Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True Part 10

Leaving the Mississippi, they had not left their tribulations behind. Far from it. For what seemed like the worst part of her whole life, Rapture had been forced to nurse her sodden, mumbling husband at close quarters with no relief. Bullboats, canoes, Mackinaws, and keelboats were all used on the Missouri, which was notorious for its obstacles and its obstreperous nature, but the vagaries of the spring and autumn high water, along with increased demand for goods and transit west had favored the rise of the steamboat, which flourished.

Now, in between the dry of summer and the heavy fall rains, the going was particularly difficult and muddy, even for a boat with iron muscle. Three times they had been forced to halt, once for an entire day, because of treacherous snags and sandbars. Then a wild downpour after a thunderstorm unleashed a flash torrent that dredged up keel-killing logs and the debris of old wrecks, making progress slower still. A "wood hawk," one of the local sh.o.r.e dwellers hired to help the fueling parties find timber to feed the ravenous boilers, had turned out to be in cahoots with a ruffian gang who tried to board the steamboat and were repelled by gunfire, which left a crew member wounded and two of the villains dead. A fast boat at the time could have reached Independence in eight days. They had already been gone five and were not even as far as Jefferson City.

Hephaestus had been racked with fever and visions while all this was happening. Meanwhile, Lloyd had remained locked in a catatonic state of retreat and denial. In all the years, Rapture had never seen her son so remote, so enclosed. She had managed, because she had had no choice, to accept that he had endeavored, by some means that remained mysterious to her, to attempt to fly. In a dirt-floor cabin, from a man with a lump on his back the size of a feather pillow, she had gathered in some uncomprehending way that her son had been the perpetrator of a deliberate and unnatural spectacle that had cost at least one wretched slave his life and had permanently jeopardized their safety in St. Louis and perhaps all America.

But these bizarre intelligences had not shed any light that she could see by. With the demonic, m.u.f.fled counterpoint of Hephaestus's ravings, they had just served to make the voyage they were committed to now seem more amphibious and ghostly, until she began to doubt her own sanity, and the pain in her feminine heart began to strain her resilient will to live. The tears and the lovemaking released her. It was Lloyd's return to the cabin that wrenched the couple back to reality and the tenuous situation they found themselves in once more.

"He better now," Rapture announced, trying to adjust her dress and bodice back into place.

"I see that," the boy sniffed, his eyes as green and hard as old Chinese jade.

Hephaestus craned his neck, fearing for an instant that he had been under some dire spell longer than he imagined, so much older and cynical did his young son seem.

Lloyd wore a knitted skullcap that Sch.e.l.ling had stuck on his head to make him less recognizable, with an orphanage long shirt over short cotton sack pants and rough leather shoes. The blacksmith's mind flitted back to the horror in the eyes of Phineas, the vivisected rabbit. At last he found his voice.

"I'm sorry, Lloyd," he said. "I've-I've made a mess of things. I don't know what came over me."

"I do," the boy returned, but despite the blankness of his tone his father spied a flicker of something warmer and human in the cold green eyes.

"It won't ever happen again," the scrawny blacksmith vowed with a clearer voice. "Now, tell me what has happened and we will make a plan. A new plan."

Rapture's eyes darted to her son, and then and there she decided an issue that had been weighing on her soul since boarding the boat. They would say nothing about Lloyd's misadventures in St. Louis. There was nothing she could say that she understood herself anyway. Maybe the black times behind them would drift into obscurity like some washed-away raft they pa.s.sed in the night. There was at least no use in troubling her troubled husband with uncertain details now. Now was the time for simple known things, and for coming together.

She was relieved when Lloyd a.s.sumed an Indian squat on the floor amid their few belongings and remained still but far more attentive than she had seen him in days, as she recounted in broad, general terms her conclusion that getting them out of St. Louis and back on their way to Texas and whatever lay ahead for them was their best course, and so had brought about their departure. Lloyd's face betrayed no emotion as she steered around the p.r.i.c.kly matters, hoping that her husband's clouded memory would stay clouded. The money they had now, she said, she had stolen from one of her employers-a desperate act that she was not proud of but which seemed necessary given Hephaestus's fragile condition. His discovery and retrieval were credited to a free Negro who frequented the fish market in town, who had found him pa.s.sed out in a shack downriver. The senior Sitt.u.r.d seemed too exhausted from his ordeal and too ashamed to inquire further. Like his wife, all he found himself caring about and able to face up to was where they were at the moment, and where they were going.

