CHAPTER 5
The Ambassadors from Mars
HEPHAESTUS AND RAPTURE WERE QUICK TO NOTE THE CHANGE IN the boy but were unable to guess the true nature of the cause. For the first time since leaving Zanesville, Lloyd seemed to have regained his inner light and his parents wondered if he might have reestablished his connection with Lodema. Not surprisingly, Lloyd declined to provide details, choosing both for his own sake and for the honor of Miss Viola to keep the matter secret.
St. Ives, in his shrewd read of personality and mood, knew that something was different about the boy, but for reasons of his own did not inquire further. Instead, he slipped back inside his armor of pseudoaristocratic condescension, yielding only upon his farewell.
“Remember our lessons, Monkey,” he said with a world-weary smile.
The boy had been quick to learn the art of card counting and odds estimation, as well as many of the psychological subtleties of gambling.
“I will,” promised Lloyd, and for a moment he longed to disappear with his damaged friend—off into the teeming world in search of money and risk, dark fragrant women, and the grotesque riddles of Junius Rutherford.
Miss Viola gave him a quick, chaste kiss on the cheek in public, and a very long, slow kiss somewhere else in the privacy of her cabin before whisking off to find another drinking partner, lover, audience—whatever it was that she was searching for.
St. Louis had come a long way since the French fur trappers drifted by in birchbark canoes to barter with the Peoria Indians. And it had come a long way even faster since the first steamboat arrived from Louisville on July 27, 1817. Many Negroes still spoke French and signs of the Spanish colonial period were everywhere to be found, but the city’s aura of European empire had been transformed into the energy and friction of a thriving outpost of western expansion. This was a border town now, a crossroads dividing North and South, East and West. Fifty steamboats provided packet service to exotic destinations such as Keokuk, Galena, and Davenport to the north, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh to the east, and Memphis, Vicksburg, New Orleans, and Mobile to the south—while the passage along the Missouri (where the Sitturds hoped to go) opened the way west to Independence, Westport, St. Joseph, Omaha, Council Bluffs, and beyond.
The city had boomed from a bluff-town harborside of around seventeen thousand people to almost four times that number, although the German Revolution and the Irish Potato Famine would soon swell the ranks to make it the largest center west of Pittsburgh.
Rapture had never imagined so many “parrysawls.” Hephaestus counted the number of taverns and public houses. Lloyd took in the grim, overburdened Negroes and the quizzical Indians, the street Arabs, imbeciles, and ringworm hillbillies—offset by lily-white gentlemen and ladies rattling around in lacquer-black carriages with shining wheels.
It was here that the infamous Dred Scott lawsuit would soon begin, igniting the Civil War, many would say, while still burning torturously in the collective memory was the case of Francis McIntosh, a free mulatto steamboat steward who had been chained to a tree and roasted alive in a slow fire in retaliation for stabbing a sheriff’s deputy—as well as that of the antislavery newspaper editor Elijah P. Lovejoy, who was shot to death and trampled in nearby Alton, Illinois, a year later (still later to be the birthplace of a boy named Miles Davis).
While Lloyd had been busy learning his bold new lessons from St. Ives and Miss Viola, Hephaestus and Rapture had been engrossed in Micah’s map and in planning the next stage of their journey to Texas. Their decision was to take a boat up the Missouri River to Independence, the southernmost of the supply towns on the route to the Pacific Coast. From there it looked like a long, strange trip across Kansas and what was then the Indian Territory—and would later become the state of Oklahoma—to reach what they hoped they would find in Texas: a new home.
Unfortunately, the riverboats for the Missouri journey were crowded—always crowded now—with such a miscellany of humanity that could scarcely be believed. One would have thought that America was coming apart at the seams, or mutating to form some crazed new creature.
Once again, money was tight. What provisions they’d been able to salvage from their earlier adventures were running low. “Life is a casting off,” Hephaestus reminded his family (which prompted a jab in the ribs from Rapture). Young Lloyd took this opportunity to introduce the money he had made with St. Ives, pretending that he had found it along one of the bustling streets. His parents were too overjoyed to ask any questions.
Hephaestus reckoned that with this windfall they were able to afford passage on the Spirit of Independence, newly overhauled and freshly painted. But they had to wait for three days. Ever worried about conserving money and knowing that they now had a stateroom to look forward to, the family sought temporary shelter in the loft of a mice-infested stable behind a glue renderer’s.
