by John Brunner
“Gagged him?”—from Trumbull.
Woodley gave a harsh laugh. “Made him tongue-tied, anyway! Gordon got him to toasting our success. One thing I’ll say for Gordon: he can drink his share. Anyway, the old man’s dozed off, and with luck when he wakes up he’ll have forgotten he ever believed that idiot Moyne.”
“And about the servant girl too?” Hogan murmured.
“Oh, heaven knows.” But recollection of his embarrassing first meeting with Dorcas made Woodley want to evade that sort of question. He turned to gaze sternward. Yonder loomed a patch of red faint as the tip of a cooling poker; even as he looked, there was a flurry of sparks to emphasize it.
“She’s keeping up well,” he said. “Too well for my liking.”
“She’s lost her length since sundown,” Hogan contradicted. “She’ll lose more overnight… Quiet, please. There’s a bar just ahead.”
Here were treacherous shallows created as the meandering current spilled silt on the outside of the bend, which were never the same from one year to the next. He waited a heartbeat to make sure she was in her marks; then he tugged in rapid succession on the larboard full-ahead rope, the starboard half-ahead rope, and the wheel itself, giving the rudder purchase to swivel the steamer through a quarter circle in barely more than her own length.
Massive, magnificent, looking from shore at night more like a fairy palace obeying Aladdin’s genie than any mode of human transport, the Nonpareil groped for the deep safe channel. Trumbull and Woodley held their breath. There were no snags here, for “Uncle Sam’s toothpullers” had been back on the job long enough to keep them under control, but there was the ever-present risk of a floating log, or—worse yet—a sawyer, a tree with its root end carrying enough dirt to prevent it showing on the surface. As the dirt dissolved, sawyers might bob up from deep water without warning.
But there was no more than a whisper of ripples to add to the noises the boat was making as she swung tidily on to her new course. Trumbull gave a quiet murmur of approval, and even Woodley was sufficiently moved to clap Hogan gently on the shoulder.
“Think we’ll make it?” he demanded after a pause.
It was less than a tactful question. Hogan answered anyway.
“You make sure Pete keeps the engineroom as trim as we keep things up here, and we’ll romp home. And by the way,” he added, “what about this nigger you hired in place of Eb?”
“Parbury insisted—” Woodley began, then broke off and once more uttered a laugh, but it was unconvincing. “Hell, sounds like I take orders on my own boat, doesn’t it? Didn’t mean that. But it seemed like a fair way of calming him.”
Both pilots were aware that Parbury had not yet learned of Dorcas’s defection when the black engineer was hired. They exchanged glances which said, to their keen dark-adapted eyes but not to Woodley, that they would rather be winning a race under anyone else’s command.
“Howsomever,” Woodley went on in haste, “I spoke to Roy, and seemingly he’s been working hard and understands the job. I had a word with the reporter, too—Mr. Siskin—and he says he really did have charge of a steam crane by himself.”
“Dermot’s right,” Trumbull muttered. “They’re taking over everything.”
“Beat the Atchafalaya,” said Woodley drily, “and you’ll help keep ‘em out of one place for a while yet.”
They gave nods of sage agreement. If one thing united them with their captain, it was disgust at what Drew had done: admitted a colored person to the sanctum sanctorum. There should not be a pilot with nigger blood! Any more than there should be a woman pilot, or Chinese, or Redskin!
The band’s music had died away. There was no sign of it resuming. Hogan said, “Are people turning in?”
Woodley shrugged. “I guess some of the single men will carry on awhile yet, but most of the passengers have gone to their staterooms.”
There were some who had no staterooms to go to, but they were never regarded as worth mentioning in such a context.
There was a brief silence between them. On the larboard shore a few lights glimmered, and then there was a ragged group of explosions: four or five people letting off guns. Hogan grinned and reached for the whistle lever.
Meditatively Trumbull said, “I guess the reality of a race is never quite what you expect. First watch should be up when we draw level with the White Hall. I’ll take her then, but right now I got to go downstairs.”
When he had left, Hogan said, “Think it’s going to be smooth from now on?”
Woodley took his time over answering. “Depends,” he said at length.
“On—?”
“Tomorrow’s hangovers, damn it!” He hesitated again, then burst out with unprecedented frankness.
“Oh, hell! Parbury thinks he owns this boat! Gordon knows he owns it—except he doesn’t! You heard about his money being locked up in England?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, then!”—with renewed firmness. “And I sold my old boat to buy a fair and honest share in the Nonpareil! What did Parbury bring to her? A reputation, hollow as a blown egg! What did Gordon bring? Another goddamn’ reputation, for conjuring money out of thin air! Ain’t that what a financier does?” He gave the word a mocking pronunciation: fine-an-sheer.
“You didn’t mention someone who brought more than just a reputation,” Hogan said.
