Enigmatic Pilot

CHAPTER 1. Rara Avis

AFTER HIS PERPLEXING MEETING WITH MOTHER TONGUE, LLOYD found it hard to rouse himself in the morning. Through a haze of threats and twisted images, his consciousness was brought back to St. Louis and the stable by the piggish noises of conjugal struggle. While the manufacture of the flying toys had brought his parents together in the matter of practical survival, their intimate life had not recovered since the Chicken Germain-root salve treatment, and Hephaestus’s libido had been bottled to bursting. Up to this point both parents had been discreet regarding Lloyd’s awareness of their lovemaking, but the urgency of the need and the systemic erosion of his dignity provoked Hephaestus to risk skin discomfort and to break with all decorum in a loud, and to Lloyd’s ears, exceedingly boorish way. Lloyd could not tell how much his mother resisted at first, but in the end she succumbed and seemed almost to enjoy it. Perhaps her need was too great to ignore as well.

Lloyd was smart enough to know that, in the matter of sex at least, there was much that he yet had to learn. Still, it sickened him to hear them, for in one guttural exclamation from the other side of a pile of mice-warm hay he realized that this was how he had come to be. At least in part. Maybe the circumstances had been different-the place, the mood, the smells and tastes-but at the heart it was this same bestial dance-brawl. “There should be a better way to be born,” Lloyd said to himself, even as his own desire was shamefully aroused at the sounds of his parents. Then he clutched himself to fulfillment.

He pulled up his pants and dragged from his pocket the two glass eyes. The more he examined them, the more they seemed to examine him. Disconcerted and afraid, he thrust them back into the depths of the bag, far down into the wads of soiled clothes where he had hidden the box adorned by the Ambassadors from Mars and his uncle’s letter. Then he stowed the bag well under the hay.

None of the Sitturds had anything to say while they breakfasted on stale rolls and can-brewed coffee. Chastened by postcoital remorse, Hephaestus and Rapture did not press Lloyd for any information on how he had slept and gave no indication they knew that he had disappeared in the night.

Meanwhile Lloyd’s brain, once free of his own sexual obsession, began whirring with worries and considerations about the Spirosians and the Vardogers. Could the things that Mother Tongue had told him be true? A war in time between two great secret societies-the real powers behind all other secret societies-the hidden orchestrators of history now brought into lethal conflict over the issues of slavery and expansion, the destiny of America?

He had seen the lights; he could not get around that. Some unthinkable harnessing of electrical energy. And the library beneath the burial ground, the riverboat festooned with moss-he had seen these things with his own eyes. Still, he could not believe that he had been told the truth. Something in a secret place inside him rebelled at the choice he had been given, and the feel of the stuffed dog on the couch returned to make his skin crawl. He was certain that he had heard it breathe.

He bolted from the stable still swallowing a lump of bread, wondering if once he had gone his parents might continue their passionate battle, or if his mother would go off to her laundry and nursing duties while his father returned to his aimless disintegration. It appeared to him that as his capabilities increased theirs diminished, so that even his mother had become his child now. His work was how the family fed itself. And if the family was somehow feeding upon itself, he felt that it was not his fault. St. Louis was the poison. The dance-hall lights. The necessity of money. All the hopeless and hope-mad people wandering through. The one solution he could see lay in getting back on the road to Texas, back to their dream. Then his father might wake and his mother would remember her old, quick joy. He ran to meet Mulrooney, who was camped on a dry-grass common to the west.

The Ambassadors and the Ladies Mulrooney were all sick from rancid milk. The tent stank of their sufferings and hummed with flies. Regrettably, a competition between the two largest of the flying clubs that had formed was scheduled for noon along the riverbank. Given the gastrointestinal crisis that had seized Mulrooney, the showman did not feel fit or able to attend, so Lloyd was left to gather all the soaring toys he could carry on the back of one of the wagon’s horses and make his way there all by himself. The obligation of rewarding the faithful and the opportunity to make some much needed sales was too important. But it did nothing to allay his fears. He had never faced the wall of faces on his own before. Never all alone. He realized that Mother Tongue had been right in a way: he was Mulrooney’s monkey. He had always had the showman to lean on, to back him up. Now it would just be him, a little boy from a small town-a boy with a big brain and bigger dreams, from a small-minded town, now confronted by what seemed a huge city and the inherent hostility of strangers.

The sky was achingly clear, and a gathering had already formed by the time he reached the bank where the competition was to be held. At his arrival, a cheer went up and people rushed toward him. They all wanted to greet the “little genius”-the boy who made the paper birds and gliding gadgets,a hundred or so of which now lay on the grass in the summer sun.

The onslaught of adulation puffed up Lloyd’s spirits (and ego). Maybe St. Louis wasn’t such an evil place after all. Perhaps fame and fortune could yet be his. That would save his family. Surely. Yes, there were cruelties and injustices. Vigilance committees, bushwhackings, and intimidation. Freed blacks could be falsely arrested and sold back into slavery, and some of the antislave voices were nonetheless anti-Negro, advocating the establishment of a whites-only territory. But right in front of him were people lined up to see him and shake his hand-many, if not most of them, good people (a few of them the same good people who had looked on as Francis McIntosh fried).

