Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  I had delivered this short speech, with the same dull Dirksonian earnestness, ten or twelve times in the past. Most people, you could watch them glaze over the minute you said words like analyst, words like relative desirability. But this girl, this Martha—her eyes were open to the story. She was nodding with fascination, as if I’d announced that I was a contract killer.

  She even asked a follow-up question, asked what makes a location suitable or unsuitable, and I gave her the combination of factors: pedestrian traffic, neighborhood demographics, competition, while Lionel shrieked and giggled with his new friends. I could keep this up all day if she wanted to. My identity was researched: backed up, backstopped, and double-backstopped.

  Martha sighed. “I’ve been to, like—Vincennes. That’s my world travels.” Her eyes were far away. “What’s the best place you’ve ever been?”

  “Best?”

  “Yeah, best. You know. Most interesting.”

  Bell’s Farm. Bell’s Farm was interesting. “Chicago,” I said.

  “Aw! Chicago! I would love to go to Chicago. Have you been there a lot?”

  “I actually—” My throat felt rusty. The room breathed chlorine. How long had it been since I spoke to anyone this way? “I lived there for some time.”

  Lake Shore Drive, the first time, skyscrapers lordly and glass-walled, hovering magisterially above Lake Michigan, reflecting gloriously at one another. My astonishing, terrifying sentinels of liberty.

  “I’ve never been,” Martha said. Her shoes were off. Her toes were in the water. Among her tattoos were twin butterflies, one on each ankle, perfectly symmetrical. I noticed. I notice everything. “You believe that? I’ve lived in Indiana my whole life. I even lived in Gary for six months once. And I never got up there.”

  “That does seem like a shame.”

  “You’re telling me!”

  She closed her eyes, like she was picturing it: picturing herself in Chicago. I pictured myself there, too, eating a hot dog. I pictured Castle. I opened my eyes again.

  “I don’t know,” Martha was saying. “I never got hold of the right weekend, I guess. And then the kid happened, and—well. You don’t have kids, huh?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, they’re great.” She leaned into me, gave me a big stage whisper. “But they fuck everything up.”

  Martha laughed, and her eyes found her boy, goofing around with these white kids, trying to dunk one under, his sleek body spangled with droplets. Another woman had come in, meanwhile, a middle-aged white lady in a black bathing suit, freckle-specked cleavage and sandy hair and big midwestern arms, with a towel wrapped around her waist. She took a look at us, at me and Martha sitting there talking. Then she looked at the pool.

  “Watch this,” Martha said. “Just watch.”

  “What?”

  “Just watch.”

  But I knew; I knew what Martha knew. The woman put her hands on her hips. We knew what was coming. Even Jim Dirkson knew.

  “Marcus? Dylan? Jamie?” The woman waved her kids in, like a lifeguard when there was a shark. “Time for lunch.”

  “What?” squealed one of the white children.

  “We just got here,” said another.

  The boys treaded water, their freckled faces twisted at the injustice. Lionel bobbed beside them. The teen, sitting on the pool steps, wrinkled her nose. “I thought we were gonna swim first.”

  “Nope,” said the mom. “After. Come on. Now.”

  The family climbed out, and the woman toweled them off and hustled them out. Lionel was left alone, treading water, a solitary buoy. Martha raised both middle fingers and pointed them at the lady like guns. We heard the children, their complaining voices growing dimmer as they disappeared down the corridor.

  Lionel went under and then came up, crested the blue surface with a harvest of sparkling droplets across his curls, his mouth a small disappointed line, watching the other kids trudge away.

  “Do we have to go, too?” he said softly.

  “No, sweetness. We’re good. You’re good. I’m just chatting with Mr.—God, I forgot it.”

  “Dirkson,” I said quietly.

  “Right, right. It’s a nice name.”

  “Thanks.” I muttered it. Murmured it. I didn’t know where the name Dirkson came from. It came from Bridge, or from Bridge’s people. It probably came from a Gaithersburg phone book. Martha was still talking, small talk, talking about the Batlisch hearings. “Have you been watching my girl Donatella, by the way? Squaring off up there? She is my hero.”

