Underground Airlines (6 page)

The subsequent fate of the nurses, or their bodies, was not noted. Also not noted was how the perpetrator of this ferocious act had managed subsequently to disappear. A very sick man, two nurses attacked, then poof. Thin air. The invisible man.

I got down off the chair and paced the room a little. I thought about going out onto the balcony and smoking a cigarette, but then I decided not to. I was boxing page 7. It was daring me to look at it, and I was turning away. I was going to have to look at it sooner or later. I skimmed the last part of the file, and it was just the usual paper-chase bullshit. Even that, though, even the basic paperwork, the warrant and the authorization, the judge-signature pages…all that was a mess, too, a mess of potholes and question marks and uncleanlinesses. I recorded these to bring to Bridge’s attention later on. If I was going to do my job, he could do his, for God’s sake.

This was how I fooled myself, you see? That was
one
of the ways I fooled myself.
If I was going to do my job, he could do his!
The righteous, wry refrain of a long-suffering employee, rolling his eyes at the incompetent desk jockey higher up the food chain. I understand why I did it, hard as it is now to admit, hard as it is to reconcile, as shameful.

As if he and I were—what? Coworkers? As though I were just some harried but ultimately steadfast employee, rolling my eyes at the frustrating flaws of my thick-skulled but ultimately lovable employer?

And then at last, after there were no more pages to review, and after I had steeled myself by sitting perfectly still for five minutes, seated with my hands in my lap, looking at nothing, seated in the uncomfortable armchair and staring at the white wall of the hotel room—when I had no other options, I connected the laptop back to my portable printer and printed out page 7.

I laid it on the grid. I climbed back on the chair and observed it from a distance, looking down. And I swayed atop my chair. Somehow I had known. Somehow I had known how hard it would be. How the man’s picture would make me feel.

Granted, all PB file photos are disturbing in one way or another. Typically the subjects are coldly furious, hatred burning from their eyes toward the lens, or else they’re sapped out, dead-eyed, staring straight ahead into nothing. I had seen some smiling, seen the wolfish, defiant grins of those unwilling to be bowed, and I had seen the lunatic, lopsided smiles of those who had slipped into an alternate dimension, who had let go the hand of reality. And who, after all, would deny them that mercy? I swear to God, man, anyone gives you the old “better-off” line, about the natural state of the Person Bound, about slaves actually preferring their lot and the simplicity of a circumscribed life, well, you just dare them to look at a few of those pictures, or a few hundred of them, as I have looked at a few hundred or more.

This man, though, Jackdaw, PIN 78312-99. His picture was something different. Jackdaw was a handsome man, almost perversely handsome, like when you see a movie star playing a tramp or a wastrel and the face is not only so familiar but also so obviously well cared for, and it just doesn’t ring true. He was thin, with slender cheeks and a slender nose, with something almost feminine in the delicacy of his features. In the picture he looked straight ahead, following instructions, but the eyebrows were half raised and the mouth just barely open, as if the camera had caught him about to speak. His eyes had sadness in them, and sensitivity, and some other thing hard to name. Nervousness? Questioning?
There must be some sort of mistake,
the eyes seemed to be saying.
Some lines got crossed here. I’ve ended up in the wrong room.

I tried to correlate this delicate and sensitive face with the horror show described in the full file. The smears of blood, the broken glass. There seemed to be some Incredible Hulk shit going on here; some Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of shit.

He was tattooed, of course, with the letters
GGSI
stylized into a logo: three little letters,
G
and
S
and
I
, safe under the curling roof of a sturdy and paternal capital
G
. This emblem was etched at the root of his neck, just above the low hollow of the collarbone. Beside it were two other boxes, squares of pure black: the logos of previous owners, now covered over.

On my own collarbone was a single black box where there once had been the bell-and-cow logo of my birthplace, long since filled in. This would be a telltale sign of my former status, except that a lot of people marked themselves this way—in some parts of the North, almost every black person did, freeborn and manumitted and runners alike. A mark of solidarity: if we are all former slaves, then none of us is.

