Now I could feel it, I could feel the storm rain slick and warm against my skin, and now my heart began to race, now it began to slam, now the adrenaline was galloping along in my veins.
An official case had never been opened. No home-state judge had issued a transcript certifying the claimant’s description. No slave commissioner in the Southern District of Indiana had been put on alert. There was no real hunt. There was no case. There was only a file.
If the marshals weren’t hunting Jackdaw so he could be returned-if we weren’t hunting him so he could be returned-then why were we hunting him? What would happen to Jackdaw when we found him?
That was the easiest question to answer.
I was a monster, but way down underneath I was good. Wasn’t I? Wasn’t I good? Didn’t I have some good part of me, buried deep underground, beneath Jim Dirkson and Kenny Morton and Albie the gardener and whoever and whatever else I was? I was good below it. I was, and I am. Good underground. In the buried parts of me are good things.
A still picture, me and Castle, whispering joy, telling stories, cabin by the northernmost fence, making plans, whispering quiet crazy hopeful.
I started moving quickly. I toweled off the rain I’d let fall onto my head and my face. While the computer was turning on I changed my shirt, then I spent five minutes on basic research, old-fashioned digging, three paragraphs of history, ten minutes of tracing lines on the map with my finger.
Then I gathered up my flashlight and what all else I thought I might need. Bridge wouldn’t be long in knowing what I had done. I could almost hear the stop-start conversation, Bridge and Janice, Jan and Lou: hey, I went ahead and asked Marlena about it for you after all, and…asked her what…what…
As soon as I was ready to go, I got going. I knew where Jackdaw was, and I knew I better get down to him soon.
22.
By the time I got back to Slim’s roadside fiefdom the storm had spent itself and the clouds had cleared away, but somewhere in there it had become nighttime. Darkness giving way to another kind of darkness. The pale face of the moon, a scattering of stars.
The grocery store was closed up and shuttered, and the body shop, too. All right by me. I parked across the street and hustled across the parking lot in the gloom, walked swiftly under the copper arch and down the shadowy little lane, head down, heart beating, man on a mission, going to the creek.
I had barely noticed it before. And if I did, I guess I figured it was drainage: a hole in the foot of a small hill, just barely visible between and behind the cluster of motor homes, dribbling overrun out into the shallow brown creek that wound behind the trailer park.
I moved swiftly past the tin-can palaces with their tribal flags, ignoring the sure, strong sense I had of dozens of eyes watching me, small beady eyes in pink piggy faces, peering from behind slat blinds, staring at my dark body moving unfamiliar and unwelcome through their cloister. Any one of those pigs could come out with a shotgun, and I wondered what I would do, but no one did.
I cleared the trailer park and passed a jumble of picnic benches and playground equipment and stepped carefully down the slope of the ravine and swung the heavy beam of my flashlight along the creek. Now it was clear, with the water swollen by the rains, the direction the brown water was flowing. The black mouth in the base of the shallow hill was an entrance, not an exit. This low little trickle of mud water was a kind of rivulet, a poor cousin of a creek, and this spot behind the motor court is where some long-ago engineer had diverted it.
This creek was called Pogue’s Run. I’d found it on the map. I’d looked up the story. This small waterway was discovered at the turn of the century-the eighteenth turning into the nineteenth-discovered and named and recorded, penciled in on early maps, when the city was not yet a city-when it was a gathering of huts, a stopping place on the way to other places. The small river was inconvenient for the city fathers and the grid they’d drawn. So they did just as Mama Walker said: they ran it underground.
I walked up to the creek, my shoe heels making slippy track marks in the muck.
Mr. Maris had never, after all, discovered he was being traced. He’d never found Jim Dirkson’s clunky butterfly knife in his pocket and tossed it overboard. He’d gone down to the creek, that’s all. Disappeared into a tunnel. He’d gone underground.
The water in the creek was shallow, but it was rushing, pulsing a little as it rose with the rain. I walked slowly, picking out individual rocks to stand on, till I got to the mouth of the tunnel. There I got down on all fours, feeling the creek water rush around me, swallowing my hands up to the wrists and surging around my knees and feet, and looked with narrowed eyes up that infinite darkness of pipe. A cold, wet animal smell breathed back out at me.
There was nothing left to do, right? This was it.
I shivered, fighting off a wave and then another wave of memory. They called it the shed, but it was more like a chamber. An underground compartment. More like a coffin, really, is what it was, concrete and narrow. Four hours in there for hygiene violations on the kill floor. Six hours for spillage. Overnight for Thoughts Against Good Work. Every hour on the hour a Franklin would crack the lid, shine the light in your eyes, listen for your breathing, close the lid again.
There was nothing to be done. This was it. I leaned forward and hunched my shoulders together, pushed the upper part of my body carefully forward, as a circus performer gingerly places his head into the lion’s mouth. I eased back and forth, back and forth, getting a sense for the width. Jackdaw at five eight and a buck fifty could fit in here, no problem. For a bruiser like Mr. Maris, I thought, it would be tight. But not impossible.
I got in there okay myself. Turned off my light, stuck it back in my jacket, and eased my body all the way into the hole. I splashed in the dirty rush of water, hunched forward, keeping my upper body small and bent. I walked with my hands stretched out on either side, fingertips scraping along the roughly textured walls. I walked a long time that way, bent almost parallel with the ground, genuflecting as I went, until the ceiling tapered back down and I was forced onto all fours and went awhile that way, soaking my kneecaps and my palms.
Time passed, and I didn’t know how much time, either. I just walked, an invisible man moving through the darkness.
That makes it sound like I was cool, cool as the water, levelheaded, nice and easy, but my stomach was clutching at me. This was the part of it I never had to do. This wasn’t part of my job description. My deal was, I tracked him down-him or her or they-I found the lair, and then I called in the cavalry. My job was the following of bread crumbs: I had tracked men across miles of prairie, down crooked Freedman Town alleyways, along boardwalks, out onto beaches. And every time I called Bridge to put the rest in motion, and every time I turned back into smoke and drifted away. The final part I never had to see.
One time I decided to force myself to stay. I must have been in some kind of mood. Some foul place. Because I decided I needed, for once, to force myself after calling it in to hang around and watch the denouement.
It was in Massachusetts. It was in February. A small college in the cold far west of the state, where I had followed the thread of a man to a fraternity house. They’d put him in a room in the attic, had been bringing him beer and dining-hall cereal for three days, trying to figure out a connecting flight. But there were way too many girlfriends and study buddies and drunk pledges wandering in and out of there, too many people brought up to the attic after swearing secrecy, and word was out-all over campus. All over town. Easiest file I ever closed.
But I don’t know. I was down. I was feeling foul. Something about the season, the ease of the work. I forced myself to stay. I made myself up as a professor, bow tie and tweed, sat sipping coffee at a rickety table in the residential quad with a view of that frat house. I prepped a whole story about being an adjunct in the racial history department in case anyone asked, but no one asked. I watched the vans roll up and I watched the men charge in and I watched the milling, baffled, outraged frat boys, watched them watch their charity project bundled and taken hand over hand by the marshals out of the house and van. I saw the boy’s face, his stricken, humiliated, terrified expression, blinking snow-blind in the brightness of the quad, crying out, confused. To have come so far and to be returning-his new friends in their Greek-lettered sweatshirts feebly shouting support, promising aid, announcing in righteous tones that their dads were lawyers, while the USMs shackled the poor peeb’s arms behind him as though he were a madman, strapped him to a gurney inside the van. The last I saw of that boy was his feet, kicking desperately against the reinforced glass of the van’s rear window, a thrashing barrage of kicks as they drove him away.