Underground Airlines(48)

I leaned across the table and pointed, and he started, hesitated. I put my finger beside his and showed him.

“Oh,” he said. “Duh.”

“This is a tricky one,” I said. “Just take your time, now. Take your time.”

He went slowly, cautiously, started down a path following the line I proposed, and wound his way out. He circled where it said END a couple times, and I said, “There you go,” and we took a look at each other for a second or two.

“What do you say, Lionel?”

“Thanks, Mr. Jim.”

“Well, you’re very welcome.”

There was no question that I was feeling something toward Martha and her son, some softening. But there was a sense of danger, too, a caution flag whipping way in the back of my mind. I could have gotten up anytime, said it was nice to meet y’all, and gotten back to work. What was I doing?

“There is this man I met,” said Martha, looking through me—past me.

“What, now?”

“A man in Ohio. Steubenville.” She said the town name one syllable at a time, as though it were make-believe. “Steubenville. I didn’t meet him. I met him on the Internet.”

Her voice was distant, quiet, but full of force. She needed to be telling this to me—to someone. The whole rest of the restaurant was watching TV. Lionel was back in Lionel world, drawing a castle in a blank space on the menu.

“He said that for twenty-nine thousand, five hundred dollars, this guy, he could…well.” She took a deep breath, looked at me head-on. “So apparently there’s a…like a, a database.”

“A—what, now?”

But I knew immediately. Immediately, much had become clear.

“A database. It says where they all are.” She leaned across the table. She was fidgeting with her fingers, twisting them together. “All the slaves, you know? And this guy says if I pay him, he can—he can get into that for me.”

“Huh,” I said, soft and uncertain, as if I didn’t know precisely what she was talking about.

The database was TorchLight, a comprehensive listing of every person who is or who has ever been held by any of the plantations, factories, mines, “working prisons,” home systems, oil rigs, all the endless variety of places where Persons Bound to Labor are bound. All slaveholding corporations and individuals are obligated under the laws of their various states to report to TorchLight every purchase or sale or escape, every birth and every death, every injury resulting in a scar. Every piece of data to be stored and cataloged.

All the information crucial to the southern man-owning class—those with the vested interest in the health, current value, and projected depreciated value of their workforce.

I was profoundly skeptical of Martha’s mysterious database hacker from Steubenville. I had tried over the years, on various assignments, to find my way into the TorchLight database. It would have been handy for all kinds of reasons. But TorchLight was protected by law, protected by internal security, protected by proprietary software. You damn near had to be sitting at a computer in some whiphand’s back office to open the thing up.

“But who—” I started, and Martha turned her gaze very quickly to her son, then back to me, and even old Jim Dirkson understood. And just at that moment, of course, the lady came, my sandwich and the boy’s pancake platter and the carafe to refill Martha’s coffee. Martha said “Hey, Liney? You want to hear something crazy?”

“What?” Lionel looked up. “What’s crazy?”

“You want to listen to music while you’re eating?” She dug out from her pocketbook a pair of big headphones, and she plugged him in to some sort of thin handheld device, no bigger than a slice of bread, one of the marvelous new Japanese imports—her sister had gotten it for him for his birthday. When he was inside the cocoon, when I was eating, she told me about his father.

“His name was Samson. Sam.”

“That’s an unusual, uh, what do they call it? An unusual service name.”

Martha’s eyes flashed darkly. “That wasn’t his service name. He had one, but we don’t need to talk about it. He wouldn’t have—he doesn’t like to talk about it. His name was Sam, okay? Sammy, sometimes. He had been on a shrimp boat.”

“Louisiana?”

“Alabama. Bayou La Batre.”

I had no experience of shrimp-boat slavery, only the stories: hot work, sweat work, the boiling sea, and the roll of the waves.

“There was some kind of crazy rescue,” Martha said. “The Mexicans. With the boats. I forget what they call them.”

“Los emprendedores, I think,” I said as if I didn’t know for sure. As if I didn’t have in my head a catalog of every kind of South American or Central American or Canadian partisans, all the alien freelancers. There had been a movie called Los Emprendedores, actually, and I happened to have seen it—it came out during my Chicago years, and I snuck into a theater on Halsted Street and watched it twice in a row. Edward James Olmos as the pirate jefe, Denzel Washington as the stoic peeb. James Woods, maybe, someone like that, as the noble but conflicted Coast Guard captain running them down. There’s a famous scene at the end, the two exiles leaping overboard, choosing to face the sharks.

Martha told me that Samson had been a tackle-box rescue, belowdecks, tumbled by waves, washed up in Jacksonville, fetched up somehow in New Albany, where she had been living at the time, as arbitrary a locale for him as it had been for her.