Enigmatic Pilot (19 page)

“Dey, dey,” she mumbled. “He naw be attackid. Naw capse. Jes gone ’way.”

Lloyd could see that she was “bex vexed,” and he did his best to console her. To help her “ ’traight’n.” The last thing he needed just then was for her to slip her chain, too.

Where had that image come from? St. Louis was getting to them. More of the ominous words of Mother Tongue came back to him. He tried to hold Rapture’s hand, something he rarely did and had not done for quite some time.

“Saw a blackbu’d attuh brekwus widda bruk-up wing,” she said with a sigh.

“That’s just superstition,” he said.

“Eb’nso. Fell down a chimbly. Buckruh seen it, too.”

“But that doesn’t
mean
anything. Birds sometimes fall out of the sky. It wouldn’t be anything to fly if it was easy,” he said, trying to soothe her. “Even for birds.”

“Seen a plateye affer!” she hissed, by which she meant an apparition.

“Murruh, you can’t go around thinking you see ghosts all the time,” he told her, but he thought that his voice seemed to lack conviction. The ghost of his lost sister, Lodema, had been very real to him back in Zanesville. And now he was coming to think of ghosts in a new way yet again, as that familiar ghost slipped further into the past. The trouble was, it was in a ghostly way—not fully formed, just out of clear sight. Yet present somehow. Active. Intent.

“He be haa’dhead. A hebby cumplain. Bit Ah’s sponsubble.”

“No more than I am,” Lloyd replied solemnly. He knew that his father resented his talents, even as he so very much appreciated them. The old man was like a crib-sucking mule you forgave for doing damage. But the boy did not like to see his mother ornery and blue at the same time. And he did not think it was wise for her to lapse so completely into her native dialect, even if she was addressing a sack of onions. The walls in St. Louis had ears. Strange things were afoot.

“Here,” he said, reaching down to the floor. “Here’s your hengkitchuh.”

His accent was authentic and sharp. She bristled at it.

“Ain’t gwine crya!”

He made a move to embrace her, but she shoved him away.

“Git ’way, l’il swellup!”

That hit Lloyd in the lights. He would rather have fallen from a rooftop.

But his own tar boiled up inside and he struck at her, landing his child-boy blow just about where she had given birth to him.

Rapture gave out a dreadful wheeze but still retained her “tan’ up.” Then they both gave into hugging and crying—softly—for fear of the church matrons in their Balmoral skirts and their shush-shush disapproval of anything vaguely human.

“It’s going to be all right,” Lloyd heard himself saying. “It will. I will make it all right.”

They kissed, for the first time in a very long while, and he slunk off to the chaos of the dormitory to prepare for another night of alley-cat scavenging.

Like his mother, Lloyd wanted to believe that Hephaestus was passing the jug and sopping gravy maybe two miles below, but he could not escape the possibility that an accident had befallen him. Of course, even if this was the case, it did not mean that the followers of the Claws & Candle were involved. His father was, after all, more than capable of doing himself harm. And there were always the knife houses to consider—floating brothel-saloons based in firetrap launches and decommissioned steamboats that renegade whites ran or that freed blacks were able to negotiate, smoke-filled mobile roach pits where men of all colors gambled on barrels and dance girls would put their legs up to knock over the whiskey. Then the razors would come out. There were rumors that a gargantuan woman named Indian Sweet ran one of the most popular and violent boats on the river. After his father’s foray with Chicken Germain—and given his weakness for sour mash, blackened fish, and raucous music—Lloyd could imagine all too clearly his sire facedown in the Mississippi as the morning sun rose.

It was then that he would take from their hiding place Mother Tongue’s terrible green eyes. He could not return them.
He could not discard them. Some moments he thought that he should just accept her offer of help and be done with his family—perhaps that was the way to really save them. The problem was that he did not believe he could trust the old witch—or Schelling, either, for that matter. Mother Tongue might give him gifts of education and money, but then he would be forever beholden to her and her hidden officers. Once initiated into either the Spirosians or the Vardogers (assuming there was any true difference between them), he knew that he could never leave.

Rapture became more and more distraught, muttering to herself and to the onions, which sometimes sprouted long green shoots, and which in his troubled dreams Lloyd imagined stretching out to strangle her. He did not like to see how carefully and methodically she washed her hands and arms in the tin basin after returning from work each night. Where else did she wash so diligently when no one was looking?

