Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True Part 8

After returning the horse and giving a cursory report to Mulrooney (who had been reduced to squatting upon a makes.h.i.+ft thunderbox in abdominal agony), Lloyd kept his appointment at the bookshop, sleepy though he was. Sch.e.l.ling was there as usual, primly dressed under a veneer of dust. The humped man was reserved in his remarks, but Lloyd sensed that he was trying to sound him out for clues to his response to Mother Tongue's interview. The boy focused on his reading with renewed intensity. Sch.e.l.ling masked his curiosity as best he could and let the boy study until the normal time without interrogation-something he was soon to regret.

CHAPTER 2.

Ascension and Deception WHEN L LLOYD LEFT THE BOOKSHOP, HE WAS FOLLOWED. THE MAN wore a black flat hat and was dressed like a Friend or Quaker in a dark single-breasted collarless coat without b.u.t.tons. Two perspiring Negroes emerged from a furniture store trundling a sideboard, and Lloyd used their cover to slip behind a butcher's wagon. He waited until the man tailing him was just pulling even before darting out and s.n.a.t.c.hing the big black hat. The man uttered an oath, but Lloyd was too quick for him. With a flick of his wrist, he sent the flat hat flying under an ambling oxcart, where it became flatter still, and then shot off back down the street the way he had come, his little legs working like steam pistons. Once around the corner, he ducked down the gla.s.sblower's lane and then back around to the glue renderer's over a tomcat fence. He did not spot the man in the b.u.t.tonless coat again, although the more he thought about it, the more he realized that it was possible that the figure had been female. wore a black flat hat and was dressed like a Friend or Quaker in a dark single-breasted collarless coat without b.u.t.tons. Two perspiring Negroes emerged from a furniture store trundling a sideboard, and Lloyd used their cover to slip behind a butcher's wagon. He waited until the man tailing him was just pulling even before darting out and s.n.a.t.c.hing the big black hat. The man uttered an oath, but Lloyd was too quick for him. With a flick of his wrist, he sent the flat hat flying under an ambling oxcart, where it became flatter still, and then shot off back down the street the way he had come, his little legs working like steam pistons. Once around the corner, he ducked down the gla.s.sblower's lane and then back around to the glue renderer's over a tomcat fence. He did not spot the man in the b.u.t.tonless coat again, although the more he thought about it, the more he realized that it was possible that the figure had been female.

That night, at Lloyd's uncompromising insistence, the Sitt.u.r.ds decamped from the stable and took refuge in a boiled linseed oilsmelling mission house operated by the Temperance Society (where, to Rapture's relief, Hephaestus was forced to swear off his drinking and men and women were not allowed to sleep together). The next morning, on the way to see the showman, Lloyd learned that a fire had broken out in their former abode. Only one of the bony nags that had been stabled there (and was not long for the gluepot anyway) had died in the conflagration. No one else was injured. "Trust your intuition," St. Ives had advised him.

Maybe it was just a coincidence, Lloyd thought. The building was a tinderbox just waiting for a spark. But maybe not. Mother Tongue had warned him that he was being watched, and he knew for himself that he had been followed. Of course, it was possible, he reasoned, that the spy in the b.u.t.tonless coat worked for Mother Tongue and Sch.e.l.ling, whoever they really were. In any case, arson-if that was what was involved-was a big step up from being tailed. The safe thing to do was lie low until the family had enough money to leave town. Lloyd had made up his mind that he was not going to accept Mother Tongue's proposal. Nor, if he could help it, was he going to fall into the hands of the Vardogers-supposing that they were real and were really after him. He was going to go his own way.

He never returned to Sch.e.l.ling's bookshop, and the next morning he told the still weak but recovering Mulrooney that he intended to take a break from the soaring toys in preparation for an entirely new kind of venture that would be noteworthy and lucrative beyond any of their previous ambitions. This latter note cheered and "bewondered" Mulrooney, but the "unfortunate intelligence" that the boy would not be present to stimulate further sales in the flying gizmos when the local interest was running "so heartwarmingly hot" provoked boisterous resistance.

Lloyd took pains to point out that a little time off, and the resulting suspense this would create, would be good for business. Besides, he needed time to perfect his new innovation and, as the showman knew so well, magic did not just happen.

Mulrooney plunged into the dumps over Lloyd's news, believing that the lad, in an attempt (probably encouraged by his parents) to show that he was wise to the ways of show business, was holding out for a larger share of the takings. The old salesman sensed that he had reached the terminus ad quem terminus ad quem of their commercial relations.h.i.+p and began making mental preparations to depart the city before the summer heat became any more oppressive (which did not seem possible). For the moment, however, he did not feel safe b.u.t.toning his pants all the way. Lloyd said goodbye without further comment or any questions about the condition of the wives or the Amba.s.sadors. It was clear to Mulrooney that the boy had some pet scheme of great pitch and moment in mind, but his curiosity was temporarily overmastered by digestive discomfort. of their commercial relations.h.i.+p and began making mental preparations to depart the city before the summer heat became any more oppressive (which did not seem possible). For the moment, however, he did not feel safe b.u.t.toning his pants all the way. Lloyd said goodbye without further comment or any questions about the condition of the wives or the Amba.s.sadors. It was clear to Mulrooney that the boy had some pet scheme of great pitch and moment in mind, but his curiosity was temporarily overmastered by digestive discomfort.

