WILLA WHITE felt a duty to please her husband any way she could. She hired Vessy, the best cook she could find, and though the girl was coarse and simple, Acy enjoyed her meals. Willa considered herself two or three pounds overweight, so she traveled to the nearest big city to purchase exotic-colored foundation garments with brocaded straps and buckles that camouflaged her lushness and made Acy breathless with the effort of getting them off her in the dark. She wanted to entertain her husband with bright talk, so she subscribed to many magazines that digested the world’s complexities for her. Acy liked a dustless and orderly house, so she hired an excellent maid, the daughter of a woman that worked for the Calhoun family. The one thing she couldn’t supply Acy with was a child.
Usually Willa took a drink of wine after lunch and supper, along with an olive-colored pill the druggist, her first cousin, had given her. It was a cure for opium addiction in the old days, he explained, and would merely calm her nerves. She took another drink or two about eight o’clock, then another at bedtime, a whiskey, for her digestion.
One night around two o’clock she heard a sound like a mosquito whining in her ear and sat up, dizzy, to realize it was her Madeline crying in the next bedroom.
She sat in a brocaded chair next to the child and could see in the glow of the night-light that she was sweaty under the fine sheets and coverlet. “Here, honey, let’s get all this off of you. It’s okay to sleep just under a sheet when it’s warm.”
“Where’s my mommy and Gussie?” the child cried, her voice sleepy and thick.
“You’re just confused, Madeline. Your family got sick and passed away, remember?”
“No, they didn’t.”
“You were in the orphanage just one day when we picked you out to be our own little girl, precious.” She leaned over and began to stroke the girl’s hair. “I saw right away you were talented and pretty, not like those dirty, snotty children. Oh, you could sing like a bird.”
“My mommy taught me songs.”
“Well…” Willa straightened her back. “Didn’t I hire a trained musician to teach you better ones? He cost lots and lots of money, Madeline.”
“He didn’t like the song I sang for him.”
Willa looked toward the window and frowned. “‘Cleopatra’ is a nasty New York song from one of those tawdry revues.”
The child began to whimper. “Vessy said she liked it.”
“Vessy is an uneducated servant who barely knows how to wear shoes. She probably sleeps with hound dogs back in the woods.”
“I like her,” the girl said.
“Bless you, there’s not a thing you know about how people are. I’ll teach you, Madeline, the difference between good and bad people. All you have to do is listen to me and watch me.”
“Can I have a drink of water?”
Willa let out a sigh. “All right. I probably won’t get back to sleep anyway.”
Down in the kitchen she fumbled around in the cabinets for a common tumbler. She started to draw a glass of tepid water from the mop faucet, which still ran to the old rainwater cistern, then remembered Vessy saying the water had things in it. What things? She would have to ask. She remembered the girl’s hot face and chipped a little ice for the glass and drew water from the city tap. What a bother it was to raise a child! But as she stood in the dark hall outside the girl’s door, holding the sweating glass, she felt somehow ennobled. The child sat up in the dim room, barely visible.
“Can I have the water?”
“Can I have the water, what?” Her heart nearly stopped beating with the expectation of her answer.
“Can I have the water, lady?”
THE AMBASSADOR stayed several days in Memphis. No big excursion boats had come to town for months, and the men’s lodges, church groups, trade unions, and general crowds kept the steamer running three outings a day at full capacity. The passengers on the night trips were mostly couples, very well dressed, fairly good dancers out for a civilized time, and the crew was able to relax.
Ted Weller, when he could walk on crutches, decided it was time to travel to Cincinnati to another hospital. After Elsie and August said their goodbyes before rushing off for a two o’clock excursion, Sam helped him into a cab and rode with him to the station, bought his ticket, and handled his trunk. He sat a long time next to him on a bench and waited for the train, noting the hurt in Ted’s face and wondering if surgery could put the rhythmic lightning back in his fingers.
“God, Lucky, I feel awful. This whole left arm is throbbing.”
“You feel too bad to travel, we can catch a hack back to the hospital.”
Ted took a long breath. “No. I’ll be all right once I get on board.”
Sam reached over and stuffed the long ticket into Ted’s inside coat pocket. “I’ll watch out for August.”
He moved and his face showed a bolt of pain. “What do you think about Lily? That maybe we’ve lost her for good?”
“You can’t think like that. We can find her if we believe we can. Maybe that sounds dumb, but if you expect something to happen, sometimes it does. Kind of like my piano playing.”
“Stop, it hurts too much to laugh.”
Sam put his hands together and hung them between his knees. “I’ll keep looking.”
Ted turned slowly toward him, bones popping in his back. “I expect it of you.”
