Stories for Chip

by Nisi Shawl

  CRREAK!

  Plaquette giggled. “You giving me a good reminder—I better put that oil on your wheels as well as your insides. You like to scare me half to death rolling round the dark in here.” She pulled the miniature oil tin from her apron pocket and knelt to lubricate the wheels of the rolling treads under Claude’s platform. It had been Plaquette’s idea to install them to replace the big brass wheels he’d had on either side. She’d grown weary of righting Claude every time he rolled over an uneven surface and toppled. It had been good practice, though, for nowadays, when Pa was like to fall with each spastic step he took and Plaquette so often had to catch him. He hated using the crutches. And all of this because he’d begun taking a few sips of jake to warm his cold bones before his early morning shifts.

  Jamaica Ginger was doing her family in, that was sure.

  Her jostling of Claude must have released some last dregs of energy left in his winding mechanism, for just then he took it into his mechanical head to drone, “…nooot to escaaape it by exerrrtion…”

  Quickly, Plaquette stopped the automaton midsentence. For good measure, she removed the book from its spool inside Claude. She didn’t want Msieur to hear that she was still downstairs, alone in the dark.

  As Plaquette straightened again, a new thought struck her.

  The shutters folded back easily. White light from the coil-powered street lamp outside flooded the tick-tocking showroom, glittering on glass cases and gold and brass watches, on polished wooden housings and numbered faces like pearly moons. More than enough illumination for Plaquette’s bright eyes. “Come along, Claude,” Plaquette commanded as she headed back towards the work room—somewhat unnecessarily, as she had Claude’s wardenclyffe in the pocket of her leather work apron. Where it went, Claude was bound to follow. Which made it doubly foolish of her to have been startled by him.

  She could see the mechanical porter more clearly now; its cold steel body painted deep blue in imitation of a porter’s uniform, down to the gold stripes at the cuffs of the jacket. Its perpetually smiling black face. The Pullman Porter “cap” atop its head screwed on like a bottle top. Inside it was the Tesla receiver the George would use to guide itself around inside the sleeping-car cabins the Pullman company planned to outfit with wireless transmitters. That part had been Plaquette’s idea. Msieur had grumbled, but Plaquette could see him mentally adding up the profits this venture could bring him.

  If Msieur’s George was a success, that’d be the end of her father’s job. Human porters had human needs. A mechanical George would never be ill, never miss work. Would always smile, would never need a new uniform—just the occasional paint touch-up. Would need to be paid for initially, but never paid thereafter.

  With two fingers, Plaquette poked the George’s ungiving chest. The mechanical man didn’t so much as rock on its sturdy legs. Plaquette still thought treads would have been better, like Claude’s. But Msieur wanted the new Georges to be as lifelike as possible, so as not to scare the fine ladies and gentlemen who rode the luxury sleeping cars. So the Georges must be able to walk. Smoothly, like Pa used to.

  The chiming clocks in the showroom began tolling the hour, each in their separate tones. Plaquette gasped. Though surrounded by clocks, she had completely forgotten how late it was. Ma would be waiting for her; it was nearly time for Pa’s shift at the station! She couldn’t stop now to test the George. She slapped Claude’s wardenclyffe into his perpetually outstretched hand, pulled her bonnet onto her head, and hastened outside, stopping only to jiggle the shop’s door by its polished handle to make sure the latch had safely caught.

  Only a few blocks to scurry home under the steadily burning lamps, among the sparse clumps of New Orleans’s foreign sightseers and those locals preferring to conduct their business in the cool of night. In her hurry, she bumped into one overdressed gent. He took her by the arms and leered, looking her up and down. She muttered an apology and pulled away before he could do more than that. She was soon home, where Ma was waiting on the landing outside their rooms. The darkness and Pa’s hat and heavy coat disguised Ma well enough to fool the white supervisors for a while, and the other colored were in on the secret. But if Ma came in late—

  “Don’t fret, darling,” Ma said, bending to kiss Plaquette’s cheek. “I can still make it. He ate some soup and I just help him to the necessary, so he probably sleep till morning.”