  “Well, anyway,” I said suddenly and stood up. “Anyway.”

  I was walking fast. Behind me I heard Martha saying “Jim…” and the boy, too, I heard him calling after me from the water’s edge, giving me back the word I gave him—“Controversy!”—but I was gone.

  13.

  Day three of the investigation, and possibilities were fanned out in front of me like playing cards. At some point, Cook would make contact with me again, or maybe I with him. I had his car number, after all, and his badge number. I had his face emblazoned in my mind, a row of white teeth and a wink and a smirk. I had an appointment for tomorrow morning, the first available slot, with the famous Dr. V. And there was Mr. Maris, freedom fighter, soldier, a blip on my screen, a man on the move. I drove with my laptop open on the shotgun seat, so as I cruised the city I could watch him cruising it, too. At some point he’d stop his car, and maybe that would just be that. Maybe Maris was the body man, the baggage handler, and I would go where he was and there would be the boy.

  Get this done. Get out of here. On to some other northern city.

  Whole Wide World Logistics was in an office park off Binford Boulevard in an industrial section of the northeastern part of the city; one in a row of identically unimpressive gray storefronts lined up like prisoners, with smudged plate-glass windows and doors of streaky glass. Across the parking lot, casting its vast shadow over this dingy arrangement, was a massive converted warehouse painted with bright jungle murals and a cheerful cartoon sign: COME AND PLAY IN INDY’S BIGGEST INDOOR TRAMPOLINE PARK.

  I got out of the Altima already working, crossing the lot in a hustle with my face anxious and my body tense. A rush of noise washed over me from behind my back, a laugh and a delighted squeal and the celebratory ding-ding-ding of an arcade game. Someone had opened the door of the trampoline park, let its noise filter out across the parking lot, from a universe away.

  I pushed into Whole Wide World and got right to work, thinking, Here we go, breathing hard, saying “Hey, I’m sorry, hey,” as the door made its little bing-bong noise and eased closed behind me.

  The woman behind the long counter was looking at me, already skeptical. She checked me out, and I checked out the room, the tottering stacks of papers and file folders all along the counter, the window letting in smudged sallow light, the tile floor in need of a sweep and a mop. High on the wall was a row of clocks, Manila and Mumbai, San Francisco and Paris. Distant cities, foreign lands. Under the clocks was the globe logo I’d seen in the picture, purple and green and radiating lines of speed. Closest to the door was a giant dry-erase board cluttered with handwriting, different colors, a crosshatch of numbers, dates, account numbers, and order numbers—and in the lower left-hand corner, a little purple heart and the words DEAR DAY SHIFT: HAVE A GREAT DAY! LOVE, NIGHT SHIFT.

  “Yes?” The day shift was a middle-aged round-cheeked black woman, a glossy magazine open on the counter in front of her.

  “Yeah, hey,” I said, talking quickly, slightly out of breath. “Winston around?”

  “Nope,” she said. “He’s sick.”

  “Sick?”

  “Yeah. He called in.”

  Sick. Could that just be a coincidence—just bad luck? Or had my man Winston smelled something coming?

  This woman, meanwhile, was looking at me, fingering the pages of her magazine, waiting for me to split. I could appreciate that. I was back in Albie’s rumpled gardener’s outfit, s
tained grass-green at the knees, bits of soil clinging to the cuffs. I was putting on a full show here, huffing and puffing, wiping sweat off my brow, drumming my fingers on the counter. “Just my luck, boy. Sick! Boy.”

  “Yes.” She shrugged. Obviously she was supposed to say Can I help you with something, but it was equally obvious that she did not want to help me. “Do you want to leave him a message?”

  “Naw,” I said. “No, thanks.”

  Still I didn’t leave. She cast a longing glance at her magazine. Thin white celebrities in swimsuits, lying like famine victims on a scorched beach. Winston Bibb’s colleague was dark-eyed and plumpish, her hair elaborately woven, her forehead high and gleaming under the fluorescents. Her skin was coffee, light-toned, in the number 120 range. I did this evaluation by reflex, then found that just doing that quick calculation, for some reason, made me sick. My stomach rolled. This here was a free woman, after all, a northern woman, a vested citizen. What right had I to look at her that way, to size her up, mark her down for a Gaithersburg file?

