Enigmatic Pilot (23 page)

Even if Brookmire had still been at his station and watching then, he would have found it impossible to say for sure what happened next. For a few seconds, an ancient cart nag stood draped with the remnants of Lloyd’s parawing. Cudgels thudded. A broad-brimmed hat lay mashed in the street. And toppled at the foot of the stairs was the auction podium, a ledger book trodden on the ground beside it. But no one saw what happened to the boy or his flying harness. Mule Christian, the most expensive field nigger on sale, had seen a miracle coming for him out of the sky, and he had stepped forth to embrace it.

P
ERHAPS IT WAS A KIND OF BLESSING THAT
M
ULE FOUND
. H
E WAS
certainly released from bondage. There was no pain. His neck snapped on impact. In giving his life, he cushioned Lloyd’s fall and the little giant from Zanesville rose out of the wreckage of the giant black man in the hot Missouri sun, like some part of Mule Christian that had lain hidden all the hard years of his life.

Lloyd managed to gain his feet for a moment and then crashed for true. The brick façades, the courthouse dome, Mulrooney, Brookmire, thoughts of his mother, his father, and his ghost sister—all swirled into a spiral that seemed to take him with it, and he remembered nothing more at all until the agitated face of Schelling yawned down into his like a pit that had learned the art of looking back.

Smelling salts were applied, hands groped and tugged at him, voices were raised and then stifled into whispers, stars—or things like stars—seemed to whiz past his head. He glimpsed his mother—or glimpsed her smell—his senses muddled. Then there was cold water and warm candlelight. He remembered one man with a face like a snapping turtle and a tall, thin white man cradling him into a passageway of dirt behind two shuttered buildings … the aroma of pumpernickel bread.

Every so often he regained enough coherence to imagine that he was still flying, higher and higher up to heaven to meet his dead sister, who waited in the dandelions at God’s feet, flying a kite with his face painted on it. Then the face on the kite would change. It would be his father, bright and ebullient as he once was ages ago back in Ohio. Then the image would change again, into the mangled bodies of Urim and Thummim. Someone stuck a rag down his throat to keep him from biting his tongue. Fragments of memory haunted him: the sight of Mulrooney’s hat in the crowd … skiffs along the esplanade … the mirror burn of Brookmire’s spyglass.

It was nightfall by the time Lloyd regained full consciousness. He was out on the water, in a larger version of the kind of boat that Schelling had used to take him to meet Mother Tongue. A tallow candle beamed out of a battered lantern hanging on the side of the pilothouse. His mother was there, looking perplexed and horrified, chattering and sobbing over him in her gumbo accent, any fussy white pretense stripped away. To his profound shock and relief, his sack of personal things lay beside him on the deck, tied up tight just the way he had left it stuffed inside his excuse for a shuck pillow back at the mission house. He longed to claw it open to see if Mother Tongue’s eyes and the Ambassadors’ box, and the precious letter from his uncle, were safe in hiding. Everything came back.

His body ached, from his skull to the legs that had slammed into Mule Christian. The slightest movement brought back sickening waves of falling. Along with Schelling, there were two large black men, but not the same men he had met before. His stomach felt like a mess of cogwheels and syrup. He wanted to throw up, but nothing came out of his gullet. The dark, thick air was hot and still, and smelled of wood smoke and river muck.

The joyous power of the wind came back to fill his smarting bones. He saw the city laid out beneath him … the ineffable experience of flight … then the shadows rose up to snatch
him—the accusing face of the showman—and at last he did vomit, over the side of the boat, his bile mingling with the Mississippi as the launch chugged upriver.

Silently, his mother sidled over and put her arm around his shoulder. He realized that he was wearing some other boy’s clothes. Whose? And what had become of Brookmire? Rapture crooned sad nonsense words in his ear, as she had done when he was wee. Why did everything go so wrong for them? Was he cursed? Would there ever be a home full of peace and belonging? Schelling scowled at him. The boat churned on.

