Enigmatic Pilot (29 page)

The kit included a general lock pick that he had sharpened out of harvested wire, a jimmy made from some window flashing, a miniature hammer he had fabricated from a hickorybarrel hove and one of the large bolts from the boat rigging, a carving knife and whetstone, along with a flint and striker from the cabin crew’s quarters, an adjustable wrench he had nipped from the engine room, some lady’s sewing implements that had been left about, a small hatchet that had dropped below the boilers, a magnifying lens he made from some plucked spectacles, and an assortment of bandages and a bottle of iodine wrapped in cotton wool so that it would not break, which he had nicked from a doctor’s bag.

From this same bag he took a vial of laudanum and added to the kit the one bottle of LUCID! that survived from his
medicine-show career, in case she became injured and needed pain relief. What he did not find in the bag was an item that he felt was important, and so he made one himself from one of the extra steam valves in the engineer’s room—a stethoscope.

“What’s this for?” Hattie asked, when he proudly laid out his offerings.

“That’s for listening to sounds,” he said. “To hearts—and to the other side of walls, if you have to. I didn’t have time to make a good one. But you’ll hear better than you would on your own. And this, this is for making sounds—music—if you’re alone and need to make noise, instead of shushing all the time. To cheer yourself up.”

The final inclusion was a crude bunch of short, tensioned metal rods screwed into the base of a burgled clock with a hollowed-out hole for a resonator, which Lloyd, in what remained of his innocence, believed at that point he had invented. It was in fact a very old kind of musical instrument—what today we would call a kalimba, or African thumb piano—like a Jew’s harp but with a much wider range of tones. He had at least adjusted the rods in the precise order to create a true musical scale, and the simple strumming of these vibrating keys produced a quiet yet pleasing sound.

To his surprise and delight, she played a plaintive yet charming melody on it. She had seen and heard many such instruments in the secrecy of plantation cabins, and was herself surprised that Lloyd knew what one was.

As to the whole of the gift—for it was a whole—she did not know what to say. Not since her father had anyone given her anything but a belting or a form of torture, and even her father had not given her things he had made himself. And so many things! Each with a sense and a purpose, but with flexibility—the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. She admired the things stolen as much as the items made, because she intuited that everything would have been made specially if there
had been time and materials at hand. The important thing was the totality of the package, and she had the wit to appreciate that.

“Is there anything you can’t make if you set your mind to it?” she asked. “I means—mean—if you had the time?”

“I can’t make more time to be with you,” Lloyd answered. “Not just yet.”

Her kiss then was something that would sustain him through many trials to come, because it was not a lewd or debauched kiss as Miss Viola’s had been. It was as innocent as his desire to help her, to give what he could. But it was filled with the fire of passion—and of something so often missing in all romance, whatever the ages: true partnership.

Therein was the great problem. The Sitturds’ way, once arrived in Independence, lay back south, into unknown territory, but almost certainly greater risk for a runaway slave girl—even one who knew that through any two points in space there is one line, and that it was Wordsworth who had suggested the shooting of the albatross in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (That she could also bend the note of a white-bean fart and have at least the semblance of an orgasm through the sensitive indulgence of a tongue kiss were other talents that won Lloyd’s deepest admiration.)

What might have been a joy thus became a torture for the young Ohioan. Once more he felt that the blessing of travel and adventure, discovering intimacies with strangers, was a cruel and unusual punishment.

For Hattie, as hard as her heart had become, she too felt the pang of inevitable separation. Lolling with him in the dark of her smelly hidey-hole—or risking all and venturing out at night into the open air of the top deck to smoke some stray leaf—she knew that her life would never be the same if this boy-man were taken from her. She had never had the luxury of not being cunning—of letting down her guard or saying anything she did not really mean. She had lived her whole life with at least “one
eye open,” but with Lloyd she relaxed for the first time, drawing energy for what she knew would be more strenuous times ahead.

“You could … come with us,” Lloyd whispered in the dark of her smuggler’s coffin, which was permeated now by the aroma of the sharp cheddar they had plundered from the boat’s larder.

