HIS JOB for the night was to roam the decks looking for signs of trouble, everything from fistfights to fires. The forward area of the lower main deck behind the big staircase was an open-air lounge of sorts, a bullpen of wicker furniture and potted plants, and he noticed that mostly older people were sitting here, served by four waiters bringing out ice setups in sweating silver buckets. The boat doddered downstream, threading through the anchored freighters in quarantine at the same speed as the current, and a breeze rose off the water like a blessing, for as much as passengers craved the music and drink, they came to get out of the over-heated pavement of the city and their oven houses that wouldn’t cool down until midnight. At eight-thirty he went upstairs and the long ballroom seemed like a broad wooden railway tunnel filled with music, each ceiling arch hung with dim yellow, red, and blue lights, and the band was settling into a medium-tempo fox-trot embroidered with clarinet improvisations. The breeze steeped in and matched the flow of music, giving the swaying four hundred couples a lift from their humid life that normally left their dancing shoes green with mildew in the back of the closet. Through the windows the doubled shore lights sparked in the river and everyone felt the watery motion under their sliding feet, the turning of currents melting into the horns’ urging; the couples quick-stepped and careened, navigating the dance floor under the colored lights. Sam remembered this deck as a closed-up and creaking static mess, but now it was a moving cloud in dreamland, soon to be a memory for the dancers, who would outlast the boat itself by many years.
He walked over where the second mate watched the crowd. “Hey,” Charlie called. “This New Orleans crowd can dance.”
Sam looked over his shoulder. “I guess they can. What’s that fellow doing?”
Duggs yelled over a rising trumpet riff. “The Texas Tommy. If too many of them start up that hop dancing you have to stop it or at least spread ’ em out. The bracing under the floor can’t take too much of that. A two-step’s worse. The whole deck goes up and down like a fight ring when everybody takes a step on the downbeat.”
“Shake the place apart?” He thought Duggs was making a joke.
Charlie shook his head. “Last year an excursion steamer upriver had the whole dance deck cave in. Sent thirty people to the hospital.”
“Hell of a way to end a good time!”
“You go check the café.”
“Right.”
The band stopped and the girls returning to their tables across the floor were smiling and fanning themselves, their dresses hanging limp.
“If you see Weller, cheer him up.”
“What?”
“The captain’s got him waiting tables on the hurricane deck.”
“I bet the musicians’ union will gripe about that.”
“He asked for it himself. His salary was cut now that he’s just playing the day trips.”
On the third deck was a long, roofed section open to the night, dim except for a glowing backwash from bulbs outlining the several decks. Here couples were lounging at tables, some mixing drinks from bottles they’d brought from shore, some at the dark edges of the deck kissing, telling lies, making promises. The restaurant on the rear half of this deck was packed with people eating sandwiches or cheap steaks. A door at the rear spewed a stream of white-jacketed waiters serving the whole boat. Everyone forward was well behaved so he turned his attention to the rear of the deck, where Ted Weller was taking an order at a table. He met him at the kitchen door, before he went in.
“Moonlighting?”
“Got to do some damn something to squeeze a nickel out of the old man.” Ted Weller’s eyes were red, and Sam wondered if he’d been drinking.
“Hey, I’m on your side.”
“The more I work, the less I have. First my little girl, and now they’re trying to starve me out.”
Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Your little girl? That’s what I’m here for. When we get upriver, I’ll start asking around onshore.”
Ted wrote something on his pad and glanced up. “She would kiss me at bedtime and say ‘Gute Nacht.’ I was teaching her German.”
“Yeah?”
He leaned close and Sam could smell the whiskey. “You don’t know what it’s like, not to be able to take your kid in your arms anymore.” He turned at once and banged through a swinging door.
Sam wanted to follow him through and remind him that he wasn’t the only man in the world to lose a child, but he held back, watching the door swing in and out with waiters and busboys, giving a sliced-up view of Ted Weller arguing with a sweating cook.
