Authors: Tim Gautreaux
SAM FOUND the Wellers outside their cabin and explained what he had learned from the Skadlocks and what kind of people they were, how they lived, that he was certain of their guilt.
As Ted Weller listened, his face turned to match the hard red surface of the shore pavings. “Why in hell didn’t you tell us this yesterday?”
“You know how it was. We had twenty-five hundred passengers last night.”
He raised both arms from his sides and let them drop. “Why didn’t you threaten them? They’re criminals.”
“I wasn’t exactly in a position to put any pressure on them. As far as the law is concerned, these people own their own country.”
Ted grabbed him by the arm and wedged him against a bulkhead. “You tell me how to get back in there and they’ll tell me something.”
Sam read his eyes and found them a mix of rage and fear. “Ted, I think they’ll kill you.”
His eyes flew wide and Elsie turned her face away. “They didn’t kill you!” Ted hollered. “You think I’m just big soft Ted the dumb German who all he can do is pound a piano. Let me tell you, I’m plenty tough. I grew up in a saloon.”
Sam pointed downriver. “Back in there where I went ain’t Cincinnati. There’s no law at all.”
“I don’t need law when my baby’s missing.”
Sam looked south along the bank understanding that Ted was going to do something stupid, and the sad part of it was that he agreed with his feelings. “You don’t know how to get back in there,” he said softly.
“I got a mouth to ask.”
Elsie put a hand on his shoulder. Sam imagined she was going to try to calm him, but instead she said, “I’ll get you money from the boat and you can ask directions at the station.”
“This is a bad idea.”
Ted glowered at him, his mustache blooming under his red nose. “You tell me where this place is. Right now.”
“No. I won’t be responsible.”
Ted slammed him against the bulkhead, hard. “Tell me or I’ll break you open like a dollar fiddle, damn you.”
Sam stared him in the eye. Ted was hoping for at least a chance of finding his family’s future, of gathering in his blood, but Sam remained silent, to keep him from getting hurt. He himself had been called Lucky so many times that he was beginning to believe the name fit, but Ted might not share his good fortune. Then he remembered the child’s face, floating in the folds of his brain like an ivory pendant. A child alive. Out there somewhere. His thoughts changed course, and he decided that luck couldn’t manifest itself unless a man took a chance. Feeling sad to the bone, he raised his open palms above his waist. “Well, to start with, there’s this murderous dog.”
* * *
TED WALKED to the Y&MV station, bought a ticket, and boarded a mixed train going out at four to St. Frank. It was a bone-rattling ride in a wooden coach through cut-over land and weed-wracked farms. Two hours later the train jammed on its brakes at a dusty board-and-batten station and he stepped off into the still air and asked the agent for directions to the livery.
The little agent sized him up. “This here’s the last train tonight, so if you wait a bit I’ll give you a lift in my flivver.” He waited under the station overhang until the agent came out in the slanting light and turned the oily crank on his Ford. At the livery Ted got the owner up from supper and asked to rent a horse.
“Well,” the liveryman said, “I like your looks so I’ll let you have my wife’s mare, Sooky.”
Ted shook his head. “No thanks. I want the one called Number six.”
The liveryman fished a set of spectacles from his pocket, put them on, and looked at Ted more closely. “That’s not a good horse for a big fellow like yourself.”
“A man who rented it before says it’s what I need.”
“You can suit yourself, but that horse will try to gallop through a parked locomotive, it’s that stupid.” The man stalked off toward his sun-bleached barn.
Ted rode across the stream before full dark, then sat the horse on the far bank, reading a compass by the light of a match. The liveryman had explained where to go and to wait for the moon to come up, and after half an hour it began to rise above the line of cypresses, shining like a communion wafer. Ted put the horse forward, keeping the moon between the animal’s ears. He carried his pistol in one pocket, his big folding knife in the other, and his little girl in his thoughts. In the swamp he lost sight of the sky and became lost. He spilled his matches into the mud and couldn’t read his compass, but he kept moving, hoping he would blunder his way to the river, deciding that nothing could stop him. Number 6 brushed against a locust tree and Ted felt the thorns rake his calf, but he didn’t so much as turn his head at the pain.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY Sam was rushing through his lunch before the loading of the two o’clock crowd when Captain Stewart walked up to the table and asked, “Have you seen Mr. Weller?”
