IT HAD BEEN TWO WEEKS since they’d seen the Wellers. Right after a thunderstorm had tortured the neighborhood with sizzling bolts, Sam and his wife were looking through the window screen at the water standing in their small bricked yard. He felt like a piece of wreckage left behind by the wind. Between them on the table was a small loaf of French bread showing a flame of desiccated ham. No lettuce or tomato, no mayonnaise. They were out of everything and the rent was due. They owned only an old Dodge automobile and their clothes. Linda had spent her needlepoint money on the telephone bill, electricity, gasoline. Sam imagined she had a jar of quarters somewhere but never asked about it, for fear it didn’t exist. The dry sandwich lay between them like a signal.
“Well, I guess I better go see Muscarella and sign up with the bank militia.”
She looked at him. “My brother can get you on at the railroad.”
“Switchman?”
“Yes.”
“Your brother with three fingers missing? Or your brother with a thumb cut off?”
She sliced the sandwich in half and pushed the larger portion toward him. “You’re more careful.”
“Linda, there’s not a man in your family that can play the piano.”
She bit at her part of the sandwich, twisting on it. “Well, go on downtown, then. And please find something.”
THAT DAY and the following, he walked the twenty blocks downtown to look for work in the stores. He went on foot to loosen up his legs, he told himself, but in fact he wanted to save the seven cents’ street-car fare. On the second day, halfway to Canal Street, he didn’t know why, some little spark of curiosity or sense of purpose overtook him at Lee Circle and he changed direction toward the river, wondering what he was doing as he walked into the smell of burning coal and roasting coffee. From the foot of Canal he could see a big Stewart Line excursion boat riding high in a dry dock across the river, its paddle wheel dismantled, its rusty stacks laid out on the deck. He caught the Algiers ferry, which cost him seven cents, and from the landing walked down a dirt lane to the shipyard. A watchman told him that most of the boat’s crew and performers had been put up in the Gardenia Hotel. He counted out five Indian-head pennies and two Lincolns, took the next boat across, and walked through the French Quarter to the hotel, a place he knew was frequented by vaudevillians and traveling salesmen. He arrived tired and thirsty, the bottoms of his feet burning in his shiny floorwalker’s shoes, and he paused on the sidewalk across from the Gardenia, examining the pressed-tin roof frieze that pretended to be stone, the copper-sheeted bay windows that hung over the street like ingots, showing a thinly deceptive elegance.
The desk clerk rang the Wellers’ room, and the wife said her husband was out but she would come right down, so Sam waited in the illusory lobby with its puddled curtains and genteel walnut settees and side tables. He knew what the rooms were like, small and hot and plain as toast. He heard Elsie on the stairs before he saw her, and her steps were slow. She joined him on a green plush sofa, sitting down quickly, perhaps pretending not to notice a polite scattering of dust rising from the cushions.
“Do you have any news?” she asked. She was composed and did not smile at him.
He shook his head, once. “I’ve been going around town trying to find a job that won’t maim me or drive me crazy or get me arrested.” He watched her face, but she seemed unconcerned about what he’d said. He knew what she wanted to hear. “While I was out and about, I did what I could. Checked with the porters at the stations. Visited some hotels and the one criminal I know.”
She still did not smile. Out in the street the vegetable man’s wagon passed by, his falsetto rising about the glories of tomatoes and plums, “Ahh gotta da bannannnn…,” but her gaze didn’t stray toward the window. “We’ve paid a private policeman to investigate Lily’s disappearance, but he’s turned up nothing. I don’t think he really cares about her, just our money.” She didn’t say this in a bitter voice, and he was glad of it. His uncle had taught him that bitterness solved nothing. “I don’t suppose you have children,” she continued. “I didn’t see any sign of them at your house.”
He looked over at the bald desk clerk, who was watching them. “I had a son. But we lost him to a fever.”
“How old?”
“Nearly two. I know a little of what you’re feeling.”
“A little,” she said. “At least you know where your son is.”
He reddened at her presumption, bordering on meanness, and had opened his mouth to say something, he wasn’t sure what, when a big hand came down on his shoulder. He looked up and saw a large, white-haired gentleman dressed in a bluewater uniform, a soft cap pulled down at an angle with the legend “Captain” in gold braid above the patent-leather bill.