Life in the mission house brought the Sitt.u.r.ds to serious grief. For Lloyd there was a constant threat from the inmates, many having bounced between the jail and the insane asylum. For Rapture there were endless smiles to fake, chamber pots to clean, and boils to lance. But Hephaestus suffered the worst in the Cold Water Army. While he craved succulent hams glazed with brown sugar and sweet fat orange-peel m.u.f.fins, he was served sinewy gruel and biscuits as hard as musketb.a.l.l.s-then told to wash the dishes. Lloyd would spare him no pocket money from his acc.u.mulating savings, and Rapture refused to sneak into the pews with him after lights-out to spoon and nuzzle. The gimpy blacksmith found himself brooding over the providential letter from his brother-and dreaming of his forge in Zanesville, of toad-sticking and fis.h.i.+ng in the Licking River with a jug of his elderberry wine beside him. There was no place for him in St. Louis-no place for him in the family anymore. He had sold what tools he had left from their earlier misadventures. Little Jack Redhorse's mash was pestering his kidneys and giving him the shakes. Now all the prayer-meeting hubbub and the sudden interruption of his escalating alcohol consumption drove him into a hallucinatory frenzy, so that Brother Dowling was forced to threaten him with ejection from the refuge. Then he was gone. Just like that, one morning.

Rapture, who felt that all her "speritual" links and secret skills had run dry (in the same way that Lloyd's mystic connection with his ghost sister had been severed), returned from a foot-swollen day of drudgery for the sawbones who patted her rear end to find that her husband was not curled in his sweaty cot in the men's dormitory and in fact had not been seen since what pa.s.sed for breakfast (which often did not pa.s.s for several days). How I hate my father sometimes, Lloyd thought. If only I did not love him.

Rapture cried herself to sleep that night, missing the garden back in Zanesville, her herbs and remedies, the cooking, the animals, the life they used to have. Lloyd took the news in apparent stride, keeping his hurt and worry to himself. He dared not tell her about the Spirosians or the Vardogers, and if his father was bent upon his own destruction he saw nothing that he could do at the moment save what he was trying to do-one final show that would be remembered forever in St. Louis. One grand performance that could rescue her.

From the platform of his modest celebrity, he would leap into the rarefied blue of legend and newfound wealth. Statesmen, speculators, and the captains of industry would woo him. He would save his mother and father, and they would not need to go to Texas to live off his uncle's charity. They could stay in St. Louis. They would eat French cheeses and broiled chicken. They would have a Negro footman and drawers full of patent medicine and ready-made clothes, a snooker table and bra.s.s spittoons, and decanters of absinthe, the Green Fairy that St. Ives drank. One day he would track the gambler down and invite him back to work for him. The rooms of their white-pillared mansion would be lined with books, telescopes, armillary spheres, and oil paintings of naked women with b.r.e.a.s.t.s like rolling waves. It would be "up tuh de notch," as his mother would say. If the Spirosians and the Vardogers wanted his loyalty, then let there be a bidding war-not a war of nerves but one that he could win, with negotiations out in the open, and with buckwheat griddle cakes, sirloins, and giant influence machines into the bargain.

When Hephaestus did not return the next morning, Rapture grew even more morose, but Lloyd a.s.sumed that he had sought refuge with the mud and root dwellers of the shantytown below the docks. It was true that there were razor fights and fisticuffs down there, but there was also boiled crawfish and banjo tunes, so perhaps the old man was not so crazy after all. In any case, Lloyd had bigger birds to fly, and he turned all the strength of his being toward his goal.

Via a circuitous route to throw off any pursuit, he went each day out to a rolling stretch of open land to the northwest of the city and began experimenting. Long before 1894, when Lawrence Hargrave was lifted from the ground by a chain of his cellular kites, or 1903, when Samuel Franklin Cody crossed the English Channel on a vessel towed by kites, the young genius from Zanesville was contemplating the logistics of his own ascension. It was what Mulrooney would have described as a "hurculanean task," for his imagination sought to integrate balloon, kite, and glider design to create an aerial display that would leave the people of St. Louis aghast.

He recognized that the issues involved in powered flight could not be solved in his present circ.u.mstances. The development of an internal-combustion engine both effective and light enough to drive an aerocraft would require tools, time, access to a machine shop, money, and fuel that he did not have. His idea was not to try to invent something new from scratch but to perfect what he already knew about. For background and inspiration, he had taken from Sch.e.l.ling's shop The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, with his drawings of the famous ornithopter, The History of Ballooning The History of Ballooning, and the book of Chinese kites (a slender seventeenth-century Dutch text on using kites to lift fireworks that he had referred to before), George Poc.o.c.k's sketches of his carriage-pulling kite system, a book on bird anatomy, the best physics manual he could find-and the published works to date of Sir George Cayley, the English aeronautical pioneer who had identified the separate properties of lift, thrust, and drag.

