Only very rarely is there a real plane involved. Every once in a while you’ll hear about some damn fool thing: some billionaire thinks he’s God, hires a daredevil pilot to swoop into the airspace of the Four, land hard and dark in a clear-cut Alabama hollow, try and get back with a hold full of refugees. Never ends well. A plane is big and hard to hide, and defending the sovereign airspace of the several states is an enumerated responsibility of the Air National Guard. Rich boy ends up in court and the pilot in jail. Peebs go back where they came from, if they’re lucky.
No, man—Underground Airlines is a figure of speech: it’s the root of a grand, extended metaphor, “pilots” and “stewards” and “baggage handlers” and “gate agents.” Connecting flights and airport security. The Airlines flies on the ground, in package trucks and unmarked vans and stolen tractor-trailers. It flies in the illicit adjustment of numbers on packing slips, in the suborning of plantation guards and the bribing of border security agents, in the small arts of persuasion: by threat or cashier’s check or blow job. The Airlines is orders placed by imaginary corporations for unneeded items to be shipped to such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time.
Once, for a month or more, I was Jean-Claude Cisse, a.k.a. Café au Lait, a Montreal-born mulatto and a member of a French-Canadian biker gang called Les Bénévoles Blackburn, which specializes in transporting runaways from their temporary and dangerous quarters in northern cities to la vraie liberté in C?te Saint-Luc. Among that crew was a woman named Cherie, who had herself escaped from Louisiana and then dedicated her adult life to the Cause. Most of their work, Cherie liked to say, was done at a desk. Forget the glory of the predawn raid. Smashing in the face of the system and pulling free the enslaved was mostly a matter of paperwork. The opening of bank accounts, the forging of documents. The creation of routes and backup routes and backups to the backups. “La liberté,” Cherie was fond of saying, in that charming Montreal accent of hers, “est une question de logistique.” Freedom is a matter of logistics.
The other thing to remember, of course, is that most people get no help at all. I sure didn’t, oh, no: it was just me and Castle, charging, desperate, through the country darkness, and that’s how it is for most folks who dare to run—no help from no Airlines, no help from no one. They just go, man, after years of planning or in the heat of a sudden moment they go, hurl their skinny bodies over a cyclone fence or plunge themselves into a moat, break free of a chain line or a guard’s hard grip and run, brother, run, sister, run along back roads and through forests. No planes and no cars or trucks, either. Just brave souls darting across open fields and wading in and out of rivers and stumbling along deer paths through dark woods. Find the star and follow it, as runners have done all the way back to the days of Old Slavery.
I was turning all this over. I was turning over the whole world. I was sitting in a restaurant called Hamburger Stand, a chain place they got all over Indianapolis, waiting for my waitress to bring me coffee. I was staring with glass eyes through the window, looking at the restaurant parking lot, where a grimy old white dude in a knitted cap was slumped against the curb, dressed in black garbage bags, with another black garbage bag draped across his body like a blanket. Nothing I hadn’t seen a thousand times before—every poor city, every northern city—but it hit me this time as bizarre, somehow, a human body just lying there like that, people stepping past him on their way to Keystone Avenue as though he were a corpse.
The lady brought me my coffee, and I asked her for a hamburger, then I turned my eyes down to the document that had come off Angie’s printer. Row 6 showed a delivery leaving from Gardens of Paradise in Clayton, Ohio, and Angie had highlighted it in bright pink, because that’s the shipment poor rattled Albie was after. But me, down there inside Albie’s skin—my interest was in row 7, the next one down in the alphabetical list: the shipment that had left Garments of the Greater South, Incorporated, in Pine Woods, Alabama, at 8:49 on Sunday night.
According to the full file, Jackdaw had fetched up in worker care at 8:35. And now here was a truck, put into motion by Winston Bibb, to rattle out of the gates of shipping and receiving at 8:49.