steamer running three outings a day at full capacity. The passengers on the night trips were mostly couples, very well dressed, fairly good dancers out for a civilized time, and the crew was able to relax.
Ted Weller, when he could walk on crutches, decided it was time to travel to Cincinnati to another hospital. After Elsie and August said their goodbyes before rushing off for a two o’clock excursion, Sam helped him into a cab and rode with him to the station, bought his ticket, and handled his trunk. He sat a long time next to him on a bench and waited for the train, noting the hurt in Ted’s face and wondering if surgery could put the rhythmic lightning back in his fingers.
“God, Lucky, I feel awful. This whole left arm is throbbing.”
“You feel too bad to travel, we can catch a hack back to the hospital.”
Ted took a long breath. “No. I’ll be all right once I get on board.”
Sam reached over and stuffed the long ticket into Ted’s inside coat pocket. “I’ll watch out for August.”
He moved and his face showed a bolt of pain. “What do you think about Lily? That maybe we’ve lost her for good?”
“You can’t think like that. We can find her if we believe we can. Maybe that sounds dumb, but if you expect something to happen, sometimes it does. Kind of like my piano playing.”
“Stop, it hurts too much to laugh.”
Sam put his hands together and hung them between his knees. “I’ll keep looking.”
Ted turned slowly toward him, bones popping in his back. “I expect it of you.”
BETWEEN TRIPS Sam stayed busy and spoke to the police sergeants, showed a picture of Lily around at the various precincts, journeyed to the city’s rail stations, and spoke with telegraphers, telling everyone that he’d pay for the telegram if they learned anything that might be useful. Twice he called home and spoke with Linda, telling her how much he’d missed her, asking if any messages for him had come to their house. She seemed to sense a sadness about him that he himself was unaware of, and she was overly cheerful, unlike her usual steady self. She told him she was glad to get the money he’d wired her, that she was eating so much good food she was getting fat. Though he knew this was a lie, it delighted him.
The night before the boat was to pull out, he was leaning against the starboard smokestack ignoring the heat running up his back when Captain Stewart came down from the pilothouse and handed him two revolvers.
“What’s this?”
“Two new Smiths I got in town. Give one to Duggs. We’re playing Stovepipe Bend tomorrow, and I want you to wear them in your waistband out on the stage.”
“Same setup as Bung City?”
The captain shook his head. “Bung City’s like a Sunday school compared to this place. Watch out. These things are loaded.”
He found Charlie in his bunk, suffering from a dizzy headache, and he tossed a revolver onto his stomach. “What’s Stovepipe Bend?”
“The advance man told me, but I didn’t believe it.” He put a forearm over his eyes. “Oh, it’s just a bad place, Sam. We’ll live through it.”
“You got a sick headache or the alcohol flu?”
Charlie gave him a look. His eyes looked like a copper sunset, and Sam reached over and felt his forehead. “Oh, I’m all right.”
“You got a little fever there.”
“It’s just being tired. My back hurts from wrestling those slot machines on the late-night run.” He closed his eyes. “Just let me be, and I’ll get up or I won’t.”
Sam removed the revolver from Charlie’s bunk. “I’ll put this on the washstand so you don’t roll over on it and shoot us both.”
“Obliged.”
Sam looked at the shiny revolver, a.38 Special with checkered walnut grips. “You ever shoot anybody?”
“You tryin’ to be funny?”
At once he realized his mistake. “Sorry. I forgot you really were in the war.”
“Yeah, really,” Charlie groaned.
THE BOAT BACKED OUT and would steam north all day through empty territory. Between Memphis and Cairo only a few small towns withered on the bank and between them was uninhabited shoreline, short hills, slick and panther-haunted lowlands, sandbars, and willows-a gravelscape fit for nothing but avoidance. Mr. Brandywine told him stories of outlaws still living in the unpoliced backwaters, some making whiskey in factory quantities, of revenuers who went in but never came out. Swaneli told him of one Arkansas lawman’s skeleton found shackled to a drift log, pulled out at Vicksburg.
As he turned in, Sam listened to the engines’ escape stacks sending big gasps up into the night sky. The engineers were using steam full-stroke to make good time, and he knew the firemen were suffering for it as they fought to keep pressure up. He wondered if August was holding his own, if the more experienced firemen were helping him out. He was a child, really, and had no business being down there in the heat and soot and leaking pipes. When Sam was a boy he’d worked all day digging potatoes with the sun rolling around on his back like a hot rock, but he’d been stronger than August. Thinking about it, he was glad to leave a place where he had to get up in the sleeting December dark to cut sugarcane all day wearing only a thin shirt, eating only a cold sweet potato in a tin cup for lunch. He smiled in his bunk as he thought of getting away from Uncle Claude’s farm. He smiled again when he remembered Krine’s department store, the broad aisles, the glowing salesgirls in their stylish dresses, Maurice playing waltzes on the mezzanine pipe organ.
THE BOAT LABORED under a hot, empty sky, Mr. Brandywine at the wheel except when he sent for Nellie Benton to run the disorienting crossing at Poker Point. The busboys cleaned up from the night before and found a drunk in a life-jacket hopper. After the man was wide awake, Charlie and Sam put him in a skiff and rowed him to shore at a place called Rowel while the steamer treaded water midriver, sending up restless spirals of coal smoke. When they got back, the captain told them to strip off their shirts and mix buckets of soap and bleach. The whole boat was graying over with soot, and it was time for a washdown. Customers didn’t want their summer skirts or shirt cuffs or seersucker pants smudged as soon as they boarded.
Sam was working over the bulkhead outside the engine room when Elsie came by wearing a paint-stained smock.
“Been gambling?” she said.
He thought a moment. “I get it. I lost my shirt.”
“I thought you were a ghost when I first walked through the door. You better stay out of the sun so you don’t burn up.” She seemed almost cheerful, and he guessed she was relieved that Ted was still alive.
“The captain said we’re playing a rough town tomorrow. You ever heard of it?”
“No.”
He tossed his brush into the pail of bleach. “So you didn’t stop there on the way down?”
She shook her head, her straight blond bob swimming. “The advance man nailed up some flyers about the northbound trip and the new boat, but we didn’t stop on the down trip. From what a couple of the waitresses say, though, the last thing Stovepipe Bend men are interested in is babies. It’s not very civilized.”
He lifted the brush from his pail and continued swiping down soot and mildew. “The captain gonna hide the black orchestra again?”
She shook her head. “He said each landing’s different. He didn’t think a black band would matter at Stovepipe Bend. Captain Stewart knows his towns, I guess. He asked me to sing ten songs, and I told him I didn’t really want to because there might be trouble.”
