McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [230]
The uncle’s hand lay heavy on Jeff’s shoulder.
—Let those boys not, he said to the rector, be punished for a display of patriotism, Father. I do not desire punishment.
The rector nodded. Then the uncle pushed Frank and Jeff toward the stairs.
—Up, boys, he said. We must hurry.
—Up? said Jeff.
He dug in his heels, gazing in uneasiness at the rippling shadow that filled the skylight. In spite of the gentle attention his cut had received, he felt a violent spasm of mistrust for the uncle now. Perhaps they were to be pushed from the roof, or thrown to a crowd of ruffians, or consigned to some unknown oubliette in the bell tower, like the poor little princes he remembered from his Lamb’s Shakespeare.
—We go up?
—Quite a considerable way, the uncle said. As a matter of fact.
8.
Though he was to observe and ship out in dozens of them during the course of his life and career—from the world-spanning, titanic Admiral Tobako f, with its concert hall and natatorium, to the worlds-spanning Lancet, hardly bigger than a racing scull, from the trim transpacific racer Gulf of Sinkiang to the sturdy, homely freight blimps of the Red Star line—Frank would never entirely lose the sense of melancholy majesty that stirred his heart when he first saw an airship, moored in the troubled sky a hundred feet above the St. Ignatius Boys’ Home. He was moved by her delicacy, by her massive silence, by the rich Britannic red of her silk gasbag. She was like a divot, bright as clay, cut into in the dull gray turf of the clouds. There was a wind in the southeast and she strained at the guy that moored her to the campanile, and once tossed her nose like a mare sniffing fire. An oblong car of silver and dark wood dangled from her underbelly, part Pullman sleeper, part clarinet, its windows haunted by dark mustached faces.
—The Tir-Na-Nog, Uncle Thomas said, as if she were a present he had brought along for his nephews. My own design.
He watched them watching his airship, pale eyes crinkling, face flushed. In the presence of the Tir-Na-Nog he seemed fonder of them; he draped his arms across their shoulders.
—There isn’t another like her in the world.
A hatch opened in the forebelly of the black gleaming gondola. Two of the mustached lascars peered out. One raised an inquiring hand and the uncle nodded, and taking his arm from Frank’s shoulders signaled, palm downward, twice. The blue-capped dark heads disappeared from the hatch and after a moment a large wicker basket dropped into sight and dangled, slowly falling.
Frank held his breath and pressed his lips together so hard they turned white. He suffered, with erotic intensity, from the signal passion of his age: engineering. He reverenced the men on whom was shed the peculiar glory of the second half of the century, when adventure went forth with gearbox, calipers, level, and chain. Thus he was mad to know the organization and capacity of the Tir-Na-Nog’s engines. He would gladly have indentured himself, for long years, to studying the system of cable, flap, and rudder that guided her, the science and finesse that regulation of her buoyancy and altitude required. He longed to subject his uncle to a close and niggling interrogation, as they had used to do on long July afternoons at Tir-Na-Nog, to draw fabulous facts and anecdotes out of Sir Thomas Mordden, pioneering aeronaut, penetrator of the trackless bush of the sky, deliverer, as the Illustrated London News had once phrased it, “of the key to making Britain the queen not merely of the land and sea but of all the vast empyrean girdle of the earth.” But gazing up at the wondrous contraption in the sky in which, most wondrous of all, he was now evidently to take ship, Frank maintained a silence as absolute as that of the Tir-Na-Nog herself. Their uncle invited