Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  But when I got there, when I found the locked door, there was no lock. There was no door, even. I was sliding my palms roughly along either side of the tunnel, feeling for the narrow crack of a hung door or the bulge of a handle, when the left-side wall just opened up. I turned and crouched and held up the flashlight and found a narrow gap in the tunnel wall, like a secret left there for a child to find. I got down on my knees and turned off my light, although of course if he was in there—and I knew that he was, I knew that he was—he’d already have seen me, seen my light bobbling down the tunnel as I came, seen it shining into this hidey-hole on which there was no lock and no door.

  They could have gotten in there, if they needed to. Bridge’s men, I mean; the recovery team. They’re ex–armed forces, those guys, big bastards. They’d roll in here with flash grenades, barking orders, they’d pull this shivering boy out and have him bundled in thirty seconds or less. Bridge’s men wouldn’t care what kind of shape he was in. They would come and take him. All I had to do was call. I’d explain myself to Bridge, about calling Janice and borrowing his voice, ha-ha, just having some fun. Maybe just maybe I was too valuable an asset to be thrown in that van next to Jackdaw.

  Maybe I should have just turned around. Done my job. The one I had agreed to do six years ago. All I had to do was go back up there and make the call.

  I passed into this new chamber, into deeper darkness, and empathy rose up in me. I was him. I was that man huddled in there, waiting, holding his breath, terrified by the small approaching light. My heart hammered, as his was likely to be hammering. I felt the sweat of fear on my brow that was the sweat of his fear.

  An investigation feels so permanent, even after only a couple days. It starts to feel like its own state. You almost forget that every search is directed at a goal, and at the end of the search, if you’re good, you find the one you’re looking for. The part is always coming when you open the door or the lid or you unzip the bag or pry open the crate or you yank open the trapdoor or pull down on the tug and let the ladder drop down.

  The ground in this narrower passage turned into a short stone staircase, three shallow steps going down. I was both of us. I was myself, and I was also the person at the end of the path, seeing my own shadow grow larger. I was the person hearing me coming. The sound was ancient and reverberant, the click and scrape of heels on stone steps.

  I was him, seeing that light cutting into his world. I was me, and I was him, struck with terror at the sound of this invader. I felt my own fear increase. I felt not the keen anxiety of the predator but the panicking fear of his prey.

  The flashlight beam struck a wall and made a pale radius, started to creep across a small room.

  I’d call out now. I wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore.

  “Who’s that?” he said, a desperate small rasp. “Who’s here?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. I moved the beam around the room and found him staring back at me. Huddled under a blanket, staring up at me with quavering cheeks. The little concrete room he huddled in was lit by one emergency-exit light, gleaming dully against the slickened packed-mud walls. He moaned and I kept coming, and it grew stronger, this dissociated feeling of watching myself approach, a looming menace in the darkness, the reaching evil hand. I saw myself as he saw me, coming in slow, step by step, my sidearm in my fist; him cornered and terrified, treed like a wounded bear, cocooned in blankets, lost in shadow.

  Jackdaw looked like shit. Sallow and unwholesome, bunched up on the ground, a discarded thing. Someone had left a bottle of water beside his bed with a straw poking out at a steep angle; in the other corner of the room was a bedpan, a dribble of piss at the bottom of it. Jackdaw’s eyes were half closed, squinting from the dim light, like moles’ eyes; his skin was marked by lesions, yellow halos of bruise and discoloration. He was crumpled atop some sort of cot or pallet, covered in blankets, and—there—Mr. Maris’s blazer, one added layer against the underground cold, no doubt with my butterfly knife still in the pocket. The kid was twisted up in all those damn layers, half in, half out, like a child who’s not sleeping, like Castle, like me. It was only later, when I saw the place again in my mind, that I recalled the semicircle of candles beside him, blown out or burned out, drowning at their bases in their own spent wax.

  Beneath his miseries he looked just as he did in the picture: handsome and fine-boned, a movie star trapped in a nightmare. No one who ever killed any two nurses, that was for sure, no one who ever battered them to death and leaped out of a window to run. A thin face and delicate eyes, face bruised and worn, but still, still he was a beautiful child. Too beautiful for this world for sure.

