Underground Airlines(37)

Something was piercing through me, some kind of heat burning the raw layer under the skin. Something I couldn’t then explain and that even now I have trouble transforming from thought into words. But something was happening. A dial was turning.

You can imagine a compass needle twitching to life—the smallest pulse—the barest movement—struggling for north.





Twice a year a group was graduated off the pile and moved inside, and soon enough it was my turn. It was something of an occasion: work halted inside and outside; everybody circled around the flagpoles. The only kind of time like it was church, or when one of us died or when someone was sold.

Mr. Bell came out and walked down the line of us. I think it was nine other boys and three girls who came off the pile along with me. We stood with our chests stuck out. We had on the yellow suits we’d just been issued, and the respirator headgear, those fancy magic face masks that you had to wear on most shifts inside.

The ceremony only took ten minutes after all that—for us to be lined up and for Mr. Bell to kiss us each one time on the top of our heads and tighten the straps of our masks with tender ceremony. And then the buzzer sounded for our very first kill-floor shift, and he said, “All right, y’all, get to it,” and we marched inside.

By the time that first day ended my yellow suit was no longer clean.

“So?” said Castle when he found me in the johns. “You all right?”

“Course I am.”

I didn’t want Castle to know how I really felt after that first long day inside the cutting house. I had been very close all day to vomiting. Not from the work itself, I guess—that first day all I did was throw the lever of the downpuller machine, over and over and over, align the mechanical jaws, press the button, and watch them tug off the cattle hide. One swift motion and the full skin came off, like taking off a shirt. I guess the sight of it, over and over. The glistening black and red of the insides. I don’t know. But I did—I had felt all day on the brink of vomiting, and I still did even then in the johns, but I didn’t want Castle to know that. I didn’t want him to lose his pride in me.

“I’m fine,” I told him, and I smiled weak and watery. When I looked at him I felt like I could see his insides, like his skin’d been pulled away.

“You’ll be all right,” he said, like he hadn’t heard me say I was fine. He put his hand on my shoulder, which made me jump. You didn’t want the Old Man seeing that, talking close and confidential. The Old Man or anyone who might tell him. “What’s next is what matters,” he said.

Sure enough, there was Harbor, looking at Castle’s hand on me, looking at us whispering all together like that.

“What you mean, what’s next?” said Harbor with his hard, slit-face smile.

“You mind your own, how about, son?” said Castle.

“My own what? Everything’s everybody’s.” Harbor smiled. “Right?”

That was one of the mottoes. Everything’s everybody’s. Eyes on the prize. For you and me and Bell’s Farm!

Harbor ignored Castle then and talked right to me. Harbor was between my age and Castle’s age, but he talked just like a grown man. Talked almost like an Old Man, actually, like he was in charge of something. “Your man here talking about what’s next. Lemme tell you what’s next. Today they fit on that mask. Tomorrow you work on the carving line. Then the kill floor. Till they put you on the block or put you in the ground. That’s what’s next.”

Castle shook me awake that night. Not to tell me any words or stories. His big eyes wider than ever but serious. Focused.

“You remember what I told you?”

I blinked. He had told me so many things.

“They not us,” he said, so quiet I could hardly hear him. “Not Harbor, not anyone. Something’ll come for you and me.”

“What?” I said. “What’ll come?”

He wasn’t even making noise anymore. He just mouthed the word. “Opportunity.”



Pretty soon I decided that inside was worse than the pile.

That was punishable, of course: to think of any kind of work as worse or worst or bad. Thoughts Against Good Work. I kept my thoughts to myself. Out on the pile there was some music in the air, kind of: there was the distant rush and honk of the highway; there was the caw of crows and even on occasion the merry chirrup of a songbird. Inside the only sounds were work sounds: the chunk-chunk of the bolt gun and the chug-chug of the ramp, the dull, ignorant lowing of the cows, the buzz and rattle of the hot machines. And the nervous click-clack of boot heels all around you: the Old Men and the guards strolling with their hands on their holsters, the Franklins with their clipboards, the USDA in their lab coats, with their instruments.

I got through it by telling myself Castle’s stories, all the ones he had told me over all those years: the man who slipped into the water and was eaten by a whale and spat out again; the leopard who cannot change his spots; and the one (my favorite one) about the man who built another man from parts he had found, brought him to life with lightning for magic.

Other times I told myself the words. Doing my tasks, again and again and again: cracking skulls, pulling out viscera, carving out tongues by their thick roots. Repeating Castle’s old words from under our blanket together: Carburetor.

Chicago.