  Plaquette went into the dark apartment. No fancy lights for them. Ma had left the kerosene lamp on the kitchen table, turned down low. Plaquette could see through to Ma and Pa’s bed. Pa was tucked in tight, only his head showing above the covers. He was breathing heavy, not quite a snore. The shape of him underneath the coverlet looked so small. Had he shrunk, or was she growing?

  Plaquette hung up her hat. In her hurry to get home, she’d left Msieur’s still wearing her leather apron. As she pulled it off to hang it beside her hat, something inside one of the pockets thumped dully against the wall. One of Claude’s book scrolls; the one she’d taken from him. She returned it to the pocket. Claude could have it back tomorrow. She poured herself some soup from the pot on the stove. Smelled like pea soup and crawfish, with a smoky hint of ham. Ma had been stretching the food with peas, seasoning it with paper-thin shavings from that one ham shank for what seemed like weeks now. Plaquette didn’t think she could stomach the taste of more peas, more stingy wisps of ham. What she wouldn’t give for a good slice of roast beef, hot from the oven, its fat glistening on the plate.

  Her stomach growled, not caring. Crawfish soup would suit it just fine. Plaquette sat to table and set about spooning cold soup down her gullet. The low flame inside the kerosene lamp flickered, drawing pictures. Plaquette imagined she saw a tower, angels circling it (or demons), a war raging below. Men skewering other men with blades and spears. Beasts she’d never before heard tell of, lunging—

  “Girl, what you seeing in that lamp? Have you so seduced.”

  Plaquette started and pulled her mind out of the profane world in the lamp. “Pa!” She jumped up from the table and went to kiss him on the forehead. He hugged her, his hands flopping limply to thump against her back. He smelled of sweat, just a few days too old to be ignored. “You need anything? The necessary?”

  “Naw.” He tried to pat the bed beside him, failed. He grimaced. “Just come and sit by me a little while. Tell me the pictures in your mind.”

  “If I do, you gotta tell me ‘bout San Francisco again.” She sat on the bed facing him, knees drawn up beneath her skirts like a little child.

  “Huh. I’m never gonna see that city again.” It tore at Plaquette’s heart to see his eyes fill with tears. “Oh, Plaquette,” he whispered, “what are we gonna to do?”

  Not we; her. She would do it. “Hush, Pa.” It wouldn’t be Billy. Ma and Pa were showing her that you couldn’t count on love and hard work alone to pull you through. Not when this life would scarcely pay a colored man a penny to labor all his days and die young. She patted Pa’s arm, took his helpless hand in hers. She closed her eyes to recollect the bright story in the lamp flame. Opened them again. “So. Say there’s a tower, higher than that mountain you told me ‘bout that one time. The one with the clouds all round the bottom of it so it look to be floating?”

  Pa’s mouth was set in bitterness. He stared off at nothing. For a moment Plaquette thought he wouldn’t answer her. But then, his expression unchanged, he ground out, “Mount Rainier. In Seattle.”

  “That’s it. This here tower, it’s taller than that.”

  Pa turned his eyes to hers. “What’s it for?”

  “How should I know? I’ll tell you that when it comes to me. I know this, though; there’s people flying round that tower, right up there in the air. Like men, and maybe a woman, but with wings. Like angels. No, like bats.”

  Pa’s eyes grew round. The lines in his face smoothed out as Plaquette spun her story. A cruel prince. A fearsome army. A lieutenant with a conscience.

  It would have to be Msieur. />
  That ended up being a good night. Pa fell back to sleep, his face more peaceful than she’d seen in days. Plaquette curled up against his side. She was used to his snoring and the heaviness of his drugged breath. She meant to sleep there beside him, but her mind wouldn’t let her rest. It was full of imaginings: dancing with Msieur at the Orleans Ballroom, her wearing a fine gown and a fixed, automaton smile; Billy’s hopeful glances and small kindnesses, his endearingly nervous bad jokes; and Billy’s shoulders, already bowed at 17 from lifting and hauling too-heavy boxes day in, day out, tick, tock, forever (how long before her eyesight went from squinting at tiny watch parts?); an army of tireless metal Georges, more each day, replacing the fleshly porters, and brought about in part by her cleverness. Whichever path her future took, Plaquette could only see disaster.

  Yet in the air above her visions, they flew. Free as bats, as angels.