AROUND TEN O’CLOCK, the boat swung into a dreamy turn at the Violet locks and was steaming upstream at three-quarters speed. The band broke into an uptempo version of “Everybody Step” and emptied the tables. When Sam came down the stairs Charlie Duggs was dragging a big young fellow by the collar out toward the forward rail. He broke loose and swung, punching Duggs in the jaw. Charlie’s face rebounded wearing a grin, and he slapped the man openhanded, the percussion cracking above the thundering band, the customer plunging sideways under a table. Sam went over to help but the second mate waved him off.
“I can handle this one. He just wants to dance a new step is all. A waiter came up a minute ago and said things were getting testy downstairs.” He grabbed the man by the ankles and hauled him back out into the music.
On the main deck Sam spotted two old men arguing, their faces crimson, one holding a cane by its bottom, the curved handle rising toward a big Emerson ceiling fan, which jerked it away, and carried it three turns before flinging it across the lounge, onto a table, where it knocked drinks in the laps of an overdressed and tipsy foursome. Sam at once understood several things about a dance steamer: people felt safe getting drunk since there was no proper law on board, nearly everyone was drinking, and any cruise was liable to turn more unstable as the trip wore on.
He stepped in front of two men advancing from their dripping table. “Easy,” he said, holding up his hands. “It was an accident.”
“Oh yeah?” One of them raised a fist, a short fellow with an ice cube rising out of his vest pocket. “Where have you been? These old bastards have been carping back and forth for the past half hour. This was supposed to be an enjoyable ride.”
“We want our money back for the drinks,” the other man said, swaying and then taking an extra step to the side.
“I’ll see that the waiter brings out another bucket of ice and some glasses.”
“What about an apology?” the little man said.
The larger of the two old men came over. His eyes were small and his nose was a huge overripe strawberry. “I’ll take my cane, thank you.”
“Don’t you have anything to say?” the little man snarled.
The old gentleman pursed his mouth, and Sam knew by looking at his face that he was going to say something that would result in the breaking up of a quarter of the wicker furniture in the lounge. “I see,” the old man began, “that you would like for me to make you feel better. You want me to apologize for the actions of an electrical contrivance.”
Here the little man’s friend stepped up. “You don’t have to get smart with us.” He gave the old man a halfhearted shove in the vest.
A tiny, well-dressed, middle-aged gentleman stood up across the room and steadied himself against a plant stand. “You just watch who you’re shoving around,” he chirped. “That’s my father-in-law.”
Two women were flapping ice off their dresses, and one of them picked up the cane and tossed it at the old man, hitting him on the forehead and knocking his glasses off. “You trashy people,” he roared, “ought to be thrown overboard!”
Sam looked around at sixty or so passengers and saw that they were nice people, well dressed and mature, not some unimportant kids he could bully into behaving. He tried to get between everybody at once and found himself in the middle of a jabbering cloud of alcoholic breath. The polite air was turning sour when the son-in-law, who was four tables over, tried to get to the argument by stepping on a wicker-bottom chair, but his foot went through it and he danced three hops and fell onto another couple’s table, his hand getting stuck in a small metal water pitcher. At this point everyone started to laugh, except the son-in-law and the old man, who slowly bent over and felt the floor for his cane and spectacles. Sam called over a waiter to dry the tables and chairs and get everybody reseated and supplied with fresh glasses and ice. The steam whistle blew a warning, followed by a rising, shrill signal from the starboard side as a ferryboat cut its engines only twenty-five feet away, its yellow running lights shining angrily, its boiler’s fire door a blinding orange star traveling sideways in the night. The passengers calmed down, distracted by the fact that the ferry had come out from its landing without waiting for or even seeing the Ambassador at all. Sam watched the ferry slide astern, hoping that everyone would realize that a couple of spilled drinks or a rude remark was nothing compared to a midnight collision spilling hundreds of folks in deep river, but then the son-in-law began throwing punches and it took him ten minutes of pulling and pushing to break up the fight.
