Underground Airlines

by Ben Winters

  “You caught me in a good mood, too, I must say. A good week for us, darn good week.”

  My mind jumped to Donatella Batlisch, to the footage from the motel TV: the woman flying forward suddenly with the gun blast, collapsing, limp. Good news for the southern interest, happy days at GGSI. But no, no. Newell just meant the late frost. “We’re coming up on Halloween, and here we still got acreage coming into flower. Don’t see that every year; no, ma’am.”

  And for a second as I approached them across the lobby, my fake smile was real, a smile of appreciation for Martha. I watched her nod admiringly. I watched her touching Newell’s elbow. Jesus. She was a natural.

  “Oh, Mr. Newell—”

  “Please, please, Jane. Make it Matty.”

  “All right, then. Matty.” She made it sound like “Hercules.” He beamed. “Matty, this is my associate.”

  Newell peered at me, confusion in his small eyes. He had a lanyard around his neck, dangling an ID card in a plastic sheath. His face was soft, his hairline retreating, just as it was in the picture. Since sitting for the corporate head shot, though, he’d grown one of those little Tommy Jefferson ponytails, and it didn’t particularly suit him.

  “Your, uh, associate?”

  “Associate, assistant.” She winked at him, mouthed the word servant. “Whatever you want to call it. He does what he’s told.”

  Matty sized me up, smiling weakly.

  “Just seems like …” He shrugged. “Well. Funny work, for a nigger.”

  Grin grin grin. Smile smile smile. “Oh, I know, sir, I know.” I glanced at Martha, at Ms. Jane Reynolds, making sure it was okay to talk. “I guess I’m a funny kind of nigger.”

  Matty Newell gaped for a second, then laughed, a nervous, throaty chortle, shaking his head at this strange old world of ours. The flags snapped sharply outside in the brisk wind. The Asian children in the photomontages were frozen in their happy cartwheels.

  “Well, come on up to the top floor,” said Newell. “Have a good look at the joint. Then we can talk about whatever it is y’all are selling.”

  The whole building had that same pleasing color scheme, easy white and gentle blue, and every wall was lined with more of the glossy enlarged pictures. On the way to the elevator was a housewife of some indeterminate Southeast Asian ethnicity, reaching into her closet for a stack of towels—while reaching through the closet wall from the other side was a black slave, grinning, servile and unseen, as he provided the stack of sturdy cotton towels.

  I did not blanch. I did not slow. I walked past, sticking close behind Martha, noticing things.

  I noticed the pattern of the light fixtures in the long hallway: a bank of two, then a bank of three, two and then three. I noticed the pants of the slaves in the photographs, black like Marlon’s pants, like the ones I was wearing along with my inoffensive peach sweater. I noticed the lushness of the white carpet. I noticed everything.

  The elevator raced us soundlessly upward fast enough for my ears to pop, and I stood clenching and unclenching my jaw, standing in quiet self-erasure at the rear of the car. I looked anywhere but up at the camera mounted in the high corner of the elevator. I studied the button plate on the elevator doors: MURDOCK ELEVATORS, it said. Murdock, Louisiana. Martha laughed and flirted with Mr. Newell.

  “No, sir,” she was saying. “Oh, no. We’re up from the Birmingham office, but the company is headquartered in Georgia.”

  “Georgia, huh?” said Newell. “And how are things in the State of Surrender?”

  “Oh, stop,” she said, and slapped him on the arm.

  He laughed, eyed her nervously, hoping not to have offended, and rushed to reassure her. “I’m only teasing, of course. Bygones be bygones and all that. Every state free to choose its own path. The American way.”

  While Newell mouthed these wooden platitudes I had another quick flash of Batlisch, flying forward, arms out, the panic of the crowd. I wondered what Martha was thinking about. The elevator dinged, and we stepped directly out into sunlight; the whole top floor was taken up by one room with windows for walls, the sun streaming in gloriously on a bright open penthouse with marble floors.

  “This is my office,” said Mr. Newell, and immediately snorted and waved his hands. “Just kiddin’, of course. This is the observation deck, what we call the perch. I love taking folks up here. Just gives a real strong sense of the place.”

