Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  No, man—Underground Airlines is a figure of speech: it’s the root of a grand, extended metaphor, “pilots” and “stewards” and “baggage handlers” and “gate agents.” Connecting flights and airport security. The Airlines flies on the ground, in package trucks and unmarked vans and stolen tractor-trailers. It flies in the illicit adjustment of numbers on packing slips, in the suborning of plantation guards and the bribing of border security agents, in the small arts of persuasion: by threat or cashier’s check or blow job. The Airlines is orders placed by imaginary corporations for unneeded items to be shipped to such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time.

  Once, for a month or more, I was Jean-Claude Cisse, a.k.a. Café au Lait, a Montreal-born mulatto and a member of a French-Canadian biker gang called Les Bénévoles Blackburn, which specializes in transporting runaways from their temporary and dangerous quarters in northern cities to la vraie liberté in Côte Saint-Luc. Among that crew was a woman named Cherie, who had herself escaped from Louisiana and then dedicated her adult life to the Cause. Most of their work, Cherie liked to say, was done at a desk. Forget the glory of the predawn raid. Smashing in the face of the system and pulling free the enslaved was mostly a matter of paperwork. The opening of bank accounts, the forging of documents. The creation of routes and backup routes and backups to the backups. “La liberté,” Cherie was fond of saying, in that charming Montreal accent of hers, “est une question de logistique.” Freedom is a matter of logistics.

  The other thing to remember, of course, is that most people get no help at all. I sure didn’t, oh, no: it was just me and Castle, charging, desperate, through the country darkness, and that’s how it is for most folks who dare to run—no help from no Airlines, no help from no one. They just go, man, after years of planning or in the heat of a sudden moment they go, hurl their skinny bodies over a cyclone fence or plunge themselves into a moat, break free of a chain line or a guard’s hard grip and run, brother, run, sister, run along back roads and through forests. No planes and no cars or trucks, either. Just brave souls darting across open fields and wading in and out of rivers and stumbling along deer paths through dark woods. Find the star and follow it, as runners have done all the way back to the days of Old Slavery.

  I was turning all this over. I was turning over the whole world. I was sitting in a restaurant called Hamburger Stand, a chain place they got all over Indianapolis, waiting for my waitress to bring me coffee. I was staring with glass eyes through the window, looking at the restaurant parking lot, where a grimy old white dude in a knitted cap was slumped against the curb, dressed in black garbage bags, with another black garbage bag draped across his body like a blanket. Nothing I hadn’t seen a thousand times before—every poor city, every northern city—but it hit me this time as bizarre, somehow, a human body just lying there like that, people stepping past him on their way to Keystone Avenue as though he were a corpse.

  The lady brought me my coffee, and I asked her for a hamburger, then I turned my eyes down to the document that had come off Angie’s printer. Row 6 showed a delivery leaving from Gardens of Paradise in Clayton, Ohio, and Angie had highlighted it in bright pink, because that’s the shipment poor rattled Albie was after. But me, down there inside Albie’s skin—my interest was in row 7, the next one down in the alphabetical list: the shipment that had left Garments of the Greater South, Incorporated, in Pine Woods, Alabama, at 8:49 on Sunday night.

  According to the full file, Jackdaw had fetched up in worker care at 8:35. And now here was a truck, put into motion by Winston Bibb, to rattle out of the gates of shipping and receiving at 8:49.

  I traced the row from left to right; I moved my finger slowly across it, like a man reading a Bible verse, memorized the numbers and the facts the numbers represented, and then I dragged my finger back over and did it again. The shipment bore internal identifier number 49-09-5442. The hauling vehicle was a forty-five-foot semitrailer pulled by a midroof tractor unit, VIN number 6ZRFL1622CJ287765. Behind the wheel was driver number HR59.

  The truck was bound for Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport laden with “4,200 raw bolts for export” along with “six tons misc. supply/waste” and twenty-six pallets of cotton T-shirts: forty boxes to the pallet, seventy-five shirts to a box.

  That made 78,000 T-shirts, plus—I was now sure, I was pretty goddamn sure—one brave, scared, sick, and desperate man. One human being tacked in there, among all the numbers. La liberté est une question de logistique.

