to align his personal skill with the potential of his creation. Faced now, at approximately three hundred feet, with the combined circumstances of the failure of one half of his enterprise (the loss of the Miss Viola and its cargo of the Ambassadors) and the success of his own means of aviation he was forced to apply all that he had learned about the wind with perilous immediacy.
He pulled the left steering toggle and swung left, sailing faster down and forward, whistling over the steeples and the carriage-colliding laneways to the horror and amazement of Mulrooney, Hansel Snowden Brookmire, and the people of St. Louis. Flaring slowed his driving speed and restored lift, while his body trembled in the risers. The thought of the helpless brothers breaking every bone in their bodies stabbed him with remorse and doubt. He whooshed around a smokestacked section of town, heading back toward the courthouse, but in banking the toggle tore and a puff of air stalled the edge of the parafoil.
Where the wing had been filled like a lung, it now gasped and he jostled in the rigging. The sunlight burned into his retinas. He heard a cry come up from the streets beneath him and the whinnying of crazed horses. The turbulence batted at him like a spinning leaf—his nerves were frayed like the ribbons he clung to.
He tried to readjust, flying at half brakes, one toggle up, one down. But in swerving around to make the courthouse and the confusion of Fourth Street, where he was to have made his epochal landing, he overcompensated and then had to brake full—which battered the wing chute more. One of the main leads streaming down to the risers broke—the toggle did not respond. He felt the heat waves rising up from the bricks below—the smell of horse manure and the din of human panic.
Ground rush hit him—the mess of scattering street traffic engulfing his field of vision, all the glory gone, leaving stomach-churning, muscle-bracing expectations of obliteration upon impact! He yanked the toggles, beginning to plummet, regaining control too late, and swooping down like a raptor to strike a fleeing rodent in a field of dry corn.
While this private drama had been playing out in the air, a rather more public debacle had been unraveling below. Representatives of Bladon, McCafferty & Co. had led their assembled offering clanking and shuffling like a parade of the damned from the auction house’s pen on Chestnut Street to the courthouse steps, where a pompous man in a frilled shirt and a broad-brimmed hat read out the particulars of the sale and clarified the terms of purchase in stentorian tones. The planter aristocracy was well represented, decked out in top hats and European-tailored finery. Some had come from as far away as the black-loam bottomlands of Mississippi and Alabama, or the sugar kingdoms of Louisiana. The merchandise stood glistening and grim in the brassy sun. Errant schoolboys gapped and stretched. Idlers spat tobacco juice; skinny dogs panted under drays. Hoop-skirted women with complexions like clotted cream dabbed their throats with eau de cologne as barrel-chested saloonkeepers emerged blinking in the glare, hooking their thumbs into their braces.
Down on Fourth Street, a hatchet-faced plantation foreman watched from the saddle of a bay gelding while his tight-lipped overseer stood gripping a musket on top of the courthouse stairs. Another man in a baggy black suit, with a head as bald as a fire bell under a black silk hat, leaned over a weathered pinewood podium that had been wrestled out of a wagon, while two hulking guardsmen strolled the lines of slaves—some slumped with weariness and despair, others standing erect, both male and female, radiating the strength they had earned by long work in bright light and all weather.
The two hard-bitten white minders had hairy arms as thick as the limbs of hod carriers and skin not much lighter than the individuals up for sale. Their square-toed boots were flecked with the pale green-gold of dried dung, and faded red or threadbare white bandannas poked up under their chins as if to hide some growth. Everything as usual.
Until the Miss Viola appeared.
The outré vessel came across the river and the sky like some narcotic vision of the future. The sausage casing—like balloon, which had provided the initial elevation, detached and expired in what from ground level Lloyd would have considered a disappointing poof relative to the incendiary excitement he had intended. (The problem was that he could not use any