Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  Eleven years of fighting. Battleships in the Gulf of Mexico, swift boats on the Rio Grande. Mexican partisans fighting hicks like Slim on the shores of Corpus Christi.

  Not my war. A useless, nasty war, and nothing to do with me.

  Eleven years of grueling, bitter combat, ending in nothing. Uneasy detente. Contested status. They call themselves the Republic of Texas, but we keep their star on our flag. We created the Special Economic Zone to protect our oil interests in the Gulf of Mexico, and they formed the Gulf Irregulars to protect theirs. Status quo antebellum.

  I was shaking. My arms were shaking. I drove back slowly to the hotel, my hands at ten and two, not even putting in a tape. Eyes on the road, deep breaths, hoping and praying for no checkpoints. I didn’t know what I would do.

  Putting a bullet in a man’s leg. Leaving carnage behind me. In the hotel parking lot I sat in the car a minute or more, hands on my knees, trying to get my head right. Work your case, I said to myself. Solve your goddamn case.

  Someone was on the phone in the horseshoe driveway of the Capital City Crossroads. There was a copse of tall hedges to the right side of the door, out of range of the streetlights, and someone was hidden by one of them, talking loudly and with emotion into a cellular phone.

  I could hear this private conversation as I came across the parking lot, and my instinct was to veer to the right, keep my head down, get to my room as soon as I could. It was 9:20. I had half an hour until Bridge called, and I wanted that time. I needed it. I needed to sit in the room with my hands on the desk until my body quit the shivering it had started up with. The tension of the confrontation at Slim’s—the buck and kick of the firearm. I wanted time for all of it to sluice out of me and leave me empty.

  “No, but that’s just not—” said the voice. It was Martha. My white friend from the breakfast area, from the pool. “That makes it very difficult for me to—no—wait, what? No. Wait…”

  I had walked past her. She had not seen me. I stopped at the threshold of the building, and the automatic door sensed my approach and whooshed open.

  “Fuck!” Martha shouted. She had not seen me. “God fucking damn it.”

  I stepped back, let the door whoosh closed again. No. Fuck this. Come on. I stepped forward, and the door whooshed open, then back again. Whoosh.

  “You okay?” I said, and she smiled, stepping out from behind the hedges.

  “Well, that’s—good question.” She stuffed the phone in her pocket. She was wearing the same jean jacket, the same jeans. She did not look as if she had slept. She twisted her small mouth into a wry grimace. “Are you okay? That’s the million-dollar question, right? My mother always told me to watch out. For that question, I mean. Because, like, are you or aren’t you, right? It’s not usually one or the other, you know?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sure. That makes sense.”

  “But no. Not really.” She tugged the phone out again and looked at it, and I studied the side of her face. I had been thinking of her as a girl, a sassy kid who’d become a mother much too early. Now—sighing, frustrated, anxious, in the moonlight outside the hotel—she looked like what she probably was: a woman in the first years of her thirties, with a few worry lines at the corners of her mouth, with some of life’s grief already in her eyes.

  “Everything all right with your boy?”

  “Lionel, remember? Like the train.”

  I remembered. I remember everything. “Oh, yes, of course. Lionel.”

  A long, rolling shudder passed through me, and I held myself still till it was gone. I had put a bullet in that man without thinking. Without hesitation or regret. What were you fighting for? What was I doing?

  “The kid is fine.” She gestured inside. “Sleeping like the proverbial…whatever. Do you have kids, Jim?”

  “Nope,” I said. “Nope. I never went down that route somehow. Never went down that road.”

  “Right. I asked you that. Your traveling.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, that’s just it.”

  The door whooshed, and a couple came out, a man and a woman, arm in arm, whispering together. The man lifted his keys, and we heard the bloop-bloop of a car door unlocking somewhere out in the darkness of the lot.

  When I looked back at Martha, her head was tilted back, and she was studying the stars.

