Enigmatic Pilot (42 page)

“B-but Petrie!” Hephaestus stammered. “They’re his kin!”

“He may have had kin. He may think these are still his kin. But they aren’t,” Lloyd answered. “Unless he’s like this, too.”

“No!” his father insisted. “I worked with the man all day. He was straight, he was quick. He was—”

“Normal?”

“Y-yes.” Hephaestus nodded, working through in his own mind a host of associations and perceptions. “N-normal.”

“Then that raises the proposition that he doesn’t know about this,” Lloyd reasoned. “Which is supported by the fact that he recommended we try to stay here. Did he say anything about them? Anything that might hint at a change in them and their lives?”

Hephaestus had to turn and stroke his chin at this.

“Well, now that you mention it … he did let on something. Once he saw I could do a good day’s work for him, honest and expert-like, he did say something at the end. What was it? Ah … he said he was glad that we were about to keep a fresh eye on them. That’s what he said—a fresh eye.”

“What did you take that to mean?” Lloyd asked.

“I’m not sure,” his father mused. “He’d said earlier that there’d been a change in them—the both of them. But he didn’t say how or what.”

“Did he say when?”

“Hmm. Not directly. At least I don’t think. I was busy working then. I got the impression it was about a year or so ago. I don’t know why.”

“That would put it sometime around when the man with the music boxes and the child he wanted embalmed came past,” Lloyd put forth.

“What that mean ya be speaken now?” his mother demanded.

“I don’t know,” Lloyd admitted, shaking his young head. “But I know we must leave here as soon as we can. Within the hour. Whatever the Clutters were, they weren’t done in by men with masks and cudgels. But they were attacked, whether from without
or within.” He deeply regretted that there would not be time to circulate through town and remove the reward posters for Hattie.

“But if they were just machines—” His father sighed.

“I don’t think we should ever use the word ‘just’ about machines anymore,” Lloyd replied. “They are—or were—not machines we understand, and there were other machines here that are not here now. The two issues must be connected.”

“What othern maysheens?” his mother asked, sobbing now.

“Don’t trouble about them now,” Lloyd consoled her. “We need to be on the move. As you said, Farruh, we need to look alive—to stay alive.”

“Is they after you—dem folks from St. Louis?”

This was the first time any such thing had been mentioned in Hephaestus’s sober presence, and his faced showed it. Lloyd spoke his mind.

“It may be, and it may not. I think not. If they were to come, whoever they are, I believe there would be no mistaking it—and they would come for me. This is something else. It may be connected by chance, if there is such a thing. But …” and then he could not think.

“What yer sperit voice say?” his mother asked at last, putting into her old and often suppressed family speech the same suddenly accepted confidence that Hephaestus had arrived at in his own way.

Lloyd felt the momentousness of the change in the family dynamic and paused to weigh his words in respect for the new weight that had been openly placed upon his young shoulders. His rarefied mind rummaged through the shattered dishware and gaping flesh for some answer that would satisfy his own flesh and blood enough to get them all out of there. Fast.

“We were not the intended victims of this—if it be a crime,” he said. “But there is something about our presence here, and our (and he really meant his own) ability to see this as something outside experience, that must be heeded. How, I’m not
yet sure. There is something larger happening in this country than we ever imagined back in Zanesville. Whether we can run from it, and truly get away, or come to understand it remains to be seen. But we can’t ignore it, and more than ever I feel we must get to our destination in Texas as quickly as we can. Uncle Micah has already warned and inspired us that something out of the ordinary awaits us there. It was our leaving Zanesville and our old lives that set in motion the wheels that have brought us here—to both this place and this new, unlikely world. We can but go forward, and now we have to do so with the greatest haste.”

“So you think we are in danger, real danger?” Hephaestus queried.

“I think,” Lloyd said, with a face on him that was far too old for his years, “that just as we must put behind us old ideas about machines—even my ideas about machines (and this remark completed the familial acknowledgment of the change that had occurred)—we need to be prepared for danger wherever we look. From now on, danger is always real. Even unreal danger. Especially the unreal.”