BETWEEN TRIPS Sam stayed busy and spoke to the police sergeants, showed a picture of Lily around at the various precincts, journeyed to the city’s rail stations, and spoke with telegraphers, telling everyone that he’d pay for the telegram if they learned anything that might be useful. Twice he called home and spoke with Linda, telling her how much he’d missed her, asking if any messages for him had come to their house. She seemed to sense a sadness about him that he himself was unaware of, and she was overly cheerful, unlike her usual steady self. She told him she was glad to get the money he’d wired her, that she was eating so much good food she was getting fat. Though he knew this was a lie, it delighted him.
The night before the boat was to pull out, he was leaning against the starboard smokestack ignoring the heat running up his back when Captain Stewart came down from the pilothouse and handed him two revolvers.
“What’s this?”
“Two new Smiths I got in town. Give one to Duggs. We’re playing Stovepipe Bend tomorrow, and I want you to wear them in your waistband out on the stage.”
“Same setup as Bung City?”
The captain shook his head. “Bung City’s like a Sunday school compared to this place. Watch out. These things are loaded.”
He found Charlie in his bunk, suffering from a dizzy headache, and he tossed a revolver onto his stomach. “What’s Stovepipe Bend?”
“The advance man told me, but I didn’t believe it.” He put a forearm over his eyes. “Oh, it’s just a bad place, Sam. We’ll live through it.”
“You got a sick headache or the alcohol flu?”
Charlie gave him a look. His eyes looked like a copper sunset, and Sam reached over and felt his forehead. “Oh, I’m all right.”
“You got a little fever there.”
“It’s just being tired. My back hurts from wrestling those slot machines on the late-night run.” He closed his eyes. “Just let me be, and I’ll get up or I won’t.”
Sam removed the revolver from Charlie’s bunk. “I’ll put this on the washstand so you don’t roll over on it and shoot us both.”
“Obliged.”
Sam looked at the shiny revolver, a.38 Special with checkered walnut grips. “You ever shoot anybody?”
“You tryin’ to be funny?”
At once he realized his mistake. “Sorry. I forgot you really were in the war.”
“Yeah, really,” Charlie groaned.
THE BOAT BACKED OUT and would steam north all day through empty territory. Between Memphis and Cairo only a few small towns withered on the bank and between them was uninhabited shoreline, short hills, slick and panther-haunted lowlands, sandbars, and willows-a gravelscape fit for nothing but avoidance. Mr. Brandywine told him stories of outlaws still living in the unpoliced backwaters, some making whiskey in factory quantities, of revenuers who went in but never came out. Swaneli told him of one Arkansas lawman’s skeleton found shackled to a drift log, pulled out at Vicksburg.
As he turned in, Sam listened to the engines’ escape stacks sending big gasps up into the night sky. The engineers were using steam full-stroke to make good time, and he knew the firemen were suffering for it as they fought to keep pressure up. He wondered if August was holding his own, if the more experienced firemen were helping him out. He was a child, really, and had no business being down there in the heat and soot and leaking pipes. When Sam was a boy he’d worked all day digging potatoes with the sun rolling around on his back like a hot rock, but he’d been stronger than August. Thinking about it, he was glad to leave a place where he had to get up in the sleeting December dark to cut sugarcane all day wearing only a thin shirt, eating only a cold sweet potato in a tin cup for lunch. He smiled in his bunk as he thought of getting away from Uncle Claude’s farm. He smiled again when he remembered Krine’s department store, the broad aisles, the glowing salesgirls in their stylish dresses, Maurice playing waltzes on the mezzanine pipe organ.
THE BOAT LABORED under a hot, empty sky, Mr. Brandywine at the wheel except when he sent for Nellie Benton to run the disorienting crossing at Poker Point. The busboys cleaned up from the night before and found a drunk in a life-jacket hopper. After the man was wide awake, Charlie and Sam put him in a skiff and rowed him to shore at a place called Rowel while the steamer treaded water midriver, sending up restless spirals of coal smoke. When they got back, the captain told them to strip off their shirts and mix buckets of soap and bleach. The whole boat was graying over with soot, and it was time for a washdown. Customers didn’t want their summer skirts or shirt cuffs or seersucker pants smudged as soon as they boarded.
Sam was working over the bulkhead outside the engine room when Elsie came by wearing a paint-stained smock.
“Been gambling?” she said.
He thought a moment. “I get it. I lost my shirt.”
“I thought you were a ghost when I first walked through the door. You better stay out of the sun so you don’t burn up.” She seemed almost cheerful, and he guessed she was relieved that Ted was still alive.
“The captain said we’re playing a rough town tomorrow. You ever heard of it?”
“No.”
He tossed his brush into the pail of bleach. “So you didn’t stop there on the way down?”
