Downriver

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Gill was all right, smiling thinly, and taking stock of the flatboat. But Lame Deer was not. She crouched before the crude cabin, her whimpering children clinging to her, worry glazing her warm brown eyes.

  “The river devils have reached up from under the water to pull us to them,” she whispered. “We ride on top of the dead, over the waters that want to pull us under and hold us down. Ahhh …”

  Victoria reached the woman and began jabbering in some sort of Indian lingua franca, but Lame Deer only nodded, her face grave, and her gaze trailing the steamboat as it diminished far ahead and finally swept around a bight. The children remained stonily silent, as most Indian children did in a crisis.

  Gill unbuttoned his soaked shirt and wrung it, his grin returning as he surveyed the vessel.

  “Close one,” he said.

  “You think the pilot didn’t see us?” Skye asked.

  “Not a chance of that. You ever been in a pilothouse? You see the whole layout.”

  “It was deliberate?”

  “Couldn’t have been other; channel’s two hundred yards wide here.” Red squinted at him as he pulled the soaked shirt back on. “He got something against you?”

  “Not this big a something. Not the sort of something that would overturn a mackinaw.”

  “Marsh sure had something against someone, brushing us like that. What do you suppose he meant by that?”

  “Warning,” Shorty Ballard said, getting a grip on his tiller and steering the boat back into the channel where the current would be fastest.

  “Who’s he warning?” Red asked.

  No one could answer that.

  Skye thought he saw a wary look pass between Red Gill and Shorty, but he couldn’t fathom what was inspiring their caution. It puzzled him. Why would Marsh do that? The man didn’t want Indians on his boat, but that hardly explained it.

  Lame Deer lifted her soaked children onto the dry and sun-warmed planks of the cargo box, and there the two little ones rested solemnly while the sun pummeled moisture from their clothes.

  Gill found a collapsible leather bucket and motioned everyone to his front corner of the flatboat so he could scoop up the filthy water accumulating there. He couldn’t get much at a time, and Skye thought the sun would evaporate it faster than Gill could dip it out, but Gill kept working.

  Even though the sun shone brightly, a cloud hung over the boat. What had been a cheerful start down the river had deteriorated into silence and caution and fear. The bravado wasn’t working; Lame Deer’s fear was palpable, a tense terror that contrasted sharply with the quiet certitude and courage that had brought her so far from her home and tribe.

  Gill quit dipping and sat down. “If Marsh’s got something against you ’uns, me and Shorty want to know about it. This here’s dangerous country. Why’d he put you off his boat?”

  The question was aimed at Skye.

  “He put us off after we tried to help the Cheyenne lady,” Skye said. “We arrived at Fort Pierre, and without a by-your-leave had his mate tote the woman’s gear from the cabin and put her and her nags off. She’d paid in furs for passage to St. Louis, and Victoria, she got her dander up and we went to talk to him about it. I was thrown out of the pilothouse, and they put us off too.”

  Red shook his head. “He’s an ornery sonofabitch, but that don’t make sense.”

  Skye didn’t argue the point. He didn’t like being on any boat, helpless, under the control of others. He didn’t like being on the riverboat, and didn’t much care for the trip on the flatboat either, at the mercy of a pair of men he didn’t know and whom he suspected of being less than forthright.

  Skye figured maybe it was his turn. “What did you say you do for a living, mate?”

  “Rivermen.”

  “Where’d this flatboat come from?”

  “They built it at Fort Pierre, up in their yard north of the post.”

  “How’d you get it?”

  Gill paused, for the first time growing wary. He shrugged. “Deal we did with the company.”

  “And how did you get up here from St. Louis?”

  Gill grinned. “Forget it, Skye.”

  “Whose furs are these in the box?”

  “Them robes and pelts are ours, lock, stock and barrel.”

  Gill turned away. Shorty was frowning. Skye had the distinct feeling a lot was left unsaid.

  Skye tried another tack. “I think you’d better report this to General Clark, if that’s the man to talk to. Someone should be pulling that pilot’s license. That was a deliberate act, I think.”

  “Aw, Skye, it wasn’t nothing. Just forget it.”

  “It’s Mister Skye, mate. And it’s not something to forget. You’d better report it. Or I will.”