  “Well…” she said. Poor girl: I had given her no choice. “Maybe I can help.”

  “Oh, I don’t know; I hope so. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  At last she closed her magazine and looked straight on at my face, and her expression softened. I saw it happen, and I doubled down. I tilted my head a certain way I had, and I grinned a soft grin of mine, narrowed my eyes in a way that I knew put light in them and crinkles at their corners.

  “My name’s Angie, by the way.” She slipped the magazine under the counter. “Tell me what you need.”

  “Okay, well,” I said, “it’s a little complicated.”

  For Angie I rolled out a long story, one with several twists and turns in it. My boy Sully, see, had gotten me a gig not two dang weeks ago, driving a light truck, just around the city, nothing long-haul, nothing complicated! ’Cause you know I just last year got my CDL, see, and Sully’d hooked me up, man, a nice gig driving for this garden supply place, loading a pickup with different kinds of supplies, you know, mulch, topsoil, garden rocks—I ticked it off on my fingers—all that kinda shit. Sorry, Angie, that kinda stuff—she smiled, waved it off, go on. Part of the gig was to meet up with the long-hauls coming from outta town, help ’em unload at the company warehouse down there off Troy Avenue.

  Angie nodded sure. Her cousin Addy, as it turned out, lived near there. Near Troy Avenue.

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “No kidding.”

  The warehouse address I’d pulled off my mapping software. Everything else was pure spun sugar, a song I was singing, finding the tune as I went. I talked as quickly as I could, gesturing a lot, charging my voice with exasperation. Angie was nodding, magazine forgotten. On the clock above her head, it became midnight in Abu Dhabi.

  “Anyway,” I went on. “Easy gig. Just load it up, drop it off, nothing to it, you know?”

  When I said that I gave Angie a smart look, like, Yeah, right, there’s always more to it, whatever it is, and she returned the look with a smart one of her own, shaking her head, Yeah, right. Angie and me, we were no dummies. We knew the score.

  “Oh, hey, look at that,” I announced suddenly. “Loving those nails.”

  She beamed, held ’em up. This stray compliment was just icing, just a little conversational texture, although I did mean it sincerely. Each fingernail was painted a different color, and together they formed a sparkling ten-finger rainbow across the faded yellow of the countertop. She spread her fingers for further inspection, which I supplied, whistling admiringly before getting to the heart of the matter.

  “But so Monday morning Sully tells me about a job. Truck left the supplier sometime Sunday night, and now I’m supposed to go and do the pickup at a vacant lot on Twelfth Street, maybe two miles past the Speedway, almost out in Hendricks. Paperwork ain’t come in yet, he says, but I better get moving. Two barrels of pit-run gravel, two cubic yards to the barrel, we’re talking, like, a couple tons of this shit—sorry, Angie, there I go again.”

  Angie cased my hand for a wedding ring when she thought I wasn’t looking.

  “But so I pulled up the light truck Monday morning, to this lot, and guess what?”

  “No rocks,” said Angie.

  I slapped the counter. “No rocks! You believe that?”

  She shook her head. She clucked her tongue. “Your boy messed you up.”

  “That’s right.”

  I tugged out my handkerchief and wiped my forehead, laying it on thick for sure at this point, but sometimes this is how you gotta do it. You make yourself an open face of need, you send out need like smoke signals. You let need billow out and fill up the room.

  “Because now the boss,” I said, “Sully’s boss, Mr. Coleman, who is now my boss, he’s saying this is on me. He’s saying I better find out what happened to that shipment or it’s coming out of my check.”

  Angie guffawed, incredulous. “And you haven’t even been paid yet.”

  “That’s right!” I slapped the counter again, both hands this time. “That’s right!”

  Angie smiled. I smiled. We smiled at each other.

  “So I been going crazy, this is four days now,” I said. “All Sully knows is the name of the supplier, and I called them, can’t get a straight answer. Sully does not know the name of the truck company. Between you and me, Angie, my man Sully, we’re not talking about Albert Einstein here, all right?”