  Finally Plaquette eased herself out of bed. The apartment was dark; she’d long since blown out the lamp to save wick and oil. She tiptoed carefully to the kitchen. By feel, she got Claude’s reading scroll out of the pocket of her apron. She crept out onto the landing. By the light of a streetlamp, she unrolled and re-rolled it so that she could see the end of the book. The punched holes stopped a good foot-and-a-half before the end of the roll. There was that much blank space left.

  Plaquette knew My Lady Nobody practically word for word. She studied the roll, figuring out the patterns of holes that created the sounds which allowed Claude to speak the syllables of the story. She could do this. She crept back inside and felt her way through the kitchen drawer. She grasped something way at the back. A bottle, closed tight, some liquid still sloshing around inside it. A sniff of the lid told her what it was. She put the bottle aside and kept rummaging through the drawer. Her heart beat triple-time when she found what she was looking for. Pa did indeed have more than one ticket punch.

  It was as though there was a fever rising in her; for the next few hours she crouched shivering on the landing and in a frenzy, punched a complicated pattern into the end of the scroll, stopping every so often to roll it back to the beginning for guidance on how to punch a particular syllable. By the time she’d used up the rest of the roll, her fingers were numb with cold, her teeth chattering, the sky was going pink in the east, and the landing was scattered with little circles of white card. But her brain finally felt at peace.

  She rose stiffly to her feet. A light breeze began blowing the white circles away. Ma would probably be home in another hour or so. Plaquette replaced the scroll in her apron pocket, changed into her night gown, and lay back down beside her father. In seconds, she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  ◊

  Ma woke her all too soon. Plaquette’s eyes felt like there was grit in them. Pa was still snoring away. Ma gestured her out to the kitchen, where they could speak without waking him. Ma’s face was drawn with fatigue. She’d spent the night fetching and carrying for white people. “How he doing?” she asked.

  “Tolerable. Needs a bath.”

  Ma sighed. “I know. He won’t let me wash him. He ashamed.”

  Plaquette felt her eyebrows raise in surprise. The Pa she knew washed every morning and night and had a full bath on Sundays.

  Ma pulled a chair out from under the table and thumped herself down into it. Her lips were pinched together with worry. “He not getting better.”

  “We’re managing.”

  “I thought he might mend. Some do. Tomorrow he supposed to start his San Francisco run. Guess I gotta do it.”

  At first, Plaquette felt only envy. Even Ma was seeing the world. Then she understood the problem. “San Francisco run’s five days.”

  Ma nodded. “I know you can see to him all by yourself, darling. You’re a big girl. But you gotta go to work for Msieur, too. Your Pa, he’s not ready to be alone all day.”

  It was one weight too many on the scales. Plaquette feared it would tip her completely over. She stammered, “I-I have to-to go, Ma.” Blindly, she grabbed her bonnet and apron and sped out the door. Guilt followed her the whole way to Msieur’s. Leaving Ma like that.

  She would have to start charming Msieur, sooner rather than later.

  Plaquette was the first one to the shop, just as she’d planned it. Msieur generally lingered over his breakfast, came down in time to open the showroom to custom. She’d have a few minutes to herself. She’d make it up to Ma later. Sit down with her and Pa Sunday morning and work out a plan.

  Claude and the George were beside her bench, right where she’d left them. She bent and patted Claude on the cheek. She delved into Claude’s base through its open hatch and removed the remaining three “books” which Claude recited when the rolls of punched paper were fed into his von Kempelen apparatus. Claude bided open and silent, waiting to be filled with words. Eagerly Plaquette lowered her book onto the spool and locked that in place, then threaded the end—no, the beginning, the very beginning of this new story—onto the toothed drum of the von Kempelen and closed its cover.

  She removed the ribbon bearing Claude’s key from his wrist. She wound him tight and released the guard halfway—for some of the automaton’s mechanisms were purely for show. In this mode, Claude’s carven lips would remain unmoving.

  With a soft creak, the spool began to turn. A flat voice issued from beneath Claude’s feet:

  “They Fly at Çironia, by Della R. Mausney. Prologue. Among the tribes and villages—”

  It was working!

  Afire with the joy of it, Plaquette began working on the George again.

