his memory was part of the reason he was on the boat to begin with.
LATE IN THE DAY it was still hot. Sam stood on the wharf and directed jostling couples up the stage plank to the ticket booth on the main deck. The calliope began gargling, the high notes singing flat until the whistles warmed up. Fred Marble, the pianist with the black orchestra, wearing a slouch hat and gloves against the flying steam, tickled out “Ain’t We Got Fun” on the roof, the instrument’s wincing notes sailing upriver over the French Quarter. Couples in their twenties and thirties began showing up, then what looked like a small men’s club, everybody in seersucker and straw boaters. For the most part, people were well dressed, the young women in thin, drop-waist dresses, the men in summer suits. One older man dressed in khaki shirt and pants carried a sheath knife on his belt, and Sam relieved him of it, promising he’d get it back at the ticket booth when the boat landed. One boy carried a sort of cane as thick as a chair leg, which he gave up grudgingly. The calliope music stopped with a yodel, and out of the long curving line of open windows above him the band began to pour a thumping-loud rendition of “When My Baby Smiles at Me” in a rattling-good dance tempo, the music coming down on the crowd like peppery candy for the ears. Customers began to back up on the broad stage plank, and as departure time drew close they were stacked three abreast, grinning and craning their necks at the big white apparition. Sam palmed a nickel-plated counter, and when he checked it read 1,255. Four deckhands shuffled down to stand by their bitts and the boat’s steam whistle let out a deep, river-filling chord. Ralph Brandywine would pilot the
Chapter Eight
HIS JOB for the night was to roam the decks looking for signs of trouble, everything from fistfights to fires. The forward area of the lower main deck behind the big staircase was an open-air lounge of sorts, a bullpen of wicker furniture and potted plants, and he noticed that mostly older people were sitting here, served by four waiters bringing out ice setups in sweating silver buckets. The boat doddered downstream, threading through the anchored freighters in quarantine at the same speed as the current, and a breeze rose off the water like a blessing, for as much as passengers craved the music and drink, they came to get out of the over-heated pavement of the city and their oven houses that wouldn’t cool down until midnight. At eight-thirty he went upstairs and the long ballroom seemed like a broad wooden railway tunnel filled with music, each ceiling arch hung with dim yellow, red, and blue lights, and the band was settling into a medium-tempo fox-trot embroidered with clarinet improvisations. The breeze steeped in and matched the flow of music, giving the swaying four hundred couples a lift from their humid life that normally left their dancing shoes green with mildew in the back of the closet. Through the windows the doubled shore lights sparked in the river and everyone felt the watery motion under their sliding feet, the turning of currents melting into the horns’ urging; the couples quick- stepped and careened, navigating the dance floor under the colored lights. Sam remembered this deck as a closed-up and creaking static mess, but now it was a moving cloud in dreamland, soon to be a memory for the dancers, who would outlast the boat itself by many years.
He walked over where the second mate watched the crowd. “Hey,” Charlie called. “This New Orleans crowd can dance.”
Sam looked over his shoulder. “I guess they can. What’s that fellow doing?”
Duggs yelled over a rising trumpet riff. “The Texas Tommy. If too many of them start up that hop dancing you have to stop it or at least spread ’ em out. The bracing under the floor can’t take too much of that. A two-step’s worse. The whole deck goes up and down like a fight ring when everybody takes a step on the downbeat.”
“Shake the place apart?” He thought Duggs was making a joke.
Charlie shook his head. “Last year an excursion steamer upriver had the whole dance deck cave in. Sent thirty people to the hospital.”
“Hell of a way to end a good time!”
“You go check the cafe.”
“Right.”
The band stopped and the girls returning to their tables across the floor were smiling and fanning themselves, their dresses hanging limp.
“If you see Weller, cheer him up.”
“What?”
“The captain’s got him waiting tables on the hurricane deck.”
“I bet the musicians’ union will gripe about that.”
“He asked for it himself. His salary was cut now that he’s just playing the day trips.”
On the third deck was a long, roofed section open to the night, dim except for a glowing backwash from bulbs outlining the several decks. Here couples were lounging at tables, some mixing drinks from bottles they’d brought from shore, some at the dark edges of the deck kissing, telling lies, making promises. The restaurant on the rear half of this deck was packed with people eating sandwiches or cheap steaks. A door at the rear spewed a stream of white-jacketed waiters serving the whole boat. Everyone forward was well behaved so he turned his attention to the rear of the deck, where Ted Weller was taking an order at a table. He met him at the kitchen door, before he went in.
“Moonlighting?”
“Got to do some damn something to squeeze a nickel out of the old man.” Ted Weller’s eyes were red, and Sam wondered if he’d been drinking.
“Hey, I’m on your side.”
“The more I work, the less I have. First my little girl, and now they’re trying to starve me out.”
Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Your little girl? That’s what I’m here for. When we get upriver, I’ll start asking around onshore.”
Ted wrote something on his pad and glanced up. “She would kiss me at bedtime and say ‘
“Yeah?”
He leaned close and Sam could smell the whiskey. “You don’t know what it’s like, not to be able to take your kid in your arms anymore.” He turned at once and banged through a swinging door.
Sam wanted to follow him through and remind him that he wasn’t the only man in the world to lose a child, but he held back, watching the door swing in and out with waiters and busboys, giving a sliced-up view of Ted Weller arguing with a sweating cook.