  He walked up to the glass and gestured for us to follow—well, for Martha to follow. My presence he had more or less forgotten: I was the rolling suitcase. I did what I was told. I was not worth thinking of.

  He stood at Martha’s elbow. “Really something, huh?”

  “It sure is.”

  From inside my cloak of invisibility, I looked, too. Most of the buildings were like the one we were in, made of glass, beaming and winking at each other across wide green lawns. The buildings were gathered in clusters, divided into regions, separated by winding walkways and black-paved service roads and high chain-link fences. I was in both places at once. I was back there in the Capital City Crossroads Hotel, staring at the satellite image from the full file, and I was here for real on this plantation, in the presence of the real thing. Everything getting realer and realer, the closer you get to it, like flesh on bones.

  I got busy correlating, matching up the buildings I was looking at with the blurry images I’d seen in the file: the offices, the outbuildings, the shipping and receiving center, the machine shop. The five brick towers of the population center, gathered around a tall tower with a glass cupola.

  My mind saw that something was missing before I knew what it was. Where were all the people? At Bell’s the yards were always full of us, hustling and hollering, singing sometimes, yelling at each other or getting yelled at by the guards and the working whites. Down there on the green lawn of GGSI, I saw not a soul. Everybody inside, I figured. Shift in progress. Slaving away. And yet…

  “Now, okay, so those right there are the garment factories,” said Matty Newell, pointing down at industrial buildings as big as football stadiums, scaffolded with exterior piping and drums, sending up streams of dark smoke. “That right there is kind of the heart of the place.”

  Newell was looking down at the pristine lawn and the handsome facilities with clear satisfaction, giving us his overhead tour with almost proprietary pride, as though GGSI belonged to him instead of the other way around.

  “Inside there are the ginning operations,” Newell added. “The cleaners and the dryers and so on. We’ve got the largest set of high-capacity round-base cotton gins in the state.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” said Martha. “No kidding.”

  My eye, meanwhile, had found it, that one abstract rectangle, shaded by the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, the small dark building that bore no number or name on the aerial picture.

  I couldn’t ask Newell what it was, of course. I couldn’t ask Martha to ask. I was black. I wasn’t there.

  “Now, this is a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation, just by the way,” Newell was saying, Martha still nodding, eyes big with amazement. “Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We run in shifts here, morning, afternoon, night, and late night. Never a dull moment. Sabbath comes every day for one-seventh of the population, so we never have to stop the plants. We got seven Easters, too. Seven Christmases. Only thing shuts us down is a bad accident, and”—he made a fist and knocked gently, ha-ha, on his bald forehead—“none of those in twenty-nine months.”

  He grinned, nice and broad, and gave me a wink. “None of your cousins got a thing to complain about down here, son. And I mean it.”

  It seemed he wanted me to respond, so I responded. “I bet you right, Mr. Newell. I bet you right.”

  Newell laughed nervously, inside his throat.

  “I mean it, son. This is not the slavery of fifty or even ten years ago. People think about slavery, and they still think—still!—about the whips and the dogs and the spiky neck chains, all of that nasty business.
But this is now. This is the twenty-first century. You see there”—pointing again with that fat finger, a gold ring between the second and third knuckles, forcing me to look—“that there is the population center. Four thousand head in those buildings right there. We got a rec center in there, gymnasium equipment that every one of our team members is not just encouraged but also required to use. And you see that building in the center, with the turret-looking thing on the top? From up in there the guards can see into every single cell, and every single cell can see the guards, too. So everybody knows they’re safe. Everybody’s looking after each other. That goes back to Jefferson, by the way, that design. So you’re looking at a proud tradition here.”

  He had fixed his hand on my arm all of a sudden, tight and congenial, like a fraternity brother.

  “Forget about whips, okay? Forget about Tasers. The BLP allows it, you probably know that, but I can tell you—because I know the folks down on the sixth floor—I can tell you that we do not use Tasers here. Once in a blue moon, maybe, is it thought to be necessary. Because this here is an incentive-based facility, okay?” His fingers were tight as a shackle on my bicep. “And I tell you, you hear folks saying, what do they feed those poor boys? Then I go home on meat-loaf night at my house, I’m thinking, gee, I wish I was over in the mess hall with the peebs!” He snorted. “I only wish! Just don’t go telling my wife!”

