Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  “Oh, he knows, he knows,” said Cook. He smiled at Maris, who did not smile back. “Father Sunshine’s just being a little particular. You know how he gets.”

  Maris’s eyes narrowed, and his nostrils flared. His dislike for Officer Cook rose off of him like steam. “He does not like to take on new projects until old projects have been completed.”

  “Right,” said Cook. “He don’t like to, but he will. He’s done it before.”

  “I don’t like to, either.”

  “No disrespect, brother, but I could give a shit what you like.”

  Maris glowered. I bore silent witness, thinking, There is no army of abolition. This is what the world has for heroes. Ordinary men, squabbling and prideful. Hassling each other, doing their best, busting the world free. And men like me, behind fake papers and clear-glass spectacles, keeping it chained.

  “This man’s got a woman he loves and nowhere else to turn,” said Cook. “And the other thing is just about put to bed, right?”

  “No, it is not yet…” A minor hesitation as Maris furrowed his brow, decoding the idiom. “It is not put to bed.”

  “How’s he holding up, by the way?” said Cook. “Our boy? What’s the word from Dr. V?”

  I kept my eyes blank while I listened to their conversation with radiological intensity. I noticed “How’s he holding up?” I noticed “Dr. V.” I stood silently just behind Officer Cook, noticing things.

  They were done talking before long, and the three of us stood and waited. Cook leaned on Lincoln’s pillar, but Maris crossed his arms and stood erect, his big forearms bulging. He darted out his tongue and licked his lips, and the tip of his tongue was bright pink, like a bit of fruit. And then at last came Father Barton in civilian drag, no collar, just a black overcoat and blue jeans, slightly hunched forward, floating like a shadow up the white steps.

  Maris descended one step, raised his hand to the priest.

  Barton saw Maris, then he saw Cook.

  Then Barton saw me, stopped walking, and turned and went back down the steps.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Officer Cook.

  Maris hustled down the steps after Father Barton, raising one arm, literally giving Cook and me the back of his hand.

  “Fuck’s sake!” Cook called again, and chased after them both. “Hey—hey, come on. Hey—”

  I was left at the top step, alone with ugly Abraham Lincoln, with his grim hawk nose and gloomy face, forever president-elect, looking out over his world.

  12.

  Back in the hotel room, I’d found a long, spidery crack in the corner behind the rickety desk they give you for writing on, and I sat and stared at that crack for a while, clutching my chest at heart level, holding myself still. I had all these leads, the case was wide open, I had Cook and Maris and their conversation leaky as an old boat, I had Whole Wide World to get to, but here all the old stuff was rising up in me like swamp water, the Old Man and the Franklins and Castle and Mr. Reedy and a swamp full of black red blood, all of it coming up until the mud filled the back of my throat, until I was choking—when I had work to do. Castle, Castle’s big eyes in the darkness—so much fucking work to do.

  With a slow, careful motion I opened the laptop and turned it on. While it was starting up I set up my cassette player and put on a mix tape I had. It wasn’t all MJ on that one, but quite a lot of it was, and the first song was “Ben,” nice and easy, gentle and tender. I let that song work its magic a second, let it cool me out, then I opened my laptop to look for Dr. V.

  There was no shortage of doctors in Indianapolis, it looked like. It looked, actually, like medicine was one of a handful of bright spots in a dark economic landscape. Like a lot of big midwestern cities, this one had spent the second half of the twentieth century stumbling in and out of recessions, trying to make the best of America’s fucked-up, piecemeal economy: all that proud but self-defeating unwillingness to do business with the Hard Four; all the blood and treasure wasted in the Texas War; all the industries, from cars to coal to computers, that had bloomed and then wilted in the face of international boycotts and sanctions (while, funnily enough, the slave states prospered, protected by the economic insulation of permanently deflated labor costs).

