A second man grumbled sourly, “You was here with us first.”
Zane slid in front of the woman protectively. “The lady said she was staying with us. There’s plenty others here for the likes of you.”
“The likes of me?” the third one of the trio cried out like a branded mule. “You’re a fine one—”
Then the woman shoved back in front of Zane, holding her arms out between the two of them. “Briggs, you and the rest ain’t never met this’un before, have you? If you had, I figger you’d know better. He’s a real snapping turtle—”
“Don’t look all that mean to me,” Briggs snorted. “Kinda old, ain’cha?”
“Shuddup, Briggs,” she snarled, slapping a hand against his chest, causing his two companions to guffaw. “Makes no matter, ’cause I’m sure you heard of him somewheres on the river anyway. Eb—this here’s Nathaniel Briggs. Briggs, this here’s Ebenezer Zane.”
The stranger’s eyes went wide as his mouth stammered, “Eb … Ebenezer Zane, is it?” The color drained from Briggs’s face as he repeated the name.
“Then I wasn’t wrong: you heard of this here half snapping turtle, half earth trembles, I take it?” Mincemeat asked. “Learn’t what happened last time he tied up here in Louisville.”
“Some talk of it,” Briggs said, his voice quieter as a few others around them at the crude bar squeezed in closer. “Last summer, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t aim to have no trouble here.” Zane clasped an arm around the woman’s waiflike waist.
“Naw,” Briggs replied with a quick wag of his head. “Just like Mincemeat said, there’s other girls hereabouts.”
Titus watched the riverman turn and urge the other two off into the crowd. Then Bass shouldered his way back into that group, anxiously asking, “What happened last summer to you what made them three back away?”
Zane bent over and whispered into the woman’s ear. Titus saw the tired expression on her face change to something a bit more animated as she brought her eyes to rest on Bass.
The pilot straightened to say, “I’ll tell you about it some other time, Titus Bass. But right now—we’ve got beer to drink, and Mincemeat here has agreed to be your friend for the night.”
She patted the wide, colorful sash the pilot had knotted around his waist. “Just as long as it’s money what’s good for a girl to spend here in Louisville.”
“Since when you become particular what you get in trade?” Ebenezer asked. “Guineas, pistoles, or shillings. Even hard American dollars—”
“What you’re to pay me with this trip down, Ebenezer Zane?”
“Coin,” Zane boasted. “American and English too. Hard money you can spend anywhere.” He whipped back around to the bar, where he slammed down his pewter mug. “Barman! Another beer for my friend and me.” Then, twisting to look at the woman, he asked, “What you drinking, Mincemeat?”
She eyed the youngster and said, “I’ll have what it is Titus Bass is having himself.”
“Another beer, good man!” Zane ordered.
At the same time the woman slid out from under the pilot’s arm and pressed her hip against Titus’s groin, threading an arm around his waist, rubbing her cheek right up against his so that he could smell her breath. Already she had likely drunk her fill of Monongahela rye. He found her face pocked with the ravages of some past pox, her cheeks flushed as she pulled back from his face and peered up into his wondering green eyes. With her skinny fingers Mincemeat stroked first one of his cheeks, then the other.
“Been a long, long time—it has,” she said huskily to the rest of them, pressing her hip into his groin all the more insistently. “A goddamned long time since’t I last had me a peach-cheeked boy like this’un!”
8
When she took his hardening flesh in her hands and began to stroke her fingers lightly up and down the length of him, Titus didn’t know whether he was going to laugh out of sheer unabashed joy, or cry from the bliss he felt flooding over his entire body.
This was more than the feeling he had experienced with Amy, twice even. But instead of the nerve-jolting joy lasting but a few seconds at most while he exploded, this woman prolonged his eruption to the point Titus became certain he was enjoying more pleasure than any one man could endure.
“Why you called Mincemeat?” he had asked her when she’d first led him back to her tiny, cramped shanty across the muddy rear yard behind the Kangaroo, where she, like the rest of the bar help, was given a crude bed frame of saplings and rope, a musty tick filled with moldy grass, a chamber pot, and a small sheet-iron chimney beneath which she could build a cooking fire. It was the only thing that could chase the damp, bone-numbing chill from the room.
At least that’s what Titus thought until the skinny woman rose from striking sparks to kindling in that rocklined fire pit and came back to the tall, gangly youth—intent on starting a fire in him.
“It just a name what don’t mean nothing,” she answered as she peeled off his oiled jerkin, then gazed up at his eyes smokily.
God, how thirsty he was, his tongue thick and pasty. He asked, “You got any more of that ale left you?”
“Little bit,” she said, reaching across the narrow crib for the small table where sat her mug. “You can finish it off, sweet boy.”
My, but it still tasted good, although some of the sparkle and bite on his tongue had diminished. The spruce beer Ebenezer had started him out on still had that earthy body to it as he let it wash back against his tonsils, just the way he saw so many of the others in the Kangaroo do throughout that evening and into the long night. After a while he had stopped counting how many mugs Ebenezer and the others bought for him, and now he couldn’t even remember what the tally was when he had stopped caring. For so long there it had seemed like the thing for a man to do—to know how many he had put under his belt—what with this being his first drunk.
She had stayed beside him all that evening, even when they’d moved from the tavern, through the low- beamed entry into the dining hall, passing men who sat on crude benches at long tables where they clattered their mugs down to get the attention of at least one of the maids busy balancing steaming platters and trenchers and even more pitchers of ale from the kitchen fireplaces at the rear of the room where a half-dozen old women and men tended the fires and the food. The venison and pork, along with heaping helpings of potatoes and corn, took the edge off his lightheadedness, yet not so much that he wasn’t anxious to head back into the tavern once all of them were bloated with solid food.
The rest of the night proved all the more raucous as he grew warmer, his forehead and the end of his nose more and more benumbed as time seemed to slither by without notice, and people with it. After the longest time now he suddenly remembered the boat crew and took the mug from his lips, turning slowly around so he wouldn’t topple over as he slurred at her.
“Where they go?”
“Who?”
“Ebenezer and the rest.”
“They got their own places to be tonight,” she replied, back at the tiny fireplace, where she laid more of the kindling on the first licks of flame. It was finally beginning to drive the chill from the narrow room constructed of chinked logs, a low, sloping roof overhead of oiled canvas on which saplings had been laid, then brush, followed by a thin layer of sod to turn out the heavy rains and wet snows that battered the Ohio country three seasons out of the year.
He gazed down into the mug, saw there wasn’t much left. He swilled it back, then leaned forward to plunk the mug back upon the table. That made his head swim and he felt mushy in the knees, as if he might go down. As heavy as his eyelids were, Titus struggled to prop them open as he tried to figure just what to do, weaving slightly on that spot where he was rooted for the moment.
Then he lunged forward with one step. From the corner of his eye he saw her turn slightly, saw her cheeks flushed with the warmth of the fire she was tending; then he kept on trudging flat-footed toward the bed near the
