Underground Airlines (8 page)

“Okay. And?”

I sighed. Mr. Bridge did not give pats on the back. No chucks on the chin.

“Victor?”

“I cracked the lock in about a minute.”

“And?”

“I had a look around.”

“Did you find the runner?”

“Yeah, Bridge. I got him. He’s here. We got fried chicken and watermelon from room service.”

But you couldn’t get a rise out of Mr. Bridge. You couldn’t make him jump. So I just went on, staring down at the cars in the lamplit parking lot. I pried away for Mr. Bridge the plywood panel over the hidden doorway at Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise; I led him into Father Barton’s crawl space, and showed off for him a variety of distinctly nonclerical objects I had discovered therein. Six guns of a variety of manufacture and caliber, none with serial numbers; three bulletproof vests; a shoe box full of driver’s licenses, displaying a wide array of black and white faces, issued by the states of Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. A locked chest that had yielded to the attention of my picks and rakes and turned out to be full of money—small and large bills, rolled up in tight circles, the better to be passed into waiting hands.

What was most interesting, though, was a single photograph, which I had found taped to the underside of a small wooden schoolboy desk, pushed up against the wall in one corner of the crawl space. The photograph was of excellent quality, seemingly the result of high-quality macro-lens photography. The faces of the two causasian gentlemen in the photograph were crystal clear, and there could be no doubt as to the activity in which they were vigorously engaged.

“Fucking?” said Bridge.

“Yes, sir. Fucking.”

Discomfort. Embarrassment. A rare species of silence, to be prized. I smiled.

“Are you suggesting,” said Barton at last, “that Father Barton is a pornographer?”

“No,” I said, rolling my eyes. No worldly sense on Bridge at all; a desk man, right down to the floor. “Not a pornographer. A blackmailer.”

I spelled it out for poor, dense Bridge. Of the two gentlemen captured in the photograph, one was in his socks, but the other had had the poor judgment to remain in his green work shirt, the corporate logo of which was displayed to the lens: a purple-and-green globe emblazoned with speed lines. Visible behind the happy couple, painted on a gray tiled wall below a row of clocks, was the same logo. Before Bridge’s call I had figured out where they were: Whole Wide World Logistics, a third-party transport company, short haul and long haul, mostly small freight, with a regional headquarters and “client relationship center” in Indianapolis.

“So maybe lover boy is married,” I told Bridge. “Maybe he doesn’t want his boss knowing what’s going on in the office after hours. Either way, they’re leaning on this mope to arrange special deliveries.”

“Do you have a name?” Bridge’s voice had recovered its customary composure.

“Winston Bibb. He’s the assistant regional manager.”

“And have you paid him a visit yet?”

I said no, and Bridge said why not, and I drew in a lungful of poison and said because I was done with this approximation of a human existence, with bending not only my abilities but my real human soul to the sinister will of an authoritarian state, and that one day I would transform my flesh to metal and become a sword aimed at his heart.

Bridge didn’t laugh. He waited in silence until, in the same even tone, I said no, I hadn’t gone to Whole Wide World yet, because it was nighttime and they weren’t open, and I doubted I would gain much ground by B and E. In daylight I would go over there and find out what special shipment poor Winston was forced to arrange so Jackdaw could be put on it. From there I could find out who took delivery, find out where—find out and find out until I found out the man himself, found him out and called him in, and then Bridge’s white vans would roll up in their rough government splendor and bear him away.

As I gave my report and we laid our plans I could hear Bridge’s fingers rattling on his keyboard, and I could feel his happiness buzzing and popping, crackling along the cables and down the invisible waves between us. His pink bureaucratic heart was alive with pleasure. Another file, almost ready to be closed.

“Okay,” he said, “very good,” getting ready to be done, and I said, “I got one more question about the file.”

“Do you?”

“Where’d he come from?”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s nothing here on the record of acquisition. It says he’s been in service for nineteen and a half months. So what about before that? He’s twenty-three years old. His patrimonial and matrimonial lines are question marks. All his stamps before the current one are blacked out.”

Bridge didn’t answer right away. Somewhere in the darkness below me, a car stuttered and started. I tried to guess what kind of car it was based on the tenor of the engine noise and the shape of the lights: the high whine of the engine said it was something cheap, subcontinental. Bridge, in his office, was frowning at his screen, scrolling through his own copy, seeking out the relevant portion of the record.

“Perhaps he was inherited,” he said finally. “Maybe he was a gift. Maybe he was won in a card game.”

I finished my Baba and flicked it out into the lot. “Does that still happen?”

“Everything happens.”

I scowled. A dark feeling was fighting up in me like a living thing, clawing up from my stomach, pushing its way from the inside out. “Well, can we find out?”

“I will look into it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that I will look
into
it.”

And there it was: for the first time in the years I had known him—except of course I had never known him at all—Mr. Bridge had raised his voice. A change in tone, almost but not quite below the level of notice. He had…insisted. He had
emphasized.

Castle’s eyes would get so wide in the dark.

Castle’s bright and beautiful white eyes, like twin planets. His eyes were all I could see when it was just Castle and me under our shared blanket, on our shared cot, in our cabin, which was the one closest to the northernmost chain fence. There was no light in the cabin except the moonlight coming from one high window, but even under the blanket I could always see Castle’s eyes. He was my brother. He’d wake me up when the other ones were all sleeping. The Old Man and the others of us as well. In the middle of the night, almost every night, he would shake my shoulder till I woke. This is starting when I was…God, I don’t know—six years old? Seven? It feels like I was so little, except I was on the pile already when he started it, which means I was done with the school, so I had to be eight or more, and Castle was off the pile—he was indoors, on the kill floor. One step up from where I was. Same thing had happened when we were babies: when I was done with the breed lot and into the school, he was already done with school and on the pile.

