Blowing Off Steam

by Karen Mercury

  “No.” Only half of Hunt’s mouth moved this time.

  Man alive, Mike Hunt laid in the shade every heartless toad Field had ever come across. Rushy was right—how did they know these papers displayed a legitimate claim to the El Dorado? Field was just trying to stall for time to come up with a plan—a meticulous, intelligent plan that didn’t involve doing a bunk through a steaming hillock of steer dung.

  “All right,” Field said slowly. “Let’s look at the engine room.”

  So he was led into the sweltering furnace of the engine room, his brain furiously broiling thinking of an escape plan. He might be able to pull something off, but how would he get his unconscious partner out of that pile of shit?

  “See, I’ve replaced this fulcrum pin, and this eccentric sheave is a big improvement over the old one.”

  Grundman seemed to have only a basic understanding of how the engine worked. “Let me move the valves!” he exhorted.

  Field rightly pointed out, “That would be idiotic, with no one in the pilothouse to steer her.”

  But good old Mike Hunt insisted. “Show him how to work the valves.”

  So Field was pantomiming what must have been the most exciting feature of a paddlewheel steamer, for children who loved to crash large objects into other large objects.

  “Valve these levers, see? Up bar, down bar.”

  “Up bar, down bar!” Grundman pantomimed along with him.

  Field was at his wit’s—and his heart’s—end when came the most glorious sound ever. The pilothouse gong right above their heads.

  Two taps. Emergency. Give her all she’s got.

  Mike wheeled about, seemingly nervous for the first time. “What’s that?”

  Field didn’t have to fake his immense relief. “That must be the mate up in the pilothouse! Reliable old Cincinnatus—he must want me to fire the boilers to keep them from rusting. Think nothing of it—just an old steamboat custom.” Field eagerly leaped to the firebox and began tossing in logs.

  “There’s another fellow aboard?” Mike asked.

  “I reckon I didn’t know Cincinnatus was up there.”

  Mike asked Grundman, “Is that true? Does he need to fire the boilers to prevent it from rusting?”

  “Sure!” Grundman apparently didn’t want to seem idiotic, especially if he was going to be the El Dorado’s new engineer.

  “Grundman!” Field barked. “Take over stoking these boilers! We’ve got to get the boat moving if we want to stop them from rusting!” And he sprinted back over to the valve levers, eyeing the steam gauge to await their moment to move.

  “But I want to work the valves!”

  Mike Hunt shoved Grundman at the firebox. “Stoke it, you jackass!”

  When Field valved, a subdued roar of steam filled the compartment, and a big piston moved. When Field reversed the direction of the steel bar, far overhead on the hurricane deck the walking beam rose to its apex. The boat shuddered and began to chug forward.

  “Where are we going?” Mike asked in a high-pitched woman’s tone.

  “Just around the harbor. Oh, damnation.”

  “What damnation? What damnation?”

  “One of the side wheels is stuck.”

  Indeed, whether by design or accident, only one of the side paddlewheels was churning, with the result that the boat was carving ever-more concentric circles in the water. She was plowing through a group of Celestials standing waist-deep in the salt water, the garments they were washing flying as they thrashed for the shore.

  “Well, unstick it then!” Mike commanded, his arm holding the revolver wavering with nerves.

  Field yelled truthfully, “We’ll have to get into the paddle box to unstick her! Grundman! Get over here. Hold these valves true.”

  Grundman didn’t seem concerned about the fact that the boat was now tearing out a rickety dock, plank by plank, tossing the wood into the air and onto their main deck. “I’ll hold her steady!” he claimed as Field grabbed a long wooden bar and headed for the paddle box, Mike following with his shaky revolver.

  Field shoved the wooden bar at Mike. “You’ll have to save us, Mr. Hunt! Stand on that bucket and pry the wheel over. Just a quarter turn should do it.”

  Mike brandished the wooden bar as though it were a spear and he a Viking. “Why can’t you do it?” He wobbled as the boat churned into a small skiff—apparently with someone in it, as the terrified shrieks that emanated from it soon stopped, silenced by the creamy froth from the El Dorado.

