Authors: Tim Gautreaux
“Nope.”
“We can’t play no polka music.”
“Just dumb it down.”
“Play like the day band?” The trumpeter’s smile was wide and bright.
“Give me a break.”
He walked over to the main staircase and down to start his rounds on the main deck. The boat was barely a hundred feet from shore when an argument broke out in the forward lounge and he got sandwiched between two men dressed in heavy denim shirts who were trying to tear them off each other. Closing his eyes, he pushed into the muffled flailing of their fists, but two enormous hands grabbed him from behind and tossed him against a bulkhead, the concussion a star-flashing impact that sent him sliding to the floor. He tried to get up but found a large soggy boot pressing on his chest. “Let ’em at it,” a voice above him said, cramped by a wad of tobacco. Someone else put a brogan on his ankle, and he lay down and gave up. After a while he felt a sticky sensation on the back of his head and realized he was bleeding. A whole wicker table arced in the air above him, and somewhere glass was breaking and rattling on the deck like gravel. Someone’s thumb must have found a windpipe or eyesocket because an ungodly squalling ensued and the room began to reshuffle, but he suddenly wasn’t there.
* * *
HE WOKE UP on the deck outside his cabin door, a wadded bedsheet under his head. Down below he could hear hundreds of shouts and the orchestra playing a waltz. Above him were stars in one eye, nothing in the other, and in the next instant he was in his upper bunk, Charlie’s hand drifting above him holding a rag soaked in alcohol. A streak of fire running around the back of his skull from ear to ear roused him.
“Damn it to hell, that hurts!”
“I’ll bet it does. Glad to see you’re coming around.”
He put a hand over his eyes. “What happened?”
“Well, it’s over now. You been out four hours.”
He blinked and rolled his head. “Where’s Lily?”
“She’s in with a maid and the maid ain’t too happy about it.”
“I can’t…Big fight?”
“You could say that. There’ll be some carpenter work to do tomorrow and a hell of a lot of mop work.”
Charlie opened the door and looked out at the paintless buildings of the town. “You dizzy?”
“I don’t think so.” He touched the bandage Charlie had put on him. “You’re not going back out?”
“Still gotta work. You can’t handle this.”
“Handle what?”
“Coming back from Talbot Island a motorboat pulled alongside with running lights and all and paced us about three feet out. The guy driving it was drunk, I guess, and was cussing at some jugheads on the top deck. Well, they went in the café and picked up a slot machine and threw it over the rail at him. Went straight through the bottom of his nice boat, and he sank like a woodstove.”
Sam lay back, deciding to stay in bed. “You meeting with the law?”
Charlie stepped through the door into the night. “It’s a mess, all right. A real mess.”
He lay there listening to the rasp of brooms overhead, the rattling of bucket bails, the crash of mop water and slops in the river. His head pulsed, and an iron taste rose up the back of his throat. He heard distant sawing and nailing in the night as the carpenters propped up the boat’s power of illusion, and finally, he slept.
At daybreak he heard his cabin door open and close, and he thought Charlie had come in.
“I’m hungry.” It was Lily standing under his bunk in a wrinkled baby dress, barefoot, her face dirty.
“Sweetie, I’m sick.”
Lily looked at him a long time and said again, her voice absolute, “I’m hungry.”
He slowly sat up and waited for the cramped room to stop drifting off to his left. He pulled on his pants and looked into the mirror at a black eye, then began to wash up and shave.
Lily lay in Charlie’s bunk and watched him. “Why doesn’t somebody come up and bring us something to eat?”
“Girlie, you been living in the wrong hotel.”
“What?”
He put on a shirt and looked at her. She was filthy and smelled sour. “Where are your clean clothes?”
“In number fourteen.”
“Where’s August?”
“I tried to wake him.”
They walked down to the cabin she shared with August, and he rummaged through her few things until he found a clean set of clothes. August lay like a stone and didn’t move. Sam gathered up four sooty little dresses and some underwear and brought her back to his cabin, where he gathered his dirty clothes. In the boat’s laundry they waited for a wringer machine to come free, and while their clothes were washing he got them breakfast in the café. On the starboard side, workmen were replacing a section of bulkhead that looked as if someone had blown it out with a cannon.
Back in the laundry he sent their things through the wringer and hung everything to dry on the temporary lines strung on the aft deck between trips. Then he looked closely at the girl. “When’s the last time you washed yourself?”
Lily shrugged.
“Do you know how to wash yourself, or does August do it?”