  I laughed, good and loud. Come on, Victor. Come on, Brother. Get it done. Find this fool trucker, find out what happened to that envelope. Bring the damn thing home. That was all I had to do. I laughed and laughed.

  Newell, encouraged by my laughter, in full booster mode, turned his attention back to Martha. “Can I tell you something crazy?” He leaned in toward her earnestly. “If Garments of the Greater South were its own country, we would have a gross domestic product bigger than that of Rhode Island!” He leaned back, goggle-eyed, red-faced. “Now, ain’t that a hell of a thing?”

  “It sure is,” said Martha. “It sure is.”

  One thing that you could see from up here that hadn’t been included in the satellite imagery from the full file were the cotton fields themselves, the unending acres of them, rolling out from the campus in all directions like the moonscape beyond a space station. And I could not see them, not from this height, but I knew they were out there, hundreds of Persons Bound to Labor too small to be seen, lost in among the long white lines of cotton. For a second or two I stared out into those distant fields, stared at the fact that when this was over, once I talked to that driver and he pointed me to the next place I had to go, I would walk out of here, and those people I could not see but knew to be suffering, they all would be here forever.

  What do you do with that fact? Do you hold it like a stone in your hand? Pitch it away from this great height and watch it fall? Do you swallow it and feel it in your throat till the day you die?

  The elevator dinged. “All right, now,” said Newell. “Let’s head on down.”

  Martha really was a goddamn natural.

  We filed into Matty Newell’s small office on the fourteenth floor, past a hallway of air-conditioner chill and the faint smell of coffee, the three of us crowded in there with the filing cabinets and his smooth black desk and computer. She and I had practiced it, going around and around, back and forth, in the lawyer’s basement, and as soon as Newell closed his door behind us, away she went. Off to the races.

  “Well, as long as we’re here, visiting,” she said, and he grinned, gave her a tsk-tsk.

  “Here it comes, huh? Here comes the sales pitch.”

  Martha winked. “You caught me. It’ll be painless, Matthew, I promise it will.”

  “Matty.”

  “Matty. All I want to do is ask you a simple question.”

  “All right.” His brows were knitted. His fingers were laced together. I could read his thoughts—from back by the door with my eager smile, a good boy, an obedient boy, I could see what he was thinking: I’ve got no juice anyway. I can’t say yes or no to anything. He had given us the tour. That was what he had to offer. His smile was preapologetic—soon she would find out, this pretty lady from Peach Tree Management Systems who had dropped from the sky into his little life, that he had no juice. We’d chosen him well.

  My eyes flitted to the four corners of the room, one by one. Nothing. Not that a camera couldn’t be small, of course. Buried in the plaster; screwed into the lights. But nothing that I could see.

  “All I ask is that you answer one question,” said Martha. “And it’s a darn easy question, too.”

  “Okay…”

  “This question is like, you know”—she palmed her forehead—“duh.”

  “Okay.” Mr. Newell laughed. “Sure. I getcha.”

  “So here’s the question. What is it that y’all are selling here?”

  Newell puffed out his cheeks. Opened his hands. “Cotton? Cotton goods?” he said, tentatively, shyly, like a kid getting a trick played on him. Waited to see if that was right, then tried again. “A brand? A, uh…” He fumbled for the buzzword. “A lifestyle?”

  “No, sir,” said Martha, shaking her head slowly, exuding confidence. I could have applauded. “What you are selling is time.”

  She launched into it then, good and confident, the whole Music Man business, while I made my comprehensive survey of his office, moving only my eyes: two squat filing cabinets; a floor-to-ceiling tiered bookshelf, lined with binders and regulatory manuals; a sturdy industrial desk with a metal frame and a glass top, with three pictures arranged neatly (Mrs. Newell, Mr. and Mrs., Mr. and Mrs. and a handsome chocolate Lab). Hidden from view, not visible but certainly present, was the fingerprint danger button: on the underside of the desk, most likely; under the seat of the chair, second choice. Behind and to the right of where Newell sat was a single interior door. Not to any kind of executive washroom, surely. Our Mr. Newell wasn’t pulling those kinds of perks. A closet, more likely. Storage.

