Underground Airlines (24 page)

When the space was too tight for carrying I put him down, and I pulled him and pushed him. I might have fucking rolled the kid. I went the other way, opposite the way I came in, following the underground creek where it flowed back, away from the trailer park and Slim’s decrepit little dynasty, figuring there had to be an exit to this tunnel somewhere, and I dragged Jackdaw until I found it.

We popped out on the other end, where the water spilled itself out into the muddy roll of the White River, south of downtown. I scrabbled with the boy down the swampy banks till we fell together by the river. There was no promenade, no sidewalk, just the embankment, just patchy scrub grass and loose stones covering fifty feet of graded slope from the water’s edge up to the roadway above.

The scene was lit, barely, by a sliver of moonlight and a pair of dim streetlights on an overpass bridge some distance downstream. I laid him gently by the water’s edge and hunched over to breathe and to think.

I didn’t know what I was doing—I didn’t know if I was bringing him in or rescuing him and if I was rescuing him what I’d be rescuing him from.

He crawled over onto all fours and spat a long trail of yellow spit, and it clung to his lower lip. He bent forward and gagged.

“Go on, then. Get it over with.”

“I am not here to torture you.”

“So,” he said. “So shoot. Shoot me, nigga. Just—” His bravado wavered. A tremor ran through him. “Just…just not in the face, okay? Don’t—and just…tell my parents I’m sorry. Okay? Can you do that?”

“Listen to me.”

“They’re in Brightmoor, okay, in Detroit? That’s where I came up, and they’re still up there. Okay?”

“Jackdaw.”

“My name is Kevin,” he said. “It’s Kevin.”

I wanted to slap him. I wanted to embrace him. This poor boy, pleading with me under the sliver of moonlight. The river was swollen from the rain, and it churned beside us. “You tell my parents I was tryna do good, okay? Tryna—” He was weeping again now, big tears rolling down his cheeks. “Just tell ’em. Charles and Chandra, okay? In Brightmoor, in Detroit. Tell them—”

“Stop it,” I said. “Stop. I’m not here to kill you.”

He looked up and gaped at me.

“So what, then? What?
What?
”

And I had no answer. I looked at him with imploring grief, like it was for
him
to tell
me
what the fuck to do, and we gaped at each other like that, like two dumb fish. But it was already late, too late already. Somewhere on the roadway above a car screeched and stopped, and I could hear the doors slamming closed, hear fast footsteps on the scrub grass, coming down fast.

It was Cook. I saw the brown of his cop’s shoes, and I grabbed the boy. Monster that I am, instinct kicked in, and I leaned into the one thing I knew, which was that this kid, whatever he was, whatever had happened, he knew something these people were after, and they weren’t going to kill him till they had it. I seized him and dance-stepped him backwards, one step, and my feet splashed in the river as I hung him before me as a shield.

“Stop there,” I yelled, and Cook—gun out as he tripped down the slope—he did as I said, and I kept it going: “Throw down your gun and raise your hands.”

I could barely see him, but I saw a flash of white teeth as he snarled, and I saw the gun where he tossed it, between us, into the bush.

Jackdaw was frozen in my arms. His heart was beating, a rabbit against my body. Slowly I took out my own gun and held it to his temple.

The others were already coming. First big Maris, then Barton, too, gliding through the darkness, and they arrayed themselves around us in a semicircle, halfway up the slope, looking down at us standing in the water. Barton was the smallest of the three, small and pale and ghostly, black cassock on black night. But it was Barton who made Jackdaw terrified and brave. When he saw the priest he became a tight wire in my arms, fearful and defiant and taut.

“It’s okay,” I heard myself tell him, murmuring brotherly in his ear, even as I held the gun to his head. “It’s gonna be all right.” And then, to Maris, “Weapons on the ground, please.”

“I do not carry a weapon,” he said forcefully, coldly, meaning he did not need a weapon. Would not need one to kill the likes of me.