With newfound confidence Lloyd scanned the throng, trying to pinpoint some presence that was hostile-one of the Claws & Candle spies that Mother Tongue had warned him about. Was it the man with thinning hair who was still wearing his leather blacksmith’s apron, the same kind his father used to wear back in Ohio when he was working-when he did work? What about the striped-vest barber or any of a number of mulatto traders, Spanish boatmen, or French fortune hunters? Perhaps one of the high-toned ladies hiding behind their fans. He tore the crowd apart face by face. But they were all watching him, and none of them appeared hostile. Yet they all could become so, he knew. He had already learned how fast the tastes of the horde could change-how insatiable they were for novelty, for innovation, and for failure. Whether or not the Spirosians and the Vardogers were real, he understood that the cries of ovation he received were but catcalls in reverse. The words of Mother Tongue came back to him: “No one goes far who travels alone.”

Alone now with his cargo of toys for sale, he felt the painful wisdom of her words. Then he glanced back up at the soothing blue emptiness overhead. That was something important that she had overlooked. There were places one could only go alone. That was the difference between the assembled mass on the riverbank and himself, Lloyd realized. The same problem as in Zanesville. What no one else could grasp, or what they could but dream about, he could do. It put his relationship with his family at risk. It put his life at risk, yet what would he be if he did not reach out? How could he lift them up-how could he save his father from himself-if he did not reach further, higher? Fear of the crowd? Yes, but what of the fear of the future?

In that fleeting instant before he was forced, all by himself, to welcome the masses and to officiate at the start of the competition-to hawk his wares like a common street vendor, to represent the interests of not one but two misfit families-he saw the sky opening before him like a welcome beyond anything that Mother Tongue and Schelling could offer. It was his destiny to ascend still higher. He would rise up into the sun above the river and all that it represented. Above the flatboats and the barge lines. Above the steeples and the columns, the plush townhouses and the claptrap cottages. He would soar above every dock walloper and carriage hack-so high that every merchant and magnate would see him, not just these few folk scattered here. There might yet come a time to travel in time, as his broken father had dreamed of. But for now, what people would pay to see was a kind of travel they could understand. Memories of Zanesville and the beaver came back to him. The trick-and perhaps it was a trick that the Vardogers, if they were real, had mastered-was how to scare people in the right way. Bewonderment. For what is fear but the other side of the nickel of surprise?

The competition was a tremendous success. The club that called itself Wings Over Walnut Street managed a narrow (but very popular) victory over The St. Louis Dispatch-sponsored Harriers. Young Lloyd was interviewed for the first time. The questions came fast and furious about where he got his ideas and where he lived and went to school-answers that he fudged as best he could. He was able to sell almost all the soarers he had brought, and he was repeatedly asked what new treats of whimsy he had in store. When the crowd broke up and people resumed their humdrum lives again, he was riding on air. From the tawdry trickery of a medicine show he had created a genuine phenomenon. Then and there, he made a decision about the patronage of Mother Tongue.

After returning the horse and giving a cursory report to Mulrooney (who had been reduced to squatting upon a makeshift thunderbox in abdominal agony), Lloyd kept his appointment at the bookshop, sleepy though he was. Schelling 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. Schelling 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 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 buttons. 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 snatching 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 glassblower’s lane and then back around to the glue renderer’s over a tomcat fence. He did not spot the man in the buttonless 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 Sitturds decamped from the stable and took refuge in a boiled linseed oil-smelling 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 buttonless coat worked for Mother Tongue and Schelling, 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 Schelling’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 of their commercial relationship 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 buttoning his pants all the way. Lloyd said goodbye without further comment or any questions about the condition of the wives or the Ambassadors. 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 Sitturds 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 muffins, he was served sinewy gruel and biscuits as hard as musketballs-then told to wash the dishes. Lloyd would spare him no pocket money from his accumulating 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 fishing 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 passed for breakfast (which often did not pass 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 brass 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 breasts 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 assumed 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 circumstances. 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 Schelling’s shop The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, with his drawings of the famous ornithopter, 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 Pocock’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 Sitturd, 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 assembly 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 superstition,” he said.

“Eb’nso. Fell down a chimbly. Buckruh seen it, too.”

“But that doesn’t 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.”

“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 cumplain. 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 passing 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 Schelling, 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 (assuming 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 reassessing-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 buttocks 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 assassin (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 shirts. 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 passed 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 assistance. 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 SNOWDEN 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 assets 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 Hampshire 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 canals 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 Schelling.

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 and the epic 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, fishing 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 succumbed 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 shining 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. Altitude, 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 altitude 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 Ambassadors’ 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 shifting 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 assumed had been too vigorous in punishing the boy for missing the sorry excuse for “class” 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 knob 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-piss ale, stripped his britches down.

The pain was excruciating, but even worse was the bestial grunting of his assailant, 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 space 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 stitched 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 whorehouse 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, fashioning 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 fishing 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 stitch and crease of the parafoil, so that whenever he did fall into a doze he felt himself airborne. Airborn.

The giant kite assembly was finished and stress-tested by the boy in the abandoned warehouse. Lloyd hadn’t seen Schelling 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 “nigger 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 rehearse 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 scrap 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 repetition 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 assumed 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 assurances 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 protégé 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 assembly, and the parawing glider. If the storm did not pass, 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 Schelling 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.

