and darkened his being around it like a toad trapped in a hot iron box. One day, he vowed, he would find that creature again, and then he would perform some fiery experiment of justice—but in the meantime he had a mission to fly. He renewed his exertions with the cold-blooded certainty of desperation.
Success continued to elude him until one afternoon a waft of wind came up over the water and tickled a wreck of spiderweb, which chanced to break free just as he was watching. Lloyd noted how the transparent netting caught the zephyr, like the sail of a boat, and lofted it away out of sight. A breeze stirred in his mind.
Up to that moment he’d been concentrating on evolving the technology of the kite into a full-size glider, taking what the tethered kite could teach and turning it into something more maneuverable, more protective and sustainable in its flight, a giant version of his popular whimsies. In the glider, Lloyd could see great potential—almost limitless. Falling reluctantly away into the dissolution of sleep, he would glimpse wondrous engined machines propelling hundreds of people through the air at speeds beyond belief—gorgeous riverboats of the sky, able to master space and distance as his father had hoped the Ark would transcend time. Travel to other worlds, yes!
But in structure there is also weakness. This subtle paradox now struck Lloyd with irresistible force. Perhaps the most beautiful machines are the ones that are least visible.
Abandoning spars, frame, or any form of rigid bracing, he designed and stitched together himself an ingenious parafoil made from the two types of material that held the most fascination for him: a couple of large American flags and enough women’s underwear to have dressed both a whorehouse and a church social. While porcelain-skinned matrons dozed on their goose down in the drowse of horsefly afternoons, Lloyd worked an ivory sailor’s needle, fashioning a perforated chamber that would theoretically fill with air when the fabric was fully unfurled and aloft. More veined than ribbed, with slender but strong strands of twined fishing line that he stole from a boathouse—feeding into steering toggles of thick hair ribbon—his new creation traded the toughness of a wood-and-bone enlargement of his soarers for the tuftiness of web and thistle. A second principle of his life had been sewn together in the process: in the face of failure, always become more ambitious and daring.
The breakthrough with the parafoil allowed him to focus more attention on the manufacture of the balloon and the kite components, and Brookmire, understanding these elements better, was able to throw the full weight of his support into their fabrication to a high standard, given the amount of time and materials available. The mill owner’s son recruited a family of free Negroes and an old Indian weaver woman without teeth but with nimbleness to spare, and was enthralled by Lloyd’s supervisory skills and native authority. The boy knew what he wanted, and he was a stern taskmaster when it came to getting it.
There was still no word from Hephaestus, but Lloyd had heard nothing to quench his hope that his father was still alive and surviving better than he would at the mission house, which had just about sapped his mother dry. He labored on, heaving himself into every stitch and crease of the parafoil, so that whenever he did fall into a doze he felt himself airborne. Airborn.
The giant kite assembly was finished and stress-tested by the boy in the abandoned warehouse. Lloyd hadn’t seen Schelling in weeks and was curious about how much he knew about his activities, if anything. He thought it unlikely that the humpback and Mother Tongue would just let him go. Perhaps they were simply waiting, wondering what he was up to.
He had no way of knowing that his former mentor did indeed know something of his whereabouts—just not the magnitude of his ambition. The bookman would later blame himself for what transpired—or what he felt he allowed to transpire—but there were many things on his mind. Dark forces were gathering strength in Missouri. At night the bloodhounds of the “nigger catchers” bayed in the woods, and men and women from faraway places stepped off the riverboats each day and disappeared but were not gone.
Lloyd was only subconsciously aware of this undercurrent, because the full strength of his intellect was directed to his aeronautical researches. At last, with balloon and kite elements resolved, it came time to formally trial his parawing out