Thieves Of Mercy

was not a hard job, not a dangerous job. Routine. But here he was, standing in the jaws of the beast, approaching it, laying hands on it, and the hardest part was to resist conjuring up the image of what was left of the scalded James Burgess right before he shot him.

“What the hell you doin up there?”

“Hold your goddamned horses… I got it now!” Taylor shouted back. “All right, English, go on.”

The fireman raised the stream of water until it was rushing over Taylor ’s hands and hissing and popping against the boiler. Taylor tried to breathe deeply but the breath wouldn’t come. He stepped into the grip of the heat, blinking water from his eyes, trembling, flinching from the steam and the spattering boiler water.

He heard something clang, as if someone had hit the boiler, and it made him jump. English jerked, and the stream of water from the fire hose went wide. Water jetted from the fire tube, gushing out the end, falling on hot metal plates, sizzling, steaming. Boiling water splashed over Taylor ’s arms and chest, burned him right through his shirt. Steam whistled by his face. He felt his stomach convulse, he thought he might piss his pants.

“Oh! Oh, son of a bitch! Git that goddamned water on here!

Git it on here, you stupid bastard!” He was shrieking at English, shouting like a madman. The fire tube had cracked more, perhaps cracked clean through. Guthrie had the plug in on the other side-the added pressure might have done it, or the jostling by Guthrie’s wrench. Whatever. The smoke box was filled with jetting water, steam, vapor, and heat.

“What’s wrong?” Guthrie shouted.

“Tube’s… son of a bitch tube… is ruptured!” Taylor went in, blinking, squinting, face turned away, hands shaking, tears running down his cheeks. There was water gushing everywhere, coming from the fire tube, from the stream English was directing at him. The heat and the smoke filled his eyes. He went in with the cone-shaped plug held out like a sword, lunging at the spurting tube. He heard himself make a low, whimpering sound but it seemed like it was someone else making the sound. He jammed the plug in the end of the tube. The water and the steam stopped.

The heat from the fire tubes was overwhelming, a searing, clawing agony, even with the stream from the fire hose. Taylor knew he had only seconds to get the nut on before he would have to step back. And then the plug would fall out and the water and steam would come and he would have to do it all again.

Don’t drop the nut, don’t drop the nut, don’t drop the nut… Taylor held the plug with his left hand, the nut in his right. The water from the fire hose tried to jerk it from his grip. Squinting in the terrible heat, like being pressed against a griddle, he worked the nut on the threads, worked it around, waited for the threads to catch.

Come on, come on, come on… And then he felt the threads take, felt the satisfying action of nut and bolt working together. He cranked it down, hand tight, stepped back with a gasp of relief.

For a minute, two minutes, he just stood there, hands on hips, gasping air, hot air, but not the burning air of the smoke box. At last he stepped forward, put the wrench on the nut, tightened it down. “All right,” he said to English, trying to sound as reasonable as he could, to compensate for his earlier hysteria. English directed the stream back into the bilge. Taylor put the access plate back on the smoke box, replaced the nuts. The heat fell off perceptibly.

“There you are! Hell, I thought you’d fainted from the heat!”

Guthrie started around the boiler toward Taylor. Taylor nodded, could not talk for a second. “That… was a son of a bitch,” he said. “Real spouter.” “All right. Well, it’s done. Thanks for the help.” There was a grudging sound to Guthrie’s thanks.

“You’re welcome.” Taylor had a sudden and overwhelming need to get out of the engine room, to stand on the deck, let the cool breeze run over him. To get away from the beast. “I got to get some fresh air,” he said, following Guthrie back around the boiler.

“Fresh air?” Guthrie exclaimed. “What the hell kind of engineer are you?” he asked, but that was yet another question that Taylor did not care to explore.

The General Page was twenty-eight hours from Greenville to Memphis, steaming upriver

against a one- to two-knot current, negotiating the wild, serpentine bends of the Mississippi River. Small towns and huge plantations slipped past, but the Page did not belong to the land. She was a citizen of another place, the riverborne community of the paddle wheelers and rafts and tugs and canoes that moved as languidly as the current on the wide brown water. The Mississippi River was like a whole other nation, with different geography, different customs, different history than the land through which it ran-one single, narrow, twisting nation smack in the middle of another.

Bowater was beginning to appreciate this unique quality of the river, to understand how the riverboat men came to be a separate breed from the deepwater sailors. During his long confinement at the naval hospital in Norfolk he had come upon and read a copy of Charles Darwin’s new Origin of Species, and though he viewed the work as predominantly a bunch of irreligious claptrap, there had been a few ideas that he fixed on, and found intriguing.

He wondered now how natural selection might have led to the species of men who worked the river. Certainly, he thought, the environment of the river community would have weeded out his own species, or any species of man with any sort of refinement or sensibilities.

These pointless and meandering thoughts drifted through Bowater’s head as he in turn drifted around the side wheeler, trying always to avoid Mike Sullivan, but still Sullivan hunted him like a hound dog on the scent of coon. Mississippi Mike was in a literary frenzy, so taken with the artistic merits and genuine originality of Bowater’s ideas on plot and character that he seemed unable to concentrate on anything else.

Sullivan finally caught him on the fantail, caught him alone. A moment before, Bowater had been talking with Ruffin Tanner about allocating crew on the new ironclad, the Tennessee, once she was under way. As long as he was with someone else, Bowater knew he was safe, because Sullivan wanted to keep his literary aspirations secret, and would not approach if a third party was there.

But no sooner had Tanner left, and Bowater begun considering with whom he could speak next, than Sullivan appeared around the corner of the deckhouse. So quickly, in fact, that Bowater had to imagine he was lurking there, waiting for Tanner to leave.

“Cap’n Bowater, there you are! I been working like a sum bitch, wrote it up the way you said.” Sullivan was smiling wide, holding a sheaf of paper in his hand. “Here, let me read you some-”

“Ahh…” There was no escape. Samuel Bowater had seen enough combat to know when there was nothing you could do but stand and take it. “All right…”

Mike, grinning harder, held the papers in front of him. “‘The Adventures of Mississippi Mike and the Murdering Dogs,’ ” he read.

“ ‘Chapter One-A Ghostly Tale. On the whole of the Mississippi, there ain’t no one who dare cross Mississippi Mike, best of the riverboat men-’ ”

“Isn’t anyone.” “What?” “There isn’t anyone who dares cross Mississippi Mike. That’s

how it should read. Or better yet, there’s no man who would dare cross Mississippi Mike.”

Mike nodded. “Yeah, that sounds real sweet, like the way them fancy French whores talk. All right, we’ll fix that up.” Mike licked the end of a pencil, scribbled awkwardly on the page.

… no man who would dare cross Mississippi Mike, best of the riverboat men. And of all of them, you’d reckon it was his kin would know best that the hardest drinkin, hardest fightin man on Western Waters was not a fellow to be done dirty. So Mike, being generous of spirit and not a fellow to think bad of another fellow, especially his kinfolk, never even thought that when his pa died it might have been at the hands of a murdering dog.

“What do you think?” Mike asked.

“Good, good,” Samuel said. “A little foreshadowing. Some nice alliteration. Is there much more of this… ah… introductory material?”

“No, no, I get right at it. Even used the names you come up with, for the other fellows. Here, listen up.” Mike cleared his throat and read:

This was in the early days, when Mississippi Mike had not yet got command of his own riverboat, but was mate on board the Belle of the West, which his pa was captain on. Paddy Sullivan was the best riverboat man there was, until his son inherited that mantle and even surpassed the former.