The Radical Element

by Jessica Spotswood

  “Joe Henry pesters the Richardson girls to no end,” she’d warned. “Be wary of him, Ray, you hear me? He don’t take no one’s feelings to heart but his own.”

  At the time, Ray had dismissed this comment. She didn’t expect Mrs. Lowry to understand what it was like to move freight, or to spend your whole life, day in and day out, pretending to be someone you weren’t. She didn’t understand the importance of Ray having a friend at work.

  Now Ray wasn’t so sure.

  For as good a friend as Joe was, he never told the other stevedores to stop comparing her to a rat. He knew she hated it — she’d complained about it to him more than once. The boys listened to Joe, but instead of wielding that power, he just threw around winks. Empty winks and dimpled smiles and encouragements that Ray should prove the boys wrong.

  He don’t take no one’s feelings to heart but his own.

  Maybe Joe wasn’t the friend Ray thought he was.

  The Mohave Canyon greeted the crew with some of the worst rapids yet, and cries to adjust the steam power were constant while the General Jesup battled its way up the rocky-bottomed river. When they eventually moored for the evening, rock towered around them, dwarfing the steamer.

  The grueling conquest left Mr. Johnson fretful, and by the time adequate wood had been gathered for the following day and the engineer had realigned components and checked for leaking joints and cracked steam pipes, it was too late for poker. In a way, Ray was grateful.

  The following days were just as exhausting, and some seventy winding miles above Mohave Canyon, the expedition found itself navigating another ravine with additional rapids waiting beyond. They were passable — no worse than what they’d crossed thus far — but Mr. Johnson and Lieutenant White had begun to argue about their thinning provisions. It was a sight to be seen, spit flying and mustaches flapping, perhaps the best bit of entertainment Ray had witnessed in weeks. In the end, they struck a compromise, agreeing that they would take a skiff through the rapids and determine their location once they had an unobstructed view of the river ahead. If the General Jesup was as far north as the captain suspected, the mission might be deemed a success.

  After the skiff departed, Joe fanned a deck of cards in Ray’s direction. “Wanna play, Rat?” He smiled, showing her those familiar dimples, but Ray shook her head. She wanted nothing less than to risk slipping up so near the end. With the help of the current, the trip home would be swift, nothing like the ascent upriver, and she couldn’t wait to get out of these suffocating canyons.

  Johnson returned the following day at twilight, grinning fiercely as he told them he could see a good forty miles to the north after crossing the rapids. “We are undoubtedly within seventy-five miles of the mouth of the Virgin River,” he declared, “which means Utah is reachable! We’ve beaten the other expedition — shown that the Colorado is clearly navigable by steamer, and the Mormon settlements within reach. I say we return to Fort Yuma, triumphant!”

  The claim was far from sound — Johnson hadn’t actually taken the steamer all the way to the Mormons — but Ray bit her tongue, and when the General Jesup turned to the south, she cheered as loudly as the others.

  Feigning a sickness on the return trip, Ray had an excuse to linger near the chamber pot in isolation. But fifty miles from Fort Yuma — when no one else had caught Ray’s ailment — Joe seemed to figure she posed him no true risk and approached her at the bow. He leaned into Ray’s shoulder, the February sun beating down on their necks, and said, for perhaps the hundredth time, “You gotta show me how you do it.”

  She cocked an eyebrow at him, attempting to appear cool when every muscle in her body was taut.

  “Cheat all the time without getting caught,” he pressed.

  “I ain’t a cheat,” Ray said. I’m a magician.

  “’Course you’re a cheat. You’ve prolly been cheating as long as I’ve known you.”

  Ray’s insides curled. Did he know? Had he seen or found her out somehow?

  “No one wins as often as you if they ain’t,” he continued. “I been suspecting it for ages, and I kept quiet all this time.”

  His insistence had nothing to do with her being a girl, Ray realized. In his drive to learn her skills, he’d been blind to the even larger con. Ray breathed a sigh of relief.

  “I reckon I should get something for that,” he continued, voice light and jovial. “Like your expedition earnings. Consider it a repayment for all my losses over the years.”

