But somehow, even when the face was gone and the smoke of the gun had blown away, the eyes were still there, staring, beckoning, waking things in him, anger and hatred and darker deeper feelings. The eyes were black as hell itself and filled with red, chasms endless and eternal as his river, calling to him, stirring his own lusts, his own red thirst. They floated before him, and Abner Marsh stared into them, into the warm black, and saw his answer there, saw the way to end them, better and surer than sword canes or stakes or buffalo guns.
Fire. Out on the river, the Fevre Dream was burning. Abner Marsh felt it all. The terrible sudden roar that ripped at the ears, worse than any thunder. The billows of flame and smoke, the burning chunks of wood and coal spilling everywhere, scalding-hot steam bursting free, clouds of white death enveloping the boat, the walls blowing out and burning, bodies flying through the air afire or half-cooked, the chimneys cracking, collapsing, the screams, the steamer listing and sinking into the river, sizzling and hissing and smoking, charred corpses floating face down amid the debris, the great side-wheeler coming apart until nothing was left but burnt wood and a chimney sticking up crookedly from the water. In the dream, when her boilers went, the name painted on her was still Fevre Dream.
It would be easy, Abner Marsh knew. A consignment of freight for New Orleans; they’d never suspect. Barrels of explosives, stowed down on the main deck carelessly near the red-hot furnaces and all those huge, unruly high-pressure boilers. He could arrange it, and that would be the end for Julian and all the night folks. A fuse, a timer, it could be done.
Abner Marsh closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the burning steamer was gone, the sounds of the screams and the boiler explosion had faded, and the night was quiet once again. “Can’t,” he said aloud to himself, “Joshua is still aboard her. Joshua.” And others as well, he hoped: Whitey Blake, Karl Framm, Hairy Mike Dunne and his rousters. And there was his lady herself to consider, his Fevre Dream. Marsh had a glimpse of a quiet bend of river on a night like tonight, and two great steamers running side by side, plumes of smoke behind them flattened by their speed, fires crowning their stacks, their wheels turning furiously. As they came on and on, one began to move ahead, a little now, then more and more, until she had opened up a boat’s length lead. She was still pulling away when they passed out of sight, and Marsh saw the names written on them, and the leader was Fevre Dream, her flags flying as she moved upriver swift and serene, and behind came the Eclipse, glittering even in defeat. I will make it happen, Abner Marsh told himself.
The crew of the Eli Reynolds had largely returned by midnight. Marsh watched them straggle in from Vicksburg, and heard Cat Grove direct the wooding-up operation in the moonlight, with a series of short, snapped commands. Hours later, the first wisps of smoke began to curl upward from the steamer’s chimneys, as the engineer fired her up. Dawn was still an hour off. It was about then that Yoerger and Grove appeared on the hurricane deck, with chairs of their own and a pot of coffee. They took seats next to Marsh in silence, and poured him a cup. It was hot and black. He sipped it gratefully.
“Well, Cap’n Marsh,” Yoerger said after a time. His long face was gray and tired. “Don’t you think it’s time you told us what this is all about?”
“Since we got back to St. Louis,” added Cat Grove, “you been talkin’ nothin’ but gettin’ back your boat. Tomorrow, maybe, we’ll have her. What then? You ain’t told us much, Cap’n, ’cept that you don’t intend to bring in no police. Why is that, if your boat was stole?”
“Same reason I ain’t told you, Mister Grove. They wouldn’t believe my story for a minute.”
“Crew’s curious,” said Grove. “Me, too.”
“It ain’t none of their business,” said Marsh. “I own this steamboat, don’t I? You work for me, and them too. Just do like I tell you.”
“Cap’n Marsh,” said Yoerger, “this old gal and I been on the river some years now. You gave her over to me soon as you got your second steamer, the old Nick Perrot I believe it was, back in ’52. I took care of this lady ever since then, and you haven’t relieved me, no sir. If I’m fired, why, tell me so. If I’m still your captain, then tell me what I’m taking my steamer into. I deserve that much.”
“I told Jonathon Jeffers,” said Marsh, seeing the little glint of gold once again, “and he died on account of it. Maybe Hairy Mike too, I don’t know.”
Cat Grove leaned forward gracefully and refilled Marsh’s cup with lukewarm coffee from the pot. “Cap’n,” he said, “from the little you told us, you ain’t sure whether Mike is alive or not, but that ain’t the point. You ain’t sure ’bout some others as well. Whitey Blake, that pilot of yours, all them that stayed on the Fevre Dream. You tell all them, too?”
