Enigmatic Pilot (17 page)

“N-no,” Lloyd stammered.

“Would you like to?” Mother Tongue wheedled. “Sex and the cravings of the body are nothing to be ashamed of—even in one so very young.”

Lloyd squirmed in the rocker. He could not hide the fact that he liked what Mother Tongue was saying, but he did not like the way she spoke. There was something in her voice that made him think of a trapdoor.

“What you can learn of books and science you can also learn of love.” The old woman smiled. “Wouldn’t you like that? To one day become not only a master of ideas and technology but an adept in the erotic arts?”

Lloyd was aroused by this prospect but repulsed by the wrinkled old woman’s offer. It was not something anyone else would say to a boy his age, he knew. And the thought of leaving his parents to themselves at such a tense juncture filled him with guilt and despair. They had already lost his sister, their home, perhaps their happiness together—how could he leave them, too? He stared at the coon dog, which still had not stirred.

“It’s late,” Mother Tongue acknowledged. “And you must be getting back to your mother and father—at least for now. I did not intend for you to decide on such a weighty matter tonight. But I want you to consider one other reason that you would be well advised to accept our invitation.”

At this she lowered her voice and raised her withered hands.

“The Vardogers are able to project and cultivate fear. They are equally skilled at orchestrating a mob brawl, mining a
bridge, or breaking a mind. They have many much more subtle arts, I am afraid. Investigations into forbidden realms. We know they have taken notice of you, Lloyd. One of their agents has been seen observing your performances with the showman. Do you not think that very soon they will seek you out with an offer of their own? But will it be an offer? Or will it be an edict? What if instead of asking you to leave your parents they take your parents from you? What will you do then? No one goes far who travels alone.”

The old woman’s voice had taken on such a dramatic tone that Lloyd instinctively slipped from the rocker onto the sofa. But when he went to pat the hound he found that it was as stiff as a statue, sculpted into a position of peaceful repose. He could have sworn he had heard it snoring, like his father.

“He … he’s dead!” Lloyd recoiled. “You’ve—”

“Old Lazarus is sleeping very soundly, but he keeps me company,” the old lady answered, and blew out the lamp. “Now reach out your hands to me. I have something to give you. A token of my faith in you. And a sign of our trust in your judgment and discretion.”

Lloyd clambered to his feet in the dark, unnerved by the stuffed dog.

“Take my hands, child,” Mother Tongue whispered.

He heard a sound that he guessed was the cat lighting on the floor as the old woman rose. Bracing himself for the feel of her soft white talons, he thrust his own hands forward. Into his moist palms plopped two warm spheres as his fists tightened. Polished jewels, he imagined—fabulous treasures from some far corner of the world.

“Good night, Lloyd,” Mother Tongue said. “For now.”

Lloyd stuffed the jewels into his pocket and stumbled toward the door. Blazon was waiting outside with a flickering lamp. Without comment or question, he led the boy back the way they had come, where Schelling greeted him with a brusque presentation of his calcium-stained tooth. The grotto and the
passageways seemed to be much darker now. Why not turn on the marvelous lights? The humpback refused to be engaged on this or any point, and so the boy had to mind every step as they climbed back up to the cemetery. Once they were free of the tomb, the blindfold was reinstated and Lloyd was encouraged back into the dogcart. Their voyage was repeated in reverse without any words being exchanged, Lloyd’s head swirling with questions and worries—and hopes—until, lulled by the legato rhythm of the boat, he slipped into a hypnagogic drowse. When he came to himself again, the boat was docking back at the ferry landing and the air smelled very late—or very early. One of the powerful black men set him down on the pier, and Wolfgang Schelling removed the blindfold.

“All right, Lloyd,” he said. “Hurry home. I will see you in the afternoon. But be careful. Not everyone means you as well as we do.”