She rubbed her nose. “I can wash if you soap the cloth.”
He led her back to her cabin, where August was snoring, drew a sink of water, put her on a stool, soaped up a washcloth, and told her to take everything off and scrub herself good all over, then rinse the rag clean and wipe off the soap and put on her clean clothes. He would wait for her out on deck.
“I can’t put on my socks when my feets are wet.”
“Just come out dressed and I’ll put your socks on.”
He sagged against the rail, something in his head spiking against his skullbones, a pain that should have been fatal.
In half an hour she came out and the little dress was on backwards. One of the cooks was coming down the Texas rail. “Oh, for gosh sake,” she said, pulling the dress off and turning it around on her. She cast Sam a malevolent look and walked on, saying over her shoulder, “You got to watch that baby, now.”
They went onto the dance floor, and he sat at the piano’s keyboard and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the pain at the back of his head. He felt her climb onto the bench, and he kept his eyes closed.
“You sleeping, Mr. Lucky?”
He began sorting through the books of music on the rack and found a simple waltz. “Do you want to sing?”
He knew she wouldn’t. He had tried to coach her on a few songs that August said she knew, but when she sang, she dragged the notes and ignored the timing. Sometimes she just whined. Neither one of them knew what was wrong with her. “Look at that mark. It’s an F. Can you find F on the piano?”
She pressed down middle F, the single note buzzing out over the hardwood.
“When the mark is in the blank line above, it’s an A, and then a C.” He went on, and she touched the notes. He looked into her corn-flower eyes. “Is a sharp up or down?”
“Up.”
“How much did your father teach you?”
“Those notes. F-A-C-E and E-G-B-D-F. He’s going to teach me to count.”
He was sick to his stomach and dizzy, and the bandage on the back of his head felt hot, but when Lily said this, he spiraled down into a new dimension of pain—of darkness, even. “Who is?” he whispered, putting an arm around her.
She looked at her shoes. “Nobody.”
He felt in her posture some notion that had not occurred to her before, that people disappear in a manner she might never understand. She began to cry gently, but he knew she didn’t really comprehend why she was sad. Someone had told her that her father had gone to heaven, then someone told her that her mother had gone to the same place, and none of it made the least sense to her because she was in the eternal present tense of childhood where the motion of life keeps your mind busy, and the future and the past don’t even exist. He felt sick for her, but terrible for himself as well, for the thin shoulder he cupped in his right hand might have been his own sister’s or brother’s, and then he was crushed by a deeper understanding of what he had lost back before he knew what loss was. He didn’t know such a feeling could come so late, and to keep from crying in front of her, he grabbed a music book and started playing the first piece that opened up, a waltz called “Falling Waters,” and he began explaining the three-four rhythm. Lily’s head raised up and scanned the page. It was a simple piece with single bass notes, and she crossed behind him and stood on his left, poking out G and C more or less in time, watching his fingers complete the chords. He began to have the strange feeling that they were playing into the future, a place where there was no baggage to carry.
They’d spent an hour at the piano when August came through the starboard door covered with coal dust. “I had to help load. I’ll take Lily now.”
Sam looked him up and down. “It’s all right. You get cleaned up, then we’ll go and pull the clothes off the line and iron them.”
“Hot time of day to iron next to a stove. How’d you get banged up?”
“I don’t even know.”
August looked at his bandage closely. “We’ve got some aspirin in our room.”
“I’ll get them when I bring down the clothes.”
* * *
THE BOAT PLOWED NORTH all the way to St. Paul, where the New Orleans music packed the dance floor every night. During the day, patrons desperate to escape the shore-bound heat loaded on board and sat under the cloth awnings, staring at their houses drifting by as travelers from some foreign land might, relishing the illusion that their town was exotic, special, or at least worth a look.
The crowds were mannered but large, the weather rainy and windy. The pilots fought the shallow channel of the upper river, and one time Mr. Brandywine was flanking a bend when he saddle-bagged the steamer on a sandbar. A ferryboat had to be hired to take fifteen hundred people back to the landing, and the Ambassador was stranded until a rise came down to float her off three days later. Sam was thankful for the idle time. The child began to soak up her piano lessons as well as her short fingers allowed, and he was teaching her limits. Do not stand at the head of stairways. Stay away from the smokestacks. Never go down to the main deck, where the guard rails were sometimes open to the water. At night he read to her, seated in an armless deck chair next to her bed, until she grew tired of the same ten baby books, so he began to make up stories. She stopped him in the middle of one and said she didn’t like it.