From initial experiments with kites, Lloyd read that Cayley had moved on to gliders (a progression that would lead to the first recorded manned flight from the top of a dale in Brompton, England, with his terrified and soon-to-resign coachman as the pilot guinea pig). Eight years before the English baronet, the so-called father of aviation, would achieve this first fragile success, young Lloyd Sitt.u.r.d, on the outskirts of slave-era St. Louis, was on the verge of another order of breakthrough all his own.

He began by building models, trying to understand and outline the precise sequence of events involved and therefore the technical problems he would need to overcome, in the exact order that he would confront them-collecting the materials he needed for a.s.sembly from his different roundabout journey each day to what he called the Field of Endeavor. The summer heat rose like his hopes, and Hephaestus still did not return to the mission house.

One night he found his mother talking to herself via a string sack of onions that she often consulted with in the cool room. He knew that she despised the "sweetmout" rot doctor she worked for, and that coming back to the gristly "bittle" of the long-plank church dinners was too close a reminder of things she had witnessed during the day. She had to "tie up me mout," as she put it, around the other women, and the "she-she talk affer praisemeetin'" always left her silent in a grim, hurricane a-comin' Gullah way. The onion sack at least provided some consolation.

"Dey, dey," she mumbled. "He naw be attackid. Naw capse. Jes gone 'way."

Lloyd could see that she was "bex vexed," and he did his best to console her. To help her "'traight'n." The last thing he needed just then was for her to slip her chain, too.

Where had that image come from? St. Louis was getting to them. More of the ominous words of Mother Tongue came back to him. He tried to hold Rapture's hand, something he rarely did and had not done for quite some time.

"Saw a blackbu'd attuh brekwus widda bruk-up wing," she said with a sigh.

"That's just superst.i.tion," he said.

"Eb'nso. Fell down a chimbly. Buckruh seen it, too."

"But that doesn't mean mean anything. Birds sometimes fall out of the sky. It wouldn't be anything to fly if it was easy," he said, trying to soothe her. "Even for birds." anything. Birds sometimes fall out of the sky. It wouldn't be anything to fly if it was easy," he said, trying to soothe her. "Even for birds."

"Seen a plateye affer!" she hissed, by which she meant an apparition.

"Murruh, you can't go around thinking you see ghosts all the time," he told her, but he thought that his voice seemed to lack conviction. The ghost of his lost sister, Lodema, had been very real to him back in Zanesville. And now he was coming to think of ghosts in a new way yet again, as that familiar ghost slipped further into the past. The trouble was, it was in a ghostly way-not fully formed, just out of clear sight. Yet present somehow. Active. Intent.

"He be haa'dhead. A hebby c.u.mplain. Bit Ah's sponsubble."

"No more than I am," Lloyd replied solemnly. He knew that his father resented his talents, even as he so very much appreciated them. The old man was like a crib-sucking mule you forgave for doing damage. But the boy did not like to see his mother ornery and blue at the same time. And he did not think it was wise for her to lapse so completely into her native dialect, even if she was addressing a sack of onions. The walls in St. Louis had ears. Strange things were afoot.

"Here," he said, reaching down to the floor. "Here's your hengkitchuh."

His accent was authentic and sharp. She bristled at it.

"Ain't gwine crya!"

He made a move to embrace her, but she shoved him away.

"Git 'way, l'il swellup!"

That hit Lloyd in the lights. He would rather have fallen from a rooftop.

But his own tar boiled up inside and he struck at her, landing his child-boy blow just about where she had given birth to him.

Rapture gave out a dreadful wheeze but still retained her "tan' up." Then they both gave into hugging and crying-softly-for fear of the church matrons in their Balmoral skirts and their shush-shush disapproval of anything vaguely human.

"It's going to be all right," Lloyd heard himself saying. "It will. I will make it all right."

They kissed, for the first time in a very long while, and he slunk off to the chaos of the dormitory to prepare for another night of alley-cat scavenging.

Like his mother, Lloyd wanted to believe that Hephaestus was pa.s.sing the jug and sopping gravy maybe two miles below, but he could not escape the possibility that an accident had befallen him. Of course, even if this was the case, it did not mean that the followers of the Claws & Candle were involved. His father was, after all, more than capable of doing himself harm. And there were always the knife houses to consider-floating brothel-saloons based in firetrap launches and decommissioned steamboats that renegade whites ran or that freed blacks were able to negotiate, smoke-filled mobile roach pits where men of all colors gambled on barrels and dance girls would put their legs up to knock over the whiskey. Then the razors would come out. There were rumors that a gargantuan woman named Indian Sweet ran one of the most popular and violent boats on the river. After his father's foray with Chicken Germain-and given his weakness for sour mash, blackened fish, and raucous music-Lloyd could imagine all too clearly his sire facedown in the Mississippi as the morning sun rose.

