Underground Airlines (13 page)

“Yes?” The day shift was a middle-aged round-cheeked black woman, a glossy magazine open on the counter in front of her.

“Yeah, hey,” I said, talking quickly, slightly out of breath. “Winston around?”

“Nope,” she said. “He’s sick.”

“Sick?”

“Yeah. He called in.”

Sick. Could that just be a coincidence—just bad luck? Or had my man Winston smelled something coming?

This woman, meanwhile, was looking at me, fingering the pages of her magazine, waiting for me to split. I could appreciate that. I was back in Albie’s rumpled gardener’s outfit, stained grass-green at the knees, bits of soil clinging to the cuffs. I was putting on a full show here, huffing and puffing, wiping sweat off my brow, drumming my fingers on the counter. “Just my luck, boy. Sick! Boy.”

“Yes.” She shrugged. Obviously she was supposed to say
Can I help you with something,
but it was equally obvious that she did not want to help me. “Do you want to leave him a message?”

“Naw,” I said. “No, thanks.”

Still I didn’t leave. She cast a longing glance at her magazine. Thin white celebrities in swimsuits, lying like famine victims on a scorched beach. Winston Bibb’s colleague was dark-eyed and plumpish, her hair elaborately woven, her forehead high and gleaming under the fluorescents. Her skin was coffee, light-toned, in the number 120 range. I did this evaluation by reflex, then found that just doing that quick calculation, for some reason, made me sick. My stomach rolled. This here was a free woman, after all, a northern woman, a vested citizen. What right had I to look at her that way, to size her up, mark her down for a Gaithersburg file?

“Well…” she said. Poor girl: I had given her no choice. “Maybe I can help.”

“Oh, I don’t know; I hope so. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

At last she closed her magazine and looked straight on at my face, and her expression softened. I saw it happen, and I doubled down. I tilted my head a certain way I had, and I grinned a soft grin of mine, narrowed my eyes in a way that I knew put light in them and crinkles at their corners.

“My name’s Angie, by the way.” She slipped the magazine under the counter. “Tell me what you need.”

“Okay, well,” I said, “it’s a little complicated.”

For Angie I rolled out a long story, one with several twists and turns in it. My boy Sully, see, had gotten me a gig not two dang weeks ago, driving a light truck, just around the city, nothing long-haul, nothing complicated! ’Cause you know I just last year got my CDL, see, and Sully’d hooked me up, man, a nice gig driving for this garden supply place, loading a pickup with different kinds of supplies, you know, mulch, topsoil, garden rocks—I ticked it off on my fingers—all that kinda shit. Sorry, Angie, that kinda
stuff
—she smiled, waved it off, go on. Part of the gig was to meet up with the long-hauls coming from outta town, help ’em unload at the company warehouse down there off Troy Avenue.

Angie nodded sure. Her cousin Addy, as it turned out, lived near there. Near Troy Avenue.

“Oh, yeah?” I said. “No kidding.”

The warehouse address I’d pulled off my mapping software. Everything else was pure spun sugar, a song I was singing, finding the tune as I went. I talked as quickly as I could, gesturing a lot, charging my voice with exasperation. Angie was nodding, magazine forgotten. On the clock above her head, it became midnight in Abu Dhabi.

“Anyway,” I went on. “Easy gig. Just load it up, drop it off, nothing to it, you know?”

When I said that I gave Angie a smart look, like,
Yeah, right,
there’s
always
more to it, whatever
it
is, and she returned the look with a smart one of her own, shaking her head,
Yeah, right.
Angie and me, we were no dummies. We knew the score.

“Oh, hey, look at that,” I announced suddenly. “Loving those nails.”

She beamed, held ’em up. This stray compliment was just icing, just a little conversational texture, although I did mean it sincerely. Each fingernail was painted a different color, and together they formed a sparkling ten-finger rainbow across the faded yellow of the countertop. She spread her fingers for further inspection, which I supplied, whistling admiringly before getting to the heart of the matter.