She shook her head, her straight blond bob swimming. “The advance man nailed up some flyers about the northbound trip and the new boat, but we didn’t stop on the down trip. From what a couple of the waitresses say, though, the last thing Stovepipe Bend men are interested in is babies. It’s not very civilized.”
He lifted the brush from his pail and continued swiping down soot and mildew. “The captain gonna hide the black orchestra again?”
She shook her head. “He said each landing’s different. He didn’t think a black band would matter at Stovepipe Bend. Captain Stewart knows his towns, I guess. He asked me to sing ten songs, and I told him I didn’t really want to because there might be trouble.”
Sam looked at his wall and dropped another flurry of soap flakes into his pail. “But he offered you good money.”
“Two bucks a song.”
“Man. So you’re singing?”
“Practicing all day. Haven’t you heard?”
“Been busy.”
“You know, the next big city’s Cairo. I’ve got a feeling about the place. Lily sang in two shows there with lots of women crowding the bandstand.”
“You told me some time ago.” He looked at her. She was a nice woman, pretty and talented, but he could tell by her eyes that she was incomplete. She was lonely. “You taking good care of yourself?”
“Sure. But when I sing at Stovepipe Bend, I don’t know what’ll happen. Might be a riot.”
“Show business!”
She laughed at that and picked up her pail, walking past him into the engine room.
THE NEXT DAY he watched the cabin boys and cooks roll out bunting left over from a July Fourth trip and drape it over the rails. The captain told him to pull out all the slot machines and space them around the lower deck. Ten miles out from Stovepipe Bend, the leader of the black orchestra, Fred Marble, came onto the roof, pulled on kid gloves, opened the steam valve wide, and warmed up the calliope with “I Found a Rose in the Devil’s Garden,” the notes screaming out to five miles around. At two o’clock Sam buttoned up his uniform and did a walkaround, spitting on hot cinders on the upper decks. They were to play two moonlight trips, nothing during the day, because this was a fairly new and hard-nosed factory town with no clubs, church groups, or schools that might take a day trip. When Nellie Benton pulled a short rasp from the whistle, Sam headed up.
She was leaning on a steering lever ringing a slow bell when he tapped on the door, and she waved him in. “Lucky, go down and tell Bit not to let idlers hang around in the engine room tonight. I understand this is a squirrelly bunch we’ll have on board.”
“I been warned.”
“Watch yourself, son. You’re a good fellow, and the Wellers need you.”
“Well, I survived Bung City.”
“Stovepipe Bend might be more of a challenge.” Suddenly a little tugboat slid out past the point of an island right ahead and stopped in the channel as if its pilot were unsure which side of the Ambassador to pass, and Mrs. Benton pulled the whistle valve wide open, the big glass panes of the wheelhouse vibrating like harmonica reeds.
LATE IN THE DAY the boat slid around a muddy bend, and there on the west bank rose a long series of iron smokestacks like spines on a poisonous caterpillar, little coal-burning factories spewing smoke and unworldly smells into the damp afternoon. The riverbank was without vegetation except for balding willows dying behind the mudflats. A gravel slope two hundred feet long served as the landing. Sam watched a smelter spew orange smoke; at the river’s edge, discharge pipes from a creosote plant pushed out gouts of ebony foam. A cottonseed-oil mill, a broom factory, and the Gettum Rat Poison plant huddled behind the levee. Painted on the water tower above the last factory was a giant rodent writhing on its back. Tiers of company shacks, each like the other, sweltered up the naked hill toward where somewhat better houses with broad sagging porches were skylighted on the ridge.
SAM COULDN’T SEE a proper street, but down the cinder-strewn trails streamed men and women drawn by the squalling calliope. The black orchestra was on the foredeck playing a jacked-up version of “Ain’t We Got Fun” as Mrs. Benton eased the Ambassador against the landing and the deckhands lassoed two cypress stumps. The captain mounted the little flying bridge on the hurricane deck and through a large megaphone announced the schedule for the next two nights. Sam scanned the crowd, the mismatched boots, patched overalls, chemical-slathered aprons, and flour-sack dresses that made Stovepipe Bend seem more beyond the news than Bung City. It looked to be a town where there would be child thieves or any other kind of criminal in abundance. He noted the square yellow flyers stapled by the advance man to every fence and porch post and imagined they were tacked up in the poor neighborhood above the factories as well, and even out along the mud road coming into town that threaded through the hookworm-haunted farms of the region. He hoped the milling workers would go home and wash before the first evening trip, which cast off at seven. Hundreds of men stood around with their thumbs under their overalls straps staring at the only white thing in their smudged hamlet. The women were dressed mostly in old shirtwaists and long full skirts, though some wore washed-out housedresses and no shoes. One woman came out of the back door of an abattoir wearing a blood-soaked jacket, stopped dead, and stared at the Ambassador, her open mouth a toothless hole.