“No,” Marsh admitted.
“Then it don’t make no mind,” said Grove.
“If there is danger downriver, we have a right to know,” said Yoerger.
Abner Marsh thought on that, and saw the justice in it. “You’re right,” he said, “but you ain’t goin’ to believe it. And I can’t have you leavin’. I need this steamer.”
“We ain’t goin’ nowhere,” said Grove. “Tell us the story.”
So Abner Marsh sighed and told the story once again. When he was finished he stared at their faces. Both wore guarded expressions, careful, noncommittal.
“It is hard to credit,” said Yoerger.
“I believe it,” said Grove. “Ain’t no harder to believe than ghosts. I seen ghosts myself, hell, dozens of times.”
“Cap’n Marsh,” said Yoerger, “you’ve talked a lot about finding the Fevre Dream, and seldom about your intentions after you find her. Do you have a plan?”
Marsh thought of the fire, the boilers roaring and blowing, the screams of his enemies. He pushed the thought away. “I’m takin’ back my boat,” he said. “You seen my gun. Once I blow Julian’s head off, I figure Joshua can take care of the rest.”
“You say you tried that, with Jeffers and Dunne, back when you still controlled the steamer and its crew. Now, if your detectives were right, the boat’s full of slaves and cutthroats. You can’t get aboard without being recognized. How will you get to Julian?”
Abner Marsh had not really given the matter much thought. But now that Yoerger had raised the point, it was plain to see that he couldn’t hardly just stomp across the stage, buffalo gun in hand, alone, which is what he’d more or less intended. He thought on it a moment. If he could get aboard somehow as a passenger . . . but Yoerger was right, that was impossible. Even if he shaved, there was no one on the river looked even approximately like Abner Marsh. “We’ll go in force,” Marsh said after a brief hesitation. “I’ll take the whole damn crew of the Reynolds. Julian and Sour Billy probably figure I’m dead; we’ll surprise them. By day, of course. I ain’t takin’ no more chances with the light. None of the night folks ever seen the Eli Reynolds, and I reckon only Joshua ever heard the name. We’ll steam right up next to her, wherever we find her landed, and we’ll wait for a good bright sunny morning, and then me and all those who’ll come with me will march over. Scum is scum, and whatever dregs Sour Billy found in Natchez ain’t goin’ to risk their skins against guns and knives. Maybe we’ll have to take care of Billy hisself, but then the way’s clear. This time I’ll make goddamn sure it’s Julian before I blow his head off.” He spread his hands. “Satisfactory?”
“Sounds good,” said Grove. Yoerger looked more dubious. But neither of them had any other suggestions worth a damn, so after a brief discussion, they agreed to his plan. By then dawn had brushed the bluffs and hills of Vicksburg, and the Eli Reynolds had her steam up. Abner Marsh rose and stretched, feeling remarkably fit for a man who hadn’t slept a wink all night. “Take ’er out,” he said loudly to the pilot, who had passed them on his way to the plain little pilot house. “Natchez!”
Deckhands cast loose the ropes that tied her to the landing, and the stern-wheeler backed out, reversed her paddle, and pushed out into the channel while
red and gray shadows began to chase each other across the eastern shore, and the clouds in the west turned rose.
For the first two hours, they made good time, past Warrenton and Hard Times and Grand Gulf. Three or four larger steamers passed them up, but that was to be expected; the Eli Reynolds wasn’t built for racing. Abner Marsh was satisfied enough with her progress so that he took himself below for thirty minutes, long enough to check and clean his gun and make sure it was loaded, and eat a quick breakfast of hotcakes and blueberries and fried eggs. Between St. Joseph and Rodney, the sky began to overcast, which Marsh didn’t like one bit. A short time later, a small storm broke over the river, not enough thunder nor lightning nor rain to hurt a fly, Marsh thought, but the pilot respected it enough to keep them tied up for a hour at a woodyard, while Marsh prowled the boat restlessly. Framm or Albright would have just pushed on through the weather, but you couldn’t expect to get a lightnin’ pilot on a boat like this. The rain was cold and gray. When it finally ended, however, there was a nice rainbow in the sky, which Marsh liked quite a lot, and still more than enough time to reach Natchez before dark.