In truth, their current position had to be deemed a significant improvement over the near-end of the world in St. Louis. They had lower-deck cabin pa.s.sage paid to Independence, Missouri, on board a side-wheeler called the Defiance Defiance, built in Louisville fifteen years before and overhauled one too many times. Just under two hundred feet long, with a thirty-five-foot beam and a cargo capacity of five hundred tons and carrying six hundred, it was a "floating palace" that had been forced to earn its keep. In its heyday the Defiance Defiance had transported explorers, soldiers, fur trappers, mountain men, and missionaries, but more recently it had given pa.s.sage to settlers and would-be western travelers, some laden already with overloaded wagons and visions of vast expanses of free land to turn into farms. Its cargo manifest was as miscellaneous as its pa.s.sengers: Hudson's Bay blankets, indigo cloth, frock coats, flannel shirts, Ma.r.s.eilles vests, and fancy calico shirts; Indian trading trinkets (like wampum moons and medals featuring a representation of John Jacob Astor on one side and peace and friendship on the reverse), horse bells, yellow bullet b.u.t.tons, gun worms, awls, padlocks, oval firesteels, black-barley corn heads, octagon bra.s.s barrel pistols, hunter's clay pipes, tinned rivets, iron kettles, refined borax, powder horns, oak.u.m, pitch, pilot bread and Havana sugar; violin bows and Manila rope, emery paper, twist tobacco, sealskin trunks and sealing wax, rattail files and trap chains, sturgeon twine and silver gorgets; ladies' Moroccan heel pumps and men's thick brogans, ivory combs and silk handkerchiefs, bags of shot and pounds of chalk-white beads; butcher knives and boxes of thimbles, ground ginger, Seidlitz powders and lucifer matches; cod fish and pepper sauce, lime juice, Lexington mustard, bacon, rosin, foolscap paper, salted mackerel, and barrels of mola.s.ses (and, for Fort Atkinson and Fort Benson, plenty of alcohol and gunpowder). had transported explorers, soldiers, fur trappers, mountain men, and missionaries, but more recently it had given pa.s.sage to settlers and would-be western travelers, some laden already with overloaded wagons and visions of vast expanses of free land to turn into farms. Its cargo manifest was as miscellaneous as its pa.s.sengers: Hudson's Bay blankets, indigo cloth, frock coats, flannel shirts, Ma.r.s.eilles vests, and fancy calico shirts; Indian trading trinkets (like wampum moons and medals featuring a representation of John Jacob Astor on one side and peace and friendship on the reverse), horse bells, yellow bullet b.u.t.tons, gun worms, awls, padlocks, oval firesteels, black-barley corn heads, octagon bra.s.s barrel pistols, hunter's clay pipes, tinned rivets, iron kettles, refined borax, powder horns, oak.u.m, pitch, pilot bread and Havana sugar; violin bows and Manila rope, emery paper, twist tobacco, sealskin trunks and sealing wax, rattail files and trap chains, sturgeon twine and silver gorgets; ladies' Moroccan heel pumps and men's thick brogans, ivory combs and silk handkerchiefs, bags of shot and pounds of chalk-white beads; butcher knives and boxes of thimbles, ground ginger, Seidlitz powders and lucifer matches; cod fish and pepper sauce, lime juice, Lexington mustard, bacon, rosin, foolscap paper, salted mackerel, and barrels of mola.s.ses (and, for Fort Atkinson and Fort Benson, plenty of alcohol and gunpowder).

The Sitt.u.r.ds' fellow pa.s.sengers included such a motley a.s.sortment of failures, fanatics, coa.r.s.e-shirt dirt growers, and the odd silk-hatted scoundrel, they had been able to go relatively unnoticed so far, and G.o.d willing might yet arrive at their destination without drawing unwanted attention, despite the endless delays. They had a dwindling but sufficient number of provisions that Sch.e.l.ling had supplied, and with Hephaestus regaining clarity, and more money in their pockets than they had had in a long while, there at least appeared to be cause for some little optimism. There was also before them again the prospect of Micah's legacy of Dustdevil, a tarnished star that had renewed in l.u.s.ter.