Dumbstruck, the professor staggered out and hunkered down on a log in the slowing rain. The clothes his wives had made for them were still there. He could not imagine what had happened. The coincidence of Lloyd’s earlier visit crossed his mind but could take no clear form that would explain his wards’ abrupt removal. Soaked to the bone and sobering fast, he kept thinking of the whirlwind from which they had supposedly emerged.

What if something in the storm had returned for them? It was improbable. But so were they. He had always been so assiduous in keeping them hidden from prying eyes-never an easy task. Perhaps they had not been captured like runaway slaves by blood-money ruffians. Perhaps they were not wet, lost, and afraid, having been stolen away-or having, in their foolishness, fled to some mooncalf idea of freedom-but home and safe, retrieved by the weather-stricken night and taken back to the secret place of the thunder? It was not much to hold on to, but Mulrooney tried. The rain dripped from the branches around him like tears.

CHAPTER 4. The Price of Surprise

THE MORNING DAWNED CLEANER AND CRISPER THAN ANY IN months. (For Mulrooney, the feeling was foreboding and recalled the day that the unfortunate Vladimir had gone missing.)

There was a rustling of ledger pages and the tapping of morning cigar ash at the City Hotel-and more than a few wagers laid over breakfast at Planter’s House, which consisted of arrowroot biscuits, coddled eggs, fresh trotters, and a serving of wild pigeon-the aromas of black tea or chicory-laced coffee cutting through the stale fumes of pipe smoke and brandy that had followed the coq au vin and bordeaux the night before.

It was the morning of a major sale. The auction house of Bladon, McCafferty & Co. of Chestnut Street was putting up on the block one hundred of the sturdiest Negro field hands valued generally at a whisker over a thousand dollars each-seventy-five older adult males, forty-eight females, and a litter of children that one squire from Kentucky likened to “French-prattling young crows.”

The event, as usual, was to take place on the steps of the proud domed courthouse on Fourth Street at noon. Typically, the public did not take much overt notice of these occasions, there being studious attention from those informed professionals either bidding or methodically recording the prices submitted by their peers. These seasoned agriculturalists and their entourages had serious business in mind and had come more than a few miles to do it. So the amateurs kept to the fringe.

Slave auctions represented significant investments in new capital equipment-gambles taken on increased productivity. An air of sober deliberation and dispassionate judgment was the rule, and for the most part an auction was no more undignified and violent than a sale of horses or cattle and easier on the nose, since the prize specimens had often been treated to a bath and an improved diet to inspire higher prices. “Beef for muscle, fresh fruit for the teeth and breath, and cod liver oil to put a shine on their hides” was the recommended short-term practice advocated by the trading houses.

No, the systematic brutality of these events was more in the mind, the soul, and heart than in the flesh. But since Negroes were not credited with having minds or souls, any explicit cruelty was considered an unfortunate by-product of what needed doing. Mating a stallion or wringing a chicken’s neck-life was filled with raw necessities, and people were much less squeamish then.

Naturally there were whips and guns on hand, but they were primarily ceremonial and symbolic. And of course the goods to be traded appeared in shackles (the young bucks, at any rate), but that was just common sense and economic prudence: the traders were not immune to the high spirits that some slaves felt at the thought of being separated from their wives and children. Better to secure the chains than to have to raise the whip or, worse still, fire the gun. In fact, there were few fatalities at the auctions-a testament to the efficiency that had been achieved through decades of practice.

And not all the slaves stood defiantly flaring their nostrils and rattling their manacles, dreaming of escape, either. Many of them welcomed the change that new ownership would bring. For some it was a chance to find a new life and the faint hope of security, or to be nearer a loved one who had earlier been prised away and sold downriver. For an attractive female who had been forced to service in unspeakable ways a Missouri master, a plantation owner in the Delta, who was less Christian but perhaps more decent, held some distinct appeal.

The upshot was, every auction was a crossroads. Money, emotions, human dignity, and the very destiny of America were all at stake. So it was no surprise that very often a fringe of loitering onlookers would form into an attempted crowd at a distance that allowed them the benefits of aspect without appearing too suspect.

The gathering that tried to take shape on the day in question was unusually large, and all the more faceless and amorphous for its size and prurient interest. Recalling the catastrophe years later in his privately printed memoir, Brookmire would speculate that it was the very size of the assembled host that so diffused the memory of what transpired (a suggestive observation, given the days of instantaneous mass communication that have followed). Perhaps the more witnesses, the less reliable their testimony-until by extension it becomes possible to deny that there was anything to witness at all. This phenomenon may go a long way toward accounting for why such abrupt and incoherent reportage was provided by the local media. Of the major regional newspapers, including The Bulletin, The Boatman, The Advocate, the Catholic weekly Shepherd of the Valley, and The Missouri Republican, only The Star contained any more than a passing reference to what resulted, and it was the sole mouthpiece to attempt a description, let alone an explanation, of the cause.

Here another overlooked law of human nature and mass perception may have come into play. The more unexpected and unprecedented an occurrence, the more likely it is to slip into the realm of legend, which may be interpreted as a communal way of forgetting what actually happened.

Both of these factors were at work in St. Louis. And, as Lloyd would come to see, other hidden influences were at work as well. Had he not been advised that a war was being waged by secret alliances masked in the shadows of history and camouflaged in the chaos of the hour? Had not Schelling warned him that the capabilities involved were formidable in their reach?

