Enigmatic Pilot (25 page)

It was this pervasive sense of doubt that had kept the boy sharp enough to stay free of the clutches of a deep depression from which he might not have recovered—a survival instinct channeled through the fine filaments of his heightened intellect, which kept him linked to the world despite an anguish and a regret that made his father’s look paltry. The voices of the past—Zanesville bullies tormenting him, St. Ives and Miss Viola, the professor, Schelling, Mother Tongue, Brookmire, the black man beneath the courthouse crying out to heaven, and the insane chatter of the doomed Martian Ambassadors—they were all stilled in the splash of the steam-driven wheel and the new look of longing in his father’s eyes.

Lloyd reasoned that he must maintain not just his mother’s pretense about what had caused them to leave St. Louis but the much larger and more complex fantasy of a world without the Spirosians and the Vardogers. “I cannot tell them about what I do not understand myself,” he admonished himself. “They have lost innocence enough, better to keep these other, longer shadows to myself.” And so he did.

Both adults experienced a wave of reassurance in the few remarks their son offered before they all slipped back down to their cabin for refreshment and rest. They chose to forgo the dining saloon (as much to avoid what passed for the “boiled meat” as to avoid questions). There was still a span of river to survive, not to mention the so-called Indian Frontier, which at that moment in history extended from the Lake of the Woods in the north to Galveston Bay in the south (and, of course, was being pushed inexorably west).

All the known routes to the Pacific were alive with white settlers. The great thrust of migration along the Oregon Trail had commenced in earnest, making mad boomtowns of places like Council Bluffs and Omaha. The Potato Famine in Ireland and
the war with Mexico were about to send more shock waves rippling out through the long grass. Then the insanity of the gold rush. Once peaceful relationships with tribes of Indians across the continent had already strained to the point of bloodshed and were building in intensity, just as the tensions over slavery and the great ideological and cultural differences between the North and the South were mounting to what would end up being a sprawling red mountain of corpses in the years to come.

Farmers, freed slaves, miners, Mormons, and families like theirs came spilling domesticated animals and heirlooms in the hope of finding some semblance of home, disrupting cycles of wild game and dispossessing native tribes on a scale and at a speed unseen on the planet before. The newspaper editor John O’ Sullivan was about to coin the phrase “manifest destiny.” It insinuated itself into even the Sitturds’ cloistered cabin, and began to make Lloyd restless.

Rapture and Hephaestus, quite content to have some moments alone, allowed the boy to slip out after darkness fell. He had made a habit of this late at night, when his mother collapsed in discomposed sleep on the floor beside the tortured patriarch, always on the lookout for some stranger who might know more about them than he would like. Gorging on the sustenance of rediscovered intimacy, his parents allowed him to exit on the last stroke of the eleventh bell, imagining that he would slink around the boat like their cabin-mate mouse.

It was in fact a very different plan the boy had in mind now that his father had arisen from his stupor. But this plan was to be subverted, and it was a little after yet another midnight when Lloyd found out that there was indeed a stranger worth knowing about on board the
Defiance
. Someone stealthier than any mouse.

T
HE WIND HAD DIED DOWN, BUT THERE WERE NO STARS OR MOONLIGHT
visible, for a low ceiling of cloud had fallen over the river, warming the air and dulling all sounds. Almost all the other passengers, save a few men playing poker on top of a barrel in what they called the poop-deck salon, had taken to their cabins. The burly crew, who were not resting fitfully below, huddled around lanterns, sucking on pungent cigars.

The Sitturds’ fellow travelers were a furtive lot in Lloyd’s view, a ragtag of prayer-sayers, blue-sky believers, runaway thieves, and would-be saints mixed up like nails and raisins in a jar. On nights before, he had heard the men playing. He had smelled their smoke and cheap whiskey, and caught the occasional loud oath or imprecation giving way to murmured bluffing and wagering. More than once he had felt the pang of memory, pondering where St. Ives and Miss Viola were—itching to be able to join the game and clean the shaving brush—bearded simpletons out of every pot. The thought of having to live in hiding even for the duration of their river journey sickened him, the stupid skullcap pulled down tight on his head like a badge of shame. And what about the future? Would he and therefore his family always be looking over their shoulders,
shuttered up in claustrophobic spaces while the bright, teeming world grew faster and ever more luminous outside?