"We have a whole new life ahead of us now," Hephaestus announced, as if he had just found the money that had been stolen by the pickpocket back in St. Louis.

"Hopen net wus'den 'ebbeh," Rapture remarked.

"Now, don't be thinkin' like that, Murruh," the revived souse insisted. "Who knows but that the jerkiest part of the road is well behind and that maybe a treasure awaits us. The treasure of a fresh start, if nothing else-which seems mighty valuable to me."

"No moa saa'bints en slabes," his wife answered, as if that would be good enough for her.

No, thought Lloyd. No more servants and slaves-at least not the way she meant. He thought again of the wretched thing he had done on Fourth Street. Did anyone know what lay ahead for them? A trap? Prosperity? Safety? d.a.m.nation?

His mind once more moved to the uncle he had never met, the man they hoped to find still alive...the cryptic words of his letter, which had set their rickety wheels in motion. So many enigmas-and that made him think once more of Mother Tongue, hiding like a spider, feeling for the trembling in her web. Was she another shape the darkness took-or an angel of deliverance, a guide to the labyrinth? He had no answers, and so he said to his parents, "Well, it will be good to have a home again-that's ours. If we get there."

The Missouri is now and was then a wilder river than the Mississippi, requiring more alertness from its captains and crews, especially since the Defiance Defiance was a tawdrier vessel than her compet.i.tor cousins. Like a dusky maiden lurking on the edge of a debutante's ball, her attempt at Gothic finery was too soiled by hard circ.u.mstance to afford much grandeur anymore. And perhaps she heard, in the escapements and the jeering bells of the stern-wheelers that were beginning to gain prominence, that her days were numbered. In any case, her piston rods were well greased and her heavy heart thumped in time to the deeper rhythm of pioneer expectation, as if there was something animate and fulfilled in her to be again heading west. was a tawdrier vessel than her compet.i.tor cousins. Like a dusky maiden lurking on the edge of a debutante's ball, her attempt at Gothic finery was too soiled by hard circ.u.mstance to afford much grandeur anymore. And perhaps she heard, in the escapements and the jeering bells of the stern-wheelers that were beginning to gain prominence, that her days were numbered. In any case, her piston rods were well greased and her heavy heart thumped in time to the deeper rhythm of pioneer expectation, as if there was something animate and fulfilled in her to be again heading west.

The Sitt.u.r.ds were once more embarked on a journey, and so had rediscovered their place together. Even Lloyd could not ignore the change in mood since seeing his father's remorseful but lucid eyes greet him across the cabin. Like sleepers awakened from a communal nightmare, they reunited now with a common will. And if it was a delicate task getting the sobered drunkard out of the bunk and dressed again, and then to limp-a stealthy expedition up into the open air, lingering in the shadow of the pilothouse on the hurricane deck with the escape pipes belching-they all rose to the challenge.

It was just on sunset, and they were halfway on their voyage west to the frontier-fueled outposts of western Missouri. A fresh autumn breeze strengthened as the blood sun sank. A lone chicken hawk circled beneath high smoke-signal clouds, and the artery of muddy green river lapped up to the ravaged base of rampart sand cliffs that flowed and smeared out like time itself into the starved suggestion of lonely prairie beauty that lay beyond the sh.o.r.eline chains of surging settlement. Voices echoed in the speaking tube, but the family from Zanesville was listening farther away. Rapture was trying to hear the spirits of her lost parents, the ghost music of places she knew that she would never see again. Hephaestus was trying not to hear the demons of backsliding degradation and oblivion, and to catch some whisper on the wind of his brother and the promise of what awaited them in Texas. Young Lloyd, who no longer looked young-at least not the way a child should look-was listening for pursuit, still reeling from his attempt to mate with the sky: the terrible inviting softness of death, the fatalities he had caused. Somewhere, out there in the distance, or perhaps as close as on board the same boat, were forces that he barely understood, if at all. But the piles of cloud above the river gave no sign of collusion with anything other than the setting sun and the strident smashing of the wooden wheel in the current.