“How do you sleep? How do you fucking sleep,
Jim?
” said Officer Cook, sneering on the name.

But I did as Bridge did. I answered his question with a question.

“Who is this boy?”

“Go to hell,” said Cook.

But I was the one with the gun. I was the one with the hostage. I directed myself to Father Barton.

“Tell me who this is.”

“The young man can tell you himself,” said Barton, and Jackdaw—Kevin—reacted to his voice with a fresh jolt of energy, jerking in my arms. I purred “Hush” in his ear and said to Barton, “No.” I said, “You tell me.”

“He is a soldier in the army of the Lord.”

“What does that mean?”

“Ask him,” said Father Barton, and just as my own eyes had not left the priest, the priest’s eyes had not left Kevin. “Ask the boy.”

“Goddamn it,” I said. “I’m asking
you
.”

Mr. Maris, meanwhile, his face bronze in the dim light, was still playing catch-up. “Who is this man?” he said.

Cook turned to him, incredulous. “He’s a nigger stealer.” Then, back to me, with a taunting grin. “Ain’t that right? Nigger stealer. Soul catcher.”

Maris looked astonished. He looked me up and down like I was a ghost, an ogre of myth. “He’s from the government?” he said.

“Yeah,” said Cook. “He’s from the fucking government.”

I felt Kevin feel this new information. Felt his body change as he understood what kind of salvation he had fallen into this time.

“He is an undercover agent,” Father Barton said quietly, sadly, a wise parent explaining wickedness to a child. And then, to me, with sympathy: “What miseries you have seen…what grief you have encountered on this earth.”

Maris took a step toward me, his big fists clenched and half raised—ready, now that he knew what I was, to tear my head off my body. I pivoted a quarter turn, made sure he saw how tightly I was holding their precious cargo.

“Now,” I said. “Tell me about this boy.
Now
.”

Barton nodded very slightly. The sun was just starting to come up, washing our desperate scene in a hazy yellow light. There was a railroad bridge fifty yards to the south, the underside of it marked with graffiti, like petroglyphs. Barton stepped toward me as he started to speak. Looked me dead in the eye, me with my gun and my hostage. A man used to breathing God’s true word even into the face of monsters.

“Five years ago our organization was made aware of certain actions being undertaken by this particular plantation. Garments of the Greater South. We had information from multiple sources. We worked out a way for evidence of these activities to be gathered. Brought north. And made public.” As he spoke, Barton’s clerical calm melted off of him, and his voice rose, and he began to nod as if from the altar, and his hands slowly came up, like he was delivering an invocation. “And in this way we can shake the very foundations, bring down not just this plantation but all the plantations…in this way we can strike at the very heart of the old evil. In this way the scales will fall from the eyes of the world…”

He had changed entirely, a hellfire evangelical emerged from the shell of the inward young priest. What was he like, I wondered, on the other side of the confessional curtain, murmuring God’s forgiveness? What was he like in a meeting of abolitionist donors, pressing flesh, demurely tucking folded checks inside his cassock? He was many men. He suited the need. He was like me.

“So all right,” I said. “So you recruited him. You sent him down there.”

“That’s right,” said Cook. “And the boy was perfect. He was goddamn perfect.”

Barton nodded, posed, arms extended and palms raised, breathing. Now he spoke to Kevin, who looked back at him, face frozen with repulsion.

“I remember that night. I remember how proud I felt to have met you, to have found you. How inspired we were. How excited we both were for this undertaking.”

“He came to my school,” said Jackdaw suddenly, and I jerked him closer to me. “This man here. In plainclothes, you know, jeans and a shirt and the collar. All fucking cool. My sophomore year, Earlham College. He shows up at a black students’ meeting, talking all hot about taking responsibility. Saying, hey, who’s tired of signing petitions? Whose feet are tired from marching? Who’s ready to do something
real?
And I said…” Kevin spoke faintly, mockingly, contemptuous of his former self. “I said me. I said
me
. I was all fired up.” He closed his eyes, energy spent, and hung limp as a doll in my arms.

