Enigmatic Pilot (26 page)

“You can talk. I heard you. Whatchyou lookin’ at?”

Lloyd had never felt so lost for words.

“What’s your name?”

This question was delivered with a steeled self-assurance.

“Are you scared?”

She sounded almost solicitous now, with the tone of fine breeding. He could imagine a wealthy white girl fondling the family cat, yet inches away from him was a Negro filly in sooty
boy’s garb with grown-up eyes and a soft, full mouth. He tried to look away but could not bring himself to do it.

“Worried ’bout bein’ with a nigger?” she challenged, and her whole bearing seemed to change again.

“Who … are … you?” Lloyd managed at last, and felt reassured to be able to speak.

“Wailll …” she smirked. “Dey calls me Shoofly.” She flashed her white teeth in a mocking way and then, in sharp finishing-school diction, added, “But I call myself Hattie. As in Henrietta LaCroix. That’s my proper name.”

Her posture and tone had shifted again, becoming haughty and cool, educated even. He could not control his gaze. The brassy glint of her high cheekbones, the buttermilk soles of her feet—everything confused him, and the thought of leaping into the river was as lost as something he had thrown overboard.

“That’s … a fine … name,” he gurgled, realizing to his mortification that he was becoming aroused between his legs.

The girl gave a slight snort and rolled her filbert-shaped eyes. “I don’t need the likes of you to tell me that,” she said, as her hands whisked out faster than he could move and zipped the skullcap from his head.

His hair was dirty and matted and, as good as it always felt to take off the cap, he felt naked now and was all the more embarrassed about his incipient erection. What made matters worse was that he had the sudden impression that the girl was drawing some disdainful conclusion about him. He had sensed this attitude from Negroes and mulattoes a few times before, and now the way she regarded him he could almost look back through her eyes, like a reversible lens, to each of those incidents, silent little moments of conspiratorial reckoning—sometimes condescending, other times rudely compassionate, and always happening at the speed of a glance. In her weird honeycomb eyes, he knew that he looked like trash.

“You’re beautiful,” he choked at last, and was instantly sorry he had said it.

The girl made a mute pucker with her lips and her face flared like copper under a flame, but she did not move.

“Like niggers, huh?” She squinted, putting on her poor, shiftless voice again.

Lloyd could feel some violence coiling up inside her. She might have pulled a water moccasin out of her breast—or a blade—but he made no move to protect himself.

“Rub my feet,” she commanded.

“W-what?” he stammered.

“Rub my feet, boy,” she repeated, with a face like a fist, and in one fluid motion she brought her legs up over the lantern and into his lap, so that if she had extended her toes they would have pressed against his straining hardness.

Lloyd gulped and took the right foot in his fingers—and, without being able to take his eyes from hers, he began to stroke and caress the arch and ball, feeling the coarse skin soften with the oil of his palm. The girl blew out the lantern.

His parents did not know where he was. No one on board knew where he was. He did not know whom he was with. She might have been mad, for all he knew—and must have been mad in some way to be hiding down there in that hole, stalking the boat alone late at night, with no family or traveling companions. A girl her age. And a Negro—or half Negro. Yet, plunked down now in complete darkness with her, massaging the calloused flesh of her foot, he was flooded with an unknown calmness. He kept his hands at their task, trying not to breathe.

What seemed like a very long time passed, and at last the girl said, “It’s different in the dark. Some folks is afraid of it. I ain’t—I’m not. Are you?”

“Sometimes,” Lloyd managed. “But not … now …”

“Call me Hattie. What I call you?”

“L-loyd.”

“All right, then. Lloyd. Were you really going to jump?”

Lloyd could no longer picture her firmly in his mind. Just her
eyes. He felt as if he were caressing the darkness itself. Her tone was sultry and soothing, but the words were young and white. Southern. Mixed up. Like someone in a dream.

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“Someone’s affer you,” Hattie said, again sounding black.

“How do you know that?”

“I can feel it. I can smell it.”

“I thought that was mutton.”

The girl gave a light grunt.

“Well, you don’t have to tell me about it, if’n you don’t want to. Got troubles enough of my own.”

“Are you … running away?”

“Yep,” she answered. “I surely am. Folks affer me for sure.”

“Are you … a … slave?”

