Enigmatic Pilot (14 page)

The lame patriarch’s dalliance with Chicken Germain had been his first betrayal of marital fidelity and had been instantly apprehended by his wife the moment he staggered back to the stable. In Rapture’s mind there was an unbridgeable difference between chugalugging moonshine and doing the jellyroll with an “oagly” cathouse madam who consumed fried chicken by the plateful. The root witch in her was quick to take retaliatory action, concocting a noxious salve and applying it to Hephaestus’s manhood when he fell asleep. The next morning he experienced the kind of profound contrition that only a severe mix
of pain and embarrassment can elicit. Since then his condition had improved but had not cleared, and his mood remained sullen and dejected. He was angry with himself for what he had done, angry with his wife for what she had done to him, and angry with Lloyd for keeping his head and becoming the family breadwinner. It was not right, and undermined what fragile dignity he had left.

Lloyd’s answer to this tension was to throw himself with full force into his work on the medicine show and into his secret studies at Wolfgang Schelling’s bookshop. While back in Zanesville Mabel Peanut and Irma Grimm battled to teach their students the multiplication tables, Lloyd considered the implications of a pendulum being perfectly isochronous when describing a cycloidal arc. In one sitting, he consumed and appeared to understand a complex dissertation on celestial mechanics. Even the densest algebraic equations were soon rendered in exact visual form on a graph. In Schelling’s experience, for sheer power of processing and retention the boy had no equal.

The book and map seller nourished the lad’s hunger for learning with the
Poetics
of Aristotle and the metaphysics of Kant, but Lloyd much preferred the researches of Gauss and Coulomb into magnetic induction and resistance. While other bright boys his age would have delved into the adventures of Sinbad or the Swamp Fox, Lloyd opted for the scientific treatises of Swedenborg. His weakness lay in the area of magic, and Schelling’s shop was more than able to accommodate these diversions with dusty grimoires, Books of the Dead, and volumes devoted to alchemy and divination.

Hour by hour Schelling imagined that he could see the boy’s mind changing shape to accommodate the new learning and, despite his best efforts to remain remote and uninvolved, when the usual look of forlorn acknowledgment swept across the prodigy’s face one afternoon at closing time the humped scholar found himself providing take-home reading—which
Lloyd began to indulge in by candlelight when his feuding parents had finally dropped off to sleep.

The first work he devoured was on thaumaturgy, the engineering of ingenious machines for the purposes of theatrical or religious magic. It included the triumphant contrivances of Hero and Vitruvius, and John Dee’s panic-causing stage effect of a mechanical flying beetle in Aristophanes’
Peace
. The second book was about Sir Joseph Banks, Captain Cook’s botanist and science officer, who smuggled into his cabin a woman, dressed as a boy, to be his “assistant.” It cheered Lloyd to learn that a man of science could also be a man of lust, and when the book described Banks as a “voyager, monster-hunter, and amoroso,” he decided that that was what he would dedicate his life to becoming.

Apart from a dog-eared Japanese pillow book, he did not find many books to titillate his erotic senses, but he did find descriptions and drawings of the mechanical iron hand designed by Götz von Berlichingen in 1505—the Little Writer, the ingenious automaton conceived by Pierre Jacquet-Droz and his son, in the 1760s, as well as Vaucanson’s miraculous mechanical digesting duck.

Lloyd rather felt his beaver was not altogether an inferior creation, but he resolved to become ever more ambitious. In response, he filched some items from a dustbin and a jeweler’s workshop and one afternoon presented his host and patron with a foot-high clockwork mannequin modeled on Andrew
Jackson and armed with a whittled dowel flintlock that fired a mung bean. After that, the bookseller began showering the youngster with more than books. From the nether reaches of the dusty warren came horseshoe magnets, lengths of coiled copper and chemical solutions, lenses and grinding tools, professional carving implements, and a miscellany of objects to further entice the boy’s imagination. Lloyd responded with a dollhouse incorporating hidden passages and optical illusions, and a miniature paddle wheeler with a high-pressure steam engine that, in proportionate terms, produced twice the power using less than half the normal fuel. An ear trumpet attached to a night watchman’s knuckle-duster and some homemade gunpowder became a handheld cannon capable of projecting a load of ball bearings. (Lloyd field-tested it against the Rovers and the Mud Puppies, two warring gangs of urchins, who were less visible on the streets thereafter.)

