“What woman? Aw, you think she’d be crazy enough to show up?”
The captain looked away. “You don’t think she’s crazy to begin with? Stealing kids and all? Maybe crazy and stupid to boot.”
“I’m kind of forgetting what she looks like, already. I just saw her for a couple seconds.”
“Keep your eyeballs rollin’.”
And he did, trying his best to remember the old woman in the fitting room, fixing the brief observation in his mind, the missing tooth and unwashed hair, the shears poised over the child’s scalp. He had to remind himself that his memory was part of the reason he was on the boat to begin with.
***
LATE IN THE DAY it was still hot. Sam stood on the wharf and directed jostling couples up the stage plank to the ticket booth on the main deck. The calliope began gargling, the high notes singing flat until the whistles warmed up. Fred Marble, the pianist with the black orchestra, wearing a slouch hat and gloves against the flying steam, tickled out “Ain’t We Got Fun” on the roof, the instrument’s wincing notes sailing upriver over the French Quarter. Couples in their twenties and thirties began showing up, then what looked like a small men’s club, everybody in seersucker and straw boaters. For the most part, people were well dressed, the young women in thin, drop-waist dresses, the men in summer suits. One older man dressed in khaki shirt and pants carried a sheath knife on his belt, and Sam relieved him of it, promising he’d get it back at the ticket booth when the boat landed. One boy carried a sort of cane as thick as a chair leg, which he gave up grudgingly. The calliope music stopped with a yodel, and out of the long curving line of open windows above him the band began to pour a thumping-loud rendition of “When My Baby Smiles at Me” in a rattling-good dance tempo, the music coming down on the crowd like peppery candy for the ears. Customers began to back up on the broad stage plank, and as departure time drew close they were stacked three abreast, grinning and craning their necks at the big white apparition. Sam palmed a nickel-plated counter, and when he checked it read 1,255. Four deckhands shuffled down to stand by their bitts and the boat’s steam whistle let out a deep, river-filling chord. Ralph Brandywine would pilot the Ambassador through the city river traffic, and he leaned out the wheelhouse window holding a megaphone and yelled down to Sam to hustle the last customers on board. The paddlewheel began to turn slowly, the half-ton deck bell banged three times, and a crush of customers bunched up on the stage as though afraid of being left behind on the wharf-the worst thing that could happen to anybody, to be left out of the steamy cloud of music and fun. Sam began to enjoy paddling the people on board, calling out for everyone to step up, thumbing his little counter device, getting lost in the excitement and the smell of vanilla, witch hazel, jasmine dusting powder, and Sen-Sen. Two minutes later the steam capstan sputtered the stage plank aboard and the mob of latecomers jammed against the ticket booth on the first deck as the boat backed away in earnest, steam spuming from vent pipes in the hull, engine-room gongs cracking alive like fight bells, and above it all big mossy gouts of coal smoke roiling from the stacks. Sam looked back across the wharf and saw, two hundred yards off, three teenaged girls running in heels through the falling light, hands on hats, purses flying out from their elbows, the hems on their short dresses shimmying with the white reciprocal blur of their knees, but it was too late, and he didn’t want to think about what was in their girl hearts as the big boat turned out under the early stars: an image of romance, hot dance music, or just dumb human fun based on the necessary mystical imagining that things in general just ain’t so bad all the time.
Chapter Eight
HIS JOB for the night was to roam the decks looking for signs of trouble, everything from fistfights to fires. The forward area of the lower main deck behind the big staircase was an open-air lounge of sorts, a bullpen of wicker furniture and potted plants, and he noticed that mostly older people were sitting here, served by four waiters bringing out ice setups in sweating silver buckets. The boat doddered downstream, threading through the anchored freighters in quarantine at the same speed as the current, and a breeze rose off the water like a blessing, for as much as passengers craved the music and drink, they came to get out of the over-heated pavement of the city and their oven houses that wouldn’t cool down until midnight. At eight-thirty he went upstairs and the long ballroom seemed like a broad wooden railway tunnel filled with music, each ceiling arch hung with dim yellow, red, and blue lights, and the band was settling into a medium-tempo fox-trot embroidered with clarinet improvisations. The breeze steeped in and matched the flow of music, giving the swaying four hundred couples a lift from their humid life that normally left their dancing shoes green with mildew in the back of the closet. Through the windows the doubled shore lights sparked in the river and everyone felt the watery motion under their sliding feet, the turning of currents melting into the horns’ urging; the couples quick-stepped and careened, navigating the dance floor under the colored lights. Sam remembered this deck as a closed-up and creaking static mess, but now it was a moving cloud in dreamland, soon to be a memory for the dancers, who would outlast the boat itself by many years.