  “I’m just trying hard. You know? Real hard.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “Trying so hard.”

  I saw myself again an hour earlier at Slim’s, wielding that rifle like a lightning bolt. That was a different person who had done all that. Now, this, here—this was Jim Dirkson, speaking softly to a distressed stranger in the parking lot of a hotel. Jim, kind and calm, lending a comforting presence, and me underneath, searching, hunting, pushing. Doing my thing.

  “I think you said…” I began, and when she jumped I said, “Sorry, sorry. But I think you said you were from here originally. Like, you grew up here?”

  “I’m from Indiana. Not Indy. My sister lives up here, though. Sometimes we come and visit.”

  “But not this time.”

  “No. This time it’s—” She held up the phone. “Business.”

  “All right. Well, I have a question for you. It’s just a number: 1819,” I said. “A year, I’m guessing. Does the year 1819 have any kind of special meaning around here?”

  Martha’s expression changed, sharply, completely. She dropped her eyes down to the gravel of the lot, then she looked back up, unsmiling, and spoke in a sad hush. “Where did you see that number?”

  “Oh…” I said. “You know…”

  It wasn’t right, dragging my problems in front of this innocent bystander, who clearly had problems of her own. I was pretty sure I already knew the goddamn answer anyway.

  “Just something I spotted hung up outside somebody’s house.”

  “Hung up how?”

  “On a flag. A number of ’em, actually. Like pennants. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine.” Something like anger was choking Martha’s face. “Because it just gets into everything.”

  “What does?”

  “It. All this shit.”

  “What shit?”

  Martha shook her head. “Where did you see them? Downtown? Southside?”

  “East side.” All the questions were making me a little uneasy. I felt the need to reinforce my ID, duck under my cover for a moment. “I was at a potential retail location, kind of poking around the area.”

  “Oh, all right,” she said. “I see.”

  “You know what?” I said, regretting the whole line. It was 9:30. Bridge would be calling in twenty minutes. “Don’t worry about it. The business with the number. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  “No,” she said. “No, you’re fine.” She gave her head a little shake, took a deep breath, preparing to bear up to unpleasantness. “It’s the year before…what’s his name?” She squeezed shut her eyes, remembering hard, then popped them back open. “Lasselle. The Indiana Supreme Court, 1820.” She closed her eyes again. She looked older with her eyes closed. “‘The framers of our Constitution intended a total and entire prohibition of slavery in this State.’ So 1820 is the year Indiana was officially and fully free.”

  I smiled sadly. “Gotcha.”

  “So 1819, for these dickwads, that’s the good old days. See?”

  “I see.”

  She looked at me head-on, tears standing in her eyes. The people with the flags were reversionists—people who as a matter of politics or personal taste regretted that their state had ever adopted its constitution and thereby abolished the practice of slavery. And it made Slim’s Trailer Court, Slim’s Market, and Slim’s Garage the unlikeliest possible place for Mr. Maris to have landed, the unlikeliest possible place for Jackdaw the runner to be squirreled away.

  “Mr. Dirkson, I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “Call me Jim. And it’s okay.”

  “I
t’s not. My state is a really nice state, for the most part. It really, really is.”

  “Oh, I get that. That’s the feeling I get for sure.”

  Mr. Bridge would be calling in fifteen minutes. But here was young, kind Martha in her cheap denim jacket and her long brown ponytail tied back with a pink rubber band standing out here in the parking lot suffering whatever it was she was suffering. She reached up to neaten the ponytail, and the motion caused the top of her white dress shirt to open slightly, and I saw just below the root of her neck a black box, inked in all the way. Not a lot of white people got them, but some did. A mark of solidarity or empathy or guilt.

  Martha saw me looking, blushed, and brought her shirt collar together.

  “God,” she said. “People think it’s far away, but it’s not. It’s here. It’s everywhere. Clouding over everything. Hanging over everything. Don’t you just feel that way sometimes?”