UPSTAIRS, the band members were running with sweat, thumping out a shimmy number as five hundred dancers stepped and turned in a massive wink of patent leather and sequins, silk ties and hair oil, good New Orleans dancers who knew what to do with a downbeat making the old deck jump. The waiters were skating around the edge of the action, sliding their shoes on the dance wax, delivering sandwiches and mixers to the people at the double layer of tables lining the walls. The expressions of most of the dancers seemed overly happy, and Sam scanned the faces of the band members, who were too busy selling the tune to exhibit any worry, and indeed no one showed a negative thought, caught up in some kind of capsule of delight, at least while the music kept everything in motion. And then he saw a still silhouette sitting at the stern end of the dance deck, and he walked over because her presence contradicted the motion-drunk room. It was Elsie, sitting alone at the last table, her hair wound in pigtails above her ears, wearing a plain dark dress.
“Hi. You on break?”
“In case you don’t know, the staff can’t join in the fun. We’ll be at the dock in ten minutes and as soon as the lights come up, I’m to start stripping the tables.”
She looked tired, and he wanted to say something to cheer her up, but all he said was, “Work you to death, don’t they?”
“Well, let’s just say I need to keep busy.”
“Ted still waiting on ’em upstairs?”
She nodded. “I was waitressing with him but they cut me loose a few minutes ago. It’ll only take a half hour to clear everybody off. This is a pretty mild crowd.”
The whistle moaned out a landing signal and the band began to play “Home, Sweet Home.” Sam felt a tug on his arm and he turned to face a thickset man also wearing a mate’s cap. He introduced himself as Aaron Swaneli, the first mate.
“How’d I miss meeting you?”
“It’s my bidness to lay low,” Swaneli said. “That way I can keep an eye on things, you know?” He made a sideways motion with his head.
“You’re the power man. Got a blackjack on you.”
Swaneli put a hand on Sam’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Look, right now I need you to go topside. The hardlegs up there are smokin’ and all in love this time of night. Walk the rail and look for cigarettes they’ve tossed. Every butt you see, lit or not, put your toe on it and twist three times, okay?”
The lights came up on the last note, and the band began to take down music and pack their instruments. People crowded the stairs, and Sam walked up through them and toured the deck, first the open area, then the café, which was hot and nearly empty. He stepped out into the night and looked forward to where Mr. Brandywine then ascended a little filigreed bridge on the hurricane deck. He raised a megaphone and called directions out to a man standing by a steam capstan. The big boat seemed asleep in the water at that point, waiting for some type of decision the current was supposed to make. Finally, Mr. Brandywine turned the megaphone up to the pilothouse’s dark windows. “Mrs. Benton! Give her a nudge.”
A bell jingled in the engine room and two snoring chuffs jetted from the escape pipes as the boat leaned into the wharf and tapped a piling right where a deckhand held a hemp fender against the hull. The fore and aft lines went out and a stop-engine bell rattled as the boat drifted in snug.
It took an hour to clear the last passengers off, a too-jolly batch of overweight young women. Sam did indeed stamp out a dozen lit cigarettes, and also woke up a drunk boy in the men’s toilet and walked him ashore. Several people lingered under the dock lights, staring at the steamer as though they couldn’t quite believe their ride was over. Their faces showed they’d just been exiled back to their ordinary selves, and they didn’t seem to like it one bit. He walked to the end of the loading stage and surveyed for himself the many lights jeweling the decks, the tired porters sweeping the dark upper walkways, the kitchen staff wiping the third-deck tables and chairs, turning them up to make room for a mop-down of spilled drinks, food, trash paper, and smashed candy. He thought of the cooks swamping down the giant ranges in the hot night, the tobacco-smudged and sticky dance floor, the piss-fouled bathrooms and damaged main-deck lounge already prowled by the ship’s carpenter. It was all fun for somebody, he guessed, but his back and legs were killing him from the night’s climbing and scuffle.
About one-thirty he rolled into his bunk, jammed against the ceiling of his cabin, and a minute later Charlie Duggs came in, stripped down to his drawers, and hung his clothes on two sixteen-penny nails. “Oh, man,” he said in the dark, “I feel like I fell through the paddlewheel.”
After two minutes, Sam sensed that he was already falling asleep, and gratitude to whatever controls man’s slumber flowed through him like a medicine. Then Charlie yawned and said, “Don’t forget to roll out, wash your armpits, and buck up for the ten-thirty harbor tour.”
