Underground Airlines (28 page)

And then in came Mr. Bell, in his big brown boots and his sharp white shirt and deep red tie, shaking the hands of the Chinese, answering the questions as they got translated, waiting and smiling, stroking his mustache, while his answers got translated back. He smiled at every one of us he saw, smiled and rubbed us on our heads, then the Chinese did, too, as if in wonder. They felt inside our mouths with the tips of their fingers. One of them pinched the flesh of my upper arms and smiled, as if he were pleased with the feel of me, and I remember how odd I felt, odd and proud.

That’s what was first. And then there was the rain. A late-summer storm like we had never seen, not in my days, cascades of rain pounding the tin roof of the kill house, soaking the poor littlest ones out there on the pile…and overflowing the blood pump. I was holding my knife; I was slicing into the heavy belly of the skinless cow that hung shackled before me. A working white raced in, water weeping off his cuffs and sleeves, and he whispered something frantic to a guard, and the guard made a face and came over and pulled at Mr. Bell, and Mr. Bell crooked a finger at fat Reedy.

Mr. Bell smiled, untroubled, at the worried-looking Chinese, who were writing on their clipboards and muttering things that were not being translated. Mr. Bell laid a hand on big Reedy and said, “Take one of ’em. Bail it out.”

Mr. Bell picked Reedy and Reedy picked Castle and Castle picked me.

I have always wondered if Castle understood. Did Castle see opportunity in this moment, Reedy laying his doughy hand on his shoulder? Did he know—this is it? The other world is seeping through—the other world, our future world? Or did he only think, I am being granted a half hour off the line, and let me give that to my brother, too?

Because Reedy just said, “You, boy.” And it was Castle who dared to question his judgment on that. Castle who said, “Respect, sir, I think I need another one.”

Castle must have known—or did he know?—he must have known, which I did not know, that the blood pump, by the primitive, premodern design of Bell’s Farm, was sandwiched into a strip of muddy land between the kill house and the fence. Castle must have guessed—or could he have?—that the presence of the Chinese would be consuming the attention of the staff and that these facts combined with the rainstorm darkness and the flickering old electrics would make it more likely than ever that we could take the chance that we had been waiting for, find the story Castle had never needed, in all those years, to tell me. And all that stood between us and that story was old Reedy, fat Reedy, sad Reedy.

Reedy was an easy one. There were hard ones, and there were easy ones—among the guards, among the working whites, among the Old Men, and among the Franklins, even. Reedy wore glasses. Reedy was worn down. He had white in his hair and red on his cheeks. Once, watching us march in our line from kill house to bunkhouse, once I had seen him shake his head and look to the ground. Sadness.

“All right, son,” he said to Castle. “So pick one.”

So Castle picked me, and we squatted at the door of the kill house and tugged on our thick galoshes, and we were bailing that blood pool and we couldn’t keep up with it. The rain was too fast, and it was backed up, clotted at all the drains, and Castle and me were working as quick as we could, but it was rising and rising, swamping our ankles and creeping to our knees, a thickening mass around our bodies.

“Ah, hell,” Reedy was saying, watching us uneasily from the lip of the sump, shifting in his boots, rubbing storm water off his glasses for the hundredth time. He looked around in the rain. He didn’t want to be down in no blood pit with no two boys. But even worse would be going in there and telling Mr. Bell the job wasn’t done.

“Ah, hell,” he said again and peeled off his overcoat and holstered his gun and came down into the sump with the two of us, Castle and me.

The rain flooded down. It crashed around us. Two black boys and one white guard, bailing like crazy, buckets and barrels, and from the corner of my eye I was watching those fence posts. We were always talking about how high they went, those fence posts, high wood pillars connected by sheets of mesh with cyclone wire at the top, always talking about how high they were, but never how low they went. That was another question—how deeply those posts were rooted. I had never thought of it, but now the rain was turning the dirt to mud, and you could see where the roots of the posts were leaning, shifting in that mud, just a little, starting just a little bit to shift and lean.

“We’re doing it, fellas,” shouted Reedy, forgetting himself entirely. “We’re doing it! Keep on, now.”

But he was wrong. As furious as we were bailing we weren’t keeping up with it, not even close, not now with the rain filling up the blood hole as fast as we could pump it. Reedy was maybe working the hardest of the three of us, going faster and faster, until he was grunting and sweating, and I was watching the ground beneath that fence post getting muddier and muddier, the post coming looser in the mud. But Castle was watching Reedy, who wasn’t just grunting but moaning now, who had dropped his bucket and collapsed onto his knees, splashing and falling into the mud and lurching forward.

“Oh, Lord,” he said, and then something else that wasn’t words at all. Just a long animal groan.

“Mr. Reedy,” I shouted, and he said something like “Get—” and then stopped talking. His mouth hung open, frozen, like the word had thickened in his throat and stopped him up.

Get help. Get someone. Get me up. But Reedy was past words. His face was dark, choked, and red; all his body’s blood had come up into his cheeks and his neck, and I was wet with fear and the rain in wild sheets. Reedy staring at us helpless, arms flapping, eyes wide, like a great fish.

“It’s okay now, sir,” I said, talking automatically, and I stepped toward him through the waist-high thickness of blood water, and Castle grabbed me hard and pulled me close and slapped me. Castle’s big eyes, wide in the rainstorm, Castle shaking me by the arms—by both arms.

“Turn around, boy,” he said. “Turn and run to that fence. Go!”

I did it—I ran to the fence and bent to its foundation and was tugging at it when I heard the shot behind me, one hollow shot swallowed in the rain. I had the post up already. I had the chain down.