The softening foot withdrew, then thrust forward deeper into his hands.

“Not anymore,” the girl replied, her voice whitening once more.

“You don’t act like …” Lloyd’s cracking voice trailed off.

“Thass ’cause I ain’t!” Hattie hissed. “Not for true. I’m from downriver—the Mississippi. Long way. Been sneakin’ on boats and layin’ low and trampin’ for more than two moons. Covered a lot of ground. Gwain to keep movin’.”

“So … you escaped? Were you on a farm?”

“
Plantation
. Big one. With a big white house and los of niggers.”

The last word stalled in the air like a belch.

“W-where?” Lloyd asked, squeezing the other foot.

“They calls it—call it—the Corners. Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louise-y-anna. Down on the line there. Grand place back off the river a few mile.”

“Why—did you run away? Was the master mean?”

The girl’s right hand whipped out like a frightened bat and cuffed his face in the dark.

“The mastah was my papa!”

Lloyd’s cheek smarted from the blow, but he did not stop working his fingers into her other foot, which seemed to him to have taken on a life of its own, like some cave animal he was cuddling. He thought back to the professor’s monkey, Vladimir, and Mother Tongue’s odd cat.

“I was born in the cabin, as they say. But he allas treated me special.
Right
. Gave me learning. On the sly. Told me one day I’d go to school. Europe. One day … I’d be a lady. Fine dresses. Books. Music.”

“Then why … did you run away?” Lloyd gasped, confused about why his companion in the dark had thrown away the same sorts of chances that he had.

“His wife hated me! She knew the truth. She saw I waddn’t like the other niggers. She hated my mother, but she hated me more. When I’s younger, it was just mean. But when I got a figure—and she found out I could read and write and do sums—she became a devil. Thought it was a sin that I should know about paintings and novels. Wouldn’t raise a hand to me long as Mama was alive. But when Mama died last year—I reckon she was poisoned! Then the old thing laid for me.”

Lloyd swallowed hard.

“She sent me up to Memphis to be sold away. It was her daddy had the land first. She was older ’n Papa. He married her back when she was still a little pretty. But she got crooked and sick—and evil inside. Lay up in her white bed all day dabbing her throat with cologne and whining for the nigger girls to fan her and shoo the flies. Story was she lost a baby. Wouldn’t let Papa come to her bed after that. So … he came … to my mother.”

“Why didn’t your father … protect you?”

“He tried.” Hattie sighed, with a mixture of fatigue and sadness that made Lloyd lighten his touch. “But men are weak. They’re all … slaves.”

This last assertion made Lloyd wince, but he kept rubbing the foot, subconsciously easing it against his erection. This girl
was like no one he had ever imagined. Shining machines and flying over rivers and cities did not seem so wondrous as before.

“Papa’s heart was broken when Mama died,” the girl continued, as if she were reconsidering the events as she recounted them.

“He sounds … like a sad man,” Lloyd offered, feeling stupid. He kept imagining her eyes in the dark.

“He was a brave man and a wise man, and a good man,” Hattie insisted. “Let all the niggers read the Bible—and more. Got ’em learning arithmetic—and the stars. The neighbor white folks hated him for that.”

“He must miss you now.”

“He’s dead,” Hattie said, and must have reached in the sack for a hunk of mutton, because Lloyd could hear her jaws click. “Hung hisself.”

“He did?” the boy wheezed, thinking back to his own actions on the deck.

“Died in shame,” the girl continued. “Man named Barlow—plantation owner nearby—challenged him to a duel. Said he was a nigger lover and a traitor to the South! Papa strung himself up the night before. His old wife had her way after that. Her and the overseer.”

Lloyd did not know what to say. It reminded him of the story Mother Tongue had told him. Perhaps the man had not hanged himself. But it was not his place to speak now.

“Give me your hands.”

“What?” Lloyd whispered, feeling his stomach turn.

“Give me your damn hands,” Hattie hissed.

He loosened his grasp of her feet and stretched out his hands. There was a rustle of fabric and then he touched warm skin. Girlish breasts beginning to form. A fragile hint of womanly fullness. And ripeness. His own skin tingled. But her flesh was ridged and welted. The body before him leaned into his grope, filling his fingers with a different kind of darkness. Lloyd
could feel the girl’s breath, mutton-scented, on his face, while his intrigued, frightened hands were allowed to roam over her bare skin.

