Underground Airlines(54)

Maybe I should have just turned around. Done my job. The one I had agreed to do six years ago. All I had to do was go back up there and make the call.

I passed into this new chamber, into deeper darkness, and empathy rose up in me. I was him. I was that man huddled in there, waiting, holding his breath, terrified by the small approaching light. My heart hammered, as his was likely to be hammering. I felt the sweat of fear on my brow that was the sweat of his fear.

An investigation feels so permanent, even after only a couple days. It starts to feel like its own state. You almost forget that every search is directed at a goal, and at the end of the search, if you’re good, you find the one you’re looking for. The part is always coming when you open the door or the lid or you unzip the bag or pry open the crate or you yank open the trapdoor or pull down on the tug and let the ladder drop down.

The ground in this narrower passage turned into a short stone staircase, three shallow steps going down. I was both of us. I was myself, and I was also the person at the end of the path, seeing my own shadow grow larger. I was the person hearing me coming. The sound was ancient and reverberant, the click and scrape of heels on stone steps.

I was him, seeing that light cutting into his world. I was me, and I was him, struck with terror at the sound of this invader. I felt my own fear increase. I felt not the keen anxiety of the predator but the panicking fear of his prey.

The flashlight beam struck a wall and made a pale radius, started to creep across a small room.

I’d call out now. I wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore.

“Who’s that?” he said, a desperate small rasp. “Who’s here?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. I moved the beam around the room and found him staring back at me. Huddled under a blanket, staring up at me with quavering cheeks. The little concrete room he huddled in was lit by one emergency-exit light, gleaming dully against the slickened packed-mud walls. He moaned and I kept coming, and it grew stronger, this dissociated feeling of watching myself approach, a looming menace in the darkness, the reaching evil hand. I saw myself as he saw me, coming in slow, step by step, my sidearm in my fist; him cornered and terrified, treed like a wounded bear, cocooned in blankets, lost in shadow.

Jackdaw looked like shit. Sallow and unwholesome, bunched up on the ground, a discarded thing. Someone had left a bottle of water beside his bed with a straw poking out at a steep angle; in the other corner of the room was a bedpan, a dribble of piss at the bottom of it. Jackdaw’s eyes were half closed, squinting from the dim light, like moles’ eyes; his skin was marked by lesions, yellow halos of bruise and discoloration. He was crumpled atop some sort of cot or pallet, covered in blankets, and—there—Mr. Maris’s blazer, one added layer against the underground cold, no doubt with my butterfly knife still in the pocket. The kid was twisted up in all those damn layers, half in, half out, like a child who’s not sleeping, like Castle, like me. It was only later, when I saw the place again in my mind, that I recalled the semicircle of candles beside him, blown out or burned out, drowning at their bases in their own spent wax.

Beneath his miseries he looked just as he did in the picture: handsome and fine-boned, a movie star trapped in a nightmare. No one who ever killed any two nurses, that was for sure, no one who ever battered them to death and leaped out of a window to run. A thin face and delicate eyes, face bruised and worn, but still, still he was a beautiful child. Too beautiful for this world for sure.

I stood in the dark staring and saying nothing, and then it was Jackdaw who started us talking.

“So you him, huh?”

I stayed back against the wall. In the shadow.

“Who?” I said. “Who am I?”

“Come on.” Jackdaw shifting his body under his mass of sheets, drawing himself back till he had pulled up against the wall. He made his delicate face tough: squared off his jaw. Jutted out his lower lip. “Go on, then. Let’s go. Where’s it start? Fingernails or what?”

“What?”

“You work on the legs, that it? You got a bat? A blowtorch. I know how y’all do. I seen the movies. Y’all with the bats and the pliers and shit. Listen. I ain’t telling you where it is, so you do what you have to do.”

His voice was like his face, grim and terrified and strained with the effort to be strong.

“What is it that I have to do?” I said, doing my own pretending, pretending I knew what was going on. I was baffled. The darkness was between us. I ain’t telling you where it is. I seen the movies.

“What movies?” I said. “What movies have you seen?”

“What?”

The truth was washing through me, phrases and scraps, small ideas, understanding—Cook: A special kind of kid; Janice: That number is just not coming up—and I drew in breath and came over and knelt beside the shivering boy. “You’re not a real slave.”

Jackdaw coughed, looked at me like I was crazy. “I’m not, and you know I’m not.”

“I don’t know anything,” I said, and I meant it. Jesus, did I mean it.

“I’m a free man, you *.” He gathered up some spirit in his eyes, and he stared at me and declared it: “Free man. Born and raised.”





23.



I picked him up, and I carried him away.

Half-dead boy, he weighed nothing at all. However long behind the Fence and nearly a week down here, buried alive by his rescuers. Worn and tired as I was, I still could carry him with no trouble, and that’s what I did—threw him over my shoulder like he was a troublesome child. He struggled, but not much. He was weak. I moved as fast as I could.