“I thought he’d asked you for the day off.”
The captain’s white eyebrows seemed to double in size as he leaned down. “He sent me a note to that effect but evidently did not wait for a reply. Who’s supposed to play for the two o’clock trip?”
Sam swallowed slowly, looking at his fingers. “Aw, I’ll cover it for him. It’s a church group, isn’t it? How much dancing are they going to do?”
“No offense, son, but I’ve heard you play. You’ve got to practice to get the stiffness out of your wrists.” He went upright, his back straight as a broom handle. “But go down and get ready while Fred Marble plays everybody on board with the calliope. And I’ll keep an ear on you.”
After a minute Elsie came over and refilled his coffee cup. “Is he awful mad?”
“He ain’t happy. When’s Ted coming back?”
“He told us he’d return on this afternoon’s train.”
“I hope he finds out more than I did.”
“Who’s going to cover for him, the colored pianist?”
“Yours truly.”
“Oh.”
He smiled at her. “Don’t worry. I’ll play like it counts.” Up on the roof Fred began to run scales of weeping notes, the whistles rising in pitch as they warmed in the blasting steam.
About one-thirty he got down to the hot dance floor and put up the lid on the piano, a six-foot-eight George Steck, a tough, loud instrument tolerant of the river’s dampness. As the first ticket holders began to roam the big boat he warmed up, playing “Nola” at a moderate tempo and nodding to the five other band members as they walked up: Zack Stimson, the banjo player; Mike Gauge, the clarinetist; Freddie Peat, drummer; Felton Bicks, cornetist; and tuba player Jackie van Pelt. The men fell into the song one at a time and swapped the lead around for fifteen minutes, letting Sam have the fancy ending to himself.
The band checked their instruments, getting ready for the long haul. Zack leaned over and asked politely, “Where’s Ted?”
“He’s laying out today. Going for some information on his little girl.”
Zack shook his head and bent down to tune his banjo. “We could use her right about now.”
Sam frowned at the remark. “Well, how’m I doing?”
“Doin’ okay, but I can tell you mostly play by yourself. No offense. Ted and us, we’re used to each other.”
The big whistle hollered up the Natchez bluff, and four young couples walked up, looking expectantly at the band, so Zack started strumming “Nobody but You” and the others landed on the melody like bees on a daisy. Captain Stewart skirted the edge of the dance floor, listened to three measures, and kept walking. When Sam had to fake a section, he heard Freddie Peat laugh out loud. He remembered the melody and what was coming up and relaxed, glancing now and then through an open door at shoreline willows flowing past along with the smokestacks of tugboats and ferries. When Mrs. Benton blew the whistle again and turned out for the main channel, the breeze began to pour in through the dance floor’s many windows and this, too, was what the customers were here for, escape from the soul-melting heat onshore. Twelve couples danced right in front, and a steward walked by sprinkling dance wax at their feet. Soon more dancers came out, the shy ones and the young ones, their steps melding with the music and the scenery passing by in the windows as if it were all part of the same song. He watched the back of a woman who’d begun two-stepping by herself, but when she turned Sam spotted the three-year-old she was holding, his arm high in his mother’s hand. He dropped a beat when he saw that and heard Zack call out, “Steady.” It’s what parents did, teach their kids to dance. He shouldn’t have been surprised. But for much of the song his timing was imperfect as he kept his attention on her, an ordinary-looking woman made distinctive by her eyes as she watched the boy feel her movements and learn that music and motion belonged together. He wondered if his own son would have learned to dance or sing, and he guessed probably so. His wife would’ve taught him, and at the thought of Linda he was filled with longing for the feel of her in his arms on a big dance floor. This pained him but the music moved him on, his fingers climbing an arpeggio so hard to execute it hurt him out of remembering and drew him back into the song. He turned his head, and Zack nodded.