It was in a thronging market square below on their second day that they were surprised to see a wagon decorated with rajas and angels—and who should be beside it but Professor Umberto, the traveling medicine showman and magician who had passed through Zanesville. The spruiker was now calling himself Lemuel Z. Bricklin, “Master of Teratology, Clairvoyance, and Prestidigitation.”
Lloyd wanted to say hello, his parents believing that the sight of the colorful wagon had brought back a fond memory of Zanesville. The truth was that their old town held but one happy recollection for the boy, and that had to do with his ghost sister’s memorial. The reason he was interested in the professor was that he wanted to catch sight of the man’s fine-figured assistant, Anastasia. His experience with Miss Viola had opened up a new kind of precocious craving within him. And the earlier magic had intrigued him.
Rapture, still miffed about the downturn in business she had experienced owing to the professor’s arrival in Ohio, found herself “haa’dly ’kin” to say howdy to him in St. Louis and went off to round up ingredients to conjure a little “tas’e ’e mout” for the family’s supper, reminding Hephaestus to keep an eye on the boy and for them both to stay out of trouble. Of course, Lloyd gave his father the slip.
The square was jammed with people buying fresh pig snouts or honeycomb tripe, and Hephaestus became so absorbed that he did not feel a passing thief’s practiced hand snake into his pocket and dexterously extract the money that was intended for their boat fare.
Lloyd, meanwhile, made a beeline for the medicine-show wagon, which had a tent set up behind it. The professor, a springy man with a waxed mustache and a receding hairline hidden under a leghorn hat, had just produced a fat Red Eagle cigar from a pocket in his coat when Lloyd strode up.
“What happened to your monkey?” the boy wanted to know.
“Why?” queried the professor, lighting the cigar with a crack of his fingers. “Would you like to apply for the position?”
“That was good.” Lloyd grinned, mimicking the finger snap.
“Prestidigitation, my boy. Legerdemain. I do three shows a day and you’re welcome to see one, if you would be so kind as to bring along your parents or guardians as paying customers. The Bible says blessed are they who pay in cash.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Lloyd objected.
“Mine does,” the showman replied, tipping his hat to a woman with a rustling bustle who shuffled by. “But never fear, the instance of instantaneous combustion you have just witnessed was a complimentary sample—gratis, without obligation; in other words, free of charge. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
“You didn’t say what happened to the monkey,” Lloyd pointed out, reaching for the man’s coat sleeve as he tried to turn away toward the tent.
“No,” agreed the professor, wheeling back and chomping on his cigar. “I have neglected to fulfill your request for further intelligence and so have left you in a state of sustained bewonderment and speculation. And there you shall remain. I have work to do.” Once again he made a move toward the tent pitched beside the wagon, nodding at a man with a thimble hat who ambled past with a frown of suspicion on his face.
“Is he dead?” Lloyd asked, refusing to budge.
“As a matter of fact, poor little Vladimir was consumed by some sort of cave lion during our recent sojourn in Kentucky,” the professor announced, glaring down at the boy. “Most distressing. Now, if you’ll excuse me!”
“Did you shoot the cave lion?” Lloyd inquired.
“Go home, young lad!” The professor waved. “I must prepare. Magic doesn’t just happen!”
“I thought that was exactly what it did,” Lloyd replied. “That’s why it’s magic.”
“Touché,” the showman retorted, appearing to bow, but really examining the boy’s sorry excuse for footwear, which confirmed his initial impression. “But if I were truly a master of the art,” he continued, “then I would wave the wand of this cigar and you would disappear—back to wherever it was you came from.”
“Zanesville,” Lloyd supplied. “Ohio. I saw you there.”
“Aha,” the professor returned, his eyes following a blooming lass with a rose-hips complexion, who giggled behind a handkerchief as she passed. “Where on earth did you say your parents were?”
“I have neglected to fulfill your request for further intelligence regarding that,” Lloyd answered.
“Touché again, my effervescent little friend. But circumstances beyond my control, otherwise known as life, require that I spin gold from straw, separate wheat from chaff—in a word, earn my daily bread. Now please, leave me to my fate as I bid you goodbye and good luck with your own.” He gave the boy a hearty pat on the head, the universal sign of condescension in adults toward children—and one that he felt certain this particular child could not fail to comprehend.
“And what about the pretty lady?” the boy asked. “Did a cave lion get her, too?”
