Enigmatic Pilot

washed up on a sandbar. The weather was growing warmer and the bugs thicker, sultry nights becoming humid with whiskey and cigar smoke, perfume dabbed to wrists and crotches.

St. Ives was well acquainted with the ship’s chief entertainer, a singer named Viola Mercy, a tall buxom brunette whose lavender-scented pantaloons filled Lloyd’s mind with notions and cravings of a new and exquisitely painful kind. Thrice a day she performed in the dining saloon of the Fidele, which was laid out around a dance-hall stage with a heavy velvet aubergine curtain. And thrice a day she would sing a song that the boy grew to love.

There’s a place I know

Where I always go

There to dream of you

And hope that you’ll be true

And someday I pray

That you’ll find your way

Back to the secret place

Within my heart.

He became obsessed with the songstress and her exotic apparel: ostrich feathers, silk stockings, lace brassieres. How he wanted to infiltrate her private domain and experience the majesty of this dark beauty. (In truth, she kept a flask of rye in her garter belt and had done as much singing on her back as she had onstage.)

Meanwhile, St. Ives opened the boy’s eyes to the larger world, relating to him the news of the day, with its cults of gangsterism becoming political forces-Tammany Hall warring with the Bowery Boys in New York, angry hordes descending on Mormons, Protestant secret societies with names like the Supreme Order of the Star- Spangled Banner murdering Catholics, abolitionists dragged through the streets, slave families broken, the women raped, the men castrated and lynched. St. Ives had dire warnings about what lay ahead, although he himself took no sides and indeed was chiefly concerned about how such turmoil might be turned to personal advantage. “In confusion there is profit, my young friend,” he told Lloyd.

More to the boy’s liking, however, the gambler let him examine the metal hand. The plates that formed the exterior were made of polished steel, but so well forged that they provided exceptional strength without the corresponding weight. Inside lurked the potential for a fantastic array of implements, from the throat-cutting blades that had appeared at the poker table to a choice of such accessories as cigar scissors, a lock pick, and a sewing kit-not to mention that the miniature compartments could also be used to hold coins or keys, vials of various potions (such as chloral hydrate), snuff, ink, even poison. However, St. Ives was not forthcoming with any intelligence about how he had come by it, until one evening.

It was a close night and a full moon shone down on the river, so the captain had the boiler fired. Lloyd had been encouraged out of the family’s cabin to allow his parents some time alone, a practice he was growing more and more curious about. Only the thump of the paddle blades stirred the quiet, so that the occasional sounds of a baying dog or the crashing of a caving bank reached the deck, where he found the gambler smoking a cigar, staring down at the wake.

“You wonder about it, don’t you, boy?” St. Ives asked, and tapped a bright ash into the water. “How I came by the hand-and how I came to lose my own.”

“I do,” Lloyd agreed. “There’s no hiding there’s a story behind it.”

“Well put, lad,” the gambler said, nodding. “And well spoken. Like a gentleman. I will reward your discretion. After all, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Partners,” Lloyd responded.

“Indeed. Gentlemanly put again. Well. Some people would say I asked to have this done to me.”

“You asked for it?”

“I said some people would say that,” the gambler answered, and his face went glassy, as if he were now looking at something long ago. Then some hatred surged up within him, like a dead log that had been submerged in the river.

“Ten years ago, I used to be the secretary to a very rich man in the East. He valued my memory and my head for calculations. He was a fellow of extreme cleverness and cruelty-Junius Rutherford, or so he called himself then, but that was not his real name, I am sure. Owner of the Behemoth Formulary and Gun Works in Delaware. For himself he made the hand-and others like it. Said he’d lost his own in a foreign war-or with the Injuns or in a sword fight. His stories changed with his audience.”

“So do yours,” Lloyd pointed out.

“W-ell… yes…” stammered St. Ives. “A man must be flexible, given the unkindness of fate. But I am inclined to think that he was the cause of his own misfortune. He had the marking of an acid burn on his face as well. My belief is that one of his experiments backfired on him. He was always fiddling with new combinations of chemicals- schemes for weaponry. And other things. Weirder things. ‘Better to be the head of a louse than the tail of a lion’ was his motto, and if ever there were a fellow to plant the head of one creature upon another he was the one. His estate was like nothing you can imagine.”

“How so?” Lloyd asked, certain that he could imagine much more than St. Ives.

“He called it the Villa of the Mysteries, and the name was apt. There were lightning rods all about, and he had hung up effigies around the grounds to keep the meddlesome townsfolk from spying. That and his dogs, a breed I had never seen before and hope never to see again. Gruesome beasts.”

“Go on,” Lloyd said.

“Well… I know this will sound like flapdoodle, but he carried a seashell around with him. Like a polished black conch. He listened to it-as people sometimes do with shells, thinking they can hear the sea. But he did it often and, stranger still, he spoke into his.”

“What did he say?” Lloyd asked. “Who was he talking to?”

“I wish I knew.” St. Ives sighed. “He spoke in a language I could never understand. To whom, I have no idea. I assumed he was touched in the head. And I had good reason to think so. The estate had an artificial lake, and on the water he had a fleet of automatic model ships that reenacted the British defeat of the Spanish Armada. And there was a greenhouse full of orchids that looked like they were made of glass, but they were alive and grew. God’s truth. He loved books and fine things, but most of all he prized unexplainable things.”

“How do you mean, unexplainable?” Lloyd asked. There were not many things you could actually perceive that could not be explained, he felt. Even the way the fancy woman with the medicine show had seemed able to be in two places at once back in Zanesville. It was the things that went unnoticed that were mysterious.

“There was a collection of paintings. Flemish, I think,” the gambler continued, puffing. “Milky, watery landscapes without much obvious interest-except that over time they changed.”

“You mean with the light?”

“No!” the gambler exclaimed. “I mean changed. One day a peasant in the picture would be pitching hay, the next day a hay cart would be seen departing-a cart that had not been there before!”

Interesting, Lloyd thought.

“And Rutherford had a huge aquarium that he would swim in himself. He had a kind of vessel built-it looked like a diamond coffin-in which he could stay submerged for long periods of time. He used it to study his electric eels and those jellyfish creatures we call the Portuguese man-of-war.”

Lloyd gave a low whistle. He would have liked some eels himself.

“Yes!” St. Ives shook his head. “You see, I would not have been in his service had I not found something in him to admire-and there was much to hold my interest. The trouble was I found too much to admire and ended up taking too much interest in his wife, an auburn-haired beauty with eyes like sapphires.”

“You fell in love-with his wife?” Lloyd blurted, but when he spoke an image of Miss Viola rose up in his mind. A glimpse he had had of one of her corsets. It had become confused in his mind with his mystic twin.

“And she with me!” St. Ives replied. “My beautiful Celeste. Never will I experience such bliss in this life again!”

A storm of rage passed through the gambler’s eyes.

“Rutherford was cruel to Celeste and ignored her-spent too much time with his compounds and machines. He was also addicted to a narcotic that he manufactured himself. A transparent liquid, tinted a faint blue-like damson