Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [41]
The Spirit of Independence may have departed without the Sitturds, and Texas may have slipped farther out of their grasp, but the youngest family member at least began traveling all around—from Spanish Lake and the Missouri Bottoms to the other side of the river on the smoking ferries, wherever Mulrooney thought they could draw a crowd.
From the self-named Professor of Teratology, Lloyd learned a plethora of new words (such as “plethora,” “pinguid,” “paludal,” and “uliginous”), not to mention the more utilitarian skills of how to make change, short change—upsell, distract, hoodwink, and hornswoggle a crowd into being an attentive audience. And a great success the arrangement was, at least at first. For a couple of golden weeks, the showman began to have Barnum-like aspirations. With a little luck, maybe he could get the boy to travel with them to Chicago. The Ambassadors would eventually be incorporated into the act, and with the proceeds he would begin to build himself an empire of novelties—a true touring odditorium featuring headhunters from lost islands and living skeletons, with scientific displays to delight and inspire all ages!
After the second successful performance, Lloyd invited his parents along to watch him work. He was proud of himself. Meanwhile, Rapture had humbled herself and found employment as a scrubwoman for a fetid old wharf doctor who sold laudanum and performed abortions on the sly. She was upset to learn of Lloyd’s exploits, but grateful that her son had risen to the occasion.
However, the boy’s new career did not sit at all well with Hephaestus. Lloyd’s dressing down of him had yanked him out of his blither for a day or so, but without any inventions to occupy his mind, with Micah and Texas now seemingly out of reach, and with a growing sense of impotence as the head of the household, and no house to hold, the former blacksmith soon began to wallow in drink, exaggerating his limp for the purposes of begging, so that he could afford a cheap charcoal-flavored mash that a freedman named Little Jack Redhorse made.
When not moping and sulking in the loft of the stable, where they were forced to remain, he took to panhandling near the main market—and if fortunate in his takings he went in search of companionship and diversion, which he ended up finding at a place called the Mississippi Rose, an apparent chop shop and taproom that was in fact a seedy house of blue lights (a favorite among the preachers and the civic leaders). In addition to five floury white floozies and a very popular quadroon named Black Cherry, the entertainments ranged from cards and billiards to wagers on rat-catching dogs or bouts of barefisted boxing if two Irishmen could be found.
The proprietor was known as Chicken Germain, a Melungeon woman built like a cart horse with straight black hair and steel-blue eyes. She loved fried food and men, especially well-endowed men—and especially well-endowed men who also had some physical deformity. The first night Hephaestus managed to sneak in the door, Chicken was about to have him evicted when she noticed his limp. An hour later she noticed that he was anything but limp, chicken bones and gaudy silk stockings strewn on the floor beside her carved oak bed upstairs.
Despite his age, Lloyd was in his own way tortured by the temptations of desire into which Miss Viola had initiated him. There were not many avenues for sexual fulfillment for a boy of his age—particularly one who was new to town and without spending money, because, unlike Hephaestus, all the money he made he turned over to his mother.
From a street waif named Scooper he heard about a teenage half-breed called Pawnee Mary, who would let you do her if you gave her chewing tobacco. There was also a beefy bucket head named Betty, who would get