The Missing

glanced up a broad central staircase and walked beyond it and then aft along the outside rail, past the boiler room, stepping through a door and walking among the main engines and pumps, expecting to find someone going over the machinery. He stopped in the dark and smelled cold oil, a ferrous mist of rust, and from below deck the sour ghost of a dark, side-rolling bilge. The old noncondensing steam engines looked like dead museum pieces that would never move again, asbestos-stuffed mammoths hulking in the gloom.

He walked forward and pulled himself up the main staircase. The vast second deck opened before him all the way to the stern windows, a maplewood dance floor hundreds of feet long that popped like distant musketry as he walked across it. A bandstand stood amidships on his left, and a long raft of small tables ganged next to cloudy windows slid shut against rain and birds, everything dusted blue with mildew. The ceiling was cross-bracketed every eight feet with gingerbread arches layered with gunpowder mold bred by the water-bound air.

The third deck was a two-tier affair, an outer open promenade called a hurricane deck and, in the center, a raised deck some rivermen called the skylight roof, railed and balustered, topped with a thin plank ceiling, the front half open to the breeze and the rear half a cafe, walled and windowed, sheltering a jumble of cheap wooden tables and deck chairs stacked in a great logjam. He walked through the cafe and looked into the kitchen at the big rusted coal ranges and many-doored oak iceboxes that hung open with the bitter smell of rotting rubber gaskets. He shook his head, thinking that every square inch of the busy woodwork, stanchions, hogchains, window frames, braces, brackets, filigree, molding, steam pipes, valve bonnets, smokestacks, and gingerbread would have to be scrubbed and painted.

The fourth level housed most of the crew. Sam remembered it was called the Texas deck and this one held a double row of plain cabins whose doors opened to the outside. On top of the Texas was the pilothouse, trimmed above its wide windows with sooty knickknack millwork and a copper-shelled dome. Sam found an unlocked cabin door and looked inside: two stacked bunks, a small lavatory, a locker with thread spools for pulls, the mattresses no better than what he had seen in a jailhouse. He looked back over the rail and realized for the first time that these old boats were made mostly of thin wood, to keep the weight down-regular wood that wanted to rot and warp and crack and leak and twist, and woe to everybody on board if a fire ever got started. The Ambassador had seen its share of summer squalls and upriver ice jams, had banged lock walls, scraped boulders, wormed over sandbars, and every lurch and shock was recorded in her timbers. He looked aft and saw again the buckles in her guardrails, the swale in her roofline. The boat seemed a used-up, dead and musty thing as still as a gravestone, and he wondered who in his right mind would want to ride on it for fun.

***

ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK a bus rattled in on solid rubber tires and men dressed in denim began to pour off, most of them black. A little later four men hopped off a horse-drawn surrey, put on plug caps that identified them as the engine-room crew, then boarded and headed aft. In the next half hour a buggy, several Fords, and one horse showed up at the wharf, soon followed by a steaming stake-bed truck driven by the captain and piled high with cans of paint, brushes, turpentine, rags, and scrapers. The Wellers and other crew members were there, dressed in their worst clothes. Another, smaller truck pulled up carrying two zinc drums of bleach, and the captain climbed up in the bed and gave directions for its dilution and use. Sam was told to work with the second mate, a big hound of an ex-policeman named Charlie Duggs.

“Hey, I know you,” Duggs said. “You’re the head floorwalker at Krine’s.”

Sam stuffed a brush in his back pocket. “Not anymore.”

Duggs waited for a clarification, and after several seconds said, “We all used to be somebody else, I guess.”

Sam motioned to Duggs’s mate’s cap. “How’d you wind up in the steamboat business?”

He shrugged. “When I got back from France with everybody else I was a cop for a year. Muscarella fired me when the new mayor came in. You know Sergeant Muscarella?”

“Who doesn’t?”

They walked up carrying ladders and in a few minutes were scraping the gingerbread along the roofline of the Texas deck. Above them several men were making the chips fly on the pilothouse, and below a crew of seven was scratching away at the balusters on the guardrails, the whole boat vibrating as though gnawed by a million carpenter bees. As the day progressed, the dark water around the Ambassador was speckled by a soiled snow of paint flakes.

Something was burning, and Sam looked up to gray smoke bailing out of the starboard smokestack. The engine crew had laid a wood fire on the boiler grates, and after a half hour it was hot enough to ignite coal, the smoke turning to a black column of tarry-sweet bituminous breath. As Sam worked, he figured that the boat had been painted at least thirty times, the paint in places nearly a quarter-inch thick. At first he went after the old paint hard, but Charlie told him to ease off. “Just get the loose stuff. We not painting a banker’s house.”

“The captain won’t get on us about it?”

“He knows it can’t last. The soot eats it off once a year. Don’t you know that?”

“No.”

With his scraper, Charlie knocked a dirt-dauber nest spinning into the canal. “How’d you get on?”

“The Wellers put in a word for me.”

“You hear about their little girl?”

“Ah, yes.”

“That was a pretty child. Smart, smart. You could see it in her eyes. Little strong eyes that told you she was gonna do some big stuff in her time.”

“You heard her sing?”

“When we tie up I stand by to do the electrics for the band. Keep the microphone goin’ and lights. She got a voice like a tiny fiddle and can play it, too. When I was that age I couldn’t hardly wipe myself.” He was standing atop the rail and holding on to the molding of the deck above. “Somebody stole that child right out of a department store and couldn’t nobody in the store stop it, not even the puke-brain of a floorwalker who was looking for her.”

Sam stopped working. He was notorious already. “So, you know it was me.”

“Yep.”

“How many people working today are the regular crew?”

“About most of us. They’s a dozen or so extra painters to work this week that’ll be paid off.”

“So you’re all some type of big family, right? Been working together a few seasons?”

Charlie lowered his arms and balanced. “So what?”

“Everybody talks about everybody’s business? So if I tell you something, it’s like having a meeting with everyone else at once, right?”

Charlie ran a thumb along his scraper’s blade and looked at him. “This is goin’ somewhere?”

“I might as well say it now. I lost that job because of the child, and here I am, number one, to keep my lights on. And number two, the Wellers think I can help find their girl.”

“Is that how it is?”

“Spread the news.”

Charlie took two steps around a corner of the rail and stood over the paddlewheel, scraping and wincing away the peppering flakes. “Something’s got to be done. Let’s hope you’re the something.”

***

A SUSURRATION began in one of the smokestacks as the boilers started to build steam pressure. The two escape pipes sizzled at their feathered tops. After two hours, the engineers fed steam to the ejectors, which opened with a roar, siphoning out the foul bilge. Sam could tell when the boilers reached the hundred-pound mark, because someone opened a valve and the muted chuff of the dynamo wound up in tempo, the running lights on the stacks coming on slow as candle flames. Soon crew members were mopping down every surface with bleach, for the pumps had brought up the water system and men in slickers began hosing the