  While I crawled through his tidy junior executive’s lair with my eyes, Martha was giving it to Matty with both barrels: “You got yourself four thousand, two hundred and thirty-two folks out there”—pausing, just barely, a quick sly acknowledgment that she had the figure, she’d done her homework—“and it’s their time that you all are selling. Every hour of good work they give to the company, every darn minute of it, that is the product.

  “Now, let’s say we take one Person Bound to Labor,” she said, “and pop him anywhere on the flowchart. Okay? He’s splitting open bales. He’s a loom operator. Doesn’t matter. He’s top-level, he’s a trusty, he’s punching code on a pattern maker. Okay?”

  “Okay…”

  “Let’s say he works one hour. How many minutes are in that hour?”

  Newell hesitated—he knew there was some smart answer here, but he couldn’t figure it. “Sixty?”

  “No, sir,” said Martha, said Jane Reynolds, saleswoman of the year. “Maybe it’s fifty. Maybe thirty. Maybe a hundred! It all depends on what’s going on in that man’s head, what’s going on with that man’s body. What we sell at Peach Tree, what we do is, we sell minutes. With our system of incentives and corrections, we add minutes to the hours that your PBLs are putting in, and you know what that does?”

  “Uh…” He was afraid to answer. Afraid to be wrong. “It makes better clothes?”

  “It makes money, Mr. Newell!” She spread her hands. “It makes more money.”

  Newell chortled. “Well, we sure hope so!”

  For a surreal half a moment I became excited at the prospect of making a sale. Ms. Reynolds and I would return to the office in Birmingham and report on our success, log it in the system, get high fives from the other sales teams, arrange a meeting with the tech guys for follow-up. Jane Reynolds would be employee of the month. I’d get—what? What reward would a freedman associate receive? Alternate universes, other worlds.

  “I tell you what,” said Martha. “I’ll show you. Can I show you?”

  “Sure,” said Mr. N
ewell. He stood up, as though maybe she was going to lead him somewhere. “Show me.”

  “Albert?”

  I popped out of the back corner like a jack-in-the-box. “Yes, ma’am!”

  “Can we get set up, please?”

  She said it with mild irritation, like she couldn’t believe I hadn’t done it already. I saw the small look she gave to Newell, the small look he gave back: these people. I opened the bag, opened up the laptop, and pressed a few buttons. Newell scurried out of my way, stood awkwardly in his own office, hands behind his back, ponytail jutting out over his pink neck.

  “Okay,” said Martha. “Away we go. Albert, would you mind hitting the lights for us?”

  “They’re just there,” said Newell and pointed, and I hopped over to the light switch.

  “What I’m going to show you,” said Martha, calling up the first slide—the logo for Peach Tree, clipped off their website—and beaming it onto the window shade of Newell’s office, “if you’ll bear with me, is just a taste of the proprietary technology that Peach Tree is offering. Just a sense of it. So…”

  The slide blinked off, and no second one came.

  “What…” said Martha in the darkness. “Albert?”

  “What is it?” said Newell.

  “Oh, dear,” I said. “Oh, boy.”

  “Albert!” Her voice transformed. Sharp as broken glass. “Albert, would you be so kind as to turn on the lights, please?”

  I did, and fast. Martha was standing, flustered, with her hands on her hips. Newell was bemused, uncertain. “Ms. Reynolds—Jane, is everything okay?”

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Newell.”

  “Matty. Please.”

  “Matty, it’s just, you know, they send me out here to do this, and they don’t send me with equipment that actually functions. Or a…a…” It was the sole flaw in her performance; the only half a moment’s hesitation. Jane Reynolds would have said “nigger,” of course. “A helper who can do his darn job.”

  Newell didn’t notice her skipped beat. He wasn’t noticing anything but a chance to be some kind of man. He was rushing around from behind his little desk. He was handing her tissues.