Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology (39 page)

All of a sudden she lets out a squeal and sits bolt upright, catches me a lick right smack on the nose with her forehead. Bloodies it good. But she don’t even notice. She slides down the side of that haystack all the way to the ground, skirt flyin’ up around her ears, most everything else unbuttoned, and her bloomers showin’ for all the wide world to see, and rolls across the ground right underneath the wagon.

I’m starin’ down at where she went, wonderin’ if I done something so horrible that she was gonna tell Pa on me, and him being deacon and all, it was gonna be a big scandal, and now was I gonna have to marry Sarah the Rassler, who was so old? I mean, it weren’t like there would be a baby or nothin’, since things just didn’t get that far. Events spoiled her plan, I reckon. Likely woulda worked, too.

But after a minute she finishes buttonin’ about a hundred little teeny wood buttons that hadn’t oughta got unbuttoned, and peeks out from underneath the wagon and stares back up at me—no—right past me. It wasn’t until I turned around to see what the heck she was starin’ at that I realized somethin’ had blotted out the sun.

An airship! Wasn’t much as airships go. Not like the behemoths in the dime novels I had hid up in the corn crib. This one wasn’t near that big. Just a little blimp. And not new or well kept up. Matter of fact she was just plain ratty. But she was the first I ever saw with my own eyes, and that mornin’, boy, was she a wonder! Big as the miller’s barn and floatin’ up there in that blue sky with those two little propellers pushin’ her along slantways to the wind, puffs of smoke and steam floatin’ behind from her little boiler.

Totally blotted out the sun. Wasn’t very far above us—maybe twenty, thirty foot—so it seemed to take forever for her to pass by, makin’ for the fairgrounds in town, where all the Independence Day celebrations was to be.

And all painted up every color of the rainbow! Lordy, wasn’t she a grand sight! Long dangly ribbons all ripplin’ in the wind. And painted on the side in red and yellow curlicue letters taller than me, “The Great and Powerful Oz.”

I’ll never forget my first sight of Ozzie Osmond. He was the pilot, of course. And the fireman.And the landing crew.And the showman.And the huckster of a patent medicine that would peel the paint off a plow. But accordin’ to him would cure the rheumatiz and gallstones and grow hair on a billiard ball. And all sorts of other whatnot.

But there he hung out the window, hallooin’ and laughin’ and wavin’ at us.

“Hey, boy!” he hollers. “Hay boy! Haystack boy!” He was so tickled with his own joke he like to bust a gut laughin’ like a dad-blame jackass. Thought he was gonna fall right out that window.

Ozzie Osmond’s little blimp turned straight for the fairgrounds and had the wind behind her a little. And Big Red pulling the hay wagon never ever went at anything but a walk, no matter how much I clucked and shook the reins and cussed him. So by the time Sarah and me made the four miles from the hay field to the fairgrounds, most all the folks in town, and for miles around, were all gathered up to see the flyin’ machine.

When I rolled up with that empty hay wagon and Sarah sitting by me, Osmond spotted me over the crowd and waved me over.

“Hay Boy!” he hollers, pointin’ at me over the crowd. I must have gone all sorts of red, because he just laughed and laughed, head throwed back, big old belly laugh. Of course, everybody else thought he was just sayin’ “Hey boy!” and didn’t get the joke. But that’s just the kind of guy he was. From then on, until we parted company, he called me Hay Boy. What a comedian.

“Hay Boy!” he says, “I’ll give you a silver quarter if you’ll take that wagon over to the train depot and fetch me a ton of their best boiler coal. Tell the station master to bring the account over and we’ll settle up.”

Now twenty-five cents was more money than I had ever had in my pocket in all my born days. Sure I wanted to go, but I was already scared what would happen if Pa found out I took the mule and wagon to town. But right that very moment I look over the crowd and there sits Pa in his best buggy with the matched grays. He and Ma beat us to town by a good stretch.

So I was all worried about nothin’—pretty much everybody from a couple of miles around was at the fair grounds that day, millin’ around, gogglin’ at Ozzie's blimp and tellin’ everyone who would listen all sorts of stuff they didn't know.

So no worries about gettin’ a dressin’ down from Pa. Before he even caught my eye he was yellin’, “Go! Go!” You can bet I lit out of there like a cat with its tail on fire. Made record time to the train depot and back.