  Field thought fast. “I need to do the daily dozen with the Johnson bar,” he lied. “That’s dangerous, and essential if we want to get this wheel unstuck. Go, man, go! Unless you want to drop a few more of these ricemen in their tracks and get arrested for murder!”

  “No one’s gonna arrest anyone for dropping a riceman,” Mike grumbled. But the hapless gunman holstered his weapon and clambered onto one of the stationary buckets. “Where do I stick this giant oar?”

  “Right under that spoke!” Field shouted from the safety of the engine room’s bulkhead where he would ostensibly do the dangerous “daily dozen.” “Put your weight into it—lean into her hard! You only need a quarter turn to—”

  There went Mike, like a puppet sucked down into the workings of the wheel’s paddles. His arms flew upward, mangled into a pool of broken bones like the arms of a marionette dropped suddenly from a great height. Field had known that the minute the crank crossed center it would take charge of the wheel, chopping everything in its path. If he’d been forced to do it himself, he would have been more delicate and would have jumped out of the way in time.

  Well, at least Mike had succeeded in unsticking the wheel, and now the boat ploughed dead center toward Yerba Buena Island, away from the dangers of the laundry and fishing operations.

  Predictably, as the wheel lurched into life, the wooden bar went zooming straight through an engine house window as though thrown by a powerful arm—but it would be too much of a miracle if it had impaled old Grundman.

  Field dashed up two flights of the central stairs to gain the pilothouse in what felt like only four great strides.

  He knew Cincinnatus had not snuck back onto the boat and rung the gong. Cincinnatus would probably have stumbled aboard and gaped at them moronically before becoming the pirates’ third hostage.

  No, poor Rushy had woken himself from the steaming mass of shit and had somehow hauled himself up to the pilothouse where he had rung the gong to alert Field to his presence. He now stood—barely—at the wheel, hanging onto it more than steering it.

  Field grasped him by the shoulders. “Rushy! I got rid of that Mike fellow, but that Grundman assassin is still in the engine room. Can you hang on another two minutes?”

  Rushy only nodded, his lower jaw swinging loose to allow a steady stream of blood to trickle from his nostril and into his mouth.

  Field patted him on the back with a joviality he certainly didn’t feel. “Good!”

  Tearing down the stairs, Field swung the engine room door open to find Grundman still obliviously working the valves, with no apparent mind as to what he was doing.

  “Good work, Grundman!” Field made directly for a bucket of tar, which he emptied into the raging firebox. He closed a few vents and left the firebox door open. “I need you to keep an eye on these valves. Just make sure they don’t move.” The momentum of the paddle wheels was sufficient for Field to drop the hooks onto the cranks, so the engineer was relieved of his work—but Grundman didn’t know that.

  Swooping down to pick up the wooden bar from the pile of glass on the floor, Field commanded Grundman, “Keep an eye out!” and closed the engine room door. He used the wooden bar to bolt the door shut and leaped back upstairs to the wheel house.

  He led Rushy to the bench, where the poor pilot collapsed. They were on a true steady course for the mouth of the Sacramento River now, so Field grabbed his box of paper from the strong box and jammed a pen into an inkwell.

  “Rushy, Rushy!” he
called out frantically. “What have we done?”

  Rushy’s head lolled about. “Is anyone…following us?”

  Field whipped his head this way and that and saw only a few Kanakas from the Sandwich Islands diving off small vessels. It was 1853. In today’s modern world the river was glutted with twenty-seven other riverboats, but none of the others were in sight. Field saw no schooners crammed with Vigilante Society men coming to arrest them. No vigilante would probably care about two dead thugs anyway.

  “Stay awake, buddy!” Field urged as he touched his pen to paper.

  My dear C,

  I regret I haven’t given you the life you deserve. My quest for a fortune has led us down many questionable paths. It is a flaw in my spirit that my adventurous lifestyle has driven me astray. I have not been a good father to poor Benjamin. I did not come up to snuff in the gold fields. Even digging for gold was too daunting a task for someone as weak as I.

  No, all I am suited for is this dubious river life, and it has once again gotten us into a big fix.

