IT WAS A WARM NIGHT and Mr. Brandywine decided to run on a full bell upstream to keep everyone cool. Sam took the exterior staircase down to the first deck to do a walkaround. He passed women whose lips bulged with snuff, but the men were smoking hand-rolled, and he reminded every waiter he saw to step on the dropped butts. Then he climbed to the dance deck.
Up there, the floor was dark and the band was heaving itself into “Avalon,” Fred Marble leading the way with the big piano. Sam walked up to Charlie Duggs and yelled over the horns, “You got a feel for the room yet?”
“It was dicey for a couple tunes. It was a good thing the old man had them out playing in the open when we pulled in so nobody was surprised.”
“Good music is good music.”
“That’s the ticket. None of these goobers have ever seen a Negro in a suit before, and they were bristling about that, but once the band set everybody’s toes a-tappin’ all they want to do is dance.”
Sam pointed his chin toward the crowd. “I guess you could call that dancing.”
“Looks like five hundred couples having a thousand fits.”
“Have you seen a big fellow in a dark coat and white shirt? Sort of a flat-brim cowboy hat?”
“As you sometimes say, ‘Been busy.’”
When the band landed on the last note, half the couples returned to their tables and the rest stood in the windows to dry themselves off. Sam turned his head as a spotlight fired a circle on the bandstand and Elsie stepped into the powdery glow. He remembered Ted’s warning about not watching her sing, and in a second he knew why, because now she was neither a worried mother nor a waitress but a smiling blonde in a richly beaded burgundy silk crepe de chine dress, and from her oval collar lined with glistening rosettes to her matching satin high heels, she was the real thing, an expert singer swaying her hips to the intro of the new song she’d taught the band. She leaned into “Am I Blue?” and the band followed her, leaving out nearly all the wandering jazzy notes and lining up behind her voice, playing to the motion of her swaying dress. The dance floor crowded up for the slow song, but Sam noticed many rough men propped on the window jambs, smoking slowly and just imagining what it would feel like to hold a woman like that. He was surprised at the power she projected into the room, and by how much larger she now was than her real self.
Charlie gave him a nudge. “She’s got it.”
Sam touched his chin. “She sure does.”
When she finished the song, drawing the first applause of the night, Sam went out to check the upper deck, and as he passed through the door a pair of bearlike hands jerked him into a pocket of darkness next to the port smokestack.
“Where’s that damn Dutchman?”
Sam could smell the river on him, and something else: liquor and a scent of angry dog. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That piano player.”
“Ted Weller? You should know. You about killed him.”
Skadlock leaned into a shaft of light, and his face looked like something made out of fieldstone. “I aim to set him back a bit more. He owes me money.”
“What?”
“He shot my black dog. I thought he’d get better but he got the infection and died on me.”
Sam pulled free and stood away. “The way I understand it, your dog was trying to eat his hand off at the time.”
Skadlock pulled a glossy automatic pistol out of his jacket and pressed it against Sam’s temple. “You think this is funny? Some kind of joke? Tell me where that man is.”
Sam looked at what he could see of the gun, then back at Skadlock. “You hurt him so bad they sent him on the train to Cincinnati. He’s got to have about five operations to straighten him up.”
Skadlock seemed to realize something all at once and his expression took on a blue heat as he pressed him against the stack. “You the dumb shit what tole him where we was.” He began to curse and ramble, and Sam wondered what he’d been drinking and for how many days.
“I was just trying to find his little girl,” Sam told him, yelling into his face, but Skadlock didn’t seem to care.
“You led him to us. I ought to kill you. I wish they hadn’t left you alive down in that shithole town so you could come back to haunt us.”
The statement was like a jolt of electricity. “What did you say?”
Skadlock strengthened his grip on the pistol and raised his elbow high. Sam closed his eyes and for an instant started praying, but then there was a bony pop, the kind of noise the blunt side of an ax makes when it kills a steer, and Skadlock hit the deck, slack all at once. Sam looked and saw Charlie pocketing his slapjack.
“Friend of yours?”
He straightened his coat. “Pick up his pistol and let’s get this bastard in the brig before he wakes up.”
“Better hurry. Trouble’s a-brewin’ below.”