These words echoed in the boy’s mind as he raced back toward the stable, wondering if his parents would be awake and waiting for him—and what he was going to say if they were. The streets were dark but for the lights of a shuttered tavern. No one else appeared to be around. Still, there was a sinister sense of watchfulness about the lanes and it wasn’t until he was all the way back to the familiar smell of the glue renderer’s and the stable door that he felt calm again. Gratefully, his parents were both sound asleep—Hephaestus hog-breathing with drink, Rapture sighing low, sometimes saying something the boy could not understand (which was not that unusual at any time).

At the rear of the stable, Lloyd sneaked off with one of his father’s hoarded matches and scraped it hard to make enough light to examine the prize that Mother Tongue had entrusted him with. He expected gemstones plucked from some harvested diadem, but he gasped and almost dropped the match and set the rank-smelling barn on fire when he saw that what she had given him was two brilliant green glass eyes.

What did it mean?

Was the ancient woman really blind, or was this just some trick? After he recovered from his shock, Lloyd extinguished the match, but the two orbs seemed to continue glowing, as if his recognition had triggered some covert luminosity within them. Or is it in my mind? he wondered.

In either case, as he fondled them—and peered into them in the pale light of morning—they seemed to take on a deeper presence. One globe he imagined gazed back at the moments that had brought him and his family to this crossroads, each of the scenes and encounters since leaving their home suspended like prehistoric insects in amber. The other sphere was a lens that he fancied looked into the future, a lightning-lit horizon of messenger possibility and foreshadowings … frozen pictures melting alive … unknown faces beginning to form.

Cupping them in his palms, Lloyd sensed an occult quality of heat and energy about them. What if these really were Mother Tongue’s eyes? he pondered. Maybe she
is
blind—and yet through some arcane mechanism the spheres allowed her to see. A kind of sight, anyway, delivered by a spectral science he didn’t comprehend … but might … in time.

Something deep within him felt a magnetic summons toward these enigmas—via Mother Tongue and her minions or not. “The door of my destiny is opening,” he whispered to the slowly graying dawn.

A
FTER HIS PERPLEXING MEETING WITH
M
OTHER
T
ONGUE
, L
LOYD
found it hard to rouse himself in the morning. Through a haze of threats and twisted images, his consciousness was brought back to St. Louis and the stable by the piggish noises of conjugal struggle. While the manufacture of the flying toys had brought his parents together in the matter of practical survival, their intimate life had not recovered since the Chicken Germain—root salve treatment, and Hephaestus’s libido had been bottled to bursting. Up to this point both parents had been discreet regarding Lloyd’s awareness of their lovemaking, but the urgency of the need and the systemic erosion of his dignity provoked Hephaestus to risk skin discomfort and to break with all decorum in a loud, and to Lloyd’s ears, exceedingly boorish way. Lloyd could not tell how much his mother resisted at first, but in the end she succumbed and seemed almost to enjoy it. Perhaps her need was too great to ignore as well.

Lloyd was smart enough to know that, in the matter of sex at least, there was much that he yet had to learn. Still, it sickened him to hear them, for in one guttural exclamation from the other side of a pile of mice-warm hay he realized that this was how
he
had come to be. At least in part. Maybe the circumstances had been different—the place, the mood, the smells
and tastes—but at the heart it was this same bestial dance-brawl. “There should be a better way to be born,” Lloyd said to himself, even as his own desire was shamefully aroused at the sounds of his parents. Then he clutched himself to fulfillment.

He pulled up his pants and dragged from his pocket the two glass eyes. The more he examined them, the more they seemed to examine him. Disconcerted and afraid, he thrust them back into the depths of the bag, far down into the wads of soiled clothes where he had hidden the box adorned by the Ambassadors from Mars and his uncle’s letter. Then he stowed the bag well under the hay.

None of the Sitturds had anything to say while they breakfasted on stale rolls and can-brewed coffee. Chastened by postcoital remorse, Hephaestus and Rapture did not press Lloyd for any information on how he had slept and gave no indication they knew that he had disappeared in the night.

