Blowing Off Steam

by Karen Mercury

  “But…” She looked down at his chest. “My former occupation. Do you want people saying your wife was…?”

  “I don’t care, Callie! How many poor lonely women in California have been hookers? Do you think it matters? They did what they could. They were resourceful!” Was she coming up with excuses not to marry him? She had called him “my love” before but had never actually professed love for him. Maybe she didn’t.

  Field was irritated at first when little Maurice popped his head up nearly in between them. But the galley helper chirped, “You love him more than pie!” and Calliope laughed indulgently.

  “Why, yes, Maurice. I did say that.” With limpid eyes she looked up at Field. “I do love you more than pie.” She held out her fingers in the shape of the box. “I do love you more than anyone alive.”

  Field felt as though in a soused haze as Calliope accepted the box from him. He was flooded with heavenly gratification when her eyes lit up, seemingly reflecting the blaze of the oriental ruby ring he had found in San Francisco. She allowed him to place it on her finger—thank God it fit—as he said, “It’s a red sapphire, much more highly esteemed than the blue sapphire. It’s from Burma, and I testified to its veracity with a blowpipe.”

  Calliope’s eyes widened. “You burned it with a blowpipe?”

  Field shrugged. “That’s how one can tell. Do you like it?”

  Calliope held it to her face so its crimson reflection rouged her cheeks. “I love it, Field. I love you.”

  He kissed her then, a wave of tenderness and love bringing tears to his eyes. Was it possible to feel more strongly for another person? Field realized he’d been waiting eight years—since his wife had died—to feel this passion for a woman again. He threaded his fingers into the silken blonde hair at the nape of her neck as she sighed into his kiss, clutching him almost with desperation.

  “I like pie better,” it sounded as though Maurice said, and they broke apart to see him staring at the mincemeat pies Chiao Kuo was putting into the oven.

  Calliope giggled and held her hand out to view the ring. “But what about Rushy, my dear fiancé? I don’t think he’ll take kindly to this. He does adore you so.”

  “As he adores you. I don’t see why it would change anything with Rushy. Don’t you enjoy our…diversions?” Field was struck clean to the heart at the sudden realization that Calliope might not want to continue canoodling with Rushy. He hadn’t thought about that. She might want to suddenly become prim and ladylike, a woman of society. She might not want to stand idly by while her husband fell to his knees and licked another man’s penis. He could understand that, but the idea of never humping his partner again just struck the fear of God into Field.

  Calliope laid her jeweled hand on his chest. “Of course I enjoy our diversions, my possum. I’m very eager to participate since it’s only us. The three of us. I don’t want Rushy to feel left out.”

  “Nor do I!” Field cried with relief. “Rushy won’t mind us wedding, as long as he can continue sticking his wick into the pot.”

  Calliope’s laugh was sheer loveliness. Field was enraptured by her honesty, her plain and simple enjoyment of the simple things in life.

  He gathered her up to kiss her again but was distracted by an odd sound. The constant, rhythmic sssoo haah, sssoo haah of the engine seemed…off. Pricking up his ears like a rabbit, Field stood at attention, his eyes fixed on the galley ceiling. The steam emitted from the escape pipes situated just fore of the calliope organ didn’t sound right, either.

  “That doesn’t sound right,” Field said ominously.

  Calliope immediately knew what he meant. “The engine? Go and check it.”

  Field did so after squeezing her hands reassuringly.

  And what he discovered nearly made his heart stop.

  Stan Sitwell was nowhere to be seen. Nobody levered the bars or checked the steam gauge. Field raced over and saw it alarmingly showing sixty-five pounds of pressure, when he knew only a few minutes before, when he’d left, it had been carrying only forty-eight.

  “Stan! Stan! Sharwood!” Field bellowed pointlessly for his fellow engineers. He was reaching for the speaking trumpet to shout something at Rushy—what, he wasn’t sure. Maybe warn him that his boat was fixed to explode. But as he did so, he took note of some activity up above, fifteen feet overhead.

  That peewee riceman balanced on a water pipe that fed into the boiler. And he had his hand around a valve that allowed cold water into the big, broiling tank.