They dragged Skadlock down the stairs, his riding boots banging every step and the people from Stovepipe Bend cheering them on. They’d just clapped him into the engine-room brig when August came back from the firing galley.
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody you need to know.” Sam pushed him along roughly and he and Charlie headed to the main-deck lounge, where they found a scuffle between smelter workers and sawmillers from Yunt. When they got among the tables they noticed ten different poker games were going on, and at one of them five men were standing and hollering back and forth.
Charlie spread his coat, showing his pistol. “What’s the beef here?”
A cross-eyed man wearing patched suspenders pulled his cigar. “This feller checked a bet and I raised and he raised me back.”
“So?”
“That’s sandbaggin’. We don’t play like that in Stovepipe.”
The man from Yunt put his finger in the first man’s face. “That’s how you play the game, chickenshit. That’s poker.”
“That’s ambushin’, you mean, and it would take somebody with sawdust for brains to play like that.”
The other man straightened his back and strutted two steps sideways like a rooster. “If they hadn’t of took my Smith I’d see what was in your fool head. Prob’ly lead sinkers.”
“Aw, sit down and just call dealer’s choice if you want to sandbag,” Duggs told him.
“Or what?” the man from Stovepipe Bend demanded, drawing a pearl-handled straight razor from his coat pocket.
Everyone at the table turned toward the sound of a pistol being cocked. Sam had pressed the muzzle of his revolver behind the man’s ear. “Or you’ll get a hot pitchfork in your ass in about half a second.”
Charlie took a step away from the table. “Easy, Sam.”
“Let’s have the razor,” Sam said, and the man handed it over his shoulder, his arm the only thing moving at the table. “We gonna have any more trouble out of you?”
“No,” the man said, but even from the one syllable Sam knew that for the rest of his life he’d better never find himself in Stovepipe Bend past dark.
IN TEN MINUTES the area was again filled with hollering and the stink of homegrown tobacco. Sam and Charlie leaned against the capstan, looking back into the lighted area of gamblers and drinkers.
“You scared me for a minute back there.”
“I kind of scared myself. I should’ve hauled his ass down to the engine room.”
“Well, maybe it was that other fellow got you excited. We all tend to go downhill when someone sticks a pistol in our face. Who the hell was that?”
“One of those Skadlocks I told you about.”
“Half man, half weasel.”
“The weasel part might be right.”
FOR THE NEXT HOUR they kept in motion on the dance floor, showing their pistols and palming slapjacks. Elsie appeared again and sang “Leave Me with a Smile,” her sweet alto taming down the room and calming Sam as well. Her voice was a drink of cool water.
Toward the staggering, glass-breaking end of the trip he went back to the engine room and saw Ralph standing above two passed-out drunks, holding on to the bars, staring at all the heaving machinery.
“We’ll get to the bank in about ten minutes, and I’ll escort you off.”
“Where’s my pistol?”
“Part of my salary for a hard night.”
Skadlock’s eyes showed several worlds of pain. “You gonna law me?”
Sam put his hand on one of the bars, tempted to say he wasn’t worth the trouble, but that would only make things worse. His uncle had taught him that for some people, hard words were the same as bullets. Finally he shook his head. Then he asked, “What do you know about the trouble down in Troumal?”
“I was livin’ in Arkansas them days.”
“Do you know who did it?”
Skadlock looked away, feeling the lump on the back of his skull. “Coulda been anybody.”
“You know.”
“Why would I tell you? You couldn’t touch ’em, even nowadays.” The big backing gong went off like a detonation above his head, but he didn’t flinch.
“How did you know somebody survived?”
“I didn’t till you hauled up in our kitchen.”
“Who did it?”
Skadlock stared at the port engine as though he envied its un-touchable heat.
Sam cocked his head, imagining what he could say to make Skadlock talk. Finally, he said, “Maybe I could pay them a visit like I did you.”
At that, Ralph Skadlock’s eyes rolled sideways into jaundiced thought. After a long time he said, “It was Cloats what did it.”
The name went through him like a chill. “How do I find them?”
“Everbody around Bung City has a opinion.”
“You’re just a fountain of information.”
“Go to hell. If I was you I’d grow some eyes in the back of my head.”
Sam heard the engine bells jangle for the landing. “Who’d you sell that little girl to?”
“The devil.”
“When I find her, I’ll do my best to send the law after you. Maybe some federal law.”
