Underground Airlines(57)

“Why?”

“Because he is confused,” said Barton softly. “He is tired and confused.”

“Because of Luna,” said Jackdaw—not Jackdaw…said Kevin the sophomore, and he didn’t sound tired or confused. He snapped to life again inside the threatening curl of my arm, taking over his own story. “There’s a girl named Luna, a PB, and she was the one who got your precious evidence. She took all the f*cking risks, this girl who was born a slave and was a slave her whole life.” His voice was a hot rush, rough with tears, rising with passion, as Barton’s voice had risen. “I told that girl that if she helped me we would get her out, too. But then your people—”

“They ain’t our people,” Cook said.

“Your people—”

Barton shook his head. “We work with various entities—”

“They left her. Left her behind. So I told them…” He rolled his head backwards, and it pushed against my chest. “I told them, go and get that girl and I tell you where I put your f*cking envelope.”

Silence. The sun was rising. The ugly water lapped at our feet. Barton stood with his eyes closed, some of that spit still making its slow way down his cheek, over an expression of agony and forbearance.

And then Barton took another step, and I said, “Stop,” but he ignored me. He knelt in the muddy water at our feet, and the brown ripples lapped the hem of his robe, his shoes, his thin brown socks. He spoke with a voice that was soft and charged and urgent, as if he were administering a rite.

“You must reconsider, Kevin. You must. We are talking here about the fate of three million people.”

“I don’t care about three million people. I care about one. You go and get her, and I tell you where it is.”

“We can’t do it,” said Barton. “That plan was years in the making. Years. We can’t just wander into places—”

“She’s dead,” said Officer Cook suddenly. “Okay? Your girl is dead.”

Barton turned to look at the cop, and Maris was looking at him, too. There was a long, brutal stillness. None of them spoke, but in the gloom of the sunrise I could read their silent communion—they hadn’t planned to tell him, afraid of how he would react, what he would do, but now there was nothing left. No other choice. The government had arrived, a monster was in their midst, the situation was at crisis, and so he had been told.

Kevin’s face, meanwhile, had gone slack with astonishment and grief. I felt his narrow rib cage next to mine, felt his grief jump like an electric arc from his heart into mine, and then at last he wailed. The sound that was coming out of poor Kevin was low and long, an animal’s trapped holler. “No,” he was saying, more sound than word. “No…”

Barton, without expression, watched him scream. His pale eyes were lasered in on suffering Kevin: X-raying, filleting, dissecting. I believe that if he could have he would have cut into that boy and torn his secret out by hand.

Cook kept going, sighing, sad. “They found out she helped you get out, and they went and put her down. They made it look like an accident. You know how they do.”

Kevin shook his head, pain evident on his face. Cook’s choice of words was brutal: they put her down. Like a dog—a wolf. Something wild.

“No, see, no,” said Kevin. “They can’t do that. She can get punished, but—no, capital punishment…no. There’s laws. Laws…”

Wishful thinking. I thought it but did not say it. There are laws. There are rules. Violent slavery is against the law. But rules are forever being broken. Guards get carried away. Workloads get dangerous. Franklins get bribed; Franklins are sloppy; Franklins don’t give a shit. A surprising number are former guards. When I was ten or eleven years old I knew a PB called Cat’s Eye who used to call a certain working white, whose name was Dickie, he used to call him Dickweed and say, “Oops, sorry ’bout that,” and every time he got punished, and then he’d do it again. Then one time he was working in the tannery, and he fell into the vat. Industrial accident; these things happen. Working whites somehow missed him going in, and so did the guards, and even the Franklins—three yellow jumpsuits in the room and nobody noticed until it was time to fish out what was left of him with the long curved stick they kept hung on the wall in there. The stink of it filled the building so severely that the first three Families who worked that room afterward had to work it with rags tied around their mouths, even after it had been closed for a week for fumigation.

“Yes,” said Cook. “Sucks, man, I know. It sucks.”

“Yeah,” said Maris.

“It is God’s will,” said Barton, “because now you are free…free to tell us—”

But Kevin had had enough after “It is God’s will.” God’s will was more than he could bear, and he thrashed and brought his knee up into me, which I was not expecting, and maybe I didn’t want to stop him, maybe that’s why he had the chance to twist around, knee me in the side of my leg, grab the gun from my hand, and aim it at Father Barton.

“Monster,” he shouted, and Barton said, “I am not the monster, son, I—”

A pair of pops, one after the other, pop pop, barely audible over the river rush—pop pop—ricocheting and overlapping each other, and everybody was moving at once in every direction. Barton jerked as if hit, but he had not been hit, only me, a sudden appearance of pain in my shoulder. I saw as I fell backwards with the bullet that it was Maris who’d fired, Maris, with Cook’s gun, scrabbled up from the ground, and Kevin had taken the other shot, right through the chest: I fell, and he fell on top of me, and he was dead.