Underground Airlines (16 page)

“It’s…” She gave a little toss of her head. “It’s nothing. Seriously. Take your call.”

I answered as I turned away, and the doors whooshed open, and Bridge said “Victor,” short and sharp, his voice charged with some energy I did not immediately recognize.

“Oh, yes, hello,” I said, still in Dirkson voice, walking fast, not liking to talk to him out in the bright no-man’s-land of the hotel lobby. It was like I had conjured a demon to rise up out of the patterned carpet, right where everyone could see it. “Hey, could you hang on just a sec?”

I kept the phone pressed against my chest until I was back in the room, out on the balcony, with a cigarette clenched in my teeth.

Would you ever…
what? Would I ever—

“Victor.”

“You caught me in the middle of something.”

“And is that a problem for some reason?” A current running through his voice like rogue electricity. “I will call when I call, Victor. Do you understand? I will call when I want to.”

I took the phone away from my ear and studied it. Maybe it had connected me by accident to the wrong man. Some other Victor, somewhere else.

“How’s your progress?”

I skipped the jokes. I gave the man a whirlwind tour of the day’s adventures. I gave him Officer Cook and Maris on the steps, I gave him the pin I had put on Maris; I gave him the name of the doctor; I gave him the printout from Whole Wide World Logistics with the route of escape. I told him about Slim’s, but not about shooting Slim.

The whole time I was providing this debrief, I was measuring the short, cool silences that breathed between my sentences. Something was off—something was way off. Some new weather, a heaviness in the atmosphere, was brooding over our call like a storm system, darkening the color of the sky.

Like a good employee, I wrapped up my report with next steps. Tomorrow morning I would feel out the doctor, try again to pick up Maris’s trail, seek out Cook the cop if I had to, prevail upon him to make another run at the recalcitrant priest.

Another half step of menacing silence from Mr. Bridge. Then he said something that blew a hole in my understanding of the world, like a cannonball smashing through the high wood sides of a ship. “You holding out on me, boy?”

“Am I—what?”

But it wasn’t even the question. That word—that word again—that
word.
I sucked in poison from the cigarette and felt my cheeks tremble. Felt my neck get hot.

“If you are dragging your feet, I will know it.”

“I’m not.”

“What I’m hearing from you, Victor, is a list of half-completed tasks. Bullshit leads. This is day three on this.”

“Three days is nothing,” I said. “Remember Milwaukee? Fuck, man, remember Carlisle?”

“If you can’t get this over with—”

“If I—what?”

“If you can’t find the man—”

I was staring at the phone again, holding it at arm’s length and shaking my head. We were upside down. We were in a shadow land. Bridge’s aggression was way, way out of character. He was my handler, and he was handling me poorly. I noticed his uncharacteristic inarticulateness, the strange doubling back, how he had arrived at “If you can’t find the man” only after “If you can’t get this over with,” which has a whole different character.

“If you’re slow playing this, Victor, I will know that. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“You understand what that means.”

I stood in silence, simmering in the implication of the question. The violence gleaming cold behind it.

Looking back, I don’t know why I was surprised. All that’d happened was that the truth of Bridge, of me and him, had unexpectedly shown itself right up close where I could see it. It had always been violence. For six years it had been violence: behind our professional exchanges and collegial banter, there had always been violence. For six years I’d spoken to him on secure lines, from comfortable hotel rooms, smoking my cigarettes, breathing night air, playing at freedom. But the first time I spoke to him I was shackled in a Chicago basement, hands tied to a table and feet to a chair, and he was a cold unfamiliar voice spooling out from a speakerphone like a length of wire, the voice of my doom until he offered me a choice that was no choice.

After all those years in the shadows I had gotten it together, gotten papers, gotten myself a job, loading and unloading trucks at Townes Stores, just north of the Chicago city limits. Two years, two normal, happy human years, then one night I came off shift at dawn and it was behind me, a silver car was idling on Monroe Street with no plates, and I didn’t even fucking think about it. I dropped the hot dog I was eating and ran, looking with wild instinct for the North Star and finding only the egg-yellow glow of streetlamps.

I made it maybe thirty feet before they tackled me and brought me down. While they dragged me to the car thrashing and wailing, I thought crazily that I should have turned right instead of left, should have gone up the alley instead of down the sidewalk. As if it mattered, as if there were any direction I could have run to escape the unforgetting world.

Next thing I knew I was in a basement. Federal building, downtown Chicago. I was still in my work shirt, still in my nice clean Adidas, in my blue jeans. All that peace and safety draining away, all my new life sloughing off onto the concrete floor. I was already feeling the cold steel of the chains drawing down between my shoulder blades, running in lengths around my ankles.

Somebody came in and put a phone down on the table, and I stared at it, confused, until it beeped two times and a voice came on the line.

“My name is Bridge,” said the voice. “I am a deputy marshal in the United States Marshals Service. I trust you appreciate the gravity of your situation. Your instructions now are simply to listen to my proposal and answer when I’m done. Your answer will be either yes or no.” Listening to his cold voice, I was thinking about cows’ heads, cows’ necks, bloodied flanks. Thinking of the hours and the days. Bridge said again, yes or no, and I would have done anything, yes, anything, I would have said anything, anything, forever, anything.

When he was done talking, I said yes. Right away I said yes, of course I did, I said yes.