* * *
FOR THE NIGHT TRIP, the black orchestra wore new tuxedos. Some dancers who’d never heard the New Orleans sound stayed back for a few tunes, leaning on roof supports or window frames trying to figure if it was all right to have fun with the band’s efforts. But the younger ones, or those who’d gone out on excursion boats earlier in the season or last year, they knew what to expect and stretched their steps. Pulled by the music, they walked on the notes, the women turning and shimmying, throwing the spangled tassels on their dresses straight out until their youth sparked like struck flint on the rumbling dance floor. Sam kept watch at the edge of the crowd, shaking his head at how much better this band was than the daylight group. When the clarinetist went off the page into his own riff some dancers stopped to listen and bounce in place, it was that good.
Elsie came down to check tables for burning cigarettes and brushed by him, pulling at his coat. “Lucky, he didn’t come back.”
“What?” He took her arm and walked her to the outside rail just as the boat shaved by the point of a big island.
“Ted told me he’d come into the station on the three-thirty train. August went up the hill to meet him, but he wasn’t on the coach.”
“Was that the last train?”
“Yes.” She balled up a fist and held it against her lips.
“That country’s slow going on a horse. The trip just took longer than he thought it would, that’s all.” He could tell she wasn’t fooled, and wished he were a better liar.
“We’re pulling out for Vicksburg after this trip.”
“He’ll know that. He’ll come up there on tomorrow’s train.”
“You think so?” He saw in her worried eyes how much she loved Ted.
“Aw, yeah. Now you go walk those tables on the other side before the captain comes along.” He watched her push through the doors and then looked down the roiling river, thinking about the Skadlocks, the dark woods, and the dog. “Lord,” he said aloud. The dog. He tried to imagine what experience in Cincinnati would prepare the musician for Louisiana swamps and the Skadlocks. He wished he had gone back with him, for Ralph Skadlock in particular had seemed a maimed soul capable of anything. He remembered that the outlaw knew where Troumal was, that speck of a place down on the Texas line. Was the slaughter of his family some sort of legend among the cutthroats of Arkansas?
Lucky walked down to the main deck and back toward the boilers, where he found August in the dim coal galley, backlit by angry yellow fire and shoving a long clinker rod into a firebox, poking up the flames. Sam grabbed a pair of black cotton gloves off a crossbeam and held them out to him in the dust-choked companionway. “Put these on and don’t let me catch you working without them. You can’t play saxophone with burnt-off fingers.”
August smiled, his blond hair lit with a bituminous glow. “Hey, they put me to firing full-time just this morning. Another half-dollar a day.” As he pulled on the gloves Lucky saw that his nostrils were black with coal dust. “Why’d you leave all the swells to come done here?”
“Just to check on you. You worried about your dad?”
August pulled out the cherry-red hook, hung it next to the fire door, and grabbed a shovel out of the chute. “Naw, he can take care of himself. He’s gonna find my sister, you know.”
Lucky watched him throw coal and tried to remember himself at fourteen, when some days he knew for sure that everything was going to turn out well, that nothing else bad could possibly happen to anyone he was close to, that life would treat him fairly. He’d felt this way up until his son died. And then there were the sorrows of France, where he finally understood that the family stories weren’t legends, but reports of real killings. He watched the boy labor, almost envious of the mindless work. “Hey, you want to sit in tomorrow with the day-trip band?”
August didn’t break his shoveling rhythm. He was counting loads, as someone had taught him that morning. “Sure,” he said through his wide smile. “That’d be great.” He slammed the fire door, set the ash vent, and moved away to the next boiler, sliding further into the hissing darkness.
THE AMBASSADOR set down her stage and let the crowd off at eleven. A messenger was sent up the hill to get a policeman to retrieve two drunks from the engine-room jail cell, and Sam turned them over. Mr. Brandywine blew the whistle, the giant note chasing the spent dancers up the road to town as the chuffing hoist raised the stage and the boat began to back out into big river.