  “I’m getting that.”

  “So I been going around to the different shippers, you know, because I gotta figure this out or I ain’t even getting my first paycheck. I’m supposed to be Sherlock Holmes or something. I’m the dang pea-gravel police all a sudden!”

  Angie laughed. I laughed. We laughed with each other.

  “You got a packing slip number?” she said, coming down off the laughter.

  “No.”

  “Client account number?”

  “No. Like I told you.”

  “You got nothing.”

  “Zip.”

  I leaned forward on the counter, let my golden eyes brim with need. I pushed the cap back so she could see my whole sad, handsome face. I was a weary and sorry soul, but nice to look at. I knew exactly how I looked.

  “Well, let’s see,” said Angie, and then, bless her beautiful free heart, she turned to her computer. “So Sunday…” she said and started typing. “What’s the name of the place?”

  “Okay, now, that’s another little problem.”

  Angie reared her head back and clucked, gave me a look: Are you serious? I grinned, sheepish.

  “It’s Garden something,” I said, “I know that. Garden Store? Gardens of—oh, I don’t know. Garden something.”

  “And you know where it’s coming from? Of course you don’t.”

  “Alabama, maybe?”

  Angie gave me a different kind of look, sharp and serious. Angry, even.

  “Not Alabama. Not with us. We do south-south, and we do north-north. We do a little bit of north to south, but we usually contract those out. We do zero south to north. You want south to north you need a specialty shipper to make sure you’re clearing all the regulations and whatnot. Most S-N places, they only do S-N, because the other customers, they do not want to be dealing with that shit.” Angie did not apologize for the word. “Best believe I would not be sitting here shipping south to north.”

  “Oh, right. Right.”

  “Best believe it.”

  Angie clucked. The very idea. Meanwhile, I was processing this. I had assumed, and Bridge had assumed along with me, that Barton had chosen Winston Bibb to blackmail because Whole Wide World could arrange a truck to go all the way—to bring Jackdaw from GGSI up to Indy. But this company didn’t move shipments north out of the Four: Angie was leaving little doubt about that. She was back to the computer, still shaking her head, typing rapidly without breaking her masterpiece fingernails.

  “So look,” she said. “I can just look for shipments starting with Garden, that’
s all. Anything coming out of anywhere, Sunday afternoon, starting with Garden. I can do that.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Oh, baby, there’s a lot of things I can do.”

  Totally deadpan, just the tiniest shadow of a smile, not even looking up from the screen. “Don’t tease me now, Angie,” I said. “Don’t you mess with me.”

  Angie typed a while, then told me to give her just a second more, and I did. I drummed on her counter with my fingertips and flashed her sweet smiles, pulsing with anxiety and flirtatious energy, while inside I thought with a certain indistinct longing of the kids in the indoor trampoline park on the other side of the parking lot, white kids and black kids, hurling themselves up and down, up and down. I pictured them in slow motion, smiling from ear to ear, howling their glee.

  “Here,” said Angie. “Here we go.”

  She turned the screen so I could see, and I slapped the counter, one last time, loud and hard enough to make the dry-erase board shiver on the wall and the little bell above the door ring.

  “Oh, Angie,” I said. “Oh, Angie!”

  She leaned back in her chair.

  “You just tell your man Sully I said not to be jerking you around again.”

  “I surely will, Angie, I surely will.” She beamed. A nice girl like Angie, she’d tangled with a Sully or two in her day. “Hey—listen,” I said at last. “You think you could print this screen out for me?”

  14.

  Only very rarely is there a real plane involved. Every once in a while you’ll hear about some damn fool thing: some billionaire thinks he’s God, hires a daredevil pilot to swoop into the airspace of the Four, land hard and dark in a clear-cut Alabama hollow, try and get back with a hold full of refugees. Never ends well. A plane is big and hard to hide, and defending the sovereign airspace of the several states is an enumerated responsibility of the Air National Guard. Rich boy ends up in court and the pilot in jail. Peebs go back where they came from, if they’re lucky.