Uncrashable Dakota (12 page)

“Solly!”

The lanky engineer stood up to greet his boss, stooping to avoid a low-hanging branch.

“Sir.”

Panting and out of breath, Samuel handed Pembroke his drawing. Pembroke handed Samuel his toy train, almost finished except for the back wheels, and squinted at the sketch. Samuel studied the toy train.

“Hmm,” each man grunted at the same time.

“This is fine work,” Samuel said once he’d caught his breath. He meant it: the train was a perfect scale model, right down to the impression of a tiny conductor’s profile in the window.

“This is a canoe,” Pembroke said, holding up the drawing and cocking his head, as if he had to explain to Samuel what he’d just drawn.

Samuel nodded. “Sure is.”

The two men stared blankly at one another for a few seconds. Then Pembroke grunted again, snatched back his toy train, and wandered off with the sketch, shaking his head.

*   *   *

THE FIRST DAKOTA AERONAUTICS
airship looked like a hollow, upside-down hedgehog. Pembroke had improved upon Samuel’s design, adding square flaps that stuck out of the side like blunted wings. His idea was that once the whiskey-sap and beetles were applied along the bottom of the canoe, additional beetles could be added to the flaps for extra lift, or scraped off the bottom to begin descent. For this purpose, he built small, oarlike protrusions into the sides of the canoe that could be controlled by the pilot. Proud of his craftsmanship, Pembroke had to admit it just might work. And while he didn’t exactly admire Samuel Dakota—not yet, anyway—there was no denying the man’s crazy willingness to see things through to the end. The probable end, in this case, being his death from a high-speed plummet to the ground.

“Solly.” Samuel clapped his chief builder on the back on the morning of the launch.

Pembroke nodded hello. “Sir.”

“Tell me the truth.” Samuel pulled on his new leather helmet with straps that flopped down over his ears. “I look okay in this?”

The three dozen employees gathered at the testing field eyed their boss with a mixture of amusement and the kind of frightened awe reserved for asylum inmates.

“Like a man on the verge of winning a war,” Pembroke said.

Samuel climbed into the sky-canoe, which was resting three feet off the ground on wooden posts. He cleared his throat.

“Gentlemen,” he began, launching into an impromptu speech, “for centuries mankind has dreamed—”

“Mr. Dakota, sir!” One of the compound guards came running up to hand him a glass bottle with a rolled-up paper inside. “Sorry to interrupt. Messenger said it was urgent.”

Samuel held the bottle up to the light. Someone had scratched a crude letter
C
into the bottom with a knife.

“Who gave this to you?”

The guard fidgeted. “Like I said, sir, a messenger came to the guardhouse. Said you would know what it meant.”

“You didn’t see this,” Samuel said.

“Y-yes sir. I mean, no sir. I didn’t. See what, sir?” The guard, clearly puzzled at Samuel’s tone, retreated down the steps.

“Dismissed,” Samuel said. But the guard was already running back to his post.

Samuel stowed the bottle beneath his seat. His men were watching him curiously. Without another word, he nodded to his chief whiskey-sap mixer, who slid beneath the ship on a rolling board and smeared the mixture evenly across the underside with a paintbrush. When he rolled out, Samuel nodded to his chief beetle keeper, who slid beneath on the same board and carefully applied eight evenly spaced beetles.

The pungent flatulence wafted up. Samuel, who had grown to value, if not quite enjoy, the smell, flared his nostrils and sniffed it proudly.

The ship ascended with an abrupt, purposeful jolt that almost spilled him over the side. He began a mental checklist of improvements for the next test flight:
seat harnesses.
After shifting his weight to regain balance, he saluted Solomon Pembroke as his chief builder took on the size and demeanor of a surly ant. He took a deep breath and looked out across the flat expanse of Virginia countryside that had been fenced off into neat squares of brown soil for the beetle farms, dense rows of transplanted trees rich with sap, steel tanks full of moonshine, and half-finished factory hangars waiting to produce the Union Army fleet. His heart swelled with pride. It was amazing how far a man could come in a few weeks with the right combination of brains, hard work, and—

His foot brushed against the bottle beneath his seat. The little hairs on the back of his neck stood up, and he felt a chill that had nothing to do with altitude. He was floating alone in the empty sky, but suddenly felt as if he were being watched. Off to the right, his landing spot—the Shenandoah River—was a thin blue ribbon curling through the countryside. He grabbed hold of the little scraping-oars, prepared to swipe beetles from the undersides of the canoe to begin his descent. It had been a short flight, but he didn’t want to push his luck; he just had to wait for the air current to carry him over the river. As he hung in the gentle sky for what seemed like an eternity, he added another item to his checklist:
steering sails.