It was this pervasive sense of doubt that had kept the boy sharp enough to stay free of the clutches of a deep depression from which he might not have recovered-a survival instinct channeled through the fine filaments of his heightened intellect, which kept him linked to the world despite an anguish and a regret that made his father's look paltry. The voices of the past-Zanesville bullies tormenting him, St. Ives and Miss Viola, the professor, Sch.e.l.ling, Mother Tongue, Brookmire, the black man beneath the courthouse crying out to heaven, and the insane chatter of the doomed Martian Amba.s.sadors-they were all stilled in the splash of the steam-driven wheel and the new look of longing in his father's eyes.

Lloyd reasoned that he must maintain not just his mother's pretense about what had caused them to leave St. Louis but the much larger and more complex fantasy of a world without the Spirosians and the Vardogers. "I cannot tell them about what I do not understand myself," he admonished himself. "They have lost innocence enough, better to keep these other, longer shadows to myself." And so he did.

Both adults experienced a wave of rea.s.surance in the few remarks their son offered before they all slipped back down to their cabin for refreshment and rest. They chose to forgo the dining saloon (as much to avoid what pa.s.sed for the "boiled meat" as to avoid questions). There was still a span of river to survive, not to mention the so-called Indian Frontier, which at that moment in history extended from the Lake of the Woods in the north to Galveston Bay in the south (and, of course, was being pushed inexorably west).

All the known routes to the Pacific were alive with white settlers. The great thrust of migration along the Oregon Trail had commenced in earnest, making mad boomtowns of places like Council Bluffs and Omaha. The Potato Famine in Ireland and the war with Mexico were about to send more shock waves rippling out through the long gra.s.s. Then the insanity of the gold rush. Once peaceful relationships with tribes of Indians across the continent had already strained to the point of bloodshed and were building in intensity, just as the tensions over slavery and the great ideological and cultural differences between the North and the South were mounting to what would end up being a sprawling red mountain of corpses in the years to come.

Farmers, freed slaves, miners, Mormons, and families like theirs came spilling domesticated animals and heirlooms in the hope of finding some semblance of home, disrupting cycles of wild game and dispossessing native tribes on a scale and at a speed unseen on the planet before. The newspaper editor John O' Sullivan was about to coin the phrase "manifest destiny." It insinuated itself into even the Sitt.u.r.ds' cloistered cabin, and began to make Lloyd restless.

Rapture and Hephaestus, quite content to have some moments alone, allowed the boy to slip out after darkness fell. He had made a habit of this late at night, when his mother collapsed in discomposed sleep on the floor beside the tortured patriarch, always on the lookout for some stranger who might know more about them than he would like. Gorging on the sustenance of rediscovered intimacy, his parents allowed him to exit on the last stroke of the eleventh bell, imagining that he would slink around the boat like their cabin-mate mouse.

It was in fact a very different plan the boy had in mind now that his father had arisen from his stupor. But this plan was to be subverted, and it was a little after yet another midnight when Lloyd found out that there was indeed a stranger worth knowing about on board the Defiance Defiance. Someone stealthier than any mouse.

CHAPTER 2.

A Different Kind of Darkness THE WIND HAD DIED DOWN, BUT THERE WERE NO STARS OR MOONLIGHT visible, for a low ceiling of cloud had fallen over the river, warming the air and dulling all sounds. Almost all the other pa.s.sengers, save a few men playing poker on top of a barrel in what they called the p.o.o.p-deck salon, had taken to their cabins. The burly crew, who were not resting fitfully below, huddled around lanterns, sucking on pungent cigars. visible, for a low ceiling of cloud had fallen over the river, warming the air and dulling all sounds. Almost all the other pa.s.sengers, save a few men playing poker on top of a barrel in what they called the p.o.o.p-deck salon, had taken to their cabins. The burly crew, who were not resting fitfully below, huddled around lanterns, sucking on pungent cigars.

The Sitt.u.r.ds' fellow travelers were a furtive lot in Lloyd's view, a ragtag of prayer-sayers, blue-sky believers, runaway thieves, and would-be saints mixed up like nails and raisins in a jar. On nights before, he had heard the men playing. He had smelled their smoke and cheap whiskey, and caught the occasional loud oath or imprecation giving way to murmured bluffing and wagering. More than once he had felt the pang of memory, pondering where St. Ives and Miss Viola were-itching to be able to join the game and clean the shaving brush-bearded simpletons out of every pot. The thought of having to live in hiding even for the duration of their river journey sickened him, the stupid skullcap pulled down tight on his head like a badge of shame. And what about the future? Would he and therefore his family always be looking over their shoulders, shuttered up in claustrophobic s.p.a.ces while the bright, teeming world grew faster and ever more luminous outside?