Meanwhile Lloyd’s brain, once free of his own sexual obsession, began whirring with worries and considerations about the Spirosians and the Vardogers. Could the things that Mother Tongue had told him be true? A war in time between two great secret societies—the real powers behind all other secret societies—the hidden orchestrators of history now brought into lethal conflict over the issues of slavery and expansion, the destiny of America?

He had seen the lights; he could not get around that. Some unthinkable harnessing of electrical energy. And the library beneath the burial ground, the riverboat festooned with moss—he had seen these things with his own eyes. Still, he could not believe that he had been told the truth. Something in a secret place inside him rebelled at the choice he had been given, and the feel of the stuffed dog on the couch returned to make his skin crawl. He was certain that he had heard it breathe.

He bolted from the stable still swallowing a lump of bread, wondering if once he had gone his parents might continue their passionate battle, or if his mother would go off to her laundry
and nursing duties while his father returned to his aimless disintegration. It appeared to him that as his capabilities increased theirs diminished, so that even his mother had become his child now. His work was how the family fed itself. And if the family was somehow feeding upon itself, he felt that it was not his fault. St. Louis was the poison. The dance-hall lights. The necessity of money. All the hopeless and hope-mad people wandering through. The one solution he could see lay in getting back on the road to Texas, back to their dream. Then his father might wake and his mother would remember her old, quick joy. He ran to meet Mulrooney, who was camped on a dry-grass common to the west.

The Ambassadors and the Ladies Mulrooney were all sick from rancid milk. The tent stank of their sufferings and hummed with flies. Regrettably, a competition between the two largest of the flying clubs that had formed was scheduled for noon along the riverbank. Given the gastrointestinal crisis that had seized Mulrooney, the showman did not feel fit or able to attend, so Lloyd was left to gather all the soaring toys he could carry on the back of one of the wagon’s horses and make his way there all by himself. The obligation of rewarding the faithful and the opportunity to make some much needed sales was too important. But it did nothing to allay his fears. He had never faced the wall of faces on his own before. Never all alone. He realized that Mother Tongue had been right in a way: he was Mulrooney’s monkey. He had always had the showman to lean on, to back him up. Now it would just be him, a little boy from a small town—a boy with a big brain and bigger dreams, from a small-minded town, now confronted by what seemed a huge city and the inherent hostility of strangers.

The sky was achingly clear, and a gathering had already formed by the time he reached the bank where the competition was to be held. At his arrival, a cheer went up and people rushed toward him. They all wanted to greet the “little genius”—the boy who made the paper birds and gliding gadgets,
a hundred or so of which now lay on the grass in the summer sun.

The onslaught of adulation puffed up Lloyd’s spirits (and ego). Maybe St. Louis wasn’t such an evil place after all. Perhaps fame and fortune could yet be his. That would save his family. Surely. Yes, there were cruelties and injustices. Vigilance committees, bushwhackings, and intimidation. Freed blacks could be falsely arrested and sold back into slavery, and some of the antislave voices were nonetheless anti-Negro, advocating the establishment of a whites-only territory. But right in front of him were people lined up to see him and shake his hand—many, if not most of them, good people (a few of them the same good people who had looked on as Francis McIntosh fried).

With newfound confidence Lloyd scanned the throng, trying to pinpoint some presence that was hostile—one of the Claws & Candle spies that Mother Tongue had warned him about. Was it the man with thinning hair who was still wearing his leather blacksmith’s apron, the same kind his father used to wear back in Ohio when he was working—when he did work? What about the striped-vest barber or any of a number of mulatto traders, Spanish boatmen, or French fortune hunters? Perhaps one of the high-toned ladies hiding behind their fans. He tore the crowd apart face by face. But they were all watching him, and none of them appeared hostile. Yet they all could become so, he knew. He had already learned how fast the tastes of the horde could change—how insatiable they were for novelty, for innovation, and for failure. Whether or not the Spirosians and the Vardogers were real, he understood that the cries of ovation he received were but catcalls in reverse. The words of Mother Tongue came back to him: “No one goes far who travels alone.”