Enigmatic Pilot (12 page)

“I take it they approve,” the professor said. “That’s how I’ll take it, anyway. You may keep the box, young Lloyd, as a souvenir to reward your sagacity and a memento of the amazements you have seen. Learn its secret if you can.”

The boy tucked the talismanic object into his shirt. Then he said goodbye to the professor and his unexpected family, not knowing how much trouble lay ahead for his own.

“What an unusual lad,” the professor said when Lloyd had departed. He was unable to recall what he had intended to lure the boy’s thoughts away from the tiger powder with when he invited him inside the tent.

The Ambassadors clicked and burbled.

L
LOYD WAS A LONG TIME TRACKING DOWN HIS FATHER AND
mother, because Hephaestus, when he discovered that he had lost the money, began combing the market, hoping against hope that it might just have fallen out of his pocket. Beside himself with anger about the loss, the reformed inventor limped out of the square and into a district of warehouses and then down a brickbat alley where he was waylaid by some toughs and might well have been beaten to a pulp had not one of them had a gimpy foot himself, and so called off the assault out of sympathy.

Meanwhile, Rapture found that haggling for bargains amid the produce merchants was exhausting work (and they sometimes found that talking to her was not so easy, either, even though she put on her whitest accent).

When Hephaestus and Lloyd were not at the agreed meeting point, she too went searching the adjacent streets and, following the commotion of a carriage accident, got lost for a time amid the dust heaps and sale yards, where it was lucky she did not get jumped. Or worse. While she could pass for white most of the time in Ohio, St. Louis was a more sensitive, volatile environment. She sensed that, but concerns about her menfolk made her bolder than she should have been.

So it was well after the professor had gathered a crowd and performed his magic show with the help of Mrs. Mulrooneys 1 and 2 (who were, of course, thought by the spectators to be the same woman) that the Sitturd family was finally reunited. And the mood was not pleasant when Hephaestus confessed what had happened to the money—or, rather, what he did not know had happened.

“How could you?” snapped Lloyd, thinking back to how hard he had to work and scheme to make it and, even worse, how honorably the rogue St. Ives had treated him, always dividing the money on equal terms. He was so put out and let down, in a way, he wished the gambler had been his father. However wounded he might have been, he was at least a man with backbone and cunning—and style—and knowledge of the world. Lloyd knew from having prowled the market himself just what had happened—and he knew that it would have been a very sorry sneak thief to have attempted such with St. Ives.

“I—I’m sorry,” Hephaestus whimpered. For the first time, Lloyd felt a cold and pure disdain for his father, which was made even worse, for it brought with it a premonitory fear of further dissolution and foolishness. I am too young to be made to lead this family, Lloyd thought. But what other choice is there if this is to happen?

They took shelter in the rodent-busy stable, with the smell of the glue boiler mingling with the smoky red grease lamps down in the street, and the collard greens and charred pigs’ feet rising up from the shacks and shantyboats.

It was a miserable night despite the butter beans and cinnamon that Rapture managed to serve, along with a slice of smoked fatback, a loaf of day-old flatiron bread, followed by a variation on apple pandowdy and quick mud coffee.

The mice were so insistent—and when they weren’t running wild across the rafters and the floor the rats in the walls and the birds in the roof sounded even louder—and Hephaestus was so disgusted with himself for losing Lloyd’s money that no one
much enjoyed their food. Rapture tried to console her husband by reminding him that Lloyd had found the wad of notes, which meant it had been lost by someone else and so was “bad luck ’n’ kemin home.” Lloyd kept his mouth shut at this, although a part of him longed to tell them both the truth. He wanted the praise he was due for his resourcefulness and knack. There was more Zanesville in his parents than he liked.

But the important fact was that they could no longer afford their stateroom on the
Spirit of Independence
. A new life with Micah seemed farther away than when they were in Ohio. They were stranded and disheartened, and just before they tried to go to sleep Hephaestus started blubbering. It was not an easily stomached sight, and filled Rapture with fear. Lloyd felt his disdain turning to shame. Suddenly, the family was outright foundering—and a long way from home.