He’d just finished playing with the night band because the pianist had jumped to a hotel orchestra, and his head felt as wooden as the wall behind it. “What kind of story do you want?”
“One about a bathtub.” She climbed out of the bunk onto his lap.
He looked at her. “A bathtub?”
“A house with a sidewalk in front.”
He frowned. “Okay. There was this little boy named Fritz who lived in a house with a huge bathtub.”
“Could he play the piano?”
“Uh, sure, he was a crackerjack pianist. Now Fritz fell in a mud puddle in the backyard…”
“Was there grass in the yard?”
“Grass? Yeah. Lots of nice grass. Well, Fritz began to cry and…”
“Did his mother come out and tell him it was okay he got muddy?” She put a hand in his shirt pocket and hung on.
“Of course she did, baby. It was an accident.”
“Did she take him inside a house? The house with the big bathtub?”
He sensed the soaring hope behind the question and understood at once what he had to do.
ON A BLUSTERY JULY MORNING a west wind drove the Ambassador into a landing barge. There was no denying that it would have to limp down to Davenport for hull repair. Sam had been calling Linda and giving reports of how he was managing the children. He had discussed certain things with August. When told that the boat would be out of business for ten days, he loaded up August and Lily and took the train south, changing in Memphis and riding through the cinder-strewn heat and humidity down to New Orleans. The three of them showed up at his house sooty from two days on the rails, and his wife met them at the front door with a frown, the baby in her arms.
She thrust Christopher at Sam and examined August and Lily. “Are y’all Catholic?”
“Yes, ma’am.” August put down his suitcase. “But would it make a difference?”
She waved them into the house. “It sure makes it easier if we all go to the same place on Sundays.” She fixed everybody glasses of iced tea, then sat Lily next to her on the sofa and asked all of them questions for an hour, paying particular attention to her. Sam could tell she was trying to get a feel for how things might be.
That night, after the children were asleep, Linda crawled in next to him, and he could feel her whole body decompress toward rest.
“Well, what you think?” He hoped he knew, but with Linda, he could never say for sure.
“I never saw a four-year-old so glad to get into a bathtub.”
“I know we can’t afford another child.”
She laughed curtly. “Baby, we can hardly afford ourselves.”
“August will stay on the boat with me. He’s a real worker.”
“You know as well as me he can only work till September. He’s got to finish school.”
“But I’ll be back right after that at the end of the season. He can get pickup work in his spare time.”
“We’ll talk about this later. Just let me try to get used to them.” She put an arm around his neck. “Come here and let’s not talk about workin’ at something.”
* * *
HE SAW HER watch August during the week, how he practiced on the back porch and wrote in the margins of sheet music while tapping his foot to some rhythm winding inside his imagination. She took him along to the market and reported that he’d asked for things Lily liked to eat. Little potatoes, he said. She liked little red potatoes. At the house, August pulled grass along the walk, went after the weeds next to the street with a sling blade. He complained about the heat, the mosquitoes, but Linda didn’t hold that against him because she did the same.
The girl watched Linda as though she might evanesce at any moment, trailing behind her, showing no affection, her bright eyes searching and expectant.
On the day before he and August were to catch the train, Linda sidled up to him in the front room, catching his hand as he set the screen-door latch for the night and pushing him out onto the front porch.
“What?”
“Nothing. I just wanted to make sure you understood that things were all right. You know, as far as Lily’s concerned. August isn’t a problem. He can handle himself already.”
“I know we didn’t talk much.”
“Yeah, you just assumed things, as usual. Well, don’t worry, I think we can raise her. But she’s not normal.”
He looked over her head into the house. “What’s that mean?”
They could hear August talking to his sister. She squealed, and August went past the kitchen door with Lily riding his back.
“She’s kind of disconnected. I don’t know how to explain it. She won’t climb into my lap or give me a hug. Maybe it’s because she’s so smart. You can see it in her eyes. She drinks everything in. Did you see her in church on Sunday? I mean, she fell asleep during the sermon, but everything else she watched with those shiny little eyes. I taught her the Hail Mary twice, and now she knows it every word.”
He nodded and looked into the kitchen toward the sound of knees thumping the floor. “I’m trying not to teach her too much music. I’m scared she’ll get bored or just forget it. If I had to guess, I’d say she’ll be a lot better piano player than me.”