Old mud-rut routes and plank toll roads were giving way to macadamized causeways. Lloyd knew that the world would one day soon be speaking the firefly language of the telegraph (like the kind he had designed back home). Mechanical marvels would rumble over the earth and city-size balloons might rise like new suns. He wanted a part of it-to lead it, to steer the future. To soar above the flour mills and the distilleries like a lord of innovation. To him, it seemed that they had only appeared to leave Zanesville. The truth was it had followed them-or, rather, he had managed against all intention to re-create it.

The roof of heavy dry cloud weighed down upon him. His mind kept zooming back to the night he had met Mother Tongue in the grotto beneath the graveyard-the miraculous lights that had illuminated the cavern. If he had accepted her offer, everything might be different. Even if she had exaggerated in her story about the Spirosians and the Vardogers, he was convinced now that she was telling some species of truth. He could have had a rich, sparkling education. He could have shared in deep matters and worked with others more like himself to solve complex riddles. There would have been fresh meat and vegetables, scientific instruments-and the acquaintance of women, not girls but grown, knowing women like Viola Mercy. For the life of him, he could not recall what had blinded him to the epic opportunity he had been offered.

He saw not a single star or night bird. Only blank, cheerless clouds reflecting back the blur of lights from the foredeck and the pilothouse, and the intermittent flickers from the shacks and settlements along the sh.o.r.e. The dimness he glimpsed all around was surpa.s.sed only by what he felt inside. What did it matter if they did reach Texas, as unlikely as that still seemed? There would be no books or microscopes or dynamos there. (Note: the term "dynamo" had yet to be coined at that point; Lloyd's term for such a device was an "electrogene.") His desire was not to plow fields for cotton or wheat but to harvest the treasures of magnetic fields. To master lightning. He had no yen to raise snap beans and hogs like a high-ranking beast of burden. He yearned to penetrate the mysteries of minerals and numbers-and the secret machinery of the mind. To invent new forms of power-new vehicles, new hybrids of intelligent light.

What he foresaw for them in Texas was dust and wind and poverty, the perpetual seclusion of guilt and disgrace. "This is no way to live," he told the thick Territory night. And yet, as he expressed this verdict, he saw that perhaps for his parents things could be different. If it was true that he was the princ.i.p.al cause of their troubles-and there was a strong argument that this was the case-then would not his parents' lives, now that Hephaestus had recovered from his alcoholic debauchery, be happier without him? Of course they would grieve, he acknowledged, but ultimately they would worry less. The sorrow would pa.s.s, and then they would be free. Perhaps they would have another child in time, a child less likely to cause heartache and destruction. A child less gifted but not d.a.m.ned-or, at least, not dogged by shadows and perverse ambitions.

The more he dwelled on this notion the more it formed in his mind. Another bitter bite of shock for his father and mother, yes, but then release, maybe forever. Besides, since the old man was back among the living Lloyd had no place at the head of the family. His childhood had been lost in the scent of Miss Viola's thighs and in the glare of the sun when he fell to earth, and he had killed at least one other human being and perhaps two innocent monsters, and caused who knows what hardships and dismay for the professor and Brookmire, not to mention Sch.e.l.ling and his clandestine tribe. The solution to all the conundrums facing him seemed amazingly simple when he examined it in the faint light of the empty deck. He found himself climbing up onto the rail, staring down at the dark flow that surged around the shape of the Defiance Defiance just as the blood coursed through the vessels in his throbbing, cap-hidden head. All it would take was a little weight, and he would disappear without a trace. just as the blood coursed through the vessels in his throbbing, cap-hidden head. All it would take was a little weight, and he would disappear without a trace.

Speak to me, Lodema, cried out Lloyd in his mind, reaching out with all his will to feel the spirit of his dead twin. Give me a sign Give me a sign.

"You best get down," a voice behind him said, and the surprise almost sent him plunging into the black water. Instead, he tumbled back onto the deck, eyes wild, heart racing, all the old fears rekindled and the thought of jumping jettisoned utterly. "Who are you?" he rasped, but he might well have asked where.