“Pardon me,” he said, “but I’ve got to put a quick question to this lady.” He was about sixty-five years old, the type of blustery fellow used to taking over anyone’s conversation. “Elsie, I need you and Ted to come down to the Industrial Canal out by the cracker works. We’ve just closed on the Ambassador and we’ve got to get her in shape fast.”
“Is there a piano on board?” She seemed confused.
The big man cocked his head. “Now, Elsie?”
“Oh, I see. You want us to clean and paint,” she said, frowning.
“The Ambassador’s a big old boat and she’s been laid up a while down here in all this dampness. You know the routine. So you’ll come out tomorrow? Bring your work duds?”
Elsie nodded vaguely, and the captain straightened up and put his hands behind his back. “I’ve got to get on and find some men who won’t milk me dry for salary.”
Suddenly, her face seemed busy with several ideas at once. “This man here’s looking for work.”
The captain leaned back and examined Sam as though he were a deck chair he might or might not buy. The leather in his shoes creaked in the quiet lobby. “You’re a pretty nice-looking fellow. Ever worked a dance boat before, son?”
“No, but I’ve gone dancing on a few.”
She stood and put a hand on his shoulder. “Last night Ted said that if you worked on the boat, you’d be able to go ashore and help us look. Maybe you could watch the crowds while we worked.”
“Watch the crowds for what?”
“The woman you saw. We figured that somebody who caught Lily’s act paid that woman to take her.”
Sam stood up, looked through the glass-paneled entry door, and took a step toward it. “That old lady’s not going to show up on your boat.”
“She’s on the bank somewhere along our route.”
He stopped, then, admitting to himself that this was probably true.
“You a musician?” the captain asked.
“I’m a pretty bad pianist.”
“And were you in the war?”
“The army.”
The captain’s white eyebrows collapsed together, and he lowered his voice. “Can you break up a fight and keep your hand out of a till?”
Elsie began to shake him. “Sam, this new boat will work the same landings we did on the way down. You might could spot that old woman in one of the towns.”
He watched the desperation rising in her face, then turned to the captain. “What kind of work do you have?”
“I need a third mate. One of the main duties is to walk around the dance floor and show some authority. You have any experience walking around and looking like you know what you’re doing?”
Elsie sat down on the settee, smoothed her dress, then ran a forefinger along one eyebrow. “He’s the floorwalker I told you about.”
The captain’s expression darkened. “You’re the one who couldn’t stop those people.”
Sam looked back through the door where three smiling couples were strolling along the street. “That’s me, all right.” Suddenly he seemed to have a new identity: the man to blame.
The captain glanced down at Elsie. “Well, I’ll hire you anyway. Long hours, free room and board.”
“I’m Sam Simoneaux. My friends call me Lucky.”
The other man took his hand soberly. “My name’s Adam Stewart, and you can call me Captain.”
HIS WIFE was not happy about this job that would keep him away from home, and seemed suspicious of his motives. It took him until late that night to explain to her why he felt obliged to go on the river, but as he fell asleep he realized that he wasn’t sure of his motives himself, though the idea of wearing a snappy uniform and being around musicians had its appeal. He could explore each town on the boat’s route, asking questions about the stolen girl, but beyond that he wasn’t sure what he might accomplish for the Wellers.
The next morning he kissed Linda goodbye and caught a streetcar down to the Canal line and made the first of several transfers, walking the last leg down the east side of the new Industrial Canal. He could see the boat from a distance as it was nearly three hundred feet long, and he could tell by the kinks in the deck railings that it had seen too much river. He judged it to be at least forty years old, a sternwheeler four decks high that must have started life as a packet, hauling passengers and cotton, and then was made over into an excursion boat after the trade played out. The wooden hull was sprung, planks out of line and seams gorged with oakum. The main stage ramp was hung up over the bow in a tangle of rusted pillow blocks limed with bird droppings. A long two-by-twelve led from the wharf to the first deck. Beyond the boat the wide canal shifted, oily and slow, the new sun caught in it like a yolk. He bounced down the plank onto a deck made of broad cupped planks shedding enamel like red snow. He glanced up a broad central staircase and walked beyond it and then aft along the outside rail, past the boiler room, stepping through a door and walking among the main engines and pumps, expecting to find someone going over the machinery. He stopped in the dark and smelled cold oil, a ferrous mist of rust, and from below deck the sour ghost of a dark, side-rolling bilge. The old noncondensing steam engines looked like dead museum pieces that would never move again, asbestos-stuffed mammoths hulking in the gloom.
