Underground Airlines(36)

“Am I—what?”

But it wasn’t even the question. That word—that word again—that word. I sucked in poison from the cigarette and felt my cheeks tremble. Felt my neck get hot.

“If you are dragging your feet, I will know it.”

“I’m not.”

“What I’m hearing from you, Victor, is a list of half-completed tasks. Bullshit leads. This is day three on this.”

“Three days is nothing,” I said. “Remember Milwaukee? Fuck, man, remember Carlisle?”

“If you can’t get this over with—”

“If I—what?”

“If you can’t find the man—”

I was staring at the phone again, holding it at arm’s length and shaking my head. We were upside down. We were in a shadow land. Bridge’s aggression was way, way out of character. He was my handler, and he was handling me poorly. I noticed his uncharacteristic inarticulateness, the strange doubling back, how he had arrived at “If you can’t find the man” only after “If you can’t get this over with,” which has a whole different character.

“If you’re slow playing this, Victor, I will know that. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“You understand what that means.”

I stood in silence, simmering in the implication of the question. The violence gleaming cold behind it.

Looking back, I don’t know why I was surprised. All that’d happened was that the truth of Bridge, of me and him, had unexpectedly shown itself right up close where I could see it. It had always been violence. For six years it had been violence: behind our professional exchanges and collegial banter, there had always been violence. For six years I’d spoken to him on secure lines, from comfortable hotel rooms, smoking my cigarettes, breathing night air, playing at freedom. But the first time I spoke to him I was shackled in a Chicago basement, hands tied to a table and feet to a chair, and he was a cold unfamiliar voice spooling out from a speakerphone like a length of wire, the voice of my doom until he offered me a choice that was no choice.

After all those years in the shadows I had gotten it together, gotten papers, gotten myself a job, loading and unloading trucks at Townes Stores, just north of the Chicago city limits. Two years, two normal, happy human years, then one night I came off shift at dawn and it was behind me, a silver car was idling on Monroe Street with no plates, and I didn’t even f*cking think about it. I dropped the hot dog I was eating and ran, looking with wild instinct for the North Star and finding only the egg-yellow glow of streetlamps.

I made it maybe thirty feet before they tackled me and brought me down. While they dragged me to the car thrashing and wailing, I thought crazily that I should have turned right instead of left, should have gone up the alley instead of down the sidewalk. As if it mattered, as if there were any direction I could have run to escape the unforgetting world.

Next thing I knew I was in a basement. Federal building, downtown Chicago. I was still in my work shirt, still in my nice clean Adidas, in my blue jeans. All that peace and safety draining away, all my new life sloughing off onto the concrete floor. I was already feeling the cold steel of the chains drawing down between my shoulder blades, running in lengths around my ankles.

Somebody came in and put a phone down on the table, and I stared at it, confused, until it beeped two times and a voice came on the line.

“My name is Bridge,” said the voice. “I am a deputy marshal in the United States Marshals Service. I trust you appreciate the gravity of your situation. Your instructions now are simply to listen to my proposal and answer when I’m done. Your answer will be either yes or no.” Listening to his cold voice, I was thinking about cows’ heads, cows’ necks, bloodied flanks. Thinking of the hours and the days. Bridge said again, yes or no, and I would have done anything, yes, anything, I would have said anything, anything, forever, anything.

When he was done talking, I said yes. Right away I said yes, of course I did, I said yes.

And now Bridge, his same voice after all these years: You understand what that means. It means I was there in Indianapolis, in that northern hotel room, but a trap could open in the floor and crash me down into that federal building basement; the walls could fall away and show how all along I’d been at Bell’s, in the stink and blood haze and weariness of Bell’s Farm.

You understand what that means, he said, and I did. Violence had always been behind our conversations. What’s behind everything, what’s under everything. Violence.

“Sir,” I said, very slowly, very calm. “I am pursuing the case to the best of my ability.”

Bridge didn’t answer. No more silences, brooding or angry or anything. He just hung up.



Maybe there was something going on with the man I didn’t know about. Maybe it was another case. Maybe it was Batlisch, the hearings, adding some tension to the air of those government hallways. But I didn’t think so. Something was going on with this—with Bridge, with me. With this case.

I was going to have to sleep, but I didn’t even try it yet. I stood out on the balcony for a long time, for what might have been hours.

All of it cycling through, rutting me up. Cook in the car, “A special kind of kid…” and Bridge on the phone, “get this over with…” and Martha Flowers, “Would you ever…” All of it. All of this life.