After cleanup, Elsie stopped Sam as he was leaving the café. “Have you seen the captain?”
He glanced at her face and looked away. “Not for an hour or so.”
“I heard we might bypass Vicksburg for a Moose lodge convention in Greenville.” She had her fists balled in the pockets of her uniform, nothing more than a well-cut apron, and she looked harried, tired unto desperation. “Ted won’t be able to find us.”
“I didn’t hear about Greenville.”
“I’ve been asking everybody. Cap must be down in the engine room.”
“The pilot, ask him.” He gave her a little smile.
“Brandywine? You’re teasing.”
“All right.” He pulled his watch. “He gets a cup of coffee right about now. I’ll bring it up myself and ask him.”
On the stairs to the dark pilothouse he tried not to slop coffee out of the stoneware mug. He started to turn the knob but remembered to knock, and Mr. Brandywine’s chicken voice cracked through the glass. “Enter.”
Sam approached the steering wheel but the pilot kept his head toward the night. Farm-size plots of fog were skating over the river, and the boat had just plowed into one. There was as little light inside as out. “Here’s your coffee, Mr. Brandywine.”
“By God, I could smell it when you were halfway here. Put it on the stool.”
He did, then stood quietly and watched the fog take away the stars. “Are we still going to play Vicksburg?”
“I don’t know about you, boy, but that’s where I’m tying up.”
Sam craned his neck forward, staring at the fog boiling in the window. “How can you run in this?”
“Hush. I don’t know exactly where I am.” The pilot closed his eyes. “Hush, now. Don’t even leave.”
The pilothouse silence drove home that every nail and plank in the three-hundred-foot steamer could break apart within moments if old Brandywine’s mind faltered. He was the pilot of everyone’s future. Reaching out, he slid back the big side windows on port and starboard, then pulled from the whistle a chop of sound, a quick musical rasp of steam sailing out into the blackness. Sam heard an echo to the east; nothing came back from the west.
Mr. Brandywine’s back straightened and his eyes opened wide. “You can leave now.”
“Where are we?”
“A thousand yards off Magnolia Bluff.” He turned his head sideways to the oncoming fog, as though listening to it sluice over the breast board.
“I can’t see a thing.”
“I wouldn’t imagine that you could.”
Sam put a hand on the doorknob, but the pilot stopped him with a question. “The little girl that sang with the band, last trip. You hear anything about her?” As he spoke he reached up and pulled a big copper ring that sounded a bell in the engine room, and after a moment, they could feel a gentle surge of speed.
Sam looked ahead into nothing, wondering what the pilot was seeing other than his storehouse of recollections from ten thousand trips in the dark. “Somebody hired people to steal her. We found out who the thieves were, and Ted’s gone to handle things.”
“He can’t law them?”
“Louisiana.”
“I see.” Mr. Brandywine let go of a spoke and the wheel spun slowly before he stopped it with the foot brake.
“Don’t like those new steering levers?”
“There’s a time for ’em.”
“Good night, then.”
“Duggs tells me you were in the war,” the pilot said, with sudden animation.
Sam stopped with his hand on the knob. It was late, the fog was beginning to lift, and he wondered if Mr. Brandywine just wasn’t ready to be left alone.
The boat finished crossing the river and straightened, or at least Sam felt it did. “Just missed the fighting. I saw what was left over, though.”
“I wish my oldest boy had missed it.” He reached up and pulled one glass-rattling note from the whistle. Sam peered out of the window to the left and after much concentration could barely make out a running light a half-mile off, dim as a cigarette in a dark hallway. From across the river came the vessel’s hoarse salute. “The Nellie Speck,” Brandywine said to the night.
“How can you tell?”
He could just make out Brandywine’s shape, slowly turning to him. “A steamboat’s whistle is its name. That other pilot knows what boat we are. Everybody’s whistle is made to sound different, my boy.”
“You must have some ears.”
“Why, can’t you tell a family member’s voice even when you can’t see them? Your good friend’s? Your wife’s?”
He didn’t answer for a long time. “I guess so.”