“But so Monday morning Sully tells me about a job. Truck left the supplier sometime Sunday night, and now I’m supposed to go and do the pickup at a vacant lot on Twelfth Street, maybe two miles past the Speedway, almost out in Hendricks. Paperwork ain’t come in yet, he says, but I better get moving. Two barrels of pit-run gravel, two cubic yards to the barrel, we’re talking, like, a couple tons of this shit—sorry, Angie, there I go
again.
”

Angie cased my hand for a wedding ring when she thought I wasn’t looking.

“But so I pulled up the light truck Monday morning, to this lot, and guess what?”

“No rocks,” said Angie.

I slapped the counter. “No rocks! You believe that?”

She shook her head. She clucked her tongue. “Your boy messed you up.”

“That’s right.”

I tugged out my handkerchief and wiped my forehead, laying it on thick for sure at this point, but sometimes this is how you gotta do it. You make yourself an open face of need, you send out need like smoke signals. You let need billow out and fill up the room.

“Because now the boss,” I said, “Sully’s boss, Mr. Coleman, who is now my boss, he’s saying this is on
me
. He’s saying I better find out what happened to that shipment or it’s coming out of my check.”

Angie guffawed, incredulous. “And you haven’t even been paid yet.”

“That’s right!” I slapped the counter again, both hands this time. “That’s right!”

Angie smiled. I smiled. We smiled at each other.

“So I been going crazy, this is four days now,” I said. “All Sully knows is the name of the supplier, and I called them, can’t get a straight answer. Sully does not know the name of the truck company. Between you and me, Angie, my man Sully, we’re not talking about Albert Einstein here, all right?”

“I’m getting that.”

“So I been going around to the different shippers, you know, because I gotta figure this out or I ain’t even getting my first paycheck. I’m supposed to be Sherlock Holmes or something. I’m the dang pea-gravel police all a sudden!”

Angie laughed. I laughed. We laughed with each other.

“You got a packing slip number?” she said, coming down off the laughter.

“No.”

“Client account number?”

“No. Like I told you.”

“You got nothing.”

“Zip.”

I leaned forward on the counter, let my golden eyes brim with need. I pushed the cap back so she could see my whole sad, handsome face. I was a weary and sorry soul, but nice to look at. I knew exactly how I looked.

“Well, let’s see,” said Angie, and then, bless her beautiful free heart, she turned to her computer. “So Sunday…” she said and started typing. “What’s the name of the place?”

“Okay, now, that’s another little problem.”

Angie reared her head back and clucked, gave me a look:
Are you serious?
I grinned, sheepish.

“It’s Garden something,” I said, “I know that. Garden Store? Gardens of—oh, I don’t know. Garden
something.
”

“And you know where it’s coming
from?
Of course you don’t.”

“Alabama, maybe?”

Angie gave me a different kind of look, sharp and serious. Angry, even.

“Not Alabama. Not with us. We do south-south, and we do north-north. We do a little bit of north to south, but we usually contract those out. We do zero south to north. You want south to north you need a specialty shipper to make sure you’re clearing all the regulations and whatnot. Most S-N places, they
only
do S-N, because the other customers, they do
not
want to be dealing with that shit.” Angie did not apologize for the word. “Best believe I would not be sitting here shipping south to north.”

“Oh, right. Right.”

“Best believe it.”

Angie clucked. The very
idea.
Meanwhile, I was processing this. I had assumed, and Bridge had assumed along with me, that Barton had chosen Winston Bibb to blackmail because Whole Wide World could arrange a truck to go all the way—to bring Jackdaw from GGSI up to Indy. But this company didn’t move shipments north out of the Four: Angie was leaving little doubt about that. She was back to the computer, still shaking her head, typing rapidly without breaking her masterpiece fingernails.

