CHAPTER 1
Rara Avis
AFTER HIS PERPLEXING MEETING WITH MOTHER TONGUE, LLOYD found it hard to rouse himself in the morning. Through a haze of threats and twisted images, his consciousness was brought back to St. Louis and the stable by the piggish noises of conjugal struggle. While the manufacture of the flying toys had brought his parents together in the matter of practical survival, their intimate life had not recovered since the Chicken Germain—root salve treatment, and Hephaestus’s libido had been bottled to bursting. Up to this point both parents had been discreet regarding Lloyd’s awareness of their lovemaking, but the urgency of the need and the systemic erosion of his dignity provoked Hephaestus to risk skin discomfort and to break with all decorum in a loud, and to Lloyd’s ears, exceedingly boorish way. Lloyd could not tell how much his mother resisted at first, but in the end she succumbed and seemed almost to enjoy it. Perhaps her need was too great to ignore as well.
Lloyd was smart enough to know that, in the matter of sex at least, there was much that he yet had to learn. Still, it sickened him to hear them, for in one guttural exclamation from the other side of a pile of mice-warm hay he realized that this was how he had come to be. At least in part. Maybe the circumstances had been different—the place, the mood, the smells and tastes—but at the heart it was this same bestial dance-brawl. “There should be a better way to be born,” Lloyd said to himself, even as his own desire was shamefully aroused at the sounds of his parents. Then he clutched himself to fulfillment.
He pulled up his pants and dragged from his pocket the two glass eyes. The more he examined them, the more they seemed to examine him. Disconcerted and afraid, he thrust them back into the depths of the bag, far down into the wads of soiled clothes where he had hidden the box adorned by the Ambassadors from Mars and his uncle’s letter. Then he stowed the bag well under the hay.
None of the Sitturds had anything to say while they breakfasted on stale rolls and can-brewed coffee. Chastened by postcoital remorse, Hephaestus and Rapture did not press Lloyd for any information on how he had slept and gave no indication they knew that he had disappeared in the night.
Meanwhile Lloyd’s brain, once free of his own sexual obsession, began whirring with worries and considerations about the Spirosians and the Vardogers. Could the things that Mother Tongue had told him be true? A war in time between two great secret societies—the real powers behind all other secret societies—the hidden orchestrators of history now brought into lethal conflict over the issues of slavery and expansion, the destiny of America?
He had seen the lights; he could not get around that. Some unthinkable harnessing of electrical energy. And the library beneath the burial ground, the riverboat festooned with moss—he had seen these things with his own eyes. Still, he could not believe that he had been told the truth. Something in a secret place inside him rebelled at the choice he had been given, and the feel of the stuffed dog on the couch returned to make his skin crawl. He was certain that he had heard it breathe.
He bolted from the stable still swallowing a lump of bread, wondering if once he had gone his parents might continue their passionate battle, or if his mother would go off to her laundry and nursing duties while his father returned to his aimless disintegration. It appeared to him that as his capabilities increased theirs diminished, so that even his mother had become his child now. His work was how the family fed itself. And if the family was somehow feeding upon itself, he felt that it was not his fault. St. Louis was the poison. The dance-hall lights. The necessity of money. All the hopeless and hope-mad people wandering through. The one solution he could see lay in getting back on the road to Texas, back to their dream. Then his father might wake and his mother would remember her old, quick joy. He ran to meet Mulrooney, who was camped on a dry-grass common to the west.
The Ambassadors and the Ladies Mulrooney were all sick from rancid milk. The tent stank of their sufferings and hummed with flies. Regrettably, a competition between the two largest of the flying clubs that had formed was scheduled for noon along the riverbank. Given the gastrointestinal crisis that had seized Mulrooney, the showman did not feel fit or able to attend, so Lloyd was left to gather all the soaring toys he could carry on the back of one of the wagon’s horses and make his way there all by himself. The obligation of rewarding the faithful and the opportunity to make some much needed sales was too important. But it did nothing to allay his fears. He had never faced the wall of faces on his own before. Never all alone. He realized that Mother Tongue had been right in a way: he was Mulrooney’s monkey. He had always had the showman to lean on, to back him up. Now it would just be him, a little boy from a small town—a boy with a big brain and bigger dreams, from a small-minded town, now confronted by what seemed a huge city and the inherent hostility of strangers.
