in the season or last year, they knew what to expect and stretched their steps. Pulled by the music, they walked on the notes, the women turning and shimmying, throwing the spangled tassels on their dresses straight out until their youth sparked like struck flint on the rumbling dance floor. Sam kept watch at the edge of the crowd, shaking his head at how much better this band was than the daylight group. When the clarinetist went off the page into his own riff some dancers stopped to listen and bounce in place, it was that good.
Elsie came down to check tables for burning cigarettes and brushed by him, pulling at his coat. “Lucky, he didn’t come back.”
“What?” He took her arm and walked her to the outside rail just as the boat shaved by the point of a big island.
“Ted told me he’d come into the station on the three-thirty train. August went up the hill to meet him, but he wasn’t on the coach.”
“Was that the last train?”
“Yes.” She balled up a fist and held it against her lips.
“That country’s slow going on a horse. The trip just took longer than he thought it would, that’s all.” He could tell she wasn’t fooled, and wished he were a better liar.
“We’re pulling out for Vicksburg after this trip.”
“He’ll know that. He’ll come up there on tomorrow’s train.”
“You think so?” He saw in her worried eyes how much she loved Ted.
“Aw, yeah. Now you go walk those tables on the other side before the captain comes along.” He watched her push through the doors and then looked down the roiling river, thinking about the Skadlocks, the dark woods, and the dog. “Lord,” he said aloud. The dog. He tried to imagine what experience in Cincinnati would prepare the musician for Louisiana swamps and the Skadlocks. He wished he had gone back with him, for Ralph Skadlock in particular had seemed a maimed soul capable of anything. He remembered that the outlaw knew where Troumal was, that speck of a place down on the Texas line. Was the slaughter of his family some sort of legend among the cutthroats of Arkansas?
Lucky walked down to the main deck and back toward the boilers, where he found August in the dim coal galley, backlit by angry yellow fire and shoving a long clinker rod into a firebox, poking up the flames. Sam grabbed a pair of black cotton gloves off a crossbeam and held them out to him in the dust-choked companionway. “Put these on and don’t let me catch you working without them. You can’t play saxophone with burnt-off fingers.”
August smiled, his blond hair lit with a bituminous glow. “Hey, they put me to firing full-time just this morning. Another half-dollar a day.” As he pulled on the gloves Lucky saw that his nostrils were black with coal dust. “Why’d you leave all the swells to come done here?”
“Just to check on you. You worried about your dad?”
August pulled out the cherry-red hook, hung it next to the fire door, and grabbed a shovel out of the chute. “Naw, he can take care of himself. He’s gonna find my sister, you know.”
Lucky watched him throw coal and tried to remember himself at fourteen, when some days he knew for sure that everything was going to turn out well, that nothing else bad could possibly happen to anyone he was close to, that life would treat him fairly. He’d felt this way up until his son died. And then there were the sorrows of France, where he finally understood that the family stories weren’t legends, but reports of real killings. He watched the boy labor, almost envious of the mindless work. “Hey, you want to sit in tomorrow with the day-trip band?”
August didn’t break his shoveling rhythm. He was counting loads, as someone had taught him that morning. “Sure,” he said through his wide smile. “That’d be great.” He slammed the fire door, set the ash vent, and moved away to the next boiler, sliding further into the hissing darkness.
Chapter Thirteen
THE
After cleanup, Elsie stopped Sam as he was leaving the cafe. “Have you seen the captain?”
He glanced at her face and looked away. “Not for an hour or so.”
“I heard we might bypass Vicksburg for a Moose lodge convention in Greenville.” She had her fists balled in the pockets of her uniform, nothing more than a well-cut apron, and she looked harried, tired unto desperation. “Ted won’t be able to find us.”
“I didn’t hear about Greenville.”
“I’ve been asking everybody. Cap must be down in the engine room.”
“The pilot, ask him.” He gave her a little smile.
“ Brandywine? You’re teasing.”
“All right.” He pulled his watch. “He gets a cup of coffee right about now. I’ll bring it up myself and ask him.”
On the stairs to the dark pilothouse he tried not to slop coffee out of the stoneware mug. He started to turn the knob but remembered to knock, and Mr. Brandywine’s chicken voice cracked through the glass. “Enter.”
Sam approached the steering wheel but the pilot kept his head toward the night. Farm-size plots of fog were skating over the river, and the boat had just plowed into one. There was as little light inside as out. “Here’s your coffee, Mr. Brandywine.”
“By God, I could smell it when you were halfway here. Put it on the stool.”
He did, then stood quietly and watched the fog take away the stars. “Are we still going to play Vicksburg?”
“I don’t know about you, boy, but that’s where I’m tying up.”
Sam craned his neck forward, staring at the fog boiling in the window. “How can you run in this?”
“Hush. I don’t know exactly where I am.” The pilot closed his eyes. “Hush, now. Don’t even leave.”
The pilothouse silence drove home that every nail and plank in the three-hundred-foot steamer could break apart within moments if old Brandywine ’s mind faltered. He was the pilot of everyone’s future. Reaching out, he slid back the big side windows on port and starboard, then pulled from the whistle a chop of sound, a quick musical rasp of steam sailing out into the blackness. Sam heard an echo to the east; nothing came back from the west.
Mr. Brandywine’s back straightened and his eyes opened wide. “You can leave now.”
“Where are we?”
“A thousand yards off Magnolia Bluff.” He turned his head sideways to the oncoming fog, as though listening to it sluice over the breast board.
“I can’t see a thing.”
“I wouldn’t imagine that you could.”
Sam put a hand on the doorknob, but the pilot stopped him with a question. “The little girl that sang with the band, last trip. You hear anything about her?” As he spoke he reached up and pulled a big copper ring that sounded a bell in the engine room, and after a moment, they could feel a gentle surge of speed.
Sam looked ahead into nothing, wondering what the pilot was seeing other than his storehouse of recollections from ten thousand trips in the dark. “Somebody hired people to steal her. We found out who the thieves were, and Ted’s gone to handle things.”
“He can’t law them?”
“ Louisiana.”
“I see.” Mr. Brandywine let go of a spoke and the wheel spun slowly before he stopped it with the foot brake.
“Don’t like those new steering levers?”
“There’s a time for ’em.”
“Good night, then.”
