Enigmatic Pilot (10 page)

Viola Mercy’s bosom was exposed, her hips arched, providing a tantalizing hint of that taboo passage that led to the secret
place within her heart. The gambler still had on his once dapper but now worn britches, and his bull’s blood Spanish leather boots. The sleeve of his frilled shirt drooped down from a chair. His silver hand, however, was hard at work. The dagger that had been projected from the index finger had been replaced by a device of equal length, significantly greater girth, and arguably far more ingenious utility, which St. Ives referred to as the tickler.

The “tickling” went on for a long time, with Miss Viola’s rough whisper rising into what sounded like an asthmatic crisis. The boy had heard a similar sound coming from his mother from time to time, but nothing as both feral and restrained as this. Another scent filled the room, distinct but confused—like wild onions and fish eggs. Then there was a shudder that shook the bed, and Lloyd was sure that he was going to be found out. Instead, St. Ives rolled off and began dismantling his mechanical finger piece.

“Don’t you fret, honey,” Miss Viola said. “Most men can’t do as well.”

The gambler started to say something but choked on his words and reached for his clothes after draining his glass. Not long after he’d left the room, Miss Viola rose, poured water from a jug into a bowl, and bathed, humming to herself. Powder and perfume were added, and then came the slow, measured ritual of dressing. It was a delicious agony for Lloyd, who could more hear and smell than see her, and he was forced to wait, with his heart pounding, until she was at last prepared for another performance. The door clicked behind her when she departed, and still he waited until he was sure she was not about to return to make his escape.

That night, when Lloyd closed his eyes and tried to imagine his dead sister, all he could see was Miss Viola.

The next day he sneaked into the entertainer’s cabin again. He couldn’t help himself. This time he chose as his vantage place her steamer trunk, a great battered box that reminded
him of a coffin but had the consolation of facing directly toward the bed and of being filled with costumes and underthings, all permeated by her woman scent. There, snuggled tight, he waited and watched through a tiny crack that he made by balancing the lid on his head, counting the terrible wonderful minutes. Finally, she returned—without the gambler. Slowly—oh, so slowly—she disrobed, poured herself a drink from a flask, then water for bathing from the jug. It was excruciating. Then she reclined on the bed—without a stitch on. She began to sing to herself, stroking her breasts and thighs with her right hand. And that was when it happened. He let the lid slip with a thump! Everything went so silent he could hear the piston rods driving in the distant engine room. He waited, then cracked the lid.

“Don’t you know not to come into a lady’s room without an invitation,” Miss Viola scolded, and then let out a trill of confusing laughter.

“I—I’m s-sorry …” Lloyd stuttered.

“No, you’re not,” the dark lady replied. “Come.
Here.
”

He rose from the trunk as if from the dead, stiff, and yet intensely alert.

“Take off your clothes,” she commanded, and with fumbling sweaty fingers he obeyed.

Perhaps the chanteuse first intended merely to teach him a lesson about spying. But as soon as she saw the boy, naked and aroused beside her bed, something happened in a secret place inside her, and she knew that for herself as much for him this was an opportunity that would never come again.

“You must never speak a word of this to anyone,” she said. “Anyone.”

Lloyd was not sure if he would ever be able to speak again at all.

H
EPHAESTUS AND
R
APTURE WERE QUICK TO NOTE THE CHANGE IN
the boy but were unable to guess the true nature of the cause. For the first time since leaving Zanesville, Lloyd seemed to have regained his inner light and his parents wondered if he might have reestablished his connection with Lodema. Not surprisingly, Lloyd declined to provide details, choosing both for his own sake and for the honor of Miss Viola to keep the matter secret.

St. Ives, in his shrewd read of personality and mood, knew that something was different about the boy, but for reasons of his own did not inquire further. Instead, he slipped back inside his armor of pseudoaristocratic condescension, yielding only upon his farewell.

“Remember our lessons, Monkey,” he said with a world-weary smile.

The boy had been quick to learn the art of card counting and odds estimation, as well as many of the psychological subtleties of gambling.

“I will,” promised Lloyd, and for a moment he longed to disappear with his damaged friend—off into the teeming world in search of money and risk, dark fragrant women, and the grotesque riddles of Junius Rutherford.