“I ain’t got her. They can’t arrest me for havin’ thin air.”
“But I got a feeling you’re worse than the ones that do.”
Skadlock looked away as if offended. “I don’t know about that. I ain’t the start of your troubles. And I sure as hell didn’t deserve no dead dog.”
When the landing whistle began roaring, Sam unlocked the brig and walked him to the stage.
Skadlock pushed out the dent in his hat and settled it back on his head. “I ain’t forgot about that Dutchman.”
“That’s your trouble. You don’t forget much of anything.”
“Keep a lookout, coonass.” He started down the plank with the rest of the tipsy crowd.
Sam faked a friendly wave. “Manges la merde, Skadlock.”
THE SECOND MOONLIGHT TRIP was worse. Among the eighteen hundred people dawdling at the landing, two hundred or so had been drinking while they waited. After they frisked the crowd and the boat slid off into the river, the generator failed again. The band kept playing, but after a few minutes a blind volcanic brawl broke out that took half an hour to stop. The mates and several waiters and even the cooks had to wade in to separate the fighters as best they could, and the captain showed up with a megaphone and shouted that there would be no more music if the crowd didn’t calm down. The crew brought up the coal-oil lanterns and hung them, and under the smoky yellow aura the band continued playing for the reeling dancers. Sam was still breathing hard when someone called out “Fire,” and he and the first mate ran to quench a smashed lamp in the men’s toilets at the rear of the boat, beating it down with sacks until an oiler coaxed the fire hose alive.
Sam sat down on a stool by a sink, his mouth open, and watched the muddy water knock down the flames. “Son of a bitch. If that had got away from us this tub would’ve gone up like a haystack in July.”
“Get up, bud,” Swaneli told him. “I just heard a gunshot.”
On the first deck several men had started shooting at the ceiling-fan blades, and one had his arm broken by a ricochet. The three mates fought them and then hustled the banged-up men to the brig, stacking them in with five others already there.
The café ran out of food halfway back to the landing, and the cooks began to fill any pot that had a lid with oil and made tubs of popcorn they salted and sold cheaply to staunch the angry hunger of the drunks. The café register was so full of money it wouldn’t close, the people wild to buy anything, even extra salt. When Sam stepped through the door he was hit across the chest with a chair, and before he could get up a woman began screaming into his face that her friend was being raped up on the Texas roof. He took the stairs two at a time to a dark open area where passengers were not allowed and saw men in overalls hoist a yowling, half-naked man over their heads and throw him off the boat. Sam looked down and saw a white scissoring motion in the water, headed aft.
A middle-aged woman was sitting on the roof tarpaper adjusting her long skirt. He looked at the skinny man next to him, whose hair was longer than the woman’s, and tried to make out his features in the dark. “If he was raping that woman, you should’ve held him for the sheriff.”
The man bent over laughing. “Her? We don’t give a shit about her. She’s just a old whore he hired to ride with him tonight.”
Sam looked at the other men, trying to understand. “Why’d you pitch him overboard, then?”
“Hell, we’uns just wanted to see could he fly.”
The men standing at the rail started laughing, coughing up popcorn, punching each other, cursing the whore and the six other men they said they’d thrown off the boat that night.
WHEN THEY GAVE BACK weapons at the end of the trip, two pistols and five knives were left over. He considered the weapons in the glow of the deck lights, and then lobbed everything into the river.
The general cleanup was unending, the boat filthy in every way. During the hour that the restrooms were closed, several people had gone up on the rear promenade and squatted in the dark. Three hours before sunrise, Charlie and Sam climbed shaking into their bunks, and neither could fall asleep.
“I saw you waltz Skadlock off the boat. What was you talking about?”
“He showed up to bother Ted Weller and then got real focused on me. I told you about his dog, didn’t I?”
“Yeah. That boy’s been in the woods too long.”
“He was drunk.”
“Why didn’t you turn him in to the law?”
“He’d maybe just kill that little town constable.”
Charlie seemed to think about this. “What else did he tell you?”
“He was whelped in Arkansas. He knows who did what they did to my family. Some people named Cloat from around Bung City.”
Charlie leaned out of the lower bunk and looked up at him. “You don’t exactly sound excited about that big news.”
“I’m still thinking about it.”
