Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [87]
“Come,” she whispered, and seized his elbow. “Out of sight.”
To his further astonishment, Lloyd yielded to her touch. She pulled him down one of the crew-ways to a step rail that led toward the cargo hold. He had peeped down that way the day before but had grown skittish when one of the crew members, a snaggle-toothed moron they called Clapper burped at him. Inside a tiny storeroom with an ax mounted on the wall, a bald man dozed on his hands at a knotwood table that played host to a tin cup and a spitting candle in a blackout box. The Night Girl shuffled Lloyd softly past and into the jumbled shadows of another chamber. A stack of firewood and some smoked meats hanging in nets met his eyes—a gaff pole, crates, kegs. With impressive certainty, the girl steered him through the maze to a trunk against a bulkhead, and then eased the trunk back without making a sound. She lifted a plank and motioned to him to step down into a hole.
Through the taut working wood Lloyd could feel the thrum and clunk of the engine, chugging at reduced speed now at night—and he imagined that he could also feel the vibrations of the other passengers, tossing in their sleep or making love, fending off creditors in dreams, savage beasts or Indian war parties that awaited them in the wilderness beyond. He had visions of stepping down into some iron cage to be trapped, and yet he did as his strange guide directed and was relieved beyond measure when she followed him, the bare skin of her hands brushing against him when they were settled in the inky confinement just below. Shades of the false-bottomed graveyard, Lloyd thought.
They crouched on the floor, facing each other in total darkness, and he heard the plank slid back into place. A moment later, the mysterious girl lit a small storm lantern that sat between them. The light flared up as if inside a cave.
“Smuggler’s hold,” the girl muttered. “Doan nobody know we’re here, so talk low.”
There was something about her voice or, rather, her way of speaking that perplexed Lloyd. He let his eyes suck in the surroundings, which were so near there was not much to see. A rough bedroll and a sack of food that smelled like cold mutton and boiled potato—their refuge was no more than a large mouse hole. Then the girl pulled off her cap and he let out a stifled sigh.
She was a Negro with milk-coffee skin and eyes that shone like the color of honeycomb in the lantern reflection. Her hair was not kinky, puffed, or nappy like that of other dark girls he had seen but straight and tinged a rich cinnamon shade, clipped as though she had taken a pair of pinking shears to her head without a mirror. She smelled a little—or perhaps it was the mutton—but her teeth were clean and white, her nose sleek and narrow. He guessed her age to be about twelve, although it was hard to tell. Thirteen, maybe. He knew that she was taller than he, but there was a womanly cast to her face despite the hardened scowl she affected and the boyish clothes she wore—a rough cotton tow shirt under a mussel-blue fisherman’s jacket and loose britches that looked as if they were stitched out of some old curtain. The garments smelled of smoke and sweat, and the moist, greasy air of the boat. Her feet were bare, the soles as pale as butter.
“Why you gwain jump?” she demanded, and then cleared her throat.
Lloyd tried to think, but all he could do was stare at her.
“You crazy or you in trouble?”
The way she said this was different. Her speech seemed to shift between dialects.
“You can talk. I heard you. Whatchyou lookin’ at?”
Lloyd had never felt so lost for words.
“What’s your name?”
This question was delivered with a steeled self-assurance.
“Are you scared?”
She sounded almost solicitous now, with the tone of fine breeding. He could imagine a wealthy white girl fondling the family cat, yet inches away from him was a Negro filly in sooty boy’s garb with grown-up eyes and a soft, full mouth. He tried to look away but