I flipped the picture facedown on the bedspread, coward that I was, but the paper was printed on both sides. Jackdaw was on the back of it, too, deaggregated into his stats and identifiers: “PIN 78312-99 (‘Jackdaw’), p.l. unknown, m.l. unknown. Age 23. Height 5’8”, weight 153 lbs (BMI = 23.3).” Shoe size and shirt size, waist and chest. Marks and scars, bumps and moles. A man as a map of his dermatological idiosyncrasies. His pigmentation was given as “late-summer honey, warm tone, #76.”

That was enough. I collected the papers off the bedspread and locked them away. Closed the clamshell lid of the laptop.

I heard car doors slamming beneath my window. The white girl and her black son, making their way across the parking lot, dragging suitcases. The kid, in rumpled jeans and a white sleeveless undershirt, was bent forward at the waist, dragging a giant purple suitcase twice as big as he was, a determined expression like a hunter returning from the kill.

“Boo-boo, come on,” his mom said over her shoulder. “I can take it.”

“I got it, Mama.”

“Yeah, but Lionel, you’re scraping it all up.”

“Mama. I
got
it.”

I turned the woman over a minute, trying to figure if she’d really been planning to stay here tonight or if she’d shown up just to give Mr. Paulsen the stick. Fifty-fifty, I figured, watching Lionel drag the suitcase. I revised my estimation of Lionel’s age—he was seven at least, maybe even eight. He wore scuffed-up sneakers with yellow stars. His Afro was grown out, more than most kids grew it out these days, a gold halo of curls. Jackdaw was waiting for me, back in the room; waiting for me, somewhere in the city. The kid stopped, right outside the door of the hotel, looked over his shoulder, and saw me, and I saw him, and for some reason—whatever reason it is that little kids do anything—he let the handle of the suitcase fall and struck a funny muscleman pose, raising both scrawny brown arms and flexing. I smiled, then the mom turned around and I ducked back into the room. The last thing I needed, with Jackdaw’s tender, baffled, frightened face floating around, stirred up in me, was some kind of awkward conversation—thanks for the fruit, what have you—with the child’s white mother.

The photo page was still on the bed. That description, “late-summer honey,” you know, that sounds like poetry, but it’s not. “Late-summer honey, warm tone, #76” is one of 172 varietals of African American skin tone delineated in the US Marshals Service field guide in a chart called “Pigmentation Taxonomies,” located in chapter 9 (“Identifiers/Descriptors”). I, myself, am “moderate charcoal, brass highlights, #41.”

8.

“Hoo, shit!
What is
this?
”

“Hey, yo—stop, man. Hey, yo, slave. Stop, slave.”

I stopped. I turned, but slowly, slowly. I didn’t turn my whole body: just my head.

“Come on, now, PB, slow it down.” The boy said the letters with singsong double emphasis,
Pee-bee; pee,
then
bee
. There were two of them, two boys hollering from the top step of a wooden porch. I was back down in the same neighborhood, a few blocks from Catholic Promise, in uniform, ready to go. Getting on now toward twilight. The same no-weather weather it had been all day: it was cloudless, or maybe there was just one large cloud, a blanket across the whole of the sky.

“Slavey be rushin’, man.”

“Shit, yeah, he be rushin’. Get back to the field before Massa scan him in late.”

They howled. They bumped fists. Hip-hop music blasted from a portable stereo beside them.

I ground my teeth and fought back a rush of bad, bad memories, my life behind the Fence coming up all together in a red flash: dangling flesh and blood guttering down into the drains. I pushed it down. I choked it back.

“Y’all talkin’ to me?” I said to the boys, very slowly, very mildly, palming my chest.

“Yeah, man.”

“Yeah, son.”