“How much time?” I asked Barton. “How long did he have to work down there before risking his life to get your—whatever it is.”

Barton raised a single finger, thin as a bone. “One year.”

I felt Jackdaw’s heart pulsing warmth where I held him. I felt the sacrifice of this, for this kid from Detroit, a kid growing up with his pals in the free world, playing basketball, going to school. College sophomore, liberal arts, textbooks and term papers, bumping fists on the quad, and then a year behind the Fence. I could not imagine it, except that I could; I could imagine it exactly. Mine had been a livestock slavery, the blood knife and the dirt, and his had been a glass-wall slavery, stitch-house slavery, needle and thread, but the baseline is the same. The bare facts are always the same.

“And he performed…” Barton trailed off into a smile, took another step toward us, held out his hands to Jackdaw. “He performed perfectly. Kevin? Are you listening to me, Kevin? You performed beautifully.”

Jackdaw cleared his throat and shot a thick wad of spit onto the priest’s face. Barton did not flinch; very gently he raised one arm and wiped the spit away. I kept one eye, meanwhile, on the other men, still up there on the slope. Cook with his arms crossed, eyes narrow. Mr. Maris, hulking and furious, brow furrowed with concentration, waiting for his moment. Waiting for a chance to separate us, to push the boy out of the way so he could tear me to bits.

“So where is it?” Silence from everyone. River rush, distant traffic. Someone honking on southbound 65. “Come on. The boy goes down, performs beautifully, gathers up the evidence. Where is it?”

“Ask the boy,” said Barton, and I said, “I’m asking you.”

“This crazy motherfucker didn’t bring it,” said Cook. He took one step down the slope toward us, and I tightened my grip and he stepped back. “He says he got it out, but he stashed it somewhere on the way up.”

“Why?”

“Because he is confused,” said Barton softly. “He is tired and confused.”

“Because of Luna,” said Jackdaw—not Jackdaw…said Kevin the sophomore, and he didn’t sound tired or confused. He snapped to life again inside the threatening curl of my arm, taking over his own story. “There’s a girl named Luna, a PB, and she was the one who got your precious evidence. She took all the fucking risks, this girl who was born a slave and was a slave her whole life.” His voice was a hot rush, rough with tears, rising with passion, as Barton’s voice had risen. “I told that girl that if she helped me we would get her out, too. But then your people—”

“They ain’t
our
people,” Cook said.

“Your people—”

Barton shook his head. “We work with various entities—”

“They
left
her. Left her behind. So I told them…” He rolled his head backwards, and it pushed against my chest. “I told them, go and get that girl and I tell you where I put your fucking envelope.”

Silence. The sun was rising. The ugly water lapped at our feet. Barton stood with his eyes closed, some of that spit still making its slow way down his cheek, over an expression of agony and forbearance.

And then Barton took another step, and I said, “Stop,” but he ignored me. He knelt in the muddy water at our feet, and the brown ripples lapped the hem of his robe, his shoes, his thin brown socks. He spoke with a voice that was soft and charged and urgent, as if he were administering a rite.

“You must reconsider, Kevin. You
must
. We are talking here about the fate of three million people.”

“I don’t care about three million people. I care about one. You go and get her, and I tell you where it is.”

“We can’t do it,” said Barton. “That plan was years in the making. Years. We can’t just wander into places—”

“She’s dead,” said Officer Cook suddenly. “Okay? Your girl is dead.”

Barton turned to look at the cop, and Maris was looking at him, too. There was a long, brutal stillness. None of them spoke, but in the gloom of the sunrise I could read their silent communion—they hadn’t planned to tell him, afraid of how he would react, what he would do, but now there was nothing left. No other choice. The government had arrived, a monster was in their midst, the situation was at crisis, and so he had been told.