We were back and forth on it for a while, Billy and me. He was trying to make me understand what I already knew, what I probably knew a lot better than he did: that it was impossible. People have tried all the ways, man, he told me. Packed in crates. Sewn into seat linings. Wrapped up within a palletized load of cargo. Inside the engine block. Clinging to the chassis.
“Jackdaw got out,” I told him. “You got Jackdaw out.”
“Yeah, but that got planned. You hear what I’m saying, man? That got set up for a fucking year. I mean, I was part of it, I don’t even know how long that got planned. And so what do you wanna do? Just, like, what? Fucking ride out shotgun?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
Although that was among the options I was considering. It was on the list that was writing and rewriting itself in my mind, possibilities arranging themselves in order of plausibility. I could hold Billy hostage or appear to hold him hostage: whittle a wooden gun from one of his sofa legs; build a bomb out of refrigerator parts and strap it to his chest and let the gate men know I’d kill him.
There were so many flaws in such a plan, so many questions.
I thought through the map of the place, thought about the buildings that abutted the property’s edge. What about that Institute for Agricultural Innovation? What about the black building behind it? It was marked off somehow; it was distinct. It occurred to me that a building so marked may be operated separately, may have its own separate system of entrances and exits.
Flaws and questions. Questions and flaws.
I stood. A quarter of an hour passed, then half an hour. I did my own version of Billy’s dance, pacing a circuit around the small space while Billy took his turn sitting, watching me think.
Subway tunnels. Delivery trucks. Employee parking.
I looked out the window. The sun was going down on the plantation, with shadow patterns on the concrete courtyard, with the bright green lawns past the fence turning darker, when the real plan began to form itself in my head—not a good plan, not even close, but perhaps the best of all the bad.
“Billy, are you allowed to go into the town if you feel like it?”
“Course. Sure. Yeah.” He eyed me warily from the table, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “I’m not a slave, man. I just gotta sign out, say where I’m going, what time I’ll be back, and then I gotta sign back in.”
“All right.” I nodded. This was something. I sat across from Billy. “You’re gonna go into the town and find a pay phone, and then you’re gonna dial the telephone number I give you. You’re gonna say exactly what I tell you to say, and the man on the other end is going to say okay. Then just stay where you are. Ten minutes later the Turner Alarm will sound.”
“What? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Listen. You’re going to call that number”—a Maryland number; my man in the system; deus ex machina—“and the Turner Alarm will go off. They’ll go to lockdown here and send out the wagons.”
The alarm was part of the Turner System. It was mutual defense. Every plantation in every county in the Hard Four was required to maintain a reinforced vehicle called a Turner Wagon, with a small armed company of guards, that could be sent out to any other plantation experiencing insurrection: a threat to one being understood as a threat to all. The system is named for Nat Turner, of course, the Virginia slave who with his confederates slaughtered fifty-odd people in 1831, although the system didn’t become common until the so-called Starman Revolt, in Carolina, in 1972.
“So you got it?” I told Billy. “Sirens gonna wail, wagon is gonna roll out.”
“And then what?” said Billy. “Where are you gonna be?”
“I’m going to be on the wagon.”
That plan might have worked, too. There were still some pieces to figure out, obviously—one more ride on that subway, a few more choruses of “These strong hands belong to you.” A couple more tricks to pull, but I was ready to try it, and I think Billy was, too, but then all the sounds started at once.
Chopper blades. A dozen automobile engines, roaring in fast. Car doors slamming, boots on the stairs. Billy’s nightmare made real.
I shouted to him, looking back over my shoulder as I ran for the window, but Billy had fainted—he was flat out. The window was useless. The door was splintering inward. A dozen people were yelling Freeze—yelling Get down; yelling Nigger, get down. A forest of gun muzzles. Me on my knees. Following instructions: hands up, hands laced behind my head, head down…
I had no gun. I had no knife. I only had that envelope, five by seven and padded and marked, and it was torn from me as they dragged me down the stairs.
9.