Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [93]
He understood in some storm-lit, intuitive way that she represented a kind of psychic union of the females whose lives or spirits had touched his most profoundly: Lodema, his mother, and Viola Mercy. But the girl was too much her own person, too much her own parents, guardian, and deliverer to be compared with anyone else. Sometimes he thought of her as the gift from his phantom sister, charmed out of his mixed-blood refugee life to give him gumption—more precious than anything Mother Tongue or Schelling had promised. No dusty scientific secret or antique treasure but a contraband friend and soul mate.
Lloyd spent every possible moment he could with the runaway girl. When he was not with her, he was thinking about her. Fixated on her. Hattie was a gift. A sacred, unexpected gift. A mercy. The miseries and sins of St. Louis were all washed away in her presence. She took his mind off the suffering of the past and the uncertainties of the future. He wanted the time with her to extend—for the boat never to reach its destination, but for them to be stealthy, secret, and together always. In all ways.
For her part, she waited with pining impatience for his arrival (although she would never have admitted this and tried hard to suppress any perceptible exuberance at all when he appeared in the dark or in the lull of the afternoon, when the other passengers were fat and sweaty with drowse. It was getting cooler now, though, and oftentimes when they got naked together they needed to hold each other all the tighter so as not to ripple with gooseflesh.
Then they got teeth-chattering cold, when Lloyd let Hattie talk him into something that would have seemed insane to anyone who had not gone sailing three hundred feet into the air, in what amounted to a membrane of handmade spiderweb above a teeming city. She coaxed him into joining her in dangling from one of the towropes down into the river. They did it fully clothed; Hattie referred to it as “doin’ laundry,” and made it sound practical, but Lloyd suspected it was pure adventure that thrilled her, and that it was a kind of challenge to him. He smuggled along another set of his ragged clothes, in case by some wild chance they managed to survive.
They did it at night, when the boat was barely moving. Still, the risks were great. It was a long way even from the service deck down to the water, and of course it seemed infinitely farther coming back up the rope, especially shivering with wet, slippery hands.
“You think you strong enough to make it?” she asked.
“You bet I am!” he snapped back. Good Lord, he thought. She is more boy than I am, and more woman than girl. He could not let himself be shown up by her, even if she was older. But there was something about her that inspired confidence, and made this daredevil rite seem not just possible but casual. Fun. And perhaps something more serious, too. Strengthening. Lloyd had never known such a quality of leadership in a female before. “She would make a good soldier,” he told himself. “A captain of midnight raids. Or … a spy.”
But all the confidence she projected did not take away from the threat of falling off the rope into the current, which was too swift to swim against. It did not keep the floating logs away, or make it any easier to be quiet so as not to alert the crew. Hattie was, after all, a stowaway and a fugitive slave. She had, as she said, “folks affer her for sure.” The river was colder than he had ever known the water to be back in Ohio. It seemed to move with a serpentine force, and there