Enigmatic Pilot (5 page)

On top of his already radically superior intelligence, the boy’s mood swings and bouts of disjointed behavior did not make his socializing with other children in Zanesville any easier. That he would have some kind of seizure or burst into tears without reason, or perform some inexplicably cruel deed, made any hope for his schooling awkward and trips into town tense. Hephaestus even steered clear of other Adventists (although in truth he was worried about them learning about the Ark).

The family was just finishing their repast and Hephaestus was about to inquire further about the boy’s ideas on the Ark (a discussion he hoped would lead to an opportunity to suggest the possibility, at least, of returning to school in autumn and spending more time with children his own age before this became an issue that the reform marms would raise), when their fifteen-year-old redbone, Tip (short for Tippecanoe), woke up under the porch and began howling lugubriously to announce the arrival of Philomela Ogulnick and Edna Vanderkamp, the town’s two most notorious gossips and exactly the kind of women the family most dreaded seeing. Neither parent was surprised to look up and see that the lad had skedaddled.

Hephaestus had an inkling that the women were an advance party sent out by the men of Zanesville he was in debt to, while Rapture was pretty sure they were on a mission regarding Lloyd’s lack of attendance in school (a tedious waste of time for him and all too often a torture of taunts and spitballs to boot). As it turned out, they were both right—and what was more, Philomela’s Joe had eaten some horse chestnuts by accident and had the trots and would Rapture recommend barley water?

Of course, little Lloyd gave all this not a thought, slipping off
in his mind the moment he had slipped away from the house. He went, as he always did in such situations, to his secret refuge beyond the veronica that Rapture harvested for her soporifics. The main Zanesville cemetery extended from the old Wheeling Road to Mill Run and was surrounded by chestnut trees, but this was a different, eldritch sort of place. The sprinkling of humble graves dated back only to the days of Ebenezer Zane and John McIntire, who had founded the town, but Lloyd liked to think they were much older. The tombs were marked by unnamed lichen-stricken stones but they filled him with admiration and awe, for he saw them not as stones but as doors to the world where his sister lived and played, whirling about in a singsong game until, dizzy and laughing, she would fall to the ground, looking up at the sky. That was how he pictured her—blowing dandelions to bits and tying satin ribbons between the alders and the buckeyes to give shape to the wind.

Rapture had kept Lodema’s burial plot a secret to herself—an old superstition she inherited from her mother—but Lloyd identified the cove with his lost twin and had taken to grounds-keeping and decorating this secluded burial ground as a monument to her. Over the months he had made pinwheels, windmills, weather vanes, and whirligigs of all descriptions and from all materials (junk wood, scrap metal, animal bones, hunting arrows, and scavenged glass), placing them in precise arrangements, so that each blade fed off the breeze created by the others, however slight or gusty, creating a constant energy exchange that he believed would please and invigorate his sister’s spirit—perhaps even, one day, call her forth to join him.

You could not have stood amid the Lilliputian wind machines and not be moved by both the ingenuity of their design and the air of devotion that drove them. This was what the boy had meant in speaking to his father about the need to vibrate at a harmonic angle to Time. Here, among the crude graves and ever-moving vanes that defined and responded to even the
stillest air, Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd felt the kind of peace that deep motion can bring.

But so deep was the meditative state he fell into that afternoon, he did not hear the figures creeping toward him until they were upon him. Jeering and stamping, and smashing his beautiful wind ghosts and carnival-colored prayer wheels! It was Grady Smeg and the Marietta Street Boys, a snotnosed gang with a fondness for decapitating geese and pelting the wood alcohol—imbibing town drunk with rotten pears. The moment they realized they had happened upon Lloyd, who was maybe half the size of any one of them, the brats knew what they were going to do—and when they were close enough to strike they charged him with a whoop of derision. Their fear and hatred of the boy was well known throughout the town and shared by more than a few adults. Not even a Jew should be able to do long division in his head, they thought. And the gift he gave to Mrs. Czeskì—a butternut squash with the likeness of her own face—was unnatural. The boy was bright, people agreed, but maybe it was the light of the Devil.

