For the night trip, the boat filled up with local men and their women. Sam worked the stage plank asking for weapons and surveying the crowd. The men were all muscle from working ten-hour shifts wrestling cylinder heads and piston rods, but only two surrendered anything, a jackknife and a dollar pistol. The ones who strutted onto the dance deck either took seats at tables or leaned against the bulkheads, all of them staring grimly at the band. When Sam came up and looked around, the hair rose on his neck. The crowd stared as if they’d never seen Negroes holding anything other than a shovel or a wrench. He guessed they hadn’t heard much jazz and distrusted any music that didn’t sound like the conventional tunes played on their Victrolas. The orchestra was playing a grinding rendition of “Sud Bustin’ Blues,” and no one was dancing. It wasn’t clear that anyone knew how.
He walked over to the trumpeter when the piece was over. “Hey, we got a boatload of rubes tonight,” he said, his back to the floor. “Can you do your hotel stuff?”
The man nodded, wiped his face with a voluminous white handkerchief, and scanned the crowd. “They don’t look like no dance club, do they?”
“Nope.”
“We can’t play no polka music.”
“Just dumb it down.”
“Play like the day band?” The trumpeter’s smile was wide and bright.
“Give me a break.”
He walked over to the main staircase and down to start his rounds on the main deck. The boat was barely a hundred feet from shore when an argument broke out in the forward lounge and he got sandwiched between two men dressed in heavy denim shirts who were trying to tear them off each other. Closing his eyes, he pushed into the muffled flailing of their fists, but two enormous hands grabbed him from behind and tossed him against a bulkhead, the concussion a star-flashing impact that sent him sliding to the floor. He tried to get up but found a large soggy boot pressing on his chest. “Let ’em at it,” a voice above him said, cramped by a wad of tobacco. Someone else put a brogan on his ankle, and he lay down and gave up. After a while he felt a sticky sensation on the back of his head and realized he was bleeding. A whole wicker table arced in the air above him, and somewhere glass was breaking and rattling on the deck like gravel. Someone’s thumb must have found a windpipe or eyesocket because an ungodly squalling ensued and the room began to reshuffle, but he suddenly wasn’t there.
HE WOKE UP on the deck outside his cabin door, a wadded bedsheet under his head. Down below he could hear hundreds of shouts and the orchestra playing a waltz. Above him were stars in one eye, nothing in the other, and in the next instant he was in his upper bunk, Charlie’s hand drifting above him holding a rag soaked in alcohol. A streak of fire running around the back of his skull from ear to ear roused him.
“Damn it to hell, that hurts!”
“I’ll bet it does. Glad to see you’re coming around.”
He put a hand over his eyes. “What happened?”
“Well, it’s over now. You been out four hours.”
He blinked and rolled his head. “Where’s Lily?”
“She’s in with a maid and the maid ain’t too happy about it.”
“I can’t…Big fight?”
“You could say that. There’ll be some carpenter work to do tomorrow and a hell of a lot of mop work.”
Charlie opened the door and looked out at the paintless buildings of the town. “You dizzy?”
“I don’t think so.” He touched the bandage Charlie had put on him. “You’re not going back out?”
“Still gotta work. You can’t handle this.”
“Handle what?”
“Coming back from Talbot Island a motorboat pulled alongside with running lights and all and paced us about three feet out. The guy driving it was drunk, I guess, and was cussing at some jugheads on the top deck. Well, they went in the cafe and picked up a slot machine and threw it over the rail at him. Went straight through the bottom of his nice boat, and he sank like a woodstove.”
Sam lay back, deciding to stay in bed. “You meeting with the law?”
Charlie stepped through the door into the night. “It’s a mess, all right. A real mess.”
He lay there listening to the rasp of brooms overhead, the rattling of bucket bails, the crash of mop water and slops in the river. His head pulsed, and an iron taste rose up the back of his throat. He heard distant sawing and nailing in the night as the carpenters propped up the boat’s power of illusion, and finally, he slept.
At daybreak he heard his cabin door open and close, and he thought Charlie had come in.
“I’m hungry.” It was Lily standing under his bunk in a wrinkled baby dress, barefoot, her face dirty.
“Sweetie, I’m sick.”
Lily looked at him a long time and said again, her voice absolute, “I’m hungry.”
He slowly sat up and waited for the cramped room to stop drifting off to his left. He pulled on his pants and looked into the mirror at a black eye, then began to wash up and shave.
Lily lay in Charlie’s bunk and watched him. “Why doesn’t somebody come up and bring us something to eat?”
“Girlie, you been living in the wrong hotel.”
“What?”
He put on a shirt and looked at her. She was filthy and smelled sour. “Where are your clean clothes?”
“In number fourteen.”
“Where’s August?”
“I tried to wake him.”
They walked down to the cabin she shared with August, and he rummaged through her few things until he found a clean set of clothes. August lay like a stone and didn’t move. Sam gathered up four sooty little dresses and some underwear and brought her back to his cabin, where he gathered his dirty clothes. In the boat’s laundry they waited for a wringer machine to come free, and while their clothes were washing he got them breakfast in the cafe. On the starboard side, workmen were replacing a section of bulkhead that looked as if someone had blown it out with a cannon.
Back in the laundry he sent their things through the wringer and hung everything to dry on the temporary lines strung on the aft deck between trips. Then he looked closely at the girl. “When’s the last time you washed yourself?”
Lily shrugged.
“Do you know how to wash yourself, or does August do it?”
She rubbed her nose. “I can wash if you soap the cloth.”
He led her back to her cabin, where August was snoring, drew a sink of water, put her on a stool, soaped up a washcloth, and told her to take everything off and scrub herself good all over, then rinse the rag clean and wipe off the soap and put on her clean clothes. He would wait for her out on deck.
“I can’t put on my socks when my feets are wet.”
“Just come out dressed and I’ll put your socks on.”
He sagged against the rail, something in his head spiking against his skullbones, a pain that should have been fatal.
In half an hour she came out and the little dress was on backwards. One of the cooks was coming down the Texas rail. “Oh, for gosh sake,” she said, pulling the dress off and turning it around on her. She cast Sam a malevolent look and walked on, saying over her shoulder, “You got to watch that baby, now.”
They went onto the dance floor, and he sat at the piano’s keyboard and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the pain at the back of his head. He felt her climb onto the bench, and he kept his eyes closed.
“You sleeping, Mr. Lucky?”
He began sorting through the books of music on the rack and found a simple waltz. “Do you want to sing?”
He knew she wouldn’t. He had tried to coach her on a few songs that August said she knew, but when she sang, she dragged the notes and ignored the timing. Sometimes she just whined. Neither one of them knew what
