Underground Airlines (5 page)

The whole community center was about as big as a Monopoly house, and it looked older than sin, older than Adam and Eve the sinners.

Except for the lock on the door. That lock was brass, and it looked shiny and new.

I smiled to myself as I got the number off the side of the truck, feeling pretty pleased at having noticed that detail. Happy about having gotten—guided by the ATM receipt—to the bank, to the Catholic community center, to Ruben, to the door. Happy with all I’d done even before Bridge and his people managed to get me the full file. I was feeling the pleasure of discovery, the pleasure of the job.

That’s the problem with doing the devil’s work. It can be pretty satisfying now and again. Pretty goddamn satisfying.

I had with me in Indianapolis all my usual equipment. Some of it was in my room at the Capital City Crossroads, some of it was stashed in the trunk of the car. A variety of costume pieces—some wigs, some fake jewelry, and various basic elements of facial camouflage: a tube of spirit gum, a few shades of foundation, an eyebrow pencil. I had six different pairs of clear-glass spectacles and six different sets of colored contact lenses. Other tools, too: a set of picks and rakes for cracking locks, plus a backup set. Lanyards with name tags, fake badges in fake badge holders. Clothes and shoes. My phone and its charger and its various accessories; the computer. Paperwork for Jim Dirkson, and three more complete sets on three other names, all of it comprehensively backstopped, every phone number connected to a real phone, a real person who knew what to say if somebody called. Cash, too, of course—rolls of bills in rubber bands, available for my use for incidental expenses, all of which were to be reported at the completion of each assignment.

I had a gun, but it stayed in the hotel. Almost all the time, that’s where I kept it. I am an undercover operative in a dangerous line of work, but understand that I am also an African American male living in the United States of America. There are
going
to be checkpoints. I am
going
to get stopped. Every once in a while I’m going to have to dump out my bag under the watchful eye of some kind of lawman. Sheriff’s deputy, patrol officer, state trooper, what have you. Might just be some shopping-center wage-slave shithead rolling up on his Segway, flashing his costume-shop tin, wanting to prove his cock size to the girl at the sunglasses kiosk.

When that sort of BS happened I had no choice but to submit. I had no badge, no ID. I was true undercover, right down the line. If you saw the way I traveled, if you went through my suitcase or the trunk of my car, you’d think I was a thief, some kind of con man.

Which I was, of course. Really, that’s exactly what I was. I was a thief. I was some kind of con man.

When I got back outside, I found a police car parked right alongside my Altima, just outside the cemetery gate. I stopped and I stared at it for a second: an IMPD black-and-white, with the stenciled letters on the side and the sirens on the roof and the long radio antenna sticking up stiff and proud from the rear. I glanced up and down the street to see if the owner was around, but it was just as quiet as it had been before. Even the sky, still gray and cool, the clouds right where I had left them. Everything same as it was, except for the marked car.

I bounced on my heels a couple times, as if my body were getting ready to take off running. But I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything. I just stood there, looking at the rear bumper of that police vehicle, looking at the gravestones, at the houses down the street, an uneasy feeling gathering and drifting in me like mist.

I was thinking that there had been two cops in the Fountain Diner last night, a black one and a white one, a couple tables over from the priest and me, looking at something on one of their phones, laughing and carrying on. Slowly I approached the parked police vehicle, listening to the distant, indistinct sounds of the city. Someone honking somewhere. A doorway gate rattling up, maybe Steak & Lemonade or The Big & The Tall opening for the day.

I committed the number to memory. Car number 101097. Big city, I was thinking. Big city, full of cops. That’s all.

7.

“What is
this? What is this, now?”

I was standing on the hotel room’s rickety wooden chair so the top of my head grazed the ceiling. I had a halfway decent printer, government-issue and portable, but it worked just fine, and when a file came in it was my practice to print it and lay the sheets out on the hotel bedspread in a grid and study them from above, as though I were doing helicopter surveillance on a city block.

The full file was a goddamn mess, and I was not pleased. I hate mess. I hate unevenness and uncertainty, and that’s what the full file was—it was uneven and uncertain.

It was midafternoon already. The file had appeared on the second server by noon, as promised, and I’d been staring at its ugly sheets since then, scowling at them, drinking water from the cheap hotel-room tumbler, puzzling over the nine pages of closely typed text and illustrations, and thinking the same thing:
What a goddamn mess.

The first three pages of the file concerned Father Barton and his cell of the Underground Airlines, and this section was short on details and long on conjecture, pure search-engine bullshit. Some intern in Bridge’s office had strung it together from old arrest warrants and radical abolition chat rooms: Barton’s birth date, town of origin, known and suspected associates. His close ties to the International Canaan Organization (ICO) and Les Bénévoles Blackburn, his loose ties to the Black Panthers and two other “domestic terror organizations.” His name in connection with a nasty incident twenty-two months ago: a body found in a crate in a Cincinnati FedEx routing center, never delivered, substantially decayed. This corpse was eventually ID’d with a PIN and a service name—a runner from Boone County, Carolina, who’d gotten himself crated and sent to “Saint Catherine’s Cathedral, Indiana.” The FedEx employee who’d facilitated this Hail Mary maneuver, an abbo sympathizer working freelance, was in federal prison but could not be persuaded to admit he’d been acting on Barton’s behest—at least, that is, not according to this useless, messy, bullshit file.

All these first few pages did was tell me what I already knew—that despite his claims of innocence, the parish priest was a prolific smuggler of runaways, directly or indirectly responsible for dozens of illegal manumissions over the last several years. Bridge or Bridge’s intern had “a high degree of certainty” (whatever the fuck that meant) that it was Barton and his group who’d pulled Jackdaw off the plantation and/or gotten him across the Fence. They were equally certain it was Barton’s people shielding the boy till he could be moved across the 49th parallel to permanent freedom.