Hattie gave his scrotum a gentle grope. The pain inside was greater than he had ever known. Even the sins and crimes of St. Louis, when he had sailed above the row houses and cobblestones to fall through his own shadow, seemed to have been rinsed from his conscience.

“Then what will you do?” he asked, when she remained silent. “What will you
really
do?”

“I’ll make my way,” Hattie answered. “Just like I tole you. I’m headed west. Where I can be free. I’m going to California. And I’m going to be rich.”

“You’re thirteen,” Lloyd reminded her. “You’re a runaway slave, and you’ve got—”

“My markings? Boy, it’s these markings of mine that are going to make me rich. You may be smart when it comes to numbers and ideas, but you’ve still got a world to learn about folks. Especially white folks—and especially menfolks. You take a good, Christian white man, never laid a hand on his wife—he get with a colored girl and he’s another creature. The thing I got in my favor is that I
am
another creature. That’s the giff the old bitch gave to me. She didn’t mean to, but she did.”

“So you’ll be a whore?” Lloyd groaned.

“I may be a queen!” Hattie snapped. “I’ll do what I need to do. What you have to do to get by isn’t who you are, Lloyd. You remember that—and remember I tole you. You say I act and talk white sometimes. That don’t make me white. I got no intention of lowering myself, believe you me. I’m goin’ to learn French. And I’m goin’ to play the harpsichord, and I’m goin’ to have me some silk dresses, buttercup-yellow and watermelon-pink,
and I’m goin’ to make sure other black folks learn how to read—and know the names of the stars and how to measure a circle without thinkin’ they have to walk around it.”

“What about me?” Lloyd asked.

The forlorn, honest tone in the boy’s voice reeled Hattie back from her dream. She felt her vulnerability full force once more, and yet she saw what she had sensed the very first moment she had met Lloyd: that here was someone lonelier than she, lonelier than she would ever be. A creature so different, not by markings or skin color, or anything anyone could definitely see, but by who he was inside. He could not just run away to find a better part of the world to live in; he would have to invent his own world if he was to survive. He might have to invent many worlds—so many that he might end up forgetting which were his creations.

“You’ll be something nobody’s ever thought of, Lloyd,” she answered.

“But I want to be with you!” he wailed, and she had to stifle his plea with her warm hand.

“Shush. Don’t you be ruinin’ things now. You gotta buck up and be strong. That’s what bein’ a man is. I’d want to be with you, too, if life would let me—but it won’t, so there’s no use cryin’.”

As she said this, the Zanesville prodigy saw that the older girl was working very hard to restrain her tears. She has enough to cry about, he thought to himself. No need for me to make her sadder still.

It was the first time in his life that Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd had ever had such a sentiment about another person, and the novelty of it took him by surprise. He reached out and embraced her, with a firmness and a tenderness that made even the resourceful runaway tremble inside.

“One day I’ll come find you,” Lloyd said, and to Hattie these words hung in the tight, cramped air like a melody on the thumb piano. There was nothing more to be said on the subject
of the future and their different destinies, for those words, uttered with complete calm and conviction, had done what every inspired melody does: condense a welter of emotions into an unconflicted clarity that one can instantly recall and call upon. Like a hierogram.

Those words gave Hattie the courage to seek a deeper hiding place when the
Defiance
landed at last at Independence. To Lloyd, she had given her abused body and something of her hidden soul while in transit together. In parting, she gave him her most prized possession—a token of the love she felt but could express only in deed. It was a tiny ivory skull, carved with gorgeous simple precision, with a hint of a smile. The size of a marble, it nonetheless contained an undeniable radiance. It had been given to her by her mother a few weeks before her death. The girl was told that the icon came from Africa and had been passed through many hands to reach her.

“Mama called it a fetish,” she told Lloyd. “She says it’s good luck agin enemies. It means Death smiles on you.”

Clutching the talisman in his own hand, Lloyd had no doubt that it held some unusual power, for it seemed to retain the vitality of all those who had held it before, and the suggestion of the smile imbued it with an eerie optimism, however grim its appearance.

