but Lloyd sensed that he was trying to sound him out for clues to his response to Mother Tongue’s interview. The boy focused on his reading with renewed intensity. Schelling masked his curiosity as best he could and let the boy study until the normal time without interrogation-something he was soon to regret.
CHAPTER 2. Ascension and Deception
WHEN LLOYD LEFT THE BOOKSHOP, HE WAS FOLLOWED. THE MAN wore a black flat hat and was dressed like a Friend or Quaker in a dark single-breasted collarless coat without buttons. Two perspiring Negroes emerged from a furniture store trundling a sideboard, and Lloyd used their cover to slip behind a butcher’s wagon. He waited until the man tailing him was just pulling even before darting out and snatching the big black hat. The man uttered an oath, but Lloyd was too quick for him. With a flick of his wrist, he sent the flat hat flying under an ambling oxcart, where it became flatter still, and then shot off back down the street the way he had come, his little legs working like steam pistons. Once around the corner, he ducked down the glassblower’s lane and then back around to the glue renderer’s over a tomcat fence. He did not spot the man in the buttonless coat again, although the more he thought about it, the more he realized that it was possible that the figure had been female.
That night, at Lloyd’s uncompromising insistence, the Sitturds decamped from the stable and took refuge in a boiled linseed oil-smelling mission house operated by the Temperance Society (where, to Rapture’s relief, Hephaestus was forced to swear off his drinking and men and women were not allowed to sleep together). The next morning, on the way to see the showman, Lloyd learned that a fire had broken out in their former abode. Only one of the bony nags that had been stabled there (and was not long for the gluepot anyway) had died in the conflagration. No one else was injured. “Trust your intuition,” St. Ives had advised him.
Maybe it was just a coincidence, Lloyd thought. The building was a tinderbox just waiting for a spark. But maybe not. Mother Tongue had warned him that he was being watched, and he knew for himself that he had been followed. Of course, it was possible, he reasoned, that the spy in the buttonless coat worked for Mother Tongue and Schelling, whoever they really were. In any case, arson-if that was what was involved-was a big step up from being tailed. The safe thing to do was lie low until the family had enough money to leave town. Lloyd had made up his mind that he was not going to accept Mother Tongue’s proposal. Nor, if he could help it, was he going to fall into the hands of the Vardogers-supposing that they were real and were really after him. He was going to go his own way.
He never returned to Schelling’s bookshop, and the next morning he told the still weak but recovering Mulrooney that he intended to take a break from the soaring toys in preparation for an entirely new kind of venture that would be noteworthy and lucrative beyond any of their previous ambitions. This latter note cheered and “bewondered” Mulrooney, but the “unfortunate intelligence” that the boy would not be present to stimulate further sales in the flying gizmos when the local interest was running “so heartwarmingly hot” provoked boisterous resistance.
Lloyd took pains to point out that a little time off, and the resulting suspense this would create, would be good for business. Besides, he needed time to perfect his new innovation and, as the showman knew so well, magic did not just happen.
Mulrooney plunged into the dumps over Lloyd’s news, believing that the lad, in an attempt (probably encouraged by his parents) to show that he was wise to the ways of show business, was holding out for a larger share of the takings. The old salesman sensed that he had reached the
Life in the mission house brought the Sitturds to serious grief. For Lloyd there was a constant threat from the inmates, many having bounced between the jail and the insane asylum. For Rapture there were endless smiles to fake, chamber pots to clean, and boils to lance. But Hephaestus suffered the worst in the Cold Water Army. While he craved succulent hams glazed with brown sugar and sweet fat orange-peel muffins, he was served sinewy gruel and biscuits as hard as musketballs-then told to wash the dishes. Lloyd would spare him no pocket money from his accumulating savings, and Rapture refused to sneak into the pews with him after lights-out to spoon and nuzzle. The gimpy blacksmith found himself brooding over the providential letter from his brother-and dreaming of his forge in Zanesville, of toad-sticking and fishing in the Licking River with a jug of his elderberry wine beside him. There was no place for him in St. Louis-no place for him in the family anymore. He had sold what tools he had left from their earlier misadventures. Little Jack Redhorse’s mash was pestering his kidneys and giving him the shakes. Now all the prayer-meeting hubbub and the sudden interruption of his escalating alcohol consumption drove him into a hallucinatory frenzy, so that Brother Dowling was forced to threaten him with ejection from the refuge. Then he was gone. Just like that, one morning.
Rapture, who felt that all her “speritual” links and secret skills had run dry (in the same way that Lloyd’s mystic connection with his ghost sister had been severed), returned from a foot-swollen day of drudgery for the sawbones who patted her rear end to find that her husband was not curled in his sweaty cot in the men’s dormitory and in fact had not been seen since what passed for breakfast (which often did not pass for several days). How I hate my father sometimes, Lloyd thought. If only I did not love him.
Rapture cried herself to sleep that night, missing the garden back in Zanesville, her herbs and remedies, the cooking, the animals, the life they used to have. Lloyd took the news in apparent stride, keeping his hurt and worry to himself. He dared not tell her about the Spirosians or the Vardogers, and if his father was bent upon his own destruction he saw nothing that he could do at the moment save what he was trying to do-one final show that would be remembered forever in St. Louis. One grand performance that could rescue her.
From the platform of his modest celebrity, he would leap into the rarefied blue of legend and newfound wealth. Statesmen, speculators, and the captains of industry would woo him. He would save his mother and father, and they would not need to go to Texas to live off his uncle’s charity. They could stay in St. Louis. They would eat French cheeses and broiled chicken. They would have a Negro footman and drawers full of patent medicine and ready-made clothes, a snooker table and brass spittoons, and decanters of absinthe, the Green Fairy that St. Ives drank. One day he would track the gambler down and invite him back to work for him. The rooms of their white- pillared mansion would be lined with books, telescopes, armillary spheres, and oil paintings of naked women with breasts like rolling waves. It would be “up tuh de notch,” as his mother would say. If the Spirosians and the Vardogers wanted his loyalty, then let there be a bidding war-not a war of nerves but one that he could win, with negotiations out in the open, and with buckwheat griddle cakes, sirloins, and giant influence machines into the bargain.
When Hephaestus did not return the next morning, Rapture grew even more morose, but Lloyd assumed that he had sought refuge with the mud and root dwellers of the shantytown below the docks. It was true that there were razor fights and fisticuffs down there, but there was also boiled crawfish and banjo tunes, so perhaps the old man was not so crazy after all. In any case, Lloyd had bigger birds to fly, and he turned all the strength of his being toward his goal.
Via a circuitous route to throw off any pursuit, he went each day out to a rolling stretch of open land to the northwest of the city and began experimenting. Long before 1894, when Lawrence Hargrave was lifted from the ground by a chain of his cellular kites, or 1903, when Samuel Franklin Cody crossed the English Channel on a vessel towed by kites, the young genius from Zanesville was contemplating the logistics of his own ascension. It was what Mulrooney would have described as a “hurculanean task,” for his imagination sought to integrate balloon, kite, and glider design to create an aerial display that would leave the people of St. Louis aghast.
He recognized that the issues involved in powered flight could not be solved in his present circumstances. The development of an internal-combustion engine both effective and light enough to drive an aerocraft would require tools, time, access to a machine shop, money, and fuel that he did not have. His idea was not to try to invent something new from scratch but to perfect what he already knew about. For background and inspiration, he had taken from Schelling’s shop
