black uniforms and pulling bright watches from their vests. August waited at the first coach, watching down the line toward the third in case his father came out of that vestibule. After every passenger had left the train, he approached the head-end conductor.
“My father was supposed to be on this train, but he didn’t get off.”
The conductor pulled his watch again and looked toward the engine. “Could be he’s asleep in his seat. I got to do a walk-through anyways.” He went up into the first coach and five minutes later August saw him come out of the last car, wave, and then shake his head. The agent had told him this was the only train from St. Frank today, but August was not yet at the age of worry, and what would happen tomorrow was for his mother to fret about. He left the station and walked through town looking in shop windows and wondering what it would be like to have any money at all.
THE MOOSE lodge trip was back at twelve-thirty, and he wanted to find his mother before he ate and went to sleep. The crew was racing to clean up the spilled root beer, popcorn, hot-dog chili, puke, tobacco spit, and stepped-out ready-mades. His mother was in the kitchen, helping the cooks make sandwiches for the two o’clock general excursion. Her hair was half down, her apron smudged with ketchup. He could smell the morning’s sweat on her.
When she noticed him at her elbow, alone, she grabbed his arm hard and pushed him through the swinging door into the restaurant. “Where’s your father?”
“I met the one train he’d be on and he wasn’t on it.”
She dug a fingernail into his biceps. “You must’ve missed him.”
“Ow.” He pulled back. “That train was empty when it left, Mom.”
She dropped her hands against her apron. “He must’ve run into trouble with those people.”
August couldn’t imagine what kind of trouble she was talking about. “Can I turn in?”
She looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. “Sure, sure. You go back on at eight?” She ran a finger through his hair and saw the cinders peppering his scalp. “How’s your back?”
“All right.” He pulled in a notch on his belt. “The second engineer said he’d find me a short-handled coal scoop that I can swing better.”
“I can tell it hurts.”
“It’s not nothing. The worst part is the sweating.”
She lowered her voice. “You have any more loose bowels from the heat?”
He rolled his eyes. “No. Engineer told me to drink a spoonful of coal ashes in a glass of water.”
Elsie seemed alarmed. “Did it work?”
“Dried me right up.” He gave her a smile. “Now quit worrying about everything.”
SOME OF THE MOOSE LODGE MEN had come on board already drunk and eager to fight with members of their fellow lodge from across the river. Sam shoved four men apart for twenty minutes and spent another half hour wrestling two of them into the brig. By the end of the run he was tired and his shoulder was sprung, but the captain told him to play for the two o’clock trip. He barely had time to sew his vest buttons back on before climbing the bandstand and catching the downbeat from the drummer. The first tune was “Japanese Sandman,” jacked up in tempo, and he felt he was an eighth beat behind everyone else, playing uphill into the alto sax and clarinet duel in the middle. Several young Vicksburg couples began dancing badly, tripping, kicking shins on their turns, and Sam hung on. The next tune was a waltz, and then he got on top of the following fox-trot and stayed there. As the dance deck heated up, sweat began to sting his eyes; then the boat pulled out and the breeze came through, fluttering the bleached tablecloths. Between tunes he watched the floor, looked at faces, tried to read minds, studied the men lurking against the white-enameled stanchions, hoping to see Ted, maybe a Skadlock, or just someone whose face showed inexplicable guilt or longing. He imagined that by now the little girl could be anywhere on the boat’s downbound route, because that was the one connection he understood, that someone saw her and had to have her, someone near the river’s fogs, within reach of the big boat’s whistle and the pull of the blasting calliope.
At the break, Elsie Weller came up next to the keyboard and told him that Ted hadn’t been on the train. Her eyes were red and she was twisting one of the boat’s cloth napkins into a rope.
“Aw, he’s probably coming up to Greenville. We’ll be there tomorrow.”
“He would’ve sent a telegram, Lucky.”
The drummer gave a rim tap and he turned to a new piece on the piano’s music rack. “Maybe the office was closed. There’s all sorts of reasons he might be late or didn’t send a wire.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
He began an intro to “I Used to Love You but It’s All Over Now,” sorry that this was in the rotation. It was a new song, and he hoped she didn’t know the title. She adjusted her little waitress crown and walked bravely out a starboard door with her back straight, and he remembered that she was a better musician than he was and deserved more than a kitchen job, that she was missing two pieces of her life, and he was missing one. His fingers struggled up a knoll of unfamiliar notes and behind him the cornetist frowned. Sam began to think of the day his son died, how Linda was inconsolable, and no matter how much he comforted her, she continued to shake with the loss. He sometimes forgot that she had as big a hole in her life as he did, and suddenly he missed her very much. A strange thing began to happen under his fingertips: he was paying less attention to his music, and his timing improved. He began to feel the notes instead of just reading them off the page. Tilting his head, he listened to himself get better as he went on, feeling sad enough to cry while making the dancers step and spin, and smile.
Chapter Fourteen
FOR THE MOONLIGHT trip he counted the gate at the stage plank, earnestly checking faces, watching up the bluff for Ted to get out of a cab. After loading everybody, he patrolled the dance floor. The Vicksburg people were pretty well behaved, though suspicious of the black orchestra, but a group from the big sawmill in Yokena had brought in an intolerable number of half-pints of 150-proof moonshine, and in midriver several rattling fistfights broke out. There was something wrong with their liquor, and toward the end of the excursion people were vomiting over the deck rails and under tables on the dance floor. One balding man wearing overalls went berserk, and it took a waiter, Charlie Duggs, and two busboys to restrain him from jumping into the paddlewheel. By the time the boat returned to the dock, Sam, Duggs, and Aaron Swaneli had to turn their uniforms over to a maid to be sewn back together for the next day’s run in Greenville.
That night while the boat was under way August helped load coal for three hours, pushing a wheelbarrow up and down a narrow plank to a dark coal flat tied to the side of the boat. He was ankle deep in black dust and shoveling in the light of a guttering kerosene lantern, humming a new piece the black orchestra had played twice in a row because the dancers wouldn’t quit hollering for it. When the bunkers were full, he threw a few shovelfuls into the firebox and saw that the coal was terrible stuff, half dirt, and he and the other firemen could raise barely enough steam to operate the engines. He fought the fires all night, trying to break up clinkers and get enough air through the coal so it would burn hot, and by the time they landed, before dawn, when his mother came down to tell him where the railroad station was in Greenville, he was too tired to stand, able only to lean on his shovel handle and listen, his eyes the only bright spots on him.
SAM WAS IN HIS CABIN matching Charlie Duggs snore for snore when he was awakened by a knock. He found Elsie outside, teary eyed and begging him to go up to the station and check the schedules because August was