  “No!” Field roared. He grabbed a few heavy bolts, wedged them in his pocket, and instantly leaped onto a transfer pipe, knowing he’d burn his hands. He could not have shot at the riceman, for a wild shot or ricocheting ball would create an immediate inferno. Instead he clung to a steaming pipe and tossed the bolts at the riceman. “What are you trying to do?” he shrieked. “Why are you trying to blow us all to smithereens?

  “I stop your race!” it sounded as though the peewee squealed. Right before a bolt bashed him in the temple and his eyes rolled up into his head. For a brief second, he resembled the stuffed lemur Field had once seen in a museum, clinging to the pipe with all his limbs curled under. He even fell like a monkey, his grasping hands the last to admit defeat before they finally went limp, and he tumbled to the deck with a thud like a bag of flour.

  All the while, the attention bell was furiously ringing, the cord pulled by Rushy in the pilothouse, telling Field to come to the speaking tube. No doubt he was wondering, too, why the engine sounded so off.

  Field had a choice—either deal immediately with the peewee, or climb up there and close the valve himself. The gauge now read sixty-eight pounds, so after swinging back to the deck and stomping on the riceman’s upper arm, he leaped into the brass work. He was so accustomed to climbing about there like a monkey himself, he was able to close the valve in a flash. But when he went to scramble back to the deck, the peewee had awakened.

  Greased lightning that Celestial thug was. He now stood upright gripping an oar with which he held down the safety valve. The boilers could stand this no more and Field took a flying leap, tackling the little man to the deck. The oar went sliding across the deck, and Field punched the fellow time and again in the head. Satisfying, resounding punches that alleviated some of his anger.

  But he had no time for this. With his arm through the back of the riceman’s high-collared coat as though he slung an enormous muff, Field strode with his baggage out the door and to the rail. He propped the flailing fellow on the rail and demanded, “Why are you endangering your boss’s cargo? Why would he send you here to blow up a boat that has thousands of dollars worth of opium aboard? Why—”

  The boiler blew then.

  Later on, Field wasn’t sure if he’d actually tossed the riceman overboard or if the force of the explosion had propelled the peewee. But the stylish Celestial was actually suspended in midair for a fraction of a second, a shocked face of horror glued to his features, before he was blown away horizontally toward shore.

  Followed by Field himself.

  Chapter Twenty

  Although Field had not come to the speaking tube, Rushy continued bellowing into it.

  “Field! Field! Attention! Attention!”

  Something was grossly wrong. After so many years piloting steamers, Rushy could sense when the pressure was off. Failing to raise Field on the speaking tube, which rankled Rushy even further, he stuck his head out the pilothouse window and shouted at some passengers near the texas to find either Rushy, Cincinnatus, or Stan Sitwell. He tried to inject levity into his voice so as not to alarm anyone.

  Standing at the wheel again, he rubbed his head in frustration. “I should’ve made it sound like I wanted to fuck,” he fumed. “That would’ve lit a fire under their heels. Get the whole damned boat up here to watch. Jesus H. Criminy. Racing and fucking at the same time. What’ve I made of my life? This life is scaring me pretty nigh into fits. I didn’t calculate this whole risky affair. I just wanted a gal from
the settlements! Someone to love me the way I am. And where’s my damned kids? I’m giving all my money to Field’s kid. He’s right. I’ve never met him. I want my own kids. Calliope would make a fine mama. Does she want kids, I wonder?”

  He was babbling on in this manner when the engine blew.

  The last thing he later recalled saying aloud was, “Could both me and Field have kids by Calliope?” What a ridiculous thing to be pondering on when his entire pilothouse was blown clear of the boat.

  It was a giddy, surreal ride that seemed to last much longer than the few seconds it probably took. Windows were blown out below Rushy, glass exploding at great distances, tearing outward in sheer clouds of tinkling shards mixed with plates, brass fixtures, and pieces of furniture. In his slowed-down vision of things, he even noted a wooden panel that must have been blasted from one of the stateroom doors, an exquisite, valuable painting of the Rocky Mountains by Thomas Cole sailing like a kite, floating on the air current at Rushy’s eye level.

