Underground Airlines (9 page)

“You gotta be crazy, boy” is what he said, and though his voice was still kind, I had never heard him say anything like it. It was in the supper line that I had slipped it to him sly, out of my cuff and into his palm. “Could you read it?” I asked him in the johns, and he didn’t say whether he had or not. He told me only that I was crazy. He told me he had taken that piece of paper and flushed it away and never to bring him nothing crazy like that again.

Castle forgot to wake me that night, but my body woke itself, and I saw him. I never told him that I had seen him, but I did. I saw him like a vision, clinging to that single sheet of goldenrod, staring at it in the darkness with his big white eyes.

I don’t know if it was ten minutes after I got off the phone with Bridge or five hours, but when I came around out of it I was in the middle of the room with my hand clamped over my mouth, breathing hard and heavy through my nose.

Castle! Jesus Christ, what was I doing thinking about Castle? I had not thought about him, not the man or even the name, had not wondered about where he had ended up—not in years. In years.

But here I was, all of a sudden; I was just surrounded by those memories. Just swarmed, man, just absolutely fucking fly-bit, like I was right back there, hip deep in that stinking fucking pile. When usually I was able never to think of it at all. When I wasn’t thinking on my cases, turning over the pages of files, I kept myself busy with enjoying the world, with savoring freedom, breakfast buffets and hotel sheets and birdsong and my MJ tapes in the Altima. Even though I knew they were down there in me, all those scenes and feelings, beating just behind my heartbeats, rushing through my veins behind my blood. Like all I had to do was get cut and they’d come oozing out, a thick pulp of bad memories.

I worked so hard to keep everything inside, but now here I was. A poor boy at the Crossroads Hotel, pacing the thin flowered carpeting, feeling the squish of old blood beneath my feet, feeling blisters on my toes burning in my boots.

I don’t know when or how I fell asleep. I must have at some point, but I know I lay awake in my bed a long hour, many long hours, just working that shit out of my system.

10.

“Mr. Dirkson?
You better get up. Come on and wake up now.”

I opened my eyes, and there he was, legs kicked up on the rickety hotel desk, eyes bright with laughter. The cop from the restaurant. The black one. Car number 101097.

He saw that I was up and he raised his eyebrows and his smile widened, crocodile wide. “You’re mumbling in your sleep there, man,” he said. “You having some bad dreams?”

I found Mr. Dirkson’s voice before I opened my mouth: timid fellow, nervous, waking up confused from a restless slumber. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. I said. Fumbled for the spectacles that he wore, which I’d kept folded by the bedside clock. “Officer? What—what seems to be the problem?”

The cop chuckled and swung his legs off the desk, planted his sturdy brown patrolman’s shoes on the carpet. He palmed his chin and leaned forward. I slipped the glasses onto my nose and pushed them up, my eyes darting from his eyes down to his belt, to the service pistol snug against his hip. A Glock. A lot of major metro forces, they carry Glocks.

His skin was moderate chestnut, sunflower highlights, number 145. When my eyes found his face again, he was smiling, but his eyes were no longer laughing.

“Now, Mr. Dirkson,” he said calmly. “We need to have us a little talk, don’t we?”

I thought,
Goddamn it all to hell,
but what I said was, “Goodness gracious.” In Mr. Dirkson’s mouse voice, eyes widening with surprise. “Am I in some kind of trouble?”

“Funny thing about that question,” said the cop. “Any time anybody ask if they in some kind of trouble, they know that they are. And they usually know what kinda trouble they in, too.”

He laughed; I could tell from his face that the man liked to laugh. He was a handsome devil, this grinning young cop. Nice nut-brown skin and nice white teeth, nice big, expressive eyes, nice neat Afro, short and sharp. He sat tipped back on the chair, fingers laced behind his head, amused as all heck, waiting for me to say something. I wondered how far he had gotten. Did he know simply that I was not Jim Dirkson and that I had no wife? Or had he gotten as far as Mr. Bridge? As far as Gaithersburg, Maryland? Had he cracked the trunk of the Nissan, broken into the double-locked false bottom, and found the bag of fake IDs and hundred-dollar bills?

