Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True Part 11

"You don't act like..." Lloyd's cracking voice trailed off.

"Tha.s.s '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 n.i.g.g.e.rs."

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 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs. 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 a.s.sertion 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. s.h.i.+ning 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs 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 n.i.g.g.e.r 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 d.a.m.n 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 b.u.mps that reminded him of the Amba.s.sadors' 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 Ridd.i.c.k."

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 s.p.a.ce 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 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. n.i.g.g.e.rs 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 n.i.g.g.e.rs?"

"I killed a...slave..." Lloyd answered, not sure what to say about the Amba.s.sadors 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 look like?" 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.

Had that horror and humiliation been what had driven him to take to the sky? He had dreamed up the flight before the rape, but there in the dark intimacy of the hold, with this fellow fugitive, it struck him that maybe there was more to the grand design of his disastrous undertaking-the insistence on fulfilling it-than he had seen before. He knew the man had a harelip, but it was the meat-slab hands he remembered. The terrible, grunting skewering-so different from his afternoon with Miss Viola...so different...

More like some hideous revenge...of...Phineas...

The floodgates were open now, and when she saw that she could not command the boy's tears away she set aside the unlit lantern and moved, so that her legs were twined around him. His body fell against hers, his wet, sputtering face pressing against her still exposed bosom-half boy's, half girl's and raked like a battlefield-hot tears soaking her like an Indian-summer rain across shallow graves. His breathing heaved as she clutched him closer, at first to quiet him and then out of some deeper need of her own.

He smelled like other children she had cradled in dirt-floor cabins and dogwood arbors, like the Persian rugs she had helped Sarah beat with a stick broom out on the fine green, rolling lawn. He smelled like her desperate, chicken-stealing tramp-night stowaway antics. He smelled like life-dreadful, sinful, tragic, precious-and she held him and held him. The baby she would never have, the white child she would never be.

"Shush, boy," she whispered in his ear, embracing him, though the tears soaked her more than him. And still he cried. She suspected that he was not one to cry much-too proud, just like herself. So he would be full of it, like a tent roof too heavy with rain to tip. He was full of a lot of things, she sensed.

Boy though he was, she felt the manhood bursting out of him. It was surprising in one his age, but she had become accustomed to surprises. She stripped down his britches, as the garments had been rent from her in the past, taking hold of his privacy as if reaching for a chunk of meat. Maybe a different kind of darkness would cure his grief. Boys, like men, were like that.

Yes, he was young. Very young. But what did that matter when there were people hunting her?

She had done it before with a boy named Samuel and another named Tee, with a white man named Johnson and another called Cooley. She had always done what she had had to do. And she had survived what had been done to her. In a corncrib and a canebrake. In a sh.e.l.l-pink high-ceilinged bedroom, razor-stropped to an iron cot with the queer scents of magnolia and quinine oozing in.

Lloyd was too jangled to resist. Even as his precocious l.u.s.t sprang forth, he gave in-let her lead. Hattie used him like a rag to staunch a hemorrhage. Hers-and his, too. She always imagined blood streaming from between her legs now. She would wake in a cold sweat at the memory of it. Not like the blood of the moon, the blood of the garden. No, like the blood of the living dead. She could take no pleasure and extract no seed that would take fruit-still, she would take something. And maybe in doing so now she would give something back.

They merged into each other's wounds with an urgency that made them both quake.

CHAPTER 3.

No One Sees the Thunder THE SUDDEN CHANGE IN L LLOYD'S DEMEANOR R RAPTURE ATTRIBUTED to the return of her husband's sobriety and health. Even the bung foot seemed to bother Hephaestus less now, and he took to exercising in their tiny cabin and accepted with grace the restrictions on his open appearance throughout the boat in daylight. Lloyd, meanwhile, had lost his sullen casing of detachment and seemed positively cheerful. To Rapture, it was a blessing. Perhaps the past was behind them. to the return of her husband's sobriety and health. Even the bung foot seemed to bother Hephaestus less now, and he took to exercising in their tiny cabin and accepted with grace the restrictions on his open appearance throughout the boat in daylight. Lloyd, meanwhile, had lost his sullen casing of detachment and seemed positively cheerful. To Rapture, it was a blessing. Perhaps the past was behind them.

The Defiance Defiance plowed on westward, and Lloyd sneaked out of the cabin every single chance he could, which allowed his parents to rebuild their romantic bridges as well as to talk about the next stage in their journey. Of course, Rapture worried about her son when he was out of sight. Not understanding the nature of the crisis that had forced their removal from St. Louis, she retained anxieties both about what the boy would get up to and who might be taking an interest in him. However, the thought that her only child, who was still only a child, was often, at the very same moment that she was in the arms of her recovering husband, languis.h.i.+ng and coming to life in the arms of a half-breed girl (much as she had been at the same age) in the world hidden between decks of the riverboat never once crossed her mind. plowed on westward, and Lloyd sneaked out of the cabin every single chance he could, which allowed his parents to rebuild their romantic bridges as well as to talk about the next stage in their journey. Of course, Rapture worried about her son when he was out of sight. Not understanding the nature of the crisis that had forced their removal from St. Louis, she retained anxieties both about what the boy would get up to and who might be taking an interest in him. However, the thought that her only child, who was still only a child, was often, at the very same moment that she was in the arms of her recovering husband, languis.h.i.+ng and coming to life in the arms of a half-breed girl (much as she had been at the same age) in the world hidden between decks of the riverboat never once crossed her mind.

