Enigmatic Pilot (28 page)

There was tongue and breath, kneading and brushing. There were eyelashes and whispers, and the simple ecstasy of mutual
grooming. Instead of rutting, panting, and spurting hot wet seed, Lloyd learned some of the secrets of temptation—of fondling, kissing, the exquisite anticipation of a feather down a belly. And he learned the profound wholeness of a shared silence.

It was like being back in the womb again, in a way, he thought. But a new kind of guiltless womb made by consensual, collusive imaginations—two people giving birth to themselves through the vulnerability, faith, and vigor of true nakedness. For all the talk of conspiracies back in St. Louis, this was the one conspiracy he was certain that he wanted to join.

That night, after they had returned from out of the river—after they had mated and consecrated each other with hushed entwinement—Hattie said to him softly, “Roll over.”

Lloyd winced at this, bristling with fear and embarrassment. Some intuition born of their intimacy warned him of what she was thinking. Yet he could not resist her direction, although he asked in a quavering voice, “What are you going to do?” Knowing already.

She moved the candle closer and produced from behind a crate a tin stew pan full of soapsuds, water, and a flannel rag. “You seen how I was hurt,” she said. “That all’s had time to heal. I want to see if you all right. You likely didn’t say nuthin’.”

To his amazement, he found himself turning over onto his stomach, as she brought the candle closer still. He flashed back to Mother Tongue’s story about the Vardogers, the Order of the Claws & Candle. That was the thing about candles—about all sources of light, heat, and hope, he realized. Some have caring fingers … some have seeking claws. The desire to help and heal … the call to crush or to possess. The two sides of the coin of bewonderment: inspiration or terror.

Hattie’s hands were both firm and respectful. She washed him there, the part of our bodies we are all most sensitive about. She dried him, and then brought the candle in close enough for him to feel the urgent caress of the flame.
In truth, he had often bled when relieving himself since the incident in the alley, and the feedbag-and-gut-clog diet had not helped. But the pain had eased. He felt very exposed for her to have bathed him that way, though—to examine him. But who better to do it?

“You all right,” she pronounced at last. Then she said, “You gwain be all right, too. Lotta boys had that done to ’em, they’d neva be good inside again. You got nuthin’ to be ’shamed of—hear? You let the pain go, all right? You keep yo’ anger. But you let the pain go.”

“How … how do I do that?” Lloyd asked, his voice muffled, as he lay facedown on the strewn hole floor.

Hattie said, “Reach behine you and pull your cheeks apart.”

He did. To his intense bewonderment, she kissed him there—with the fullness of her soft mouth.

“You be all right,” she said, blowing on his lower back, so that he squirmed. “And doan ever let that hurt you inside anymore. No shame.”

For the second time that night, she had worked a kind of magic—the type you can feel and smell. Lloyd trembled beneath her body, as she enveloped him, the heat of her scars and her tenacity melting into him, just as the wax dripped from the shaft of the candle into its cup-lipped dish.

But despite this depth of animal affection, physical intimacy was not all they shared—by a great measure. They were, after all, still very young—even Hattie. They both savored pickles and would pilfer them from the oily jars in the storeroom, feeding them to each other. They stole squab nuts and beef jerky, a sumptuous wheel of fragrant cheese—and a smoked chicken, too. Then they would dine down in the murk of Hattie’s cubbyhole, pretending they were a lordly couple in some fancy stateroom or a luxurious private railway carriage, rattling through the snowcapped mountains of Europe.

Both of them had at least glimpsed books with brilliant illustrations of the Alps and the lakes of Italy and Switzerland,
Paris, Rome, the temples of Greece. Those visions seemed so remote from their circumstances, to openly conjure them would have seemed plain cruel with anyone else. But they had each other, and they somehow gave each other permission to dream aloud—perhaps the greatest intimacy of all.

