Underground Airlines (38 page)

That man, that forty-five-plus, they took him away. At no clear signal, we all got on the train.

It was twenty-four men to a train car, twelve on either side. There were no seats. We stood, staring straight ahead. The train pulled away from the station, and we all began to sing again: endless choruses of the same song, no variation. There were no windows on the train. The man across from me was barrel-chested, with a thick bull neck and deep-set eyes. The train was loud in the tunnel, rushing and roaring through the darkness. It was hard to think with the singing and the rattle of the train.

The train ran in a simple circle around the plantation, fourteen stops in all, but I just had to make it through four of them: headquarters to facilities maintenance; facilities maintenance to stitch house 1; stitch house 1 to stitch house 2; stitch house 2 to Free White Housing. I looked past the big barrel-chested man. Behind him, in small letters, where one metal plate of the car’s structure met the next, were the words
STIPELY
FABRICATING
SERVICE
,
LOUISVILLE
,
KENTUCKY
. Just beneath the word
Kentucky,
one tiny machine screw was coming loose—I saw its head, a flat silver insect, poking like a secret from the surface of the train wall. I watched the screw as we juddered along.

At the first stop, facilities maintenance, a middle-aged white woman got on in the bright orange jumpsuit of the Bureau of Labor Practices. The singing stopped, but the train began to roll again, and she made her way down the center aisle, counting heads, clicking a small handheld clicker, one click for each of us. She did this while whistling slightly to herself distractedly, the way you might move through a crowd of chickens in a pen. Nobody looked at her. Nobody looked at anybody else. We just kept singing. I stared at the tiny loose metal screw. “All right, folks,” she said brightly. “Thanks very much,” and she moved through to the next car. At stitch house 1 nine slaves got off, and nine new slaves took their places. I did not look at the new faces.

I was going to find William Smith, and I was going to ask him my questions. Find out where that package was, get the fuck out of there—
How? How are you going to figure it out?
—and go and get it.

I should have felt something. I should have been excited, I should have been reveling in a moment, an opportunity that had at long last arrived.

But there on the train car, surrounded by men who would ride this train forever, I did not feel shit. I just wanted to get this done. Get it over with and get out.

Between the third and fourth stations the train stopped again.

“Hands in,” said an intercom voice, and before I could wonder what that meant, a pair of shackles dropped and dangled in front of me and in front of everybody else on the train car. One pair per passenger, they appeared and hung there like oxygen masks coming down when a plane has lost cabin pressure. I followed the others. Did what they did. Raised my hands and stuck them through the holes. The manacles tightened automatically, biting into my wrists. I still had my pass, my Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate. It was tight between my forefinger and thumb.

The doors opened at either end, and two men came in, one at each end, black men, like the one from the platform who’d led off the forty-five-plus. Petty authorities, whatever they called them here. One of them had a dog. They wore uniforms, the same color scheme as the one worn by the guard who’d gone over me in the lobby, the same as the carpeting in Newell’s office: cotton white and blue-sky blue.

“All right, y’all,” said the first, from the forward end of the car. “Who’s feeling good today?” The man talking was the taller of the pair, with a broad chest and dark shining eyes. His voice had a rousing, rolling cadence. “Who’s feeling
good?
”

Everybody answered together. “I am.”

“Good. Who’s feeling strong?”

This time I was ready. I joined in. “I am!”

He nodded again, beaming. “Now, you all know this: GGSI loves you.”

Every man on that car spoke it in unison: “Thank you, GGSI.”

“Now, GGSI is here to
take care of
you.”

“Thank you, GGSI.”

The other overseer, down at the back end, was nodding heartily at everything, mouthing the answers, too. He stood there holding the dog’s leash. His attentive expression matched the dog’s.

“Let me ask y’all something.” The overseer who was running the show here, he licked his lips. He bounced on the balls of his feet. The dog poked its nose around. I was scared of that dog. “Who is it that gives us these clothes?”

“GGSI.”

“Who puts food in our bellies?”

“GGSI.”

“That’s right. Sing it, brothers. Sing it with me now.”

And we were back into it, hands and backs and spirit, too, everybody singing with noticeably more verve now, in the presence of the law. While we sang the two overseers worked their way down the line, one on either side, checking everybody’s papers. This was not perfunctory, either—they were holding pens, checking carefully, while the singing went on around them.

“You good.” Looking each man in the eye, then looking at the paperwork, nodding. “You good. You good.”

My pass was incomplete. As the trusty on my side drew closer, he and his dog, I managed a good, clear look at the Temporary Intracampus Travel Certificate of the man beside me, and I could see how Newell had fucked me. At the bottom, not in any box, just jammed in where there was space for it next to the signature, this man’s pass bore an inky thumbprint. By accident or by design, Newell had left mine off.

I kept singing. I considered my options. My hands were shackled. The snare was sprung, the lock in place. I had no options. I continued to sing.

I watched the overseer moving down the line, watched my madman’s game sailing toward its end. I should have felt scared, I knew. I should have felt the horror of the man trapped in his fate.

Instead I was just thinking
I failed you,
a quick burst of felt thought, like a prayer—but I wasn’t sure who I was praying to. Whom had I failed?

The overseer was in front of me now, running his eyes over my face. He took the piece of paper from between my fingers and looked at it closely. His expression did not harden; his round cheeks did not change. “As Thou hast done in times gone by,” I sang. “Oh, Lord, protect GGSI.” The man turned very slightly back toward the other overseer, to check where he was, then he took my pass, and when he placed it back in my hand it had a thumbprint on the bottom.

“You good,” he said and kept moving.