“Carburetor.”

“What?”

My sleepy little head. I remember how it felt to be so tired, looking up into Castle’s eyes, big and white, like I was dreaming them.

“Go on. Try and say it. Carburetor.”

“Carburetor.”

He was ten, and I was eight. We were little boys. I don’t know how he trained his body to wake, but he did, and he’d shake me till I woke up, too, and then he’d tell me stories and teach me words.

The dead-to-life breathing of the other ones, a darkness filled with sleep. The fat, shuddering snores of the Old Man. Just me and Castle, alive together in the dark.

“Good, honey. Right on. A carburetor is a little part of a car, or of a tractor. Or of one of the small carts, you know, them the working whites putter around on. It’s a little part in the engine, helps get it started.”

“Oh.” My head drifting back toward the pillow, Castle flicking me with his fingers, going, “No, love. No, honey, no. Eyes open, now. I got more for you.”

I huddled together with him underneath our scratchy blanket, sleep swimming in and out of my head. Murmuring car parts and cities.

“Montreal.”

“Montreal.”

“Chicago.”

“Chicago.”

From the near distance, on the opposite side of the farm, came the mournful night songs of the cows, mooing in their lairages.

Castle told me stories, too: a man who got eaten by a whale and came swimming out fine. A boy and a girl who fell in love and killed a witch and ate her.

We had to be real quiet, of course, whispering back and forth so soft it was almost like just thinking. Obviously lying there talking in bunk you could get charged: Theft of Rest. Bad Use of Time. There had been a man in our Family named Bones, one of the older of the youngers, a skinny broomstick of a man with sharp elbows. Someone flagged him for being a masturbator—Theft of Rest; Bad Use of Time; Act Against God; Act Against Mr. Bell. We all got woke in the dead of night from him hollering as they were dragging him out for it. They charged him right there and took two witness statements in the presence of a Franklin, who certified the verdict, then they hauled him to the shed. The shed was just a few yards from where our cabin was along the fence, and you could hear Bones in there weeping and whatnot, right till morning.

“Betcha he ain’t playing with his little thing about now,” said Harbor. “Not with his hands bound up behind him.” Harbor had a hard smile like a knife slit that showed up when others were suffering. “No, I betcha he is not.” I never wondered who had whispered against poor Bones.

But we kept nice and quiet, Castle and me, and we were all right. Our Old Man in those early years, he was a heavy kind of sleeper, and once he was down he was down till the rooster. Harbor never heard us, I guess, and no one else did, either. We were charmed in some way: just me and Castle in a private world, beneath the blankets, with only the dimmest glow of moonlight in there with us, like we were somewhere under the sea.

There were certainly many of those nights when I did not care to be woke. By the end of the day I ached all over from tending that pile. Head aching from the sun, back aching from crouching, arms aching from the hauling: dung buckets, rumen buckets, hay, and straw. Raking it and raking it. Last thing I wanted sometimes was to be shook awake, feel all the ache of my body again while Castle whispered me words. His wide white eyes hovering in the dark above me were unwelcome as searchlights, sometimes, and I’d complain bitterly, whisper hotly at him to leave me be.

“Listen, honey,” he would say when I moaned. Never getting cross. Never even the littlest bit. Only one of us I knew who never did. “Listen, love. Deep nighttime is the only time we got. This is our opportunity.”

“Our opportunity.” My tongue was thick with exhaustion.

“That’s right. We crazy we don’t take it.”

“What about all these, then?” I blinked, gummy-eyed in my tiredness, looked around the room at the other ones.

“What about ’em?”

“They crazy?”

“No, no.” He wouldn’t ever say that. He would never talk down on any man. “They just—my love, you know, they not us.”

That always got me. It was nice to be us. I’d ease myself up on my aching elbow, blink furious till I came full awake, and listen to my good, good brother talk.

I was six months on the pile, a year, maybe, when I saw a pale gleam of yellow in there. You would see things, of course, in the pile. A lot of times. Cows’ll eat things, or goats will, and it’ll pass right in and through and they’ll never know. Stones; glass; once, I swear, a bedspring. Now this, though, now this, peeking and winking out from the pile, in among all the mud browns and dull vegetable reds: a tiny plastic sheath, smaller than a thumb and bright yellow like a bird’s beak. I nearly didn’t see it, but then I did, and it called to me and I lifted it and felt there was something inside.

I popped it out. A single piece of paper, folded and folded and folded again until it was a tiny hard rock. I hunched in the shadow of the pile, crouched like a goblin and unfolded the paper.

There were no words on it, only pictures, black figures with their hands raised in fists, tugging apart their chains. Black figures seizing guns from white figures, white figures with their heads cut off, perfect black teardrops of blood spurting up out of their necks. I couldn’t read the words, only the punctuation: a big red exclamation point. Exclamation points were on signs all over Bell’s Farm: don’t go in there, must wear masks in here, only overseers and staff may pass. I knew what exclamation points meant, and I knew about blood, and I did not know what the paper meant, but I stared at it and felt from it a queer power, a sparkling panic passing over me, like something melting.

I folded it back up carefully, jammed it back into the balloon how it had been, hid it in my cuff, and hurried back to my labor, busied my fingers and bent my back for the rest of the day. Someone fed that balloon to one of our cows. Someone did it on purpose. I was stunned by that purposefulness. I carried the paper in my cuff all day and brought it to Castle, and I gasped with grief later on, in the johns, when he told me he’d destroyed it.