“Boy! I am going to perform some magic on you yet if you don’t move on!” This time the showman took a decisive step away, prepared to fend off the lad with an elbow if necessary.
“Do you still sell the powder made from tiger penis?” Lloyd asked.
This inquiry caught the professor by surprise, and was made at too loud a volume for his liking. He glanced around, thinking, Damn this boy. What he said aloud was “Shush, please! Here, my friend. Come now. Take this delightful toy as a token of my exasperation and carry on.”
The medicine man produced from inside his coat a sheet of heavy paper neatly folded into the shape of a bird, which he un-creased, and adjusted, and then lofted into the air. The flat wings carried the construction several feet toward a scowling lady who was hawking carrots.
“Now, go and collect that novelty and it is yours to have, without payment or condition, save that you leave me to the tasks at hand!”
Lloyd scoffed at this offer but went and retrieved the paper bird—and then whistled at the showman, who, in spite of himself, spun around.
Lloyd then tilted both wings upward and sent it soaring over the head of the carrot woman, where it caught an updraft and sailed well out of the market.
“Inclined wings produce more lift and also more stability,” he called out to the showman, whose eyebrows had arched in surprise. “Now, what about the tiger powder?”
“Please, my young friend!” the showman entreated with nervous gesticulations, buffaloed at last. “Just come in here and let me give you something to take your mind off all these questions.”
Lloyd’s eyes adjusted to the change in light. The tent was much larger than it had looked from outside, and set out like a room in a house, except that over in one corner was another tentlike structure, like the sort of cloth-screened cubicle one might find in a doctor’s surgery. Worn Turkish carpets had been laid down, with satiny pillows strewn about, creating an ambience that was both cozy and exotic, although a distinct mix of odors permeated the enclosure: a chamber pot, perspiration, lice soap. Lloyd felt at home.
This impression was strengthened by the presence of two women. The first Lloyd recognized as the beautiful Anastasia he had been wondering about (who in truth was as worn as the carpets, but still richly patterned). She was seated on a camp meeting chair mending clothes, dressed in a forget-me-not blue frock that showed off her figure in a manner that he found quite compelling. His enthusiasm intensified when his eyes took in the other woman, who was standing a few feet off to the left—on her head. She was dressed in tight-fitting mannish garb that accentuated her curved shape. Lloyd was soon unable to hide the prominence of his enthusiasm.
Amazed but sympathetic to his condition, the professor gestured broadly. “Ladies, meet a persistent new friend. Your name, young sir … ?”
“L-loyd,” the boy stammered, transfixed by the gymnastic calm of the other woman, who in his mind’s eye he had transposed into a conventional standing position and realized that she was the spitting image of Anastasia. So that was how the trick was done, Lloyd thought.
“Young Lloyd hails from Zanesville, where he made something of our acquaintance during one of our past peregrinations,” the showman explained, and took more notice of the boy’s fatigued clothing and unscrubbed state. Here was another child of misfortune trying to find his way. Rather like the son the professor had lost long ago, only more touched by the sun. Anastasia looked up from her sewing and smiled. The woman, whom Lloyd took to be her twin, or at least her sister, waved one of her feet.
“Hello,” Lloyd tried, but the two women just repeated these gestures as before.
“Ah,” the Professor said, shaking his head. “Don’t be offended. I’m saddened to say that both my lovely ladies have been deprived of speech, a diabolical punishment that was conferred upon them as children by a mad father.”
“Anastasia can’t talk?” Lloyd asked.
“Mrs. Mulrooney,” the professor corrected. “Or Lady Mulrooney, as I prefer to think of her. For Mulrooney is the surname I was born with. The other monikers and personae I use are but stage machinations to heighten and enhance the mystique necessary to build confidence and create an atmosphere of possibility, credibility, and awe.”
“And she … is your wife?” Lloyd asked, digging his right hand into the pocket of his dirty knee pants.
“Yes, son. In a word, we are matrimonially united, conjoined, and conspicuously complementary.”
“And who is the other woman?”
“Technically speaking, she is my wife’s sister—twin sister—and how beneficent and expeditious it has proven to have two female assistants who look virtually identical! I mean from a stage-magic point of view. But privately, confidentially, and just between you and us, she too, is a partner in the adventure of my life that combines entertainment and enlightenment to provide illumination and enjoyment for all those who experience it!”
“You mean you have two wives?” the boy asked. Now, there was a goal worth aspiring to, Lloyd thought.