H
EPHAESTUS HAD NO IDEA WHAT
L
LOYD WAS SAYING, AND YET HE
understood that what was called for now was belief in his son. The failed inventor had sobered up inside himself at the deepest level.

“The Clutters have two horses and a wagon they used as a hearse,” he announced. “Petrie told me. I think I heard them out back. They may not get us all the way to Texas, but they’ll get us out of here. When any kind of word gets out about this, we’ll be in strife. People will think somehow we done this. Whether these be the real Clutters or no, locals will need to make sense of things.”

Lloyd nodded.

“These are the Clutters that Petrie knew. And what happened to them may have something to do with our arrival. But we aren’t to blame and we won’t be burned for it if we keep our heads.”

“We takem wib us and give ’em proper beerial,” Rapture said.

“That’s right,” Lloyd agreed. “We take everything with us, we get a head start. Then anyone who wants to know more has got to find us, and they have no proof of anything being wrong.”

“Let’s load up the coffin first,” Hephaestus suggested. “The way these folk lived, we might get a couple of days or even more
before they’re missed. Even Petrie said he hadn’t had a meal or a jaw with them in weeks.”

Over the course of the next hour the Sitturd family worked in a frenzy of divided labor. Once Lloyd had indicated that he was finished examining the wreckage in the back area, Rapture set about gathering up all the broken, scattered bits into a neat pile. Hephaestus went out to inspect the wagon and the horses. “These animals have got to be real,” he said to himself when he found them and had lit a lantern. “If they were machines, they’d look better.” Both animals were desperately skinny, which seemed to fit in with everything the family had learned about the couple. “Perhaps they didn’t know any better,” Hephaestus reasoned.

While his mother was cleaning up and his father was giving the horses a feed and preparing the hearse, Lloyd completed his analysis of the bodies. In addition to the obvious mortal indignity they appeared to have inflicted on each other, he noted odd puncture wounds and gouges in their feet and legs, as well as on their hands. A couple of samples of their innards, some of which seemed organic and were already decomposing as the black dog in the street had, as well as some pieces of what were clearly manufactured workings of an intricate, complex nature, he placed in a bag that he found in the kitchen. Along with the now empty Vardogers’ music box, he tucked all his findings away with the Eye, the Ambassadors’ box, Hattie’s fetish, and his uncle’s map and letter.

Beyond the fatal wounds, the aspect of the corpses that he found most puzzling was discovered only when he pried open their mouths to find shards of comb and bent metal, as if in their delusional fever the couple had taken to eating the contents of the music boxes they snapped open. How very curious, Lloyd thought, remembering the ravenous hunger that had overtaken them all before.

When he combined this phenomenon with the ravaged interior of the living quarters and the position and unmistakable
nature of the activity the bodies had been engaged in, he was forced to conclude that the Clutters had undergone some rabid confluence of animal cravings and instinctive behavior. Gluttony, fear, violence, lust, bloodlust. That machines of any kind could experience these states and needs was startling. But all at once? “Perhaps that’s just the way it would be,” Lloyd mused, not at all sure he knew what he was thinking.

Once Hephaestus had the horses hitched and the wagon ready, he returned to help Rapture and Lloyd load the two bodies and the miscellany of demolished kitchenware, music boxes, and household items into one of the larger coffins. It was only because the bodies were beginning to soften and break apart that they were able to stuff everything that needed to be disposed of in the one box. All three Sitturds helped lug the coffin out back and onto the hearse.

They fed themselves with what decent food they could find and then began hauling the goods they hoped to take with them. It was frustrating that many things would not fit with the coffin in position on the wagon, which, of course, needed to remain easy to unload. They could have managed everything if they had chosen to take the coffin and bury it first and then return to load their things, but no one in the family thought this was a good idea. Better to be seen by as few people as possible. Two trips would increase their vulnerability.