It was then that he would take from their hiding place Mother Tongue's terrible green eyes. He could not return them. He could not discard them. Some moments he thought that he should just accept her offer of help and be done with his family-perhaps that was the way to really save them. The problem was that he did not believe he could trust the old witch-or Sch.e.l.ling, either, for that matter. Mother Tongue might give him gifts of education and money, but then he would be forever beholden to her and her hidden officers. Once initiated into either the Spirosians or the Vardogers (a.s.suming there was any true difference between them), he knew that he could never leave.

Rapture became more and more distraught, muttering to herself and to the onions, which sometimes sprouted long green shoots, and which in his troubled dreams Lloyd imagined stretching out to strangle her. He did not like to see how carefully and methodically she washed her hands and arms in the tin basin after returning from work each night. Where else did she wash so diligently when no one was looking?

And so he redoubled his efforts, skulking in the small hours through the factory lanes, the holding pens, and the residential enclaves, searching for abandoned items amid the ash-hopper-sleeping-porch-outhouse-junk-lot backstage of St. Louis. What he did not find in these places he went looking for down on the docks at night-sneaking out of the male dormitory, with its bedlam of tubercular coughs and alcoholic dementia. Throughout the day he read, sketched, pondered, and paced. Then he began making and breaking, dismantling and reconfiguring-sewing, pasting, running, chucking, checking, measuring, and rea.s.sessing-driven to the brink of madness by his dream of flight and his yen for female flesh.

On his nocturnal hunting expeditions he witnessed things that opened dark new doors in his longing: a white woman in a rose arbor behind one of the well-to-do houses, kneeling down to her black houseboy, whose pants she lowered. Through another window he chanced to see a wattle-chinned oldster disrobe and allow a bare-breasted harlot in creased trousers and pointed boots to insert a bridle bit in his mouth and flail his wobbling b.u.t.tocks with a riding crop. These visions fired his fantasies and made him all the more desperate to take to the sky.

Not only had his knowledge of physics and mechanics deepened; his understanding of people was sharper and subtler. He knew that he could not fulfill a project of the scope and magnitude he had in mind without the help of others. Yet he could not afford to fall into the clutches of either of the twilight leagues that Mother Tongue had told him about. As he could not avoid experimenting, or the need to gather equipment and materials, he had to run the constant risk of being seen-whether by some hired whisperer or by a trained agent and perhaps a.s.sa.s.sin (who would no doubt be skilled in the arts of camouflage and deception). Was it the peanut peddler? The ink-and-parchment lawyer, or the coffeehouse Romeo? It could even have been one of the slatternly wash girls or the Negro boys in their tow-linen s.h.i.+rts. Sometimes Lloyd thought that the notion that he was surrounded by emissaries of a powerful occult order would drive him around the bend. Yet his intuition remained keen. If the ghost of his dead twin was not as present to him anymore, he retained his sensitivity to what pa.s.sed below the surface of daily life, and his time on the medicine-show wagon had made him a wiser judge of character than he would otherwise have been. It was this skill that allowed him to see the possibilities presented by the timely emergence of the figure of H. S. Brookmire-what his mother would have called a "spishus" arrival.

But desperation is both the mother and the father of invention and, for better or for worse, Lloyd saw no way around trusting in the man's a.s.sistance. Not if his dream was to be realized. What had Mother Tongue said? His intention was to travel right far.

CHAPTER 3.

On Glory's Fragile Wings HANSEL S SNOWDEN B BROOKMIRE HAILED FROM THE EASTERN MILL town of Manchester, and offered Lloyd two crucial benefits: he was eager to make a name for himself and, while not especially clever himself, he knew what cleverness smelled like. Just twenty-five at the time, he was in St. Louis visiting his older sister, Rudalena Cosgrove, who had come into significant a.s.sets following the death of her much older husband, Jarvis-a fortune large enough for Rudalena's father to excuse his only son from his managerial duties at their New Hamps.h.i.+re textile mill and dispatch the fledgling to Missouri to provide guidance and ballast in the dispensation and investment of the widow's capital. town of Manchester, and offered Lloyd two crucial benefits: he was eager to make a name for himself and, while not especially clever himself, he knew what cleverness smelled like. Just twenty-five at the time, he was in St. Louis visiting his older sister, Rudalena Cosgrove, who had come into significant a.s.sets following the death of her much older husband, Jarvis-a fortune large enough for Rudalena's father to excuse his only son from his managerial duties at their New Hamps.h.i.+re textile mill and dispatch the fledgling to Missouri to provide guidance and ballast in the dispensation and investment of the widow's capital.