  But come noon the metal man was still as jake-legged as Pa. Seemed there was nothing Plaquette could do to fix either one.

  She tried to settle her thoughts. She couldn’t work if her mind was troubled. She’d listened to her punchcard story three times today already. She knew she was being vain, but she purely loved hearing her words issue forth from Claude. The story was a creation that was completely hers, not built on the carcass of someone else’s ingenuity. Last night’s sleepless frenzy had cut the bonds on her imagination. She’d set free something she didn’t know she had in her. Claude’s other novels were all rich folk weeping over rich folk problems, white folk pitching woo. They Fly at Çironia was different, wickedly so. The sweep and swoop of it. The crudeness, the brutality.

  She wound the key set into Claude’s side until it was just tight enough, and tripped the release fully. With a quiet sound like paper riffling, Claude’s head started to move. His eyelids flicked up and down. His head turned left to right. The punchcard clicked forward one turn. Claude’s jaw opened, and he began to recite.

  “Now,” she whispered to the George, “one more time. Let’s see what’s to be done with you.” She reached into his chest with her tweezers as the familiar enchantment began to come upon her. While the Winged Ones screeed through the air of Çironia’s mountains on pinions of quartz, Plaquette wove and balanced quiltings of coiled springs, hooked them into layer upon layer of delicately-weighted controls, dropped them into one another’s curving grasps, adjusted and readjusted the workings of the George’s legs.

  Finally, for the fourth time that day, the Winged Ones seized the story’s teller and tossed him among themselves in play. Finally, for the fourth time that day, he picked himself up from the ground, gathered about himself such selfness as he could.

  The short book ended. Gradually Plaquette’s trance did the same.

  Except for the automatons, she was alone. The time was earlier than it had been last night. Not by much. Shadows filled the wide corners, and the little light that fell between buildings to slip in at the tall windows was thin and nearly useless.

  A creaking board revealed Msieur’s presence in the showroom just before the door communicating with it opened. He stuck his head through, smiling like the overdressed man Plaquette had run from on her way home last night. She returned the smile, trying for winsomeness.

  “Not taking ill, are you?” Msieur asked. So much for her winnin
g ways.

  He moved forward into the room to examine the George. “Have you finished for the day? I doubt you made much progress.” His manicured hands reopened the chest she had just shut. He bent as if to peer inside, but his eyes slid sideways, toward Plaquette’s bosom and shoulders. She should stand proud to show off her figure. Instead, she stumbled up from her bench and edged behind the stolid protection of Claude’s metal body.

  Smiling more broadly yet, Msieur turned his gaze to the George’s innards in reality. “You do appear to have done something, however—Let’s test it!” He closed up the chest access. He retrieved the mechanism’s key from the table, wound it tight, and tripped its initial release. The George lumbered clumsily to its feet.

  “Where’s that instruction card? Ah!” Msieur inserted it and pressed the secondary release button.

  A grinding hum issued from the metal chest. The George’s left knee lifted—waist-high—higher! But then it lowered and the foot kicked out. It landed heel first. One step—another—a third—a fourth—four more—it stopped. It had reached the workroom’s far wall, and, piled against it, the Gladstones and imperials it was now supposed to load itself with. It whirred and stooped. It ticked and reached, tocked and grasped, and then—

  Then it stuck in place. Quivering punctuated by rhythmic jerks ran along its blue-painted frame. Rrrr-rap! Rrrr-rap! RRRR-RAP! With each repetition the noise of the George’s faulty operation grew louder. Msieur ran quickly to disengage its power.

  “Such precision! Astonishing!” Msieur appeared pleased at even partial success. He stroked his neat, silky beard thoughtfully. He seemed to come to a decision. “We’ll work through the night. The expense of the extra oil consumed is nothing if we succeed—and I believe we will.”

  By “we,” Msieur meant her. He expected for her to toil on his commission all night.

  But what about Pa?

  Self-assured though he was, Msieur must have sensed her hesitation. “What do you need? Of course—you must be fed! I’ll send to the Café du Monde—” He glanced around the empty workshop. “—or if I must go myself, no matter. A cup of chicory and a slice of chocolate pie, girl! How does that sound?”