"No d.a.m.n fool like you," the voice answered, and it seemed to Lloyd that the night itself was addressing him. The pitch and tone were female, but unlike any he could remember.

"I'm not a fool," he answered, raising himself up cautiously.

"Could've foxed me," the voice replied, and still Lloyd could not pick out a face or body in the gloom. Could this be some magical science of the Spirosians or their foes, or was he imagining it?

"Come out and let me see you," he said, and was struck dumb when a hand patted his shoulder in response.

He whirled about, but it took several seconds for his eyes to adjust and comprehend the new information that had presented itself so dangerously close beside him. Ever since the alley in St. Louis, he had prided himself on his alertness. Now, here someone had crept up within knifing distance-and a girl at that! She had emerged from under a roll of oilcloth behind one of the distress boats lashed to the rail. She was dressed in dark clothes, like a boy, and was as far as he could tell several years older than he-taller, anyway. She wore a skiff boy's cap and kept both hands in front of her. Lloyd blinked, half expecting her to fade back into the murk, but her figure held firm, like a phantom reluctantly fleshed.

"Come," she whispered, and seized his elbow. "Out of sight."

To his further astonishment, Lloyd yielded to her touch. She pulled him down one of the crew-ways to a step rail that led toward the cargo hold. He had peeped down that way the day before but had grown skittish when one of the crew members, a snaggle-toothed moron they called Clapper burped at him. Inside a tiny storeroom with an ax mounted on the wall, a bald man dozed on his hands at a knotwood table that played host to a tin cup and a spitting candle in a blackout box. The Night Girl shuffled Lloyd softly past and into the jumbled shadows of another chamber. A stack of firewood and some smoked meats hanging in nets met his eyes-a gaff pole, crates, kegs. With impressive certainty, the girl steered him through the maze to a trunk against a bulkhead, and then eased the trunk back without making a sound. She lifted a plank and motioned to him to step down into a hole.

Through the taut working wood Lloyd could feel the thrum and clunk of the engine, chugging at reduced speed now at night-and he imagined that he could also feel the vibrations of the other pa.s.sengers, tossing in their sleep or making love, fending off creditors in dreams, savage beasts or Indian war parties that awaited them in the wilderness beyond. He had visions of stepping down into some iron cage to be trapped, and yet he did as his strange guide directed and was relieved beyond measure when she followed him, the bare skin of her hands brushing against him when they were settled in the inky confinement just below. Shades of the false-bottomed graveyard, Lloyd thought.

They crouched on the floor, facing each other in total darkness, and he heard the plank slid back into place. A moment later, the mysterious girl lit a small storm lantern that sat between them. The light flared up as if inside a cave.

"Smuggler's hold," the girl muttered. "Doan n.o.body know we're here, so talk low."

There was something about her voice or, rather, her way of speaking that perplexed Lloyd. He let his eyes suck in the surroundings, which were so near there was not much to see. A rough bedroll and a sack of food that smelled like cold mutton and boiled potato-their refuge was no more than a large mouse hole. Then the girl pulled off her cap and he let out a stifled sigh.

She was a Negro with milk-coffee skin and eyes that shone like the color of honeycomb in the lantern reflection. Her hair was not kinky, puffed, or nappy like that of other dark girls he had seen but straight and tinged a rich cinnamon shade, clipped as though she had taken a pair of pinking shears to her head without a mirror. She smelled a little-or perhaps it was the mutton-but her teeth were clean and white, her nose sleek and narrow. He guessed her age to be about twelve, although it was hard to tell. Thirteen, maybe. He knew that she was taller than he, but there was a womanly cast to her face despite the hardened scowl she affected and the boyish clothes she wore-a rough cotton tow shirt under a mussel-blue fisherman's jacket and loose britches that looked as if they were st.i.tched out of some old curtain. The garments smelled of smoke and sweat, and the moist, greasy air of the boat. Her feet were bare, the soles as pale as b.u.t.ter.

"Why you gwain jump?" she demanded, and then cleared her throat.

Lloyd tried to think, but all he could do was stare at her.

"You crazy or you in trouble?"

The way she said this was different. Her speech seemed to shift between dialects.

"You can talk. I heard you. Whatchyou lookin' at?"

Lloyd had never felt so lost for words.

"What's your name?"