Linda put an arm around his waist. She seemed worried. “It’s like she’s waiting for something to happen.”
“Honey, she’s used to a lot of somethings happening to her.”
She shook her head. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe not.”
“I’ll bring in some money. I’ll make it work.”
“For her, you’ll have to.” She pulled open the screen and halfway into the room stopped and turned to him. “I know why you brought those kids into our home. Just don’t forget what they’ll mean for me.”
“Pretty lady, I won’t.”
“I want a house someday.”
“We’ll get one.”
“We don’t have a penny in savings.”
“We’ll get one, you’ll see.”
* * *
THE REST OF THE SEASON the boat ran town to town, a different landing each night. The dance floor was worn to a dull brown abrasion, the outside paint an occlusion of soot despite repeated scrubbings, the paddlewheel a barewood rack of planks washed to splinters. The old boat was waterlogged, rain-wracked, and out of true, its hogchains and turnbuckles bleeding rust and the hull warped out of its proper curve. The whole crew was as weary as a thin-walled boiler, waiting for payoff and bonus and release.
The weather turned cool early and the Ambassador began to tramp south, chasing the receding summer. In mid-September the crowds thinned out, except for the Friday and Saturday runs, and eventually, in October at Memphis, a cold front blasted in off the plains and all but killed the excursion business. Captain Stewart decided to try a few more towns below Memphis, and on a day of a big west wind, Mr. Brandywine was at the wheel fighting current as they started south. Mrs. Benton and Sam sat on the lazy bench watching whitecaps rise up in the channel. The boat was to land at a dock near the mouth of the Wolf River but wasn’t traveling where it was steered, commencing a dizzying wander. The pilothouse glazing rattled in the wind, and arching currents kicked up a dirty froth midriver.
Mr. Brandywine raised a hand for the whistle ring and blew a landing signal. “I’m going straight in with her back to the blow.” It was unusual for him to announce a maneuver, and Sam traded glances with Nellie Benton, wondering if the old man was hinting for advice. He watched the east bank come up in the bright midday. The pilot rang a stop bell and let the wind shove him along. Sam looked down at the water, figuring motion. Nellie Benton said nothing but seemed to be watching for wind direction in the trees. When Mr. Brandywine rang a backing bell, the pilothouse trembled as the paddlewheel grabbed water, and Sam knew he was trying to pull the boat parallel to the dock and let the breeze push him in. But then the wind came up hard, whistling through the rooftop gingerbread and popping the jackstaff flags. They were a hundred yards offshore with the stern swinging in hard. Mr. Brandywine rang a double gong, and after a moment the escape pipes barked up gouts of exhausting steam as the engines fought to draw the boat back from the wharf. Sam stood up. Steamboats were always underpowered things, and the wind treated them like box kites. Feeling one going out from under your feet, you knew that something terrible was going to happen in three or four minutes and that there was nothing anyone could do except drift along on what seemed like a county-sized piece of wood and wait for the bump that might break it open like a packing box, sending everyone, sleeping or awake, into the muddy current. Mr. Brandywine put the wheel over hard, but the wind was beating both the engines and the rudders, so he blew a warning whistle of four shorts, watched the dark dock pilings grow bigger in his port windows and said, over his shoulder, “Here’s the end of this season.” He rang the stop-engine bell right before the stern crashed into a cluster of pilings, but the signal was too late. A series of jolts shook the Ambassador and a spray of shattered lumber and long bolts flew up over the stern as the paddlewheel beat itself apart against the dock. The boat rocked severely shoreward, then leveled as the deckhands threw out lines. Later, Sam found out that the piano had rumbled over its roller chocks and chased a busboy a hundred feet down the dance floor.
By nightfall, the purser had paid off nearly everyone and asked the mates to stay an extra two days to tie up loose ends. Sam helped the pilots carry their luggage up to a taxi. He’d made several friendships on board, but he admired Nellie Benton and Rafe Brandywine the most, and felt that he was sending off legends.
The old man, wearing a bluewater uniform and bow tie, opened the door to the idling car and motioned for Mrs. Benton to get in. “Safest pilot goes first,” he said.
She gave him a startled look. “I don’t know about that, but it’s a nice thing to say.”
“Next year, if there is a next year, you hit the captain up for full wages, you hear?”
She slid into the backseat. “Come on and get in. You’ll miss your train back to Pennsylvania.”
He turned to Sam and told him, “You know, I admire the way you took in those Weller kids. I just wanted you to know that.”
“I kind of felt responsible.”