Mulrooney blinked at this, for he realized that he had just let his staunch guard completely down and offered far more detail regarding his personal affairs than he had ever intended to with anyone, let alone a strange boy.
I must be slipping, the showman mused. Apart from the somewhat darker skin tone and the green eyes, the lad did remind him very much of his lost son—perhaps that was why.
“Well, now, sonny boy,” he humbugged, trying to regain mastery of the situation. “Let’s not put delicate matters quite so baldly, eh? I think if we are discoursing privately and confidentially, in a manner of speaking, one could answer in the affirmative, while conceding that the arrangement is not to everyone’s taste. In some regrettable cases it is not at all celebrated with the level of tolerance and understanding we would like, so we do not normally make a habit of announcing the status of our little family outside our little family. Coming from a place like Zanesville, I’m sure you understand. I would therefore appreciate your respecting that fact and this rare confidence—and, for reasons inexplicable, I have sufficient faith in my assessment of your character to believe you will.”
“And neither of them can talk?”
“No,” Mulrooney assented, concerned about how much harm he had done. “But their wits are as sharp as any, and I could not ask for better companionship. Besides …” He grinned. “There is something to be said for women who can’t answer back.”
This attempt at levity drew an immediate response from the two mute sisters. Mrs. Mulrooney the seamstress launched a ball of woolen socks, while Mrs. Mulrooney the gymnast whipped off a shoe. Both missiles struck their target full in the face.
“Bah! Ladies!” the professor complained. “You see what I mean? You have no reason to feel any pity for these two, young lad. They are more than able to look out for themselves! It is I who am outnumbered.”
Mrs. Mulrooney No. 1 licked an end of thread and darted it through a needle with a grin of vindication, while Mrs. Mulrooney No. 2 clapped her feet.
“And now,” said the professor. “Won’t you repay our candor and tell us your story? It’s plain you have one. Else you would not be so far from Zanesville.”
Just then a sound came from behind the cloth partition in the corner. The showman and his two wives showed no sign of acknowledgment. Perhaps a child was sick behind there, Lloyd thought, although the idea of having two wives still occupied him. Two wives this side of the curtain seemed to increase the possibilities of what lay behind. He tried to focus on the professor’s query.
Ordinarily he would not have satisfied such a request with much detail, but as a result of his time with St. Ives he was growing more secure in his ability to gauge people’s character and, as the professor had trusted him with a confidence, so he related as best he could his family’s trek from Ohio and their hopes of beginning a new life in Texas (save for the mystery that his uncle had referred to in his letter and the nature of his relationship with Miss Viola).
The professor and his two mute wives were both entertained and reassured by the boy’s account. “We are all strangers and pilgrims,” the showman summed up when Lloyd was done. “I wish you well on your journey to Texas. We are headed north for the heat of summer and then back south when autumn comes.”
It was at this point, just as Lloyd was thinking that it was time for him to get back to his father and how he hoped the professor would give him a bottle of the tiger powder, that another sound came from behind the screen partition—a very odd sound that was soon followed by odder noises still.
“What was that?” Lloyd asked when he could no longer resist.
“What?” answered the showman coyly.
“That. That!”
“Hmm. Yes …” the showman was forced to acknowledge now as the sounds grew odder and louder. “They’re awake.”
“They?” the boy repeated. “Who are they?”
Mulrooney’s face fell as if he had put his foot in his mouth again.
“The Ambassadors from Mars. The strangest strangers and pilgrims you will ever see,” he said at last. “But, my boy, you must swear not to tell a soul, because it’s not my intention to exhibit them yet.”
“Exhibit them?”
“Well, my commitment is not to exploit them but to help them maximize those features that offer such singular advantages if understood properly and positioned effectively. As their sponsor, I am obliged to insure that such an arrangement is practicable and sustainable—in a word, sufficiently profitable to cover the costs of their maintenance.”
“May I see … them?”
Knowing that the child, with curiosity now aroused, would not be likely to give in and go, the professor reluctantly motioned for him to approach the cubicle. This boy has got under my skin in the damnedest way, Mulrooney thought to himself, as he pulled back the swath of drape to reveal a sight that made even Lloyd’s mouth drop open.
The figures were dressed in clothes that conjured up images of Washington and Jefferson at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
“I call ’em Urim and Thummim,” the professor announced. “Or the Ambassadors from Mars. Don’t know what they call themselves.”