Miss Viola gave him a quick, chaste kiss on the cheek in public, and a very long, slow kiss somewhere else in the privacy of her cabin before whisking off to find another drinking partner, lover, audience—whatever it was that she was searching for.

St. Louis had come a long way since the French fur trappers drifted by in birchbark canoes to barter with the Peoria Indians. And it had come a long way even faster since the first steamboat arrived from Louisville on July 27, 1817. Many Negroes still spoke French and signs of the Spanish colonial period were everywhere to be found, but the city’s aura of European empire had been transformed into the energy and friction of a thriving outpost of western expansion. This was a border town now, a crossroads dividing North and South, East and West. Fifty steamboats provided packet service to exotic destinations such as Keokuk, Galena, and Davenport to the north, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh to the east, and Memphis, Vicksburg, New Orleans, and Mobile to the south—while the passage along the Missouri (where the Sitturds hoped to go) opened the way west to Independence, Westport, St. Joseph, Omaha, Council Bluffs, and beyond.

The city had boomed from a bluff-town harborside of around seventeen thousand people to almost four times that number, although the German Revolution and the Irish Potato Famine would soon swell the ranks to make it the largest center west of Pittsburgh.

Rapture had never imagined so many “parrysawls.” Hephaestus counted the number of taverns and public houses. Lloyd took in the grim, overburdened Negroes and the quizzical Indians, the street Arabs, imbeciles, and ringworm hillbillies—offset by lily-white gentlemen and ladies rattling around in lacquer-black carriages with shining wheels.

It was here that the infamous Dred Scott lawsuit would soon begin, igniting the Civil War, many would say, while still burning torturously in the collective memory was the case of Francis
McIntosh, a free mulatto steamboat steward who had been chained to a tree and roasted alive in a slow fire in retaliation for stabbing a sheriff’s deputy—as well as that of the antislavery newspaper editor Elijah P. Lovejoy, who was shot to death and trampled in nearby Alton, Illinois, a year later (still later to be the birthplace of a boy named Miles Davis).

While Lloyd had been busy learning his bold new lessons from St. Ives and Miss Viola, Hephaestus and Rapture had been engrossed in Micah’s map and in planning the next stage of their journey to Texas. Their decision was to take a boat up the Missouri River to Independence, the southernmost of the supply towns on the route to the Pacific Coast. From there it looked like a long, strange trip across Kansas and what was then the Indian Territory—and would later become the state of Oklahoma—to reach what they hoped they would find in Texas: a new home.

Unfortunately, the riverboats for the Missouri journey were crowded—always crowded now—with such a miscellany of humanity that could scarcely be believed. One would have thought that America was coming apart at the seams, or mutating to form some crazed new creature.

Once again, money was tight. What provisions they’d been able to salvage from their earlier adventures were running low. “Life is a casting off,” Hephaestus reminded his family (which prompted a jab in the ribs from Rapture). Young Lloyd took this opportunity to introduce the money he had made with St. Ives, pretending that he had found it along one of the bustling streets. His parents were too overjoyed to ask any questions.

Hephaestus reckoned that with this windfall they were able to afford passage on the
Spirit of Independence
, newly overhauled and freshly painted. But they had to wait for three days. Ever worried about conserving money and knowing that they now had a stateroom to look forward to, the family sought temporary shelter in the loft of a mice-infested stable behind a glue renderer’s.

It was in a thronging market square below on their second day that they were surprised to see a wagon decorated with rajas and angels—and who should be beside it but Professor Umberto, the traveling medicine showman and magician who had passed through Zanesville. The spruiker was now calling himself Lemuel Z. Bricklin, “Master of Teratology, Clairvoyance, and Prestidigitation.”

Lloyd wanted to say hello, his parents believing that the sight of the colorful wagon had brought back a fond memory of Zanesville. The truth was that their old town held but one happy recollection for the boy, and that had to do with his ghost sister’s memorial. The reason he was interested in the professor was that he wanted to catch sight of the man’s fine-figured assistant, Anastasia. His experience with Miss Viola had opened up a new kind of precocious craving within him. And the earlier magic had intrigued him.