Such sentiments did not fuss Lloyd much (although his parents, who were already sensitive about their mixed blood, were plenty troubled). He had never known otherwise, and most of it was just talk. Still, he was not so foolish now not to run—or, at least, to appear to run—and he led the Marietta Street tribe through a stand of poplars into an area that Hephaestus had used as a scrap yard until he found a black cat dead of snakebite. Lloyd had since turned the wasteland into a maze of chicanes and surprises.

Booth Tanner and Buddy Pitch took the first hits, tripping a crawdad wire that hurled a corn-popping basket full of fishing shot at them. A smaller but more tightly wound hairspring catapult almost plinked out Mason Griddle’s left eye, while Andy Cudrup took a palm-size flywheel straight to the forehead. Then Willie Best and Oscar Trogdon stepped on partially
buried potato rakes and knocked themselves silly, while Ezra Fudge planted both feet in a concealed wagon wheel and just about broke off at the ankles. The gang halted or retreated in disarray at this point—all except the hellion general, Grady Smeg, who lumbered after Lloyd with the sticking plaster from his father’s strappings hanging off him.

Even with his comrades downed or deserted, Grady could not grasp that he had been led into a trap. Lloyd had covered the hole with a big swath of burlap floured with dirt and sneezeweed. Grady never suspected a thing until he landed with a thud. Everything hurt, and blood filled his mouth with a taste of iron and chagrin.

As predicted, Lloyd came home as the lengthening shadows of dusk were spreading out over the goat pen, where Hephaestus was milking the two long-eared Anglo-Nubians for the second time that day. The boy stopped by the well and washed his face, but his father could tell that something was up by the way he flustered the Indian Runner they called Cotton Mather (because the duck would often alight on the roof of the forge and “preach”). The bottle-shaped drake squawked with indignation and wobbled off to what green ooze was left of the pond. The boy marched on toward the house without pause. Such behavior worried Hephaestus more than the fits and the invisible friends. There was a scary side to the child. Normally, Lloyd was kind to all creatures, a lover of animals—but things could change, as Hephaestus had discovered to his disgust and anguish one afternoon when he interrupted the young student in the midst of a vivisection of his once favorite Flemish giant rabbit, Phineas. The sounds the creature made, its long soft ears drooping—it was something he would never forget. The boy’s punishment had been to dig a regal tomb for the creature and to tend the grave every day. But Hephaestus could never get the pitiful rabbit’s eyes out of his mind.

That evening they ate a pale celery soup served cool and a
spatterdock-and-spikenard salad tossed with crushed coriander. Not much was said. Then, just as they were washing up and Hephaestus was thinking about getting out of working in the garden and enjoying some parsnip wine, Lionel Smeg, Grady’s ham-fisted father, rattled into their yard in his logging cart, old Tip crooning balefully.

“Sitturd! Yoo get that boy-a-yoors out here!” Lionel commanded.

The elder Smeg had been top bulldog in the local sport of brawling until his love of the “Democratic comforter” had made him too stout for such exertions, so he had taken to imbibing vinegar to reduce his flesh, and this was now ruining his stomach.

Lloyd was already out in the settling dust, patting Tip and staring defiantly at the blood pressure—red visitor, whose cheek bulged with chewing tobacco.

“Somep’n’s heppend to ma boy!” the man blubbered. “This one done somep’n to ’im!”

“What?” asked Hephaestus, limping out of the house. “Lloyd? He’s only a runt compared to Grady. What do you mean?

Lionel’s face blotched even redder at this reminder of the physical inequity of the boys, but he stammered on, lolling the tobacco wad around in his mouth like a second tongue.

“Thair ’as some shenanigans. Lloyd heer done somep’n dirty to Grady. Now we kaint fine ’im.”

“What’s this about, Lloyd?” Hephaestus asked.

The boy looked back with his green eyes and said, without blinking, “Grady plays with some rough boys and in some rough places. Remember when Corky Niles almost drowned in that sinkhole? I’d be talking to them if I were you, Mr. Smeg.”

“Oh, yoo wudd, wudd yoo? Yoo little freak! Let me tell yoo what they said—them that weernt too humped up to talk.”

“That’ll be enough, Smeg,” snapped Hephaestus. “You don’t
come to my house to insult my family. You can do your own foaling and blacksmithing—your business isn’t wanted anymore.”

“Zat so?” the big red-faced man snarled. “Well, wee’ll see about that. Be a shame if that furnace-a-yoors was to set yoor barn on fire. Happens in summer, yoo know.”