“Think, hell. Don’t you have folks you can round up to go find these people? At least try to tell the law about them. Man alive!”
At once a wave of fatigue swamped Sam. “Charlie, it’s been around twenty-five years. I never knew my parents or brother or sister. Don’t have pictures, nothing. Just some wooden markings in the churchyard. My uncle never raised me to be big on revenge, you know? Most French people on the bayou are like that. Too poor to afford a grudge.”
Charlie seemed amazed. “Well, you’re a little pudding if I ever saw one. You don’t try to find out about these outlaws, I hate to say this, but I’ll be ashamed of you.”
“What? What would you do?”
“What do you think? If I found out for certain they’d killed my folks, I’d go to the sheriff. If he was bought off or scared, I’d dump my bank account and buy as many pump shotguns I could afford and a case of high-brass goose shot.” He began waving his arm toward the low roof. “I’d get my cousin Buck, who was with me over in France, my brother Maxie, my uncle Dick Agle, who was with Roosevelt in Cuba, and that big Eyetalian who married my sister. We’d wait for asshole-hunting season to open and go find ’em in their nest.”
“With bad luck, you’d all get arrested. With good luck you’d all get shot up. I’m wondering if that’s why Skadlock told me, thinking these Cloats’d swat me like a mosquito. And maybe they didn’t have anything to do with it at all.”
Charlie rolled on his back. “Some things you don’t worry about.”
“If I did get some kind of revenge, you can bet one of them would get away and show up at my house one night two years down the road, squattin’ there in the bushes, a knife between his teeth.”
The cabin was quiet for a long time; then Charlie’s voice came out of the darkness, sleepy and yawning. “I still think you’re chickenshit.”
“Maybe after I find the little girl, I’ll think about all this. First things first.”
“Chick-en-shit.”
“You think shootin’ up a yardful of folks is the right thing to do?”
“Kill a snake, and the next man on the trail won’t get bit.”
“Not unless another snake gets him.”
“Boy, I can see you ain’t never been shot at.”
Sam put an arm over his eyes and let out a long sigh. “Not in a good while, anyways.”
THE NEXT NIGHT drew sizeable crowds again. A logjam of denim-clad sawmillers and their women came over the river from Yunt in skiffs, and the captain hired the local constable and three men he deputized and armed with shotguns to ride and help break up fights. Sam took four aspirin and patrolled constantly, the pistol gleaming in his belt, but generally the crowd was subdued, a fact which didn’t improve his opinion of human nature, that it took a show of hardware to teach people how to have a good time. Elsie sang her beautiful songs, August played in the band for both trips, and Sam listened to them as he made his rounds, wishing he were at the piano.
One o’clock in the morning found the Ambassador digging river for Cairo as the crew fire-hosed the upper decks of the crowd’s sediment. The ship’s carpenter began replacing balusters kicked out of the upper railings, and the waiters threw ice on the main deck to chill blood off the wood.
That night, Charlie Duggs carried a pint of his own, and by the time he crowded into the cabin he was fueled up with malevolent energy.
Sitting down on the stool beside the lavatory, he looked up to where Sam lay in his bunk.
“You goin’ after the Cloats when we come back downriver? I’ll go with you.”
“Been too busy to think about them.” Sam saw only an outline of the man seated across from him.
“If I was you I couldn’t think of nothin’ else. They killed your whole family, bud.”
“I’m turnin’ in.” He was unable to think about anything.
Charlie stood up. “Think I’ll bed down on the Texas roof.” He lurched toward the narrow door. “The air smells better up there.”
Sam folded an arm over his eyes and tried for sleep. He thought of his uncle and of his aunt, who’d always treated him as their own son. Still, he remembered feeling at times that he was not totally theirs. The cousins were the whole children, and he was loved as much, but still not of the same house, born somewhere else out of someone else. He tried to remember anything, a touch, a flash of light, the timbre of an owning voice, but there was nothing at all. When they had been killed, the part of him that made memory had not yet come alive. Like a sudden foul cloud, what the murderers had done began to envelop him, and he understood with a shudder what they had taken away. He began to cry quietly in the sour bunk, wondering what was wrong with him. Maybe he was changing, approaching the edge of that age where for the first time he would begin to look back on things, and he realized dimly how sad a change that was.