Fifteen minutes after casting off again, the Eli Reynolds fetched up hard against a sandbar.
It was a stupid, frustrating mistake. The young pilot, barely past being a cub, had tried to make up some lost time by running an uncertain cutoff instead of staying with the main channel, which made a wide bend to the east. A month or two back it might have been a slick bit of piloting, but now the river stage was too low, even for a steamer drawing as little as the Eli Reynolds.
Abner Marsh swore and fumed and stomped about angrily, especially when it became clear that they couldn’t back her clear of the bar. Cat Grove and his men fetched out the winches and grasshopper poles and set to. It rained on them a couple times, just to make things more difficult, but four-and-a-half wet, weary hours later, the pilot started the stern wheel up again and the Eli Reynolds wrenched herself forward with a spray of mud and sand, shaking like she was about to fall to pieces. And then she was afloat. Her whistle blew in triumph.
They crept along the cutoff cautiously for another half-hour, but once they regained the river, the current took hold of them and the Reynolds picked up speed. She shot downriver smoking and rattling like the very devil, but there was no way to make up the time she’d lost.
Abner Marsh was sitting on the faded yellow couch in the pilot house when they first glimpsed the city, up ahead on its bluffs. He set down his coffee cup on top of the big pot-bellied stove and stood behind the pilot, who was busy making a crossing. Marsh paid him no mind; his eyes were on the distant landing, where twenty or more steamers were nuzzling up against Natchez-under-the-hill.
She was there, as he had known she’d be.
Marsh knew her right off. She was the biggest boat on the landing, and stuck out a good fifty feet beyond her nearest rival, and her stacks were tallest, too. As the Eli Reynolds drew nearer, Marsh saw that they hadn’t changed her much. She was still mostly blue and white and silver, though they’d painted her wheelhouses a tawdry bright red, like the lips of a Natchez whore. Her name was spelled out in yellow lettering curved around the side of the paddlebox, crudely; OZYMANDIAS, it said. Marsh scowled. “See the big one there?” he said to the pilot, pointing. “You put us close to her as you can, you hear?”
“Yessuh, Cap’n.”
Marsh looked at the town ahead with distaste. Already the shadows were growing in the streets, and the river waters wore the scarlet and gold tinge of sunset. It was cloudy too, too damn cloudy. They had lost too much time at the woodyard and the cutoff, he thought, and sunset came a lot earlier in October than in summer.
Captain Yoerger had entered the pilot house and moved to his side, and now he put words to Marsh’s thoughts. “You can’t go tonight, Cap’n Marsh. It’s too late. It will be dark in less than an hour. Wait till tomorrow.”
“What kind of damned fool you take me for?” Marsh said. “Course I’ll wait. I made that damn mistake once, I ain’t makin’ it again.” He stamped his walking stick hard against the deck in frustration. Yoerger started to say something else, but Marsh wasn’t listening. He was still studying the big side-wheeler by the landing. “Hell,” he said suddenly.
“What’s wrong?”
Marsh pointed with his hickory stick. “Smoke,” he said. “Damn them, they got her steam up! She must be leavin’.”
“Don’t be rash,” Yoerger cautioned. “If she leaves, she leaves, but we’ll catch up to her somewhere else downriver.”
“They must run her by night,” Marsh said, “tie up during the day. I should have figured that.” He turned to the pilot. “Mister Norman,” he said, “don’t you land after all. Keep goin’ downstream and put in at the first woodyard you see, wait till that boat there passes you by. Then follow her, well as you can. She’s a hell of a lot faster’n the Reynolds, so don’t you worry if she loses you, just keep on downriver as close behind her as you can.”
“Whatever you say, Cap’n,” the pilot replied. He swung the worn wooden wheel hand over hand, and the Eli Reynolds turned her head abruptly and began to angle back out into the channel.
They had been at the woodyard for ninety minutes, and it had been full night for at least twenty, when the Fevre Dream came steaming past. Marsh shivered when he saw her approach. The huge side-wheeler moved downriver with a terrible liquid grace, a quiet smoothness that reminded him somehow of Damon Julian and the way he walked. She was half-dark. The main deck glowed a faint reddish-pink from the fires of her furnaces, but only a few of the cabin windows on the boiler deck were lit up, and the texas was entirely black, as was the pilot house. Marsh thought he could see a solitary figure up there, standing at the wheel, but she was too far off to be sure. The moon and stars shone pale on her white paint and silver trim, and the red wheelhouses looked obscene. As she passed by, another steamer’s lights appeared way downstream, ascending toward her, and they called out to one another in the night. Marsh would have known her whistle anywhere, he thought, but now it seemed to him that it had a cold and mournful sound to it that he had never heard before, a melancholy wail that spoke of pain and despair.