“That’s right.”
“What outfit was your oldest boy in?”
“He volunteered in Missouri.”
Sam didn’t want to ask the next question, and Brandywine perhaps knew this, that there would be several questions leading to a black answer, so he went ahead and gave it.
“He got his eyes burned out,” the old man said. “And what a loss that was to him. When he rode cub pilot with me, he could see a green running light a mile and a half away, and now he’s at home making brooms.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sometimes, late at night when I’m tired and waiting for first light, I feel like he’s standing right here to the side of me. I’ll turn to him and there’s nothing there, just this hole in the darkness.” He gave the wheel a nudge to starboard. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Yes,” Sam said. “It is.”
ON THE WAY DOWNSTAIRS Sam watched a fog patch crossing the river. Two or three stars spun overhead, and a navigation light burned yellow above the western batture. A steam towboat came breathing heavily down on the starboard side, escape pipes woofing, running lights no more than sooty fireflies above the velvety stream, its sudden-rising whistle an organ note driven like a nail into the delta night, audible for ten miles where a farmboy hearing its hum might decide to drop from his bedroom window and join a world of wanderers. Sam imagined such a boy and wondered what would happen to him, if he’d wind up shoveling coal all night or sleeping above Charlie Duggs’s torturous snoring, a dull life going in a straight line. No wonder so many songs were about going back home.
Passing by the café, he saw Elsie cleaning up, her long waist bent over a checkered oilcloth. Everything would go on in a straight line tomorrow, all right, unless Ted returned with world-changing news. Or unless he didn’t return at all.
* * *
TED SQUATTED in the dark guessing when dawn would come, lost in a timeless ocean of blackness where ten minutes seemed an hour. It had taken two days to find the Skadlocks, and now, in a tangle of reeds behind the big house, he crouched and waited for movement or sound. The moon was long gone, and a barge of cloud had moored in the sky. A wind came up and rattled the stalks around him and he thought of his daughter, gone now too many weeks. He saw himself as a shrinking spark in her mind and knew that time was the enemy, an old cliché as true as anything else he might think. Each day cost him more of his little girl’s voice, her sense of perfect pitch, her baby teeth shining above her laughter, the touch of her hands on his big ears as he hoisted her up to sing in his arms. All he could do during this dangerous wait for the sun was think of her, and he feared it would distract him from the task at hand. He shook his head, hoping again for light since he could see nothing at all. He had scouted the house and its outbuildings before the moon lay down in the trees, but now there was nothing before him except his dark imagination of a house, a brush-swamped, gigantic thing of nibbled chimney tops and grass-spiked roof gutters. Looking off to the right, he saw nothing. Turning left, he thought he saw—what, distant fireflies? Two amber lights from a far-off boat? As he stared, the color came up in intensity and the glowing rounds grew larger—closing in from a mile away? With a shock he realized they weren’t far at all, but floating in midair right beside him, fixed in the warm, silent breath of an animal.
The blood drained from his chest, and though he knew he should remain as frozen and quiet as a stump, he understood that an animal’s nose couldn’t be fooled. Against his will he rose and his left hand floated up in defense just as a dark fury of indeterminate size struck it like a hungry fish, pain streaking up his arm at once. His hand was crushed and shredded by a huge invisible animal and he drew his pistol and pumped one detonation toward the dark pull, guessing at what had hold of him since he could see only phantom movement in the crashing reeds. The growling power on his hand turned him loose, and he tried to lurch away and find his stride but was seized in the back of the neck by a set of steel-trap fangs that shook him like a rabbit, trying to snap his brain stem. He raised the pistol again and fired once over his shoulder and then something metal banged his skull and a shower of sparks rained down in his eyes. A gruff cry that might have been for the dog’s benefit rose behind him. Ted was down on his knees when he felt a second blow and then the crush of wet, sulphurous swamp grass against his cheek.