  Red shrugged, and once again Skye sensed there were things unspoken.

  “You just mind your business, Skye,” Shorty growled from the stern.

  Between the warm sun and the labor of crew and passengers, the flatboat dried out. Gill and Skye spent the next hour putting gear in order, coiling hempen ropes, checking the cargo box for leakage, mopping river bilge out of the boat. Shorty steered in the exact center of the channel, swearing profusely, a low monotone of cussing that Skye found inventive and odd. The women vanished into the cabin, and when they emerged Lame Deer was wearing a dry skirt and Victoria’s buckskins had been wrung out and smoothed.

  Skye wandered to the prow, peered into the water, and tried to put it all together, but he only ran into mysteries. Something more than Marsh’s ugly temper and powerful racial antagonisms had caused him to put the Cheyenne family off his boat; and the Skyes too. What was it? And what was this outfit’s real business? Why were Red and Shorty so secretive?

  He discovered a heavy stubble of beard on his face, dug a straight-edge out of his kit, lathered with a sliver of soap, and scraped carefully. He lacked a looking glass, except the rippling surface of the river, but his fingers served to tell him what surfaces had been missed. Victoria loved his smooth cheeks and she grew testy about his bristly facial hair. The little Cheyenne children, Singing Rain and Echo, as he called the boy, watched solemnly.

  “Bet you watched your father shave,” Skye said.

  The boy stared, and turned away.

  The boat creaked with every swell, but Lame Deer never quite accepted the groaning, and he saw her studying the planks, the oakum calking, the crudely joined corners, doweled together for the want of screws or nails. Often they were a hundred yards from a bank; a hard swim in swift cold water, especially when dragged down by doeskin clothing.

  They made another twenty miles that day and camped on a gravelly bar stretching out from an ash grove. Skye wished he had a horse to reconnoiter the country; they were vulnerable not only to predatory war and hunting parties, but also to bears, migrating buffalo herds, and wolves. He cradled his mountain rifle in the crook of his arm and hiked in his soaked moccasins across a grassy flat and up a ravine until he topped the bluff guarding the valley, and saw only a silent plain, undulating westward toward the sunset, shrouding its secrets. No Name patrolled before him, acknowledging only that he and Skye were bound by Fate, but not by affection. No Name ived by his inner lights, which Skye had never fathomed or changed.

  Skye felt incredibly lonely there, so far from other mortals. Loneliness was nothing new; he had been lonely ever since the moment a press gang had hauled him off the London Dock and stuffed him into a warship. He had been thirteen years old, and never saw his family again.

  This vast plain reminded him of the sea; desolate, hollow, but grand and ever-changing too. He hoped he might hear coyotes this night; he wanted life around him. He knew there would be deer and antelope and all manner of small creatures patrolling the riverbanks this evening, and maybe he would make meat. But in this twilight he felt not life, but a deadness, a forsakenness in this solemn and flat land without landmarks. He preferred the mountains.

  He found Victoria and Lame Deer boiling cornmeal. They would have corn mush again
, tasteless and dull but filling. It satisfied the belly, but not the tongue.

  Shorty and Gill insisted that people sleep on the flatboat at night, rather than on dry land, and maybe there was reason in it, Skye thought. When everyone had eaten from the mess tins, and done their ablutions in the brush, Gill herded them back aboard, and he and Shorty maneuvered the boat twenty or thirty feet offshore, and set anchors. Skye slept on a buffalo robe, wishing for soil which he could sculpt into a decent bed. The planks of the flatboat were unyielding. The bunks in the cabin were occupied by the women and children, luckier than he by virtue of sex and age.

  But the starry night passed, and even before dawn Shorty was stirring, and soon Red was too. They pulled anchor as soon as Shorty could see to navigate, and drifted through another humdrum morning, watching the plains march by, the bluffs change from tan to orange to white, the tributary creeks tumble into the Missouri, and the fishing birds wheel through the sky, dive for minnows, shrill their warnings, and flap away from carrion.

  Then, midday, they spotted the Otter. She lay crosswise of the channel, her deck tilted sharply, her chimneys askance and emitting no smoke.

  “Will ya look at that,” Red said. “She’s run aground.”

