Underground Airlines(65)

I have always wondered if Castle understood. Did Castle see opportunity in this moment, Reedy laying his doughy hand on his shoulder? Did he know—this is it? The other world is seeping through—the other world, our future world? Or did he only think, I am being granted a half hour off the line, and let me give that to my brother, too?

Because Reedy just said, “You, boy.” And it was Castle who dared to question his judgment on that. Castle who said, “Respect, sir, I think I need another one.”

Castle must have known—or did he know?—he must have known, which I did not know, that the blood pump, by the primitive, premodern design of Bell’s Farm, was sandwiched into a strip of muddy land between the kill house and the fence. Castle must have guessed—or could he have?—that the presence of the Chinese would be consuming the attention of the staff and that these facts combined with the rainstorm darkness and the flickering old electrics would make it more likely than ever that we could take the chance that we had been waiting for, find the story Castle had never needed, in all those years, to tell me. And all that stood between us and that story was old Reedy, fat Reedy, sad Reedy.

Reedy was an easy one. There were hard ones, and there were easy ones—among the guards, among the working whites, among the Old Men, and among the Franklins, even. Reedy wore glasses. Reedy was worn down. He had white in his hair and red on his cheeks. Once, watching us march in our line from kill house to bunkhouse, once I had seen him shake his head and look to the ground. Sadness.

“All right, son,” he said to Castle. “So pick one.”

So Castle picked me, and we squatted at the door of the kill house and tugged on our thick galoshes, and we were bailing that blood pool and we couldn’t keep up with it. The rain was too fast, and it was backed up, clotted at all the drains, and Castle and me were working as quick as we could, but it was rising and rising, swamping our ankles and creeping to our knees, a thickening mass around our bodies.

“Ah, hell,” Reedy was saying, watching us uneasily from the lip of the sump, shifting in his boots, rubbing storm water off his glasses for the hundredth time. He looked around in the rain. He didn’t want to be down in no blood pit with no two boys. But even worse would be going in there and telling Mr. Bell the job wasn’t done.

“Ah, hell,” he said again and peeled off his overcoat and holstered his gun and came down into the sump with the two of us, Castle and me.

The rain flooded down. It crashed around us. Two black boys and one white guard, bailing like crazy, buckets and barrels, and from the corner of my eye I was watching those fence posts. We were always talking about how high they went, those fence posts, high wood pillars connected by sheets of mesh with cyclone wire at the top, always talking about how high they were, but never how low they went. That was another question—how deeply those posts were rooted. I had never thought of it, but now the rain was turning the dirt to mud, and you could see where the roots of the posts were leaning, shifting in that mud, just a little, starting just a little bit to shift and lean.

“We’re doing it, fellas,” shouted Reedy, forgetting himself entirely. “We’re doing it! Keep on, now.”

But he was wrong. As furious as we were bailing we weren’t keeping up with it, not even close, not now with the rain filling up the blood hole as fast as we could pump it. Reedy was maybe working the hardest of the three of us, going faster and faster, until he was grunting and sweating, and I was watching the ground beneath that fence post getting muddier and muddier, the post coming looser in the mud. But Castle was watching Reedy, who wasn’t just grunting but moaning now, who had dropped his bucket and collapsed onto his knees, splashing and falling into the mud and lurching forward.

“Oh, Lord,” he said, and then something else that wasn’t words at all. Just a long animal groan.

“Mr. Reedy,” I shouted, and he said something like “Get—” and then stopped talking. His mouth hung open, frozen, like the word had thickened in his throat and stopped him up.

Get help. Get someone. Get me up. But Reedy was past words. His face was dark, choked, and red; all his body’s blood had come up into his cheeks and his neck, and I was wet with fear and the rain in wild sheets. Reedy staring at us helpless, arms flapping, eyes wide, like a great fish.

“It’s okay now, sir,” I said, talking automatically, and I stepped toward him through the waist-high thickness of blood water, and Castle grabbed me hard and pulled me close and slapped me. Castle’s big eyes, wide in the rainstorm, Castle shaking me by the arms—by both arms.

“Turn around, boy,” he said. “Turn and run to that fence. Go!”

I did it—I ran to the fence and bent to its foundation and was tugging at it when I heard the shot behind me, one hollow shot swallowed in the rain. I had the post up already. I had the chain down.

“Come on!” said Castle, still holding Reedy’s pistol, and we ran. There was no time, but I looked back once and saw Reedy’s body as it slipped down and was swallowed in all that blood.





Part Two





South





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