clomping Virginia reel, while the creosote workers, many in pressed overalls, were dancing deluded buck-and- wings, clog steps, or lunging polka stomps deadly to their partners’ toes. Pinwheeling dancers broke through the Virginia reel lines like crazed mules spinning out of a flaming barn. By the middle of the tune half the dancers were cap-sized on the floor and a general stomp-and-gouge had broken out. Charlie Duggs, Sam, and Aaron waded in and began pulling scuffed and screaming women out of the fray; then they began shoving apart the fighters and getting knocked around for their trouble. The biggest waiters waded in next, pulling hair and kicking, and the orchestra kept playing, as if trying to remind everyone what they were there for. A little man pulled a knife, and Charlie slapjacked him on the top of his head. Someone knocked down a tin lantern and a big fellow fell on it, crushing open the fuel tank, and women shrieked as he caught fire, then leapt up and ran, a flaming cross flying down the middle of the dance floor. Men stopped fighting to knock him over, everyone suddenly mad to get at him, a flurry of sympathetic hands rolling him like a barrel across the dance floor as he hollered and cursed. A man in overalls dumped a pitcher of water over his length, and suddenly the battle was finished. People from all sides grabbed the smoking man’s singed hands in congratulation and hauled him to a chair. Most of his hair was gone, and his face was blacked, but a woman came down from the cafe with a stick of butter and when a water-tank worker handed him a full glass of whiskey, the victim gave the room a bald-faced grin. Couples reformed, a few started to dance again, and there was a general search for hats and eyeglasses. Waiters found two brawlers unconscious under the piano and propped them against a bulkhead near four women who were sitting drunk and weeping at their tables. Sam told a waiter to bring them sodas and then surveyed the room, walking from bow to stern scanning the floor for broken glass and dropped cigarettes, wondering how much time was spent in the world protecting people from one another, folks who had no cause to fight, no reason at all.
Charlie examined a tear in his jacket as he walked alongside. “You know, these ain’t bad people. They’re just uneducated, unsophisticated, untraveled, immoral, and uncivilized. Plus stupid.”
“It’s kind of scary tonight, all right. All these lanterns stink to high heaven.”
“I’m glad for the light, though.”
They heard a single gunshot and stopped at a window to listen. After a half-minute the boat’s whistle began a series of short yelps, the fire signal, and both men bolted for the upper deck, making it halfway up the stairs only to be bowled over by an avalanche of people running from a smoky bloom of flame under the roof of the skylight deck. Then another shot went off, and they ran back in and across the dance floor to the starboard stairs. Up top they saw two men facing off with pistols.
Sam pulled a full fire bucket from its rack and yelled at Swaneli, still at the bottom of the stair. “He shot a lantern and set the damn bunting on fire. Come on.” They rushed at the armed men, considering the gunfight of little importance compared to a fire. The under-side of the roof was hung with drooping panels of striped cotton material to give the spindly construction a plush appearance. These had ignited, the flames licking at the thin pine lumber. Cooks and waiters began running up onto the roof hauling fire buckets, flinging their contents and stumbling off for more water. Shortly a line formed with Sam and Charlie at the head, heaving one bucket after another up to the flaming stripes. Swaneli came forward with a fire hose and pulled the lever on the nozzle, soaking nearly everyone on the open deck as he knocked down the fire.
Soon Captain Stewart appeared at the top of the stairs holding a lantern and stared at the blackened roof. “Now who the hell started this?”
“Those two.” Charlie pointed at the men, who had gone down to the dark outside rail of the lower deck and were looking up at the smoke, still holding their pistols. A waiter came up and pointed out the man on the right as the first to draw and shoot.
The captain passed Sam his lantern and thundered down the steps, and one of the men stumbled backwards. He was dressed in a bibbed cowboy shirt frayed through at the neck. “Hey, now. Ain’t no reason to go crazy,” the man said. “Ah’ll buy you a new fuckin’ lantern.”
Even in the dark the captain’s face was terrible to see. He jerked both revolvers away and threw them over the rail, then grabbed the man who’d fired his gun. “Can you swim or are you too drunk?”
The little man was bucktoothed, stubble-faced, and roundheaded. “Ah kin swim faster’n this here garbage tub you the captain of.”
“All right, you undernourished squirrel, start stroking for land.” Captain Stewart grabbed his triple-stitch shirt with one hand and his crotch with the other and hurled him over the rail into the blackness next to Chicken Neck Island, the only sign of his landing a brief white flash as he broke water.
The captain turned to the customers coming back out on deck, now that the fire was out, and through the wayward tendrils of smoke, he screamed, “Who’s the next son of a bitch wants to swim back to the landing?”
The other man in the gunfight said out loud, “Old George was just a havin’ some fun.”
The captain took a deep breath, then grabbed the man’s overall straps and shook him and hollered in his face, “If your idea of fun is turning a three-hundred-foot pineboard boat into a flaming coffin of fifteen hundred people, then you’re a thirty-second-degree asshole and the dumbest donkey turd in Arkansas!”
The electric lights came back up and the man blinked, looked over the rail, and said, “Who’s gonna pay fer my pistol?”
THE BOAT CAME into the landing at midnight. Though he nursed a bruised forearm and bleeding shins from breaking up three fights late in the cruise, Sam still had to go down to the stage plank and hand back weaponry. Charlie Duggs, who’d had some experience as a medic in the war, spent twenty minutes sewing up a busboy who’d been gouged with a bottle, then came down to help return the last of the knives and blackjacks.
“How’s the boy that got cut?” Sam asked.
“I think he’ll do fine. Sure thing there wasn’t no infection alive in that whiskey bottle.”
“What about the old gal who lost her dress overboard?”
“She’s passed out on the Texas deck. The maids’ll drag her down directly. Nobody can find her beau. I swear we come back with several less than we went out with.”
Sam handed over a rusty revolver. “You’re tempted to laugh, but if you think about it, none of it’s funny.”
Charlie handed the large Bowie back to its grim owner. “The things you laugh at never are funny. That’s why you just got to laugh.”
“I’ll think about that.”
“If you figure it out, explain to me what I said.”
Chapter Seventeen
ALL NIGHT the crews dried the skylight roof with a wood-alcohol wash, then wiped, scraped, and repainted it. They turned on every light and washed soot, cinders, tobacco ash, spit, snot, chili, beer, moonshine, popcorn, and chicken salad off of everything, and either repaired the broken furniture or threw it overboard.
Sam got up for breakfast and sat with August in the restaurant for the morning potatoes and eggs.
The boy looked at Sam’s denim shirt and frowned. “You going somewhere?”
“Just want to check out something onshore. Where’s your mother?”
He rolled his eyes. “In bed with the headache. A woman she was waiting on last night didn’t like the food she brought and punched her. Knocked her down.”
“I didn’t hear about that.”
“You hear about the man chased the woman through the firing gallery?”
Sam grabbed a hot biscuit and pulled it apart. “Ah, no.”
“She picked up that hammer we use to bust apart the big coal pieces and laid him out. He was asleep in the coal pile till an hour or so ago. I’ve never seen such people.”
Sam slathered butter on the steaming biscuit. “Well, I’m about to meet some more of them.”