  “Hit a bar,” Shorty said, squinting.

  “Hit a bar and it twisted her around so that bar runs along her keel, looks like,” Red said. “They’re gonna need some lighters to clear that hold and float her over.”

  That’s when the six-pounder cracked, a puff of white smoke ballooning from its barrel even before the sound reached Skye’s ears.

  twenty

  Shorty Ballard ignored the shot and steered the flatboat straight ahead on a trajectory that wouldn’t come within a hundred yards of the marooned riverboat. Crewmen stood on the sloping boiler deck, but other people, passengers mostly, had splashed across a gravelly shallows to the left bank and stood on a knoll.

  Skye didn’t like it. “He means for you to stop and render assistance,” he said.

  “After what he done?” Shorty’s bellicose retort was intended to settle the matter instantly.

  “You’ll see your license pulled,” Skye retorted. Failure to render assistance was a grave matter.

  Red Gill grinned, and motioned to Ballard.

  “The hell I will!” Ballard spat. Skye sympathized. The wake of the riverboat had pitched Shorty into the Missouri and endangered his life. But Skye could see a deck crew charging the cannon, and this time with more than just powder. He nodded to Victoria, and both of them lay flat on the warm boards, as close to the plank side of the hull as they could. Lame Deer vanished inside the cabin, herding her children with her.

  Marsh’s voice, amplified by a megaphone, boiled across the water. “Gill and Ballard, bring that flatboat in at once!”

  “Go to hell,” Ballard yelled.

  Time slid by, while the flatboat approached the poin where it would pass the grounded steamer.

  “Bring her here!” Marsh bellowed. “Or face the music.”

  Shorty bristled. “Go to hell, Marsh.”

  The response this time was another crack of the cannon Skye watched someone with a fusee dip it to the touch hole Skye ducked and covered his head, knocking off his topper in the process. The ball crossed the bow and hit water near the right bank. Skye slid his head over the gunnel and stared. A crew was frantically recharging the piece.

  “Gill, pull over,” Marsh bawled. “Next time we won’t miss.’

  Red crawled back to Shorty. “Give me the tiller,” he said.

  “Hell I will. They won’t shoot a hole in a boat they need.”

  Skye lifted his head. “It will be cannister, and it’ll clear you right out of the boat.”

  “Then I’ll lie on the planks and let this sonofabitch drift by it’s in the current anyway.”

  They were opposite the riverboat now, and Skye heard the snap of small arms, and felt lead pop into the planks. He’d had it with this pair. They were up to no good. He gathered himself, crawled aft under cover, and then sprang at Shorty, catching him unprepared. He heard the pop of rifle fire, and then he landed on Shorty, ripping him loose from the tiller and landing on him in one swift motion.

  Red dodged sideways, not wanting a part of this, but Skye spotted a drawn Arkansas Toothpick in his hand. The blow knocked the air out of Shorty, who gulped for breath, gasping on the floorboards. Skye leapt for the tiller and stood up, braving the pistols of crewmen, and swung it hard toward the left bank. The flatboat had already passed the Otter. For a terrible moment the bore of the six-pounder followed him as the crew swung it, but then they saw the flatboat veer sharply, its skewing wake showing them the sudden turn.

  Shorty recovered but chose not to fight. Red, his furious gaze darting from Skye to the riverboat, crouched ready for action. And then he did an odd thing: He dug into a tackle box at the prow, and with his back to the riverboat, dropped his jug of Kentuck overboard.

  Skye mourned, but at last had an inkling of the business this partnership was in.

  He studied the riverboat, watching the six-pounder swivel in his direction; watching Marsh up on the hurricane deck watching him; watching the crew watching him. Everyone on that steamer had seen the whole business.

  Red slid his Green River knife into its sheath, and grinned.

  Shorty started cussing again, a nonstop, profane damning of everyone’s ancestors, parents, animals, connections, children, grandchildren, businesses, profits, and anything else that caught his wrath. Victoria was so fascinated that she crouched beside Shorty, blotting up locutions for future use.

  “Goddam,” she said, her face wreathed in joy.

  “Skye, run that flatboat into the bank there,” Marsh bawled.

  “It’s Mister Skye, mate.”