AT EIGHT the next morning the two of them were eating eggs, fried potatoes, and onions with the rest of the crew. The musicians had gone drinking in town after the boat docked and were eating out on the open part of the deck, moping about like wounded soldiers. Charlie folded a piece of white bread in half and waved it in the air over his plate for emphasis. “On the way down from Cincinnati we stopped at an odd little town in Indiana, I think, and ran an afternoon trip. I was nailing down new chocks for the piano during the break, and then Elsie and Ted did a number with the little girl and some of the lady passengers gathered around the bandstand and got this look in their eye like they was ready to start bawlin’. I don’t know why. It was a happy little song. Maybe they thought she was a come-alive baby doll or something.” He took a heaping bite of potatoes.
Sam straightened in his chair. “Where was the town, exactly?”
“That was a busy trip. It might have been in Kentucky, now that I think about it. Every time she sang, the mommies would come up to the bandstand. Maybe they were imagining what kind of life she might have in front of her. Everywhere she sang her two little numbers, she got the same reaction.”
Sam finished his eggs and shoved away his plate. “Some people think a lot about the future and screw up the day they’re walking around in.”
“I hear that.”
Sam did a slow pan of the café and frowned. “You think someone might want to save her from a musician’s life? I got to admit, they bring home about as much as a fry cook. My sergeant in the army sang on some phonograph records. Big labels, too. He was paid ten bucks for two sides of the record and never got a penny royalty.”
Duggs drained his ironware coffee cup and put it down, his head bobbing. “Brother plays in the Orpheum orchestra, and that don’t even pay the food bill for his family. He’s got to do Sunday bandstand work and Elks club dances and all that kind of bullshit.”
Sam tossed his napkin in his plate. “I play a little piano.”
“Pick up some extra scratch that way?”
“People tried to hire me for about a penny a key, so I said the hell with it.”
Charlie threw back his head and laughed.
Captain Stewart walked in and stood in the doorway, which everyone took as a signal to get to work. Before long, the boat was swamped by a special charter for middle-school children. The white band played for the chaperones and a few tourists as the boat eased up along the docks toward the grain elevators, the mates and watch-men keeping the children from walking the rails and swinging from the ceiling fans.
TWO DAYS LATER the boat ran a moonlight trip out of Donaldsonville, and two days after that the Ambassador docked in Baton Rouge to run three trips. The advance man had come up in his little Ford two weeks earlier, placed ads in the paper, put up posters on three hundred telegraph poles and in every store window, and talked a Presbyterian church group into a two p.m. trip. The captain gave the Wellers the morning off to go to the police station and report their daughter’s abduction and provide a description. The morning orchestra wasn’t taken too seriously, so Sam took Ted’s place at the piano and played the guitar parts off the chart, smiling at the few couples choosing to box-step next to the bandstand. He was surprised to remember how good it felt to have someone dance to his music. He studied the customers and after the set stood ashore by the stage plank to watch the morning riders file off the boat, looking carefully into each face.
He was going up the main staircase when the Wellers caught up with him, Elsie racing past, saying she needed aspirin. Ted mopped his face with his handkerchief and leaned against the rail. “The damned cops here aren’t interested in lost children from Cincinnati. They wouldn’t call other jurisdictions unless we paid the charges, and we’re about flat broke.” He pulled off his straw and wiped the hatband mark on his high forehead. “The desk sergeant took our description and threw it in a drawer. We asked him a bunch of questions, if there had been any child stealing that he knew off. You know what he told us? He said he had a few kids of his own he wouldn’t mind someone taking off his hands.”
“Sounds like you ran into a jughead. Probably the chief’s brother-in-law.”
Ted glared at him. “That supposed to make me feel better?”
“Look, I’ll lay off the two o’clock trip if the captain gives me the okay, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Ted cocked his head. “What makes you think you can do better than we did?”
“I know an old boy on the force-that is, if he hasn’t quit by now. We were in the same detachment in France.”