  “Good one,” Ray said, laughing.

  She looked at him only to realize he wasn’t joking. His brows were drawn down, and his mouth was twisted into a smirk. Only one dimple appeared.

  “You can’t be serious,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m serious as can be,” Joe said coldly.

  He was no longer lean like her. Over the years he’d filled out, put on muscle like extra layers of clothing. He could lift freight with ease, limbs never seeming to tire even as they bulged beneath the weight of goods. What she’d come to envy now made Ray feel small — her just fifteen and wiry, him broad-shouldered and nearing twenty. She’d be no match for Joe if he decided he truly wanted her fifty dollars. The blade in her boot felt no better than a butter knife.

  “Well?” he prompted, still smirking.

  Ray’s gaze flicked away, settling on the muddy waters so stagnant and low that —

  “Rock!” she shouted. “Rocky bottom straight ahead!”

  Johnson screamed orders, and the engineer worked frantically at the valves, but the General Jesup was positioned midriver and running under too much steam to adequately slow or alter course.

  They ran aground hard.

  Propelled by the impact, Ray flew off the bow and into the shallows. Her right wrist broke her fall, and she gasped in pain, cold water filling her nose.

  Coughing and sputtering, Ray rolled onto her back only to see the General Jesup still crawling forward, her hull tearing open with an ungodly sound. An arm came over Ray’s shoulder, locked firm across the front of her chest, and yanked her away from the vessel. The steamer lurched to a stop, caught on the rocky bottom.

  In three feet of water, the General Jesup met its match.

  And so did Ray.

  Because it was Joe who had pulled her to safety. Joe who still had a hand on her chest. Joe who was spinning her to face him, eyes ablaze with fury as his palms flew over her form, patting and prodding, confirming the truth.

  “Joe, don’t say anything,” she begged. “Please don’t tell anyone.”

  She’d lose her job, the expedition earnings, everything. She’d never be able to work for the Company again. And if the pain in her wrist told her anything, it would be a while before she could shuffle a deck smoothly, either.

  Crew members splashed into the water, inspecting the steamer and shouting about damage.

  “All this time?” Joe glowered. “For years I been helping you, and giving advice, saving your hide from underperformance, and you ain’t had the decency to be honest?”

  “Joe, please.”

  He considered it a moment, mouth in a hard, flat line. After a moment, he said, “You know what, Rat? It’ll cost you fifty damn dollars.”

  The way he said the nickname made Ray’s stomach shrivel with dread. She’d been wrong about everything. He might not have made jokes about her being a rat, but his silence was only complacency. He agreed, deep down, and now he’d decided their friendship meant nothing, that she was nothing.

  The con had come crumbling down.

  She had no cards up her sleeve, no way of saving the act.

  It was over.

  “Hey, you two all right?” someone called from the steamer.

  “Well, Rat?” Joe asked, dimples flashing. “What’s it gonna be?”

  She still had her earnings from poker, plus everything else she’d saved up at home. If fifty dollars bought Joe’s silence, well, she could make that money back. It would take ages but it was better than losing her job.

&nb
sp; Not knowing what else to do, Ray said, “Fine. Fifty dollars.”

  The bastard gave the crewman a thumbs-up and left Ray standing alone in the shallows.

  Mr. Johnson took a skiff to Fort Yuma and returned with a stern-wheeled steamer called the Colorado. Before they continued home, he had the crew build a bulkhead around his flooded General Jesup, which he swore he would raise and repair. Joe watched Ray like a hawk through it all, and by the time the crew moored the Colorado in Fort Yuma, she felt naked despite her sweat-stained clothes.

  Lieutenant White marched off proudly with his soldiers, ready to send word to the War Department of their success. The rest of the crew marched into Johnson’s office one by one and left with their pay.

  The banknote was crisp, and Ray thumbed its edge like a card, knowing its time with her would be fleeting. She made it all the way to the alley behind Mrs. Lowry’s before her shadow caught up with her. She let him brush by, his shoulder knocking into hers. Then his hands were on her arms. He shoved her against the building, pinning her there.

  “Gimme my money, Rat.”