  The windows of his own pilothouse were shattered inward. Glass cut his face and hands but otherwise he felt uninjured as he rose in his little rocket of a wheelhouse, like part of a Celestial fireworks display. He even had time to note how absurd it was that he continued to steer the wheel, seeing as how he was obviously not connected to the rudder anymore. At the summit of his ride, off to port the engine’s boiler sailed. It didn’t reach the apex Rushy himself had attained but shot out toward shore in a spectacular display of cannonball speed before hitting the water with a loud hiss.

  He even found the time, in a remote detached sort of daze, to admire the view from the summit. Clutching the pins of his wheel as items—Field’s journal, inkwell, a comb, boots, an opium pipe—bounced about the small enclosure, Rushy could see for miles over the tops of the willows and cottonwoods to some distant mountains where rainclouds gathered for a renewed downpour.

  The wheelhouse paused in its skyrocketing journey. Passengers splashed about in the muddy, littered current below, some clinging to sections of bulwarks, the hull, couches. As Rushy was directly above where the pilothouse had formerly been seated, he couldn’t see much of the actual destruction done in the engine room. But since the middle of the hurricane deck as well as part of the texas sat between the boiler and the pilothouse, more than likely some passengers had been wiped out as well.

  The descent was much more precipitous than the ride up. Field, Rushy thought in a flashing of an instant. Whoever had been standing closest to those boilers were no doubt dead ducks. Then the wheelhouse slammed back into its former position with such an impact the timbers blasted outward, like a puffy dandelion seed torn apart by a sudden gust of wind.

  Rushy tried to brace for the impact by crouching and clutching the wheel pins, plastering himself to it even with his sprained arm. When the small house hit the boat it was slammed so violently against the roof of the texas it burrowed several feet down. Rushy was jammed into the enclosure where the bottom half of the large wheel was normally hidden from view, a narrow box just big enough for the wheel and not much else.

  Which was a fortunate thing, because the pilothouse roof had collapsed, compressed like a layer of rock in a mine explosion. The wheel was crammed into the slot next to Rushy, squeezing him like a sardine in a can.

  * * * *

  After Calliope spat out great gulps of fresh water, she shook her head. She was floating on the river’s surface. Floating on her enormous oak cutting board.

  Gasping, she clung to the board and steadied herself. She floated in the midst of a clogged mass of people who foundered, shrieking, as though big birds would pluck them out of the water and carry them to safety.

  Chiao Kuo was one such who flailed nearby, and Calliope cried out, “Can you swim?” Her own words were muffled, her eardrums blown out by the blast. There was no room for a single other person on the cutting board.

  Apparently Chiao Kuo could swim, for her fearful eyes flashed only once before she stroked frantically toward shore, luckily only sixty feet away.

  Oh, dear Lord! What had happened? The last thing Calliope recalled was tossing some lobsters onto her board in preparation for separating the tails from the bodies. Then she wondered if she should be wearing her exquisite new sapphire ring. Would cooking ruin it? Would flour clog the gorgeous gold setting? Would—

  And that was it. That was the last thing she recalled before the mighty, powerful concussion wrenched objects and bodies from the galley. There were several endless seconds where giant timbers and posts exploded past her head and she didn’t know which way was up. She had the sensation of tumbling end over end, although she must have continued clinging to her board and now found the knife she’d been cutting with wedged an inch deep in her forearm.

  Items still rained down around her from the sky. Plop, a chafing dish. That sank immediately. Plop, a whole pig she had intended on gutting. That sank but resurfaced seconds later even closer to Calliope. Plop, part of a mural of the Rocky Mountains. Plop, a hand. A hand? Neat and tidy, as though it’d been cut off clean at the wrist.

  The hand didn’t sink, and Calliope wanted to get away from it. Easing her legs into the water, she gripped the board like a buoy and paddled with her feet toward shore. Tentacles of steam crawled across the water’s surface, shrouding struggling people, some who clearly didn’t know how to swim. Calliope bumped into pork barrels, liquor casks, boxes of raisins and soap, but the most frightening obstacle was a riceman corpse, already wrapped for burial, its innards stuffed with opium.

