Underground Airlines (17 page)

Carburetor.

Chicago.

Opportunity.

Six or eight months after I moved in to the cutting floor, Castle shook me awake one night, and I was as mad as I’d ever been.

“Getting too old for this,” I said, grumpy.

“No, love,” he said. “Don’t say that.”

My hands hurt so much. I had been moved from the downpuller onto a straight carving station, and in sleep my hands stayed cramped in the shape that held the knife.

“Too old.”

“I know, dear. I know. But listen. I have to give you something.”

And always, Castle knew what I didn’t know yet, because he had seen it happen with the olders. Soon they would come and read his number out and move him to another cabin. He was the oldest of the younger ones, and soon they’d need the room for the new littlest coming out of the breed lot. He’d go to cabin 9, and after a year, on from there to breeding.

That night while he waited for me to wake and listen, his big eyes were full of tears. I think they were. I wish I could remember.

“I got a secret to give you. You gotta listen. This matters.”

“Huh?”

“You listening?”

I allowed with a shrug that I was.

“We are from the future.”

“Man, what?” That had woken me all the way. “The future? Castle, come on.”

But his face was serious. So, so serious.

“We are from the future, my sweet brother. We are future boys. Okay?” He was talking too loud. He was all worked up. I put my finger across his lips. He brushed it away. “We look like we’re here, with all this, but we’re really somewhere else. In the future we got somewhere else. Some other time.”

“What place you mean?”

“I don’t know, honey. Someplace. Chicago, maybe. Future place.” He had told me stories about that city he got from somewhere. It was a city on the other side of America. Buildings upright and proud. “I’m in Chicago, and I’m eating a hot dog.”

I had to put my cramped hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

Castle had never eaten any hot dogs, and neither had I, but we knew what they were well enough. There was a dancing hot dog on the trucks that rumbled in and out unceasingly from the loading dock on the north side of the kill house. But for our food we had mostly the loaves, dense and filling. Carrot loaves and sorghum loaves and vanilla loaves for a treat.

“We live in two places at once, you and me.” Castle’s eyes shone with pleasure, with real, true electric pleasure, and I felt it arcing between us like starlight. “You live here, you live there. You live now, you live later. You live in this place, you live in the other place. There’s two of you. Do you understand?”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure that I did, but I wanted him to know that I did.

Castle held up two fingers in the dark, and from then on that was our sign. Two fingers, raised and spread apart. It meant—you and me—two of us. It meant him and me, but also it meant me and me and it also meant him and him. Me now, me later. Castle now, Castle later.

This place and the other place, here and there, now and later on.

17.

In the
morning, in the silence of the waiting room, in the bright light of the small examination room of Dr. Venezia-Karbach, I felt the uneasy and unwelcome sensation of being completely alone in the presence of myself. I had spent so much of my life costumed and posing, turning and turning myself, like changing the channels on a television set, that sometimes when I was caught as I was now, in a silent moment, just waiting, nothing to do but sit and wait and think in a white and airless room, I felt like a blank screen. I felt like a dead television. I was myself. I was nothing. I sat there in the thin paper robe. My ass was freezing on the steel of the table.

The one piece of artwork in Dr. Venezia-Karbach’s office was a framed print of a Norman Rockwell painting,
First-Day Jitters:
little black girl in a plain white dress, handing up an apple to her pretty black teacher, and both of them looking shy and aw-shucks nervous. That was a famous painting, the first day of class at Little Rock School for Negro Children, 1954, seven years after Arkansas became free, nine months after the Supreme Court ruled that freedom wasn’t enough—there had to be schools. There had to be a chance.

I stared at that schoolteacher now, her wide excited eyes, her worry, the white bows in her hair. I had read some sort of magazine feature about her recently, the real person, about the way the rest of her life had turned out. I tried to remember where I had read it. Tried to remember how she was doing.

“Good morning, Mr. Morton. I understand you’re here for a checkup—is that correct?”

“Yes, Doc, you got it,” I said, snapping right into it. “That’s right.”

“Let’s have a look.”

Dr. Venezia-Karbach was a white woman in her late fifties or early sixties, not unfriendly but not friendly, either. Her hair was short and spiked up, boxy and sexless. On her instructions I removed the robe and sat in my underpants, hands laced in my lap, while she conducted her examination with brisk efficiency. Her fingertips lit on the various regions of my anatomy—torso and limbs, eyes and ears, pulse points and glands. I breathed deeply while she pressed my chest with the cold flat face of the stethoscope. I opened my mouth and said “Ah” and flinched a little while she inspected my throat with the funneled light of the laryngoscope.

She started a chart and asked me some questions. Mr. Kenny Morton, it turned out, was the type of old-fashioned amiable cat who called the doctor Doc, who probably called cops Chief, and who called fat strangers Big Guy. He was the kind of fella who scratched his head with theatrical uncertainty when asked where his previous physician’s practice was located and when his last appointment had taken place. Dr. Venezia-Karbach registered no surprise to hear that Mr. Morton had no insurance or current place of employment.

I imagined for one sharp second Dr. V’s tidy white examination room as the tidy white examination room at the worker-care facility in the western section of the GGSI campus: imagined it splattered with gore, covered with an exuberance of blood. Two dead nurses. Jackdaw on the loose.

Dr. V wrote everything down on her chart and told me that for a man of my age and height and weight I seemed to be in fine shape. When she asked what it was that had brought me to the doctor today, I figured that was enough of that. “Well,” I said, emotion coming hot into my voice, choking me up, “well…” and I slid off the examination table and exploded with need. “That
boy!
”

“What?” Dr. Venezia-Karbach stepped backward in startlement while I fought back a sob. I advanced across the small room and grasped her roughly by the shoulders. “That boy y’all got!”