Where there should have been nipples there were lumpy crosses of scars. His fingertips explored small slices and pocks and bumps that reminded him of the Ambassadors’ secret hierograms. The girl’s entire chest and belly rippled with markings that seemed to radiate an angry heat.

“They … did … 
this
 … to you?”

“Not all at once, mind,” Hattie whispered. “They took their sweet time. Her and Riddick.”

Lloyd recollected the tone of St. Ives’s voice when he told of his maiming at the hands of the diabolical Rutherford. The odor of the mutton was starting to make him nauseated. Or maybe it was the scarring.

“And that’s not all they did,” Hattie hissed—and Lloyd caught the faintest hint of a sob in her voice. He pulled his hands back.

“I’ll never have chillum—children. And … I’ll never have pleasure. With a man. Understand? I reckon you old enough to know what I mean. That’s what the old hag wanted. Then she sold me off. Up Memphis way. That’s when I run off. First chance I had. Only chance I thought I’d get. ”

Lloyd could think of nothing to say. His hands had retracted from the girl’s wounded skin, and yet had been drawn to the feel of her, as if through some perverse attraction. His stomach growled—still his erection stiffened. The space they were in seemed to contract around them, as if somewhere deep within he retained the memory of what it had been like to be so close to his twin sister, Lodema, back in the mother darkness.

“So.
Lloyd
?” Hattie inquired after a long moment’s silence. “Why you wanna end your life? ’Cause you a mongrel colored boy in disguise?”

“What?”

“I see through you. Niggers will. Smart ones, anywise. I knew it the first time I saw you sneakin’ around with the Judas face.”

Lloyd remained still, listening through the coffin-creaking walls.

“You gots woes and worries? You gots scars, too?” Hattie badgered. “Hmm? Let me feel ’em!”

“I killed a man,” he answered at last. “Maybe three. Back in St. Louis.”

“You lie!” Hattie scoffed and jabbed her feet into his belly.

“How a li’l skunk like you do that?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Lloyd replied. “But I did. Just as sure as I’m sitting here.”

“White men? Or niggers?”

“I killed a … slave …” Lloyd answered, not sure what to say about the Ambassadors from Mars.

“Well, then. That ain’t so bad,” Hattie said, sounding younger and blacker again. “Less’n he was somebody else’s. And I reckon he was—way y’all look. I seen your mama slinkin’ round, too. She white, I eat your stinky hat. But she pretty and smart. Plays good.”

This calling attention to his mother’s ancestry, and therefore his own, did not sit well with Lloyd, although he was relieved that she did not seem to know about his father. He had come to believe that the family had overcome or managed to obscure their mixed blood, and that their problems lay on another level. But seen now through the eyes of this blighted creature before him—in the dark, torn between tribes and destinies like two girls separated at birth by a knife and then sewn back up in a single body—he felt again the stirrings of the monstrous within himself. Had not the professor once joked that he was as anomalous as the Martian brothers in his own way? He may not have scars on his skin like this half-educated, half-slave girl, but what if someone were to feel deeper?

His head and heart were inundated—the hosanna-shouting
Mule Christian below the courthouse, the chatter of the freakish twins borne away into the sky. Every detail of the infernal incident came rushing back upon him like the rising of the ground. And before he could master himself he burst into tears.

“Boy, stop that!” Hattie demanded. “You gots nuthin’ to cry over. You want me to strike a light and show you what these scars of mine
look
like?”

Lloyd choked on his words. “I … I was done, too,” he gasped. “In St. Louis … this ugly man … in an alley one night.”

The girl paused at this announcement. This sounded to her like a much more believable claim than the murders the boy had mentioned before. But she wanted to be clear before projecting any sympathy.

“He take down your pants?”

“Ripped them down,” Lloyd sobbed. “Then he slammed my head down into a dung cart … and … and … he did me. Hard as he could.”

Hattie LaCroix remained silent and still, waiting for him to catch his breath. She knew there was more to come.

“He said … he said … I felt just like a little … pig!” Lloyd wailed at last, and even though his voice never broke above a whisper, the admission broke him wide open.