The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “He’s underage,” said Everett when Cole presented the marker for three hundred dollars and demanded payment.

  “If he’s old enough to sign his name to a debt, he’s old enough to pay it,” said Cole, sweet, cheerful, insistent.

  Everett was, like all husbands in the late stage of his wife’s pregnancy, overemotional. “I have a sick child aboard: I don’t have time for this. Get out of here, sir, or I’ll apprise your mother of the mistake she made hatching you out of that vulture’s egg. Count yourself lucky I don’t bring countercharges! Corrupting a minor! The theft of lollipops from babies!”

  Cole smirked. “Matter of fact, you’ll find I’m pretty well liked around here. . . . You bring your lawsuit. I take it you people have plenty of respectable folk upriver ready to give you character references? If so, my uncle the judge would be glad to read them over . . . though I heard you ran into a spot of trouble. That right?”

  Everett looked Cole up and down with open disdain. Gone were Cole’s hick hat and jacket, thrown over the boat’s rail in a flamboyant gesture of swaggering, gloating vanity. From underneath them had emerged a vain, expensively dressed brat.

  “The Devil marked your cards from the day you were born!” declared Elder Slater, brandishing his gun, but Everett waved him away. Like Slater, he longed to puncture the puffed-up arrogance of this low-life local dandy, but he knew there was no point. He recognized a professional when he saw one. Cole had seen Kookie coming. There was something premeditated and calculated in every move he had made. Somehow he knew of the difficulties they had encountered upstream. In short, Cole knew the strength of the hand he had to play. Here was a crooked gambler, and a gambler’s only instinct in life is to win.

  Everett closed his eyes, thought himself into the character of the river gambler who had come aboard back in Engedi: wily, wordly, worming . . . “Like it or not, sir, I lack the luck to have three hundred dollars. I’m short that sort of spondooly. I barely have thirty. Won’t dirty your shirt pocket with thirty. Let us evolve—solve our dilemma. Say we forget all about this?” Crew reached to tug the IOU out of Cole’s hand, but Cole was too quick for him. “You’re a player, yes? You want to ride the river, yes? Plucking new suckers every night? A gambling booth on deck? Discreet. Be sweet. What’s a paddler without sport, I say? To my way of thinking, three hundred is the purchase price of a prime pitch aboard the Sunshine Queen.”

  “And I say double or quits!” Loucien Crew swept into the decayed stateroom with Elder Slater at her shoulder. The preacher had been telling her the bad news. In a flame-red dress, prodigious, wild-haired and raging, she was more alarming than any hellfire preacher. “I’ll bet you can’t run faster than a bullet!” she threatened, pointing her pearl-handled pistol at Cole’s head. “That’s my bet. Now you prove me wrong and you get twice three hundred! Start running!”

  The gambler’s smile stayed wedged in his mouth, like a harmonica. He flicked his forelock of soft dark hair. “You don’t want to do that, lady. My uncle’s the—”

  “Oh, but I do want to do it, young man! I crave shootin’ all your kind. It’s a crusade o’ mine. Some people it’s rabbits. Some folk it’s roaches. Me it’s gamblers.” And she actually cocked the pistol.

  Everett stepped between the two. Cole’s cronies were even now watching from the wharf, erect as prairie dogs, spellbound. His imagination pelted ahead toward disaster. “Lou! I think this is a time for diplomacy. A little compromise!”

  His wife glared at him. “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I say? I won’t have gamblers on board!”

  Cole, as smug as ever, baring his white fender of perfect teeth, raising one sardonic eyebrow, reached over Crew’s shoulder, and shook Loucien’s hand, pistol and all. “Double or quits, did you say, ma’am? I’ll settle for double or quits. I like a game worth playing. What’s yours? Cribbage? Snap?” And he allowed himself a snort of laughter that made Kookie (curled up under the tables nearby) beat his head softly on the floor.

  “I know cards,” said Loucien with sudden icy coolness. “I got plenty chance to learn. My first husband was a gambler.” And she made it sound as bitter as any words ever spoken by a wronged wife.

  Never in all their acquaintance had Loucien spoken of life before Olive Town. Not even to her husband, Everett Crew. It was a locked room, a previous address she had torn out of her address book. Now the sight of this snickering cardsharp sparked such raging recollections that the memories spilled out of her, a frozen river thawing, a flood of incoherent words.

