Underground Airlines(38)

Opportunity.



Six or eight months after I moved in to the cutting floor, Castle shook me awake one night, and I was as mad as I’d ever been.

“Getting too old for this,” I said, grumpy.

“No, love,” he said. “Don’t say that.”

My hands hurt so much. I had been moved from the downpuller onto a straight carving station, and in sleep my hands stayed cramped in the shape that held the knife.

“Too old.”

“I know, dear. I know. But listen. I have to give you something.”

And always, Castle knew what I didn’t know yet, because he had seen it happen with the olders. Soon they would come and read his number out and move him to another cabin. He was the oldest of the younger ones, and soon they’d need the room for the new littlest coming out of the breed lot. He’d go to cabin 9, and after a year, on from there to breeding.

That night while he waited for me to wake and listen, his big eyes were full of tears. I think they were. I wish I could remember.

“I got a secret to give you. You gotta listen. This matters.”

“Huh?”

“You listening?”

I allowed with a shrug that I was.

“We are from the future.”

“Man, what?” That had woken me all the way. “The future? Castle, come on.”

But his face was serious. So, so serious.

“We are from the future, my sweet brother. We are future boys. Okay?” He was talking too loud. He was all worked up. I put my finger across his lips. He brushed it away. “We look like we’re here, with all this, but we’re really somewhere else. In the future we got somewhere else. Some other time.”

“What place you mean?”

“I don’t know, honey. Someplace. Chicago, maybe. Future place.” He had told me stories about that city he got from somewhere. It was a city on the other side of America. Buildings upright and proud. “I’m in Chicago, and I’m eating a hot dog.”

I had to put my cramped hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

Castle had never eaten any hot dogs, and neither had I, but we knew what they were well enough. There was a dancing hot dog on the trucks that rumbled in and out unceasingly from the loading dock on the north side of the kill house. But for our food we had mostly the loaves, dense and filling. Carrot loaves and sorghum loaves and vanilla loaves for a treat.

“We live in two places at once, you and me.” Castle’s eyes shone with pleasure, with real, true electric pleasure, and I felt it arcing between us like starlight. “You live here, you live there. You live now, you live later. You live in this place, you live in the other place. There’s two of you. Do you understand?”

I nodded. I wasn’t sure that I did, but I wanted him to know that I did.

Castle held up two fingers in the dark, and from then on that was our sign. Two fingers, raised and spread apart. It meant—you and me—two of us. It meant him and me, but also it meant me and me and it also meant him and him. Me now, me later. Castle now, Castle later.

This place and the other place, here and there, now and later on.





17.



In the morning, in the silence of the waiting room, in the bright light of the small examination room of Dr. Venezia-Karbach, I felt the uneasy and unwelcome sensation of being completely alone in the presence of myself. I had spent so much of my life costumed and posing, turning and turning myself, like changing the channels on a television set, that sometimes when I was caught as I was now, in a silent moment, just waiting, nothing to do but sit and wait and think in a white and airless room, I felt like a blank screen. I felt like a dead television. I was myself. I was nothing. I sat there in the thin paper robe. My ass was freezing on the steel of the table.

The one piece of artwork in Dr. Venezia-Karbach’s office was a framed print of a Norman Rockwell painting, First-Day Jitters: little black girl in a plain white dress, handing up an apple to her pretty black teacher, and both of them looking shy and aw-shucks nervous. That was a famous painting, the first day of class at Little Rock School for Negro Children, 1954, seven years after Arkansas became free, nine months after the Supreme Court ruled that freedom wasn’t enough—there had to be schools. There had to be a chance.

I stared at that schoolteacher now, her wide excited eyes, her worry, the white bows in her hair. I had read some sort of magazine feature about her recently, the real person, about the way the rest of her life had turned out. I tried to remember where I had read it. Tried to remember how she was doing.

“Good morning, Mr. Morton. I understand you’re here for a checkup—is that correct?”

“Yes, Doc, you got it,” I said, snapping right into it. “That’s right.”

“Let’s have a look.”

Dr. Venezia-Karbach was a white woman in her late fifties or early sixties, not unfriendly but not friendly, either. Her hair was short and spiked up, boxy and sexless. On her instructions I removed the robe and sat in my underpants, hands laced in my lap, while she conducted her examination with brisk efficiency. Her fingertips lit on the various regions of my anatomy—torso and limbs, eyes and ears, pulse points and glands. I breathed deeply while she pressed my chest with the cold flat face of the stethoscope. I opened my mouth and said “Ah” and flinched a little while she inspected my throat with the funneled light of the laryngoscope.