He walked forward and pulled himself up the main staircase. The vast second deck opened before him all the way to the stern windows, a maplewood dance floor hundreds of feet long that popped like distant musketry as he walked across it. A bandstand stood amidships on his left, and a long raft of small tables ganged next to cloudy windows slid shut against rain and birds, everything dusted blue with mildew. The ceiling was cross-bracketed every eight feet with gingerbread arches layered with gunpowder mold bred by the water-bound air.
The third deck was a two-tier affair, an outer open promenade called a hurricane deck and, in the center, a raised deck some rivermen called the skylight roof, railed and balustered, topped with a thin plank ceiling, the front half open to the breeze and the rear half a café, walled and windowed, sheltering a jumble of cheap wooden tables and deck chairs stacked in a great logjam. He walked through the café and looked into the kitchen at the big rusted coal ranges and many-doored oak iceboxes that hung open with the bitter smell of rotting rubber gaskets. He shook his head, thinking that every square inch of the busy woodwork, stanchions, hogchains, window frames, braces, brackets, filigree, molding, steam pipes, valve bonnets, smokestacks, and gingerbread would have to be scrubbed and painted.
The fourth level housed most of the crew. Sam remembered it was called the Texas deck and this one held a double row of plain cabins whose doors opened to the outside. On top of the Texas was the pilothouse, trimmed above its wide windows with sooty knickknack millwork and a copper-shelled dome. Sam found an unlocked cabin door and looked inside: two stacked bunks, a small lavatory, a locker with thread spools for pulls, the mattresses no better than what he had seen in a jailhouse. He looked back over the rail and realized for the first time that these old boats were made mostly of thin wood, to keep the weight down-regular wood that wanted to rot and warp and crack and leak and twist, and woe to everybody on board if a fire ever got started. The Ambassador had seen its share of summer squalls and upriver ice jams, had banged lock walls, scraped boulders, wormed over sandbars, and every lurch and shock was recorded in her timbers. He looked aft and saw again the buckles in her guardrails, the swale in her roofline. The boat seemed a used-up, dead and musty thing as still as a gravestone, and he wondered who in his right mind would want to ride on it for fun.
ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK a bus rattled in on solid rubber tires and men dressed in denim began to pour off, most of them black. A little later four men hopped off a horse-drawn surrey, put on plug caps that identified them as the engine-room crew, then boarded and headed aft. In the next half hour a buggy, several Fords, and one horse showed up at the wharf, soon followed by a steaming stake-bed truck driven by the captain and piled high with cans of paint, brushes, turpentine, rags, and scrapers. The Wellers and other crew members were there, dressed in their worst clothes. Another, smaller truck pulled up carrying two zinc drums of bleach, and the captain climbed up in the bed and gave directions for its dilution and use. Sam was told to work with the second mate, a big hound of an ex-policeman named Charlie Duggs.
“Hey, I know you,” Duggs said. “You’re the head floorwalker at Krine’s.”
Sam stuffed a brush in his back pocket. “Not anymore.”
Duggs waited for a clarification, and after several seconds said, “We all used to be somebody else, I guess.”
Sam motioned to Duggs’s mate’s cap. “How’d you wind up in the steamboat business?”
He shrugged. “When I got back from France with everybody else I was a cop for a year. Muscarella fired me when the new mayor came in. You know Sergeant Muscarella?”
“Who doesn’t?”
They walked up carrying ladders and in a few minutes were scraping the gingerbread along the roofline of the Texas deck. Above them several men were making the chips fly on the pilothouse, and below a crew of seven was scratching away at the balusters on the guardrails, the whole boat vibrating as though gnawed by a million carpenter bees. As the day progressed, the dark water around the Ambassador was speckled by a soiled snow of paint flakes.