If events could be orchestrated, could not their perception be manipulated, perhaps even eradicated? Personal reports and newspaper accounts of the lynching and burning of Francis McIntosh had diverged wildly and more than a few residents had clean forgotten their involvement, so in the end it was not surprising that those citizens of St. Louis who were watching on the day could not agree and many did not want to admit what they saw sailing toward the city-not on the river but in the sky. Though it came out of the heavens, it looked as if it came from hell. Or perhaps Chicago, Mulrooney thought as he watched from the crowd in astonishment, his good heart pounding and perspiration beading under his leghorn hat.

As Lloyd had predicted, if it had been just a balloon that drifted over the city people would have known how to respond. But it was ever so much more than a balloon that detached and exploded like a slow-falling star over the esplanade. What emerged was nothing like anything anyone had ever seen before. Imagine a swirled cage made of fishing net, bone-dry cane and broom straw, twined wig hair, umbrella spokes and wax, rippling with a patchwork of bandages and bed linen-with a puff of silken sail atop. The rising power of the balloon had lifted the surreal structure into the freshening breeze, where it was then driven forward by all the boiler-bursting speed that Lucky Cahill spurred his smoking steam barge to provide since lugging it out of its secluded mooring on the Illinois side.

Young Lloyd had named his creation the Miss Viola. Atop the domed roof of the courthouse, Hansel Snowden Brookmire squinted through a spyglass when he spotted it. Fragments of American flag crackled in the wind, mirrors glinted, feathers rained like snow-and a voice called out of the blue, “All Hail the Ambassadors from Mars!”

The voice was Lloyd’s, projected through a huge knitting mill cone used for winding yarn, but there were other voices that might have been heard-namely, the hysterical cluckings of Urim and Thummim. Lloyd’s initial plan had been to dress Mulrooney’s charges in stovepipe hats and swallowtail coats, as befitting their introduction to St. Louis society and the earth at large. But he had been unable to acquire togs in their size and so had been forced to improvise again, arriving at a solution that he felt was economical and more appropriate given their supposed otherworldly origin (not to mention the wind!). The brothers were now dressed in toga-like gowns made of ladies’ undergarments and equipped with tiny gold wands the boy had foraged out of a rubbish bin. Trembling hundreds of feet in the air inside a bird-delicate cell of spiral-arranged bladders stitched with bass line, linen, and scavenged wharfery-and now, hovering free of the barge with no balloon to support them-the twins were literally at the end of their tether.

It was pure adrenaline that kept Lloyd from taking more notice of their consternation-that and the sheer novelty of the view. The sight of the people and the horse carriages, the packing crates and the ship pipes, pony carts and rooftops! He could not believe that he was seeing it all just as he had imagined. He had done what he set out to do-to rise above the hordes and sweep all attention skyward! For a moment, it seemed to him that he owned the town. And the river. Everything he could see.

When he did acknowledge the Martians’ expostulations, he was upset to find that he was becoming less effective in calming them. When he had appeared in the dark of the storm the night before to lead them away from Mulrooney’s camp, they had showed an instinctive sense of trust that encouraged him. Up to the precise moment of their departure in the soaking confusion (he disliked the thought of its being kidnapping), he had harbored a concern that his plan violated the trust of his old business associate. That it also put at grave risk the lives of the two teratological brothers was just now beginning to dawn upon the boy, for in his mania he had discounted all risk to himself as well.

Once aloft, any fear had left him, and with it all reasonable consideration of malfunction. Ironically, the very moment when his father was more absent from his thoughts than at any time in his short life, Lloyd was more in harmony with Hephaestus’s blindered faith in the magic of invention than ever before. Airborne above 1845 St. Louis on the day of a major slave auction, he was not only his father’s son; he felt the uncanny sense of his sister’s spirit for the first time since leaving Ohio. He was going to rescue his mother from drudgery and humiliation. He was going to lead them all forth to meat, wine, and fresh linen.

This invigorating delusion did not last very long. Urim and Thummim became more agitated as the craft wisped over the humming port like a crazed eclipse heading toward the city buildings and the scene in progress on the courthouse steps. Lloyd rode in a harness that he had fashioned from pilfered horse tack attached to the great plume of flag-and-underwear canopy that fanned out above and behind the miraculous kite cage. His intention was to pass over the courthouse dome and heave a fine fishnet rigging line down as an anchor that Brookmire would attach, and then to cut himself and the parafoil loose and ride the wind line down and around to make a spectacular landing amid the auction. Then he and Brookmire would wind down the weird-shaped giant box kite and introduce the brothers to the stunned populace. It would be the perfect theatrical occasion to launch their show-business career. As mortified as Mulrooney might feel at their disappearance (and did), he would be speechless with delight and gratitude when the crowd roared. And the fact that the entire performance would overshadow a slave auction was an inspired twist that Lloyd could not resist. The whole deranged caper sparkled in his mind.

Mulrooney would forgive him the fright he had caused and grasp the commercial opportunities the stunt would create. Although not everyone (fortunately enough!) would believe that Urim and Thummim came from the Red Planet, their singular appearance and bizarre mode of arrival would cause a sensation. Mulrooney’s future as a famous showman would be assured. Lloyd himself would be hailed as a god of invention and adventure. There would be no more broadcloth and boiled-leek broth. He would have a Villa of Wonders and roast duck, and every night a lascivious lady would come to him. His father would have a workshop again, and his mother a garden, roots, herbs, sweet-smelling leaves, and healing teas always brewing.

