That name was not only picturesque, but apt and clearly fitting. Tucked here under the fine houses and rich shops catering only to the most cultured of Natchez residents sat the squalid, low-roofed sheds where the rivermen flocked to celebrate a bawdy and profane life. Above them stood the big houses, all finished off with ornate balconies and ivy-covered piazzas, the town’s streets crowded by handsome carriages, while here beside the river huddled only those monuments to man’s timeless attraction to the varied sins of the flesh.
Kingsbury set the group off again, draping an arm over the youngster’s shoulder to say, “I’m wanting Titus here to have him a look at Annie Christmas’s gunboat down the way.”
“Gunboat?” Titus asked. “What the devil that be?”
“Just what they call a flatboat been left behind by a crew long ago and some working girls took it over,” Ovatt declared.
Bass asked him, “Working girls? Like them at the Kangaroo in Louisville?”
“That’s the idea!” Kingsbury replied. “It’s their floating whorehouse.”
“But why is it called a gunboat?”
“Don’t you go there to shoot off your gun?” Root inquired.
“I didn’t bring me my rifle—”
“Naw!” Kingsbury interrupted with a chuckle. “Didn’t Mincemeat go an’ teach you all about how to use your gun?”
“Yeah,” added Root. “You was locked up with her for all that time—I figured you’d learn’t you couldn’t have you near the fun with your rifle you can have with your gun!”
It came over him slowly as he looked from face to grinning, gaping face in that deepening twilight. “All right,” Bass said. “Let’s go see this here gunboat.”
Ovatt asked, “Maybe you’ll shoot your gun off tonight, eh?”
“Count on it,” Bass replied enthusiastically as they started off down the wharf once more, passing noisy whorehouses, grogshops, card rooms, and gambling dens where laughter and music, shouts and screams, as well as drunken men all came tumbling out onto the cold plank thoroughfare. Here and there a short street ran perpendicular to the single long avenue that corded itself beside the river—streets named: Choctaw, Silver, Cherokee, Arkansas, and Chickasaw, all of them littered with filth, trash, and human excrement. Hundreds of men poured from one dimly lit place to the other, hooting and hollering at the pinnacle of bawdy revelry, while half-feral dogs and other wild creatures slunk back in the dark places and fought wrinkle-necked vultures among the shadows over the rotting garbage heaved right out of each establishment’s front door.
“Here you go, Titus,” Kingsbury said when they finally reached the southern end of the wharf to stand near a long flatboat badly in need of repair.
“What’s this?” Bass inquired as the pilot held his palm open and there laid three coins.
“A picayune.”
“What’s it for?”
“Man needs money to buy hisself a place to shoot off his gun!” Root exclaimed as Kingsbury handed the other two boatmen their picayune—the equivalent of six cents.
“What’m I gonna do with only this?” Titus protested.
Kingsbury snorted a loud guffaw, then said, “Here at Annie Christmas’s gunboat, that there picayune gonna get you drunk, get you a woman near all night long, and a bed till morning.”
“But you don’t wanna let yourself fall asleep, Titus,” Ovatt warned.
“Listen to him,” Root echoed. “Don’t you dare fall asleep with one of Annie’s whores.”
“Why can’t I just sleep it off if’n I take a mind to—like I done with—”
“Ain’t like Mincemeat,” Kingsbury started to explain. “Most of these here gals got ’em steady men they flock with. The women work on their backs and those fellas go gamble off what the women make getting poked by boatmen.”
“So? What’s that mean to me?”
“It means a lot of them gals don’t give a good goddamn about you after they let you poke ’em,” Ovatt said. “You fall asleep, and you’re likely as not to never wake up—at the bottom of the river.”
He glanced down at the three coins in his palm, then clenched them tightly as he asked, “N-never wake up? How?”
Kingsbury slapped a hand on Bass’s shoulder in the way of a big brother explaining sharp realities, “You go to sleeping, that gal you’re with might let in her feller to do the blood work.”
“B-blood work?” He was suspicious they were yanking on his leg.
Root dragged an index finger from one ear, across his throat to the other ear, making a distasteful sound as he did so.
“Or that gal might just be the sort of whore cut your throat her own self!” Ovatt said.
“Like a hog hung up at the slaughter!” Kingsbury added.
Wide-eyed, Titus regarded them all in turn, then blinked and asked, “Why … why all you fellas—and Ebenezer too—let me go off by my own self with that one named Mincemeat?”
“Shit!” Kingsbury replied, rubbing a hand across the top of Bass’s head. “None of us, ’specially Ebenezer, gonna let you go off with some whore what’d open you up a new breathing hole in your neck! Ebenezer Zane was taking good care of you, sending you off with Mincemeat.”
“She’s a good whore!” Root exclaimed.
“Not like none of these here bitches in Natchez,” Ovatt said. “G’won and dip your stinger in their honey-pot, then get on outta there to do some more drinking. Or get your bones back to the boat.”
“That’s the only way, Titus,” Kingsbury warned. “Don’t trust none of them spread-legged bitches here in Natchez. They all likely murdered a man or two their own selves.”
Ovatt agreed, saying, “You just figure that’s why they’re working here, and not up to St. Louie, or on down to Norlins.”
“Likely got runned out of those towns,” Kingsbury said, “or escaped afore they was strung up for murderin’ customers.”
“Ain’t much law hereabouts,” Root said, gesturing this way and that. “Best thing for a man to do is to hang together with his crew when he ain’t humping ’tween the legs of one of them bang-tailed bitches.”
*
13
A hard, cold rain hammered the heavy oiled-canvas sheeting stretched over Bass’s head like the rattle of hailstones against the white-oak top of an empty shipping cask.
At first he was too frightened to allow himself to be pleasured by one of Annie Christmas’s homely castaways.
Instead Titus sought relief at the bottom of a clay mug filled with a fiery concoction of corn spirits, for the longest time unable to take his eyes off the gunboat madam. He’d never seen anyone, much less a woman, near so tall—over six and a half feet of her. She laughed and drank, roared and cussed with the other three boatmen, and then he watched her disappear in the back with Kingsbury. Bass found another big one to stare at. This one—just about as wide as Annie was tall.
From that point on it didn’t take him long to start sensing the whiskey’s effects as the tip of his nose steadily grew more numb and felt for all the world like it was swelling as large as a hog’s snout right there on the front of his face.
Mysterious thing about what he had been swilling down—the more he drank, the more beautiful that plump and fleshy half-dressed consort became.
It took a while as he sat there drinking, but that gunboat whore finally realized the youngest customer there that night at Annie Christmas’s was giving her all his attention from across the small windowless parlor that fronted a half-dozen tiny cribs. In all, the parlor and those six cribs took up the entire length of a flatboat salvaged after its