Brookmire thus arrived in the river city with both a mandate and a line of credit commensurate with his ambition, and not an idea in his head of what to do next. He did, however, think he knew a good thing when he saw one, and two weeks into his stay the best or at least the most surprising thing he had seen was little Lloyd's flying toys and the fascination they induced.

The meeting, or rather collision, occurred as the important meetings in life often do, seemingly by chance, following Lloyd's return from the Field of Endeavor, scuffed and bruised from his first serious fall and smarting with worry that, now that his researches and his test work had moved beyond the model stage, he was sure to be seen and that word would get out and some vicious circle would close around him. Brookmire, who had witnessed the child in action down on the riverbank, took the force of the Market Street meeting as an omen. Not having noticed the boy's banged-up state prior to impact, he at first believed himself to be the cause of the injuries. Lloyd quickly ascertained that if the man were an agent of conspiracy, then he was not one to worry about, and so let Brookmire buy him a treat from a chocolate shop. A fateful discussion ensued.

Lloyd needed a backer. Brookmire needed an investment. Along with ca.n.a.ls and railroads, the nation was being laced with telegraph wires as fast as men could string them. New inventions were being introduced at dizzying speed. When the easterner learned what Lloyd had in mind for the next phase of his career, he was openmouthed. But intrigued in spite of himself. A notional, confidential agreement was reached later that afternoon in a laneway beside a pharmacy, the streaked windows full of foot powder and bottles of witch hazel, which reminded Lloyd of Sch.e.l.ling.

Brookmire was the sole other person who knew of Lloyd's audacious project. No doubt he must have had his share of misgivings. But as the only son of a domineering father he had experienced how detrimental external meddling can be. He had seen for himself examples of Lloyd's perspicacity and his ability to work a crowd, and the idea of investing in new technology thrilled him. If there were risks-and the sum total of his investment strategy was the greater the risk, the greater the return-he had the funds to cover them. Besides, he argued, "The boy is taking the real risk."

And the risks were great. Accounts of kite fighting can be found in the Sanskrit religious writings of the Veda Veda and the epic and the epic Ramayana Ramayana, but the young Zanesvillean's battle was not with another solitary opponent, it was with himself and the everpresent factors of money, time, and the physical forces of the world. Just as his father had become obsessed with the Time Ark, so Lloyd became fixated on his daring quest of conquering St. Louis by air. A sufficiently bewondering spectacle, and maybe his family could be salvaged-and he could be free. There would be marmalade and venison-and real scientific equipment.

Brookmire could do little or nothing about minimizing the physical risks of flight, but he worked minor miracles when it came to the problems of money and privacy. Without question, he purchased (as Lloyd requested) lumber, wire, fis.h.i.+ng nets, ropes, cable, bellows, baskets, sailcloth, and muslin. He arranged for the use of a large high-ceilinged warehouse suitable for the boy's very specific needs, and he secured the services of a rust-blooming steam barge owned by a burned-face roughneck named Lucky Cahill, who had earned his nickname by virtue of having survived two furnace explosions caused by his driving his boats too hard.

Brookmire had no idea what Lloyd meant when he jabbered on about "cambered airfoils," but he kept the boy's belly stoked with ham hocks and grits, corn Johnny and green tomato sauce. He knew how to grease a palm-and how to find the sort of people who did not ask awkward questions when he did. The talk around town was all about Texas becoming a state and an impending war with Mexico, but Lloyd did not pay it any mind. For four sweltering weeks he battled on in a delirious state of detachment and absorption, all his talents and attention channeled with manic verve into the silkworm-and-catgut task he had set himself.

His father had not returned, he suspected that his mother had at last succ.u.mbed to the advances of the laudanum-addled doctor she mopped up after, and his old friend Mulrooney had been laid low with a fever picked up in the pestilential marshes where he had insisted on camping, following the clan's bout of dysentery. All hope of reaching Texas, or some s.h.i.+ning tomorrow that would restore the health and happiness of his family, hung in the balance of his great design, Lloyd felt. But every day brought new engineering conundrums. Alt.i.tude, balance, directional control. Discovery, failure, damage. Repair, breakthrough, breakdown. Then a tantalizing hint of success, only to be confronted with some horrendous new challenge.

His plan divided into three stages. First, the manufacture of a small but potent balloon that would serve to lift a man-size kite. Sufficient initial propulsion and additional lift would be provided by the forward momentum of the barge to which it would remain attached. Once equilibrium at maximum alt.i.tude had been achieved, the kite platform would be cut loose for a brief moment of spectacular display. Then the third stage of the project would be deployed-a fixed wing glider. This would be the all-important steerable component in the mix.