Rapture, still miffed about the downturn in business she had experienced owing to the professor’s arrival in Ohio, found herself “haa’dly ’kin” to say howdy to him in St. Louis and went off to round up ingredients to conjure a little “tas’e ’e mout” for the family’s supper, reminding Hephaestus to keep an eye on the boy and for them both to stay out of trouble. Of course, Lloyd gave his father the slip.

The square was jammed with people buying fresh pig snouts or honeycomb tripe, and Hephaestus became so absorbed that he did not feel a passing thief’s practiced hand snake into his pocket and dexterously extract the money that was intended for their boat fare.

Lloyd, meanwhile, made a beeline for the medicine-show wagon, which had a tent set up behind it. The professor, a springy man with a waxed mustache and a receding hairline hidden under a leghorn hat, had just produced a fat Red Eagle cigar from a pocket in his coat when Lloyd strode up.

“What happened to your monkey?” the boy wanted to know.

“Why?” queried the professor, lighting the cigar with a crack of his fingers. “Would you like to apply for the position?”

“That was good.” Lloyd grinned, mimicking the finger snap.

“Prestidigitation, my boy. Legerdemain. I do three shows a day and you’re welcome to see one, if you would be so kind as to bring along your parents or guardians as paying customers. The Bible says blessed are they who pay in cash.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Lloyd objected.

“Mine does,” the showman replied, tipping his hat to a woman with a rustling bustle who shuffled by. “But never fear, the instance of instantaneous combustion you have just witnessed was a complimentary sample—gratis, without obligation; in other words, free of charge. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“You didn’t say what happened to the monkey,” Lloyd pointed out, reaching for the man’s coat sleeve as he tried to turn away toward the tent.

“No,” agreed the professor, wheeling back and chomping on his cigar. “I have neglected to fulfill your request for further intelligence and so have left you in a state of sustained bewonderment and speculation. And there you shall remain. I have work to do.” Once again he made a move toward the tent pitched beside the wagon, nodding at a man with a thimble hat who ambled past with a frown of suspicion on his face.

“Is he dead?” Lloyd asked, refusing to budge.

“As a matter of fact, poor little Vladimir was consumed by some sort of cave lion during our recent sojourn in Kentucky,” the professor announced, glaring down at the boy. “Most distressing. Now, if you’ll excuse me!”

“Did you shoot the cave lion?” Lloyd inquired.

“Go home, young lad!” The professor waved. “I must prepare. Magic doesn’t just happen!”

“I thought that was exactly what it did,” Lloyd replied. “That’s why it’s magic.”

“Touché,” the showman retorted, appearing to bow, but
really examining the boy’s sorry excuse for footwear, which confirmed his initial impression. “But if I were truly a master of the art,” he continued, “then I would wave the wand of this cigar and
you
would disappear—back to wherever it was you came from.”

“Zanesville,” Lloyd supplied. “Ohio. I saw you there.”

“Aha,” the professor returned, his eyes following a blooming lass with a rose-hips complexion, who giggled behind a handkerchief as she passed. “Where on earth did you say your parents were?”

“I have neglected to fulfill your request for further intelligence regarding that,” Lloyd answered.

“Touché again, my effervescent little friend. But circumstances beyond my control, otherwise known as life, require that I spin gold from straw, separate wheat from chaff—in a word, earn my daily bread. Now
please
, leave me to my fate as I bid you goodbye and good luck with your own.” He gave the boy a hearty pat on the head, the universal sign of condescension in adults toward children—and one that he felt certain this particular child could not fail to comprehend.

“And what about the pretty lady?” the boy asked. “Did a cave lion get her, too?”

“Boy! I am going to perform some magic on you yet if you don’t move on!” This time the showman took a decisive step away, prepared to fend off the lad with an elbow if necessary.

“Do you still sell the powder made from tiger penis?” Lloyd asked.

This inquiry caught the professor by surprise, and was made at too loud a volume for his liking. He glanced around, thinking,
Damn this boy
. What he said aloud was “Shush, please! Here, my friend. Come now. Take this delightful toy as a token of my exasperation and carry on.”