When the men were done the shackles loosened, just enough for us to withdraw our hands, but they stayed dangling, jostling and swinging in front of our eyes as the train lurched back into motion.

The next stop was Free White Housing, and I got off.

That is one of the moments I still think about. Lord, I do.

I’ve tried to enact it. The small, quick, dangerous motions: to pop his thumb quickly in and out of his mouth, drag it through Newell’s signature, jam the smeary thumb pad into the corner of my paper. Furtive movements. One, two, three.

I think about that moment all the time, how nice it would have been to say thank you. To say something. This man a stranger to me. My hero. I would have kissed him. I return in my mind to Bell’s, to Chicago, to the thousand small kindnesses with which we armored ourselves against the world.

Free White Housing area 9 was visible from where the train doors opened, an ugly apartment block surrounded by a high chain-link fence. I booked it over there, hustling quick, eyes front, knees up. I ran past a high guard tower, ran with my back erect and my paper held out in front of me, thinking,
One way or another, this is almost over
.

The fence was unlocked. As I was going in, a pair of whites was coming out, rumpled blue work clothes marked
GGSI
, and I stepped aside, angled my eyes down. They took no notice. The buildings of Free White Housing were pale sandstone apartment houses, the kind of undistinguished clustered residences you see on the outskirts of poor towns—every apartment with a tiny balcony facing squarely forward, overlooking a concrete courtyard below. Four balconies per floor, six floors up. Apartments like cages, like drawers in a rolltop desk, identical and interchangeable, like pigeonholes in a wall.

I found building B and pressed the button for apartment 8. I had to stand calmly; I had to force my body to be still. Pressed the button again and waited.

They found him out,
I was thinking. William Smith. He made a run for it. He’s dead.

But then when I pressed the button again there were footsteps, thumping a thousand miles an hour, coming down the steps inside.

“Stop buzzing,” said a voice, muffled, through the door. “Stop buzzing!”

The door of the lobby jerked open. A rag doll of a man, with a thin neck and long greasy heavy-metal hair, jutted his head outside into the courtyard, looked around quickly.

“Get in, man. Get in. For fuck’s sake get
in
.”

8.

Billy Smith
was in a bad, bad way.

“Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man,” he kept saying, a steady mumble, all the time shaking his head, gritting his teeth, running one hand through his greasy heavy-metal hair. “Oh, man, oh, man.”

“Why don’t we have a seat, Mr. Smith?” I said—I kept saying—but he couldn’t do it or wouldn’t. He told me to call him Billy, everybody fucking called him Billy, but that was all the sense I got out of him, at least at first. I sat watching him from one of his two folding chairs while he smoked and paced the tiny apartment in caged-tiger loops, trailing ash, stepping over and around Styrofoam food cartons and empty beer bottles. Billy didn’t look like any truck driver I had ever seen: lean and lank, with nervous, edgy eyes that flickered constantly into all corners of the room.

“You gotta just tell them I’m fucking sorry, man,” he said over and over in our first few minutes together, no matter what I asked, no matter where I tried to start. “You gotta just tell them I’m fucking
sorry
. Okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “You bet. But listen. Billy.”

“You’ll tell them? Please?”

I couldn’t make him slow down. I couldn’t make him hear me. Billy was operating on some level beyond my reach. The air in the apartment was a low, thick funk, the smell of a scared little man, an addict who had run out of whatever it was that kept him bumping along life’s bottoms.

“I did what I could, okay? I’m sorry; things don’t always—I did my best, okay?”

He lit a new cigarette with the end of the one he was smoking and shook his head bitterly. “I don’t know why I ever got involved with all this mess. I really, surely do not.” Inhaling, twitching, pulsing. “It all just depends who’s on the gate, you know, and it was supposed to be Murph, but it wasn’t Murph, and there’s nothing I could do, so I’m sorry. Will you tell them? Will you?”

“Mr. Smith?” I said, real loud, then I slapped my hand down hard on the table and for whatever reason that caught him. He stopped moving. Rubbed his forefingers into his eyes, shook his head, then took a good look at me at last: no shirt, black pants, green wristband.

“What center you sneak out of?”

“I’m not part of the population here, Billy. I’m from the outside.”

“No shit?” His eyes went wide. “How’d you get in?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Jesus. Jesus fucking
Christ.
” He rushed over to the window, slowly lifted one slat of the blinds, and peeked outside, clutching his chest.
“Jesus.”

And he was off, a new tense orbit around the apartment. This man had all sorts of cosmic things going on in his mind, some stew of fear and regret and, unless I missed my guess, early-stage narcotics withdrawal.

“They’re coming,” he said now. “They’re fucking coming.”

“Who, Billy?”

“Bosses, man.” He gaped at me. “Bosses always coming, man. It’s not my
house,
you know what I’m saying? They can come in any time they want to. They got that right, okay? It’s my house, you know, but they own it. Rent comes right outta my check. Everything. Food. Water. Stove gas. Everything.” He had ramped up, he was talking fast, a million nervous miles an hour. “They can come in
whenever
. My man Jackie Boy in building C, he got jacked for porn. Black-girl porn, too, which they fucking
hate.
Tossed him right the fuck out. I knew a guy—Bolo, Bowler, Bowser, something—in FW 6, he had a bunch of coke in a Baggie in the toilet tank, you know? They canned his ass in a hurry. They woulda sold him offshore if he had a drop of nigger in him, shit you not.” Billy had made his way back to the window, and he risked another glance outside. “No, man, no: they can come in any time they want to. That’s why I’ve been so freaked out, you know?” He crossed the room in two long paces, sat down across from me, sudden and hard. “So let’s
go
, okay? What do you want to know?” Banged his fist on the table. “What do you want to fucking
know?
”