his face he felt each bone in his spine line straight up.
It was Ralph Skadlock, who said, “I come to talk to you, Simoneaux,” and then looked behind him. The crowd, which had been pressing up toward the stage, stopped for a moment under his gaze. “You load these chickens and I’ll find you aboard.”
Sam was stunned and could think of nothing to say. He watched the man’s dark back as he drifted through the crowd and onto the boat.
At that moment, Charlie and the second engineer began struggling with a large Indian who’d showed up in the heat wearing a long canvas duster under which he’d concealed a sawed-off eight-gauge hammer gun. “Good God,” Charlie began to shout, “give us a hand, Lucky-this fellow’s stark raving!” They all boarded him like terriers on a mastiff, knocked him down in the mud, threw his gun pinwheeling into the river, and handed him over to a local constable, who broke his nightstick atop the Indian’s huge head before he agreed to go along. And when Sam leaned on the table, caught his breath, and scanned the boat, Skadlock was nowhere to be seen.
They cast off fifteen minutes late, the boat wallowing low in the water with over two thousand excursionists walking her decks like so many fire ants inspecting a slice of wedding cake dropped on their mound. A good deal of moonshine was brought on board, and the waiters and busboys were running to keep up with demands for ice and setups. Before the boat hit midriver, a platoon of Yunt men began a bite-and-stomp fight with rivals from Stovepipe Bend that took both slapjacks and pistols to quell.
The captain walked up to the skylight deck to see how the contest ended and called Sam over. “Lucky, you’re bleeding already. Can you handle them? Tell me if you can’t, and I’ll give the order to head to the bank.”
He thumbed blood from his nose. “I guess so. Good thing you asked us to pick the iron off ’em.”
“Hang on. Just hang on. They’re spending money like water at a whorehouse fire. On the main deck they’re fighting over the slot machines already, and I don’t think most of these people have ever seen popcorn.”
Chapter Nineteen
IT WAS A WARM NIGHT and Mr. Brandywine decided to run on a full bell upstream to keep everyone cool. Sam took the exterior staircase down to the first deck to do a walkaround. He passed women whose lips bulged with snuff, but the men were smoking hand-rolled, and he reminded every waiter he saw to step on the dropped butts. Then he climbed to the dance deck.
Up there, the floor was dark and the band was heaving itself into “Avalon,” Fred Marble leading the way with the big piano. Sam walked up to Charlie Duggs and yelled over the horns, “You got a feel for the room yet?”
“It was dicey for a couple tunes. It was a good thing the old man had them out playing in the open when we pulled in so nobody was surprised.”
“Good music is good music.”
“That’s the ticket. None of these goobers have ever seen a Negro in a suit before, and they were bristling about that, but once the band set everybody’s toes a-tappin’ all they want to do is dance.”
Sam pointed his chin toward the crowd. “I guess you could call that dancing.”
“Looks like five hundred couples having a thousand fits.”
“Have you seen a big fellow in a dark coat and white shirt? Sort of a flat-brim cowboy hat?”
“As you sometimes say, ‘Been busy.’”
When the band landed on the last note, half the couples returned to their tables and the rest stood in the windows to dry themselves off. Sam turned his head as a spotlight fired a circle on the bandstand and Elsie stepped into the powdery glow. He remembered Ted’s warning about not watching her sing, and in a second he knew why, because now she was neither a worried mother nor a waitress but a smiling blonde in a richly beaded burgundy silk crepe de chine dress, and from her oval collar lined with glistening rosettes to her matching satin high heels, she was the real thing, an expert singer swaying her hips to the intro of the new song she’d taught the band. She leaned into “Am I Blue?” and the band followed her, leaving out nearly all the wandering jazzy notes and lining up behind her voice, playing to the motion of her swaying dress. The dance floor crowded up for the slow song, but Sam noticed many rough men propped on the window jambs, smoking slowly and just imagining what it would feel like to hold a woman like that. He was surprised at the power she projected into the room, and by how much larger she now was than her real self.
Charlie gave him a nudge. “She’s got it.”
Sam touched his chin. “She sure does.”
When she finished the song, drawing the first applause of the night, Sam went out to check the upper deck, and as he passed through the door a pair of bearlike hands jerked him into a pocket of darkness next to the port smokestack.
“Where’s that damn Dutchman?”
Sam could smell the river on him, and something else: liquor and a scent of angry dog. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That piano player.”
“Ted Weller? You should know. You about killed him.”
Skadlock leaned into a shaft of light, and his face looked like something made out of fieldstone. “I aim to set him back a bit more. He owes me money.”
“What?”
“He shot my black dog. I thought he’d get better but he got the infection and died on me.”
Sam pulled free and stood away. “The way I understand it, your dog was trying to eat his hand off at the time.”
Skadlock pulled a glossy automatic pistol out of his jacket and pressed it against Sam’s temple. “You think this is funny? Some kind of joke? Tell me where that man is.”
Sam looked at what he could see of the gun, then back at Skadlock. “You hurt him so bad they sent him on the train to Cincinnati. He’s got to have about five operations to straighten him up.”
Skadlock seemed to realize something all at once and his expression took on a blue heat as he pressed him against the stack. “You the dumb shit what tole him where we was.” He began to curse and ramble, and Sam wondered what he’d been drinking and for how many days.
“I was just trying to find his little girl,” Sam told him, yelling into his face, but Skadlock didn’t seem to care.
“You led him to us. I ought to kill you. I wish they hadn’t left you alive down in that shithole town so you could come back to haunt us.”
The statement was like a jolt of electricity. “What did you say?”
Skadlock strengthened his grip on the pistol and raised his elbow high. Sam closed his eyes and for an instant started praying, but then there was a bony pop, the kind of noise the blunt side of an ax makes when it kills a steer, and Skadlock hit the deck, slack all at once. Sam looked and saw Charlie pocketing his slapjack.
“Friend of yours?”
He straightened his coat. “Pick up his pistol and let’s get this bastard in the brig before he wakes up.”
“Better hurry. Trouble’s a-brewin’ below.”
They dragged Skadlock down the stairs, his riding boots banging every step and the people from Stovepipe Bend cheering them on. They’d just clapped him into the engine-room brig when August came back from the firing galley.
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody you need to know.” Sam pushed him along roughly and he and Charlie headed to the main-deck lounge, where they found a scuffle between smelter workers and sawmillers from Yunt. When they got among the tables they noticed ten different poker games were going on, and at one of them five men were standing and hollering back and forth.
Charlie spread his coat, showing his pistol. “What’s the beef here?”
A cross-eyed man wearing patched suspenders pulled his cigar. “This feller checked a bet and I raised and he raised me back.”
“So?”