He stretched an arm over the side and opened his hand so that his palm caught the wind. He gazed out at the surrounding clouds and thought,
There will be more of us up here very soon.
Finally, when he couldn’t put it off any longer, Samuel grabbed the bottle and slid the rolled-up paper out into his hand. The scrawled message read:

TO MISTER SAM DIKOTA,

YOU OWE ME.

HEZEKIAH CASTOR

PS: IM WASHING YOU.

Samuel tore the note into pieces.
What’s done is done
, he thought as he scattered the flecks of paper into the gently swirling air that he had conquered on behalf of the United States of America.

11

STEERAGE BEGAN
WITH A STRUCK MATCH.

Hollis had descended as fast as he could from the promenade bar to the depths of the pelican’s belly—a straight vertical drop on a map, but maddeningly slow going within the physical reality of the ship. As a hunted fugitive, he had to stick to the back-alley network of the
Wendell Dakota
, seeking pools of shadow like a dog on a hot summer day. He skirted Coal Town by ducking into the third-class infirmary, where minding one’s business was an art form. An all-out sprint through a rank tunnel that connected the lift chambers provided express service from aft to fore. Then a bad guess had gotten him lost in a place where even his own hands were difficult to see.

A smoker lit her pipe by scraping a match along the wall. Hollis would have blundered right into her, but now he followed the orange glow. If she noticed him, she didn’t say, just kept going as if she were taking a stroll to clear her head. When the tunnel emptied out onto a gangway that overlooked the massive hold, the smoker vanished and Hollis was confronted by a potent blend of noise, heat, and stench. A mangy Labrador bounded past, trailing a viscous rope of saliva from its bared teeth. Something thudded against his shoe, and he looked down to see a little girl retrieving an errant marble. She grinned up at him and snatched it away, sliding back into the game circle while her companions laughed. At the edge of the gangway, a rickety catwalk connected two makeshift tent cities nestled among the rafters. Hollis found an empty spot next to the railing and peered over the side. Some families had staked out shelters with blankets strung from clotheslines, little checkered tents. Others simply camped out in the open. Groups of men gathered around overturned crates, playing cards and tossing dice. But most people just milled about, jostling endlessly for a sliver of space.

It was hard to believe they were all passengers on the same ship. He had always imagined steerage to be a slightly more cramped version of third class. But this was something else entirely—there didn’t appear to be any bunks. It was as if the population of several tenement buildings had simply been transported en masse into the belly of the
Wendell Dakota.

He was thankful not to be wearing a finely tailored suit, but still felt as though his outfit screamed
spoiled first-class dandy
to the passengers cradling babies swaddled in rags or herding wild-eyed, barefoot children. He had gone out on the catwalk in hopes of spotting the rendezvous point, when he realized—too late—that he was halfway inside the moist, dim closeness of someone’s tent.

A gruff voice came out of the darkness.

“It’s about time.”

Hollis straightened up as a man stepped into view, old and gaunt, with thin wisps of hair that spilled across his forehead. He carried a cane, which he extended to thump Hollis in the center of his chest. Then he pressed the cane harder, forcing Hollis back into the creaky wooden railing.

“Sorry, sir,” Hollis said quickly. “I’ll be on my way.”

“Now, hold on. Not so fast, boy.” The man, still pressing his cane into Hollis’s chest, leaned forward slowly, reminding Hollis of a medieval knight sliding down the length of his foe’s sword. The man cocked his head to the side and said, “I could use some more soup.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t …
soup?
”

The man pulled the cane back slightly and jabbed Hollis once again. “That’s right.” He thought for a moment. “More soup.”

Another voice came from the darkness, an old woman. “Leave ’im alone, Sidney. Godsakes, you’ll scare the poor boy to—” The woman blinked in surprise as she moved forward to lower the man’s cane with a liver-spotted hand. “Oh,” she said. The saggy skin of her face seemed to tighten as she regarded Hollis. Her mouth made a thin line. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“He’s getting my soup!” protested the old man. The woman ignored him as she pointed back across the catwalk, the way Hollis had come.