HE CROSSED the railroad tracks in the heat and climbed the long hill into town. At the police station the sergeant told him that Melvin Robicheaux was directing traffic at Florida and North. Sam walked out and half an hour later spotted him standing on a side street under a drugstore awning, smoking. His uniform was wrinkled and greasy, his badge pinned on crookedly. Sam called out his name.
The officer blinked. “Lucky! Where the hell did you come from?”
“The real city.”
They shook hands.
“You get a indoors job like you said you would?”
“Got it and lost it. I’m working on an excursion boat right now.”
“No cop work? Most boys got on the force.” He took a hissing drag on his cigarette.
“No. Not that. Not official, anyway.” He then told him what he was doing and who he was looking for.
Melvin spun his cigarette into the street and laughed. “You really are a lucky son of a bitch.” He looked down and laughed again.
“You want to share the joke?”
“You just walk up and get what you want, just like that.”
“What?” He bumped up his shoulders. Melvin Robicheaux seemed angry that the world was taking it easy on everyone but himself.
“I ought to hit you up for a few bucks like I do the pimps.” He looked up and down the street. “But I’ll take it easy. There’s a bunch of raggedy outlaws live way up on the river, right before the Mississippi state line, I guess. The Skadlocks. The old woman of the clan is Ninga, and she fits your description.”
Sam looked at him and then down the blinding street. “So do a lot of ugly old gals. This one ever steal somebody’s kid?”
Melvin looked over and watched an Oldsmobile run a stop sign. “She or any one of them that lives with her would carve out the pope’s eyeballs and bring ’em to you in a coin purse if you was to pay enough.”
“The world’s got no shortage of cutthroats. Why’d you think of her so fast?”
“Dogs.”
He took a step back toward the street. “Come again?”
“She steals dogs. Prize hounds, bank-guard dogs, yapping nuisance dogs. Don’t know how she makes off with them or who hires her. Last year I found her driving an old Dodge Betsy with three German shepherds in the backseat asleep in sacks. Purebloods from the damned army, no less. The car stunk of chloroform. We took her in and she had bail in her purse. Never seen her since.” Melvin put his tongue in his cheek and rolled his eyes. “Then I heard she got pinched for the same thing down in Orleans Parish. Same results, too.”
Sam put a hand in his pocket and leaned against the plate glass out of the sun. “It’s worth a shot. You can go out with me and we’ll talk to her face-to-face.”
“Lucky, my authority extends about five blocks from where we’re standing. I’m just a city cop.”
“Well, a parish deputy, then.”
“Her place is two parishes away, and that sheriff tolerates the Skadlocks like they was kin. I think they give him his liquor. If you want to talk to her, you’ll have to go into Gasket Landing yourself.”
“Where the hell is this place? Maybe I can take a train up and meet the boat at Bayou Sadie. Our advance man set up a moonlight trip out of there for the townspeople.”
Melvin pulled his watch and wound it, shaking his head. “Gasket Landing isn’t really a place anymore. Long time ago there was a plantation in there, but everything’s mostly fallen apart, I hear. It’s gone back to horse country. A car can’t get back in there through the slop.”
“Can I get there by boat?”
“You gonna sneak up on somebody on an excursion steamer?” He laughed and pulled out the papers for another cigarette. “If you got some wood sense from when you was a kid, there’s still one livery in St. Frank where they’ll rent you a horse.”
“The hell you say.” Sam remembered riding to grammar school with his cousins down in Calcasieu Parish, three of them on one rough-riding plug named Slop Jar. “I haven’t been aboard a horse but once since I left the farm.”
“It’s the only way to get there, Lucky. Bring a cheap compass and ask directions from everybody you see.” He put the cigarette in his mouth and gave Sam a sideways look. “You got a gun?”
He shook his head. “Don’t want one.”
“I’d bring a Colt.45 if I was hunting up a Skadlock.”
“I don’t even own a pocketknife. I just want to find this woman and talk to her. Then I’ll know what to do, I guess.”
A truck rumbled into the intersection and stopped. Two women in a REO approached from the far side, and the driver squeezed the bulb on her horn.
Melvin blew his whistle and waved the truck on through. “I’ll tell you everything I know, bud. Vive la France and all that. You just have to ask.”
“Well, then. Here goes.”