  I looked at the sidewalk again, the old man shifting around, people walking past, in and out of the parking lot. Wherever I looked in this city, all I saw was parking lots. That’s what it felt like, anyway. Bleached sidewalks and a grim, sunless horizon. Something about this job was washing out the world. Taking the weather out of the sky.

  Jackdaw left GGSI at 8:49 on a tractor-trailer bound for Hartsfield airport. Pine Woods to Hartsfield. South to south.

  Georgia abolished slavery by statute in the year 1944, same as Kentucky. It was President Truman’s great victory, achieved by dangling the prize of wartime contracts, a huge economic incentive for states to go free. But the Georgia legislature, in its wisdom, and under pressure from Alabama and the newly united state of Carolina, had kept its airport quasi-southern—half slave and half free. The same with the Red Highway—US Highway 20—like an open wound, east to west across the state, keeping its neighbors connected to its airport and to the international market for cotton and cattle and corn.

  According to the very last column on the chart, all those cotton T-shirts were bound, ultimately, for Shanghai Pudong International Airport.

  But Jackdaw hadn’t been flown to China, had he? He was here. He was known to have intended to remove himself to Indianapolis. Right?

  When the girl brought my hamburger, I murmured “Thank you” and ate it slowly, purposefully, enjoying each bite as I had trained myself to enjoy such things. I chewed and swallowed and cleaned my chin with my napkin, not thinking about the smells and sights of my childhood, imagining Jackdaw as a blue dot moving east and not as a man, folded up inside a forty-five-foot trailer, dying from having to piss, his delicate face wilting and sweat-soaked, his eyes big in the darkness of whatever box or pallet he was crated up in. What was he thinking about? Did he know how he was going to get from there to here? Had Barton’s proxies briefed him on the plan, or had he simply cast his lot with strangers? Was he just waiting to find out what would happen to him, as I was waiting to find out now?

  When I was done with the burger I pushed away my plate. I kept on staring at the printout from Whole Wide World, but all that was left to be discovered was on the back, where Angie had drawn a smiley face and her phone number in pink highlighter.

  In the car I turned on my laptop and saw right away that Mr. Maris was no longer driving around. The dot, which had been making Pac-Man patterns around the map of the city, had now settled on 30th Street, a mile and a half past Keystone. Maybe Maris had realized he was still carrying around old Jim’s butterfly knife and tossed the thing out the window—or maybe he was there now with Jackdaw the slave, and all my searching and cross-checking were moot, and all I had to do was go and scoop him up.

  15.

  When I got there, though, there was no sign of Mr. Maris.

  I got out of the Altima at the address the map had given me, in yet another gray parking lot on East 30th Street. This lot was little more than a widening of the road shoulder—an oval of rough gravel with parking spaces haphazardly painted on.

  The businesses arranged around the lot, all apparently part of the same fiefdom, were of a ramshackle, third-world quality. There was Slim’s Market, an unpainted small building, wide and low as a log cabin, the front door propped open with a phone book, a few rows of fruit and vegetable bins haphazardly arrayed outside on staggered wooden platforms. Opposite the market was Slim’s Garage, an auto-body shop with its doorway nearly obscured by a half dozen teetering columns of tires. And then there was a rickety unsanded
picnic table, and behind the picnic table a flimsy copper archway, hammered into the dirt like a croquet wicket at the head of a rough path winding down into the woods. Following this path, said the sign, would take you to Slim’s Trailer Court.

  No Maris, no sign of Maris. No sign of anyone. Mine was the only car in the lot. I opened the shotgun door and checked my laptop again. Lo and behold, the dot had disappeared, and no new location was being shown. Mr. Maris had dropped clean off the map.

  “Goddamn it,” I said out loud. I looked around. “Fuck.”

  A single bird, small and dark-winged, lit on the copper arch and then flitted away again.