When he set to work on improving the primary battery cell developed by J. F. Daniell, Schelling’s eyebrows stayed raised. Most significant of all, Lloyd proved that what the book merchant had taken to be a toy was at minimum a very sophisticated toy. It was a hand-size locomotive that appeared to be made of glass, which Schelling said had come from Austria. Lloyd recalled the story St. Ives had told him about the crystal orchids of Junius Rutherford, and performed a series of experiments. He revealed that the object responded to the energy of the sun and posited that the glass was really some form of disguised plant material. Schelling was careful to put the locomotive under lock and key after that, and he began to consider that it might be wise to do the same with Lloyd. Such a development prompted the bookseller to relax his rule about private confidences, and he began soliciting information about Lloyd’s family and their plans. He was pleased that the boy was as forthcoming as he was.

The problem Schelling perceived was that the lad’s interests flitted from subject to subject—one minute daguerreotypes,
the next ideas for an internal-combustion engine. Of far greater concern, however, was an incipient sadism that the book merchant found despicable.

Deciding that Lloyd’s education required something other than scientific literature and handbooks of magic, the humped man provided an illustrated volume on Greek mythology. On the way back to the stable after closing, Lloyd trapped a wharf rat, which he named Theseus. The next day he built a maze for the rat to explore, but when the rodent failed to extricate itself Lloyd attached one of his battery wires and proceeded to torture it with electricity. Schelling was left to perform a merciful extermination. The next day when the bookseller inquired what the child was clutching in a damp handkerchief, Lloyd replied, “A cat’s brain.”

Schelling was forced to admit that his protégé’s moral intelligence lagged far behind his mental aptitude. When he quizzed the boy to describe what his special field of interest was, Lloyd muttered, “Wild science.”

“What do you mean by that?” the bookman queried.

“The life of machines,” Lloyd said with a shrug. “The machinery of life.”

Schelling was taken aback to learn that a further inventory of the subjects that exuded fascination for the prodigy included ghosts, dreams, and the female anatomy. When asked what he would most like to accomplish, given his prodigious gifts, Lloyd replied, without a hint of irony or self-consciousness, “Design a female playmate who will remain forever young, communicate with the dead, formulate a detailed map of the mind, and perhaps travel to other worlds.”

Fortunately, Lloyd had to use the privy in the back lane, so Schelling was left to splutter to himself. Then he sneaked a peek at the boy’s notes. In the beleaguered two-penny Buffalo book, he found an amalgam of symbols, numbers, and marginalia—from mathematical calculations and sketches depicting various mechanical actions to a chain of hierograms
that made him gawk. These emblems spiraled through a series of schematic drawings that merged existing and imaginary machines with animals and insects, along with humans and mythological beasts in graphic sexual poses. Lloyd returned and picked up his work just where he had left off without noticing the disturbed look on Schelling’s face.

While his education under the bookseller’s patronage progressed at the speed of thought, out on the medicine-show circuit the brisk sales of LUCID! were beginning to fall off. From long experience, Mulrooney sensed that the “hole was pretty well fished out” and the solution was to move on, upriver to Hannibal, Quincy, Rock Island, maybe even St. Paul. Of course, Lloyd could not go. The Sitturds’ way led west and south, yet the boy’s share of tonic sales was still nowhere near enough to pay for all three fares on the Missouri.

