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 passengers, save a few men playing poker on top of a barrel in what they called the poop-deck salon, had taken to their cabins. The burly crew, who were not resting fitfully below, huddled around lanterns, sucking on pungent cigars.
The Sitturds’ 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 spaces 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 shore. The dimness he glimpsed all around was surpassed 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 principal 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 pass, 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 damned—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 Schelling 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 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.
“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 damn 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 passengers, 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 nobody 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 stitched 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 butter.
“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-assurance.
“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 nigger?” she challenged, and her whole bearing seemed to change again.
“Who … are … you?” Lloyd managed at last, and felt reassured 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 brassy glint of her high cheekbones, the buttermilk 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 embarrassed 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 attitude 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 compassionate, 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 niggers, 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 coarse 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, massaging 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 passed, 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.
“You don’t act like …” Lloyd’s cracking voice trailed off.
“Thass ’cause I ain’t!” Hattie hissed. “Not for true. I’m from downriver—the Mississippi. Long way. Been sneakin’ on boats and layin’ low and trampin’ for more than two moons. Covered a lot of ground. Gwain to keep movin’.”
“So … you escaped? Were you on a farm?”
“Plantation. Big one. With a big white house and los of niggers.”
The last word stalled in the air like a belch.
“W-where?” Lloyd asked, squeezing the other foot.
“They calls it—call it—the Corners. Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louise-y-anna. Down on the line there. Grand place back off the river a few mile.”
“Why—did you run away? Was the master mean?”
The girl’s right hand whipped out like a frightened bat and cuffed his face in the dark.
“The mastah was my papa!”
Lloyd’s cheek smarted from the blow, but he did not stop working his fingers into her other foot, which seemed to him to have taken on a life of its own, like some cave animal he was cuddling. He thought back to the professor’s monkey, Vladimir, and Mother Tongue’s odd cat.
“I was born in the cabin, as they say. But he allas treated me special. Right. Gave me learning. On the sly. Told me one day I’d go to school. Europe. One day … I’d be a lady. Fine dresses. Books. Music.”
“Then why … did you run away?” Lloyd gasped, confused about why his companion in the dark had thrown away the same sorts of chances that he had.
“His wife hated me! She knew the truth. She saw I waddn’t like the other niggers. She hated my mother, but she hated me more. When I’s younger, it was just mean. But when I got a figure—and she found out I could read and write and do sums—she became a devil. Thought it was a sin that I should know about paintings and novels. Wouldn’t raise a hand to me long as Mama was alive. But when Mama died last year—I reckon she was poisoned! Then the old thing laid for me.”
Lloyd swallowed hard.
“She sent me up to Memphis to be sold away. It was her daddy had the land first. She was older ’n Papa. He married her back when she was still a little pretty. But she got crooked and sick—and evil inside. Lay up in her white bed all day dabbing her throat with cologne and whining for the nigger girls to fan her and shoo the flies. Story was she lost a baby. Wouldn’t let Papa come to her bed after that. So … he came … to my mother.”
“Why didn’t your father … protect you?”
“He tried.” Hattie sighed, with a mixture of fatigue and sadness that made Lloyd lighten his touch. “But men are weak. They’re all … slaves.”
This last assertion made Lloyd wince, but he kept rubbing the foot, subconsciously easing it against his erection. This girl was like no one he had ever imagined. Shining machines and flying over rivers and cities did not seem so wondrous as before.
“Papa’s heart was broken when Mama died,” the girl continued, as if she were reconsidering the events as she recounted them.
“He sounds … like a sad man,” Lloyd offered, feeling stupid. He kept imagining her eyes in the dark.
“He was a brave man and a wise man, and a good man,” Hattie insisted. “Let all the niggers read the Bible—and more. Got ’em learning arithmetic—and the stars. The neighbor white folks hated him for that.”
“He must miss you now.”
“He’s dead,” Hattie said, and must have reached in the sack for a hunk of mutton, because Lloyd could hear her jaws click. “Hung hisself.”