  I walked a few paces on the dirt path, down toward the trailer park, until I could make out the shapes of the parked RVs and Winnebagos, shadowy under the bare trees. There were a dozen or more down there, ringed around a bank of water hookups. Most were up on concrete blocks, the wheels long gone, trailer homes more home than trailer. The whole scene had a quiet, dirty beauty: the pockmarked gravel lane between these tin-can houses, the cheap clothes hung up to air-dry in the chill air. Behind the cluster of RVs was a leaky twist of muddy brown water flowing tiredly out of a drainage pipe that emerged from a shallow hill. More than one of the campers was festooned with a red pennant, and these identical fluttering flags had numbers on them—I looked closer, peered in the dusk gloom. Four red numbers on a white background: 1819.

  A dog barked inside one of the trailers; barked, then growled. Then a squat white lady in sweats came out, her hair in curlers, talking on her phone. She saw me, squinted in confusion a minute, then went back inside. The screen door slammed behind her.

  I tried to imagine Mr. Maris inside one of those tin cans, sitting motionless in the darkness, watching me through slatted blinds with his bright golden eyes. I imagined Jackdaw under a bed; I pictured him in the narrow space between a refrigerator and a wall. I would have to go from house to house, trailer to trailer, knocking on doors or climbing in windows.

  It was getting along toward twilight, and I squinted in the growing darkness at the bank of parked vehicles. The sky was dense, low, heavy with rain that wasn’t yet ready to come down.

  Not right. Something wasn’t right. I turned and walked back up the lane.

  “You need something?”

  “Let me guess,” I said, raising a hand to the man now standing at the door of the market. “You’re Slim.”

  He didn’t answer. He watched me as I walked over. Slim had a long, droopy brown mustache, and his eyes were droopy, too, coming down at the corners like he was born sleeping and never quite woke up. Slim bent his head slightly and spat. My shoe heels crunched on the gravel.

  “I asked what you needed, boy.”

  I flinched and hid my flinching. I felt my mouth turning up into a scowl, and I ordered it not to do that. The little one-syllable insult, boy, it worked as it always did, like a little chunk of gravel, a pointy rock of disgust and contempt.

  I smiled. God forgive me, I did. The word hit the side of my face, and I smiled. I was working. “Not meaning to bother you, sir,” I said. “I’m just looking for a friend of mine.”

  “I ain’t seen him,” said Slim immediately. Before I could answer there was a short, blaring shriek, like two pieces of sheet metal scraping together, from inside the body shop behind me. Slim didn’t turn his head, so I didn’t, either.

  “Due respect, sir,” I said, nice and calm, “but how do you know you haven’t seen him? Can I tell you what he looks like?”

  “Due respect,” he said, “does he look like you?”

  I required of my smile that it widen. That it broaden and harden and glaze, become a smile that was like a shield. The answer to the question was no, of course. Mr. Maris wasn’t even close to looking like me. Maris was built like a boxer, and he had metallic skin and distinctly African features, a long nose and wide nostrils, bright golden eyes. He didn’t look shit like me.

  “If you’re asking is he black, then yes. He’s black.”

  “Like I said. I ain’t seen him.”

  “You mind if I come in the store a minute, have a look around?”

  “We’re closed.”

  My smile was having trouble. I could feel it flickering.

  “It’ll just take a second,” I said. “I’d just like to have a quick look. This friend of mine, see, I’m trying to find him. He said he was coming down here.”

  “Did you not hear the man?” I turned around and saw a dump truck in mechanic’s overalls. “He said git.”

  The man who’d come out of the garage to join us was burly and bearded, with streaks and smears of oil on his chest and fat stomach. Slim sniffed and spat again, while the big fella snorted. They could have been a goddamn vaudeville team, these two, except that the big one was holding not a microphone but a long rifle. He had it clutched across his chest, minuteman style. My smile gave up. It extinguished. Fuck it.

  “I don’t know what I’ve done to upset you fellas,” I said. “But I don’t want any trouble.”

  “He don’t want any trouble,” said the mechanic over my shoulder to Slim, who harrumphed and stroked his mustache. I turned at the sound of gravel, as fat boy took a step forward and brandished the rifle.

