FOR THE MOONLIGHT trip he counted the gate at the stage plank, earnestly checking faces, watching up the bluff for Ted to get out of a cab. After loading everybody, he patrolled the dance floor. The Vicksburg people were pretty well behaved, though suspicious of the black orchestra, but a group from the big sawmill in Yokena had brought in an intolerable number of half-pints of 150-proof moonshine, and in midriver several rattling fistfights broke out. There was something wrong with their liquor, and toward the end of the excursion people were vomiting over the deck rails and under tables on the dance floor. One balding man wearing overalls went berserk, and it took a waiter, Charlie Duggs, and two busboys to restrain him from jumping into the paddlewheel. By the time the boat returned to the dock, Sam, Duggs, and Aaron Swaneli had to turn their uniforms over to a maid to be sewn back together for the next day’s run in Greenville.
That night while the boat was under way August helped load coal for three hours, pushing a wheelbarrow up and down a narrow plank to a dark coal flat tied to the side of the boat. He was ankle deep in black dust and shoveling in the light of a guttering kerosene lantern, humming a new piece the black orchestra had played twice in a row because the dancers wouldn’t quit hollering for it. When the bunkers were full, he threw a few shovelfuls into the firebox and saw that the coal was terrible stuff, half dirt, and he and the other firemen could raise barely enough steam to operate the engines. He fought the fires all night, trying to break up clinkers and get enough air through the coal so it would burn hot, and by the time they landed, before dawn, when his mother came down to tell him where the railroad station was in Greenville, he was too tired to stand, able only to lean on his shovel handle and listen, his eyes the only bright spots on him.
SAM WAS IN HIS CABIN matching Charlie Duggs snore for snore when he was awakened by a knock. He found Elsie outside, teary eyed and begging him to go up to the station and check the schedules because August was dead on his feet and needed an hour’s washing besides. She was already late for the kitchen, and receiving his nod, ran down the steps. His shoulder was aching and he was so exhausted he swayed like a drunk. Pulling on mismatched pants and shirt, he stepped out on the wet deck. The boat itself was snoring steam into the gray dawn as he crossed the levee into town.
The night agent was at the end of his shift, and his eyes were bloodshot under his visor. He glanced at Sam’s clothes and made him wait at the ticket window a long time before coming over and telling him that the connecting up from St. Frank was due in at one-thirty.
Sam made a face and looked over the agent’s shoulder at the regulator clock.
“Something else?” The man had a nasty sneer.
Sam took a breath. “You hear of anybody in town bringing a three-year-old girl into their family?”
“You from down in French country?”
“I might still sound like I am but I live in New Orleans. Off Magazine Street.”
“One of my brothers lives in New Orleans, but he don’t like it. What kind of little girl you mean, like a orphan or something?” The fat agent snorted. “Like people around here need another mouth to feed.”
Sam blinked himself more awake. He had to think straight. “I bet everybody in town goes through this station. We had a baby girl stolen from a musical act on the excursion boat on the trip downriver. I was hoping something might have caught your eye.”
The agent cocked his big bald head in the little barred window. “Everybody’s got some big tragedy to deal with sooner or later. Are you not old enough yet to know that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not.”
“And why are you even interested in these other folks’ kid? You owe them something?”
“Mister, it’s a long story, but I’m sort of responsible she got stole.”
The agent looked him over carefully. “You just trying to get rid of a little guilty feeling, maybe?”
Sam didn’t know what to say to this. He already suspected that most human action was self-serving but now wondered if there wasn’t something beyond the selfishness, a possibility that interested him. “That and maybe something more.”
The agent stared at a wad of waybills in his hand, but he was not reading them. “I’d like to wipe my ass with these things.” He took a long breath and let it out, sounding like a man who’d come to a hard decision. “You say it’s a little girl?”
“About three years old. They cut her hair short to disguise her, but some weeks have gone by.”
“So she’d look like a boy, maybe.”
“I guess so.”
The agent met his gaze and looked away. “All I can do is keep my eyes and ears open.”
“I’m a mate on the excursion boat, the Ambassador. If you find something, anything, send me a wire and I’ll pay for it.”
From under the window, the agent picked up a hook stuck full with waybills. “In the unlikely event that I do, it’ll be from Morris Hightower. That’s me. But nobody I know would steal somebody’s kid.” He wet his lips with his tongue. “Now, if it was a boy, some mud farmer might be after making him a hand. But who’d want a girl?”