  I stood in the dark staring and saying nothing, and then it was Jackdaw who started us talking.

  “So you him, huh?”

  I stayed back against the wall. In the shadow.

  “Who?” I said. “Who am I?”

  “Come on.” Jackdaw shifting his body under his mass of sheets, drawing himself back till he had pulled up against the wall. He made his delicate face tough: squared off his jaw. Jutted out his lower lip. “Go on, then. Let’s go. Where’s it start? Fingernails or what?”

  “What?”

  “You work on the legs, that it? You got a bat? A blowtorch. I know how y’all do. I seen the movies. Y’all with the bats and the pliers and shit. Listen. I ain’t telling you where it is, so you do what you have to do.”

  His voice was like his face, grim and terrified and strained with the effort to be strong.

  “What is it that I have to do?” I said, doing my own pretending, pretending I knew what was going on. I was baffled. The darkness was between us. I ain’t telling you where it is. I seen the movies.

  “What movies?” I said. “What movies have you seen?”

  “What?”

  The truth was washing through me, phrases and scraps, small ideas, understanding—Cook: A special kind of kid; Janice: That number is just not coming up—and I drew in breath and came over and knelt beside the shivering boy. “You’re not a real slave.”

  Jackdaw coughed, looked at me like I was crazy. “I’m not, and you know I’m not.”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said, and I meant it. Jesus, did I mean it.

  “I’m a free man, you asshole.” He gathered up some spirit in his eyes, and he stared at me and declared it: “Free man. Born and raised.”

  23.

  I picked him up, and I carried him away.

  Half-dead boy, he weighed nothing at all. However long behind the Fence and nearly a week down here, buried alive by his rescuers. Worn and tired as I was, I still could carry him with no trouble, and that’s what I did—threw him over my shoulder like he was a troublesome child. He struggled, but not much. He was weak. I moved as fast as I could.

  When the space was too tight for carrying I put him down, and I pulled him and pushed him. I might have fucking rolled the kid. I went the other way, opposite the way I came in, following the underground creek where it flowed back, away from the trailer park and Slim’s decrepit little dynasty, figuring there had to be an exit to this tunnel somewhere, and I dragged Jackdaw until I found it.

  We popped out on the other end, where the water spilled itself out into the muddy roll of the White River, south of downtown. I scrabbled with the boy down the swampy banks till we fell together by the river. There was no promenade, no sidewalk, just the embankment, just patchy scrub grass and loose stones covering fifty feet of graded slope from the water’s edge up to the roadway above.

  The scene was lit, barely, by a sliver of moonlight and a pair of dim streetlights on an overpass bridge some distance downstream. I laid him gently by the water’s edge and hunched over to breathe and to think.

  I didn’t know what I was doing—I didn’t know if I was bringing him in or rescuing him and if I was rescuing him what I’d be rescuing him from.

  He crawled over onto all fours and spat a long trail of yellow spit, and it clung to his lower lip.
He bent forward and gagged.

  “Go on, then. Get it over with.”

  “I am not here to torture you.”

  “So,” he said. “So shoot. Shoot me, nigga. Just—” His bravado wavered. A tremor ran through him. “Just…just not in the face, okay? Don’t—and just…tell my parents I’m sorry. Okay? Can you do that?”

  “Listen to me.”

  “They’re in Brightmoor, okay, in Detroit? That’s where I came up, and they’re still up there. Okay?”

  “Jackdaw.”

  “My name is Kevin,” he said. “It’s Kevin.”

  I wanted to slap him. I wanted to embrace him. This poor boy, pleading with me under the sliver of moonlight. The river was swollen from the rain, and it churned beside us. “You tell my parents I was tryna do good, okay? Tryna—” He was weeping again now, big tears rolling down his cheeks. “Just tell ’em. Charles and Chandra, okay? In Brightmoor, in Detroit. Tell them—”

  “Stop it,” I said. “Stop. I’m not here to kill you.”

  He looked up and gaped at me.