He walked over where the second mate watched the crowd. “Hey,” Charlie called. “This New Orleans crowd can dance.”
Sam looked over his shoulder. “I guess they can. What’s that fellow doing?”
Duggs yelled over a rising trumpet riff. “The Texas Tommy. If too many of them start up that hop dancing you have to stop it or at least spread ’ em out. The bracing under the floor can’t take too much of that. A two-step’s worse. The whole deck goes up and down like a fight ring when everybody takes a step on the downbeat.”
“Shake the place apart?” He thought Duggs was making a joke.
Charlie shook his head. “Last year an excursion steamer upriver had the whole dance deck cave in. Sent thirty people to the hospital.”
“Hell of a way to end a good time!”
“You go check the café.”
“Right.”
The band stopped and the girls returning to their tables across the floor were smiling and fanning themselves, their dresses hanging limp.
“If you see Weller, cheer him up.”
“What?”
“The captain’s got him waiting tables on the hurricane deck.”
“I bet the musicians’ union will gripe about that.”
“He asked for it himself. His salary was cut now that he’s just playing the day trips.”
On the third deck was a long, roofed section open to the night, dim except for a glowing backwash from bulbs outlining the several decks. Here couples were lounging at tables, some mixing drinks from bottles they’d brought from shore, some at the dark edges of the deck kissing, telling lies, making promises. The restaurant on the rear half of this deck was packed with people eating sandwiches or cheap steaks. A door at the rear spewed a stream of white-jacketed waiters serving the whole boat. Everyone forward was well behaved so he turned his attention to the rear of the deck, where Ted Weller was taking an order at a table. He met him at the kitchen door, before he went in.
“Moonlighting?”
“Got to do some damn something to squeeze a nickel out of the old man.” Ted Weller’s eyes were red, and Sam wondered if he’d been drinking.
“Hey, I’m on your side.”
“The more I work, the less I have. First my little girl, and now they’re trying to starve me out.”
Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Your little girl? That’s what I’m here for. When we get upriver, I’ll start asking around onshore.”
Ted wrote something on his pad and glanced up. “She would kiss me at bedtime and say ‘Gute Nacht.’ I was teaching her German.”
“Yeah?”
He leaned close and Sam could smell the whiskey. “You don’t know what it’s like, not to be able to take your kid in your arms anymore.” He turned at once and banged through a swinging door.
Sam wanted to follow him through and remi
nd him that he wasn’t the only man in the world to lose a child, but he held back, watching the door swing in and out with waiters and busboys, giving a sliced-up view of Ted Weller arguing with a sweating cook.
***
AROUND TEN O’CLOCK, the boat swung into a dreamy turn at the Violet locks and was steaming upstream at three-quarters speed. The band broke into an uptempo version of “Everybody Step” and emptied the tables. When Sam came down the stairs Charlie Duggs was dragging a big young fellow by the collar out toward the forward rail. He broke loose and swung, punching Duggs in the jaw. Charlie’s face rebounded wearing a grin, and he slapped the man openhanded, the percussion cracking above the thundering band, the customer plunging sideways under a table. Sam went over to help but the second mate waved him off.
“I can handle this one. He just wants to dance a new step is all. A waiter came up a minute ago and said things were getting testy downstairs.” He grabbed the man by the ankles and hauled him back out into the music.