They prowled down from the steps they’d been sitting on, a pack of two, and flanked me. I stood military straight. There was nothing to be concerned about here. They hadn’t seen through me, no way. Not these two. These were just boys, mischievous children of good, hardworking free people, a couple teenagers throwing poses, pants down around their nuts, playing at gangster. There were wind chimes tinkling on that porch behind my tormentors. This was some long-suffering mama’s porch.

But one of them, skinny with bare arms and a head shaped like a peanut, hitched up his T-shirt to show me the handle of a Saturday night special. I stood quietly between them at the foot of the wooden stairs. The rap song on the stereo ended, and another one began, a shouted lyric and a ropy bass line snaking between beats. It was not a song I knew, but I don’t listen to a lot of rap. It’s that power in it—that danger that scares a lot of white people, that’s gotten it banned outright in some places—that power that’s right up there on the surface. It’s too much for me sometimes. It batters at me. It catches me in the rib cage.

“I am afraid you fellas have me mistaken,” I said, still mild, even smiling slightly. “I have never even
been
behind the line.”

“Oh, yeah?” said the other of the two boys. He was larger, dense, thickly muscled arms in a sleeveless Colts T-shirt. He had beady little eyes. Medium-red pigment, somewhere in the mahogany range; his friend, with the peanut head, he was brighter-skinned, almost Caucasian. “I think you lyin’,” said the thick one, but then turned, uncertain, to his boy. “He lyin’, right?”

Peanut Head ignored him, pushed a flat hand into the center of my chest. I didn’t flinch. I kept my cool.

“You a hardworking man, PB?” he demanded. “You got good years in you, yeah? How much you think you worth?”

“Yeah,” said the other. “How much we earn, we call you ass in?”

“Call it
in?
” Peanut Head turned to his friend, incredulous. “Shit, Bernard. We ain’t calling the fucking
tip
line. We call Elron, he call his cousin what’s-his-name, that snatcher. We make some real bread on this fucking runner.”

I contemplated my options. I wondered about Elron, about the cousin. There
are
real snatchers, of course, man takers cruising the back alleys of black neighborhoods and Freedman Towns, looking for men to peel off the fringes of life: parolees, the homeless, sex offenders living low—anyone who can be thrown in an SUV, shorn of papers, and sold to some bargain-hunting middler who’ll turn him around on a no-auction sale. It happens rarely, but it happens. Everything happens.

“Hold ’em,” said the littler one to his friend, but Bernard hesitated. “Grab him, son, go on.”

Bernard cornered me against the porch rail, wide body blocking my exit, and I thought about my move. If it came to it, I’d catch them both before either could draw. Quick, easy martial-arts throat chops to bring them down, slam their heads together to make them still. Drag them down the stairs quickly and put them in the trunk of the Altima. Drive back north toward the hotel, call Bridge from the car. There was a man he used, I knew, to handle these kinds of situations. His name was Ferdinand. He was a Cuban. I didn’t have the number, but I would call Bridge, and Bridge would call Ferdinand.
Unavoidable,
I would say.
Nothing I could do
.

“Go on, Bernard,” said Peanut, one hand on the butt of his gun, the other calling Elron with his phone. “Grab that bitch.”

Bernard raised his hands as if to seize me, but he wasn’t quite sure on this thing, not quite yet. I took the moment. I spoke, slow and low and clear. “I would not do that.”

Bernard’s hands came down. He could hear it, the cold ancient strangeness in my voice, all that cow’s blood and knife heat pulsing in my eyes.

Peanut Head wasn’t there yet. He lowered his phone and turned back to glare at me. Yanked out the gun. Bernard winced. He didn’t like this at all.

“Put it down,” I told him. “Put down the weapon.”

“Or what, slave?”

“I am no runner. I am no slave.”

“What?”

I kept going. I told them the truth.

“But neither am I a man.”

“What?”

“I am a monster in the shape of a man. I am a man with the skin of a snake and the feet of a wolf.”