“Listen, Hephaestus,” he said in a dark, calm voice, the first time he had ever called his father by his first name. “You have to pull yourself together. Tomorrow I will go out and bring some
more
money in. I don’t know how yet, but I will. But you can’t be a machine that breaks down now. You’re supposed to be the father in this family.”

There was an almost chilling sobriety to the boy’s words that shook both parents—perhaps because they each suspected that the money that had been lost had not been found. In any case, the next morning while the sun was still low, at the tender age of six, Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd went to seek employment with the one person he knew in the river city.

“A job?” Mulrooney sighed. “My boy, you overestimate the financial fertility of my little enterprise. I regret to disinform you of this misconception, but last night, despite significant audience attention, the like of which any entertainer in any city of substance would be pleased to inspire, I ate fish-head soup. This morning I dined on oatmeal and brine. Please accept my apology for having to deny your request.”

“Why don’t you exhibit the Ambassadors?” Lloyd asked.

“They are not yet ready,” came the answer.

“Then why don’t you let them go?”

“Where?” the showman countered, and Lloyd saw that beneath the apparent flabbiness of his character Mulrooney was a victim of his own soft heart.

“But I can do things!” Lloyd insisted. “Things that will stir the crowd.”

“Such as?” the showman queried.

“What about long division—in my head?” Lloyd demanded.

“
Long
division? All right.” The showman smiled sadly.

“What’s 648,065 divided by 17?”

The boy thought for a moment and then replied, “38,121.47.”

“That answer sounds as plausible as any,” Mulrooney admitted.

“It’s the right answer!” Lloyd cried. “You can check it!”

“Bravo. But this is a magic show. Bewonderment and mystification.”

“What about calculating the number of beans in a big jar?”

“My boy, the best place to hide a buffalo is in a buffalo herd, and the best way to figure the number of beans in a jar is to be the one who put them there. That’s what my business is all about. That’s why it’s vital to think there is only one woman and not twins. But these little tricks of the intellect lack the necessary appeal for public performance.”

“But I have to earn some money!” the boy cried.

The shrillness of this outburst unsettled Mulrooney. There were people trawling the riversides who would be very interested in a child his age. Despite his apparent self-sufficiency, if the boy became desperate enough he could fall prey to some very undesirable folk.

“All right,” Mulrooney consented, racking his brain. “Let me think. Does your family know about your intentions?”

“N-no,” Lloyd admitted. “Not yet.”

“And I assume they would not approve if they did. So we know where we stand. All right, then. What about this? I believe
we could fabricate … a mentalist attraction. In a word, mind reading. Hmm? We will ask questions of the audience and have you secured in such a way as not to hear. Then I shall ask you questions and you will tell everyone what it was the person said.”

“How will I know that?” Lloyd inquired.

“Because of the order of the questions that I ask you and certain key words I will use. We will have a code. With your quick head, we will fool and enlighten many. The rest will be amused. Then you can do some calculating feats and we can sell some special mind-strengthening tonic, for sharper wits and clearer thoughts.”

“Do you have some of that?” the boy asked.

“My little friend, I have but three tonics to sell, and they all have the main ingredient in common. The secret to tonic is not how it’s made but how it’s sold and therefore what it’s called. I will pay you one-third the price of every bottle of tonic we sell. I’m afraid I can do no better than that.”

“Thank you!” Lloyd smiled, imagining, in his naïve enthusiasm, the residents of St. Louis lining up for miles.

“Come back this afternoon and I will have written some patter for you to memorize and we will rehearse the code. But be warned, young Lloyd, show business is a difficult business. So keep your mind clear and your wits about you, or we may both find ourselves in a situation that no tonic can cure.”

Lloyd ran back to the stables and the showman slipped into the tent, where his wives were debating in their personal sign language and the Ambassadors from Mars were clicking wildly. “Well,” Mulrooney told himself. “At least the boy will be safer with me than roaming the streets.”