Sam bent at the knees to look under the man’s visor. “She was pretty and could sing like a bird.”
Morris Hightower frowned and pulled the paper bills apart angrily. He was tired, sedentary, probably wouldn’t be alive in five years and knew it. “Partner, there never was a bird that made a nickel off a song.”
THE TEN O’CLOCK TRIP was a field day for several grammar schools, and no music was required, so he haunted the railings, keeping the children from falling into the river and away from the hot smokestacks on the upper deck. After lunch, the boat landed and he walked back to the station to wait for Ted, who wasn’t on that day’s train either. He sat down on the long bench and stared south along the tracks. The Skadlocks were dishonest in all ways and coldhearted as well, but he didn’t know if they were killers. Throughout his life people had accused him of never suspecting the worst of people, but he didn’t see any need to without reason. The Skadlocks had let him leave safely. But then, he hadn’t threatened them, had tried to deal with them on their own level. And he wasn’t the desperate father of a child they’d stolen away. Down at the landing a donkey engine’s whistle went off like a woman’s scream, bouncing away from the buildings in town and spreading west over the Arkansas wilderness. He hoped more than anything that Ted hadn’t done something stupid.
After he walked back to the boat, he went to the kitchen and asked Elsie if Ted had brought any weapons with him. She told him about his knife and pistol, and he looked at the floor and shook his head.
“You didn’t expect him to go off without so much as a penknife, did you?” She picked up a crewman’s order and headed for the out door. Then she stopped and studied his expression. “You think he’s been hurt?”
“No. Not that. I bet he went ahead to Memphis. The train I met was packed full of Confederate veterans coming in for the two-thirty trip. He might’ve been forced to ride the main line all the way up. I wouldn’t worry until tomorrow, or whenever it is we get to Memphis.”
She set the plates down. “You checked for telegrams?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t suppose we could call the law down there and see if there’s been any trouble?”
The calliopist on the roof began to belt out “Camptown Races,” the whistles calling out over the county.
“The law down there isn’t real law,” he told her. “And the Skadlocks live where hawks couldn’t find ’em at noon.”
She closed her eyes. “I’m so scared.”
“I know. We’ll talk after I go down and play some Stephen Foster for the veterans.”
She shook her head, roused herself. “All right.”
“This time I’ll let the right hand know what the left hand’s doing.”
She didn’t smile. “Okay, Lucky.”
There was no one on the dance floor for the afternoon trip, the old soldiers staying as far away as possible from the music so they could retell their legends. Sam saw many one-legged fellows crowing about in long white beards. Some of them drew maps in the air with their crooked fingers to bring old battles back; in their brittle memories they rode horses dead so long their bones had gone to powder in the deep clay fields of northern Virginia.
The band knocked off, the musicians set free to wander with the customers, and as he walked along the starboard rail, Sam noted the missing arms, the eye patches, the nervous twitches. Most of the men were animated, wore their old uniforms or some version of those gray markings, but he wondered about the ones who’d stayed at home, who wanted nothing of the remembering, who’d gotten in the mail a two-cent postcard announcing the veterans’ excursion and thrown it in the stove and then maybe looked out the window, gladdened by the fact that people weren’t shooting each other down in the street. Charlie Duggs had been to France and had killed a few Germans, and twice Lucky had to drop down out of his bunk in darkness and shake him out of a nightmare. The first time, Duggs was calling out, “Not that, not that,” one leg thrashing out of his bunk, his body vibrating in the memory-stoked heat of despair. Sam had put a hand on his chest, feeling the spasms die off like the vibrations of a departing train.
“What?” Charlie had gasped.
“Bad dream, bud?”
He was quiet for a moment, gulping deep breaths of the stale air in the little cabin. “The worst,” he’d said.
THE MOONLIGHT carried eight hundred, and Sam studied faces at the stage plank, not sure what he was looking for, maybe nothing, maybe Ninga Skadlock stumping up the ramp. Later, on the dance floor, he saw a surly crowd stand well back from the bandstand and regard the black orchestra with bovine mistrust. No one from the scowling, slouching group danced for two numbers, and then the musicians seemed to size them up and began “Down Yonder,” played straight hotel-style but with a subtle African jounce that drew out first the young dancers and then, pair by pair, some of the others. The captain ordered the lights turned down, blackness receding into blackness, the mood of the deck graying out, rhythm, for a time, overcoming hate.