Anyways, I was climbin’ out of the blimp’s coal bunker, just finishin’ up from shoveling that ton of coal all by myself, when here come Mr. Peterson.

I yelled up to Ozzie, “Here’s the station master to collect for the coal.” He never said a word, but before I knew it, a ton of water ballast dumps on the ground, and that blimp jumps into the air like a pheasant out of a ditch bank, with me hangin’ off the bottom, half in and half out.

You can bet I scrambled up into that coal bin quick as I could, and sat there with my mouth hangin’ open like a frog, watchin’ all the folks shrinkin’ to the size of mice. They was all drenched and muddy from the ballast water and yellin’ up at Ozzie to get his fancy butt back down here and yellin’ at me to jump, for glory’s sake!

But I was frozen like a deer on the railroad tracks, just hangin’ on for dear life. Didn’t take long before we was up so high that jumpin’ would have busted every bone in my body.

Then that good strong hot west wind that nearly always blows over that valley got hold of us, and the people and houses and trees and foothills got shootin’ past us faster and faster, all without a sound, and all the time us climbin’ higher and higher.

The higher we climbed the faster we was travelin’. The ground was risin’ nearly as fast as we was, which meant it was rippin’ by at a terrible clip, rocks and trees and more rocks, and we was climbin’ better than a thousand feet per minute. But silently, because in a blimp without the propellers turnin’, the wind doesn’t rush past: it washes you along. You ride it.

Then I got my breath, and the first thing that came out of my mouth was a squeal like a scalded hog. Startled Ozzie so bad he squealed too, me echoin’ in the half-full coal bin, him in the pilot car.

The inside door to the coal bin slams open and there’s Ozzie’s face. Quick as a flash he reaches in there and grabs me by the collar and hauls me out to where I’m standing up in the little space between the bunker and the boiler. In his other hand he’s got this big ol' coal shovel, worn down to a nubbin, but plenty left to brain me with. He sees it’s me, throws down that shovel with a clang, and stomps off.

Now at this point I should tell you this about Ozzie Osmond: that man was one powerful cusser. He could cuss a cuss that would turn the air blue six feet around his head in every direction. He could cuss a cuss in rhythm and rhyme for a good ten minutes, whenever he was powerful worked up. Or whenever he wanted folks to think he was powerful worked up. He even had a version for when he was in polite society, or with religious folks, or just with folks that wanted other folks to think they were polite or religious. You can bet lots of it stuck in my head forever. Some things you can’t just unhear. I’ll give you the start of the polite society version. Goes like this:

“Log jam! Log jam!

Brother trucking log jam!

Horse clopping, runt bucking,

Brother trucking log jam!”

So he stomps around the cabin log jammin’ for a couple of minutes, then he turns to me all of a sudden with a pondering look on his face. “Well, Hay Boy,” he says, “this may work out good after all, since you’re stuck with me and me with you.”

I finally manage to choke out, which was the first words I managed to speak since the blimp left the ground, “W-w-w-what do you mean? I’ll just get off when you go back to settle up. Folks will be mad about the water and the mud and whatnot, but it was an accident. They’ll get over it.”

He looks at me all open-mouthed like I sprouted a second head. Finally he says, all wonderin’-like, “Well! Ain’t you just about as simple as you look? No, Hay Boy, I ain’t going back there to Podunk.”

“It ain’t Podunk,” I say.

“Wake up, rube! You’re Hay Boy, from Podunk, Nowhere County, God-forsaken Territory,”he says. “Listen up: I didn’t dump ballast on accident.”

Then it dawns on me, how the whole time he was on the ground he never once set foot more than two or three steps away from the blimp. How the whole time he was showing one pretty girl after another the controls, putting his arms around her from behind to show her where to put her hands on the wheel, leanin’ this way and that, hollerin’, “Port! Now stabberd!” his eyes never once left the crowd. How he particularly watched fresh wagons pull up with folks from further out from town. Of course he was watchin’ for Mr. Peterson, the station master, or for Mr. Kessler, the general store owner, to come with their accounts.

“Oh,” I says.

“Yeah,” he says. “I see you’re startin’ to figger out what’s what.”

Then I really started puttin’ things together. “You dumped ballast for a quick getaway! You had no intention of payin’ for your coal or groceries!”