* * *
MRS. BENTON was in the wheelhouse when the Ambassador drifted up against the foot of the bluff in Vicksburg, and she laid the boat against the pilings as gently as she’d once put her baby in a crib. Down in the boiler room, August cleaned his fires. Getting off duty, he washed up, combed his brassy hair, and hiked the steep redbrick street to check the train schedule at the Y&MV station. The agent told him that passengers coming up from St. Frank would arrive in two hours on the eleven o’clock train from Harriston. The boy went out on the platform and sat on a bench under the overhang, just out of the sunshine, looking down the track. A switch engine chuffed by, pulling two flats of lumber, and he watched it hiss and smoke off toward the upriver end of town. Half an hour later a passenger train of three wooden coaches creaked up to the station, thirty or so people getting off. One portly man in a straw boater kissed his wife and two daughters who had come to the station to meet him. August watched their shiny Ford chatter up the hill. His father had told him that they’d buy a car as soon as they finished up the season and went back to Cincinnati, that they’d have a better place for the winter, a flat with hot water and more than two rooms, a ground-floor place that would support a substantial piano and have room for them to play music and sing. He began to pass the time going over arrangements in his head, fox-trots he’d picked up on the way downriver. When he got stuck figuring which way to go with a note, he pictured his father’s fingers on the keyboard, rolling up, skipping down, showing the way to the melody. Those same fingers had stung his legs as a child, pulled back at his thick hair when he disobeyed. His father was pretty much all business, and his business was music. So no matter what, they were the same in that.
At ten he heard Mrs. Benton pull the whistle ring for the Moose lodge trip as he was meditating on “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” the way the white band played the melody, then how the colored orchestra played around the melody, going in and out of it, and he came to the revelation that there were more notes around a song than in it. He closed his eyes and began to hum and pat his feet on the cindery brickwork.
At 10:58, August lifted his chin toward the whistle of a passenger train, three blended notes rising toward A-sharp, D, and F-sharp. A well-maintained ten-wheeler pulled a train of six coaches into the station, and two conductors lowered step stools to the apron the moment the wheels stopped turning, getting off in their sharp black uniforms and pulling bright watches from their vests. August waited at the first coach, watching down the line toward the third in case his father came out of that vestibule. After every passenger had left the train, he approached the head-end conductor.
“My father was supposed to be on this train, but he didn’t get off.”
The conductor pulled his watch again and looked toward the engine. “Could be he’s asleep in his seat. I got to do a walk-through anyways.” He went up into the first coach and five minutes later August saw him come out of the last car, wave, and then shake his head. The agent had told him this was the only train from St. Frank today, but August was not yet at the age of worry, and what would happen tomorrow was for his mother to fret about. He left the station and walked through town looking in shop windows and wondering what it would be like to have any money at all.
* * *
THE MOOSE lodge trip was back at twelve-thirty, and he wanted to find his mother before he ate and went to sleep. The crew was racing to clean up the spilled root beer, popcorn, hot-dog chili, puke, tobacco spit, and stepped-out ready-mades. His mother was in the kitchen, helping the cooks make sandwiches for the two o’clock general excursion. Her hair was half down, her apron smudged with ketchup. He could smell the morning’s sweat on her.
When she noticed him at her elbow, alone, she grabbed his arm hard and pushed him through the swinging door into the restaurant. “Where’s your father?”
“I met the one train he’d be on and he wasn’t on it.”
She dug a fingernail into his biceps. “You must’ve missed him.”
“Ow.” He pulled back. “That train was empty when it left, Mom.”
She dropped her hands against her apron. “He must’ve run into trouble with those people.”
August couldn’t imagine what kind of trouble she was talking about. “Can I turn in?”
She looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. “Sure, sure. You go back on at eight?” She ran a finger through his hair and saw the cinders peppering his scalp. “How’s your back?”
“All right.” He pulled in a notch on his belt. “The second engineer said he’d find me a short-handled coal scoop that I can swing better.”
“I can tell it hurts.”
“It’s not nothing. The worst part is the sweating.”
She lowered her voice. “You have any more loose bowels from the heat?”
He rolled his eyes. “No. Engineer told me to drink a spoonful of coal ashes in a glass of water.”