Underground Airlines(14)
Bernard’s hands came down. He could hear it, the cold ancient strangeness in my voice, all that cow’s blood and knife heat pulsing in my eyes.
Peanut Head wasn’t there yet. He lowered his phone and turned back to glare at me. Yanked out the gun. Bernard winced. He didn’t like this at all.
“Put it down,” I told him. “Put down the weapon.”
“Or what, slave?”
“I am no runner. I am no slave.”
“What?”
I kept going. I told them the truth.
“But neither am I a man.”
“What?”
“I am a monster in the shape of a man. I am a man with the skin of a snake and the feet of a wolf.”
“Fuck you talkin’ about?” said Peanut, starting to get a little bit of Bernard’s nervous eyes. His fingers dancing on the gun butt. Bernard, for his part, was done. “Come on, man,” he said, tugging on his boy’s sleeve. “Come on.”
“I do not walk the world, son, but stalk it,” I said. “With the scent of blood in my nostrils, my flanks a mess of scars.” I started down the street, still talking. “I am not a slave. But neither am I a man.”
“That ain’t no PB,” I heard Bernard say behind me. “That dude’s just f*cking crazy.”
The problem was that those old bad times, once they got keyed up, were hard to quiet. It was all around me in the air now, all those miserable f*cking memories, the terrified lowing of the cattle and the ka-thunk of the bolt gun. The heat and stench of the workroom, my cramped grip on the saw, the cows’ slow turning in the air, bloated and dripping gore. My brother Castle, his big eyes in the darkness. I was trying to go along now and get on with my work, and all these snatches of vision hovered like bits of ash or motes of dust, flickering glimpses of an old world, my old world, floating around me and settling on my skin as I came out onto Central Avenue, breathing hard.
“All right, now, honey,” I whispered, talking to myself, nice and soft. “All right.”
It was twilight. Streetlamps blinked to life. I just breathed. Nice and easy.
Once I got back to the spot, I was fine. I was cool. I ambled slowly up to the community center in a pair of heavy black work shoes and the CIRCLE CITY LAWNSCAPING coveralls I had boosted off the back of Ruben’s truck. The tag above the breast pocket said in cursive letters that my name was Albie, and I liked that name. I murmured it twice, thinking maybe I’d put it to use sometime in the future.
I stood outside the community center at dusk with my hat tilted back, taking in the building, scratching my head, and I knew exactly what I looked like: I looked like a gardener. Albie the lawn man at the end of the day. Maybe trying to puzzle out the location of the hose connection, maybe going back to pull out this one particular dead rosebush the boss man said to be sure to pull. I had gloves on, tight latex, thin as skin. I walked down the hedge-flanked walkway with a workingman’s purpose, peered in the windows, and tested the handles.
I hummed and whistled and crouched and took a sounding of that big brass front-door lock, running my fingers gently across its surface, feeling for nicks and scratches that would show that someone else had been here before me. My humming built its way up to a crescendo as I opened my slim black case and found the right rake and the right tension bar and stuck them in there and wiggled and poked at the lock’s invisible insides. As I tested that hardware-store lock I considered which way I would run if this turned out to be the moment when I ran. Highway overpass was one mile west. I would move as fast as I could without running. Chuck the lock-pick kit into the bushes, peel off Albie’s uniform, stuff it into a garbage can, and head away on foot, due west on 38th Street. One mile, then I would hustle up the on-ramp on foot and flag down a car and get myself gone.
I shooed the idea away. I always shooed it away. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was tethered tight. There was a device inside of me, right up at the place where the top of the spine meets the base of the brain. Screwed in by government doctors, sending out coordinates on me all day every day to Bridge, to whoever sits beside Bridge. Smaller than a grain of rice, that little device, or so they’d told me. Smaller than the head of a pin.
They also told me I would not feel it, but I could feel it, I always felt it, I always heard it, though it made no sound. When I was too quiet for too long I heard it singing in me: humming, taunting, burning. A hook. An anchor. A leash.
It didn’t take more than a minute to persuade the lock of Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise to let go. I straightened up, cracked my knuckles, nodded approvingly—nice work, Albie the gardener—and nudged open the door with my foot.
I moved quickly through the empty quiet of the community center. Most of it was taken up by the one room, a big room, with a dozen beige folding chairs arranged in a circle and a coffee service set up in the back, as if for a meeting of drug addicts or drunks. I crouched down to examine one of these folding-chair seats and found no dust on it at all. I looked for gaps in wallpaper. I looked for loose tiles on the floor. I counted entrances and exits. Doing this part of a job, straight breaking and entering, covering a room, sniffing for holes and hideaways, I really was not a person. I was neither black nor white. Just action. Just work. A machine. I dropped down onto my hands and knees to feel my way across the floor.
I turned on my flashlight and pointed it one way, then another, watching the line of light pick out stains on the floor, dust balls, a couple of cigarette butts, bent like tiny broken bones. I didn’t imagine I’d be finding the PB himself in here, alone in the darkness, behind a stack of boxes or under loose floorboards. I gave smooth young Father Barton more credit than that. Although it had, at least once, been just that easy. In Buffalo once—or Burlington, or Baltimore, some northern city—the poor son of a bitch I was looking for had been in a child’s tree house in the backyard. Some foolish dilettante abolitionist, a software engineer or some other kind of workaday white man, had volunteered to serve as an attendant on the Airlines, told himself that he could hide a rabbit for six days until the man could get put on a connecting flight to Ontario.