“I think I should like to be … the first lady prime minister of England,” Hattie announced at one point, with her mouth full of plundered pork crisp and what passed for quince paste (and later passed as gas, which set them both snorting). She had put on her best, crispest “elegant” white accent for this confession, and it set Lloyd chortling, trying to stifle his hilarity—with his own mouth full of what he hoped was smoked side ham. For someone whose thoughts had stretched into abstruse realms far beyond his years, he had done precious little laughing. It was like balm for his inner being. But it did not stop him from ribbing her.

“I don’t … think … that they’ll let you be … prime minister,” he asserted at last, almost hiccupping.

“ ’Cause I’s a girl?” Hattie retorted, chucking his cheek.

“Because … because … you’re not English!” Lloyd replied, which made them both collapse into the delicious foolishness of shared hysterics.

They both seemed to want dogs—several of them—so the hounds could keep one another company. They wanted dogs, books, art. Hattie stressed the importance of music, Lloyd the essentiality of science.

Hattie wanted horses, too—she had never been allowed to ride. Lloyd insisted that new forms of transportation were already taking shape (and he recalled the bizarre locomotive, seemingly made of glass, that Schelling had shown him).

She named him Li’l Skunk. It was not easy for her to express affection, in spite of her passionate nature, so the nickname conveyed more than it appeared. She had first thought of Li’l Pig, to help Lloyd own the evil that had preyed on him and to
turn it around—to transform shame into a badge of honor, which was how she felt about her scars and welts. But she knew instinctively that those words rubbed too close to the wound. He would have to make his treaty with them himself now. She had shown him the way.

She chose Li’l Skunk instead, because he was both black and white, because a skunk protects itself through ingenuity rather than physical strength and aggression, and because it gave concise expression to her joshing about his body odor. She meant, in part, that he already had a man smell about him, even though he was still so young.

Rather than taking offense, Lloyd found any comment about his scent amusing, because he was pretty certain that if either of them was more odiferous it was she. Both in a womanly way and because he had the refuge of an official cabin with a washtub, while she was stranded down in her hiding place.

He dubbed her the Brown Recluse, a moniker that at first puzzled and almost pipped her temper. “Why you call me that? A spider? And a dangerous spider, too.”

“There’s something of the spider in all females,” he replied. “And a spider is the first thing I remember, other than my dead sister. It used to come down to visit me on an invisible thread in the kindling scuttle I slept in as a baby. She taught me about time and light, and how to make something out of thin air. But brown recluses don’t spin webs—they hunt on their own, just like you. And in case you didn’t know, you
are
dangerous,” he told her. “You are
very
dangerous. You aren’t afraid of things you should fear and that others would. You’re clever and brave, and you have the control to strike when you have the advantage but the sense to conceal yourself, as a rule. You would go about your business without disrupting anyone, yet you have poison enough if the need arises.”

Hattie had to smile at this. Presented thus, the title seemed more a badge of honor than she could have imagined. It was
like a promotion in life rank—a reflection from out of the depths of a very subtle mirror of all that she valued and hoped to be seen as—to be.

How often we forget, or are forced to overlook because of lack, that the true fire of connection between hearts and souls is fundamental. Are you seen by the adored as less than you are at your best, or as all that you could be? That is the one sure measure of the health of any adoration. Both of them grasped in the other what was unique, what shone, what was to be prized, and that is rare at any age.

So it became graceful and relaxed to share other secrets, and commonplaces as well. Hattie told Lloyd more about the persecutions she had endured, the horrors she had felt, along with just the day-to-day fowl-plucking, slop-bucket, and weed-pulling life of the Corners. She painted a bright, detailed picture of working, loving, hating, surviving life on a major plantation, and filled in many gaps in his understanding.

She explained that because there was always some movement or migration of slaves due to sales or exchanges between owners, news and gossip about other plantations spread. They were each run in their own ways, yet most of the same larger principles applied. There were pecking orders, an assignment of tasks and a deployment of resources that remained relatively constant. Conditions and treatment might be very different, but there were protocols and codes of action that never varied.