The possibility that even if the aeronautics went off without a hitch-which was hardly likely, given the many unknown and unforeseeable factors involved-the appearance out of the sky of such outlandish-looking individuals as Urim and Thummim, and the disruption of a significant slave auction, might instigate something more like a riot rather than endless rounds of applause did not occur to the boy with anything like the clarity it should have. He was blind to everything but his own ambition and his desperate craving for adulation-the sanctuary of money and freedom he hoped would descend upon him as soon as he descended into the thoroughfares of the city. This was his moment, his chance to reverse the fortunes of his family and establish a place for himself in the history of transport, science, and entertainment. The world.

Then a sudden rogue gust rose up as they crossed through the hotter air of the cityscape. The thermal blast destabilized the Miss Viola after its smooth drift over the cooler water. Lloyd’s parawing ripped free and swept him up to breaking point above the kite nest, the perforated panels bloated with air. Mulrooney’s stomach leaped up into his throat at what he saw next. Brookmire nearly fell from his perch.

The spiral kite cell caught the updraft and surged up to graze Lloyd’s swinging legs and then veered off back toward the Mississippi, the Ambassadors clicking and squealing like hysterical animals in a drowning cage. The tether that Lloyd held to the kite now threatened to drag him out of control and he was forced to let go, releasing the deformed brothers to the mercy of the sky. Meanwhile, he was rising higher than he had intended, the figures below seething like ants before a rainstorm. The power of the wind billowed out his homemade wings and filled his belly with the butterflies that a normal person would have felt long before. His whole being was alive, and terrified at the volatile elements now determining his fate. The kite was but a speck in the air. He felt the world slipping away. Then he remembered that he could steer. He had to steer-for his life. And yet even now-ruptured from the Miss Viola, with the Ambassadors from Mars doomed to some terrible crash in heavy timber-he felt the psychological as well as the physical force of the wind lifting him, calling him upward…

Years before Sir George Cayley’s hapless coachman was compelled to make his historic glider flight (which inspired him to defecate in his trousers and resign his post). Long before Lawrence Hargrave and Alexander Graham Bell experimented with their kites and Otto Lilienthal broke his neck. Before Samuel Pierpont Langley catapulted his Aerodromes-and before the bicycle-repairing Wright brothers from another small town in Ohio took their fifty-nine-second flight into history over the dunes of Kitty Hawk-Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd was flying, fulfilling the dreams of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Chinese, Indians, Norse, and Greeks. Not falling. He was riding the wind in a winged vehicle that, while neither heavier than air nor machine-powered, possessed a capacity for maneuverability that would not be achieved by others for another fifty years.

But herein lay the great shortcoming of his undertaking. Wilbur Wright’s critical insight was that the secret of controlled flight lay as much in the skills of the pilot as in the capabilities of the craft. It was not enough for the machine to have the ability to maneuver; it was essential for the pilot to have the experience to utilize this potential. Without control, the solutions of lift and propulsion were meaningless. Despite the feverish pace at which he had been working, Lloyd had not had time to align his personal skill with the potential of his creation. Faced now, at approximately three hundred feet, with the combined circumstances of the failure of one half of his enterprise (the loss of the Miss Viola and its cargo of the Ambassadors) and the success of his own means of aviation he was forced to apply all that he had learned about the wind with perilous immediacy.

He pulled the left steering toggle and swung left, sailing faster down and forward, whistling over the steeples and the carriage-colliding laneways to the horror and amazement of Mulrooney, Hansel Snowden Brookmire, and the people of St. Louis. Flaring slowed his driving speed and restored lift, while his body trembled in the risers. The thought of the helpless brothers breaking every bone in their bodies stabbed him with remorse and doubt. He whooshed around a smokestacked section of town, heading back toward the courthouse, but in banking the toggle tore and a puff of air stalled the edge of the parafoil.

Where the wing had been filled like a lung, it now gasped and he jostled in the rigging. The sunlight burned into his retinas. He heard a cry come up from the streets beneath him and the whinnying of crazed horses. The turbulence batted at him like a spinning leaf-his nerves were frayed like the ribbons he clung to.

He tried to readjust, flying at half brakes, one toggle up, one down. But in swerving around to make the courthouse and the confusion of Fourth Street, where he was to have made his epochal landing, he overcompensated and then had to brake full-which battered the wing chute more. One of the main leads streaming down to the risers broke-the toggle did not respond. He felt the heat waves rising up from the bricks below-the smell of horse manure and the din of human panic.

Ground rush hit him-the mess of scattering street traffic engulfing his field of vision, all the glory gone, leaving stomach-churning, muscle-bracing expectations of obliteration upon impact! He yanked the toggles, beginning to plummet, regaining control too late, and swooping down like a raptor to strike a fleeing rodent in a field of dry corn.