“Get along, now,” she said, not unkindly. “There’s nothing but trouble for you here.”

“I have to meet someone,” Hollis said. “Can you help me find the message drop?”

The woman’s face softened, as if an invisible mask had been removed from her skin. She studied him for a moment and shrugged. “Downstairs, smack in the middle.”

“We’re going to Ireland,” explained the old man matter-of-factly as the woman melted back into darkness. “Where it’s quiet and the dust don’t settle in the soup.”

Hollis felt ashamed of something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. “Safe journey, sir.”

The old man’s mouth stretched into a toothless grin. He broke into hideous peals of wheezing laughter. Hollis ducked away from the cane, backed out of the tent, and took the first set of stairs down to the floor of the hold. Rattled and out of breath, he leaned against a stack of crates and stared up into a ceiling of faded shirts and graying undergarments hanging from a web of clotheslines. A haunting tenor voice sang a few bars in Italian. Hollis picked his way past piles of trunks, baskets, and cardboard boxes. And barrels! There were so many barrels down here, he wondered if the hold doubled as barrel storage. He was careful not to step through the middle of any conversations—the last thing he wanted was to disturb anyone and draw attention to himself. Off to one side, he was relieved to see the framework of a partition, separated from the main area by a wall of sheets, with the silhouettes of bunks on the other side. Perhaps most of the steerage passengers slept in there and came out here to socialize. Then he noticed the
SICK BAY
sign tacked to one of the crossbeams and turned away.

Directly in front of him was a crudely drawn portrait of an infant in a crib. It was nailed to a thick support beam that stretched all the way up to the ceiling. More drawings, along with a few letters, were pinned up around the portrait, their edges overlapping like tree bark. Hollis stepped back and took in the full sight: pictures of people and animals, scraps of paper with names and hearts and addresses. Just above his head, someone had fastened a wooden cross, upon which a realistic carving of a beetle was crucified.

A girl’s voice brought his attention back down to the floor of the hold.

“Lookee here, Chester.”

The girl stood as tall as Hollis. Her hair was a knotty mess of red tangles that flopped out of a handkerchief tied beneath her chin. Her left eye was an angry slit ringed with a fresh bruise. The boy she called Chester was heavily built but not quite fat, with tight black curls on his head and pencil-sketch hints of hair on his upper lip. She jabbed him playfully with her elbow.

“I think we got ourselves a mighty fine society boy.”

Avoiding their eyes, Hollis tried to push between them. A thick, powerful hand on his shoulder held him back. Chester slammed him up against the crates. Hollis’s breath exited his throat in a sudden rush. All at once, the girl was in his face. Her open eye was bright green and brimming with liquid, as if she’d been stockpiling tears.

“Not so fast,” she said, examining him up close, nostrils flared. “What brings you down here?”

“Maybe his shoes need shinin’, Maggie,” suggested Chester.

“Nah,” Maggie said. “Society boys don’t wear shoes, they wear golden slippers—ain’t that right?”

She glared expectantly, waiting for Hollis to confirm this.

“I wouldn’t know.” He tried to swallow and made an audible, embarrassing gulp. “So, um, where you all headed?”

Maggie wiggled a finger inside an improbable tube of ringlets that stuck out next to her ear. Chester said, “Who cares? Anywhere’s better than New York.”

Despite Chester’s iron grip on his shoulder, Hollis found this interesting. “But isn’t that where the work is?”

Maggie laughed. “Yeah,” she said, “if you wanna drown in some sap pit or choke in a propeller factory. I figure if I’m gonna starve, I’m gonna go starve somewhere I can breathe.”

Hollis knew that people had booked passage on the
Wendell Dakota
for all sorts of reasons—plenty of first-class passengers just wanted the maiden-voyage bragging rights. Second class was generally split between vacationing families and business travelers. Third class was full of single men and women seeking various fortunes around the world—the kind of traveler Marius would be if he hadn’t signed on with the company. But Maggie and Chester’s reverse immigration was new to him. He listened to the riot of voices surrounding him—Russians, Germans, Hungarians, Swedes—was everybody down here headed back to the Old World?