Something was burning, and Sam looked up to gray smoke bailing out of the starboard smokestack. The engine crew had laid a wood fire on the boiler grates, and after a half hour it was hot enough to ignite coal, the smoke turning to a black column of tarry-sweet bituminous breath. As Sam worked, he figured that the boat had been painted at least thirty times, the paint in places nearly a quarter-inch thick. At first he went after the old paint hard, but Charlie told him to ease off. “Just get the loose stuff. We not painting a banker’s house.”
“The captain won’t get on us about it?”
“He knows it can’t last. The soot eats it off once a year. Don’t you know that?”
“No.”
With his scraper, Charlie knocked a dirt-dauber nest spinning into the canal. “How’d you get on?”
“The Wellers put in a word for me.”
“You hear about their little girl?”
“Ah, yes.”
“That was a pretty child. Smart, smart. You could see it in her eyes. Little strong eyes that told you she was gonna do some big stuff in her time.”
“You heard her sing?”
“When we tie up I stand by to do the electrics for the band. Keep the microphone goin’ and lights. She got a voice like a tiny fiddle and can play it, too. When I was that age I couldn’t hardly wipe myself.” He was standing atop the rail and holding on to the molding of the deck above. “Somebody stole that child right out of a department store and couldn’t nobody in the store stop it, not even the puke-brain of a floorwalker who was looking for her.”
Sam stopped working. He was notorious already. “So, you know it was me.”
“Yep.”
“How many people working today are the regular crew?”
“About most of us. They’s a dozen or so extra painters to work this week that’ll be paid off.”
“So you’re all some type of big family, right? Been working together a few seasons?”
Charlie lowered his arms and balanced. “So what?”
“Everybody talks about everybody’s business? So if I tell you something, it’s like having a meeting with everyone else at once, right?”
Charlie ran a thumb along his scraper’s blade and looked at him. “This is goin’ somewhere?”
“I might as well say it now. I lost that job because of the child, and here I am, number one, to keep my lights on. And number two, the Wellers think I can help find their girl.”
“Is that how it is?”
“Spread the news.”
Charlie took two steps around a corner of the rail and stood over the paddlewheel, scraping and wincing away the peppering flakes. “Something’s got to be done. Let’s hope you’re the something.”
A SUSURRATION began in one of the smokestacks as the boilers started to build steam pressure. The two escape pipes sizzled at their feathered tops. After two hours, the engineers fed steam to the ejectors, which opened with a roar, siphoning out the foul bilge. Sam could tell when the boilers reached the hundred-pound mark, because someone opened a valve and the muted chuff of the dynamo wound up in tempo, the running lights on the stacks coming on slow as candle flames. Soon crew members were mopping down every surface with bleach, for the pumps had brought up the water system and men in slickers began hosing the Ambassador down from pilothouse to lower deck, washing off smut, bird droppings, dust, paint chips, wasp nests, and mildew. The day had turned hot, and Sam leaned against the roof bell, letting Charlie stand back with a fire hose and soak him like a dirty rug.
By sundown of the second day, the whole boat was skinned down and drying in the hot breeze. After two days everyone was to come back and paint, unless rain threatened. The second night, the engineers stayed on the boat testing the boilers and chasing rust and tarnish, clogged oil channels, or wrens’ nests in the engines’ valve works. Sam was told to light the lanterns on the engineers’ wagon and drive it back to their house, which was only eight blocks from his own. It’d been a long time since he’d driven a team, but once his hands remembered the feel of reins, he backed and turned the horses for town. The animals were heavy and streetwise, and he ran them alongside the clattering, sparking trolleys and under the streetlamps with no trouble at all. The day was finally cooling, and it was a pleasure to jostle the night air with their iron-shod hooves. Running over the Belgian-block streets downtown the wagon’s steel rims and gear sounded like an avalanche of silverware. About ten o’clock he tied them off in back of a house on Magazine Street, where a light came on in the yard and an older woman wearing gray cotton trousers came out to unharness them.
“And thank you for not latherin’ the boys up,” she said, bending to unhook the chains.
“You can let me do that.”