Lloyd returned that afternoon as ordered. In but an hour he mastered the speech the showman had composed and a host of variations, all the intricacies of the mind-reading code, and some simple ways of integrating his calculating and spelling abilities—along with various musical improvisations on the
mouth organ, squeezebox, and an old dimpled bugle that the showman had kept from his own boyhood. Lloyd had not had much direct exposure to music; he had been too busy with his inventions. But he quickly, intuitively grasped the system of music, and if his instrumental technique was raw that actually worked in his favor as far as performance theatrics went—or so Mulrooney thought. On the squeezebox, he became an imp of melody with astounding rapidity. “Damn me if that boy couldn’t be a musical genius if he turned his mind to it,” Mulrooney told his wives.

Then Lloyd had to decant a large cask of transparent liquid that gave off fumes that brought tears to his eyes into a series of little bottles with corks in the end. The magical-memory and mind-strengthening tonic was 140-proof alcohol laced with juniper and spearmint and could not have been more effective at clouding memory, although Mulrooney dubbed it LUCID! (He was particular about the exclamation mark.)

While working to fill the bottles, Lloyd listened to Urim and Thummim, and the more certain he became that, as freakish as they were, there was something about their language that was beautiful and subtle.

The showman retained his reservations about putting the boy “up on the stump,” and if Mabel Peanut, Lloyd’s sometime teacher back in Zanesville, could have seen him in St. Louis, performing on the medicine-show wagon, she would have felt confirmed in all her predictions about the family’s errant ways. But for Lloyd the experience of being
THE MIRACLE MIND READER & MYSTIFYING CHILD OF VISION
was as invigorating as a whiff of ozone or the taste of sarsaparilla—a brazen vindication of his special abilities, all the things, or at least some of them, that he had had to cloak or to be ashamed of back home. It chuffed his pride to be able to help his family, when he felt that, for all his singular gifts, he had caused them distress in the past.

Yet it also piqued his native rebelliousness and his no longer
secret contempt for his parents, try to hide it deep down in his heart though he did. The stinking hobnailed boot was on the other foot now. They were of necessity grateful for his earnings, and gratitude is a double-minded emotion that can snake in many directions.

The
Spirit of Independence
may have departed without the Sitturds, and Texas may have slipped farther out of their grasp, but the youngest family member at least began traveling all around—from Spanish Lake and the Missouri Bottoms to the other side of the river on the smoking ferries, wherever Mulrooney thought they could draw a crowd.

From the self-named Professor of Teratology, Lloyd learned a plethora of new words (such as “plethora,” “pinguid,” “paludal,” and “uliginous”), not to mention the more utilitarian skills of how to make change, short change—upsell, distract, hoodwink, and hornswoggle a crowd into being an attentive audience. And a great success the arrangement was, at least at first. For a couple of golden weeks, the showman began to have Barnum-like aspirations. With a little luck, maybe he could get the boy to travel with them to Chicago. The Ambassadors would eventually be incorporated into the act, and with the proceeds he would begin to build himself an empire of novelties—a true touring odditorium featuring headhunters from lost islands and living skeletons, with scientific displays to delight and inspire all ages!

After the second successful performance, Lloyd invited his parents along to watch him work. He was proud of himself. Meanwhile, Rapture had humbled herself and found employment as a scrubwoman for a fetid old wharf doctor who sold laudanum and performed abortions on the sly. She was upset to learn of Lloyd’s exploits, but grateful that her son had risen to the occasion.

However, the boy’s new career did not sit at all well with Hephaestus. Lloyd’s dressing down of him had yanked him out of his blither for a day or so, but without any inventions to occupy
his mind, with Micah and Texas now seemingly out of reach, and with a growing sense of impotence as the head of the household, and no house to hold, the former blacksmith soon began to wallow in drink, exaggerating his limp for the purposes of begging, so that he could afford a cheap charcoal-flavored mash that a freedman named Little Jack Redhorse made.

When not moping and sulking in the loft of the stable, where they were forced to remain, he took to panhandling near the main market—and if fortunate in his takings he went in search of companionship and diversion, which he ended up finding at a place called the Mississippi Rose, an apparent chop shop and taproom that was in fact a seedy house of blue lights (a favorite among the preachers and the civic leaders). In addition to five floury white floozies and a very popular quadroon named Black Cherry, the entertainments ranged from cards and billiards to wagers on rat-catching dogs or bouts of barefisted boxing if two Irishmen could be found.