  Field’s handwriting was sketchy and fractured, as befitted his panicked state. Already he could see the tarry smoke roiling up from the escape pipes that jutted up aft through the hurricane deck. Sticking the cork back into the inkwell, Field gently slapped Rushy on the face.

  “Mm?” said Rushy.

  Field whipped a handkerchief from the velvet-edged pocket of Rushy’s frock coat. Wiping off the sensual, full lower lip of blood and grime, Field leaned over to plant a kiss there. Rushy’s only response was to lift an arm and drop it just as swiftly.

  “I love you,” Field whispered and went downstairs with his own cocked pistol in hand.

  Chapter Two

  October 1853

  San Francisco

  A month earlier

  Thomas Field Trueworthy was fuming.

  First, he had finally admitted defeat in the gold fields. It was enough to toil in the roasting sun that reflected off the waters of the Merced River, frying men’s faces as red as their threadbare shirts that lined the banks of every river in the foothills. The filth, the belches, the farts—these were not the sights and sounds acceptable to a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.

  And then, gold had been petering out lately. The days where a man could pan out a thousand dollars worth of gold from his riffle box were coming to an end. Children handing their mothers seven-pound nuggets, or a man and his slave dreaming of finding twenty thousand dollars in gold under their floorboards—and finding it the next day—those times were gone. Field had come to California after hearing tales of men rolling barrels of gold dust into swank San Francisco hotel lobbies, and now he was lucky to see a fellow in the mines who could afford a bottle of whiskey.

  Of course, that wasn’t a sight one was eager to see, either. Man was the only beast who drank to get drunk, and they drank out of horns with pointed bottoms so the drinker had to gulp it all before setting down the cup. The morning after a three-day spree was the worst, men with breaths as foul as that sultan who lived on poison, his breath causing instant death.

  So Field had returned downcast to San Francisco, only to be bullied by some highfalutin former classmate, Ted Judah. Cursed by a letter from Judah declaring they would be the “pioneering railroad engineers of the Pacific Coast,” Field now haunted San Francisco’s embarcadero awaiting arrival of some steam engine parts Judah claimed he’d shipped.

  This was Field’s only hope now that gold had given up the ghost.

  And it would have been a gleaming beacon of hope, if only Field didn’t buck under the condescending and snooty assumptions Judah seemed to make. Mainly, that Field would do all the work assembling this engine prototype and setting up meetings with future railroad barons. These would have all been worthwhile pursuits if Field had thought of and instigated them himself. But he was doomed to wear the yoke of pride, and it wasn’t in his character to labor for any hoity-toity New Yorker, even if the railroad idea was a damned good one.

  “The Henry Miller? She’s supposed to be arriving tomorrow.”

  Field pounded the counter. “Yesterday it was today. Today it’s tomorrow? What, did the captain shout into the speaking horn all the way from San Diego? How do you know her arrival has changed?”

  The shipping clerk must have been accustomed to irate, shouting men, for he merely glared at Field as though steam was about to come from his ears. “Says right here.” He jabbed his hammy forefinger at a piece of paper.

  Field felt like arguing. He had nothing else to do. “Oh, so someone comes along and handwrites on that piece of paper and suddenly it’s gospel?”

  The clerk shrugged. “You can wait for the Henry Miller. Outside.”

  Field wanted to go outside anyway, so he wasn’t taking the clerk’s suggestion when he wound through the crowd of disembarking passengers and stevedores shouldering giant crates of oysters and bags of coffee beans. Finding a wooden post where only a chicken perched, Field leaned his butt up against it and lit a match from his match safe, puffing with enjoyment on his cigarro.

  The anchorage was a field of raked and broken masts, emanating sizzling heat waves at this time of day. As land was at a premium here—citizens were constantly creating new land by dumping crates of sardines, bags of flour, and chamber pots at the edge of the shore—the vessels in harbor had been turned into hulks, floating stores where one could paddle a little skiff over and have a pound of sugar tossed down onto one’s head.