That he satisfied himself with his hand and took great satisfaction from the practice, she knew well and discreetly ignored. Her own upbringing had been free and earthy in matters of the body, and the enjoyment of s.e.x fit into her view of the world just as a belief in haints or the protective and restorative powers of lynx spice and fennel. But the thought that her son was not a virgin, and was in fact engaged in the most torrid romping that Hattie's stowaway status would allow, would have come as a shock, and Lloyd was careful to spare her and his fragile father.

Lloyd Meadhorn Sitt.u.r.d, the willful prodigy and fallen angel, had found something he had known only in his imagination while lying among the wind machines of his shrine to his lost sister back in Zanesville. It was an energizing, redemptive peace that seemed to flood his entire being.

There would have been countless other things that might have occupied his mind, such as the performance of the steam engines or the physics of the current. There was plenty of river traffic to note and wildlife to observe along the sh.o.r.e: deer, wolves, bison, elk, and the now extinct Carolina parrots. There was a joint-skinny German on board, whose sagging flesh told a story of hards.h.i.+p and deprivation, who nonetheless would ascend to the hurricane deck at twilight and play a mournful silver cornet-in thanks, he said, for coming to America. And there were always stories to hear among his fellow pa.s.sengers-tales of taxes and lost farms, of grubbing out trees and burying sick children, whispered fears of Indians and blizzards, and of fortunes to be made in trading whiskey, salt, tobacco, and beeswax.

But Hattie LaCroix, b.a.s.t.a.r.d mulatto woman-child, was all he could think of. The smell of her on his hands, the sounds she made, the things she said, the tears that she gave him, were like rain from a higher sky. They watered and nourished him out of his arrogance and guilt, his self-pity and his clumsy bootencased boyness. He always felt naked with her, even when they sneaked out late to smoke her corncob pipe, dressed and wrapped in a stolen horse blanket, beside the distress boats up on deck, where on that first murky night he had contemplated leaping into the river and she had saved him.

She had had saved him. The slightest scent of her skin or breath of her voice would set off a tremor inside him, but a tremor that seemed to make him stronger. Back with his parents, chattering about the road ahead to Texas or lying on his slender dog shuck on the floor of their cabin, the memory of something she had said, or the whiff of her body that still clung to him, could make him dizzy. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw her scars burning in his mind, a diabolical language of pain, but a beautiful secret language, too, of survival-the kind of deeper language he felt underlay the world, which he one day hoped to read as easily as algebraic equations or sheet music. saved him. The slightest scent of her skin or breath of her voice would set off a tremor inside him, but a tremor that seemed to make him stronger. Back with his parents, chattering about the road ahead to Texas or lying on his slender dog shuck on the floor of their cabin, the memory of something she had said, or the whiff of her body that still clung to him, could make him dizzy. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw her scars burning in his mind, a diabolical language of pain, but a beautiful secret language, too, of survival-the kind of deeper language he felt underlay the world, which he one day hoped to read as easily as algebraic equations or sheet music.

He understood in some storm-lit, intuitive way that she represented a kind of psychic union of the females whose lives or spirits had touched his most profoundly: Lodema, his mother, and Viola Mercy. But the girl was too much her own person, too much her own parents, guardian, and deliverer to be compared with anyone else. Sometimes he thought of her as the gift from his phantom sister, charmed out of his mixed-blood refugee life to give him gumption-more precious than anything Mother Tongue or Sch.e.l.ling had promised. No dusty scientific secret or antique treasure but a contraband friend and soul mate.

Lloyd spent every possible moment he could with the runaway girl. When he was not with her, he was thinking about her. Fixated on her. Hattie was a gift. A sacred, unexpected gift. A mercy. The miseries and sins of St. Louis were all washed away in her presence. She took his mind off the suffering of the past and the uncertainties of the future. He wanted the time with her to extend-for the boat never to reach its destination, but for them to be stealthy, secret, and together always. In all ways.

For her part, she waited with pining impatience for his arrival (although she would never have admitted this and tried hard to suppress any perceptible exuberance at all when he appeared in the dark or in the lull of the afternoon, when the other pa.s.sengers were fat and sweaty with drowse. It was getting cooler now, though, and oftentimes when they got naked together they needed to hold each other all the tighter so as not to ripple with gooseflesh.

Then they got teeth-chattering cold, when Lloyd let Hattie talk him into something that would have seemed insane to anyone who had not gone sailing three hundred feet into the air, in what amounted to a membrane of handmade spiderweb above a teeming city. She coaxed him into joining her in dangling from one of the towropes down into the river. They did it fully clothed; Hattie referred to it as "doin' laundry," and made it sound practical, but Lloyd suspected it was pure adventure that thrilled her, and that it was a kind of challenge to him. He smuggled along another set of his ragged clothes, in case by some wild chance they managed to survive.