  “So what, then? What? What?”

  And I had no answer. I looked at him with imploring grief, like it was for him to tell me what the fuck to do, and we gaped at each other like that, like two dumb fish. But it was already late, too late already. Somewhere on the roadway above a car screeched and stopped, and I could hear the doors slamming closed, hear fast footsteps on the scrub grass, coming down fast.

  It was Cook. I saw the brown of his cop’s shoes, and I grabbed the boy. Monster that I am, instinct kicked in, and I leaned into the one thing I knew, which was that this kid, whatever he was, whatever had happened, he knew something these people were after, and they weren’t going to kill him till they had it. I seized him and dance-stepped him backwards, one step, and my feet splashed in the river as I hung him before me as a shield.

  “Stop there,” I yelled, and Cook—gun out as he tripped down the slope—he did as I said, and I kept it going: “Throw down your gun and raise your hands.”

  I could barely see him, but I saw a flash of white teeth as he snarled, and I saw the gun where he tossed it, between us, into the bush.

  Jackdaw was frozen in my arms. His heart was beating, a rabbit against my body. Slowly I took out my own gun and held it to his temple.

  The others were already coming. First big Maris, then Barton, too, gliding through the darkness, and they arrayed themselves around us in a semicircle, halfway up the slope, looking down at us standing in the water. Barton was the smallest of the three, small and pale and ghostly, black cassock on black night. But it was Barton who made Jackdaw terrified and brave. When he saw the priest he became a tight wire in my arms, fearful and defiant and taut.

  “It’s okay,” I heard myself tell him, murmuring brotherly in his ear, even as I held the gun to his head. “It’s gonna be all right.” And then, to Maris, “Weapons on the ground, please.”

  “I do not carry a weapon,” he said forcefully, coldly, meaning he did not need a weapon. Would not need one to kill the likes of me.

  “How do you sleep? How do you fucking sleep, Jim?” said Officer Cook, sneering on the name.

  But I did as Bridge did. I answered his question with a question.

  “Who is this boy?”

  “Go to hell,” said Cook.

  But I was the one with the gun. I was the one with the hostage. I directed myself to Father Barton.

  “Tell me who this is.”

  “The young man can tell you himself,” said Barton, and Jackdaw—Kevin—reacted to his voice with a fresh jolt of energy, jerking in my arms. I purred “Hush” in his ear and said to Barton, “No.” I said, “You tell me.”

  “He is a soldier in the army of the Lord.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Ask him,” said Father Barton, and just as my own eyes had not left the priest, the priest’s eyes had not left Kevin. “Ask the boy.”

  “Goddamn it,” I said. “I’m asking you.”

  Mr. Maris, meanwhile, his face bronze in the dim light, was still playing catch-up. “Who is this man?” he said.

  Cook turned to him, incredulous. “He’s a nigger stealer.” Then, back to me, with a taunting grin. “Ain’t that right? Nigger stealer. Soul catcher.”

  Maris looked astonished. He looked me up and down like I was a ghost, an ogre of myth. “He’s from the government?” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Cook. “He’s from the fucking government.”

  I felt Kevin feel this new information. Felt his body change as he understood what kind of salvation he had fallen into this time.

  “He is an undercover agent,” Father Barton said quietly, sadly, a wise parent explaining wickedness to a child. And then, to me, with sympathy: “What miseries you have seen…what grief you have encountered on this earth.”

  Maris took a step toward me, his big fists clenched and half raised—ready, now that he knew what I was, to tear my head off my body. I pivoted a quarter turn, made sure he saw how tightly I was holding their precious cargo.

  “Now,” I said. “Tell me about this boy. Now.”

  Barton nodded very slightly. The sun was just starting to come up, washing our desperate scene in a hazy yellow light. There was a railroad bridge fifty yards to the south, the underside of it marked with graffiti, like petroglyphs. Barton stepped toward me as he started to speak. Looked me dead in the eye, me with my gun and my hostage. A man used to breathing God’s true word even into the face of monsters.