“No, get on home, son. As dark as it is, I can tell you’re sunburned and coated with paint chips.”
“How’s this wagon gonna get back?”
“I’ll take it out tomorrow afternoon.” She was a big woman and no stranger to horses. In a moment she was leading the animals to a pair of roofed stalls against the back fence. “I guess we’ll get rid of these fellas after this season. We’re the last in the neighborhood to keep any.”
“Do you work on the boat?”
She gave him a quick look. “Yes. Those engineers are my nephews, and the bunch of us have been on the river all our lives. My late husband was a pilot and two of my sons are pilots on the upper Ohio. I’m Nellie Benton.” She reached out like a man and he looked at her hand for just a heartbeat before taking it. She shook like she meant to hurt his fingers. And she did.
THE STREETS on his way home were fogbound, and the live oaks sucked the light out of the streetlamps. He walked through the gloom nearly asleep and found himself standing on a corner half a block past his door before he understood where he was.
In a few minutes he was in the bathtub, the water cold because the gas had been turned off.
Linda padded in to use the commode, and glanced at his eyes. “You look like an Indian, honeybunch.”
He covered his face with a hand. “Can I have your straw hat?”
“Sure. I’ll take the sash off so it’ll look like a man’s.” She stood and looked at him again. “You see the Wellers any?”
“Yeah. They were scrubbing down the dance floor. I believe they’re tireder than I am.”
She put a hand in his hair. “You don’t have to do this.”
“It’s sixty bucks a month, plus you don’t have to feed me.”
“You know what I mean.”
He pulled his palm away from his face. “I don’t know. I just can’t understand it.”
She reached into the tub and rubbed his neck as though claiming him. “I believe I can.”
BY THE SECOND DAY the bilge was pumped dry, and he and Charlie were sent belowdecks with carbide lamps to check the hull. There wasn’t much down there other than a potable water tank, some steering and capstan works, and a few steam lines. After his eyes adjusted, he crawled along under the bracing, holding his lamp so Charlie could examine warped areas and test for punky boards with an ice pick. They had been out of daylight for an hour when Sam shone the lamp ahead and then back toward the dim shaft of light falling down the hatch they’d entered.
“You looking for frogs?”
“Everything’s wood,” Sam said. “No watertight compartments.”
“That’s a fact.” Charlie took a string of oakum from his shoulder, then set it into a seeping joint with the pick.
“How’d this thing stay afloat all these years?”
“Two eyeballs in the wheelhouse. Shine that light here.”
He was in awe of all the soggy wood. “One bump on a rock and this tub’ll go down like a woodstove.”
Charlie sniffed. “Kind of makes ’em careful where they steer it, don’t it? One thing about a steamboat, it’s all wood, and not the best wood or heaviest at that. It’s just kind of a glorified chicken coop. If you smack a bridge pier with a wood steamboat, folks downstream will have all the toothpicks they want.”
THE NEXT DAY, fifty people showed up to paint. The stacks were washed down with stove black; the outside of cabin doors, the rails, the first-deck planking, and the boat’s name-in four-foot letters on the engine-room bulkhead-were dressed with burgundy gloss enamel. The paddlewheel was painted bright red and everything else, from the circus molding branching out from the deck posts to the balusters and fire buckets, a sun-tossing white. Inside, when everything was scrubbed and enameled white, the spaces loomed larger, the huge dance floor now cavernous, the whole interior glowing like a snow cave. After he used turpentine to get the sticky oil paint from his hands and forearms, Sam jumped on shore and walked way back from the boat to look her over: in the early evening light she was a three-hundred-foot wedding cake. The running lights came on at the top of the stacks, and then the thousand roofline bulbs sent up their ivory fire, the whole boat flashing against the dark canal and floating above it like someone’s dream of a traveling good time. Inside, a pianist was running the moths out of the bandstand piano with “Dill Pickles Rag,” the notes completing the paint-bright illusion that made him want to pat his foot.
Charlie followed over to where he stood by a coal pile. “Sam, my man. What you think?”
He raised a hand, then let it fall. “I can’t understand it. A few days ago it was a stinking washtub. Now I want to buy a ticket for the moonlight cruise.”