While this private drama had been playing out in the air, a rather more public debacle had been unraveling below. Representatives of Bladon, McCafferty & Co. had led their assembled offering clanking and shuffling like a parade of the damned from the auction house’s pen on Chestnut Street to the courthouse steps, where a pompous man in a frilled shirt and a broad-brimmed hat read out the particulars of the sale and clarified the terms of purchase in stentorian tones. The planter aristocracy was well represented, decked out in top hats and European-tailored finery. Some had come from as far away as the black-loam bottomlands of Mississippi and Alabama, or the sugar kingdoms of Louisiana. The merchandise stood glistening and grim in the brassy sun. Errant schoolboys gapped and stretched. Idlers spat tobacco juice; skinny dogs panted under drays. Hoop-skirted women with complexions like clotted cream dabbed their throats with eau de cologne as barrel-chested saloonkeepers emerged blinking in the glare, hooking their thumbs into their braces.

Down on Fourth Street, a hatchet-faced plantation foreman watched from the saddle of a bay gelding while his tight-lipped overseer stood gripping a musket on top of the courthouse stairs. Another man in a baggy black suit, with a head as bald as a fire bell under a black silk hat, leaned over a weathered pinewood podium that had been wrestled out of a wagon, while two hulking guardsmen strolled the lines of slaves-some slumped with weariness and despair, others standing erect, both male and female, radiating the strength they had earned by long work in bright light and all weather.

The two hard-bitten white minders had hairy arms as thick as the limbs of hod carriers and skin not much lighter than the individuals up for sale. Their square-toed boots were flecked with the pale green-gold of dried dung, and faded red or threadbare white bandannas poked up under their chins as if to hide some growth. Everything as usual.

Until the Miss Viola appeared.

The outré vessel came across the river and the sky like some narcotic vision of the future. The sausage casing-like balloon, which had provided the initial elevation, detached and expired in what from ground level Lloyd would have considered a disappointing poof relative to the incendiary excitement he had intended. (The problem was that he could not use any true ordnance for fear of incinerating the Ambassadors and himself.) But to those who were unprepared it was fireworks enough. The river-slapping force of the barge, stoked to boiler-blowing overload, hauled the beautiful abomination forward, where it was set free in a dense shower of glitter, sparks, and feathers.

It was right about then that Mule Christian glanced up from his row of chained fellow slaves and came to the conclusion that this was the sign from God that he had been waiting for. There was no other way to interpret it. This was a message from the Almighty. And he knew in his heart just what the message was.

Mule was what white plantation owners of the day would have described as a “big field nigger”-and big he was, in every way. Worth fourteen hundred dollars in St. Louis. More in Memphis or New Orleans. Six feet five inches tall and as muscled as a well-bred fighting dog. He had the mind of a child but a clear head, except when it came to his religious visions. Somewhere in the past his people had come from the Bight of Benin, that gouge in Africa that extends from Cape Verde to the Congo River. They had given him a name that sounded like Mulu, but all that was a cloudy memory. Mule he became to everyone he met in the cruel New World. An earlier owner had been known as Christianson, but it was thought that his American surname owed more to the fervent faith he had adopted. In any case, Mule Christian knew what he must do. The moment he gazed up at the terrible blue sky, he knew.

“Heee comin’!” the giant boomed in his work-gang baritone. “Heee comin’ to sabe us all! Lord beee praised-heee comin’!”

This remark, uttered as loudly as it was, at the precise moment that it was, by someone not expected to speak at all-and by someone of Mule’s impressive physical stature-had a profound effect. The tall-hatted white dandies in polished boots moved toward their carriages. Several of the auction items sought to plunge to the ground in fear and supplication, which, chained as they were, caused havoc among the rows. Others, in a state of understandable panic, tried to bolt. They had no clear thought of trying to escape. They had no clear thought at all-and, pulling in different directions, manacled together, they created a gibbering tangle of prostrate and floundering black flesh.

For the whites in official control, this was problem enough to loose a tide of anxieties that translated into physical force-which served only to intensify the confusion and the fear. There were also their own concerns to deal with. What had emerged out of the blue was odd enough to make even the most tough-minded of them drop their jaws and entertain the flickering conclusion that Mule Christian may well have hit the nail on the head (which had been a part of Lloyd’s intention from the start).

The uncertainty flashed like flint in a caved-in mine and triggered a series of incidents of localized violence that turned into streetwide turmoil. Whips cracked, horses bucked, a carriage turned over, at least one firearm was discharged-to no effect, except to heighten the hubbub. And Mule Christian managed to break free. How he did it no one in the confusion saw, but while the overseers were busy trying to regain order and the loiterers were scattering like mice-the drunks and larrikins rolling over themselves in stupefaction-Mule Christian broke free of his chains and stood tall on the steps of the courthouse staring at the sky, waiting for the salvation that he knew was coming.

Brookmire had had all his attention riveted at the end of his spyglass, staring at first with pride, then shock, and then abject devastation. Something in the course of events in the sky convinced him that things had not only gone very wrong, they were about to get much worse, and a finely tuned instinct for self-preservation sent him scurrying down from the courthouse.

There were too many other things to take interest in: ululating slaves, shouting foremen, barking dogs, wagon smashups, and the risk of being trampled-and above all else, above them all and closing fast, a magical marionette of an angry bird boy descending to wreak vengeance or enact some revelation.

The truth, however, is that if Brookmire had managed to maintain his poise and position he might have become aware that he was being scrutinized himself-from two different rooftops and two very different points of view. He would have observed that when the commotion began other men who had not been seen before appeared below and began taking charge. It was one of these men, moving with practiced skill, who hustled Mulrooney into an alley, where he woke up hours later lying in a masonry wheelbarrow with a taste in his mouth like copper wire.