The sky was achingly clear, and a gathering had already formed by the time he reached the bank where the competition was to be held. At his arrival, a cheer went up and people rushed toward him. They all wanted to greet the “little genius”—the boy who made the paper birds and gliding gadgets,a hundred or so of which now lay on the grass in the summer sun.
The onslaught of adulation puffed up Lloyd’s spirits (and ego). Maybe St. Louis wasn’t such an evil place after all. Perhaps fame and fortune could yet be his. That would save his family. Surely. Yes, there were cruelties and injustices. Vigilance committees, bushwhackings, and intimidation. Freed blacks could be falsely arrested and sold back into slavery, and some of the antislave voices were nonetheless anti-Negro, advocating the establishment of a whites-only territory. But right in front of him were people lined up to see him and shake his hand—many, if not most of them, good people (a few of them the same good people who had looked on as Francis McIntosh fried).
With newfound confidence Lloyd scanned the throng, trying to pinpoint some presence that was hostile—one of the Claws & Candle spies that Mother Tongue had warned him about. Was it the man with thinning hair who was still wearing his leather blacksmith’s apron, the same kind his father used to wear back in Ohio when he was working—when he did work? What about the striped-vest barber or any of a number of mulatto traders, Spanish boatmen, or French fortune hunters? Perhaps one of the high-toned ladies hiding behind their fans. He tore the crowd apart face by face. But they were all watching him, and none of them appeared hostile. Yet they all could become so, he knew. He had already learned how fast the tastes of the horde could change—how insatiable they were for novelty, for innovation, and for failure. Whether or not the Spirosians and the Vardogers were real, he understood that the cries of ovation he received were but catcalls in reverse. The words of Mother Tongue came back to him: “No one goes far who travels alone.”
Alone now with his cargo of toys for sale, he felt the painful wisdom of her words. Then he glanced back up at the soothing blue emptiness overhead. That was something important that she had overlooked. There were places one could only go alone. That was the difference between the assembled mass on the riverbank and himself, Lloyd realized. The same problem as in Zanesville. What no one else could grasp, or what they could but dream about, he could do. It put his relationship with his family at risk. It put his life at risk, yet what would he be if he did not reach out? How could he lift them up—how could he save his father from himself—if he did not reach further, higher? Fear of the crowd? Yes, but what of the fear of the future?
In that fleeting instant before he was forced, all by himself, to welcome the masses and to officiate at the start of the competition—to hawk his wares like a common street vendor, to represent the interests of not one but two misfit families—he saw the sky opening before him like a welcome beyond anything that Mother Tongue and Schelling could offer. It was his destiny to ascend still higher. He would rise up into the sun above the river and all that it represented. Above the flatboats and the barge lines. Above the steeples and the columns, the plush townhouses and the claptrap cottages. He would soar above every dock walloper and carriage hack—so high that every merchant and magnate would see him, not just these few folk scattered here. There might yet come a time to travel in time, as his broken father had dreamed of. But for now, what people would pay to see was a kind of travel they could understand. Memories of Zanesville and the beaver came back to him. The trick—and perhaps it was a trick that the Vardogers, if they were real, had mastered—was how to scare people in the right way. Bewonderment. For what is fear but the other side of the nickel of surprise?
The competition was a tremendous success. The club that called itself Wings Over Walnut Street managed a narrow (but very popular) victory over The St. Louis Dispatch–sponsored Harriers. Young Lloyd was interviewed for the first time. The questions came fast and furious about where he got his ideas and where he lived and went to school—answers that he fudged as best he could. He was able to sell almost all the soarers he had brought, and he was repeatedly asked what new treats of whimsy he had in store. When the crowd broke up and people resumed their humdrum lives again, he was riding on air. From the tawdry trickery of a medicine show he had created a genuine phenomenon. Then and there, he made a decision about the patronage of Mother Tongue.
After returning the horse and giving a cursory report to Mulrooney (who had been reduced to squatting upon a makeshift thunderbox in abdominal agony), Lloyd kept his appointment at the bookshop, sleepy though he was. Schelling was there as usual, primly dressed under a veneer of dust. The humped man was reserved in his remarks, 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.