The moment he cupped it, he was charged with a realization that had been waiting for him since birth. He, too, had black blood in his veins. Though it sometimes may have taken a light-skinned Negro to spot it, and this had often been to his advantage, he saw the truth, whole and clear. He remembered every taunt from the Zanesville hooligans he had ever heard. Every sidewise glance from the children in St. Louis. He was not a mongrel, for the Europeans he had encountered in the family travels were as mongrel a bunch as you could imagine. He was part white, part Indian, and part black, and each of those breeds carried its own unique burden and heritage, especially in the America of those times. Something in him connected
back to Africa—to the dark magic and turmoil of that faraway continent. He felt the literal truth of this course through him when he gripped the skull. This was a piece of his own puzzle handed back. It daunted and augmented him all at once, and he placed it with extreme, gentle care deep in his little knapsack next to the box with the hierograms of the Martian Ambassadors, his uncle’s letter and map, and the always watching glass eyes of Mother Tongue.

Before Hattie, he had not had the wherewithal to look upon the Ambassadors’ box since leaving St. Louis. Now, nurtured by the girl’s devotion, he could and did examine the container again—and saw in the intricate alien characters that it displayed a message for his life that he knew he must do everything in his power to understand. So Hattie’s gift, no bigger than a berry, served both to free him from his horror of losing her and as a seed. He cried when it dawned on him that he must say goodbye to her. But when the tears were gone he felt refreshed and full of her spirit, as if she had given not only her body to him but all that she had—all that she was. And so, he gave her a gift to remember him by, to watch over her and link her to him.

“Is this a jewel?” Hattie asked when Lloyd put one of Mother Tongue’s eyes in her hands.

“It’s a species of jewel, I believe—and a very great mystery,” he answered. “A very powerful, very old white woman who helps the slaves gave it to me. It’s a match of this,” he told her, holding up the mate.

“They’re eyes!” Hattie cried. “Made eyes!”

“Yes, but who they were made by is the thing. The old woman, who is a kind of witch, you’d say—before she took them out she could see with them, I swear. And I’ve thought I’ve seen things in them, too. There’s some sort of magic to them, just like there is to your fetish. I want you to keep this, then we will each have one.”

Hattie had no doubt about the sincerity of the gesture, and
was warmed inside to have something of Lloyd and his past to take with her. There was indeed something touched about the sphere, a talisman to match her skull. She cupped it lovingly in her hand, then hid it away inside her clothes.

The steam whistle blew.

“Do we say goodbye?” Lloyd asked.

“Not folks like us,” Hattie replied.

Lloyd did not look for her when the family stepped off the gangplank at their destination, for he knew that she would not be seen, but that she was moving forward with a will stronger than any river current could ever be.

But God he missed her. The Brown Recluse.

I
NDEPENDENCE
, M
ISSOURI, IS A PLACE RICH IN HISTORY
. I
T BEGAN
as a fort when Osage Indians would come to trade furs and pause at the window of Agent George Shipley’s house to listen to his daughter play the piano. A little log courthouse was later built, which doubled as a pig pen and became so infested with fleas that it was necessary to invite sheep inside while the court was in session, to give the bloodsuckers something else to feed on. In the 1830s, the Mormons settled here and for a time prospered, only to be tarred and feathered and eventually burned out. Much, much later, Harry S. Truman would go to high school here, the man whose middle initial stood for nothing—“Mr. Citizen,” who became a judge without ever having been a lawyer, the first and the last United States president to run a failing men’s clothing store, and the man famous for his belief that “the buck stops here.” (He apparently gave the two most important military orders in the history of Western civilization, carried through on August 6th and 9th of 1945.)

What the Sitturds found when they landed was, of course, a very different scene. As the family disembarked, there were a few raised eyebrows about Hephaestus’s appearance, but there was so much activity in this western Missouri “jumping off
place” (where many folk, indeed, looked as though they had hurled themselves off the precipice of reason and restraint) that no one in the family, including Lloyd, worried much about who might be watching them just then. There was too much happening.