Underground Airlines(22)
I framed my questions with care. “So is that how it works, usually? Get a person settled in the North? Would that be—that would be for a woman, too?”
I readjusted my posture in the seat, sat as Dirkson would sit, thinking about his beloved Gentle, imagining her in a parka and winter gloves in the snowy reaches of Little America.
“Yeah, usually.” He frowned. “Well, I think so. Not my department.”
“Barton handles that part?”
“No.” Cook rolled his eyes. “Father Barton does a whole lot of nothing, most of the time. A lot of speeches. A lot of passing the f*cking hat. But other folks do the rescues, other folks run ’em north, other folks sit on ’em till they ready to move ’em on. See? Nobody talks to nobody.”
I nodded. This was classic underground: distinct, discontinuous cells. Cutout operations. Everything clean and careful and strictly need-to-know. The road turned into an overpass, spanning a muddy tributary down below, then back into a road, with fast-food chains and small office buildings slipping past my window. Homeless people on bus-stop benches. Storefronts available for lease. Same thing everywhere. Every northern city.
“And this poor young brother,” I said, hushed and hesitant. “The one y’all just took. How is he adjusting to his freedom?”
“Ah…well.” Cook gritted his teeth, gave his head a quick shake. A passing pain or a reflection of pain. “He’s a special case, that one. A special kind of kid.”
“Oh, yes?” I said, but Cook didn’t seem to want to elaborate, and I didn’t want to push.
We parked downtown, across from a tall monument that sat at the center of a traffic circle. It was an imposing white obelisk topped with a statue of a man in an old-fashioned long coat, standing slender and erect, with his arms extended. The man was tall and made taller by his long face and long top hat, and he was surrounded by shorter white columns and tiers of white steps. A nine-foot-tall, bearded, rail-thin white man, stone-faced and stoic, staring out over the downtown, hands out with palms up, as if imploring.
Oh, Jesus, I thought, studying the statue. Oh, God. That’s right—Indianapolis. Indiana. It was here. This is where they killed the poor bastard.
“This spot right here is the exact center of the state,” Officer Cook was saying, talking over his shoulder as we crossed the circle and approached the man on his high marble pedestal. “Indy is smack dab in the middle of Indiana, see, and Monument Circle’s the center of the city, and the statue of Old Abe—you get the idea. Plus, of course, the state’s in the middle of nowhere. So there you have it: right now we’re in the exact geographical middle of f*cking nowhere.”
Cook walked briskly up the steps, and I trotted up behind him. Pathetic, desperate little Jim Dirkson, scrabbling and shifting, trailing after tall, striding, confident Officer Willie Cook. He’d told me that Barton would never get it, because Barton’s white, but I knew that Cook would never get it, either. A northern man, a black man who had never been a slave—we were like creatures of a different species. I was as different from him as I was from Barton or from Bridge because of what I had seen, because of what moved still beneath my skin.
As I thought about it, it came up again, heaving up, and I felt my hand rushing up to my mouth to clamp it shut, keep everything back. The old loud sounds and the stink that always clouded my nostrils, sounds that only I could hear. All I wanted was silence, so I could listen to this cocky young officer and gather up the details he was dropping like fruit from a tree. All I wanted was silence. Silence to do my work. What the slave wants but can never have is not only freedom from the chains but also from their memory.
We got to the top of the steps, Cook and me. We stood beside each other looking across the traffic circle at the surrounding storefronts: a sandwich shop, a big pretty Presbyterian church, the entrance to the symphony hall. A couple of friends walked into the Starbucks, a black girl and a white girl, both of them in nurse’s scrubs, their arms linked together, giggling.
The first-thing sun was wavering and uneasy behind a thick bank of clouds. Glimmers of blue making a faint effort around it. I felt the sour acid of anticipation in my gut. I felt the cool mist of rain on my face.
“Be a few minutes,” said Willie Cook. He tugged out a fresh piece of gum, leaned back on the base of the statue, stuck the dead wad into the foil. A former smoker; traces of old habits in the new.
Running around the base of the obelisk was a series of bas-reliefs, starting with Lincoln in knee pants, splitting rails.
I wandered slowly around, tracing the lines with my fingers. I remembered it dimly, all the history I had crammed into my head during my wilderness years, my time in Chicago learning to be human, memorizing the world. It was all here, illustrated in stone, the whole story of Old Abe’s assassination—the martyrdom that saved the union, the murder that remade the country. Here he was, hands raised in humble farewell to the adoring crowd around his train car, the president-elect leaving Springfield for Washington. Here he was on a hotel balcony, eyes wide as he fell backwards from the fatal shot into the arms of his son Robert. Here was Lincoln with a halo, the good angel hovering over the hastily reconvened Congress. Even the members who had thrown down their commissions, who had resigned and stomped off to form the Confederacy in the preceding months—they had returned, moved by the death of a president, wary but willing, ready to start anew.