  The captain looked even more choleric than usual. Behind him on the hurricane deck stood the helmsman, hefting a rifle.

  A party of boatmen had stepped off the riverboat and advanced down a spit of gravel to the point where Skye was steering the flatboat, and in moments they caught the lines that Red pitched to them. Red eyed Skye, his gaze so odd, so twisted, that Skye couldn’t fathom what was going through the man’s head.

  Shorty oozed sheer hate, and Skye knew he had made an enemy, and when this pair got their flatboat back, Skye and Victoria and the Cheyennes would not be aboard.

  The flatboat bumped gravel, but the crew pulled it upstream to the looming riverboat. Skye stepped to land, and helped Victoria. The riverboat rode on a sandbar, canted prow and starboard down, stern and port side up, entirely in water. The gangway provided a bridge to a gravelly driftwood littered island, one of many separated by shallow flowage of the river, which formed a huge oxbow there. Even when unloaded, it would be a hell of a thing to float that ship and ease it out to the current in an area of braided channels.

  The starboard paddle wheel had shattered.

  “Skye, why didn’t you stop as directed?” Marsh bellowed

  Skye ignored him. Marsh knew perfectly well who had stopped the flatboat to render aid, so there was nothing to say not one damned word.

  “Trenholm, examine that flatboat and bring me a manifest.’

  The mate and two crewmen boarded, probed the packs of robes in the cargo box, poked around in the cabin, and emerged.

  “No manifest,” Trenholm said to the man above.

  “Then what’s in there?”

  “Nineteen bales of robes and pelts and some loose furs.”

  “Whose pelts?” That question was directed at Red Gill.

  “Reckon they’re ours.”

  “We’ll see. If you don’t have papers, they’re contraband.”

  “Contraband hell!” Shorty yelled.

  “We’ll take this to Gen’ral Clark,” Gill said.

  Marsh laughed. “You will, eh? Get those packs out of there and tow that flatboat around to midships and tie up. Get busy We’re losing time.”

  Skye watched, wondering whether Gill and Ballard would end up
with their buffalo hides when they got their vessel back. For that matter, he wondered whether he and Victoria would be stranded two or three hundred miles from anywhere.

  “You can’t do this,” Gill said hotly.

  “Get busy,” Marsh yelled.

  Crewmen from the riverboat swarmed over the flatboat hoisting the hundred-pound packs out of the cargo box and onto gravel. Lame Deer drew her children away, hurried them. across wet rock and settled them at a distance on a gravelly spit. Skye knew she didn’t understand any of this and was finding safety in distance.

  That afternoon sweating boatmen hoisted pack after pack of furs out of the hold of the Otter and into the flatboat, and then poled the flatboat to a point just downstream where the cargo could be unloaded on dry ground. There, the furs could be reloaded onto the flatboat and lightered back to the steamer after it had floated over the sandbar.

  The riverboat didn’t budge. The pressure of the current pressed it to the bar. Evening came, and still the boat didn’t float free. Crewmen built bonfires downwind, and continued to lift cargo out of the hold through the twilight and into darkness, while Marsh paced his hurricane deck furiously, emanating rage but saying nothing.

  Ballard and Gill, helpless against this armed commandeering of their boat, glared at Skye, who was the author of their misfortune, and Skye figured he and Victoria would be walking to St. Louis when all this was over. Ballard cussed nonstop, softly, profanely, witheringly, his wrath washing over Marsh, Trenholm, every deckman in sight, as well as Skye and Victoria. Skye wasn’t worried about him: a man venting his spleen in such fashion was less dangerous than one bottling it up, like Red Gill, whose silent assessing gaze hid calculations and bitterness.

  His stomach told him it was time for some good biscuits and corn, but no one started a meal. Marsh paced relentlessly; his mate, Trenholm, oversaw the operation, the steersman stood at the pilothouse, rifle in hand, and the crew worked silently, saying nothing about food or rest under the palpable rage of the master.

  Then, when the flatboat was poled away with yet another mound of peltries, the boat ground against gravel once, groaned, creaked, and floated over, gradually righting itself. The crew anchored just below the bar but well away from shore, just downstream from the heaped cargo on the gravel.