  This is Field’s son’s lifesaver. Calliope swiped a hand out in an effort to tow the corpse back to shore. Without ofuyung, and with most of the cargo they’d been hauling to Sacramento either ruined or damaged, Field would have nothing to send his sister next week. But it was a much too massive effort to clutch her chopping board and tow the corpse at the same time, and Calliope had to release it with a frustrated gurgle.

  “Can you swim well, my puss?”

  Field! Calliope whipped her head this way and that. Field had most likely been near the boiler when it blew—was that his hand she’d seen floating merrily by? “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine”—Field would say that even if he was missing most of his limbs, so it had no meaning—“so let’s get you to shore. Let go of the board and just climb on my back.”

  Calliope could swim fairly well when not clothed, but weighed down by her heavy skirts she was already growing fatigued from staying afloat. She was inordinately glad when Field’s head, sleek like a seal’s, appeared bobbing in the water between fingers of dissipating steam and both his hands grabbed her under the arms to hoist her on his back.

  “What happened?” Calliope spat out water as Field stroked to shore. “We shouldn’t have been racing!”

  “Not the racing, so much,” huffed Field, gliding past another floating ofuyung corpse. “That shrimp. Poured cold water. Into the boiler. Then held down. The safety valve.”

  “Don’t talk,” Calliope instructed, “Is Rushy all right? The only live person I’ve seen is Chiao Kuo heading for shore and a couple of the texas-tenders.”

  “I saw Tobias. Alive.”

  “Don’t talk.”

  When Field got a toehold on the river’s bottom and started to stand, Calliope slid down his back and sloshed toward the dry shore. Panting passengers sat among torn pieces of decking, timbers, and the idiotic junk they had chosen to haul from the water. Calliope even saw one nearly drowned fellow hotfooting it into the cottonwoods, staggering under the weight of someone else’s personal steamer trunk. She realized then. Her stateroom was amidships in the texas, right over the boiler. She would never see her daguerreotype of her sisters again.

  She clasped the lapels of Field’s jacket. “Where’s Rushy? We have to find Rushy!”

  Field pointed. “The pilothouse is still there.” He seemed to be trying to shake her off. “I’ve got to try and help more people.” He pierced her with his intent eyes. “Don’t. Move. Callie.
”

  “All right,” Callie lied.

  She fixed on his broad shoulders as he waded back into the river. Diving under a flailing woman’s arm, he towed her back toward shore, and Calliope finally looked to the steamer. The El Dorado had ploughed into a cove on the opposite shore upriver, choked with willow roots and overhanging moss, flames already streaming from the engine room. The pilothouse was blown forward, a smokestack lay over the port paddle box, and the forward part of the hurricane deck hung like the brim of a slouch hat. Men ashore were already chopping a willow to make an impromptu landing stage for women, but injured passengers still aboard might burn to death.

  Field helped three more passengers out of the river before they sighted the Cleopatra, never a more welcome sight than now. Steaming heroically, she was the loser of the race but the savior of the day. She anchored as close as was safe to the El Dorado and sent her firemen aboard to help put out the fire. Her skiff came to Calliope’s shore to take on any passengers who wished to continue to Sacramento, but in frustration, Field had already dove back into the water after stripping to the waist.

  “It’s my boat, Callie. I can’t stay here and watch her burn. Don’t move,” he commanded before vanishing under the waves that buffeted timbers, crates, and already less commonly, body parts.

  Calliope was horrified that he intended to swim all the way to the opposite shore while dodging all that floating detritus, but she could do nothing about it. She was acquainted with the Cleopatra helmsman, and she shoved aside a sobbing matron to board the skiff. “Leroy,” she said urgently. “Pilot Rushy Wakeman is still aboard that burning hulk. Every second we waste on these crybabies brings him one more second closer to death.”

  Leroy, as a fellow river man, seemed to instantly understand, and he began hoisting passengers aboard with unconcern, nearly flinging them over the gunwales. Calliope even manned an oar herself, nudging aside the matron with her ass and over-correcting the small boat in her zeal to reach the El Dorado.