creeping up toward fifteen pounds per square inch, though Taylor was certain the boilers were not meant to run much more than ten.
“Three more pounds, Spence? Gonna pop them safety valves, ain’t ya?” Guthrie snickered. “Would, if the safety valves wasn’t tied down! Best part about bein part of this army fleet. No damned inspectors crawlin around the engine room, tellin ya this and that. Man can do what he wants, engine room’s his castle, way it should be. You must get an earful on them navy boats, huh?”
Taylor shook his head. His eyes moved to the top of the long, narrow locomotive boilers that provided steam to the walking beam engine. He could see the tatty bits of twine tied around the lever arms of the safety valves, preventing them from opening under the pressure of excess steam. He looked back at the steam gauge, the needle creeping up as the furnace sucked air into the fire. “On them big ships, maybe, but I don’t get bothered much. Old man don’t know enough engineering to stick his nose in.” By “old man,” Taylor meant Bowater, who was six years his junior.
“Well, you know Sullivan, he can’t keep his goddamned nose outta my business. But I just give him a swift kick in the ass and it’s settled.”
Guthrie and Mississippi Mike Sullivan had been together for the past year, but Taylor had known them both much longer than that. Sailors and black gang moved in and out of the universe of riverboat men on the Mississippi, but at the center of that universe was a core of pilots and engineers and captains who had been drifting around the river for years. They were a small town. They knew one another.
Taylor nodded absently. “Uh-huh. Sullivan can use a swift kick, now and again.” The needle in the pressure gauge was trembling around fifteen pounds per square inch.
It was the first time Taylor had been in an engine room since abandoning the crippled
Taylor forced his eyes from the gauge. Beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead. It was well over one hundred degrees in the engine room, but the sweat he felt on his face and palms, on his back, was something different. A cold sweat. He could smell himself.
“Got to get the hell outta Vicksburg, ya see?” Guthrie was still talking. “On account of how we commandeered that coal barge, and thank your skipper for his help. Back off on the steam once we gets up around the bend.”
Taylor nodded again. Suddenly he was not feeling well. He heard a thump on the deck overhead and it made him start. Then he heard another, and with it a muffled cry and he cocked his head, turned his ear to the fidley, that open space above the engine room that ended with the cabin roof above.
There was a fight going on, a brawl topsides. Taylor recognized the sounds-he had heard them often enough, on riverboats and in taverns and on waterfront streets. It was easy enough to guess who was doing the fighting and why. As every river man knew, when salt- and freshwater mix, it causes a chaotic, roiling effect.
“Gotta go, Spence. I’ll stop by later,” Taylor said quickly and headed up the ladder.
“What the hell’s your hurry?” Spence called to his back. Guthrie had not heard the sounds of the fight over the hiss of steam, the roar of the boiler, and Taylor did not enlighten him.
He stepped out of the fidley into the night air and breathed deep. He had left his gray uniform frock coat on the workbench below, and his white cotton shirt was wet with perspiration. It was fifty degrees cooler topside than in the engine room, and though the night was not cold by any means, Taylor shivered. He was glad to be on deck.
He hurried down the side deck, the sounds of the fight loud now. He could hear breaking furniture, cursing, shouting, the thump of bodies hitting structural members of the vessel. He burst through the door into the salon, into a world of chaos.
The fight was fully under way, with sailors and river men flailing away at one another, men rolling on the deck, swinging roundhouse punches, biting, kicking, clawing. Hard to see who was winning. No one.
To his right, Taylor saw Angus Littlefield, rated seaman, with arms pinned behind him by the one they called Doc, while another of the riverboat crew was beating him senseless. Taylor had no concern for Littlefield one way or another-it was how he felt about most sailors-but now Littlefield was one of his people getting whipped by two of them.
He shouted and flung himself at the cluster of men, pushing Littlefield out of the river men’s grasp as he elbowed one and drove a fist into the jaw of the second, the kind of move that takes dozens of brawls to master.
Littlefield went down, so did the man holding him, but the man punching came up with a boot in the stomach and Taylor was doubled over. But he knew what was coming, stumbled aside, felt the second kick swish by his head and miss. He straightened. The kicker was off balance now, and Taylor ’s fist plowed into his hedgerow of beard. The man went down and Taylor pounced on him.
Taylor ’s fists fell like hammer blows, too fast for the man to fend off. Over twenty years of wrenching in engine rooms had rendered his hands and arms powerful. He felt his control slipping, slipping. A brawl was supposed to be cathartic, but now every blow he struck just ratcheted his fury up further and further. He was shouting, “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!”
A brogan connected with his left side, knocked him off the bleeding man he had been pummeling and onto the deck. The foot hit him again, in the stomach, but his muscles were clenched and he hardly felt it. The river man kicked again. Taylor caught the foot in his arm, pulled, and the man went down, and Taylor was up and on him, kicking him again and again, shouting incoherently. The room seemed to resolve into shades of red, and his screaming seemed to meld into the shrieks of James Burgess an instant before the silencing blast of the shotgun.
The man on the deck was curled up, fetal position, and Taylor ’s kicks were landing on shins and arms, so Taylor stopped kicking him, grabbed him by the hair, and pulled him half to his knees. He grabbed the collar of the river man’s filthy checked shirt, held it with the iron grip of his left hand, and began to hammer the man’s face with his right, and there was nothing the man could do to stop him, so powerful and relentless was Hieronymus Taylor.
Taylor no longer had any sense of what was happening, of the fight around him, of the noise, which had fallen off to nothing, he could only keep hitting and screaming. He felt hands on his arms and his shoulders, pulling him back, and he jerked and twisted and flailed out, but the hands had him tight, pulled him away until his grip on the riverboat man’s shirt was broken, his bloody face out of reach.
The hands pulled him back, and he twisted and saw that it was Ruffin Tanner holding him on one side, blood streaked across his face. On the other side, Dick Merrow, his gray bibbed sailor shirt ripped halfway in two. And still Taylor fought.
“All right, Chief, all right!” Tanner shouted. “Fight’s over, damn it!”
Taylor stopped flailing. The room came back into focus. He could hear his own breath, the loudest thing in his ears. The hands were still holding him tight, and he twisted, angry and resentful, and they let him go.
He looked around the room. The chairs and tables were everywhere, not one still standing. The men had stopped fighting now. Bloody men, hurt men, some nursing limbs or holding handkerchiefs against bleeding wounds.
They were looking at him. Looking at him like he was some kind of lunatic. In that place of insanity, they were looking at him as if he had done something savage and inhuman. He turned from them all and stormed out of the wrecked salon.
FIVE