  “I do,” I said. “I guess I do.”

  With an effort of will, she made herself smile, made her eyes get hopeful. “But you know what? Maybe this thing with Batlisch, you know, the president sticking up for her and all…maybe it’s the beginning of some real change.”

  I smiled. I nodded. I’d read the same article. It had been in my own newspaper. “Sure,” I said. Thinking, Shit does not change. Thinking, It will never change. “You never know.”

  “Listen, Jim,” she said. “Hey. Would you ever…”

  She paused. She looked down at her phone, considering something, gathering some kind of quick courage. My heart was a tight, high knot; there was some keening emotion making itself felt that I had never felt before while I stood in the invisible light of those words, hanging and spinning between us, Would you ever…

  Then her phone rang. She opened it, and it rang again, and then we both realized together it wasn’t her phone ringing, it was mine.

  I looked at the incoming number and at the time. It was 9:36.

  “Mr. Dirkson?”

  My phone rang again. Bridge was calling, fourteen minutes ahead of schedule.

  “I should get this.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “I need to get this.”

  The world was a confused clamor. Bridge ringing in my hand, those 1819 flags flapping in my brain, Jackdaw trembling inside a box, the rifle bucking against my shoulder, and Martha, Would you ever—would I ever what?

  “It’s…” She gave a little toss of her head. “It’s nothing. Seriously. Take your call.”

  I answered as I turned away, and the doors whooshed open, and Bridge said “Victor,” short and sharp, his voice charged with some energy I did not immediately recognize.

  “Oh, yes, hello,” I said, still in Dirkson voice, walking fast, not liking to talk to him out in the bright no-man’s-land of the hotel lobby. It was like I had conjured a demon to rise up out of the patterned carpet, right where everyone could see it. “Hey, could you hang on just a sec?”

  I kept the phone pressed against my chest until I was back in the room, out on the balcony, with a cigarette clenched in my teeth.

  Would you ever…what? Would I ever—

  “Victor.”

  “You caught me in the middle of something.”

  “And is that a problem for some reason?” A current running through his voice like rogue electricity. “I will call when I call, Victor. Do you understand? I will call when I want to.”

  I took the phone away from my ear and studied it. Maybe it had connected me by accident to the wrong man. Some other Victor, somewhere else.

  “How’s your progress?”

  I skipped the jokes. I gave the man a whirlwind tour of the day’s adventures. I gave him Officer Cook and Maris on the steps, I gave him the pin I had put on Maris; I gave him the name of the doctor; I gave him the printout from Whole Wide World Logistics with the route of escape. I told him about Slim’s, but not about shooting Slim.

  The whole time I was providing this debrief, I was measuring the short, cool silences that breathed between my sentences. Something was off—something was way off. Some new weather, a heaviness in the atmosphere, was brooding over our call like a storm system, darkening the color of the sky.

  Like a good employee, I wrapped up my report with next steps. Tomorrow morning I would feel out the doctor, try again to pick up Maris’s trail, seek out Cook the cop if I had to, prevail upon him to make another run at the recalcitrant priest.

  Another half step of menacing silence from Mr. Bridge. Then he said something that blew a hole in my understanding of the world, like a cannonball smashing through the high wood sides of a ship. “You holding out on me, boy?”

  “Am I—what?”

  But it wasn’t even the question. That word—that word again—that word. I sucked in poison from the cigarette and felt my cheeks tremble. Felt my neck get hot.

  “If you are dragging your feet, I will know it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “What I’m hearing from you, Victor, is a list of half-completed tasks. Bullshit leads. This is day three on this.”

  “Three days is nothing,” I said. “Remember Milwaukee? Fuck, man, remember Carlisle?”

  “If you can’t get this over with—”

  “If I—what?”