As she spoke, Lloyd realized that what she was providing in her descriptions was both an internal and an exploded view of a very intricate machine. An organic machine, yes, but to him the concept of a machine
was
organic. Without knowing, she brought forth into illumination the idea of the self-assembling, self-consuming, self-sustaining complex system in his mind.

It suddenly struck him, for instance, that the definition of a complex machine was one that was five-dimensional—time defining the fourth, psychology the fifth. Mind transcended
time, the same way that language tried to, and could indeed transcend space.

He thought back to Mother Tongue’s remarks about Spiro of Lemnos, the Enigmatist who had glimpsed more deeply than all others into the mesh of things—all that was hidden in plain sight.

It also came to him for the first time that if the complicated workings of something like a plantation—a machine both built by humans and including them as critical components—could be understood as a machine, working within a network of other similar machines to form a bigger, still more complicated machine, then there were two contrary but very pregnant implications.

First, the notion of mechanism, as in the mechanistic philosophy he had become acquainted with in Schelling’s bookshop—as in a reductionist strategy—was categorically deficient, if not totally wrong. Second, the far more interesting idea that such a thing even as multifaceted as a plantation could be rendered diagrammatically, as could any machine. It was just a question of what the hierogram looked like. Then he said to himself, “I meant diagram.”

Even as she spoke, his mind raced. The problem with the traditional mechanists, he grasped, was that they merely broke processes and subassemblies down. There was no integration. Therefore no creation. Everything their method touched died in their hands. Their wholes were always less than the sum of their parts. That had been his problem with the parafoil system in St. Louis. It was not a lack of time and quality materials. It was not just hubris and pilot error. He had not had the model clear enough in his mind, because it was the wrong model. It was only a model.

Without realizing, Hattie taught him—or helped him teach himself—more than all that he had learned up to that moment. She was like the frizzen that fires a flintlock, for a consideration
began to take form in his mind: when you really understand something—even a very complex process or system (and what is not complex, if you give it deep enough attention?)—then you can picture it whole. And the picture somehow
is
the whole.

The hierograms of the Martian Ambassadors streamed through his mind, and it occurred to him to ask, What if their inscrutable emblems were not symbols representing sounds, ideas, and things as other languages do but, rather, intense distillations of relationships between concepts, so that figuratively speaking, if you could step to the other side of them in your mind they would be prismatic ways of seeing certain kinds of complexity whole and clear?

He was wise enough to leave off this spiral train of thought for the moment, but it released him to tell Hattie about the mutant brothers and the ravaging remorse at what he had done.

At first she was very skeptical about his claims of flying, but he spoke so matter-of-factly of how he had gone about it that her doubt wavered. There was no gainsaying his guilt over the deformed twins—and, like her descriptions of plantation life, she heard in his words the unmistakable accuracy of the authentic.

She chided him about what he had done, and yet when he made mention of them having apparently, at least, fallen out of a tornado, she posed another surprising question. “How you know they wasn’t taken back?”

“How do you mean?” Lloyd asked, eager, of course, to find any mitigating circumstance.

“Mebbe, you didn’t do ever-thing. You was just the way it happened. The way you talk about ’em, they wasn’t from here.”

“No,” Lloyd agreed. “They were from Indiana.”

“I doan mean that, fool! I mean from somewheres else.”

“Like Mars? I don’t think so.”

“Mebbe, more places to be from than you think.”

Lloyd heard the wisdom in that.

“Some kines of knowin’ just doan answer ever question. My Papa, he had a sayin’:

Indeed, thought Lloyd.

Learning to see the thunder is what he should have told Schelling when asked his greatest aspiration.

L
LOYD PUT TOGETHER FOR
H
ATTIE A SIMPLE YET VERY FUNCTIONAL
all-purpose tool kit that she could keep rolled in a pinched oilskin furnace apron, with separate corn-sack pockets for each item, which he stitched himself with a heavy bagger’s needle that he had kept from St. Louis, while his parents were preparing food. (His experience with the kites had taught him a great deal, and he had the artificial hand of St. Ives in mind.)