There were more graceful ways I could have gone about this. More circumspect methods, more careful. But I was feeling half off the horse that morning. I was feeling like a battering ram, just wanting to shove and smash through this thing. What had Bridge said, in that unwonted casualism—I wanted to get it over with.

“What on earth are you talking about?” said Dr. V, furrowing her brow, playing at confused, putting on a nice show of her own. “What
boy?
”

“Come on,” I said. “Come on, now. They brought you a boy. The Airlines, a boy, Sunday night. Monday morning?”

“Sir.”
Without turning around, Dr. V extended a leg behind her and kicked the door shut.

“The boy!”

“Sir,
please
.”

I waited for some stammering excuse—what are you talking about, I don’t understand. But it was too late, and she knew it—her eyes had betrayed her, her neat physician’s mask had slipped to reveal not fear, or not just fear, but also the shock of having been discovered. In a fluid gesture she turned around, locked the door, and turned back around. She smoothed her white coat with both hands, adjusted the stethoscope that had been jostled, ran thin fingers through her hair.

“Okay,” she said. “What about him?”

“Well…” What the hell, I figured. “Where’s he at?”

“I do not know, and I could not tell you if I did.” She nodded once, a quick birdlike gesture. “Now, as I’ve said, your checkup shows no areas of concern. Have a good day.”

She unlocked the door and opened it, and I was across the room,  reaching past her and pushing it closed again. Dr. V’s shoulders tensed as she turned to face me, the two of us separated by inches. This was a fine line I was walking here. I’m big, even for a man, and she was small, even for a woman, and the room was small and close.

“He’s my brother,” I told her quietly, damn near whispering now.

“What?”

I took two deep breaths. The space between us was ruffled by a drift of warm air from the heating system, riffling Dr. V’s short, spiky hair and making it look like white grass.

“I don’t mean he’s my biological brother; I mean he’s my
brother
.” It was a southern voice, PB voice, the blood traces of my old real voice tasting like dirt in my mouth. “You know what that means down there? Raised up together, eyes on each other. Family.” I was careful not to say what kind of place it’d been, this plantation or mine or rig where Mr. Morton and Jackdaw had been bound together as boys. The full file was empty on Jackdaw’s history, and I guessed that Barton and company didn’t know any more and that, regardless, they wouldn’t have shared anything with a physician brought in on a freelance basis to tend to him. But this was dangerous territory, and I moved past it quickly.

“We come up together ten years, him and me, but then he gets sold. No warning, no good-bye. That’s how it goes, you know?”

Dr. V was watching me warily, arms crossed, eyes darting back and forth in the small room. I charged on.

“I stay up in Wisconsin. I got people up there. And I been trying to find him all these years, writing letters to manumits from our old place, then with the Internet, you know, everything’s easier and harder, too. I’m looking at forums, typing his name in search engines. Looking for anyone matching his age, description, you know? Saving up my money and all, like somehow I’m gonna put together enough scratch to buy him out.” I looked down, shook my head self-mockingly, as if a poor freedman like Kenny Morton could ever earn enough to buy a man out of slavery. As if there weren’t laws against it. “And then, suddenly, jackpot, you know? A decade of nothing, and then one day, up pops the name! Boy called Jackdaw, gone ghost from some Alabama stitch house. Well, first thing I think is he’s here. He was always talking about Indianapolis. Don’t know how he got it in his head. Don’t know how he even heard of this place. But that was it—
I ever get out of here
—you know, just talk. Night talk.”

Castle and I, talking under the blanket, telling stories. Imagining made-up futures. Whispering
Chicago
to each other. And we did, didn’t we? We did make it out, did we not? Opportunity came—one, two, three, like horseshoes ringing onto the post—and we flew away.

“But so I came up here, and someone down Freedman Town, they told me you the doc who sees to runners, least sometimes.”

Dr. Venezia-Karbach’s eyes flashed, and her arms uncrossed from her chest so she could plant her fists on her hips. She didn’t like that the word was out on her. I had rattled the woman for sure. I stared at her pleadingly, and she looked back, and behind her the 1954 schoolteacher waited for her students to arrive, an unlikely hero in Salvation Army shoes, surrounded by her uncertain future.

“All right. I understand.” The sternness in Dr. V’s eyes softened, and her mouth twisted at the corners. She was keeping her voice firm, but with effort now. Something else was trying to find its way out, pity or empathy or kindness. “And what is it that you want?”

“All I want to do is see him,” I said. “That’s all. Just—before y’all spirit him away. Up north. I just gotta see him one time. I need him to know I never did forget about him.”

And there were tears in my eyes now, of course. Seems like one thing I could always manage was to conjure up some tears into my eyes. I was still nearly naked, just in my underpants, and it only added to the awkward urgency of our exchange, that we bore this relation to each other—doctor and patient, woman and man. “I just want him to know I never let him out of my heart. I never did. I just want to see him and tell him that. That’s all that I want.”

She should have simply said, “I’m sorry.” She should have said there was nothing she could do. I could only imagine the firm instructions she got from Father Barton, the sternness with which his admonitions of silence were delivered. But the ripples were passing over her, the ripples of want. She
wanted
to help me. She
needed
to. It was the flip side of the reflexive hatred of Slim and Slim’s fat pal—someone like Dr. V, white and liberal and a child of her era: she wanted and needed for the poor black man in her office, he of humble circumstance and simple hopes, to see that she was
not
like the sneering bigots and whiphands of the world, that she was a person of conscience. She was different.