  “If you can’t find the man—”

  I was staring at the phone again, holding it at arm’s length and shaking my head. We were upside down. We were in a shadow land. Bridge’s aggression was way, way out of character. He was my handler, and he was handling me poorly. I noticed his uncharacteristic inarticulateness, the strange doubling back, how he had arrived at “If you can’t find the man” only after “If you can’t get this over with,” which has a whole different character.

  “If you’re slow playing this, Victor, I will know that. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  “You understand what that means.”

  I stood in silence, simmering in the implication of the question. The violence gleaming cold behind it.

  Looking back, I don’t know why I was surprised. All that’d happened was that the truth of Bridge, of me and him, had unexpectedly shown itself right up close where I could see it. It had always been violence. For six years it had been violence: behind our professional exchanges and collegial banter, there had always been violence. For six years I’d spoken to him on secure lines, from comfortable hotel rooms, smoking my cigarettes, breathing night air, playing at freedom. But the first time I spoke to him I was shackled in a Chicago basement, hands tied to a table and feet to a chair, and he was a cold unfamiliar voice spooling out from a speakerphone like a length of wire, the voice of my doom until he offered me a choice that was no choice.

  After all those years in the shadows I had gotten it together, gotten papers, gotten myself a job, loading and unloading trucks at Townes Stores, just north of the Chicago city limits. Two years, two normal, happy human years, then one night I came off shift at dawn and it was behind me, a silver car was idling on Monroe Street with no plates, and I didn’t even fucking think about it. I dropped the hot dog I was eating and ran, looking with wild instinct for the North Star and finding only the egg-yellow glow of streetlamps.

  I made it maybe thirty feet before they tackled me and brought me down. While they dragged me to the car thrashing and wailing, I thought crazily that I should have turned right instead of left, should have gone up the alley instead of down the sidewalk. As if it mattered, as if there were any direction I could have run to escape the unforgetting world.

  Next thing I knew I was in a basement. Federal building, downtown Chicago. I was still in my work shirt, still in my nice clean Adidas, in my blue jeans. All that peace and safety draining away, all my new life sloughing off onto the concrete floor. I was already feeling the cold steel of the chains drawing down between my shoulder blades, running in lengths around my ankles.

  Somebody came in and put a phone down on the table, and I stared at it, confused, until it beeped two times
and a voice came on the line.

  “My name is Bridge,” said the voice. “I am a deputy marshal in the United States Marshals Service. I trust you appreciate the gravity of your situation. Your instructions now are simply to listen to my proposal and answer when I’m done. Your answer will be either yes or no.” Listening to his cold voice, I was thinking about cows’ heads, cows’ necks, bloodied flanks. Thinking of the hours and the days. Bridge said again, yes or no, and I would have done anything, yes, anything, I would have said anything, anything, forever, anything.

  When he was done talking, I said yes. Right away I said yes, of course I did, I said yes.

  And now Bridge, his same voice after all these years: You understand what that means. It means I was there in Indianapolis, in that northern hotel room, but a trap could open in the floor and crash me down into that federal building basement; the walls could fall away and show how all along I’d been at Bell’s, in the stink and blood haze and weariness of Bell’s Farm.

  You understand what that means, he said, and I did. Violence had always been behind our conversations. What’s behind everything, what’s under everything. Violence.

  “Sir,” I said, very slowly, very calm. “I am pursuing the case to the best of my ability.”

  Bridge didn’t answer. No more silences, brooding or angry or anything. He just hung up.

  Maybe there was something going on with the man I didn’t know about. Maybe it was another case. Maybe it was Batlisch, the hearings, adding some tension to the air of those government hallways. But I didn’t think so. Something was going on with this—with Bridge, with me. With this case.

  I was going to have to sleep, but I didn’t even try it yet. I stood out on the balcony for a long time, for what might have been hours.

  All of it cycling through, rutting me up. Cook in the car, “A special kind of kid…” and Bridge on the phone, “get this over with…” and Martha Flowers, “Would you ever…” All of it. All of this life.