And now Bridge, his same voice after all these years:
You understand what that means
. It means I was there in Indianapolis, in that northern hotel room, but a trap could open in the floor and crash me down into that federal building basement; the walls could fall away and show how all along I’d been at Bell’s, in the stink and blood haze and weariness of Bell’s Farm.

You understand what that means,
he said, and I did. Violence had always been behind our conversations. What’s behind everything, what’s under everything. Violence.

“Sir,” I said, very slowly, very calm. “I am pursuing the case to the best of my ability.”

Bridge didn’t answer. No more silences, brooding or angry or anything. He just hung up.

Maybe there was something going on with the man I didn’t know about. Maybe it was another case. Maybe it was Batlisch, the hearings, adding some tension to the air of those government hallways. But I didn’t think so. Something was going on with this—with Bridge, with me. With this case.

I was going to have to sleep, but I didn’t even try it yet. I stood out on the balcony for a long time, for what might have been hours.

All of it cycling through, rutting me up. Cook in the car, “A special kind of kid…” and Bridge on the phone, “get this over with…” and Martha Flowers, “Would you ever…” All of it. All of this life.

Something was piercing through me, some kind of heat burning the raw layer under the skin. Something I couldn’t then explain and that even now I have trouble transforming from thought into words. But
something
was happening. A dial was turning.

You can imagine a compass needle twitching to life—the smallest pulse—the barest movement—struggling for north.

Twice a year a group was graduated off the pile and moved inside, and soon enough it was my turn. It was something of an occasion: work halted inside and outside; everybody circled around the flagpoles. The only kind of time like it was church, or when one of us died or when someone was sold.

Mr. Bell came out and walked down the line of us. I think it was nine other boys and three girls who came off the pile along with me. We stood with our chests stuck out. We had on the yellow suits we’d just been issued, and the respirator headgear, those fancy magic face masks that you had to wear on most shifts inside.

The ceremony only took ten minutes after all that—for us to be lined up and for Mr. Bell to kiss us each one time on the top of our heads and tighten the straps of our masks with tender ceremony. And then the buzzer sounded for our very first kill-floor shift, and he said, “All right, y’all, get to it,” and we marched inside.

By the time that first day ended my yellow suit was no longer clean.

“So?” said Castle when he found me in the johns. “You all right?”

“Course I am.”

I didn’t want Castle to know how I really felt after that first long day inside the cutting house. I had been very close all day to vomiting. Not from the work itself, I guess—that first day all I did was throw the lever of the downpuller machine, over and over and over, align the mechanical jaws, press the button, and watch them tug off the cattle hide. One swift motion and the full skin came off, like taking off a shirt. I guess the sight of it, over and over. The glistening black and red of the insides. I don’t know. But I did—I had felt all day on the brink of vomiting, and I still did even then in the johns, but I didn’t want Castle to know that. I didn’t want him to lose his pride in me.

“I’m fine,” I told him, and I smiled weak and watery. When I looked at him I felt like I could see his insides, like his skin’d been pulled away.

“You’ll be all right,” he said, like he hadn’t heard me say I was fine. He put his hand on my shoulder, which made me jump. You didn’t want the Old Man seeing that, talking close and confidential. The Old Man or anyone who might tell him. “What’s next is what matters,” he said.

Sure enough, there was Harbor, looking at Castle’s hand on me, looking at us whispering all together like that.

“What you mean, what’s next?” said Harbor with his hard, slit-face smile.

“You mind your own, how about, son?” said Castle.

“My own what? Everything’s everybody’s.” Harbor smiled. “Right?”

That was one of the mottoes. Everything’s everybody’s. Eyes on the prize. For you and me and Bell’s Farm!

Harbor ignored Castle then and talked right to me. Harbor was between my age and Castle’s age, but he talked just like a grown man. Talked almost like an Old Man, actually, like he was in charge of something. “Your man here talking about what’s next. Lemme tell you what’s next. Today they fit on that mask. Tomorrow you work on the carving line. Then the kill floor. Till they put you on the block or put you in the ground. That’s what’s next.”

Castle shook me awake that night. Not to tell me any words or stories. His big eyes wider than ever but serious. Focused.

“You remember what I told you?”

I blinked. He had told me so many things.

“They not us,” he said, so quiet I could hardly hear him. “Not Harbor, not anyone. Something’ll come for you and me.”

“What?” I said. “What’ll come?”

He wasn’t even making noise anymore. He just mouthed the word. “Opportunity.”

Pretty soon I decided that inside was worse than the pile.

That was punishable, of course: to think of any kind of work as worse or worst or bad. Thoughts Against Good Work. I kept my thoughts to myself. Out on the pile there was some music in the air, kind of: there was the distant rush and honk of the highway; there was the caw of crows and even on occasion the merry chirrup of a songbird. Inside the only sounds were work sounds: the chunk-chunk of the bolt gun and the chug-chug of the ramp, the dull, ignorant lowing of the cows, the buzz and rattle of the hot machines. And the nervous click-clack of boot heels all around you: the Old Men and the guards strolling with their hands on their holsters, the Franklins with their clipboards, the USDA in their lab coats, with their instruments.

I got through it by telling myself Castle’s stories, all the ones he had told me over all those years: the man who slipped into the water and was eaten by a whale and spat out again; the leopard who cannot change his spots; and the one (my favorite one) about the man who built another man from parts he had found, brought him to life with lightning for magic.

Other times I told myself the words. Doing my tasks, again and again and again: cracking skulls, pulling out viscera, carving out tongues by their thick roots. Repeating Castle’s old words from under our blanket together: