It was very dark here. The only light came from the lamp on Vernon’s digger’s helmet, Leon’s lantern, and the flashlight Tony gripped tightly.
“¿Cuánto tiempo más?” Tony asked, pacing to keep warm.
Vernon shrugged. “Till the boss man comes.”
“Don’t like it here,” Leon grumbled, his breath coming out in smoky puffs that evaporated in the lantern light.
Vernon was comfortable in the tunnels. As a sandhog, he’d built some of them. That was dangerous work—deep underground, where a man could only dig a certain number of hours a day or else the pressure could get him. But he took pride in knowing that he was responsible for digging out to make way for the city’s future—the subways, bridges, and tunnels of tomorrow.
“Telling you, it doesn’t feel right,” Leon said.
“Don’t be bringing that island superstition into it,” Vernon chided, borrowing a phrase from his cousin Clyde.
Clyde had served in the all-black 92nd Division during the big war. After it was over, he walked into Harlem decorated and proud, despite the fact that he’d lost a leg to a bullet wound gone to rot. They’d smoked cigars and rolled craps in the back of Junior Jackson’s grocery till the wee hours, laughing and drinking whiskey, listening to two fellas cutting each other on stride piano. But Clyde looked haunted. Later, under the yellow-tinged moon, he’d said, “I saw things in that war that a man shouldn’t ever have to see. Things that make you forget we’re human and not just a bunch of beasts crawling out of the sludge somewhere. And the damnedest part of it all is, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what we were fighting for in the first place. After a while, fighting just got to be habit.”
Five months later, Clyde had gone down to Georgia to visit relatives. He’d walked into town for a cold drink. The local folks hadn’t taken too kindly to Clyde wearing his uniform with its shiny medals and told him to strip it off. Clyde refused. “I fought for this country in this uniform. Lost a leg doing it, too. Got a right to wear it.”
The good folks of Georgia disagreed. They dragged him through town tied to the back of a truck, set him alight, then strung him up from the tallest tree. Somebody said you could hear his screams clear over to the next town. His family never even got his medals back.
Funny that Vernon remembered Clyde just now. For the past few nights, he’d dreamed about his long-gone cousin. In the dream, Clyde had no crutch, and his uniform was crisp and clean. He’d waved to Vernon from the front porch of a house with a garden in front and a fine peach tree in the yard, the very sort of place Vernon had dreamed of running himself. Beside Clyde was a pretty girl in an old-fashioned bridal gown and veil. “Dream with me…” she’d whispered in Vernon’s head.
He’d taken it as a sign that everything was going right, that this job for the bootlegger and the extra money might mean a piece of the pie for Vernon at last. But now something about the dream crawled under Big Vern’s skin like an itch he couldn’t scratch. He couldn’t say why.
Down the long cannon of tunnel, he heard a sound. The men jumped up, alert.
“That them?” Leon whispered.
Vernon held up a hand for quiet and stared into the dark, waiting. “No signal.”
The bootlegger always shined his flashlight in code: three short blasts. But whoever lurked down in the tunnel wasn’t doing that. Vern’s muscles went tight. It could be cops. Or rival bootleggers with guns drawn in an ambush.
Vernon strained, listening. What he heard was faint but persistent—a whine like bees trapped inside a house and trying to get out. But deeper. Almost human. It made his skin prickle into gooseflesh. Instinctively, he stepped back.
“What is that?” Leon asked. He raised the lantern. His eyes were huge.
“Shhh, quiet now,” Vernon whispered.
They waited.
“You hear it still?” Vernon whispered.
“No,” Leon whispered back, but just then, it came again, a little louder. “Told you I don’t like this. Let’s get out of here.”
Vernon gripped Leon’s arm. “Can’t go till the boss say go.”
“Hang the boss! He’s not down here with whatever that is.”
“You don’t just walk off the job with these Sicilian fellas,” Vernon warned. “We wait with the booze.”
A loud screech reverberated in the tunnel. The men felt it in their teeth.
“Dios mío,” Tony whispered.
“Boss or no boss, I’m gone,” Leon said.