On the main deck Sam spotted two old men arguing, their faces crimson, one holding a cane by its bottom, the curved handle rising toward a big Emerson ceiling fan, which jerked it away, and carried it three turns before flinging it across the lounge, onto a table, where it knocked drinks in the laps of an overdressed and tipsy foursome. Sam at once understood several things about a dance steamer: people felt safe getting drunk since there was no proper law on board, nearly everyone was drinking, and any cruise was liable to turn more unstable as the trip wore on.
He stepped in front of two men advancing from their dripping table. “Easy,” he said, holding up his hands. “It was an accident.”
“Oh yeah?” One of them raised a fist, a short fellow with an ice cube rising out of his vest pocket. “Where have you been? These old bastards have been carping back and forth for the past half hour. This was supposed to be an enjoyable ride.”
“We want our money back for the drinks,” the other man said, swaying and then taking an extra step to the side.
“I’ll see that the waiter brings out another bucket of ice and some glasses.”
“What about an apology?” the little man said.
The larger of the two old men came over. His eyes were small and his nose was a huge overripe strawberry. “I’ll take my cane, thank you.”
“Don’t you have anything to say?” the little man snarled.
The old gentleman pursed his mouth, and Sam knew by looking at his face that he was going to say something that would result in the breaking up of a quarter of the wicker furniture in the lounge. “I see,” the old man began, “that you would like for me to make you feel better. You want me to apologize for the actions of an electrical contrivance.”
Here the little man’s friend stepped up. “You don’t have to get smart with us.” He gave the old man a halfhearted shove in the vest.
A tiny, well-dressed, middle-aged gentleman stood up across the room and steadied himself against a plant stand. “You just watch who you’re shoving around,” he chirped. “That’s my father-in-law.”
Two women were flapping ice off their dresses, and one of them picked up the cane and tossed it at the old man, hitting him on the forehead and knocking his glasses off. “You trashy people,” he roared, “ought to be thrown overboard!”
Sam looked around at sixty or so passengers and saw that they were nice people, well dressed and mature, not some unimportant kids he could bully into behaving. He tried to get between everybody at once and found himself in the middle of a jabbering cloud of alcoholic breath. The polite air was turning sour when the son-in-law, who was four tables over, tried to get to the argument by stepping on a wicker-bottom chair, but his foot went through it and he danced three hops and fell onto another couple’s table, his hand getting stuck in a small metal water pitcher. At this point everyone started to laugh, except the son-in-law and the old man, who slowly bent over and felt the floor for his cane and spectacles. Sam called over a waiter to dry the tables and chairs and get everybody reseated and supplied with fresh glasses and ice. The steam whistle blew a warning, followed by a rising, shrill signal from the starboard side as a ferryboat cut its engines only twenty-five feet away, its yellow running lights shining angrily, its boiler’s fire door a blinding orange star traveling sideways in the night. The passengers calmed down, distracted by the fact that the ferry had come out from its landing without waiting for or even seeing the Ambassador at all. Sam watched the ferry slide astern, hoping that everyone would realize that a couple of spilled drinks or a rude remark was nothing compared to a midnight collision spilling hundreds of folks in deep river, but then the son-in-law began throwing punches and it took him ten minutes of pulling and pushing to break up the fight.
***
UPSTAIRS, the band members were running with sweat, thumping out a shimmy number as five hundred dancers stepped and turned in a massive wink of patent leather and sequins, silk ties and hair oil, good New Orleans dancers who knew what to do with a downbeat making the old deck jump. The waiters were skating around the edge of the action, sliding their shoes on the dance wax, delivering sandwiches and mixers to the people at the double layer of tables lining the walls. The expressions of most of the dancers seemed overly happy, and Sam scanned the faces of the band members, who were too busy selling the tune to exhibit any worry, and indeed no one showed a negative thought, caught up in some kind of capsule of delight, at least while the music kept everything in motion. And then he saw a still silhouette sitting at the stern end of the dance deck, and he walked over because her presence contradicted the motion-drunk room. It was Elsie, sitting alone at the last table, her hair wound in pigtails above her ears, wearing a plain dark dress.
“Hi. You on break?”
“In case you don’t know, the staff can’t join in the fun. We’ll be at the dock in ten minutes and as soon as the lights come up, I’m to start stripping the tables.”