“Hell, we’re all responsible for something, but most of us don’t do a damn thing about it.” He got in, and Sam pushed the door shut.
As the hack pulled away, Nellie Benton called out, “Stay in easy water, son.”
* * *
RIDING QUIET and broken against the dock, the Ambassador soon lost its magic, and the smell of dust and dampness rose from its decks. The engineers dropped the fires under the boilers, and with all machinery wound down to a stop, Sam found things too quiet, and he began to think. For weeks the noise and music kept him from imagining what lay a hundred or so miles inland, somewhere in Arkansas. People he had a history with, so to speak, who owed him voices, touches, the generation of bloodline. In the near dark he leaned on the starboard rail, his mind boring westward.
The captain came up a staircase and stopped for a moment, as if surprised to see him outside. “The purser gave me your pay.” He stepped close and handed over a brown legal-size envelope. “You’ve stuck until the end of things this season, and you’ve had a rough road, Lucky, so there’s a fifty-dollar bonus.”
He turned and looked at the captain closely. “You’ll need a new uniform next year.”
The captain regarded the braid around his cuffs. He bent over slowly and put his arms on the rail. “It’s silly, isn’t it? A uniform used to mean something twenty-five years ago, when I was on the Anchor Line hauling freight and overnight passengers, people who were really going somewhere. It’s all silliness now. Just music and dancing.”
“I don’t know. Some people need it like Pittsburgh needs coal.”
The captain shook his head. “I guess fun has its place. Are you going home now? See the wife and all?”
He looked west over the water. The light had diminished, and the air itself seemed as grainy as fresh-broken iron. “Got a little business to transact first.”
“Duggs told me a few things about you.”
“I bet.”
The captain straightened up and clapped him on the shoulder. “Remember this. I never took a boat up a stream without a map.” Then he walked aft, nudging spittoons against the rail with his left foot.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING EVENING he and Charlie Duggs were the only ones on the dark boat. Sam lit a kerosene lantern and walked down to the bandstand and sat at the piano in a yellow envelope of light, playing with an edge of anger in his fingers, aware how much he’d improved in the past few months. Perhaps of necessity: no one made a living with ordinary playing. In front of so many crowds of sweating dancers, he’d learned to pay more attention to his timing. He opened the music for a new ballad and began embellishing a bit, adding notes, replacing others. Then he heard the sound of footsteps in the dark, and said, “Hey, Charlie.”
“I was up in the pilothouse watchin’ the sun go down.”
“That right?” He changed the song, playing from memory, slowed the tempo, and placed a foot on the soft pedal. “You heading out tomorrow?”
“Yeah. You want to ride the same train?”
“I’ll be down in a couple days.”
Charlie sat in a folding chair in the banjo player’s position. “You decided to make a little Arkansas excursion?”
“I don’t think I’ll know for sure till I start out. The last thing I need to do is get myself hurt.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“I know that.”
Charlie tilted his head. “But it’s your gig, right?”
“Solo act. Everybody’s a solo act when it comes right down to it.” He began tipping slow and playful notes into “St. Louis Blues,” and Charlie sat back and fished out a flask, taking a long swallow.
While he played, Sam wondered if anyone was out there on the riverbank listening and what the boat looked like from shore, the enormous old steamer a motionless white smudge against the charcoal river, one yellow square of light in its center and the sad lilt of music tinkling out into the darkness like a luring call. The thought came to him that no one was listening, and this made his music seem smaller, hardly able to escape the piano’s soundboard, even trapped under the balls of his fingers, his alone; but in spite of this he began to polish his notes, playing the song’s Latin bridge into velvet, and Charlie put away his bottle.
* * *
THE NEXT AFTERNOON they were playing gin in the café when they heard a big towboat simmering down on them. There was a jolt and a holler as the Mountain Wizard sidled up under a pall of coal smoke, deckhands jumping aboard with their ropes and lashing tight. They went out to the rail and looked over to the low pilothouse where a graybeard wheelman slid a section of window open.
“You boys packed and ready?”
“Yep,” Sam yelled.
“Well, head on to town, then. I’m fixin’ to pull her off the bank.”
They got their suitcases and walked a plank off the second deck onto the dock. They crossed a rail spur to a road, where they hitched into town on a lumber truck. At the Y&MV station, Charlie bought a ticket and Sam sent a telegram. He thought a long time before he composed it, because it contained a lie. He rewrote the message several times, trying to lessen the falsehood.