This question was delivered with a steeled self-a.s.surance.

"Are you scared?"

She sounded almost solicitous now, with the tone of fine breeding. He could imagine a wealthy white girl fondling the family cat, yet inches away from him was a Negro filly in sooty boy's garb with grown-up eyes and a soft, full mouth. He tried to look away but could not bring himself to do it.

"Worried 'bout bein' with a n.i.g.g.e.r?" she challenged, and her whole bearing seemed to change again.

"Who...are...you?" Lloyd managed at last, and felt rea.s.sured to be able to speak.

"Wailll..." she smirked. "Dey calls me Shoofly." She flashed her white teeth in a mocking way and then, in sharp finishing-school diction, added, "But I call myself Hattie. As in Henrietta LaCroix. That's my proper name."

Her posture and tone had shifted again, becoming haughty and cool, educated even. He could not control his gaze. The bra.s.sy glint of her high cheekbones, the b.u.t.termilk soles of her feet-everything confused him, and the thought of leaping into the river was as lost as something he had thrown overboard.

"That's...a fine...name," he gurgled, realizing to his mortification that he was becoming aroused between his legs.

The girl gave a slight snort and rolled her filbert-shaped eyes. "I don't need the likes of you to tell me that," she said, as her hands whisked out faster than he could move and zipped the skullcap from his head.

His hair was dirty and matted and, as good as it always felt to take off the cap, he felt naked now and was all the more embarra.s.sed about his incipient erection. What made matters worse was that he had the sudden impression that the girl was drawing some disdainful conclusion about him. He had sensed this att.i.tude from Negroes and mulattoes a few times before, and now the way she regarded him he could almost look back through her eyes, like a reversible lens, to each of those incidents, silent little moments of conspiratorial reckoning-sometimes condescending, other times rudely compa.s.sionate, and always happening at the speed of a glance. In her weird honeycomb eyes, he knew that he looked like trash.

"You're beautiful," he choked at last, and was instantly sorry he had said it.

The girl made a mute pucker with her lips and her face flared like copper under a flame, but she did not move.

"Like n.i.g.g.e.rs, huh?" She squinted, putting on her poor, shiftless voice again.

Lloyd could feel some violence coiling up inside her. She might have pulled a water moccasin out of her breast-or a blade-but he made no move to protect himself.

"Rub my feet," she commanded.

"W-what?" he stammered.

"Rub my feet, boy," she repeated, with a face like a fist, and in one fluid motion she brought her legs up over the lantern and into his lap, so that if she had extended her toes they would have pressed against his straining hardness.

Lloyd gulped and took the right foot in his fingers-and, without being able to take his eyes from hers, he began to stroke and caress the arch and ball, feeling the coa.r.s.e skin soften with the oil of his palm. The girl blew out the lantern.

His parents did not know where he was. No one on board knew where he was. He did not know whom he was with. She might have been mad, for all he knew-and must have been mad in some way to be hiding down there in that hole, stalking the boat alone late at night, with no family or traveling companions. A girl her age. And a Negro-or half Negro. Yet, plunked down now in complete darkness with her, ma.s.saging the calloused flesh of her foot, he was flooded with an unknown calmness. He kept his hands at their task, trying not to breathe.

What seemed like a very long time pa.s.sed, and at last the girl said, "It's different in the dark. Some folks is afraid of it. I ain't-I'm not. Are you?"

"Sometimes," Lloyd managed. "But not...now..."

"Call me Hattie. What I call you?"

"L-loyd."

"All right, then. Lloyd. Were you really going to jump?"

Lloyd could no longer picture her firmly in his mind. Just her eyes. He felt as if he were caressing the darkness itself. Her tone was sultry and soothing, but the words were young and white. Southern. Mixed up. Like someone in a dream.

"I don't know," he answered.

"Someone's affer you," Hattie said, again sounding black.

"How do you know that?"

"I can feel it. I can smell it."

"I thought that was mutton."

The girl gave a light grunt.

"Well, you don't have to tell me about it, if'n you don't want to. Got troubles enough of my own."

"Are you...running away?"

"Yep," she answered. "I surely am. Folks affer me for sure."

"Are you...a...slave?"

The softening foot withdrew, then thrust forward deeper into his hands.

"Not anymore," the girl replied, her voice whitening once more.