They were headed north to the junction of the Missouri River, hugging the shore. In about two hours, they had melded into this other flow and arrived at their apparent destination, a clutter of what in the dark looked like drying sheds and some sort of chandler’s warehouse at the end of a sagging pier. The boat docked and up on the bank a hound moaned. A hard-looking white woman in a plain black frock appeared, carrying a bear rifle. With her was what Lloyd first thought was a boy, perhaps the boy whose clothes he was wearing. The lad hoisted at arm’s length the kind of lamp Lloyd had seen dangling on the bows of the fishing boats, but when the couple got closer Lloyd saw that he was in fact a midget—with a tight dried-apple face that rose up out of dirty flannel like the head of someone who had drowned. The pair spoke not a word.

“Where are you taking us?” Lloyd asked Schelling.

The humpback cast a glance at him, like a chunk of gristle to a mutt.

“You will stay here the rest of the night, then be on your way tomorrow.”

“Where?” the boy queried. He tried to reckon the number of days since he had last seen his old patron, but the midget’s face distracted him.

“Where you were heading before you created such trouble.”

Lloyd flinched at this remark but grabbed at his satchel and hugged it to his chest. Schelling gestured them off the boat and
accompanied them down the rickety gangplank. The midget and the rifle woman led them up a cut-clay path through a tangle of unlit buildings. They passed a chicken coop, coming to a windowless chinkwall cabin. A drainage trench ran around the place like a moat they had to step over—and when they did, a towering but emaciated deerhound ambled out of the shadows, assuming horselike proportions up against the midget. One of the black men who had been with them on the boat was left outside on guard.

Inside, the floor was packed dirt and the only light came from the hearth, where a spunk of resiny pine was smoldering and popping. The cloistered air was oppressive with mosquitoes. Lloyd’s eyes shot around the room. A pewter jug and a stack of scratched tin plates stood on a turned-leg table with two milking stools beside it. Another chair was a rocker like the one he had sat in during his interview with Mother Tongue and, next to it, a pathetic-looking child-size wheelchair. In the corner rose a jailhouse bunk with a patchwork comforter laid over each bundle of ticking. A polished cherry-handled dueling pistol lay on the bottom bunk.

Schelling spoke to the woman and the midget in some language that sounded to Lloyd like German but was not. A cold leg of poached chicken, corn pone, and some black-eyed peas were served to him and Rapture, along with a lopsided bottle of birch beer to share. He felt as ravenous as the insects and as dry as the air. When he had finished gnawing his bone, Schelling ordered him toward the bunk. Carefully, the boy laid the dueling pistol on the hardened mud floor, which had been swept smooth by a stiff broom and strong arms.

Lloyd lay back on the ticking but kept his eyes on Schelling and his ears open, the mosquitoes whining around his head. The humped man whispered to Rapture for quite some time as the woman and the midget crouched in their respective chairs, staring hypnotically into the fireplace as if they were all by themselves. At last the bookseller reached into a pocket and
produced a sheaf of paper money. The notes he pressed into Rapture’s hand. Lloyd caught a hint of the calcium-stained tooth, and then his old patron’s face marbled over into blankness once again.

Soon after, Schelling left without saying anything more to Lloyd. The beer had softened and slowed the boy’s thinking, and the whirring of the skeeters and the hissing of the sap in the lump of pine eased his alertness away from its moorings and out into the current of slumber. Only once did he stir—some upsetting dream about the midget watching him in his sleep—but fatigue and despair got the better of him again, and it was not until the light of a sullen morning spilled through the open doorway that he woke up properly.

His mother squatted on one of the milking stools, and beside her, hunched over the table, was what might have been a scarecrow that had been plucked out of the river and left to dry on a line. Schelling glowered at the boy.

“Here is your father,” he announced acidly. “Or what is left of him. Very soon now a steamer will put in. You are all going to be on it. Do you understand?”

“Where are we going?” Lloyd mumbled, rubbing away the crust of sleep.

“Far away, I hope,” Schelling said, shrugging. “And never to return. Don’t you remember you were going to Texas—before you took to trying to fly? Or did your brains get scrambled when you crushed that poor fellow?”