By the time Lloyd overshot the courthouse and made his attempt to bring himself around to land, there were not that many people left on Fourth Street to see it. A subtle but relentless force had been unleashed to quash the slave upheaval and coerce the potential witnesses from the scene. Only Mule Christian seemed immune to these efforts. Whip leather slashed across his shoulders, but this just served to encourage him into the middle of the street, where he braced, with outstretched arms, forming a tiny post-noon shadow in the thoroughfare, as Lloyd whisked down and toward him.

Lloyd tried to swerve, which spoiled the stalling power he tried to call on-his vision blurred, his reflexes jangled. He had a faint greenish flash of his sister’s face-she who had never had a living face. A rush of doom and shame whooshed through him, and his wind-filled wings ripped away as he tumbled headlong into the dark man who stood before him with open arms.

Even if Brookmire had still been at his station and watching then, he would have found it impossible to say for sure what happened next. For a few seconds, an ancient cart nag stood draped with the remnants of Lloyd’s parawing. Cudgels thudded. A broad-brimmed hat lay mashed in the street. And toppled at the foot of the stairs was the auction podium, a ledger book trodden on the ground beside it. But no one saw what happened to the boy or his flying harness. Mule Christian, the most expensive field nigger on sale, had seen a miracle coming for him out of the sky, and he had stepped forth to embrace it.

CHAPTER 5. Fleeing from Grace

PERHAPS IT WAS A KIND OF BLESSING THAT MULE FOUND. HE WAS certainly released from bondage. There was no pain. His neck snapped on impact. In giving his life, he cushioned Lloyd’s fall and the little giant from Zanesville rose out of the wreckage of the giant black man in the hot Missouri sun, like some part of Mule Christian that had lain hidden all the hard years of his life.

Lloyd managed to gain his feet for a moment and then crashed for true. The brick façades, the courthouse dome, Mulrooney, Brookmire, thoughts of his mother, his father, and his ghost sister-all swirled into a spiral that seemed to take him with it, and he remembered nothing more at all until the agitated face of Schelling yawned down into his like a pit that had learned the art of looking back.

Smelling salts were applied, hands groped and tugged at him, voices were raised and then stifled into whispers, stars-or things like stars-seemed to whiz past his head. He glimpsed his mother-or glimpsed her smell-his senses muddled. Then there was cold water and warm candlelight. He remembered one man with a face like a snapping turtle and a tall, thin white man cradling him into a passageway of dirt behind two shuttered buildings… the aroma of pumpernickel bread.

Every so often he regained enough coherence to imagine that he was still flying, higher and higher up to heaven to meet his dead sister, who waited in the dandelions at God’s feet, flying a kite with his face painted on it. Then the face on the kite would change. It would be his father, bright and ebullient as he once was ages ago back in Ohio. Then the image would change again, into the mangled bodies of Urim and Thummim. Someone stuck a rag down his throat to keep him from biting his tongue. Fragments of memory haunted him: the sight of Mulrooney’s hat in the crowd… skiffs along the esplanade… the mirror burn of Brookmire’s spyglass.

It was nightfall by the time Lloyd regained full consciousness. He was out on the water, in a larger version of the kind of boat that Schelling had used to take him to meet Mother Tongue. A tallow candle beamed out of a battered lantern hanging on the side of the pilothouse. His mother was there, looking perplexed and horrified, chattering and sobbing over him in her gumbo accent, any fussy white pretense stripped away. To his profound shock and relief, his sack of personal things lay beside him on the deck, tied up tight just the way he had left it stuffed inside his excuse for a shuck pillow back at the mission house. He longed to claw it open to see if Mother Tongue’s eyes and the Ambassadors’ box, and the precious letter from his uncle, were safe in hiding. Everything came back.

His body ached, from his skull to the legs that had slammed into Mule Christian. The slightest movement brought back sickening waves of falling. Along with Schelling, there were two large black men, but not the same men he had met before. His stomach felt like a mess of cogwheels and syrup. He wanted to throw up, but nothing came out of his gullet. The dark, thick air was hot and still, and smelled of wood smoke and river muck.

The joyous power of the wind came back to fill his smarting bones. He saw the city laid out beneath him… the ineffable experience of flight… then the shadows rose up to snatch him-the accusing face of the showman-and at last he did vomit, over the side of the boat, his bile mingling with the Mississippi as the launch chugged upriver.

Silently, his mother sidled over and put her arm around his shoulder. He realized that he was wearing some other boy’s clothes. Whose? And what had become of Brookmire? Rapture crooned sad nonsense words in his ear, as she had done when he was wee. Why did everything go so wrong for them? Was he cursed? Would there ever be a home full of peace and belonging? Schelling scowled at him. The boat churned on.

They were headed north to the junction of the Missouri River, hugging the shore. In about two hours, they had melded into this other flow and arrived at their apparent destination, a clutter of what in the dark looked like drying sheds and some sort of chandler’s warehouse at the end of a sagging pier. The boat docked and up on the bank a hound moaned. A hard-looking white woman in a plain black frock appeared, carrying a bear rifle. With her was what Lloyd first thought was a boy, perhaps the boy whose clothes he was wearing. The lad hoisted at arm’s length the kind of lamp Lloyd had seen dangling on the bows of the fishing boats, but when the couple got closer Lloyd saw that he was in fact a midget-with a tight dried-apple face that rose up out of dirty flannel like the head of someone who had drowned. The pair spoke not a word.