  Everything’s changing in the twenty-first century, of course, thanks to emerging global markets—various former Communist states and economically insurgent African nations wanting nothing to do with the European Consensus—but that tide seemed not yet to have hit Indianapolis. The city, as I saw it from that rickety desk in that cheap hotel room, was a place with a lot of former glories: a used-to-be publishing industry, a used-to-be rail hub, a used-to-be powerhouse in coal and steel. What remained were services: a convention trade, a marketing trade, a handful of technology “start-ups”…and health care. Lots and lots of health care. Drug companies and medical device companies, ophthalmology centers and optometry centers and cancer centers. I counted five general hospitals, three private and two public, plus two children’s hospitals and a vast constellation of outpatient clinics.

  I sat at the computer, listening to my music, drilling deeper in. Within the city’s vast population of doctors was a certain number with surnames beginning with the letter V; within that group was a much smaller group, those with V names long enough or unusual enough to be shorthanded down to “Dr. V.”

  I pecked at the keyboard. I typed in instructions.

  At first I excluded the outlying areas—Carmel, Fishers, Zionsville, Plainfield—but then I reincluded them, expanding my lists, narrowing my lists, playing with my lists. I eliminated psychiatrists and psychologists. I eliminated pediatricians and obstetrician-gynecologists. I did not, after some reflection, eliminate dentists and orthodontists. Who could say? I did not know what I was looking for. I was just looking.

  And meanwhile I had my map application open and was keeping one eye on it, watching a blue blip move block by block through the city. That was Mr. Maris, still carrying my butterfly knife in his pocket. Embedded in the handle of the knife was a tidy little GPS tracking unit, throwing up location signals to some satellite, which was then throwing them back down to me.

  I watched Mr. Maris drive south on Meridian Street away from Abraham the Martyr, then cut right on West South Street, then left on Capitol.

  Planting the bug on Maris was an old trick. An easy one. I had done four months of training after they picked me up, in a desert in Arizona, before they sent me out on my first file. I had learned picks and rakes, footprints and fingerprints, fighting and following, database infiltration, encryption and de-encryption.

  And then after all that, a doctor with no name and a cold room, two unconscious hours. The hook, the anchor, the leash.

  It was funny to think about. Not that funny. Me tracking Maris, Gaithersburg tracking me.

  MJ was doing “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool,” and I took that as a good sign. I just listened to that a second, just that, shoo-bop, shoo-bop, swelling strings in the chorus. After that there was a James Brown song, which made me smile—they didn’t play a lot of James on the radio. He’d been the leader of one of those god-awful “family bands” that toured the North in the fifties and sixties, talented slaves brought north to sing to sold-out northern audiences, living proof of how happy everybody was down there. But James defected—snuck out of his Buffalo hotel room and turned up in Quebec City, making beautiful music and touring the world, except for America.

  “Just look at me!” he used to crow from European concert stages, palming his pompadour, braggadocious in his spangled cape and boots. “Look at what they robbin’ themselves of!”

  Sort of thing used to happen all the time. There was an Olympic gold medalist from Alabama, boy named Jesse Owens, who took a mess of world records in Berlin in 1936 and then defected to the Soviet Union. For the next half century he was one of the evil empire’s prize possessions, turning up in Pravda every once in a while to denounce degenerate slave-state capitalism.

  When I felt read
y, I got back into it, making notes on Maris’s route, jotting it all down, toggling back and forth between his journey and my slow search-driven encircling of the mysterious Dr. V.

  After I was satisfied with my initial list of doctors, I closed out the pages full of hospitals and clinics and started opening the donor rolls of every abolitionist organization active in the city and state. There were local organizations called Total Freedom Now! (pure abolitionist) and Indy FreedomWorks (gradualist); there was a central Indiana chapter of the Fire Bell Society, and there was the Indianapolis chapter of the Black Panthers. The membership rolls and the donor lists were all public information, except for those of the Panthers, which was officially classified as a terrorist organization, but I got their names by hacking the IMPD.

  Maris, meanwhile, had gotten on the highway. He moved south by southeast on 465, tracing the city’s outskirts. While I watched him I rehearsed his distinctive African cadences in my mind, replayed what he had said to Cook about the “old business.” No, it is not yet…it is not yet put to bed.