Mulrooney encouraged the prodigy to improvise more flamboyant expressions of his talents with an “enterprise point of view” in mind. Lloyd answered with theatrical exhibitions of magnetism, mirrors, and various volatile chemicals, which stimulated both consternation and raucous applause but did not lead to further sales. However, when he unveiled a flock of soaring toys and wind flyers public interest took a decided turn. These were simpler than the ones he had made in Zanesville but more elegant in their efficiency and less labor-intensive to produce. They had the added benefit of being disposable, which encouraged repeat purchases. They achieved an instant local vogue. Children and grown-ups alike were smitten by the sleek white arrows and bird-shaped creations. Prices varied, depending on the size and the materials, but the sudden popularity of the flying toys brought the Sitturds momentarily back together again, as Lloyd, Rapture, and the repentant Hephaestus were forced to work side by side in order to keep pace with demand as clubs and competitions sprouted wings. Yet even this success was not enough to satisfy Lloyd. His inclinations and impatience spurred him on to new heights.

The next phase started with a caged dove, a lamb, and a rooster. While gathering his things to leave Schelling’s bookshop one afternoon, Lloyd stumbled upon a volume on the history of ballooning, which began with the story of the Frenchman Pilâtre de Rozier launching the first animals in a balloon of paper and fabric, then making a solo ascent himself a few months after—followed later by a true free flight in a balloon designed by the famous Montgolfier brothers in 1783.

In the early hours of the next day, Lloyd launched his own straw fire—fueled balloon made of butcher paper and hat wire, sending aloft one of the stable mice he had nabbed. He watched with pride as it disappeared in the vicinity of the Nicholson grocery store. (Unbeknownst to the boy, the balloon bounded about in the framing of a rooftop water tank before crashing near the Wheaton drugstore, to the mystification of a clerk named Balthus Tubb, who would go to his grave puzzling over the singed vermin that fell from the sky and hit him in the head.)

Reading how kites had been used in ancient China to elevate fireworks for military purposes set off fireworks of its own inside the boy’s mind. With funding from Mulrooney, Lloyd began constructing, demonstrating, and selling kites as big as himself along the levee as part of the medicine show’s new program. The sight of the creations trembling on their tethers over the river brought whistles from the packet steamers and cheers from the freight-loaded flatboats. The size of the kites grew, and so did their efficiency. When the Fourth of July came, Lloyd incorporated his emerging capabilities into a pyrotechnic display along the riverbank. Mulrooney handled the ticket sales and was delighted at the takings. Schelling was circulating in the crowd that night, too, but he was far from delighted.

The next day at closing time, the humpbacked bibliophile buttonholed the wunderkind and said, “My boy, I have someone who would like to make your acquaintance. Someone I think it would be very strategic for you to meet. She is known
as Mother Tongue. She is elderly and eccentric, but if favorably disposed toward you—and I believe she will be—she could become an invaluable … sponsor.”

“Why?” Lloyd asked.

“Because of your unique abilities. And because she is eccentric. I would like you to meet me at the old ferry landing at midnight tonight.”

“Midnight?” Lloyd cried. “What will I tell my mother and father?” Although he protested, he was beginning to think that he did not owe his parents any explanation for his actions anymore.

“You must not tell them. You must wait until they are asleep and slip out.”

“But why so late—and where does this Mother Tongue live?”

“I can only say that she is eccentric, as I have told you. But she
is
worth meeting. Trust me,” the bookseller replied, and the lump on his back twitched.

“All right,” Lloyd agreed, and turned to head home, thinking all the while that his own fortunes seemed to rise in proportion to the fall in his parents’. It stung him, though, how they were forever undermining his elation, flinging filaments if not cables of guilt and responsibility at him, needing him yet holding him back. But from what? Perhaps the answer to that question was about to take more than a dream’s shape.

L
LOYD ARRIVED AT THE OLD FERRY LANDING DEAD ON THE APPOINTED
time. A full moon reflected off the wharf and the chimneys of the docked boats, giving the Mississippi a sickly silver sheen. Schelling was waiting for him. Two stevedore-muscled black men were on board a cramped, decrepit steam launch with him—one at the helm, one standing guard. Despite the warm summer night, the boy shivered.