And so he redoubled his efforts, skulking in the small hours through the factory lanes, the holding pens, and the residential enclaves, searching for abandoned items amid the ash-hopper-sleeping-porch-outhouse-junk-lot backstage of St. Louis. What he did not find in these places he went looking for down on the docks at night—sneaking out of the male dormitory, with its bedlam of tubercular coughs and alcoholic dementia. Throughout the day he read, sketched, pondered, and paced. Then he began making and breaking, dismantling and reconfiguring—sewing, pasting, running, chucking, checking, measuring, and reassessing—driven to the brink of madness by his dream of flight and his yen for female flesh.

On his nocturnal hunting expeditions he witnessed things that opened dark new doors in his longing: a white woman in a rose arbor behind one of the well-to-do houses, kneeling down to her black houseboy, whose pants she lowered. Through another window he chanced to see a wattle-chinned oldster disrobe and allow a bare-breasted harlot in creased trousers and
pointed boots to insert a bridle bit in his mouth and flail his wobbling buttocks with a riding crop. These visions fired his fantasies and made him all the more desperate to take to the sky.

Not only had his knowledge of physics and mechanics deepened; his understanding of people was sharper and subtler. He knew that he could not fulfill a project of the scope and magnitude he had in mind without the help of others. Yet he could not afford to fall into the clutches of either of the twilight leagues that Mother Tongue had told him about. As he could not avoid experimenting, or the need to gather equipment and materials, he had to run the constant risk of being seen—whether by some hired whisperer or by a trained agent and perhaps assassin (who would no doubt be skilled in the arts of camouflage and deception). Was it the peanut peddler? The ink-and-parchment lawyer, or the coffeehouse Romeo? It could even have been one of the slatternly wash girls or the Negro boys in their tow-linen shirts. Sometimes Lloyd thought that the notion that he was surrounded by emissaries of a powerful occult order would drive him around the bend. Yet his intuition remained keen. If the ghost of his dead twin was not as present to him anymore, he retained his sensitivity to what passed below the surface of daily life, and his time on the medicine-show wagon had made him a wiser judge of character than he would otherwise have been. It was this skill that allowed him to see the possibilities presented by the timely emergence of the figure of H. S. Brookmire—what his mother would have called a “spishus” arrival.

But desperation is both the mother and the father of invention and, for better or for worse, Lloyd saw no way around trusting in the man’s assistance. Not if his dream was to be realized. What had Mother Tongue said? His intention was to travel right far.

H
ANSEL
S
NOWDEN
B
ROOKMIRE HAILED FROM THE EASTERN MILL
town of Manchester, and offered Lloyd two crucial benefits: he was eager to make a name for himself and, while not especially clever himself, he knew what cleverness smelled like. Just twenty-five at the time, he was in St. Louis visiting his older sister, Rudalena Cosgrove, who had come into significant assets following the death of her much older husband, Jarvis—a fortune large enough for Rudalena’s father to excuse his only son from his managerial duties at their New Hampshire textile mill and dispatch the fledgling to Missouri to provide guidance and ballast in the dispensation and investment of the widow’s capital.

Brookmire thus arrived in the river city with both a mandate and a line of credit commensurate with his ambition, and not an idea in his head of what to do next. He did, however, think he knew a good thing when he saw one, and two weeks into his stay the best or at least the most surprising thing he had seen was little Lloyd’s flying toys and the fascination they induced.

The meeting, or rather collision, occurred as the important meetings in life often do, seemingly by chance, following Lloyd’s return from the Field of Endeavor, scuffed and bruised from his first serious fall and smarting with worry that, now
that his researches and his test work had moved beyond the model stage, he was sure to be seen and that word would get out and some vicious circle would close around him. Brookmire, who had witnessed the child in action down on the riverbank, took the force of the Market Street meeting as an omen. Not having noticed the boy’s banged-up state prior to impact, he at first believed himself to be the cause of the injuries. Lloyd quickly ascertained that if the man were an agent of conspiracy, then he was not one to worry about, and so let Brookmire buy him a treat from a chocolate shop. A fateful discussion ensued.