Rapture squirmed at this remark, but the huddled figure beside her did not respond. The woman and the midget were nowhere to be seen. Despite Lloyd’s native self-possession, he felt that he might cry. He climbed to his feet instead, too curious about the derelict plopped on the stool.

“Keep to your cabin as much as you are able,” the bookseller commanded. “Use the money I have given you and pay the bursar direct. Talk to as few people as you can, and tell no one your plans. You are a little boy, after all, Lloyd. A dangerous, selfish,
foolish little boy. In spite of your genius, your stupidity is matched only by mine for watching over you and not taking action before you did. I thought I was protecting you. Already it seems the better question is who will protect the world
from
you. I leave you to your destiny, just as you leave me to clean up your mess.”

Rapture sat speechless, propping up the figure that Schelling had called his father—rousty with chiggers and alcoholic delirium (a condition that Mother Tongue’s lieutenant treated with an injection from a horse needle). The skeletonized tramp slumped with the shot as a riverboat whistle tooted in the distance.

“He will rest for a while now,” Schelling rasped, his hump twitching. “I recommend that you restrain him—and keep his head turned. Plenty of water and time can get him through this. Now go. And be gone.”

Moving toward the gray light, Lloyd could see a paddle steamer pulling into the ramshackle wharf, where a man in a buckboard loaded with sacks of flour waited. The air was greasy-warm and smelled like dead fish.

He tried to imagine where Mulrooney was at that moment, but he could not bring the showman into focus. What would Brookmire tell his father? And what of the Ambassadors?

The steamboat let out another whistle that reminded him of the screech owl in the slave cemetery the night that Schelling had taken him to meet Mother Tongue—a cry from out of the stillness, between the land of the living and the brilliant darkness of the dead.

I
T WAS NOT THE SLURPING OF THE PADDLE-WHEEL WOOD WHACKING
the water that first penetrated his consciousness. It was another softer, nearer sound. After all the horrors and the tremors—the weevils burrowing into his flesh and the clam-sweat-salt-dry-throat retching and gulping of buggy water—he now heard a persistent nibbling rasp just above his head. At first he thought he was back in the stable in St. Louis, but the stench of the urine-soaked hay and the wafts from the glue renderer’s were different. Instead, he smelled the odor of damp hemp and warping lumber, with traces of vinegar and gunpowder—and somewhere the scent of a woman’s underthings. He blinked, trying to focus—to both remember and forget.

Gradually, Hephaestus Sitturd came to accept that he was lying in the dingy waterline cabin of a steamboat, going where he could not yet fix in his brain. The noise he had been hearing was an industrious little mouse, pecking at something in a hammerhead-size hole just above a bent-slat rail that ran across the wall behind the rope-hinged excuse for a bed. The creature’s nose poked out at him once or twice, sniffing for news of danger or sustenance. After the insidious roaches and the rats, and the other beady-eyed nameless things that had tormented him in his delirium, the affront of this actual rodent might have
seemed a cruel reality to awaken to, but it struck the stretched-thin blacksmith instead as innocent and reassuring. Despite the wagon wreck he had made of his life, he was still in the world—and not alone. There were others struggling just as precariously as he. He held out his right hand and the mouse’s nose twitched at the lip of the hole, then withdrew in a scurry of tiny-clawed feet.

Hephaestus recognized that, humble though they were, his surrounds were much more gracious and hygienic than where he had been previously, even though he could not summon a precise image of what that had entailed. He noted the presence of his son’s and his wife’s things. They had been huddling on the floor, it appeared, while he had occupied the narrow bunk. Inching back the sheet of nubbled muslin, he saw that he was naked. One of his shins sported a livid bruise, which brought to mind a baby bluebird he had found at the door of the forge back in Zanesville one spring. A boil on his left thigh had been lanced and dressed, and a purulent sore on the ankle of his deformed foot was sealed and calming beneath a dab of lanolin. His arms were flaky and pocked, but his body did not stink. Rapture, he guessed, had managed to bathe him in his trials. He thought that he could recall her firm hands pouring over him like tepid water.