They did it at night, when the boat was barely moving. Still, the risks were great. It was a long way even from the service deck down to the water, and of course it seemed infinitely farther coming back up the rope, especially s.h.i.+vering with wet, slippery hands.

"You think you strong enough to make it?" she asked.

"You bet I am!" he snapped back. Good Lord, he thought. She is more boy than I am, and more woman than girl. He could not let himself be shown up by her, even if she was older. But there was something about her that inspired confidence, and made this daredevil rite seem not just possible but casual. Fun. And perhaps something more serious, too. Strengthening. Lloyd had never known such a quality of leaders.h.i.+p in a female before. "She would make a good soldier," he told himself. "A captain of midnight raids. Or...a spy."

But all the confidence she projected did not take away from the threat of falling off the rope into the current, which was too swift to swim against. It did not keep the floating logs away, or make it any easier to be quiet so as not to alert the crew. Hattie was, after all, a stowaway and a fugitive slave. She had, as she said, "folks affer her for sure." The river was colder than he had ever known the water to be back in Ohio. It seemed to move with a serpentine force, and there was always the chance that there still were some snakes in it-and to see a snake swimming, as he often had from the decks on their travels, is a disturbing thing. (Of course, not not to see one swimming, when you are in the water, too, can be fatal.) to see one swimming, when you are in the water, too, can be fatal.) The clasping, gasping, reddened hand-over-hand, leg-and-foot-s.h.i.+mmying drag back up the heavy hemp braid-freezing with even just a light breeze on soaked clothes and skin-was the hardest thing Lloyd remembered ever doing.

It was made no easier when one of the crew appeared in silhouette above them, smoking a cheroot, which forced them to pause in their ascent, just about the time Lloyd felt that his arms would explode or drop off. The pain and strain were excruciating, but there was cloud cover above and a fine mist rising off the water, as if the river really were a kind of monstrous snake and the vapor was the skin it was shedding.

As exhausting as it was, it somehow filled him with an electric zest, because he was not clutching onto the rope in the dark alone. Hattie was just below him, and he knew that she was exerting extra effort to help keep him braced. He knew that she would not have hesitated a second to leap into the current if he had slipped. He was not sure what he would have done if she had fallen, as deep as his feelings ran. She had more than courage. She had a mastery of herself that made her a captain of split-second decisions.

At last the infernal idler finished his smoke and abandoned the deck to them, where they scrambled up and over, dripping, shaking with the wet, the cold, the struggle-and the grand achievement of clandestine triumph. Then they crept back as quietly as they could, given the drenched garments, to Hattie's hideaway, where with almost ritual devotion they undressed each other by stubbed candlelight.

It was then, with the bracing sensation of ducking down into the fast black water still fresh and vivid in his very bones, that Lloyd realized that Hattie had "bactize" him, as his mother would have said.

What was more, she had enacted with him-virtually holding his hand, certainly holding his heart-a ceremonial variation of the blind, desperate act he had been contemplating the night she had intervened. She had made the darkness visible and livable. He was cured of that attraction forever.

He held her and held her and held her. They melded together for warmth, and the heat of their longing softened their chafed palms. Mother Tongue had teased him with the promise of learning the art of love. But, in all the world, Lloyd doubted if he could have found a better teacher-one more generous or less ashamed.

s.e.xually maimed though she was, Hattie had not lost her young, powerful libido. It had diffused across her whole body. The blossom may have been cut, but her deeper bloom had not perished. Her skin had a hunger to be touched, and her scars an incandescent need for acceptance and blessing. She found in Lloyd the eye and tender hand witness she had hoped for, without even knowing it.

She was both rough and gentle with him-giving and greedy. She let herself open her broken wings to his mingling, teaching him how to use his p.e.n.i.s; it was in the end a tool, just as it is often called. She understood the driving male pleasure, and shared an injured version of the penetrative desire herself. There was the two-becoming-one delight that no mutilation could revoke. But she showed him there was more. Oh, so much more.

There was tongue and breath, kneading and brus.h.i.+ng. There were eyelashes and whispers, and the simple ecstasy of mutual grooming. Instead of rutting, panting, and spurting hot wet seed, Lloyd learned some of the secrets of temptation-of fondling, kissing, the exquisite antic.i.p.ation of a feather down a belly. And he learned the profound wholeness of a shared silence.

It was like being back in the womb again, in a way, he thought. But a new kind of guiltless womb made by consensual, collusive imaginations-two people giving birth to themselves through the vulnerability, faith, and vigor of true nakedness. For all the talk of conspiracies back in St. Louis, this was the one conspiracy he was certain that he wanted to join.

That night, after they had returned from out of the river-after they had mated and consecrated each other with hushed entwinement-Hattie said to him softly, "Roll over."

Lloyd winced at this, bristling with fear and embarra.s.sment. Some intuition born of their intimacy warned him of what she was thinking. Yet he could not resist her direction, although he asked in a quavering voice, "What are you going to do?" Knowing already.