“Come on!” said Castle, still holding Reedy’s pistol, and we ran. There was no time, but I looked back once and saw Reedy’s body as it slipped down and was swallowed in all that blood.

Part Two

South

Obviously there will be disagreements within any such body, and the United States of America does not shrink from disagreement. But every nation has her traditions, and America shall not relinquish its traditions as a prerequisite to participation in any institution.

—Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at a press conference to announce the United States’ withdrawal from the United Nations, December 11, 1973

Good riddance.

—Sir Colin Crowe, British permanent representative to the United Nations, quoted in the London
Times
, December 12, 1973

1.

We drove
south all day Monday, Martha and me.

We drove in a white Toyota with Wisconsin plates, an Airlines junker that had been waiting in a Southside parking lot, just where Cook had said it would be, with the keys duct-taped in the wheel well. The Toyota rattled at speeds over sixty miles per hour, so I kept it at fifty-five all the way through southern Indiana and the western part of Kentucky. Route 65 down there behaved more like a country two-lane than a big interstate, winding and gentle, running like a brook. We drove up and then down the Blue Ridge Mountains, into the clear blue air of Tennessee. The ugly weather burned away as we went. We passed red barns and green fields and acres of swaying corn. The sky was all porcelain blue and gentle white clouds, the whole curve of heaven like painted pottery. Every town had its steeple and its water tower, and the shoulder was dotted with wooden signs advertising pies and antiques.

It all made me weary and anxious. I took it all, all the sugar-sweet beauty of the sky and the charm of the landscape, as a taunt: a haughty sneer from the venerable southland as we drew nearer.
Purty down here, ain’t it? Well, come on, now, ’n’ sit a spell…

We listened to Michael all the way down. We started with
Thriller,
then we jumped back in time, did
Ben,
MJ with the big Afro on the cover, looking mournful.

His tragedy was always in his face, even from the beginning. You could see it in his eyes.

We listened to “Take Care of Our Brothers,” the charity single that caused poor Michael so much grief. It raised a ton of money for relief, but half his fans called him a sucker, said it was an amelioration anthem—so he disclaimed it, and then the other half of his fans said he was letting himself get pushed around, boxed in, politicized.

Sometimes I think he never recovered from that. Sometimes I think he spent the rest of his life trying to escape from all that shit, from what our country is, but of course he couldn’t do it. Of course you can’t.

God, those songs, though. That voice. It carried us all the way down.

“Evenin’. What can I do for y’all?”

This man wore no name tag. Either this motel, the Rambler’s Roost, did not provide uniforms for its employees or the desk clerk was happier in his rumpled plaid button-down shirt, worn unbuttoned to show off a beer-company T-shirt. He surveyed us warily from behind the desk.

“We just need a room, thanks,” Martha told him.

I hung back, hovered in the shadows of the dark, unpleasant lobby of the Rambler’s Roost, with the mismatched armchairs and the smell of burned coffee.

“Just the one room, eh?” said the old cracker.

“Yes,” said Martha.

“And how many beds?”

His eyes were moving slowly back and forth between the two of us: me and Martha, Martha and me. The Rambler’s Roost was in Pulaski, Tennessee, fifty miles north of the Fence, but of course it got thicker the farther south you went, that coefficient of difficulty involved in doing even the simplest tasks. I think of it sometimes as a pressure in the atmosphere, like walking under water: the extra effort required to get served at a restaurant, make a purchase at a store. Check in to a motel.

“Whatever you got is fine.” Martha spoke through clenched teeth. “Do you have a room or don’t you?”

“Oh, I reckon I might.”

The clerk turned with his hands on his hips to look at the pigeonholes on the wall, nearly every one of which had a key inside. He pulled out number 12 and placed it on the counter, but when Martha reached for it, he put his flat, heavy hand on top of hers and whispered.

“Listen, hon.” Hoarse, plenty loud for me to hear. “Everything all right here?”

Martha didn’t answer. She pulled her hand free from under the old man’s, as though she were escaping from a trap. He shrugged, pushed her the key.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Checkout is at ten thirty.”

Room 12 was no improvement from the lobby. An indistinct and unpleasant smell; tattered curtains over a streaked window; a thin rug spattered with a grim archipelago of stains. There was one bed, a twin, and a rollaway cot on the floor beside it. Martha grimly lifted one corner of the bedspread, looking for bugs, I figured, and I felt a jolt of regret for bringing her here—for bringing myself here—for all this. Martha disappeared into the tiny bathroom, and I watched the door shut. I had no choice. I had a mission here—a goal. But this girl…

There was a mirror tacked to the wall above the dresser. I looked into it. I told myself it was okay. It was all going to be okay. This time tomorrow, Martha would be back in Indianapolis, picking up Lionel from her sister’s place. By this time tomorrow, all this would be a strange dream—in twenty-four hours I would be a dream she had woken from.

Our deal was simple: clean and clear. Money for service.

The money had come from my petty cash, all the unmarked money Bridge provided me with for incidentals, money that—after the next couple days—I would never need again. I’d had twenty grand in a lockbox within the safe of the hotel room. I’d had five thousand in a false bottom of my rolling suitcase. Another $5,200 in the glove compartment of the Altima. Four hundred-dollar bills from one wallet and two hundred-dollar bills from a second wallet; a final two thousand sewn into the lining of a tan sport coat.

From this I’d counted out Martha’s $29,500 and brought it to her in the laundry bag.

I told her the truth—a version of it. A portion, calved off from the whole. I was an agent of the Underground Airlines. I was going down into the Four to recover something that had been lost, a weapon in the battle against the old foe. All true; no lies. All true.