  I steeled my jaw. Jim Dirkson wasn’t going to cut it, and I found inside myself a hard man, a stone-cold antihero from one of those 1970s black revenge pictures, from Jim Blackmon’s Slaveland Vengeance or one of its many sequels.

  “Drop the weapon, shitheel,” I said. My voice was down half an octave. I was cold and keen-eyed and hard in my shell.

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll wrap it around your fat white neck.”

  This was dialogue, I was doing lines, but goddamn if I didn’t mean it. This bearded sack of crap dropped into some kind of firing-range stance, but man, I was just one step too close and he didn’t know what I was and I had gravel in my hand and I was flinging it in his piggy eyes and then I was leaping at him, one big panther leap. I had him by the hair and the gun on the ground and I slapped him with my big open hand—once, twice, then three times, slapped his face back and forth like a cruel father hitting his boy because he hates himself.

  The mechanic was down on the ground, his hands feebly defending himself against my superior strength, the rifle at his feet in the gravel. I heard movement on the porch and without turning, still holding fat boy, I said: “Stay where you are, Slim.”

  “Hey,” said the mechanic, and I kicked him in the face and his mouth blew open with blood and he turned and started to curl away. I grabbed the gun and wheeled around and was glad to see Slim rooted to his place as instructed. A drool of tobacco spit ran from the corner of his mouth. I came at him now with the rifle, one step, two steps.

  “You seen my friend?”

  “I seen no black men.”

  I fired. The glass behind Slim shattered, and the whole door jumped and shuddered in the jamb. Slim’s old coyote face convulsed with fear. It felt good; it all felt good. I took another step forward and raised the muzzle to his eyes.

  “You seen him?”

  “No.” He kept his hands where I could see them, raised them slowly and laced his fingers behind his head, like a man who’d been trained. The interrogation was over. I believed him. He hadn’t seen Maris or anybody else. But I—I don’t know. I wasn’t done.

  “You military, Slim?”

  “What?”

  “Were you in the army?”

  “Yes.”

  “You see action?”

  “Yes. In the gulf. In Texas.”

  “Oh, yeah? What side?”

  He stopped talking. He stared at me. “America. Our side.”

  “So what were you fighting for?” His eyes went down to the gun, then back to my face; my face was set and cruel. He knew where I was going. So did I. I couldn’t stop. “I said, what were you fighting for, Slim?”

  “For—for America. For the Union.”

  “Yeah, but Texas didn’t want none of the Union. Ri
ght? They didn’t want nothing to do with it. With us. With slavery. They just wanted to be done with it. Remember?” He tried to move his head, but I had the gun pressed between his eyes, really grinding in hard between his eyes. “But you went and fought to keep the Union together.”

  “I got drafted.”

  “Coulda run. Plenty ran. They still up there.”

  “I was fighting for my country.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “All right.”

  He closed his eyes. He thought I was gonna kill him right there. I was glad. I was tight with rage. My rib cage was a fist clenched around my heart. The sun had gone down. There were no lights in the parking lot. The moon was coming up, pale and disinterested.

  “What were you fighting for, Slim?”

  He looked down. Mustache drooping down. He whispered. “Slavery.”

  I shot him in the knee. While he wailed, while the fat one moaned, I wiped my prints off the rifle with the sleeve of my shirt and threw it in the dirt and drove away.

  16.

  I drove away trembling.

  What the hell was I doing?

  What did I care?

  Texas was the Lone Star miracle, the success story of early-twentieth-century activist abolitionism: in an orchestrated campaign, migrant manumissionists from all over the country flooded in, along with tens of thousands of Catholic-abolitionist Mexicans, drawn by the come one, come all immigration policy shortsightedly enacted by a state eager for oil-field hands. Hence the miracle, el milagro: the largest state in the union, free by statute in 1939. It wasn’t till twenty-five years later, under the first Mexican-American governor in that or any other state, that they went further, declared their intention to secede, and Washington said, the fuck you will. There was a Texan in the White House by then, one who’d been a schoolteacher, who’d had some of these Mexican sumbitches in his classroom. He took it personally. These folks needs to read their history books, said President Johnson. Secession is illegal under the Constitution—and by the way, that’s American oil under all that sand.