Underground Airlines(75)

“All right,” I said. “Who’s your cousin?”

“Didn’t I just say don’t ask me questions?”

“Yeah.”

“So? I tell you what I tell you, you listen.”

Ada and I outside the house as the sun came up. The mansion at our backs was sparkling white, gabled and turreted, with polished glass doors sliding open onto the slate patio, where we sat drinking coffee. After the cramped raucousness of the night, the big quiet morning world was soft and cool. A rolling valley of a backyard, the grass true green, dew-dappled, endless.

“Now. You’re wanting to know about this contract, completed a week ago now, week ago Sunday. You’re wondering what went wrong.”

“What do you mean, a contract?”

Ada scowled. “Are you fooling? Are you still doped up? I said stop asking me questions.” She hissed, shook her head. But she couldn’t help herself. “Goddamn right it’s a contract. What do you think we’re playing at down here? We’re doing the good Lord’s work, but we’re no dummies. Cash on the barrel. Pay in advance or no one going nowhere.” She sipped coffee, ran her tongue over her teeth. “But this one now, this one…thing is, nothing went wrong with this one. This one went just exactly right. Everything how it was clocked.”

“Something went wrong,” I said.

“Listen: shut up. Okay? Listen.”

I loved Ada’s face. It was wide, with a strong African nose and a broad forehead. She had hidden her short dreadlocks again under the orange kerchief. I wondered if that was for the benefit of the neighbors. A line of high thick hedges shielded the lawyer’s property, but those neighbors would presumably be dismayed if they caught a glimpse of two black people on his patio, sitting on his tasteful outdoor furniture, talking urgently about a runaway’s route.

“This boy. The one you after. He did what we told him. We got a message in to him four months ago. Told him the night, told him how to do it. Told him get sick. He did it.”

I had more questions, but I held on to them for now. Ada was rolling now, talking fast. Word had come from the northern friends about a boy who needed to come out along with a package he was working to obtain. Payment was arranged.

“And we had the bay, see.”

“The bay?”

A sharp glance—No questions, dummy—then she answered my question. “Sick bay. Two girls are assigned to western section worker care on Sundays, and that night both of them were us.”

Monica Smith, age twenty-four, and Angelina Croth, age twenty-seven. Two working-class girls in starched nurse’s whites, fighters in the Cause—willing to take a job in a plantation, pass whatever tests they had to, get the necessary permits from the American Medical Association to do medical care on a PB population. Work down there for however long was required to earn trust, sweeten the scheduling person in HR, get on duty on the preappointed night.

“That boy came in to worker care, puking his guts out, like we told him to, and our people had him.”

This time I made my question into a statement. “Must be hard to get yourself sent to the infirmary on a plantation.”

Ada nodded. “Not hard getting sick. The trick is to get sick enough. They see a lot of injuries in these places. You’re working with needles, band knives. You fall; you get a sleeve tangled in a drive shaft. I knew a man who had his face burned with a hot iron: they sent him down to worker care and turned him out again in an hour. Most injuries they handle in population or on the floor. They wrap you up, maybe a steroid shot, and you’re back on the floor.

“The thing you want, you want to get sent down, is poison. At a garment factory, you know, you’re working the floor, there’s a lot of industrial strength lying around. Sealants. Chemicals and cleaners. You smart, you don’t overdo it, you can get yourself real bad, get it so you almost die. Then they take you down for sure.”

That sent me back down, back into the tunnel, down below Indianapolis with that boy. The pallor of Kevin’s skin. Chemicals and cleaners. Oh, that boy. That beautiful broken boy.

Not to be thought of now. Work to do now.

“All right, so he comes in. He’s sick as hell; he’s got this package.”

Ada winced, moved her head back and forth. “I don’t know. Some of these details I never had, you know? But the way I understand it, the package went to the driver direct. Never came into the bay. But you’d have to ask one of them nurses, which you will never be able to do. And don’t ask me, by the way, what the f*ck was in that envelope, because I do not know, and I do not care.”

So there’s Jackdaw in the sick bay. The clock is ticking; the delivery is scheduled for 8:49 p.m. onto a forty-five-foot tractor-trailer. Forty-two hundred raw bolts for export, and all the rest of it crated and palleted and headed for a route along the Red Highway.

The boy is there, and somehow or other the package is, too. It goes into the jacket of the driver. Maybe the driver is playing out a crush on one of those sweet young nurses, Monica or Angelina, and maybe he stops by with flowers and it’s a quick thank-you hug to slip it in his pocket.

Or maybe one of our nurses junks it out the window while the driver happens to be out for a stroll around the campus, stretching his legs before climbing in the rig.

Ada doesn’t know all that. Ada says if I want to know how the package got from the girls to the driver, I’d have to ask one of them.