It was a complex affair, but broken down into sections he felt he could get his mind around. A balloon he had already manufactured; it was just a matter of scale. The problem lay in producing sufficient hydrogen, a painstaking process involving exposing iron filings to acid. But a balloon of itself lacked the requisite novelty to provoke "bewonderment." The people of St. Louis had seen balloons before. So the second element was demanded. In his mind, Lloyd saw a diaphanous skeletal structure that would create a theatrical focal point and a sense of awe, and here again he felt confident. His work with kites had proved tremendously successful. (While it is considered an accomplishment for a kite to fly at angles of up to 70 degrees, he had achieved efficiency close to 110 degrees, moving to the kind of tetrahedral design that Alexander Graham Bell would later introduce-and then beyond.) It was the peculiar hierograms of the Martian diplomats that gave him the critical idea. Using woven strands of cane and millinery wire, he pieced together an enclosed scaffold in the most exact shape of their repeating tornado icon that he could, then he set it loose in a whirlwind of dust in one of the city's weed lots. The woven spiral, which in his concentration and excitement he had forgotten to secure, rose so fast that he could barely watch it. He made a larger model, and this time remembered to keep a lead attached. Because Lloyd had integrated panels made of umbrella cloth and handkerchiefs, the structure was able to support a terrified young pig that he pinched to a height of almost a hundred feet. More work, he had no doubt, would produce a still stronger and more effective model, and once the physics were right he knew that it would be a simple matter to enhance the dramatic grandeur through the use of color, reflective materials, and improvised noisemakers. "I am going to build an enormous kite in the shape of the Amba.s.sadors' favorite symbol," he said to himself.

The most difficult part was the critical third element-a working glider. For hours he labored, hallucinating a storm of theoretical insects and birds. Ever s.h.i.+fting between the strength of structure and the responsiveness of form, his designs evolved with a life of their own, as step by heartbreaking misstep he taught himself about flight.

He introduced a slight reflex curve at the trailing edge of the wings. Into the body of the glider he fabricated a rudder and an elevator rigged through a universal joint. Then he fitted a moving weight to adjust the center of gravity and improved stability by setting the wings at a dihedral angle. He rose and fell and swung on ropes. Every frantic hour brought a crash and then a jet of hope...some radiant insight...some fresh despair.

He so covered himself in bruises that Rapture tongue-lashed Brother Dowling and the prune of the Baptist school marm, who she a.s.sumed had been too vigorous in punis.h.i.+ng the boy for missing the sorry excuse for "cla.s.s" that consisted of nothing but rote memorizing of Bible verses and some half-wit figuring. As if the Wizard of Zanesville would sit still in a stifling prayer room to count on a slate with the dim little dumpling Hiram Pennyweight, an orphan with a k.n.o.b on his forehead the size of a duck egg, and Cecilia Tosh, who had lost her leg in a wagon accident and smelled like boiling hoof jelly! Lloyd would rather have faced the strap, and often did. But, despite the enthusiasm of these whippings, they were nothing to what he put himself through when he sneaked out to conduct his trials.

One night a man with a harelip and huge meat-slab hands ambushed him in an alley on the way home. Living in fear of the Vardogers, Lloyd fell victim to this more predictable predator, who brained the boy with a barrel stave and, stinking of dog-p.i.s.s ale, stripped his britches down.

The pain was excruciating, but even worse was the b.e.s.t.i.a.l grunting of his a.s.sailant, who left him swollen and bleeding in a pile of ox excrement. Never a tear did the young innovator shed. Not one. He took each thrust straight into his heart and darkened his being around it like a toad trapped in a hot iron box. One day, he vowed, he would find that creature again, and then he would perform some fiery experiment of justice-but in the meantime he had a mission to fly. He renewed his exertions with the cold-blooded certainty of desperation.

Success continued to elude him until one afternoon a waft of wind came up over the water and tickled a wreck of spiderweb, which chanced to break free just as he was watching. Lloyd noted how the transparent netting caught the zephyr, like the sail of a boat, and lofted it away out of sight. A breeze stirred in his mind.

Up to that moment he'd been concentrating on evolving the technology of the kite into a full-size glider, taking what the tethered kite could teach and turning it into something more maneuverable, more protective and sustainable in its flight, a giant version of his popular whimsies. In the glider, Lloyd could see great potential-almost limitless. Falling reluctantly away into the dissolution of sleep, he would glimpse wondrous engined machines propelling hundreds of people through the air at speeds beyond belief-gorgeous riverboats of the sky, able to master s.p.a.ce and distance as his father had hoped the Ark would transcend time. Travel to other worlds, yes!

But in structure there is also weakness. This subtle paradox now struck Lloyd with irresistible force. Perhaps the most beautiful machines are the ones that are least visible.

Abandoning spars, frame, or any form of rigid bracing, he designed and st.i.tched together himself an ingenious parafoil made from the two types of material that held the most fascination for him: a couple of large American flags and enough women's underwear to have dressed both a wh.o.r.ehouse and a church social. While porcelain-skinned matrons dozed on their goose down in the drowse of horsefly afternoons, Lloyd worked an ivory sailor's needle, fas.h.i.+oning a perforated chamber that would theoretically fill with air when the fabric was fully unfurled and aloft. More veined than ribbed, with slender but strong strands of twined fis.h.i.+ng line that he stole from a boathouse-feeding into steering toggles of thick hair ribbon-his new creation traded the toughness of a wood-and-bone enlargement of his soarers for the tuftiness of web and thistle. A second principle of his life had been sewn together in the process: in the face of failure, always become more ambitious and daring.