I scowled. I shifted my weight. My eyes flickered past the hole in my grid, a gap like a vacant lot in a row of homes. That was page 7, and I hadn’t printed it. I wasn’t ready to look at it. Not yet.

The section about Garments of the Greater South, Incorporated, wasn’t much more useful. Nothing that any mope couldn’t have pulled from public records. Total acreage; acreage devoted to production; total annual yield; yield of upland, yield of American pima. Gross annual revenue, gross annual profit, projected future revenue. Every time I read about one of these places, they’d gotten bigger, more modern, larger in scope, and more sophisticated in their operations. This one, this GGSI, boasted of having customers in seventy-two countries around the world for its “durable, high-fineness fibers” and its “premium-rated seeds and seed oils.” GGSI housed the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, with support from the state of Alabama and the American Cotton Council, performing “cutting-edge research on new technologies in the production of pest- and drought-resistant cotton strains.” GGSI had 4,232 Persons Bound to Labor on its sprawling campus—in its fields, in its factories, in its offices.

Four thousand, two hundred and thirty-one,
I thought.
As of Sunday night, 4,231.

There was an aerial photograph of the facility in there, too, a smudged satellite image with every blurry rectangle numbered and labeled. Thirty-two separate structures. I let my finger move from rectangle to rectangle. I traced the lines between the buildings, along the service roads and gravel paths connecting them, fighting off a burst of dread imagination, me down in there, running in slave grays from building to building, from shipping and receiving to facilities maintenance, bare feet slapping the paths.

The population center was five buildings arranged in a semicircle around a courtyard labeled
RECREATION
, five grim rectangles of identical dimensions, arrayed like soldiers. Past the pop center was building 20, labeled
DETENTION
/
RECONDITIONING
, which would have been known in the land of my own youth as the shed.

I paused, just a second, just a half second, my forefinger pressed into building 20 until the blood had left it and it was white as the fingernail.

Some things on the map I could not understand, and I noted them all, put them aside to discuss with Mr. Bridge later on. One building, just behind the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, was unlabeled and blacked out, a redacted rectangle, hidden from the eye of God. And there was a whole set of lines on the map I could not explain, a broken black line making a loop around the periphery of the campus, just inside the line of the fence. Was it an extra line of fencing? A kind of shock collar around the whole place? I didn’t like it, that line. I felt sure it was connected to the PB population. Some new innovation in the control of men.

I wondered. I clenched my jaw. I memorized the map and moved on.

Not to page 7, though. Not yet.

My eye slid over the gap in my grid where page 7 should have been and arrived at the relative safety of page 8, a dry recitation of facts, detailing the events of the escape as presently known. The runner, service name Jackdaw, registry PIN 78312-99, had been roused from the pop center on Sunday morning, marked present at muster (confirmation from multiple sources). He was scanned into stitch house 2 (building 27) at 7:30 a.m. (visual confirmation from two PB overseers and a Free White Worker on the floor). Jackdaw had performed his shift, twelve hours on a stool, trimming stray threads from collars. GGSI ran its PB population on the eight-twelve-three system, in accordance with the Labor Practices Act: eight hours in population for every twelve on the floor, with a mandated job change every three years at the minimum. BLP agents regulated the shifts, checking everyone in and out, enforcing all the rules: breaks to be taken as scheduled; punishments to be humane and proportional to infraction. Violent slavery is against the law.

The file didn’t say how deep Jackdaw was into his rotation, because the file was a goddamn mess.

I put myself in the man’s shoes, imagined the man’s day. Jackdaw perched on a backless stool; Jackdaw at his small steel table with his tiny pair of scissors; Jackdaw, squinting through a magnifying glass, clipping the impossibly small and delicate threads, tidying up the black or red or blue collars, collar after collar, thread upon thread. Jackdaw’s cramped fingers and tired eyes. His pile slowly shrinking until the moment, every half hour or so, when the buzzer shrieked and a warehouse forklift would arrive from receiving, and the PB or the Free White behind the wheel would dump out a new load of collars.

I turned the page.

7:30 p.m.: 78312-99 shift ends, scanned out (multiple sources), returned to Pop Center B

7:47 p.m.: 78312-99 self-reporting “stomach pains.” Responsible on-call party admins 750 mg NSAID in situ

8:17 p.m.: 78312-99 self-reporting stomach pains + vomiting + diarrhea. ROCP transports TM to worker care

I nodded to myself a few times. I closed my eyes. The scenes came in to me as red flashes, summoning themselves from between the words of the file.

The boy in his cot, adrenaline flooding his veins. Jamming on the red button for the trusty: “I’m sick, man; I’m real sick.…” Thirty minutes later, 8:17, calling again: now he’s puking. Now there’s shit on the floor.

8:35 p.m.: 78312-99 admitted to worker care (building 47) for treatment by staff on call

And on and on. PIN 78312-99, taken from his bunk in “heavy restraining garments” (per protocol), moved in a one-man mesh transport containment unit (TCU) to the worker-care facility in the western section of the campus. Brought up via the elevator, gravely ill, removed from the TCU and restrained (per protocol) with zip ties to the examination table, and left in the care of the on-call nurses: Monica Smith, age twenty-four, and Angelina Croth, age twenty-seven. When the guard returns an hour later (protocol, protocol, a small contained universe of protocols), he discovers a horrifying tableau. Blood splattered on the floor of the worker-care unit; blood on the walls; blood on the rear wall in two descending smears, as if the helpless nurses had been slammed into the wall, then left to slide down slowly. The four zip ties that had been used to bind the patient to the bed by the wrist and ankle were snapped, as if by violent strength. Not just one but all the windows in the examination room were shattered, presumably by the wheeled examination cart, which was found upended in the hedges six stories below.