The sky was achingly clear, and a gathering had already formed by the time he reached the bank where the competition was to be held. At his arrival, a cheer went up and people rushed toward him. They all wanted to greet the “little genius”—the boy who made the paper birds and gliding gadgets,a hundred or so of which now lay on the grass in the summer sun.
The onslaught of adulation puffed up Lloyd’s spirits (and ego). Maybe St. Louis wasn’t such an evil place after all. Perhaps fame and fortune could yet be his. That would save his family. Surely. Yes, there were cruelties and injustices. Vigilance committees, bushwhackings, and intimidation. Freed blacks could be falsely arrested and sold back into slavery, and some of the antislave voices were nonetheless anti-Negro, advocating the establishment of a whites-only territory. But right in front of him were people lined up to see him and shake his hand—many, if not most of them, good people (a few of them the same good people who had looked on as Francis McIntosh fried).
With newfound confidence Lloyd scanned the throng, trying to pinpoint some presence that was hostile—one of the Claws & Candle spies that Mother Tongue had warned him about. Was it the man with thinning hair who was still wearing his leather blacksmith’s apron, the same kind his father used to wear back in Ohio when he was working—when he did work? What about the striped-vest barber or any of a number of mulatto traders, Spanish boatmen, or French fortune hunters? Perhaps one of the high-toned ladies hiding behind their fans. He tore the crowd apart face by face. But they were all watching him, and none of them appeared hostile. Yet they all could become so, he knew. He had already learned how fast the tastes of the horde could change—how insatiable they were for novelty, for innovation, and for failure. Whether or not the Spirosians and the Vardogers were real, he understood that the cries of ovation he received were but catcalls in reverse. The words of Mother Tongue came back to him: “No one goes far who travels alone.”
Alone now with his cargo of toys for sale, he felt the painful wisdom of her words. Then he glanced back up at the soothing blue emptiness overhead. That was something important that she had overlooked. There were places one could only go alone. That was the difference between the assembled mass on the riverbank and himself, Lloyd realized. The same problem as in Zanesville. What no one else could grasp, or what they could but dream about, he could do. It put his relationship with his family at risk. It put his life at risk, yet what would he be if he did not reach out? How could he lift them up—how could he save his father from himself—if he did not reach further, higher? Fear of the crowd? Yes, but what of the fear of the future?
In that fleeting instant before he was forced, all by himself, to welcome the masses and to officiate at the start of the competition—to hawk his wares like a common street vendor, to represent the interests of not one but two misfit families—he saw the sky opening before him like a welcome beyond anything that Mother Tongue and Schelling could offer. It was his destiny to ascend still higher. He would rise up into the sun above the river and all that it represented. Above the flatboats and the barge lines. Above the steeples and the columns, the plush townhouses and the claptrap cottages. He would soar above every dock walloper and carriage hack—so high that every merchant and magnate would see him, not just these few folk scattered here. There might yet come a time to travel in time, as his broken father had dreamed of. But for now, what people would pay to see was a kind of travel they could understand. Memories of Zanesville and the beaver came back to him. The trick—and perhaps it was a trick that the Vardogers, if they were real, had mastered—was how to scare people in the right way. Bewonderment. For what is fear but the other side of the nickel of surprise?
The competition was a tremendous success. The club that called itself Wings Over Walnut Street managed a narrow (but very popular) victory over The St. Louis Dispatch–sponsored Harriers. Young Lloyd was interviewed for the first time. The questions came fast