“He did?” the boy wheezed, thinking back to his own actions on the deck.
“Died in shame,” the girl continued. “Man named Barlow—plantation owner nearby—challenged him to a duel. Said he was a nigger lover and a traitor to the South! Papa strung himself up the night before. His old wife had her way after that. Her and the overseer.”
Lloyd did not know what to say. It reminded him of the story Mother Tongue had told him. Perhaps the man had not hanged himself. But it was not his place to speak now.
“Give me your hands.”
“What?” Lloyd whispered, feeling his stomach turn.
“Give me your damn hands,” Hattie hissed.
He loosened his grasp of her feet and stretched out his hands. There was a rustle of fabric and then he touched warm skin. Girlish breasts beginning to form. A fragile hint of womanly fullness. And ripeness. His own skin tingled. But her flesh was ridged and welted. The body before him leaned into his grope, filling his fingers with a different kind of darkness. Lloyd could feel the girl’s breath, mutton-scented, on his face, while his intrigued, frightened hands were allowed to roam over her bare skin.
Where there should have been nipples there were lumpy crosses of scars. His fingertips explored small slices and pocks and bumps that reminded him of the Ambassadors’ secret hierograms. The girl’s entire chest and belly rippled with markings that seemed to radiate an angry heat.
“They … did … this … to you?”
“Not all at once, mind,” Hattie whispered. “They took their sweet time. Her and Riddick.”
Lloyd recollected the tone of St. Ives’s voice when he told of his maiming at the hands of the diabolical Rutherford. The odor of the mutton was starting to make him nauseated. Or maybe it was the scarring.
“And that’s not all they did,” Hattie hissed—and Lloyd caught the faintest hint of a sob in her voice. He pulled his hands back.
“I’ll never have chillum—children. And … I’ll never have pleasure. With a man. Understand? I reckon you old enough to know what I mean. That’s what the old hag wanted. Then she sold me off. Up Memphis way. That’s when I run off. First chance I had. Only chance I thought I’d get. ”
Lloyd could think of nothing to say. His hands had retracted from the girl’s wounded skin, and yet had been drawn to the feel of her, as if through some perverse attraction. His stomach growled—still his erection stiffened. The space they were in seemed to contract around them, as if somewhere deep within he retained the memory of what it had been like to be so close to his twin sister, Lodema, back in the mother darkness.
“So. Lloyd?” Hattie inquired after a long moment’s silence. “Why you wanna end your life? ’Cause you a mongrel colored boy in disguise?”
“What?”
“I see through you. Niggers will. Smart ones, anywise. I knew it the first time I saw you sneakin’ around with the Judas face.”
Lloyd remained still, listening through the coffin-creaking walls.
“You gots woes and worries? You gots scars, too?” Hattie badgered. “Hmm? Let me feel ’em!”
“I killed a man,” he answered at last. “Maybe three. Back in St. Louis.”
“You lie!” Hattie scoffed and jabbed her feet into his belly.
“How a li’l skunk like you do that?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Lloyd replied. “But I did. Just as sure as I’m sitting here.”
“White men? Or niggers?”
“I killed a … slave …” Lloyd answered, not sure what to say about the Ambassadors from Mars.
“Well, then. That ain’t so bad,” Hattie said, sounding younger and blacker again. “Less’n he was somebody else’s. And I reckon he was—way y’all look. I seen your mama slinkin’ round, too. She white, I eat your stinky hat. But she pretty and smart. Plays good.”
This calling attention to his mother’s ancestry, and therefore his own, did not sit well with Lloyd, although he was relieved that she did not seem to know about his father. He had come to believe that the family had overcome or managed to obscure their mixed blood, and that their problems lay on another level. But seen now through the eyes of this blighted creature before him—in the dark, torn between tribes and destinies like two girls separated at birth by a knife and then sewn back up in a single body—he felt again the stirrings of the monstrous within himself. Had not the professor once joked that he was as anomalous as the Martian brothers in his own way? He may not have scars on his skin like this half-educated, half-slave girl, but what if someone were to feel deeper?