BY SIX Sam and Charlie were standing by the gangplank, pistols in belt, asking each patron if he or she carried any weapons, and for a while only pocket knives dropped into the baskets. But then gaggles of younger couples began to show up, some men in reblued overalls or their fathers’ patched suit coats, and then straight razors and dollar pistols began to weigh down the long table. Skiffs from the hamlet of Yunt, a cluster of crooked smokestacks across the river, started to land and tie up, each boat bearing four or five contrary, hollering folks dressed in gay, cheap clothes.
The first of these that Sam stopped pulled back his arm when asked if he had any weapons. “Yeah, what’s it to you?” He was drunk and sweating and his straw boater was cracked in two places already.
“You can’t board with a weapon. Hand it over, whatever you got, and we’ll give it back after the trip.”
“Hell, they’s five or six on that boat want to kill me. I need my little six-gun.”
Sam grabbed his lapel. “We’ve taken everybody’s weapons, sport. You’ll be safe as in church.”
The man frowned. “If I went in a church the place would prob’ly ketch on far.”
Charlie Duggs slipped up behind and slid a hand into the man’s pants pocket, fishing out a Colt with the barrel hacksawed off. He tossed it to Sam. “Here you go.”
“Hey!” The man lurched for his gun.
“Aw, go on and have a good time.” Charlie gave him a shove up the stage. “When you get off we’ll let you kill as many jugheads as you want.”
The man continued to holler, but the crowd pushed up against him and he floated toward the ticket window. “My name’s Buxton, and I better get the same gun when I come back,” he called.
The second engineer was helping them look for weapons, but they could only do a patchy job of it, checking the customers with coats or lumpy pockets. The people were wrinkled, sunburned, generally thin, coal stained, thick voiced, and bent, a hard-used population with limps, eye patches, bad breath, casts in the eye, crooked teeth or none, missing fingers. Sam looked at the smokestacks of the town, now just giving off mild waves of residual stench, and knew that most of the workers had some money but nowhere at all to waste it, until now. He turned and spotted the captain surveying the crowd from high up on the Texas roof. He was smiling.
Several other skiffs landed ahead of the Ambassador and tied off to anything that would hold them. One carried a single man wearing a dark coat and an old-fashioned shirt without a collar. He mixed in with the crowd and gravitated toward the stage like a dark spirit, seemingly carried not by his legs but by the motion of others. Sam didn’t study him, but at some point while counting, touching, and questioning the crowd, he felt a lull, an absence of light, something that connected him to the worst possible world. He took a blackjack from a man and turned to receive, without having asked for it, an antique throwing dagger with an ebony handle and a carbon-steel blade, a knife invisible in the dark. Its owner was the lone skiffman, and when Sam looked at his face he felt each bone in his spine line straight up.
It was Ralph Skadlock, who said, “I come to talk to you, Simoneaux,” and then looked behind him. The crowd, which had been pressing up toward the stage, stopped for a moment under his gaze. “You load these chickens and I’ll find you aboard.”
Sam was stunned and could think of nothing to say. He watched the man’s dark back as he drifted through the crowd and onto the boat.
At that moment, Charlie and the second engineer began struggling with a large Indian who’d showed up in the heat wearing a long canvas duster under which he’d concealed a sawed-off eight-gauge hammer gun. “Good God,” Charlie began to shout, “give us a hand, Lucky-this fellow’s stark raving!” They all boarded him like terriers on a mastiff, knocked him down in the mud, threw his gun pinwheeling into the river, and handed him over to a local constable, who broke his nightstick atop the Indian’s huge head before he agreed to go along. And when Sam leaned on the table, caught his breath, and scanned the boat, Skadlock was nowhere to be seen.
They cast off fifteen minutes late, the boat wallowing low in the water with over two thousand excursionists walking her decks like so many fire ants inspecting a slice of wedding cake dropped on their mound. A good deal of moonshine was brought on board, and the waiters and busboys were running to keep up with demands for ice and setups. Before the boat hit midriver, a platoon of Yunt men began a bite-and-stomp fight with rivals from Stovepipe Bend that took both slapjacks and pistols to quell.
The captain walked up to the skylight deck to see how the contest ended and called Sam over. “Lucky, you’re bleeding already. Can you handle them? Tell me if you can’t, and I’ll give the order to head to the bank.”
He thumbed blood from his nose. “I guess so. Good thing you asked us to pick the iron off ’em.”
“Hang on. Just hang on. They’re spending money like water at a whorehouse fire. On the main deck they’re fighting over the slot machines already, and I don’t think most of these people have ever seen popcorn.”