Old mud-rut routes and plank toll roads were giving way to macadamized causeways. Lloyd knew that the world would one day soon be speaking the firefly language of the telegraph (like the kind he had designed back home). Mechanical marvels would rumble over the earth and city-size balloons might rise like new suns. He wanted a part of it—to lead it, to steer the future. To soar above the flour mills and the distilleries like a lord of innovation. To him, it seemed that they had only appeared to leave Zanesville. The truth was it had followed them—or, rather, he had managed against all intention to re-create it.

The roof of heavy dry cloud weighed down upon him. His mind kept zooming back to the night he had met Mother Tongue in the grotto beneath the graveyard—the miraculous lights that had illuminated the cavern. If he had accepted her offer, everything might be different. Even if she had exaggerated in her story about the Spirosians and the Vardogers, he was convinced now that she was telling some species of truth. He could have had a rich, sparkling education. He could have shared in deep matters and worked with others more like himself to solve complex riddles. There would have been fresh meat and vegetables, scientific instruments—and the acquaintance of women, not girls but grown, knowing women like Viola Mercy. For the life of him, he could not recall what had blinded him to the epic opportunity he had been offered.

He saw not a single star or night bird. Only blank, cheerless clouds reflecting back the blur of lights from the foredeck and the pilothouse, and the intermittent flickers from the shacks and settlements along the shore. The dimness he glimpsed all around was surpassed only by what he felt inside. What did it matter if they did reach Texas, as unlikely as that still seemed? There would be no books or microscopes or dynamos there. (Note: the term “dynamo” had yet to be coined at that point;
Lloyd’s term for such a device was an “electrogene.”) His desire was not to plow fields for cotton or wheat but to harvest the treasures of magnetic fields. To master lightning. He had no yen to raise snap beans and hogs like a high-ranking beast of burden. He yearned to penetrate the mysteries of minerals and numbers—and the secret machinery of the mind. To invent new forms of power—new vehicles, new hybrids of intelligent light.

What he foresaw for them in Texas was dust and wind and poverty, the perpetual seclusion of guilt and disgrace. “This is no way to live,” he told the thick Territory night. And yet, as he expressed this verdict, he saw that perhaps for his parents things could be different. If it was true that he was the principal cause of their troubles—and there was a strong argument that this was the case—then would not his parents’ lives, now that Hephaestus had recovered from his alcoholic debauchery, be happier without him? Of course they would grieve, he acknowledged, but ultimately they would worry less. The sorrow would pass, and then they would be free. Perhaps they would have another child in time, a child less likely to cause heartache and destruction. A child less gifted but not damned—or, at least, not dogged by shadows and perverse ambitions.

The more he dwelled on this notion the more it formed in his mind. Another bitter bite of shock for his father and mother, yes, but then release, maybe forever. Besides, since the old man was back among the living Lloyd had no place at the head of the family. His childhood had been lost in the scent of Miss Viola’s thighs and in the glare of the sun when he fell to earth, and he had killed at least one other human being and perhaps two innocent monsters, and caused who knows what hardships and dismay for the professor and Brookmire, not to mention Schelling and his clandestine tribe. The solution to all the conundrums facing him seemed amazingly simple when he examined it in the faint light of the empty deck. He found himself climbing up onto the rail, staring down at the dark flow that
surged around the shape of the
Defiance
just as the blood coursed through the vessels in his throbbing, cap-hidden head. All it would take was a little weight, and he would disappear without a trace.

Speak to me, Lodema
, cried out Lloyd in his mind, reaching out with all his will to feel the spirit of his dead twin.
Give me a sign
.

“You best get down,” a voice behind him said, and the surprise almost sent him plunging into the black water. Instead, he tumbled back onto the deck, eyes wild, heart racing, all the old fears rekindled and the thought of jumping jettisoned utterly. “Who are you?” he rasped, but he might well have asked where.

