Underground Airlines(17)

“So maybe lover boy is married,” I told Bridge. “Maybe he doesn’t want his boss knowing what’s going on in the office after hours. Either way, they’re leaning on this mope to arrange special deliveries.”

“Do you have a name?” Bridge’s voice had recovered its customary composure.

“Winston Bibb. He’s the assistant regional manager.”

“And have you paid him a visit yet?”

I said no, and Bridge said why not, and I drew in a lungful of poison and said because I was done with this approximation of a human existence, with bending not only my abilities but my real human soul to the sinister will of an authoritarian state, and that one day I would transform my flesh to metal and become a sword aimed at his heart.

Bridge didn’t laugh. He waited in silence until, in the same even tone, I said no, I hadn’t gone to Whole Wide World yet, because it was nighttime and they weren’t open, and I doubted I would gain much ground by B and E. In daylight I would go over there and find out what special shipment poor Winston was forced to arrange so Jackdaw could be put on it. From there I could find out who took delivery, find out where—find out and find out until I found out the man himself, found him out and called him in, and then Bridge’s white vans would roll up in their rough government splendor and bear him away.

As I gave my report and we laid our plans I could hear Bridge’s fingers rattling on his keyboard, and I could feel his happiness buzzing and popping, crackling along the cables and down the invisible waves between us. His pink bureaucratic heart was alive with pleasure. Another file, almost ready to be closed.

“Okay,” he said, “very good,” getting ready to be done, and I said, “I got one more question about the file.”

“Do you?”

“Where’d he come from?”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s nothing here on the record of acquisition. It says he’s been in service for nineteen and a half months. So what about before that? He’s twenty-three years old. His patrimonial and matrimonial lines are question marks. All his stamps before the current one are blacked out.”

Bridge didn’t answer right away. Somewhere in the darkness below me, a car stuttered and started. I tried to guess what kind of car it was based on the tenor of the engine noise and the shape of the lights: the high whine of the engine said it was something cheap, subcontinental. Bridge, in his office, was frowning at his screen, scrolling through his own copy, seeking out the relevant portion of the record.

“Perhaps he was inherited,” he said finally. “Maybe he was a gift. Maybe he was won in a card game.”

I finished my Baba and flicked it out into the lot. “Does that still happen?”

“Everything happens.”

I scowled. A dark feeling was fighting up in me like a living thing, clawing up from my stomach, pushing its way from the inside out. “Well, can we find out?”

“I will look into it.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that I will look into it.”

And there it was: for the first time in the years I had known him—except of course I had never known him at all—Mr. Bridge had raised his voice. A change in tone, almost but not quite below the level of notice. He had…insisted. He had emphasized.





Castle’s eyes would get so wide in the dark.

Castle’s bright and beautiful white eyes, like twin planets. His eyes were all I could see when it was just Castle and me under our shared blanket, on our shared cot, in our cabin, which was the one closest to the northernmost chain fence. There was no light in the cabin except the moonlight coming from one high window, but even under the blanket I could always see Castle’s eyes. He was my brother. He’d wake me up when the other ones were all sleeping. The Old Man and the others of us as well. In the middle of the night, almost every night, he would shake my shoulder till I woke. This is starting when I was…God, I don’t know—six years old? Seven? It feels like I was so little, except I was on the pile already when he started it, which means I was done with the school, so I had to be eight or more, and Castle was off the pile—he was indoors, on the kill floor. One step up from where I was. Same thing had happened when we were babies: when I was done with the breed lot and into the school, he was already done with school and on the pile.

“Carburetor.”

“What?”

My sleepy little head. I remember how it felt to be so tired, looking up into Castle’s eyes, big and white, like I was dreaming them.

“Go on. Try and say it. Carburetor.”

“Carburetor.”

He was ten, and I was eight. We were little boys. I don’t know how he trained his body to wake, but he did, and he’d shake me till I woke up, too, and then he’d tell me stories and teach me words.

The dead-to-life breathing of the other ones, a darkness filled with sleep. The fat, shuddering snores of the Old Man. Just me and Castle, alive together in the dark.

“Good, honey. Right on. A carburetor is a little part of a car, or of a tractor. Or of one of the small carts, you know, them the working whites putter around on. It’s a little part in the engine, helps get it started.”

“Oh.” My head drifting back toward the pillow, Castle flicking me with his fingers, going, “No, love. No, honey, no. Eyes open, now. I got more for you.”