“You threaten me and my family and you’ll be the one who’s sorry, Smeg. I’ll get my wife to put a spell on your pecker and it’ll never rise again!”

Hephaestus gave a snort of laughter at the expression on Smeg’s face, for he knew that Rapture’s hoodoo reputation held sway over many people in town. As hard as Smeg talked, he would be worried now. You could see it in his eyes.

Lloyd’s eyes, meanwhile, shone back in the deepening sunset like lightning bugs.

“All right, Sitturd. But yoo’re bad business and the word’s out. I reckon yoo’ll lose all that high an’ mighty come winter. Yoo kaint git by on what that witch cooks up firever.”

“Good evening, Smeg. And don’t drive those nags too hard—I can see you’re about to bust an axle.”

“Pshaw!” Smeg exclaimed, and spat out a stream of stringy black juice that landed on his boot before hauling himself onto the wagon and whipping the two rib-stickers out of the yard.

After Grady’s father was gone, Lloyd said, “Farruh, do you think he’ll try to burn down our barn?”

“Naw,” Hephaestus mused. “But I reckon we should keep an eye open for trouble. He’s right when he says there’s folks in town who are mad with me about money.”

“Because of the Ark?” Lloyd asked.

“Yep,” his father said, sighing. “And the self-pulling planter … and the milking glove … and the air wheel. You don’t know anything about what Smeg was saying, do you? I get the impression that you did have a run-in with them Marietta whelps.”

“They chased me. I got away.”

“Did they?”

“What do you mean?” asked the boy, his eyes flaring.

“I mean did you lead them into some snare of yours? That deer noose ’bout broke my good leg.”

“They tripped a catapult,” Lloyd answered.

Hephaestus wanted to believe that that was all there was to the story. It was enough to accept that his son even knew what a catapult was, let alone how to build and wire one.

“All right. You go lock up the hens and tend to Phineas’s grave. I’m going to help your mother bring in some beans.”

Hephaestus did not see that the boy headed back to the well and then off toward the no-man’s-land where he had led the stooges to ambush. And he did not know how many other secrets Lloyd had on hand, from wild-turkey snares he had modified in size to deadfall netting and fermentation jars full of nasty things ready to fly up off a hidden springboard. The pit Lloyd had captured Grady in was an example of taking advantage of a natural asset. The hole was part of a seam of clay and had been excavated years before. All that had been required was to disguise it and lead the quarry there. Lloyd set down one of the well buckets to pick up a few stones along the path. A long summer twilight was settling in, full of whip-poor-wills and spoon frog chirping. But there was another sound as Lloyd approached the pit, which he had covered with a section of mite-ridden thatching. A plaintive moaning.

“Any bones broken?” he called, lifting the thatching.

“Hey!” bellowed Grady from below. “Yoo li’l weasel. Ah’ll git yoo! Let me up! I mean it!”

“I’m sorry, Grady,” Lloyd answered. “You need to learn a lesson. Three days should do it.”

“Three days! Yoo lissen to me!”

Lloyd dropped one of the stones he had picked up along the path.

“Aw! Sheet! Damn thang hit me.”

“I have plenty more,” Lloyd assured him. “Now, if you want
some water—and believe me you do, then you’re going to say you’re sorry for what you did to my windmills.”

“Sorry? Yoo goddamned mongrel!”

Another stone fell, with similar results. Then another.

“Hey! Hey! All right, Ah give. Ah’m sorry for breakin’ up yer toys.”

“They’re not toys,” Lloyd hissed. “They’re
machines
. Reverence machines—and they’re not for hogswill like you to touch or even see. You’re going to learn that lesson over the next three days. And you’ll never breathe a word, because you’ll be so ashamed. Now stand back, I’m going to lower a bucket of water. I don’t want you to die of thirst before the lesson’s over.”

The creature in the pit was very quiet now, bruised and hoarse and completely bamboozled. But the sploshing bucket came down, as promised, on a length of rope, and there followed a slurping sound of relief.

Lloyd waited for the darkening hole to go almost silent again before he unbuttoned his britches and pulled his peter out. At first the trickle of fluid provoked no reaction. Then, when it dawned on the boy imprisoned below what was happening, the yelping was louder than that caused by the stones. But there was no one else around to hear. Lloyd had made sure of that.