  Field amused himself watching the doings aboard these hulks. Aboard one, two hookers ganged up against an offensive patron, hurling him over the rail and into a slick of chamber pot offal. Aboard a flat-bottomed Celestial vessel with a very high poop deck, many ricemen smoked their long opium pipes. Field remembered that he had wanted to sample that commodity but was afraid to venture into the Celestial section of town.

  But finally, it was a seemingly ordinary event that changed the course of Field’s life. A side-wheel paddle steamer chugged serenely into the bay, her lacey stacks standing out in sharp relief against the cloudless sky, giving a toot on her whistle. Field had always wanted to go on a steamer. He had arrived in San Francisco on a clipper through the Chagres River in Panama, where he had proceeded to fall to a virulent case of the Chagres fever, along with nearly everyone else on board. He would like to try a steamer. They seemed more genteel, dependable, solid. And river travel certainly wouldn’t have you hanging over the rail puking the entire time. Maybe this steamer would continue to Sacramento. Field could bring his steam engine to Sacramento to his ostensible meeting with the magnate Mark Hopkins. He would like to see this new boat’s engine, too.

  The steamer—the El Dorado, according to the giant letters painted on her side-wheel paddle box—approached the customs house as close as she could, dropping anchor about sixty yards from the wharf. A fellow who looked like a captain, from his hat with the patent leather brim, appeared at the stern. He was a rather handsome fellow from what Field could see from this distance, about his own age of thirty, very athletically made. As skiffs crowded the boat’s hull to see what goods were aboard, an odd thing happened.

  The captain fell overboard.

  Field was looking at him when he fell. The chap merely toppled, like a tree being felled. No flailing about, no shrieking, no cries for help, just plop.

  Even odder, none of the three deckhands visible seemed to notice or care, and two Celestial stewards continued their determined padding about the decks with no concern. Some of the San Franciscans in the skiffs shouted out and pointed, but no one rowed over to see what the problem was. Field was about to dive in and save the fellow—he had maybe just come from the Chagres River and was ill—when he surfaced, spitting out great mouthfuls of salty water, gliding elegantly for the customs house.

  Field frowned in consternation. Did the captain not wish to wait for a skiff to take him ashore? He would need to present his bill of lading before he could sell any of the items he was hauling.
>
  His curiosity roused, Field wandered to where the fellow would haul himself ashore. When the captain reached the wharf’s ladder, Field even squatted to reach a hand down. Yes. He was the pilot, Field could tell from the dandy military bars stitched onto the shoulders of his burgundy frock coat. Water streamed off his long eyelashes and the tip of his aquiline, artistic nose, and he had retained his captain’s patent leather cap. His longish sandy hair flopped over one crystal-clear hazel eye. A very hearty, hale, broad-chested fellow obviously accustomed to the rough out-of-doors work of rigging lines and turning cranks, this man was the epitome of what Field wished to be. A man who made a successful living at a manly pursuit.

  “Thanks for the hand, partner.”

  “What happened out there?” Field inquired. “You sick?”

  As though the idea had just occurred to him, the captain held a quavering palm to his belly and frowned something fierce. “Sick, yes. These here cyclone hurricanes off the coast near Monterey. Made everyone sick as dogs, vomiting off the rails. A sight to scare the witches. I’ve been in a bad way for several days now. And dang if I didn’t lose my papers in this saltwater bay.” He slapped his sopping pockets, as though he could tell instantly that his ownership papers were missing. “The fact of the business is, they must’ve floated off. Guess I’d better get the customs master to write me up some new ones. Thanks for the hand up, buddy.”

  And he stalked off, his boots squishing, his nicely turned rear end shapely under the clinging coattails.

  Yes, this fellow was masculinity personified, but an evil plot began to foment in Field’s brain.

  Field liked to be in charge, in control. Pandering to Judah’s railroad scheme didn’t sit well with him. It was a splendid idea—San Francisco was obviously not fading into the bushes any time soon, even when the gold vanished—but since Judah would insist on being the president of whatever railroad company they concocted, with Field doing all the actual work, this idea was repellant to him. Judah had not invited Field to partake of this railroad scheme right out of university, and the only reason he was allowing him to join the venture now was that he was the only fellow Judah knew who happened to be in California at the moment.