  Seized by an impulse, I said the words out loud, drew myself up to stand at full height, as Maris did, making my face solemn, as he had. “No, it is not yet…” I said to myself, to the computer, to the cracks in the wall. “No, it is not yet put to bed.”

  Then I eased back down into the chair, relaxed my limbs, grinned to show my teeth. What had Cook said, Officer Cook, complicated Cook? How is he adjusting to his freedom? I said, and what was the officer’s reply? I spoke it in his smooth voice: “He’s a special case, that one. A special kind of kid.”

  Then I was myself again. As much myself as I ever was. I popped out of the chair, pulled out the full-file pages from their locked box, and read again my favorite part, my least favorite part, the baffling run of words: Known to have intended to remove himself to Indianapolis.

  There was something in all of it. What was it? Something buried in all those bits and scraps, scratching to get out.

  I did the next piece. Cross-referenced names with names, circled some, and crossed out the others. When I was done I had a list of four complicated surnames written carefully in pencil on the hotel notepad: Vasilevsky, Vorshonsky, Venezia-Karbach, and Vishaparatham. Ten minutes later I was reading a magazine profile, two years old, from a special issue of Indianapolis Monthly celebrating “Indy’s Unsung Heroes,” about a lauded general practitioner who had closed a thriving suburban practice to open a storefront clinic in Haughville, a historic working-class African American neighborhood north of Freedman Town. This doctor accepted all health plans and dedicated one-third of her appointment slots to the uninsured.

  “Health care,” declared Dr. Elizabeta Venezia-Karbach in the article, “is a basic human right.”

  “All right,” I said, toggling back over to my other screen. “All right, all right.”

  Mr. Maris, it seemed, was still on the move. His blue dot had come off the highway on the near east side. I watched him cruise 42nd Street, past the fairgrounds, then turn right to come south on Keystone.

  I was still watching him while the phone rang, but then when Dr. Venezia-Karbach’s receptionist answered I stood up and found my voice, said, “Yes, ma’am, how are you, sweetheart?” A little growly and weary, a cough in the back of my throat, a man in need of a doctor. My name, I said, was Kenny Morton—sliding open the balcony doors now, staring again at the parking lot—and yes, I would be a new patient, that’s right, ma’am, and no, ma’am, I had no health insurance at this time, and I had to confess I was of limited means, but if there was some way I could—yes, tomorrow morning would be fine—Saturday, right, I know, that’ll do for me just fine, and oh, my, thank you so much, that’s just wonderful, ma’am, and I really do appreciate it so much, and thank you, and while I turned in this small, workmanlike performance, leaning into the balcony threshold, growling over the phone, I could see the memories coming for me, swelling over the horizon, charging across the parking lot between the cars like bloody horses.

  “There he is. Mystery man. My savior.”

  She was out of her jean jacket, and she’d changed into some sort of short-sleeved dress, but the Doc Martens were still on. She had winding tattoos, dark ink on the strawberry flesh of her calves: summer flowers, peonies and roses. Her boy was in a bathing suit, with a Spider-Man towel slung over his shoulder. The white girl fell into step beside me, walking down the second-floor hallway, with the boy trailing behind.

  “I’m Martha, by the way.”

  “How do you do? I’m Jim Dirkson.”

  “Oh, okay, Jim Dirkson. Sorry. I didn’t know we were doing last names.” She was in her late twenties, early thirties, but she was tiny and laughed like a teenager, big and unself-conscious. “Martha Flowers. And this here is Lionel, like the trains.”

  “Mama!” The kid scowled and bumped into his mom, accidentally on purpose. “Like the lion.”

  Martha rolled her eyes. “Do you know that cartoon? Lionel the Lion? It’s terrible.”

  “It’s—no, it’s not. Mama!” said Lionel. “It’s badass.”

  “Whoa! Hey!” Martha, playfully shocked, knocking her son gently on his shoulder. “Don’t say badass.”

  “You say it!”

  “I’m allowed to say it.”

