Underground Airlines(64)

“I’ve got layers, Mr. Bridge. I go way down.”

Darkness was rising all around me like black water. Darkness was subsuming me; darkness was me. I focused instead on the distant light, high and far above me, the glittering promise I had glimpsed when Barton set me to my new task.

“I’m going to go get this thing for these people,” I told Bridge. “And then I’m going to bring it to you. And in exchange, you’re going to give me what I want.”

“Which is?”

“Which is freedom. I bring it back, and you pull out my pin. You unclip me, and I go to Canada, and I never hear from you again.”



I caught up to Martha coming out of her room, halfway down the first-floor hallway, a duffel bag strung over her arm. I was holding a bag, too, the thin plastic bag they give you for dirty laundry.

“Martha,” I said, and she turned around, and I didn’t have my glasses on and my clothes were a rumpled mess. There was blood on my sleeve, blood down the length of my arm.

“Jim?” she said, but even as she said it she knew that Jim was gone—I had left Jim behind; he had melted into mud in the bed of the White River.

“My name’s not Jim,” I said. “It’s Victor.”

“What?”

“And it’s not even Victor.”

“What—what’s in the bag?”

We went into her room, where we could be alone. The same as my room, but with two double beds instead of one king. One of the beds, Martha’s bed, was spotless, made, and Lionel’s was a mess of kid stuff—comic books, small garbagey plastic toys, spacemen and soldier-men and superheroes. Lionel was waiting in the lobby, she said, while she packed up the car. Except I told her that she couldn’t go.

“No. What? We’re—I checked out. We’re leaving.”

I took her hands—I squeezed them.

“Listen,” I said, and goddamn it if I wasn’t crying—crying for Kevin, crying for me, for Castle. “I need help,” I said. “I need a lot of help.”





I had never been on the blood sump because the blood sump was not a station. In your first two years inside they moved you every three months, and in two years I had worked the lairage, the chiller, hooves and horns, the downpuller, every stop along the rail. But the blood sump was not a regular station because it did not need to be tended regularly.

It tended to itself. Excess blood from the kill floor guttered through the drain and filled up the sump outside, and two times a year a truck came with a pipe and sucked it out.

But it was raining. The Chinese were on-site, that was the first thing, and the second thing was the rain, and then there was fat Reedy getting sick like he did.

Opportunity came like that: one, two, three. Castle had been telling me it would come, and it came like that, like horseshoes ringing on the pole, one, two, three. Did Castle know that opportunity would come, or did opportunity come because Castle said it? Anyway, it came.

I had heard about the Chinese before but never seen them. On this day in the morning we got woke before even the rooster, and the Old Men had all been woken before that, and they were all clapping and shouting: Tianjin Jiachu! Tianjin Jiachu! That was the name of the company, our biggest customer, but to me then those words were just like magic words, and all the Old Men and the guards were fussy or furious, barking orders, and all the working whites were walking double-time, talking loud. Get down to work. Eyes on the ball. Do it for each other. For Mr. Bell.

I was cutting out intestines on that day, pulling out the thick ropes of stomach and winding them into careful piles, and I was at it but fifteen minutes when they swept in, a crowd of curious Chinese, appearing on the floor all together and then scattering into every corner: bowing, peering into stations. I kept on working. Everybody did. The men and women from Tianjin Jiachu had knee pads on, and they crawled under the machines and murmured. They had clipboards tucked neatly under their arms. The Franklins made way for them, and so did the working whites.

And then in came Mr. Bell, in his big brown boots and his sharp white shirt and deep red tie, shaking the hands of the Chinese, answering the questions as they got translated, waiting and smiling, stroking his mustache, while his answers got translated back. He smiled at every one of us he saw, smiled and rubbed us on our heads, then the Chinese did, too, as if in wonder. They felt inside our mouths with the tips of their fingers. One of them pinched the flesh of my upper arms and smiled, as if he were pleased with the feel of me, and I remember how odd I felt, odd and proud.

That’s what was first. And then there was the rain. A late-summer storm like we had never seen, not in my days, cascades of rain pounding the tin roof of the kill house, soaking the poor littlest ones out there on the pile…and overflowing the blood pump. I was holding my knife; I was slicing into the heavy belly of the skinless cow that hung shackled before me. A working white raced in, water weeping off his cuffs and sleeves, and he whispered something frantic to a guard, and the guard made a face and came over and pulled at Mr. Bell, and Mr. Bell crooked a finger at fat Reedy.

Mr. Bell smiled, untroubled, at the worried-looking Chinese, who were writing on their clipboards and muttering things that were not being translated. Mr. Bell laid a hand on big Reedy and said, “Take one of ’em. Bail it out.”

Mr. Bell picked Reedy and Reedy picked Castle and Castle picked me.