  All those years spent married to a gambling man.

  His endless excuses for being short of cash; the sudden lavish gifts whenever he got lucky.

  Things unaccountably missing from around the house—furniture, clocks, wedding presents that turned up in the pawnshop window.

  Arguments with the landlord; moonlight flits to another town to escape the unpaid debts—debts they never shook off.

  Anger—his everlasting righteous anger—because she did not understand him, because she could not make ends meet, because she whined, because a man needs a bit of excitement, a little flutter now and then. Her gloomy face had soured his luck, he said. The way she had let herself go: it was no wonder he preferred to spend time down with the backroom boys and pretty barroom girls . . . Lurline was the woman he should have married, he said: Lurline Monteverdi, queen of the gambling tables.

  Loucien’s past continued to pour memories down on her head, like a burst water tank. The debt collectors at the door at three in the morning. The grocer refusing any more credit. All these horrors she tried to describe, for the very first time since they had happened.

  Her husband’s certainty that every other cardplayer was a crimp and a cheat.

  “Finally he tried it himself,” said Loucien. “Bought a book mail order: 100 Ways to Cheat at Cards. Had it in his pocket the day someone shot him for laying down five kings.”

  Cole’s grin was still pouched in his cheeks, as big as a squirrel’s store of acorns. Everett tried to put an arm around Loucien, but she shook him off. Her dead husband’s crimes went on piling up around them, till it seemed the boat would founder under their weight.

  Debt collectors on the day of the funeral, pushing past mourners to reach the furniture, off-loading the food onto the floor so as to carry away table and chairs. After that: nothing left in the house to eat.

  “I went searching—clear through the place. Went looking for some clue, some hint. Something to remind me of the reason I married this man. Ever. Loved him. Ever. Felt something good when he came through the door. Know what I found? Gambling markers and IOUs, that’s what I found. Bills shoved outa sight so I wouldn’t see—huh!—so he could go on pretending the next game would make him rich.

  “When the landlord came to throw me out, he had a newspaper in his paw. Them days, I couldn’t read. So I got him to read out the want ads. “Mail-Order Brides.” Next day I caught the stage—for some place in Oklahoma didn’t hardly exist; to marry some Swedish baker—sight unseen. That’s what gambling did for me. And every day of my married life, leeches and horseflies like this . . . this . . .” Loucien took a swipe at Cole, but he ducked. “Every day these bloodsuckers sank their teeth into him, plied him with whiskey; took his money and his markers and his soul and his common sense. . . . Might as well have taken the face off his head, ’cause I didn’t know him no more. When I put that man in his grave . . . felt like burying litter.”

  Kookie, arms over his head, pulled his face so hard into the floor that the wood grain impressed itself on his forehead. A stone chisel seemed to be chipping a monumental heart into his chest: a heart, spade, diamond, and club, and underneath the words I WILL NEVER, EVER BET.

  Everett was inclined to take the pistol out of Loucien’s hand and shoot Cole himself. Instead, he simply withdrew his offer of a gambler’s booth aboard the Queen. “I find I don’t care to bring rats in among my family,” he said, and the whole of the Bright Lights Company knew that they were inc
luded in that family.

  Cole was still wearing that imbecilic grin, fanning himself with the marker for three hundred dollars. “A new wager, then! Double or quits, like the lady said! A race! A river race! You win: you get this plus three hundred more. I win, I get to keep the Queen.”

  No one in the saloon spoke. No one said yea or nay. There was a general understanding: this was where Cole had been heading right from the start.

  “Just a hunch. Is that your vessel moored up on the wharf?” asked Everett.

  “The Tula-Rose? Yah, she’s mine.” Cole ran a hand over his mouth, struggling to keep from laughing out loud. Taking out his wallet, he unfolded another sheet of paper and wrote out the deal, using a fancy gold fountain pen. Crossing to the potbellied stove in the corner, he wiped a hand down the soot-blackened wall above it and returned to the table to press his palm print down onto the sheet of paper.

  “Cole Blacker,” he said, beaming around him, snatching Everett’s hand and shaking it. Now both their hands were dirtied by the deal. “A river race. Just like the old days, eh?”

