Free Underground Airlines by Ben Winters

about ’em?”
    “They crazy?”
    “No, no.” He wouldn’t ever say that. He would never talk down on any man. “They just—my love, you know, they not us.”
    That always got me. It was nice to be us. I’d ease myself up on my aching elbow, blink furious till I came full awake, and listen to my good, good brother talk.
      
    I was six months on the pile, a year, maybe, when I saw a pale gleam of yellow in there. You would see things, of course, in the pile. A lot of times. Cows’ll eat things, or goats will, and it’ll pass right in and through and they’ll never know. Stones; glass; once, I swear, a bedspring. Now this, though, now this, peeking and winking out from the pile, in among all the mud browns and dull vegetable reds: a tiny plastic sheath, smaller than a thumb and bright yellow like a bird’s beak. I nearly didn’t see it, but then I did, and it called to me and I lifted it and felt there was something inside.
    I popped it out. A single piece of paper, folded and folded and folded again until it was a tiny hard rock. I hunched in the shadow of the pile, crouched like a goblin and unfolded the paper.
    There were no words on it, only pictures, black figures with their hands raised in fists, tugging apart their chains. Black figures seizing guns from white figures, white figures with their heads cut off, perfect black teardrops of blood spurting up out of their necks. I couldn’t read the words, only the punctuation: a big red exclamation point. Exclamation points were on signs all over Bell’s Farm: don’t go in there, must wear masks in here, only overseers and staff may pass. I knew what exclamation points meant, and I knew about blood, and I did not know what the paper meant, but I stared at it and felt from it a queer power, a sparkling panic passing over me, like something melting.
    I folded it back up carefully, jammed it back into the balloon how it had been, hid it in my cuff, and hurried back to my labor, busied my fingers and bent my back for the rest of the day. Someone fed that balloon to one of our cows. Someone did it on purpose. I was stunned by that purposefulness. I carried the paper in my cuff all day and brought it to Castle, and I gasped with grief later on, in the johns, when he told me he’d destroyed it.
    “You gotta be crazy, boy” is what he said, and though his voice was still kind, I had never heard him say anything like it. It was in the supper line that I had slipped it to him sly, out of my cuff and into his palm. “Could you read it?” I asked him in the johns, and he didn’t say whether he had or not. He told me only that I was crazy. He told me he had taken that piece of paper and flushed it away and never to bring him nothing crazy like that again.
    Castle forgot to wake me that night, but my body woke itself, and I saw him. I never told him that I had seen him, but I did. I saw him like a vision, clinging to that single sheet of goldenrod, staring at it in the darkness with his big white eyes.
      
    I don’t know if it was ten minutes after I got off the phone with Bridge or five hours, but when I came around out of it I was in the middle of the room with my hand clamped over my mouth, breathing hard and heavy through my nose.
    Castle! Jesus Christ, what was I doing thinking about Castle? I had not thought about him, not the man or even the name, had not wondered about where he had ended up—not in years. In years.
    But here I was, all of a sudden; I was just surrounded by those memories. Just swarmed, man, just absolutely fucking fly-bit, like I was right back there, hip deep in that stinking fucking pile. When usually I was able never to think of it at all. When I wasn’t thinking on my cases, turning over the pages of files, I kept myself busy with enjoying the world, with savoring freedom, breakfast buffets and hotel sheets and birdsong and my MJ tapes in the Altima. Even though I knew they were down there in me, all those scenes and feelings, beating