The creatures who now stood before Lloyd were remarkable individuals by anyone’s standards. Short but not exactly dwarfs, they were obviously brothers—both microcephalics, or pinheads. They were Negroid, perhaps, but pale-skinned, with highly distorted features and an animalish clicking-grunting type of language.
“Why do you call them the Ambassadors from Mars?” Lloyd asked.
“I don’t plan to outside the smaller burgs,” replied the professor. “Wouldn’t do a’tall to get the tar bubbling.”
“You mean to fool folks,” the boy chided.
“My young friend, let me say this about that. As a rule, people like to be fooled. If you mean inspired, surprised, delighted—made to wonder and to wish for things. If I can make the world bigger and brighter for a moment for some boot stone or put even a tintype star in the eye of some leather-skinned lass, where’s the crime in that? But when you say fool, you not only make it sound cheap, you make it sound easy—and t’aint always so. You can’t fool or enlighten all the people all the time, son. That’s why it’s so very important to be clear about who you are trying to fool or enlighten at any given time.”
“But they’re not from Mars, are they?” the boy continued (which stirred the Ambassadors into a fit of clicking and grunting).
“No,” agreed the professor, twisting his mustache. “They’re from Indiana, far as I know. That’s where I found ’em, at any rate. But their story is just as hard to swallow, in its own way. The free niggers looking after them swore on the Bible that these two were dropped out of a tornado.”
“A tornado?” Lloyd puzzled.
Mulrooney held his hand over his heart. “Urim and Thummim came down out of the storm unharmed about two years ago, they said. No hint of where they started from or who their real family was. The niggers took it as a sign from the Almighty and took ’em in, but they kept ’em hidden in their barn for fear of someone doing ’em harm.”
“So you bought them?” Lloyd asked, thinking back to how he had been hidden away in the family barn.
“The nigger and his wife were damn grateful when I proposed taking the boys off their hands. But now, when you see the lads in the sumptuous duds designed by the Ladies Mulrooney, prognosticating and pontificating in their mumbo-jumbo, who can but conclude that they are emissaries and apostles from some distant kingdom of celestial grandeur far beyond our ken?”
This assertion prompted more clicking and grunting from the Ambassadors, and the showman observed how closely the boy was listening.
“You look like you understand them.”
“I think I could, with a little time,” Lloyd replied.
“Balderdash! You can’t tell me there’s anything to their doggerel. Or if there is, only they know it!”
“No,” Lloyd answered. “I think it’s a real language—a spoken one, anyway.”
“Oh, they write, too—if you can call it that,” the professor remarked.
“Could I see?” Lloyd cried, unable to hide his interest.
“My boy, you’re as curious a specimen as they are in your own way,” the professor replied. He went to a trunk, which made Lloyd wince with the recollection of Miss Viola, and produced a large handful of paper scraps all covered with a tiny but precise cuneiform-like writing. Holding the dense lines of unknown symbols together was a repeated icon that resembled the spiral shape of a tornado.
“Now don’t be telling me you can read this!” the professor scoffed.
“Well, not yet,” Lloyd agreed. “But maybe …”
“Son, all the clever men in the world would be a long while in unraveling the secret of this doodling. And it may well be that there is no secret—that they’ve just scribbled and scrawled to please themselves and what looks good is good enough.”
Lloyd noticed a wooden matchbox, or what he first thought was a wooden matchbox, edging out from under the Ambassadors’ bed. It was in fact triangular in shape, rather like a hand-size metronome, and when he picked it up he was surprised by the almost total lack of weight. Its surface, which had the smoothness and hardness of metal, not wood, had been covered, but here the writing had been engraved. The weird ciphers flowed in their swimming lines, but the lines took on a larger shape of the cyclonic spiral.
“Could I have this?” the boy asked. “I want to study it.”
Urim and Thummim exchanged determined clicks and grunts.
Lloyd nodded at them, and they seemed to nod back.
“I take it they approve,” the professor said. “That’s how I’ll take it, anyway. You may keep the box, young Lloyd, as a souvenir to reward your sagacity and a memento of the amazements you have seen. Learn its secret if you can.”
The boy tucked the talismanic object into his shirt. Then he said goodbye to the professor and his unexpected family, not knowing how much trouble lay ahead for his own.
“What an unusual lad,” the professor said when Lloyd had departed. He was unable to recall what he had intended to lure the boy’s thoughts away from the tiger powder with when he invited him inside the tent.
The Ambassadors clicked and burbled.