By the time they were ready to depart, it was close to midnight. In one sense this was good, because it meant fewer people would be abroad. However, it would also make their errand more suspicious if they encountered anyone—and, as Lloyd had learned the other night, anyone who was out at that time was far more likely to be a threat. But there was nothing to be done about that now.

Once more the Sitturds found themselves stealing away, hoping to avoid the detection of prying eyes. The difference this time was that all three were united in alertness, the bond of family stronger for the trials they had survived.

They were on the southwestern side of the town, so extricating themselves from the community was somewhat easier, given that this was the direction they were heading in. Nevertheless, they had intended to leave at first light, with full supplies and the best maps they could acquire. As it was, they had a compass, one of the large-scale maps used by the mail riders, a small duck gun, and a waxing moon swathed in clouds. With any luck, thought Hephaestus, the clouds will hold until we clear town and then break and give us some help.

The road was still muddy, but the Clutters’ emaciated horses seemed relieved to have made their escape from the funeral parlor and found an effort their sorry frames would not have indicated they could deliver. Their pace was slow, because the Sitturds wanted to make as little noise as possible without at the same time appearing to be sneaking. Their senses were sharp and their breathing was shallow. They saw a man snoring drunk beside a hogshead, which gave Hephaestus a prick of conscience, because he realized that this was what he must have looked like often in the past.

The dwindling aroma of a savory stew drifted out of a makeshift boardinghouse, so unlike the fare they had been inflicted with at the Clutters’. The whole sordid scene passed through their minds again, but passed through Lloyd’s the fastest. He was ruminating on the music box he had plundered. He could not imagine not having taken it—it was too tempting a prize not to want to examine further, even though it was empty. And that was the thing that troubled him, although he could not say why. Did having something of the enemy’s—if that was indeed what the Vardogers were—strengthen their position or weaken it? He did not like to think he carried with him something that might endanger his family further.

The frail horses hauling the overloaded wagon squished along in the hardening mud as the clouds thinned and the moon broke through. By the time they were past the edge of the town proper, they had counted just two figures they knew had
seen them. One was an Indian smoking a long store-bought pipe, leaning up against his dozing horse as if there were nothing more natural than using your horse as a pillow—as at home as he would have been a hundred miles away in prairie grass.

Lloyd wished that he understood more about the Indians and their ways. He had known things about those closer to home in Zanesville, like King Billy, but in the family’s travels since, he seemed to have been cut off from any close contact. He had seen many, but they were more like parts of the landscape. Even by moonlight, it frustrated him not to be able to intuit more about the man. How far away did he live? What was his tribe, his language, the magic he believed in? Lloyd had already come to understand something that eludes or deceives many: everyone believes in a kind of magic, though it may go by other names. “I hope my life has more to do with Indians,” he told himself as they creaked past.

The other denizen of Independence to confront them was a dog, which at first made them all wary, because they were afraid it would bark and call notice to them. There was also not far in the back of all their minds the image of the black savage that had shredded the Spaniard’s dog in the street. But this dog seemed to be normal. Curious but not vicious. Scruffy, of no particular breed, it began to tag along behind them, tempting Hephaestus to load the duck gun.

Lloyd observed his father’s annoyance and said, “It’s all right, Farruh. Maybe he needs to leave town, too.”

The lame man sent out more energy through his arms into the reins. His son was right again. They had much more to worry about than stray dogs. And what were they if not stray dogs themselves? “You can’t blame a critter for wanting company,” Hephaestus told himself, his eyes ferreting through the moon shadows, hoping for some sign of the mail track on the outskirts.

They were a long time finding it, and then getting far enough down it to think of veering off—someplace they could get the
wagon to so as to bury the remains of the Clutters in as much privacy as they could manage. Along the way they passed a couple of buckboards and simple farm wagons with canvas shells trying to be houses large enough to contain a ragtag of families and animals. It gave them all a little hope that their designs were no more foolish than many folk’s, torn between old lives and new. They also passed a large Spanish camp under some chestnuts. Here the fires were still burning—the scent of food and scheming. “Spaniards never seem to sleep,” Lloyd said to himself. “Perhaps I should become a Spaniard.”