  I smiled at all this, the teasing and admonishment, the affectionate banter. I had learned about the love between parents and children the way I had learned so many other things, by observation. By skulking, by paying attention through what I came to call in retrospect my shadow years: years out of slavery but not yet in civilization. Saving up to buy solid papers, living underground. In Naperville in a church basement; under a train bridge on Chicago’s west side. I’d spend whole days in the reading room of the big library downtown, a shadow in the corner; reading the great slave narratives, reading Ellison, Baldwin, Wright. Learning my own history. I read Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, the one that had, legendarily, been smuggled page by page out of a Florida cane plantation two decades before that state went free.

  Slowly drinking water in coffee shops, perching on corners, watching people interact, learning free American language. The way people laughed when they were allowed to laugh out loud. Ha ha ha, I said to myself on the basement floor in the middle of the night. Ha ha ha.

  The elevator door binged. “Well, come on, Jim Dirkson,” said Martha. “Come on down to the pool and chat a minute.”

  It wasn’t much of a pool they had down there, fifty square feet, maybe, a shallow end and a deep end and no diving board or anything. A list of rules, painted on a wooden sign. No diving. No horseplay. No lifeguard on duty. At the far end of the room was a glass wall revealing the “fitness center”—a couple treadmills and a bowl of fruit and a wall-mounted TV set to CNN.

  Lionel dropped his towel and leaped unceremoniously into the pool, cannonballing in, disappearing and then splashing back up a second later, sputtering and grinning, water dewdropping on his brow.

  “Hoo, my God,” he shouted. “It’s so cold. Mama, you gotta come in. It’s so cold.”

  “No way.”

  “Come on.”

  “I didn’t even wear a suit.”

  Lionel blew her a raspberry and wheeled back under the surface, flashed around, a streak beneath the chlorine blue. A second later his feet jutted up from the surface and kicked back and forth.

  “Kid’s amazing,” said Martha softly, then, abruptly, “Thanks for the food yesterday morning, by the way. Very decent of you. Extremely human.”

  I shrugged. “How was the job fair?”

  “Great.” She pushed at her hair. “Really great. Really, really, really great.” She smiled sardonically, but her eyes were anxious and scared, staring into some kind of bad future. “It was the sort of thing, the first day is all applications, meeting the people, then people call you back on the second day if they want you to come in and interview.” I remembered the stack of paperwork on her lap, dog-eared photocopies, ballpoint pen smearing everywhere. “So, you
know, anyway,” she said. “Here I am at the pool.”

  Well. I had my own thing going. I had my own problems.

  A clutch of new kids came in, white kids, shrieking. A girl maybe thirteen plus two twin brothers just about Lionel’s age, the girl with freckles and the boys with flat midwestern crew cuts. They all splashed on in there, and the boys immediately got into some kind of tussle with Lionel, the way kids that age do, making themselves into animals, sliding around each other, surfacing on each other’s shoulders.

  “So what’s your story?” Martha asked me, and I lingered, polite as Dirkson was polite. “Business or pleasure? I’m going to guess business.”

  “Why do you guess that?”

  “Oh, well, you know. A gentleman traveling alone? In Indianapolis? It’s a nice town, but it’s not, like, I don’t know.” She laughed. “Cancun. Right?”

  “Right.” I smiled. “Yes. I travel quite a bit for business.”

  As soon as I said it, I wished I had held my tongue. It was a foolish thing to say. Unnecessary. Martha was interested, too. “Cool,” she said. “God. I wish I traveled a lot. What do you do? Why are you here?”

  “I work for a company called Sulawesi Digital as a site analyst.” She blinked. I smiled. “It’s a cellular service provider. Based in Indonesia.”

  “What was it? Sula—what was it?”

  “Right, well”—I smiled, apologetic site-analyst smile—“see, that’s what we’re working on changing. The company’s wanting to start opening some American locations. Raise brand awareness. So I’ve been traveling to some cities, investigating available retail properties in storefronts and shopping centers, and then what I’ll do is submit an analysis to Jakarta as to the relative desirability of each potential location.”