He didn’t even bother to answer, just shook his head at me like I was a simpleton. Which I guess I was. Finally I blurted out, “And if I wasn’t stuck on board I wouldn’t have got my silver quarter, either, would I?” He just looked at me and shook his head all exasperated.

I thought about all this for a minute, includin’ how we were thousands of feet off the ground. Which got me to wonderin’, “How high will we go? How far will the wind blow us before we get to the ground again?”

“Blamed if I know,” he says, as casual as good morning, and went to huntin’ in his pockets for sulfur matches to light his pipe. “I don’t generally fly this thing. It come with a man to pilot it when I won it at stud poker over to Calaveras County. But he was off getting’ his ashes hauled in Chinatown when I was obliged to leave San Francisco in a hurry. Didn’t exactly settle up accounts there either. Dumped so much ballast to get over the Sierra Nevada Mountains that I used up all my coal and boiler water drivin’ her back down to the ground again.”

I was pretty glum by now. “That’s five hundred miles! Why didn’t you just vent some of the gas to come down?”

“And be stranded devil knows where? You think I could get a hydrogen gas refill in the middle of nowhere? Not by a damned sight! Counted myself lucky to get coal and water and groceries. And now looks like I got me a first mate, too.”

“Sure,” I say to myself, “until my feet hit the ground and I get running for home.” But then right there on the spot he offers to teach me airship piloting—what he knew about it, which wasn’t much. He offered a way to learn me a trade, plus bed and board, five dollars every single week, and see the sights all around the world. Not that I ever saw a dime of those wages. But he could see he had me.

Of course I jumped on it. What boy wouldn’t, especially one like me who would rather be curled up in the loft with a penny dreadful than shovelin’ pig manure or pitchin’ hay? A boy who slept at night with Jules Verne under his pillow?

We shook on it. And of course, the way I was brought up, the handshake made it as binding as an oath. Yep, he had me all right. 

“Well,” he says, “I got me a powerful thirst. And I ain’t slept in three days, ever since San Francisco, so I’m gonna check my eyelids for holes.” He reaches in one of the grocery boxes from Kessler’s General Store and comes up with a pint.

He points his bottle at the wheel, and the little table by the side of it, where there was a compass, a barometric altimeter, and a thick roll of charts. “Sit right there, and for the love of Pete, don’t touch nothin’. We got to get over the Rocky Mountains, but that won’t happen until at least tomorrow, maybe the day after. Nothin’ you can do to steer without the boiler goin’ and the propellers turnin’ anyhow.

“Don’t even think about tryin’ to start the boiler without me—you’ll blow us clean out of the sky. We’ll keep climbin’ for a spell. Then she’ll level herself out. Don’t touch nothin’. Just let the wind take us.” And with that he drains half that bottle, and quicker than a wink he was snorin’ like a freight train.

The first three hours was a joy, watchin’ the mountain tops speed by a thousand feet below, all in total silence. I could see golden eagles down below us, ridin’ the thermal currents above them hot rocky peaks. The mountaintops of the Great Basin slid past, the flanks with their blankets of spruce and quakin’ aspen, the north sides still with traces of snowfields even in summer. In between them, the dusty little valleys with the regular square green patches of irrigated farmland.

Ozzie kind of come to once, halfway at least, with just enough wits about him to drain the rest of that bottle. After that, he was really out.

Sure enough, just like Ozzie said, the blimp leveled out, all on its own, about twelve thousand feet. That high up, even in the summer it was kinda chilly, so I lit the little coal heating stove in the cabin.

When I came back from that, I was startled to see that the mountain I had been watchin’ grow gradually in front of me all of a sudden was far behind. We had to be goin’ way faster than I ever imagined.

That scared me, and made me curious, so I found the right charts, and started doin’ some figurin’. I was plain flabbergasted just how quick the geometry my mother drummed into my head became really useful. In a couple of minutes I had landmarked our position, and had our bearing and speed. 

But what them charts showed scared me near to death. I ran to Ozzie and tried to shake him awake, but it was just no good. He was way too passed out. Never stirred. I screamed, I hollered, I slapped him. “Osmond! OSMOND! You’ve got to wake up and light the boiler! We’re going to hit the mountain!”