  She relinquished the banknote, and Joe winked. God, did she hate that wink. She hated everything about him now.

  He flapped the two notes in her face, taunting her. “Watch me add to this pot.”

  “This ain’t a game of poker, Joe.”

  “Oh, I think it is. See, I bet that Tom Polluck would want another whore for his establishment ’cause they don’t got many youngins over there. And my wager were right. He’s meeting me any minute. I’ll get good money for you.”

  She wrestled against him. “I’m a person, not a thing you can sell.”

  “You’re a rat.” His fingers pinched her arms harder. “You been stealing our money, stealing an honest man’s job. You’re a fraud and a liar, and you’re getting what you deserve. You’re getting the roof you always should’ve been under.”

  He kept smiling, those dimples jeering at Ray. She didn’t know how she’d ever admired Joe Henry. He was the rat, the louse, the swine. She squirmed against him, but her right arm was still pinned to the wall, and she needed it free. She needed to vanish.

  It was time for the final act.

  “Hey, Joe,” Ray said coolly. “Where’s your Colt?”

  Finally — finally — he let go, dropping his head to see what his fingers could not believe. An empty holster. His gaze snapped back up, locking on the pistol in Ray’s hand, now aimed at his chest. She’d lifted it off him when he’d first brushed by.

  “Cheat,” he snarled.

  “Magician,” she replied.

  Using the Colt, she struck him as hard as she could. Joe Henry crumpled to the dirt. Ray gathered the hundred dollars in banknotes — his pay, along with her own — and left him in the alley, unconscious.

  Mrs. Lowry was sleeping deeply.

  Ray watched the rise and fall of her chest in the feeble candlelight. She longed to say good-bye, but this was easiest. “I don’t know where Ray is,” the woman would be able to say tomorrow. “I weren’t even aware the expedition had returned, and I haven’t the slightest how Joe Henry got himself robbed.”

  Besides, Ray wouldn’t be able to stand the begging. Mrs. Lowry would implore Ray to stay, and she couldn’t, not with Joe knowing her secret. The gig was up, the show over. It was time for the curtain to fall. For so long, Ray had dreamed of leaving, and now that the moment was here, she was startled by how much it hurt.

  Ray knew she might never find her family. Quite likely, the only family she had was right here in Yuma Crossing. But she was tired of pretending, and here along the river, she was a mystery even to herself. She was a boy and she was a girl. She was motherless and she was someone’s child. She was a soul wanting to belong and a soul desperate to escape. If she left, she could become more than these labels. In San Francisco, she could find who she was.

  By the light of the flickering candle, Ray unfolded the newspaper clipping, crossed out words, and wrote new ones until the note read:

  She placed the clipping on Mrs. Lowry’s nightstand, along with one of the fifty-dollar notes. Then she gathered her few possessions, packed a small rucksack, and crept for the Colorado.

  The river was inky black. The current tugged south.

  She stepped onto a skiff and, with the moon as her only audience, the magician disappeared.

  I have written two novels set in the Southwest during the second half of the nineteenth century, and both focus on revenge and justice — quintessential themes of the Western genre. With “The Magician,” I wanted to tell a different type of Western story, one about identity, family, and uncertainty; about finding your way in a world that is rapidly changing.

  While Ray and her fellow stevedores are fictional, the expedition they participate in is not. The George A. Johnson & Company was an influential steamer business in New Mexico Territory’s history, and many of the details of Ray’s trip — from embarking on New Year’s Eve and trying to beat the War Department’s official survey of the river, to running aground and sinking just fifty miles shy of their return home — are true. In researching Ray’s story, I pored over literature on steamboats and scoured maps of the Colorado River, one of which was created from Lieutenant Ives’s survey. It noted where his expedition made camp and illustrated quite clearly how grueling — and slow — an ascent of the river was in 1858. But as a result of the initial expeditions, the Colorado soon became a major shipping line for goods, bringing modern conveniences to mining towns along the river and to inland settlements much faster than by wagon alone. In the following years and decades, the area in which Ray’s story is set was redrawn as Arizona Territory, and the arrival of trains made shipments even speedier. If anything was constant during this time in history, it was that nothing was constant. Which is perhaps why Ray relied so heavily on magic. Cards, she could control.

