one who had poked me. The orange head wrap was gone: her hair was short dreadlocks, a bristle of corks. She was crouching now in front of me. She had cagey eyes and ruby lips and her skin was smooth. She lifted a red bath towel that had fallen off my lap and pooled at my feet. It must have been covering my nakedness while I dozed in the chair—I lifted it up and covered myself up again.

“Now, listen,” I began.

“Shush, man. You’re in no state.”

“Ah, he all right,” called someone else, a man, from the far side of the room, and someone else said, “He’s just fine,” and then a third voice, a woman’s voice: “Fine and dandy,” and then all the voices were laughing. Not me, not this time. “Now, look,” I said, and the woman told me to shush again, firmly, and I shushed again. The kitchen was crowded with people. A kitchen! I was in a kitchen, in a basement, unfinished and unfancy. One of the men was sitting on a counter, swinging his legs. Another was leaning against a refrigerator, with a girl wrapped up in his arms like they were old-time sweethearts.

Everybody was in black. Everybody was wearing overalls, with a logo at the breast. Everybody was either barefoot or in sandals.

There was music playing. It had taken a while to reach me, but now I could hear it, and it was like sugar. Horns. Trumpets. Saxophones? And drums: snares and cymbals. It was fast and sweet, and it rolled around the room. I tasted that music. It was like hard candy.

“Sorry about the violence out in the square,” said the woman with the dreads. “Two black folks slipping in a car together is a conspiracy. Couple black boys beating the shit out of another one, that ain’t nothing. That nobody cares about. Black folks scrapping, cops ain’t looking. Patrol, neither. They turning away.”

“Turning away?” said the man on the counter. “C’mon, Ada. Placing bets, more like.”

“Yeah,” said Ada. She reached forward, touched the side of my head, and I winced. My head
hurt.
“But anyway. It’s gotta look real. So. Sorry ’bout that.”

“So okay,” I said. Blinking my eyes and trying to get this lady to come into focus. “Are you the lawyer?”

“Damn. You all business, huh?”

“Are you?”

“No,” she said. “I am not.”

Ada stood up. She was a girl, really—twenty-two, maybe? Twenty-three? She was a slave. They were all slaves. Overalls, shoes or no shoes. House slaves. My body was lurching around inside me. The music was rushing, dazzling: high, squeaking horn lines and rat-a-tats on the drums.

“Who is the lawyer?” I said.

“Listen. Shut up,” she said. “That was a pretty heavy kiss of olanzapine I gave you. You in no state yet to be talking business, fella.”

I shook my head, insistent. I started to stand again and wobbled, and the woman called Ada placed me firmly back in the chair. Close up I saw the logo stitched on one strap of her overalls: a gavel wound with a snake. A peach dangling from a bow.

“Sit, all right?” She turned away. “Someone get the poor boy a glass of water.”

“I—”

“I got it, Ada.” One of the others. How many people were down here?

“Listen—”

“Sit.”

It was a party of sorts, down there in the basement, and I sat amid it for an hour, maybe for two hours, people walking past and around me, these beautiful black people in their overalls and sandals, grown-out scruffed-up Afros or dreadlocks, figures in a dream, while my head swam and swam. There were unlabeled boxes of wine stacked beside a tub full of cold water. A plate of cookies was being passed around, and there was a bucket full of peanuts in one corner, another bucket for shells.

I swayed to the music awhile, tried to catch up to its rhythm. Someone put a glass of water in my hand and I drank it and needed more and someone brought me more.

“You should try to relax,” said the girl who brought me the water, looking at me shyly. I laughed—just the idea, the idea of relaxing. It made me laugh. I tried to think of the last time I had done that: done nothing. Acted
without
purpose. Barton, Bridge, everybody waiting on me. Indianapolis; Gaithersburg. The whole world waiting.

But I did. I relaxed. I spent the next hour, or it might have been a few, trying to count how many other people were in the room. I had an impression of people coming and going, everybody friendly, laughing loud. Slapping palms. Punch lines hollered, good-natured, grooving laughter. Aw, man, you
know
that’s true. She ain’t say that! She
ain’t
say that!

It felt like I was among a huge crowd, a happy, bustling infinity of black folks, but it was only five of them in the room—or at least, only five by the time I got my head straight enough to count. Two women, besides Ada: Maryellen, short and puckish, with very long thick hair hanging in one big braid between her shoulder blades. She was the one who brought me the water. And Shai, a little older, narrow-eyed and observant. The bigger of the men was Otis, very dark, heavily muscled. The last of them was Marlon, who wore a scruffy kind of billy-goat beard. He was the one who had hit me, but he was also the one who came over now with a couple pieces of ice wrapped in a thin paper towel, held it tenderly to the bruise above my ear, hidden in my hair. “I’m a hard-hitting dude,” he said, adjusting the ice pack. “Can’t hardly help it.”

“You all don’t have service names?” I asked Marlon, but it was Maryellen who answered, from way over on the other side of the room, where I wouldn’t have thought she could hear. “Oh, we got ’em. We don’t use ’em is all.”