  “How would you know about the old days, boy?” asked Benet with icy composure.

  But Cole “The Hand” Blacker was tucked up safe inside his good opinion of himself. He swaggered ashore over the gangplank, arms outstretched, conducting his giggling cronies, who had started up singing:

  “For he’s a jolly good fellow,

  For he’s a jolly good fellow . . .”

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Day at the Races

  Easy come, easy go,” said Everett Crew. The silence snapped like old elastic. “We started off stranded, and now I surmise that the Bright Lights Steamboat and Theater Company has just run aground again. I hope that everyone . . .” Then he looked around him at the people whose lives he had disrupted—Medora, Max, Miss May, the Dixie Quartet—and his speech, too, foundered.

  “But we might win!” said Kookie, crawling out from under the table. He shriveled and withdrew as a dozen pairs of eyes turned on him. The story of Loucien’s past life seemed to have filled the saloon like smoke, and they were all choking on the blackness of it.

  Loucien herself came to the rescue. She took a deep breath. “Kookie’s right. We got two thirds of a wheel, at least. That’s two thirds more than we useta! Let’s ask Elijah if we stand a chance. He musta seen riverboats race when he was a boy.”

  But nobody did ask Elijah. Sometimes hoping for the best is better than knowing for sure. Anyway, no one had much confidence in the opinion of an antique boiler man with a defective memory and a sorrowful countenance. Instead, they did what they had come to Blowville to do: wrapped up Tibbie Boden in a blanket and carried her to the doctor, unwrapping her there like some antique heirloom they wanted valued. The doctor’s office smelled of carbolic soap. The doctor did not appreciate sick people bringing their ailments into it and being sick on the floor. He gave Tibbie quinine, calomel, and a tartar emetic and advised cold baths. Three made her sick and the other made her cry, even before there was a bathtub in sight. He also advised a period of convalescence at the sanatorium in Sedalia, away from the river. Away from his office.

  “And what do you get in one of those places?” demanded Miss May March. The children gave a shudder, remembering being hit with such questions in school. (“Do you think there’s a right answer?” Kookie whispered to Cissy.)

  “Healthsome food, good hygiene, competent nursing,” said the doctor, washing his hands in a basin.

  “Well, I can give her that without trekking all the way to Sedalia!” Miss May March enfolded Tibbie in her blanket again.

  “Couldn’t I just go home to Papa?” whimpered Tibbie, still thinking of the cold baths.

  “Not till the diphtheria’s past, dear.” At which the doctor shot up out of his chair like a distress flare and ordered them out of his office. The sweating sickness was one thing, but diphtheria he wanted nothing to do with. There proved to be one advantage, though, to finding a doctor with a fear of illnesses: he forgot to write out a bill.

  George, meanwhile, went looking for a barbershop. Even before he found one, he had gained a fair picture of the situation in Blowville. The whole town seemed to be owned by the Blacker family: he passed the Blacker Forge, Blacker’s General Store, the Blacker Livery. . . . The local barber filled George in on the rest.

  Cole was the youngest member of the Blacker dynasty, and the only one without a job. He would disappear for months on end, then suddenly reappear, hinting at dashing-like adventures and smelling of shady dealing. He might be the black sheep, but he was also an only child and sole heir to the Blacker fortune. Ever since babyhood he had been spoiled with extravagant presents and pats on the head. His every fad was indulged, every crime excused; every lie he told was believed, so his relations thought of him as a genius in the making.

  All plans were abandoned by the Bright Lights to visit the Blackers and describe what their darling Cole had been up to higher up the Numchuck River. What was the point in telling doting parents that their son had rooked respectable citizens out of their savings—cheating, stealing, and hustling his way through the riverside communities like a fox stealing chickens? What witnesses could they produce? Nobody trusts actors: they have a reputation for exaggeration and making things up. As Loucien said, “How would you like a pack of miscellaneouses turning up on the doorstep, telling you your darlin’ little boy’s a shyster and a thief?”

  “They may know already in their heart of hearts,” suggested Curly. “Parents generally have an inkling.”

  “They also have a knack for denying it,” said Miss May March the schoolteacher, speaking with the voice of experience.