She looked tired, and he wanted to say something to cheer her up, but all he said was, “Work you to death, don’t they?”
“Well, let’s just say I need to keep busy.”
“Ted still waiting on ’em upstairs?”
She nodded. “I was waitressing with him but they cut me loose a few minutes ago. It’ll only take a half hour to clear everybody off. This is a pretty mild crowd.”
The whistle moaned out a landing signal and the band began to play “Home, Sweet Home.” Sam felt a tug on his arm and he turned to face a thickset man also wearing a mate’s cap. He introduced himself as Aaron Swaneli, the first mate.
“How’d I miss meeting you?”
“It’s my bidness to lay low,” Swaneli said. “That way I can keep an eye on things, you know?” He made a sideways motion with his head.
“You’re the power man. Got a blackjack on you.”
Swaneli put a hand on Sam’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Look, right now I need you to go topside. The hardlegs up there are smokin’ and all in love this time of night. Walk the rail and look for cigarettes they’ve tossed. Every butt you see, lit or not, put your toe on it and twist three times, okay?”
The lights came up on the last note, and the band began to take down music and pack their instruments. People crowded the stairs, and Sam walked up through them and toured the deck, first the open area, then the café, which was hot and nearly empty. He stepped out into the night and looked forward to where Mr. Brandywine then ascended a little filigreed bridge on the hurricane deck. He raised a megaphone and called directions out to a man standing by a steam capstan. The big boat seemed asleep in the water at that point, waiting for some type of decision the current was supposed to make. Finally, Mr. Brandywine turned the megaphone up to the pilothouse’s dark windows. “Mrs. Benton! Give her a nudge.”
A bell jingled in the engine room and two snoring chuffs jetted from the escape pipes as the boat leaned into the wharf and tapped a piling right where a deckhand held a hemp fender against the hull. The fore and aft lines went out and a sto
p-engine bell rattled as the boat drifted in snug.
It took an hour to clear the last passengers off, a too-jolly batch of overweight young women. Sam did indeed stamp out a dozen lit cigarettes, and also woke up a drunk boy in the men’s toilet and walked him ashore. Several people lingered under the dock lights, staring at the steamer as though they couldn’t quite believe their ride was over. Their faces showed they’d just been exiled back to their ordinary selves, and they didn’t seem to like it one bit. He walked to the end of the loading stage and surveyed for himself the many lights jeweling the decks, the tired porters sweeping the dark upper walkways, the kitchen staff wiping the third-deck tables and chairs, turning them up to make room for a mop-down of spilled drinks, food, trash paper, and smashed candy. He thought of the cooks swamping down the giant ranges in the hot night, the tobacco-smudged and sticky dance floor, the piss-fouled bathrooms and damaged main-deck lounge already prowled by the ship’s carpenter. It was all fun for somebody, he guessed, but his back and legs were killing him from the night’s climbing and scuffle.
About one-thirty he rolled into his bunk, jammed against the ceiling of his cabin, and a minute later Charlie Duggs came in, stripped down to his drawers, and hung his clothes on two sixteen-penny nails. “Oh, man,” he said in the dark, “I feel like I fell through the paddlewheel.”
After two minutes, Sam sensed that he was already falling asleep, and gratitude to whatever controls man’s slumber flowed through him like a medicine. Then Charlie yawned and said, “Don’t forget to roll out, wash your armpits, and buck up for the ten-thirty harbor tour.”
***
AT EIGHT the next morning the two of them were eating eggs, fried potatoes, and onions with the rest of the crew. The musicians had gone drinking in town after the boat docked and were eating out on the open part of the deck, moping about like wounded soldiers. Charlie folded a piece of white bread in half and waved it in the air over his plate for emphasis. “On the way down from Cincinnati we stopped at an odd little town in Indiana, I think, and ran an afternoon trip. I was nailing down new chocks for the piano during the break, and then Elsie and Ted did a number with the little girl and some of the lady passengers gathered around the bandstand and got this look in their eye like they was ready to start bawlin’. I don’t know why. It was a happy little song. Maybe they thought she was a come-alive baby doll or something.” He took a heaping bite of potatoes.
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