The breakthrough with the parafoil allowed him to focus more attention on the manufacture of the balloon and the kite components, and Brookmire, understanding these elements better, was able to throw the full weight of his support into their fabrication to a high standard, given the amount of time and materials available. The mill owner's son recruited a family of free Negroes and an old Indian weaver woman without teeth but with nimbleness to spare, and was enthralled by Lloyd's supervisory skills and native authority. The boy knew what he wanted, and he was a stern taskmaster when it came to getting it.

There was still no word from Hephaestus, but Lloyd had heard nothing to quench his hope that his father was still alive and surviving better than he would at the mission house, which had just about sapped his mother dry. He labored on, heaving himself into every st.i.tch and crease of the parafoil, so that whenever he did fall into a doze he felt himself airborne. Airborn.

The giant kite a.s.sembly was finished and stress-tested by the boy in the abandoned warehouse. Lloyd hadn't seen Sch.e.l.ling in weeks and was curious about how much he knew about his activities, if anything. He thought it unlikely that the humpback and Mother Tongue would just let him go. Perhaps they were simply waiting, wondering what he was up to.

He had no way of knowing that his former mentor did indeed know something of his whereabouts-just not the magnitude of his ambition. The bookman would later blame himself for what transpired-or what he felt he allowed to transpire-but there were many things on his mind. Dark forces were gathering strength in Missouri. At night the bloodhounds of the "n.i.g.g.e.r catchers" bayed in the woods, and men and women from faraway places stepped off the riverboats each day and disappeared but were not gone.

Lloyd was only subconsciously aware of this undercurrent, because the full strength of his intellect was directed to his aeronautical researches. At last, with balloon and kite elements resolved, it came time to formally trial his parawing out on the river, behind the barge, under the cover of night. Of course there were dangers, and of course there were a few glitches at first, but nothing he could not handle. The cells of the fabric wings filled with air, and within two trials he rose to the full tension length of the line, albeit very wet.

And what a feeling! In his dreams he saw future creations, combining the lightness of cloth and the capacity to change shape with the strength of reinforced structure and the thrust of unthinkable motors. He would think them! After his display over St. Louis, he would turn his mind to engines and generators. Beyond steam, electricity, and magnetism, there were miracles on the horizon of his imagination. Mirror-bright machines with the maneuverability of dragonflies. Vast airborne opera houses. Enormous bullets with men in them. He no longer cared about Texas and his uncle. He longed to get to the future. To plant a flag and stake his claim. Pathfinder. Priest of Invention. Impresario.

The searing heat of September found him ready to step beyond theory and trial. He could not rehea.r.s.e the complete performance; there were not enough materials or secrecy to go around. He felt that he had mastered the physics and engineering problems as completely as he could without open and comprehensive testing, which he could not afford or risk. His butcher paper and Buffalo-book notes were full of coefficients of drag and the effects of air pressure on airspeed, calculations about wingspan and weight-to-lift ratios-a miniature history of the mathematics of flight strained through a sieve. If only he had more time. If only he had better equipment. If only he could come out and work in the open. But he did not, could not, and a natural tendency toward arrogance settled him on what he had accomplished. It would do. It had to.

So he turned his mind away from the science of his creation to its aesthetics, with particular attention to the stimulation of bewonderment. For this he looked to Mulrooney, master of tinsel angels and two-headed cats. The professor and his mute wives were still battling the marsh fever but had managed to relocate nearer the fresher air of the river. Urim and Thummim remained hardy in health where the fever was concerned but incomprehensible as ever in terms of speech.

While Lloyd had been tackling the ancient dream of human flight with some success, Mulrooney had made no headway whatsoever in cracking the brothers' private code, and the two preterhuman charges seemed as remote from the world as when the boy had first met them. They had, however, been busy in their own right, although Mulrooney could make nothing of their written efforts. Since Lloyd had last seen them, they had filled up every sc.r.a.p of paper and smoothed-out rag that they had been given with more of their queer hierograms. The tent was now littered with their work. In addition to the repet.i.tion of the singular tornado icon, their row upon column of insectoid deliberations mingled regimented dots and curls like imaginary musical notes and unknown mathematical symbols with the filigreed suggestions of animal forms and crystalline shapes that brought to mind the snowflake images that float across one's eyes when staring.

Lloyd was struck by the fact that, with the exception of his graphs and diagrams, the brothers' esoterica bore an inescapable resemblance to his own figurings and formulas-to the extent that if some ordinary person compared his Buffalo-book pages with the sheaves and remnants here, they might well have a.s.sumed that the teratoids had been working on the same problem in parallel, but from an encrypted perspective. To his further puzzlement, he could not avoid the impression that if gazed at without close scrutiny the goblins' ciphers took on an overall pattern-a hypnotic labyrinthine spiral. It took an act of will to force himself away from contemplation and back to the reason for his visit.