  “Just think, folks,” said Loucien brightly. “There’s three hundred dollars at stake here. There’s Tibbie’s medicine to pay for, fuel and groceries to buy, and nothing much in the kitty. Three hundred would boost funds nicely if we won.”

  No one else there could have dared to say it: it had to be Loucien.

  “And if we lose, I say we put notices in all the newspapers upriver of here telling his victims exactly where they can find Cole ‘The Hand’ Blacker,” said Chad Powers with a degree of venom they had never seen in him before.

  “Lose?” said Cissy, pulling herself up tall. “That’s not Bright Lights talk, Mr. Powers. We never lose. We just mislay our luck for a space.”

  So all of a sudden, the race was on. All of a sudden, everyone was finding optimistic things to say about the Sunshine Queen—so small and light—and what good publicity it would be for the Bright Lights—and how glad they were about that little Scottish engineer and the renovations. . . . Not a soul spoke of why they were having to race. No one suggested throwing Kookie to the wolves, leaving him on the quayside with his gambling debt and a whiskey headache. He was family, after all.

  Elijah, asked if he had ever seen a steamer race, scoured around his coal scuttle of a brain and came up with a few dusty recollections. “They stripped down to the bones. If it weren’t nailed down, it went. Course the engineer was the man. Make or break. Watching the traps; keeping the levels right in the traps.” To almost everyone, Elijah’s reminiscences were quaint musical nonsense. But Chad Powers squatted at the old man’s feet, notebook open as if to catch and press the petals of these ramblings between the pages and preserve them forever. “Pine knots are all well and good, but if you’re all steam and no water . . . well, you start in St. Joseph and end up in hell,” said Elijah. “Secret is to make the river lend a hand—every mud bank, every little ’striction pushing the water on through.”

  It was Chad who borrowed the canoe so that Elijah could reconnoiter the course. It was not easy, though, to get Elijah into the stern of the canoe. Cissy (whose lame pa often needed a helping hand) helped him down off the wharf. Somehow she found that she was in the canoe herself, sandwiched between the two men—the inventor and the boiler man—as Chad paddled the course and wrote down what Elijah said about it. The currents and mud bars, the plants on
the bank, the height of the levees—even the breeds of fish—seemed to tell the old man something. Luckily it was Friday, and Elijah tended to remember things on Fridays. Less luckily, his mind was not on the job. With one gnarled hand peaked over his eyes against the glare, he peered around him as the river slid between high escarpments of yellow sandstone. It was a stretch of rare beauty after muddy miles of sparse brush. Whenever the sun escaped the clouds, it turned the cliff to gold. High above them, overlooking the gorge, with a view down two miles of river, was a vast mansion of white clapboard and yellow brick, its windows aglitter with sunlight. Steps had been cut into the golden escarpment, which zigzagged down to the water’s edge. At the bottom stood a derelict shack that the floods had reduced to a matchwood fishpen.

  “Well, look at that,” said Elijah. “There’s my place.”

  Cissy’s heart ached for Elijah. It had never been much of a shack: now it was uninhabitable. No wonder he had ended up living aboard the Queen. “My house got wrecked too,” she said, and kissed the big veiny hand resting on her shoulder. She had only just remembered about the store being demolished. Up till then, Elijah’s sieve of a memory had been a puzzle to her. Now she realized: it is possible to forget the most enormous things when life gets busy.

  Back at the wharf, Chad and Kookie scoured the woodpile for pine knots; they burned hotter and brighter than ordinary logs because of the resin in them. It was Chad who supervised the removal of every fixture, fitting, and piece of luggage that could be carried ashore. When Medora protested that she could not possibly leave her camera equipment on the wharf unguarded, Crew told her that was fine because he would be leaving the women and children on shore, for safety.

  Cole Blacker’s paddle steamer, bought with the proceeds of his scams upriver, was a big vintage craft, creamy with lavish layers of new white paint, lacy with metal filigree. Golden steam whistles sprouted from the pilothouse, and two Union flags as big as tablecloths flew one on either side of the paddle wheel. The rivets in the twin chimneys were as smart as the buttons on a lady’s boots. The crew (though they were simply Cole’s drinking friends) had on uniform maroon overalls, and Cole Blacker, when he finally put in an appearance, was dressed somewhere between an admiral and a ringmaster.