  The dining room of Drexel Hall was everything one would expect in a grand plantation home: miles of floral wallpaper, a cherry dining table set for twelve, a chandelier threatening to buckle under its own opulence. Rose Blake, exiled to the farthest end of the table — suitable only for visiting relatives — eyed the chandelier, secretly willing it to fall. Anything to end Aunt Edith’s latest tirade.

  “It’s positively uncivilized,” Edith drawled from the better-lit end of the table. The primary victim of her attention was an officer who’d been recently stationed at Fort Sumter. A handsome young officer, Rose couldn’t help but note, tall and graceful as a mountain lion, with blue eyes and chestnut hair pushing the limit of regulation length.

  “I haven’t had fabric from France in two years because of that dreadful Union blockade,” her aunt continued. “Tell me, Captain Austin, what material am I to use when Stella outgrows her dresses? The curtains?”

  She motioned to Rose’s eleven-year-old cousin, Stella, who was wearing a worn yellow frock and staring at the handsome officer with big moony eyes. Stella was so tiny that there was no danger of her outgrowing anything anytime soon, especially not with the war reducing Drexel’s usual feasts to meager rations and wormy cabbage and granting all their ribs new prominence.

  Captain Austin didn’t answer immediately, which secretly pleased Rose. There was nothing worse than a man who spoke the first thought in his head. He dabbed his mouth with his napkin, which had once been expensive but was now unraveling, fading into disrepair like everything else at the planation. No wonder Aunt Edith kept the lanterns set low.

  “We must all make sacrifices in a time of war,” he said at last.

  “But surely not for dresses,” Edith huffed, patting her rouged cheeks, more like a spoiled girl than a woman of thirty-six.

  Rose held her tongue against the ugly words that flooded her mouth. People were dying, and all her aunt thought of was next month’s ball with the soldiers at Fort Sumter. Rose stabbed the sharp tines of her fork into a pea.

  A young male slave dressed in ill-fitting livery waited by the servants’ entrance to clear the second cours
e. His reddish-brown jaw was clenched, his folded hands tensing every time Aunt Edith complained about a triviality. Rose glanced over her shoulder to catch Pauline’s eye, wondering what her friend thought of it all. Pauline was seated far out of sight in the corner by the buffet table, her mahogany hair tidily braided and her homespun lavender dress freshly pressed. As far as Rose’s aunt and uncle knew, Pauline was her free colored maid, whom Rose insisted always be close by in case she needed her. Pauline met Rose’s gaze, her pretty honey-brown face wearing a carefully blank expression. An excellent actress, Rose thought. Acting skills would be required of both of them if they were to accomplish what they’d come to Charleston to do.

  Rose’s uncle, Cornelius, leaned forward to speak with Mr. Fillion, the owner of the neighboring Mayfair Plantation. Rose strained to catch what they might be conspiring about. Union frigate just off the coast . . . Crates with blue crests . . .

  Edith signaled for the slave in livery to refill her wine. “Captain Austin, you must tell your commander that we are suffering more than our fair share. That Union blockade is strangling us. We can’t get our cotton to buyers in London. Which means we can’t get the supplies we need from their agents in Nassau. And now even the blockade runners are too frightened to attempt a voyage because of that masked renegade.”

  Captain Austin sat straighter. “What masked renegade?”

  Edith clapped her hands together. “Ah, you haven’t heard! Why, Charleston has its own vigilante. A Northern sympathizer. He goes by the name of —”

  “Lord Firebrand!” Stella cried in delight.

  Edith tsked. “Yes. A provocative alias, isn’t it? He’s made it his mission to destroy the last three cotton shipments from Drexel and Mayfair. They say he makes explosives from black powder. He always strikes just after sundown.” Edith dropped her voice. “Rumors are he’s an Englishman who’s come to America and taken up the Northern cause.”

  “He dresses all in black and wears gloves and a mask to disguise his face,” Stella added, “because he’s a real, famous lord, and he doesn’t want to be recognized!”