Mulrooney was beside himself with curiosity about the boy's request, but believing in Lloyd's a.s.surances that his plan was almost fulfilled and would soon create significant new business opportunities for them both, the showman was willing to supply what goods he could: strips of painted cloth, jars of colored sand, and bits of broken mirror-all sorts of things he had magpied from his "peregrinations" to fascinate children and lend an enchanted air to his performances. To these Lloyd would add some of his own improvisations back at the warehouse.

An ominous rumble of thunder rolled over the encampment, followed by a flash of light and the intoxicating bite of ozone, which always reminded Lloyd of Lodema. A storm was moving in and, given the hothouse air and the voraciousness of the midges and mosquitoes, a dump of rain was seen as a relief. Lloyd considered it a good omen. He wanted the air fresh and clear for the morrow, with a good wind. Not gusty but steady.

The first pregnant drops of rain hit the roof of the tent and the wagon, and Lloyd hastened to gather up his booty. He did not want to get caught in the downpour. Before he departed, he gave the Ladies Mulrooney each a kiss on the cheek and told the professor to be at the courthouse on Fourth Street no later than noon the next day.

"I wish you would let me in on your little secret, my boy," the showman lamented. "After all, we are partners. Aren't we?"

Lloyd had grown adept at his management of both information and personnel. He thought of Brookmire's intensifying questions, and how the easterner was probably pacing back at the warehouse awaiting the final preparations.

"Trust me," Lloyd said. "Remember what you have taught me."

"That's what I'm afraid of!" the showman confessed.

"Fear is the price of surprise," Lloyd answered.

The professor twisted the ends of his mustache at this remark, trying to think if he had said it or if the boy had out-Mulrooneyed him.

"I'll be at the appointed rendezvous-with bells on," the showman confirmed. "How will I find you?"

"That won't be a problem." Lloyd smiled and then was gone, picking his way through the trees as fast as he could, eyes ever on the alert for confrontation, the warm big drops of rain sticking to his back like flies.

In spite of the boy's nonchalance, the professor had the nagging suspicion that he would never see his protege again, and it pained him to think that he was in some way responsible. Little did he know that the boy would be back again later that night.

In the interim, Lloyd had a hectic schedule. He had to return to the mission house and see his mother before lights-out, then slip out of the dormitory, as usual-go meet Brookmire at the vacant warehouse, beautify his creation with Mulrooney's baubles, make his final inspection, and then return to the showman's camp amid the storm to perform what would be the most troublesome part of the entire scheme. He had left this crucial element to the last minute because he had no choice. If he had put forward an open request to Mulrooney, he knew the showman would have outright refused.

Once his delicate errand was completed, he would then have to get himself and his unlikely accomplices over the river to where Cahill's barge was moored and across to Illinois, where they would lie in wait for the morning light. Meanwhile, Brookmire and the covert team he had employed would transport the balloon, the kite a.s.sembly, and the parawing glider. If the storm did not pa.s.s, all these preparations would be for naught. It would be the busiest night of his life, and a day of reckoning whichever way the wind blew. "So much to do," he mourned. "And so little time."

It was the familiar complaint of his father back in his inventing days, Lloyd realized, and the thought of his missing father and the concern over his whereabouts wavered before him like a ghost. "But I can't think about that now!" he told himself. There were theatrical effects that needed to be applied, checks and counterchecks to be performed. His mother would be fretful and despondent. Brookmire would be wound as tight as a cheap watch. The Vardogers could be laying for him-or some villain like before. And always the specter of Sch.e.l.ling and Mother Tongue's emissaries haunted him. Even if they meant well, they could derail everything. But there was no turning back now. He had to hurry and be very careful. He darted through the gathering storm unaware of the greater storm that was mounting.

Back at Mulrooney's, the showman battened down the wagon and the tent. The horses were jumpy, and so were the brothers. Not even a foot rub from his wives could dispel the professor's apprehensions, so he had a nip of LUCID!, then a vial. Then one more. His silent wives laid him to rest in a rumpled state and extinguished their candles. White barbs of lightning tore the sky and precipitation plummeted, pounding down on their tent so hard it almost drowned out the sound of his snoring.

Yet as deeply as he had fallen asleep, some inner alarm woke Mulrooney. He was still groggy with liquor, but an old traveling man's instinct had sounded in his dreams and forced him, thick-tongued and sweaty, to his feet. He stepped over his slumbering women and lit a lantern. Outside, the storm had calmed, but the ground around their camp was alive with web-footed rain. No one seemed to be lurking, although the mud was as rich with footprints as Urim and Thummim's pages were with enigmatic emblems. That thought triggered a sudden horror. He flung back inside the tent and poked the lantern toward the brothers' modesty screen. It was a very long moment later when Mulrooney accepted what he found. The pygmies from Indiana were gone.