“Keep your distance,” he said to his pilot, “but follow her.” A deckhand cast off the rope holding them to the woodyard’s snubbing post, and the Eli Reynolds swallowed a mess of tar and pine-knots and snorted out into the river after her larger, wayward cousin. A minute or two later, the stranger steamer ascending toward Natchez crossed the Fevre Dream and steamed toward them, sounding a deep three-toned blast on her whistle. The Reynolds answered, but her call sounded so thin and weak compared to the Fevre Dream’s wild shrill that it filled Marsh with unease.
He had expected that the Fevre Dream would outdistance them within minutes, but it did not turn out that way. The Eli Reynolds steamed downstream in her wake for two solid hours. She lost the bigger boat a half-dozen times around river bends, but always caught sight of her again within minutes. The distance between the two steamboats widened, but so gradually that it was hardly worth mentioning. “We’re runnin’ full out, or near it,” Marsh said to Captain Yoerger, “but they’re just loafin’. Unless they turn up the Red River, I reckon they’ll stop at Bayou Sara. That’s where we’ll catch ’em.” He smiled. “Fittin’, ain’t it?”
With eighteen big boilers to heat and a lot of boat to move, the Fevre Dream ate up a lot more wood than her small shadow. She stopped to wood up several times, and each time the Eli Reynolds crept up on her a bit, although Marsh was careful to have his pilot slow to quarter-speed so as not to catch the side-wheeler while she was taking on wood. The Reynolds herself stopped once to load up her neary-empty main deck with twenty cords of fresh-cut beech, and when she pushed back out into the river the lights of the Fevre Dream had receded to a vague reddish blur on the black waters ahead. But Marsh ordered a barrel of lard chucked into the furnace, and the burst of heat and steam soon made up most of the lost distance.
Near whe
re the mouth of the Red River emptied into the wider Mississippi, a comfortable mile separated the two steamers. Marsh had just brought a fresh pot of coffee up to the pilot house, and was helping the pilot drink it, when the man squinted over the wheel and said, “Take a look here, Cap’n, appears the current’s pushin’ her sideways. Ain’t no crossing to be made there.”
Marsh put down his cup and looked. The Fevre Dream looked a lot closer all of a sudden, he thought, and the pilot was right, he could see a good portion of her larboard side. If she wasn’t making a crossing, maybe the waters rushing in from the lesser river were responsible for her sheer, but he didn’t see how a decent pilot would allow that. “She’s just anglin’ round a snag or a bar,” Marsh said, but there was no certainty in his tone. As he watched, the side-wheeler seemed to turn even more, so she was practically at cross angles to them. He could read the lettering on her wheelhouse in the moonlight. She almost looked like she was drifting, but the smoke and sparks still steamed from her stacks, and now her bow was swinging into view.
“Goddamn,” Marsh said loudly. He felt as cold as if he’d just taken another fall into the river. “She’s turnin’. Damn it all to hell! She’s turnin’!”
“What should I do, Cap’n?” asked the pilot.
Abner Marsh did not answer. He was watching the Fevre Dream with fear in his heart. A stern-wheeler like the Eli Reynolds had two ways to reverse directions, both of them clumsy. If the channel was wide enough, she could round to in a big U, but that took a lot of room and a lot of push. Otherwise she had to stop and reverse her paddle, back and turn, stop again and start forward to complete the turnabout. Either way took time, and Marsh didn’t even know if they could round to right here. A side-wheeler was a damn sight more maneuverable. A side-wheeler could just reverse one wheel and keep the other going forward, so she’d spin about neat as you please like a dancer twirling on a toe. Now Abner Marsh could see the forecastle of the Fevre Dream. Her stages, drawn up, looked like two long white teeth in the moonlight, and pale-faced figures in dark clothing were clustered together on the forward portions of the main and boiler decks. The Fevre Dream loomed ahead of them bigger and more formidable than ever. She had almost completed her spin now, and the Eli Reynolds was still paddling toward her, whapwhapwhap, paddling toward those white maggot-faces and darkness and hot red eyes.
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