“No damn fool like you,” the voice answered, and it seemed to Lloyd that the night itself was addressing him. The pitch and tone were female, but unlike any he could remember.

“I’m not a fool,” he answered, raising himself up cautiously.

“Could’ve foxed me,” the voice replied, and still Lloyd could not pick out a face or body in the gloom. Could this be some magical science of the Spirosians or their foes, or was he imagining it?

“Come out and let me see you,” he said, and was struck dumb when a hand patted his shoulder in response.

He whirled about, but it took several seconds for his eyes to adjust and comprehend the new information that had presented itself so dangerously close beside him. Ever since the alley in St. Louis, he had prided himself on his alertness. Now, here someone had crept up within knifing distance—and a girl at that! She had emerged from under a roll of oilcloth behind one of the distress boats lashed to the rail. She was dressed in dark clothes, like a boy, and was as far as he could tell several years older than he—taller, anyway. She wore a skiff boy’s cap and kept both hands in front of her. Lloyd blinked, half expecting her to fade back into the murk, but her figure held firm, like a phantom reluctantly fleshed.

“Come,” she whispered, and seized his elbow. “Out of sight.”

To his further astonishment, Lloyd yielded to her touch. She pulled him down one of the crew-ways to a step rail that led toward the cargo hold. He had peeped down that way the day before but had grown skittish when one of the crew members, a snaggle-toothed moron they called Clapper burped at him. Inside a tiny storeroom with an ax mounted on the wall, a bald man dozed on his hands at a knotwood table that played host to a tin cup and a spitting candle in a blackout box. The Night Girl shuffled Lloyd softly past and into the jumbled shadows of another chamber. A stack of firewood and some smoked meats hanging in nets met his eyes—a gaff pole, crates, kegs. With impressive certainty, the girl steered him through the maze to a trunk against a bulkhead, and then eased the trunk back without making a sound. She lifted a plank and motioned to him to step down into a hole.

Through the taut working wood Lloyd could feel the thrum and clunk of the engine, chugging at reduced speed now at night—and he imagined that he could also feel the vibrations of the other passengers, tossing in their sleep or making love, fending off creditors in dreams, savage beasts or Indian war parties that awaited them in the wilderness beyond. He had visions of stepping down into some iron cage to be trapped, and yet he did as his strange guide directed and was relieved beyond measure when she followed him, the bare skin of her hands brushing against him when they were settled in the inky confinement just below. Shades of the false-bottomed graveyard, Lloyd thought.

They crouched on the floor, facing each other in total darkness, and he heard the plank slid back into place. A moment later, the mysterious girl lit a small storm lantern that sat between them. The light flared up as if inside a cave.

“Smuggler’s hold,” the girl muttered. “Doan nobody know we’re here, so talk low.”

There was something about her voice or, rather, her way of speaking that perplexed Lloyd. He let his eyes suck in the surroundings,
which were so near there was not much to see. A rough bedroll and a sack of food that smelled like cold mutton and boiled potato—their refuge was no more than a large mouse hole. Then the girl pulled off her cap and he let out a stifled sigh.

She was a Negro with milk-coffee skin and eyes that shone like the color of honeycomb in the lantern reflection. Her hair was not kinky, puffed, or nappy like that of other dark girls he had seen but straight and tinged a rich cinnamon shade, clipped as though she had taken a pair of pinking shears to her head without a mirror. She smelled a little—or perhaps it was the mutton—but her teeth were clean and white, her nose sleek and narrow. He guessed her age to be about twelve, although it was hard to tell. Thirteen, maybe. He knew that she was taller than he, but there was a womanly cast to her face despite the hardened scowl she affected and the boyish clothes she wore—a rough cotton tow shirt under a mussel-blue fisherman’s jacket and loose britches that looked as if they were stitched out of some old curtain. The garments smelled of smoke and sweat, and the moist, greasy air of the boat. Her feet were bare, the soles as pale as butter.

“Why you gwain jump?” she demanded, and then cleared her throat.

Lloyd tried to think, but all he could do was stare at her.

“You crazy or you in trouble?”

The way she said this was different. Her speech seemed to shift between dialects.