Lloyd needed a backer. Brookmire needed an investment. Along with canals and railroads, the nation was being laced with telegraph wires as fast as men could string them. New inventions were being introduced at dizzying speed. When the easterner learned what Lloyd had in mind for the next phase of his career, he was openmouthed. But intrigued in spite of himself. A notional, confidential agreement was reached later that afternoon in a laneway beside a pharmacy, the streaked windows full of foot powder and bottles of witch hazel, which reminded Lloyd of Schelling.

Brookmire was the sole other person who knew of Lloyd’s audacious project. No doubt he must have had his share of misgivings. But as the only son of a domineering father he had experienced how detrimental external meddling can be. He had seen for himself examples of Lloyd’s perspicacity and his ability to work a crowd, and the idea of investing in new technology thrilled him. If there were risks—and the sum total of his investment strategy was the greater the risk, the greater the return—he had the funds to cover them. Besides, he argued, “The boy is taking the real risk.”

And the risks were great. Accounts of kite fighting can be found in the Sanskrit religious writings of the
Veda
and the epic
Ramayana
, but the young Zanesvillean’s battle was not with another solitary opponent, it was with himself and the everpresent factors of money, time, and the physical forces of the
world. Just as his father had become obsessed with the Time Ark, so Lloyd became fixated on his daring quest of conquering St. Louis by air. A sufficiently bewondering spectacle, and maybe his family could be salvaged—and he could be free. There would be marmalade and venison—and real scientific equipment.

Brookmire could do little or nothing about minimizing the physical risks of flight, but he worked minor miracles when it came to the problems of money and privacy. Without question, he purchased (as Lloyd requested) lumber, wire, fishing nets, ropes, cable, bellows, baskets, sailcloth, and muslin. He arranged for the use of a large high-ceilinged warehouse suitable for the boy’s very specific needs, and he secured the services of a rust-blooming steam barge owned by a burned-face roughneck named Lucky Cahill, who had earned his nickname by virtue of having survived two furnace explosions caused by his driving his boats too hard.

Brookmire had no idea what Lloyd meant when he jabbered on about “cambered airfoils,” but he kept the boy’s belly stoked with ham hocks and grits, corn Johnny and green tomato sauce. He knew how to grease a palm—and how to find the sort of people who did not ask awkward questions when he did. The talk around town was all about Texas becoming a state and an impending war with Mexico, but Lloyd did not pay it any mind. For four sweltering weeks he battled on in a delirious state of detachment and absorption, all his talents and attention channeled with manic verve into the silkworm-and-catgut task he had set himself.

His father had not returned, he suspected that his mother had at last succumbed to the advances of the laudanum-addled doctor she mopped up after, and his old friend Mulrooney had been laid low with a fever picked up in the pestilential marshes where he had insisted on camping, following the clan’s bout of dysentery. All hope of reaching Texas, or some shining tomorrow that would restore the health and happiness of his family,
hung in the balance of his great design, Lloyd felt. But every day brought new engineering conundrums. Altitude, balance, directional control. Discovery, failure, damage. Repair, breakthrough, breakdown. Then a tantalizing hint of success, only to be confronted with some horrendous new challenge.

His plan divided into three stages. First, the manufacture of a small but potent balloon that would serve to lift a man-size kite. Sufficient initial propulsion and additional lift would be provided by the forward momentum of the barge to which it would remain attached. Once equilibrium at maximum altitude had been achieved, the kite platform would be cut loose for a brief moment of spectacular display. Then the third stage of the project would be deployed—a fixed wing glider. This would be the all-important steerable component in the mix.

It was a complex affair, but broken down into sections he felt he could get his mind around. A balloon he had already manufactured; it was just a matter of scale. The problem lay in producing sufficient hydrogen, a painstaking process involving exposing iron filings to acid. But a balloon of itself lacked the requisite novelty to provoke “bewonderment.” The people of St. Louis had seen balloons before. So the second element was demanded. In his mind, Lloyd saw a diaphanous skeletal structure that would create a theatrical focal point and a sense of awe, and here again he felt confident. His work with kites had proved tremendously successful. (While it is considered an accomplishment for a kite to fly at angles of up to 70 degrees, he had achieved efficiency close to 110 degrees, moving to the kind of tetrahedral design that Alexander Graham Bell would later introduce—and then beyond.)