Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [75]
He tried to readjust, flying at half brakes, one toggle up, one down. But in swerving around to make the courthouse and the confusion of Fourth Street, where he was to have made his epochal landing, he overcompensated and then had to brake full—which battered the wing chute more. One of the main leads streaming down to the risers broke—the toggle did not respond. He felt the heat waves rising up from the bricks below—the smell of horse manure and the din of human panic.
Ground rush hit him—the mess of scattering street traffic engulfing his field of vision, all the glory gone, leaving stomach-churning, muscle-bracing expectations of obliteration upon impact! He yanked the toggles, beginning to plummet, regaining control too late, and swooping down like a raptor to strike a fleeing rodent in a field of dry corn.
While this private drama had been playing out in the air, a rather more public debacle had been unraveling below. Representatives of Bladon, McCafferty & Co. had led their assembled offering clanking and shuffling like a parade of the damned from the auction house’s pen on Chestnut Street to the courthouse steps, where a pompous man in a frilled shirt and a broad-brimmed hat read out the particulars of the sale and clarified the terms of purchase in stentorian tones. The planter aristocracy was well represented, decked out in top hats and European-tailored finery. Some had come from as far away as the black-loam bottomlands of Mississippi and Alabama, or the sugar kingdoms of Louisiana. The merchandise stood glistening and grim in the brassy sun. Errant schoolboys gapped and stretched. Idlers spat tobacco juice; skinny dogs panted under drays. Hoop-skirted women with complexions like clotted cream dabbed their throats with eau de cologne as barrel-chested saloonkeepers emerged blinking in the glare, hooking their thumbs into their braces.
Down on Fourth Street, a hatchet-faced plantation foreman watched from the saddle of a bay gelding while his tight-lipped overseer stood gripping a musket on top of the courthouse stairs. Another man in a baggy black suit, with a head as bald as a fire bell under a black silk hat, leaned over a weathered pinewood podium that had been wrestled out of a wagon, while two hulking guardsmen strolled the lines of slaves—some slumped with weariness and despair, others standing erect, both male and female, radiating the strength they had earned by long work in bright light and all weather.
The two hard-bitten white minders had hairy arms as thick as the limbs of hod carriers and skin not much lighter than the individuals up for sale. Their square-toed boots were flecked with the pale green-gold of dried dung, and faded red or threadbare white bandannas poked up under their chins as if to hide some growth. Everything as usual.
Until the Miss Viola appeared.
The outré vessel came across the river and the sky like some narcotic vision of the future. The sausage casing—like balloon, which had provided the initial elevation, detached and expired in what from ground level Lloyd would have considered a disappointing poof relative to the incendiary excitement he had intended. (The problem was that he could not use any true ordnance for fear of incinerating the Ambassadors and himself.) But to those who were unprepared it was fireworks enough. The river-slapping force of the barge, stoked to boiler-blowing overload, hauled the beautiful abomination forward, where it was set free in a dense shower of glitter, sparks, and feathers.
It was right about then that Mule Christian glanced up from his row of chained fellow slaves and came to the conclusion that this was the sign from God that he had been waiting for. There was no other way to interpret it. This was a message from the Almighty. And he knew in his heart just what the message was.
Mule was what white plantation owners of the day would have described as a “big field nigger”—and big he