“So look,” she said. “I can just look for shipments starting with Garden, that’s all. Anything coming out of anywhere, Sunday afternoon, starting with Garden. I can do that.”

“You can do that?”

“Oh, baby, there’s a
lot
of things I can do.”

Totally deadpan, just the tiniest shadow of a smile, not even looking up from the screen. “Don’t tease me now, Angie,” I said. “Don’t you mess with me.”

Angie typed a while, then told me to give her just a second more, and I did. I drummed on her counter with my fingertips and flashed her sweet smiles, pulsing with anxiety and flirtatious energy, while inside I thought with a certain indistinct longing of the kids in the indoor trampoline park on the other side of the parking lot, white kids and black kids, hurling themselves up and down, up and down. I pictured them in slow motion, smiling from ear to ear, howling their glee.

“Here,” said Angie. “Here we go.”

She turned the screen so I could see, and I slapped the counter, one last time, loud and hard enough to make the dry-erase board shiver on the wall and the little bell above the door ring.

“Oh, Angie,” I said. “Oh, Angie!”

She leaned back in her chair.

“You just tell your man Sully I said not to be jerking you around again.”

“I surely will, Angie, I surely will.” She beamed. A nice girl like Angie, she’d tangled with a Sully or two in her day. “Hey—listen,” I said at last. “You think you could print this screen out for me?”

14.

Only very
rarely is there a real plane involved. Every once in a while you’ll hear about some damn fool thing: some billionaire thinks he’s God, hires a daredevil pilot to swoop into the airspace of the Four, land hard and dark in a clear-cut Alabama hollow, try and get back with a hold full of refugees. Never ends well. A plane is big and hard to hide, and defending the sovereign airspace of the several states is an enumerated responsibility of the Air National Guard. Rich boy ends up in court and the pilot in jail. Peebs go back where they came from, if they’re lucky.

No, man—Underground Airlines is a figure of speech: it’s the root of a grand, extended metaphor, “pilots” and “stewards” and “baggage handlers” and “gate agents.” Connecting flights and airport security. The Airlines flies on the ground, in package trucks and unmarked vans and stolen tractor-trailers. It flies in the illicit adjustment of numbers on packing slips, in the suborning of plantation guards and the bribing of border security agents, in the small arts of persuasion: by threat or cashier’s check or blow job. The Airlines is orders placed by imaginary corporations for unneeded items to be shipped to such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time.

Once, for a month or more, I was Jean-Claude Cisse, a.k.a. Café au Lait, a Montreal-born mulatto and a member of a French-Canadian biker gang called Les Bénévoles Blackburn, which specializes in transporting runaways from their temporary and dangerous quarters in northern cities to
la vraie liberté
in Côte Saint-Luc. Among that crew was a woman named Cherie, who had herself escaped from Louisiana and then dedicated her adult life to the Cause. Most of their work, Cherie liked to say, was done at a desk. Forget the glory of the predawn raid. Smashing in the face of the system and pulling free the enslaved was mostly a matter of paperwork. The opening of bank accounts, the forging of documents. The creation of routes and backup routes and backups to the backups.
“La liberté,”
Cherie was fond of saying, in that charming Montreal accent of hers,
“est une question de logistique.”
Freedom is a matter of logistics.

The other thing to remember, of course, is that most people get no help at all. I sure didn’t, oh, no: it was just me and Castle, charging, desperate, through the country darkness, and that’s how it is for most folks who dare to run—no help from no Airlines, no help from
no one
. They just go, man, after years of planning or in the heat of a sudden moment they
go,
hurl their skinny bodies over a cyclone fence or plunge themselves into a moat, break free of a chain line or a guard’s hard grip and
run,
brother,
run,
sister, run along back roads and through forests. No planes and no cars or trucks, either. Just brave souls darting across open fields and wading in and out of rivers and stumbling along deer paths through dark woods. Find the star and follow it, as runners have done all the way back to the days of Old Slavery.