I wondered, too, if there was a silencer on the Glock. That wasn’t standard equipment for a policeman’s gun, but there are plenty of cops who put ’em on.

Car number 101097 stood up and scratched the back of his neck, advanced casually toward me across the room. On the notepad on the bedside table was a ballpoint pen, and there was a way to drive it through a man’s trachea, but he would drop me first with the Glock. He had reflexes. I could see it in his movements, graceful and self-controlled, like a ballplayer.

“I’m sorry, Officer, but I’m uh…well, I’m a bit confused. What is it that I can do for you?”

I half rose out of the bed, and he motioned with two hands, palms down, stay where you are. He sat right next to me.

“You had supper a couple nights ago with Father Patrick Barton, the parish priest of Saint Catherine’s Church on Meridian Street.”

He said this as a grand announcement, like I was supposed to be amazed already by how much he knew, and so I took it that way, letting my mouth drop open.

“You ate down at the Fountain.” He winked. “I do believe you had the fish.”

“Oh, my goodness,” I said. “How did you—”

“I was there, brother.” He grinned, his face practically glowing with satisfaction. “Love that place.” He patted his stomach. “Love it a little
too
much, I think. Anyway, I caught the basic gist of your conversation, know what I’m saying?”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Are you—are you watching Father Barton?” Then I furrowed my brow and leaned in, catching a hunch, trusting a feeling. “Are you
with
Father Barton?”

“You got it.” The grin widened. “Fact, you might say I’m more with Barton than Barton is.”

My racing heart slowed a little. Poor old Jim Dirkson remained flummoxed and uncertain, licking his lips and adjusting his glasses, but inside I was performing a series of recalibrations. Thinking that what was emerging here might, in fact, be a positive development.

“So you’re like a, a what—a bodyguard?”

“Bodyguard?
Shit
.” The cop made a sour face. “Let’s say I keep an eye on the man, okay? Keep the shepherd from coming into any harm while he’s doing the work of the Lord.”

“Wait, wait.” I snapped my fingers, scratched my chin, put up a little playlet called
Man Remembering Something.
“There was another officer…”

“White man? Big thick neck? That’s Officer Morris. He’s my shift partner sometimes. We have dinner most nights, so I take him along when I’m babysitting, ’cause he’s a simple man. If I begged off, he might get his feelings hurt. Start asking questions.”

“So he doesn’t know that you’re…you’re…?” I left it there, wide-eyed and tentative.

“That I’m moonlighting with a flight crew? Running peebs up out of the Hard Four?
Shit
.” This time he slow-danced with the word, pulling the vowel sound out like taffy:
Shiiiiiiit.
“Officer Morris wouldn’t know he was on fire ’less a pretty girl told him so.”

“So—so, I’m sorry, Officer,” I said and shrugged meekly. “I don’t understand.”

This cop got up suddenly from the bed and stared down at me. The grin shut down to a tight line, the eyes stopped twinkling. “I heard your whole pitch, man, and I know that the padre shot you down. ‘You got the wrong man, nuthin’ I can do for you,’ the whole dog and pony. And he’s just being cautious, is all, because that’s how we do. Especially because…” He hunched forward and raised his brows. “Especially because we just
did
one.”

My Dirkson eyes grew big and wide, but behind them was me thinking,
I know that, brother, I know that you just did one.
There’s a poor suffering child of God named Jackdaw, and he managed to drop through the floor of an Alabama cotton house on Sunday night, and y’all scooped him up and brought him north on an invisible plane, and now he’s stashed somewhere in this proud, busted northern city. And I’ve got Barton, and I’ve got Barton’s workroom, and I’ve got Winston Bibb and Whole Wide World Logistics, and now I’ve got you, you laughing idiot, and I know we will find him. Bridge and me. Goddamn Bridge and goddamn me.

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.