“Where are you taking us?” Lloyd asked Schelling.

The humpback cast a glance at him, like a chunk of gristle to a mutt.

“You will stay here the rest of the night, then be on your way tomorrow.”

“Where?” the boy queried. He tried to reckon the number of days since he had last seen his old patron, but the midget’s face distracted him.

“Where you were heading before you created such trouble.”

Lloyd flinched at this remark but grabbed at his satchel and hugged it to his chest. Schelling gestured them off the boat and accompanied them down the rickety gangplank. The midget and the rifle woman led them up a cut-clay path through a tangle of unlit buildings. They passed a chicken coop, coming to a windowless chinkwall cabin. A drainage trench ran around the place like a moat they had to step over-and when they did, a towering but emaciated deerhound ambled out of the shadows, assuming horselike proportions up against the midget. One of the black men who had been with them on the boat was left outside on guard.

Inside, the floor was packed dirt and the only light came from the hearth, where a spunk of resiny pine was smoldering and popping. The cloistered air was oppressive with mosquitoes. Lloyd’s eyes shot around the room. A pewter jug and a stack of scratched tin plates stood on a turned-leg table with two milking stools beside it. Another chair was a rocker like the one he had sat in during his interview with Mother Tongue and, next to it, a pathetic-looking child-size wheelchair. In the corner rose a jailhouse bunk with a patchwork comforter laid over each bundle of ticking. A polished cherry-handled dueling pistol lay on the bottom bunk.

Schelling spoke to the woman and the midget in some language that sounded to Lloyd like German but was not. A cold leg of poached chicken, corn pone, and some black-eyed peas were served to him and Rapture, along with a lopsided bottle of birch beer to share. He felt as ravenous as the insects and as dry as the air. When he had finished gnawing his bone, Schelling ordered him toward the bunk. Carefully, the boy laid the dueling pistol on the hardened mud floor, which had been swept smooth by a stiff broom and strong arms.

Lloyd lay back on the ticking but kept his eyes on Schelling and his ears open, the mosquitoes whining around his head. The humped man whispered to Rapture for quite some time as the woman and the midget crouched in their respective chairs, staring hypnotically into the fireplace as if they were all by themselves. At last the bookseller reached into a pocket and produced a sheaf of paper money. The notes he pressed into Rapture’s hand. Lloyd caught a hint of the calcium-stained tooth, and then his old patron’s face marbled over into blankness once again.

Soon after, Schelling left without saying anything more to Lloyd. The beer had softened and slowed the boy’s thinking, and the whirring of the skeeters and the hissing of the sap in the lump of pine eased his alertness away from its moorings and out into the current of slumber. Only once did he stir-some upsetting dream about the midget watching him in his sleep-but fatigue and despair got the better of him again, and it was not until the light of a sullen morning spilled through the open doorway that he woke up properly.

His mother squatted on one of the milking stools, and beside her, hunched over the table, was what might have been a scarecrow that had been plucked out of the river and left to dry on a line. Schelling glowered at the boy.

“Here is your father,” he announced acidly. “Or what is left of him. Very soon now a steamer will put in. You are all going to be on it. Do you understand?”

“Where are we going?” Lloyd mumbled, rubbing away the crust of sleep.

“Far away, I hope,” Schelling said, shrugging. “And never to return. Don’t you remember you were going to Texas-before you took to trying to fly? Or did your brains get scrambled when you crushed that poor fellow?”

Rapture squirmed at this remark, but the huddled figure beside her did not respond. The woman and the midget were nowhere to be seen. Despite Lloyd’s native self-possession, he felt that he might cry. He climbed to his feet instead, too curious about the derelict plopped on the stool.

“Keep to your cabin as much as you are able,” the bookseller commanded. “Use the money I have given you and pay the bursar direct. Talk to as few people as you can, and tell no one your plans. You are a little boy, after all, Lloyd. A dangerous, selfish,foolish little boy. In spite of your genius, your stupidity is matched only by mine for watching over you and not taking action before you did. I thought I was protecting you. Already it seems the better question is who will protect the world from you. I leave you to your destiny, just as you leave me to clean up your mess.”

Rapture sat speechless, propping up the figure that Schelling had called his father-rousty with chiggers and alcoholic delirium (a condition that Mother Tongue’s lieutenant treated with an injection from a horse needle). The skeletonized tramp slumped with the shot as a riverboat whistle tooted in the distance.

“He will rest for a while now,” Schelling rasped, his hump twitching. “I recommend that you restrain him-and keep his head turned. Plenty of water and time can get him through this. Now go. And be gone.”

Moving toward the gray light, Lloyd could see a paddle steamer pulling into the ramshackle wharf, where a man in a buckboard loaded with sacks of flour waited. The air was greasy-warm and smelled like dead fish.

He tried to imagine where Mulrooney was at that moment, but he could not bring the showman into focus. What would Brookmire tell his father? And what of the Ambassadors?

The steamboat let out another whistle that reminded him of the screech owl in the slave cemetery the night that Schelling had taken him to meet Mother Tongue-a cry from out of the stillness, between the land of the living and the brilliant darkness of the dead.