  “Five years ago our organization was made aware of certain actions being undertaken by this particular plantation. Garments of the Greater South. We had information from multiple sources. We worked out a way for evidence of these activities to be gathered. Brought north. And made public.” As he spoke, Barton’s clerical calm melted off of him, and his voice rose, and he began to nod as if from the altar, and his hands slowly came up, like he was delivering an invocation. “And in this way we can shake the very foundations, bring down not just this plantation but all the plantations…in this way we can strike at the very heart of the old evil. In this way the scales will fall from the eyes of the world…”

  He had changed entirely, a hellfire evangelical emerged from the shell of the inward young priest. What was he like, I wondered, on the other side of the confessional curtain, murmuring God’s forgiveness? What was he like in a meeting of abolitionist donors, pressing flesh, demurely tucking folded checks inside his cassock? He was many men. He suited the need. He was like me.

  “So all right,” I said. “So you recruited him. You sent him down there.”

  “That’s right,” said Cook. “And the boy was perfect. He was goddamn perfect.”

  Barton nodded, posed, arms extended and palms raised, breathing. Now he spoke to Kevin, who looked back at him, face frozen with repulsion.

  “I remember that night. I remember how proud I felt to have met you, to have found you. How inspired we were. How excited we both were for this undertaking.”

  “He came to my school,” said Jackdaw suddenly, and I jerked him closer to me. “This man here. In plainclothes, you know, jeans and a shirt and the collar. All fucking cool. My sophomore year, Earlham College. He shows up at a black students’ meeting, talking all hot about taking responsibility. Saying, hey, who’s tired of signing petitions? Whose feet are tired from marching? Who’s ready to do something real? And I said…” Kevin spoke faintly, mockingly, contemptuous of his former self. “I said me. I said me. I was all fired up.” He closed his eyes, energy spent, and hung limp as a doll in my arms.

  “How much time?” I asked Barton. “How long did he have to work down there before risking his life to get your—whatever it is.”

  Barton raised a single finger, thin as a bone. “One year.”

  I felt Jackdaw’s heart pulsing warmth where I held him. I felt the sacrifice of this, for this kid from Detroit, a kid growing up with his pals in the free world, playing basketball, going to school. College soph
omore, liberal arts, textbooks and term papers, bumping fists on the quad, and then a year behind the Fence. I could not imagine it, except that I could; I could imagine it exactly. Mine had been a livestock slavery, the blood knife and the dirt, and his had been a glass-wall slavery, stitch-house slavery, needle and thread, but the baseline is the same. The bare facts are always the same.

  “And he performed…” Barton trailed off into a smile, took another step toward us, held out his hands to Jackdaw. “He performed perfectly. Kevin? Are you listening to me, Kevin? You performed beautifully.”

  Jackdaw cleared his throat and shot a thick wad of spit onto the priest’s face. Barton did not flinch; very gently he raised one arm and wiped the spit away. I kept one eye, meanwhile, on the other men, still up there on the slope. Cook with his arms crossed, eyes narrow. Mr. Maris, hulking and furious, brow furrowed with concentration, waiting for his moment. Waiting for a chance to separate us, to push the boy out of the way so he could tear me to bits.

  “So where is it?” Silence from everyone. River rush, distant traffic. Someone honking on southbound 65. “Come on. The boy goes down, performs beautifully, gathers up the evidence. Where is it?”

  “Ask the boy,” said Barton, and I said, “I’m asking you.”

  “This crazy motherfucker didn’t bring it,” said Cook. He took one step down the slope toward us, and I tightened my grip and he stepped back. “He says he got it out, but he stashed it somewhere on the way up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he is confused,” said Barton softly. “He is tired and confused.”

  “Because of Luna,” said Jackdaw—not Jackdaw…said Kevin the sophomore, and he didn’t sound tired or confused. He snapped to life again inside the threatening curl of my arm, taking over his own story. “There’s a girl named Luna, a PB, and she was the one who got your precious evidence. She took all the fucking risks, this girl who was born a slave and was a slave her whole life.” His voice was a hot rush, rough with tears, rising with passion, as Barton’s voice had risen. “I told that girl that if she helped me we would get her out, too. But then your people—”