Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [59]
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.
CHAPTER 2
Ascension and Deception
WHEN LLOYD LEFT THE BOOKSHOP, HE WAS FOLLOWED. THE MAN wore a black flat hat and was dressed like a Friend or Quaker in a dark single-breasted collarless coat without buttons. Two perspiring Negroes emerged from a furniture store trundling a sideboard, and Lloyd used their cover to slip behind a butcher’s wagon. He waited until the man tailing him was just pulling even before darting out and snatching the big black hat. The man uttered an oath, but Lloyd was too quick for him. With a flick of his wrist, he sent the flat hat flying under an ambling