THE
He met August coming forward, an alto sax under his arm and a grin on his face. “The captain said I could play this trip.” He had scrubbed the coal dust out of his hair, and Sam turned him around, wondering how he could get so clean.
“Hey, knock ’em dead, kid. The captain payin’ you?”
“I guess not. Experience is like money, he said.”
Sam bit his cheek. “Well, there might be something to that.”
“I’ll have to make up the time I missed in the boiler room, but that’s all right.”
“Captain tell you that too, did he?”
“Did you find out anything about Lily or Dad?”
He shook his head. “I heard about a kid, but it was a boy. You go on and join the band. Keep your ears open. If Mr. Gauge has been drinking, he’ll be slow an eighth beat or so. Don’t get ahead of him and he’ll be your friend for life.”
The boy’s feet were dancing when Sam waved him off, watching him run, trying to remember the last time he’d felt that excitement boiling in his own feet, so happy at fitting in and doing well that the future seemed to promise just one long, ecstatic performance. He went back into his cabin and found Charlie Duggs’s quart of Canadian whiskey, poured a shot into a tall glass and a couple slugs of warm pitcher water on top of that, and took it down like a purge, then had another, rinsed his mouth, and bit a nip of Sen-Sen.
He found the captain walking the restaurant with his hands behind his back, and he went up behind him. “Hi, Cap.”
“Lucky. Glad you made it back.”
“How’d we do last night?”
The captain leaned toward him. “Son, we made the money. It was rough going but those chuckleheads had silver in their overalls.”
“You make enough to give August a couple bucks for playing this trip?”
The captain pulled back, then studied the deck as though checking the quality of its varnish. “He ought to pay me. I’m training him.”
Sam took a breath. “To do what? Be a slave?”
Captain Stewart let a waiter breeze by. “I have to watch every nickel, you know that.” He hazarded a glance at Sam’s face to see what he thought of this statement, and after a moment threw up his hands. “Damn it, all right. You’re holding me up, but I’ll slip him something. Now check out the main-deck lounge.”
Sam gently pinched the captain’s left lapel between thumb and forefinger. “He’ll tell me what you gave him.”
“I said all right. You trying to make me feel like a crook?”
THEY TOOK on a flat of new coal better than the last, and after the sober church excursion the
“Gonna cross the channel?” he asked.
She didn’t turn around. “Captain demote you?”
“Elsie was just curious about when we’d get into Memphis.”
“Captain Stewart thinks this stretch can be run in jig time, but the water’s down a little. Can’t take a chance with this old chicken coop.”
He watched her read the water’s surface, saw her steer the boat away from lines of ripples. When, after five minutes, she turned to him, he handed her the mug of coffee.
“Y’all hear from Ted?”
“We’re hopin’ he’ll show up next stop.”
“And you didn’t hear anything about his little girl?”
He shook his head, and she turned back to the river. “Maybe Ted’s found out something,” he said, desperate for a cheerful statement.
Mrs. Benton squinted and pressed a hip against a steering lever. “It’s a terrible thing to lose one of your own. That way, especially.” She took a long swallow of coffee. “When they pass away from us, we believe they’ve gone somewhere good, don’t you know? But the way little Lily’s gone, you hate to think about it.”
He moved up beside her and studied the long shadows arrowing from the west bank. The deep water she was following was in her fingertips, for it all looked the same to him. “I’m doing the best I can.”
“Are you?”
He met her glance. “I lost a boychild myself. I kind of know what people go through.”
“Sickness?”
“Yes.”
“I lost two to scarlet fever and one to diphtheria.”
“Good lord, I’m sorry…”
She gave him a sharp glance. “It’s not a contest, you know, to see who’s got it hardest. Everybody’s got it hard. If they don’t, they’re not alive.” She drained her cup and swung it out to him, hitting him in the chest.
“Were they young?”
“Old enough that every time I walk into a kitchen, they’re at the table.” She threw the levers over to cross the river and reached up to pull the whistle cord. “Dead or alive, they never go away. But if I had a living child out there I couldn’t get my hands on, it’d drive me crazy.”
THE BOAT PADDLED in to Memphis the next morning in time to board two thousand Masons lined up on the levee for the eleven o’clock ride. As soon as the
“What is it?”
“It’s Ted. He’s up the hill in the hospital.”
He looked down on a group of rousters struggling to place the balky stage. “Let’s find the captain and lay off the eleven o’clock. You want to take August?”
She began to tear up. “Oh, I don’t think so. We don’t know how badly he’s hurt.”
They walked up into the city through the hot morning and found the hospital, a broad marble-faced building roamed by smells of ether and alcohol. They found Ted in a small, stuffy room on the fourth floor. He was bruised all over and didn’t answer Elsie when she touched his shoulder and said his name. Sam had seen a survivor of a boiler explosion once, and he’d looked like the bandaged form lying crookedly on the thin bed.
Ted didn’t even turn his head to speak. “I’ve been here since yesterday,” he told them, his voice like a dry hinge. “They cut on me twice and set the bones in my hand.” He held up a mittenlike bandage with three drain tubes snaking out of it.
Elsie kissed him on the small patch of unbruised skin below his nose. Sam took in the bandages, the casts, the wormlike black rubber tubes. The Skadlocks hadn’t seemed the type to hurt a man this badly, but he’d misjudged