I smiled. I looked at Maryellen, and I found that my mind would not assign her skin a value. Wild honey, light tones, all that shit. I couldn’t even call it up in my mind, the pigmentation chart that had first been thrust before me in Arizona six years ago. If this didn’t work, all this adventuring, and I ended up back in Bridge’s command, I’d be in some difficulty, and to that I said, “Thank fucking God,” and Marlon said, “For what?”

“Nothing,” I said. Gingerly I removed the ice pack from my head and thanked him again.

“You straight?” he said, and I said, “I’m straight,” and he chunked the ice into the sink.

The music stopped, briefly, while someone flipped the tape, and when it came on it got bigger. Multiple voices singing, sometimes words and sometimes just sounds. Rough, uneven melodies with high harmonies, then fast overlapping chopping passages. Big drumbeats, hand claps, and whistles. I had been missing it forever, whatever music this was. I longed to have known it before—I longed to have known this music all my life.

I felt myself come back into myself, drop by drop, like a drained well filling back up. I stood up, and everybody clapped for me, then they died laughing when I offered an ironic bow. I think I may have done some dancing. I politely declined the fat rolled joint that Maryellen offered to me, not wanting to find out how cannabis would interact with olanzapine.

When I was sitting again it was at the kitchen table, and for the first time I noticed a very old white man. I could have sworn he hadn’t been there before, that I would have seen him, but on the other hand he looked like he’d been there forever, for centuries: pulled up close to the table in a wheelchair, dressed for a funeral, dark suit and thin black tie. Everybody else was drinking from cans and bottles, but his crooked fingers were splayed around a rocks glass containing only ice and the last clinging droplets of something dark and brown.

“Is that glass empty, son?”

“Sorry?” I had been looking out the window—the basement had a pair of high garden windows, letting in a peek of dirt-colored sky. I was wondering where exactly I was.

“It is rather dark in here, but I do believe my glass is empty.” His voice was a decayed whisper, still carrying its ancient and decorous southern accent. “I do believe that it is. Would you be so kind as to fill up that glass? You will find a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red in a cabinet beside the icebox.”

His watery eye was fixed on me. I found the whiskey and poured him out his glass.

“I appreciate it, young man. I do very much appreciate it.” The old white man sipped slowly and licked his thin, cracked lips. “I do not believe I have had the pleasure.”

“This man is named Elijah, sir.” It was Ada. She had materialized at my side, one hand on my shoulder. He craned his thin neck around to peer at her.

“Elijah?” he said, looking back at me slowly.

“That’s right, Counselor.” Ada looked at me carefully, and I said, “Yes, sir. Elijah.” And then, because it seemed like the thing to say, I said, “It’s an honor to meet you.”

“The honor…” He cleared his throat with effort. “The honor belongs entirely to me.”

His body had been incapacitated at some point, probably by a stroke. Half of him was slumped and slurred like a melting candle. He’s a hundred, I thought. He’s a thousand. He had the look of eternal old age, like he had been old forever, sitting pale and wraithlike in his old-fashioned wheelchair.

“Now, Elijah.” He gazed at me, licked the tips of his yellow teeth. “Now. You have embarked upon your journey. You are finding your way to freedom. The bad times are behind you, Elijah, but much uncertainty lies ahead. I cannot imagine…” Another pause, another elaborate throat clearing. “Cannot imagine how you must feel. But please know that
here,
boy,
here
in this home you are welcome. Here, there is…” He spread his arthritic fingers as wide as they would go. “Sanctuary.”

“Well,” I said, and then—what else was there to say?—“Thank you.”

“Yes, sir, Counselor,” said Ada on my behalf. “Elijah is on his way. On his way to the promised land.”

“God bless you, boy,” said the lawyer. “God protect you.”

And then just like that he fell asleep: tilted his head to one side, and his eyes clicked shut like a doll’s.

“Sir?” said Ada. “Mr. Russell?”

“Oh, he
out,
” said Marlon, easing past, a beer bottle in his fist.

“Yeah.” Ada patted the old man on his hand. “Think you’re right.”

“One of these times, you know, he gonna just die.”

“Hush your mouth,” said Ada. She smiled with undeniable tenderness at the lawyer as Marlon wandered away. “He’s right, though. He comes and goes. One of these days he won’t come back.”

The group was getting quieter around us: people talking in low voices, murmuring. Big Otis and little Maryellen had settled into the chair I was in before, she on his lap, cuddling close.

“We just tell him everybody’s named Elijah. Makes things easier is all.”

I scratched my forehead. “I’m supposed to be talking to him. That’s what they told me.”

“Well, go on,” Ada said. “Talk.”

I looked at the lawyer, then at her, and I saw that she was laughing, and I laughed, too.

“Yeah, how about that, huh?” Ada shook her head. She draped a blanket across the old man’s lap, eased a few strands of white hair out of his eyes. “But you try telling the Holy Ghost up there it’s a bunch of Negroes running the show.”

Cook had said much the same thing, laughing but not smiling, as we drove down Meridian Street to the monument: that
Mockingbird
mentality.