His head and heart were inundated—the hosanna-shouting Mule Christian below the courthouse, the chatter of the freakish twins borne away into the sky. Every detail of the infernal incident came rushing back upon him like the rising of the ground. And before he could master himself he burst into tears.
“Boy, stop that!” Hattie demanded. “You gots nuthin’ to cry over. You want me to strike a light and show you what these scars of mine look like?”
Lloyd choked on his words. “I … I was done, too,” he gasped. “In St. Louis … this ugly man … in an alley one night.”
The girl paused at this announcement. This sounded to her like a much more believable claim than the murders the boy had mentioned before. But she wanted to be clear before projecting any sympathy.
“He take down your pants?”
“Ripped them down,” Lloyd sobbed. “Then he slammed my head down into a dung cart … and … and … he did me. Hard as he could.”
Hattie LaCroix remained silent and still, waiting for him to catch his breath. She knew there was more to come.
“He said … he said … I felt just like a little … pig!” Lloyd wailed at last, and even though his voice never broke above a whisper, the admission broke him wide open.
Had that horror and humiliation been what had driven him to take to the sky? He had dreamed up the flight before the rape, but there in the dark intimacy of the hold, with this fellow fugitive, it struck him that maybe there was more to the grand design of his disastrous undertaking—the insistence on fulfilling it—than he had seen before. He knew the man had a harelip, but it was the meat-slab hands he remembered. The terrible, grunting skewering—so different from his afternoon with Miss Viola … so different …
More like some hideous revenge … of … Phineas …
The floodgates were open now, and when she saw that she could not command the boy’s tears away she set aside the unlit lantern and moved, so that her legs were twined around him. His body fell against hers, his wet, sputtering face pressing against her still exposed bosom—half boy’s, half girl’s and raked like a battlefield—hot tears soaking her like an Indian-summer rain across shallow graves. His breathing heaved as she clutched him closer, at first to quiet him and then out of some deeper need of her own.
He smelled like other children she had cradled in dirt-floor cabins and dogwood arbors, like the Persian rugs she had helped Sarah beat with a stick broom out on the fine green, rolling lawn. He smelled like her desperate, chicken-stealing tramp-night stowaway antics. He smelled like life—dreadful, sinful, tragic, precious—and she held him and held him. The baby she would never have, the white child she would never be.
“Shush, boy,” she whispered in his ear, embracing him, though the tears soaked her more than him. And still he cried. She suspected that he was not one to cry much—too proud, just like herself. So he would be full of it, like a tent roof too heavy with rain to tip. He was full of a lot of things, she sensed.
Boy though he was, she felt the manhood bursting out of him. It was surprising in one his age, but she had become accustomed to surprises. She stripped down his britches, as the garments had been rent from her in the past, taking hold of his privacy as if reaching for a chunk of meat. Maybe a different kind of darkness would cure his grief. Boys, like men, were like that.
Yes, he was young. Very young. But what did that matter when there were people hunting her?
She had done it before with a boy named Samuel and another named Tee, with a white man named Johnson and another called Cooley. She had always done what she had had to do. And she had survived what had been done to her. In a corncrib and a canebrake. In a shell-pink high-ceilinged bedroom, razor-stropped to an iron cot with the queer scents of magnolia and quinine oozing in.
Lloyd was too jangled to resist. Even as his precocious lust sprang forth, he gave in—let her lead. Hattie used him like a rag to staunch a hemorrhage. Hers—and his, too. She always imagined blood streaming from between her legs now. She would wake in a cold sweat at the memory of it. Not like the blood of the moon, the blood of the garden. No, like the blood of the living dead. She could take no pleasure and extract no seed that would take fruit—still, she would take something. And maybe in doing so now she would give something back.
They merged into each other’s wounds with an urgency that made them both quake.