“What do you mean?”
“Doesn’t matter who owns a steamer. Doesn’t matter who ships freight on her, who clerks for her, who books passage. She goes where the pilot tells her.” Hogan sounded as though he were smiling; the dark was too intense for Woodley to discern his features.
“So?”
“I guess you have considerable stakes riding on this race” was the oblique response. Woodley snorted.
“Sure! And I’m not alone!”
“But right now we are,” Hogan said softly. “Nobody to hear me say this except you. You better listen good because I’ll never say it again. You’re going to have to forget about bringing other pilots aboard.”
Woodley’s voice became abruptly shrill. “Are you out of your head?”
“No, I’m coming to my senses.” There was another rattle of gunfire on shore and he tugged the whistle lever again. “I want to win this race. So does Colin. We’re the only two who know her vices. She’s unique. And in any case we don’t want hired help.” He stressed the term and thereby converted it into an obscenity.
“Shut up, damn you!” Woodley barked. “We’ll do as I—”
“Captain,” Hogan said silkily, “you insisted on signing me and Dermot to one-year contracts, which nowhere make mention of other pilots taking over. We’d like to win the race, but we shall be no worse off if we don’t. I guess you didn’t reflect too much on the fact that it isn’t done for pilots to make more than a token bet on a race they’re taking part in. The Guild don’t lay down strict regulations, but they’re informally observed. And everybody in the Guild, and everybody the Guild approves of, will know why and how come the Nonpareil didn’t quite win.”
He chuckled. Trumbull was coming back; his weight made the stairs cry again, and the same flash of wan light as before matched the swinging of the door.
“I’ll be back on watch in four hours,” Hogan concluded. “We’ll be some place around Baton Rouge. From there you can send telegrams to Zeke and Tom and Joe Smith, tell them not to worry after all. Think about it… Colin, you got our drift?”
“I guess so,” Trumbull answered. “And it makes good sense.” Ceremonially he laid his hand on the wheel and uttered the customary phrase, “I got her!”
Mopping his face, Hogan said as he turned to leave, “Got to do something about the lamp reflecting on that door!”
Solitary, Harry Whitworth prowled the decks of the Nonpareil. They were abnormally empty except near the bows, where a group of deckhands were whiling away time by improvising verses to well-known tunes like “De Las’ Sack.”
Normally, of course, there would have be
en—on the main deck at least—bodies stretched out all anyhow, and the same down in the hold if the weather was bad: people who could not afford cabin passage, sometimes whole families. They littered the smart boat like garbage on a slum street. Whitworth hated them. He far preferred what he found tonight. Everything was neater and tidier than usual, and neatness and tidiness were cardinal virtues in his universe.
He allowed himself only one slight irregularity. In a while he would be entitled to a rest period. He would ignore it. Watches on most Mississippi steamers were four hours on, four off, although there was an increasing tendency on the towboats to switch to six and six. Both were too short to suit Whitworth, who had slept badly since childhood and tended to look down on those who were not insomniac as either lazy or unfortunate. The most frequent exception to the standard schedule was a watchman’s routine of twelve hours on and twelve off, from dusk to dawn as near as made small difference. But that was a disappearing post. Old-fashioned, Drew still kept up the custom; wanting to seem progressive, Woodley had made no mention of it when drawing up a list of officers to be hired. Had the pay for a second mate on a brand-new boat not been far better, he would have gone hunting for another watchman’s job.
“Hunt for another job”—that phrase came close to summing up his career. He was forever grasping at opportunity; no one could say he let it slip by, though now and then his wife tried to. They saw one another infrequently nowadays. She lived in Paducah, near her folks; he was more like a boarder than her husband when he went there, so he kept his visits to a minimum.
Nobody could accuse him of inefficiency, he was sure of that. He was thorough, he was punctilious, he understood his duties and carried them out to the letter, and his few mistakes had each entailed a burning lesson; never to be so neglectful again.
Yet here he was in the second mate’s post when many men with less experience had been promoted to first, and not a few had bought part shares in the boats they worked on…
If the war had gone the other way, it would have been different.
That was his firm conviction. There was no other logical explanation for his plight. The Northern victors had broken down the fences surrounding the inferior type of humanity, which in its collective wisdom the South had erected. With the end of slavery those whom God had branded on their very hides had been released to carry their dirty habits, their disregard for the rights of property (and what greater infringement of such rights than depriving their former owners of their most valuable possessions?) and their foul so-called religion which bordered on black magic, into the heart of cities, into the homes of formerly respectable people, into professions that once were jealously protected by those who had created them. What had niggers invented? Some said the banjar, that instrument which all too often made the night hideous aboard a riverboat. But did they ever invent a steamer? Or a gun?
And his resentment did not stop there. He looked down on Dagoes, too, and on the slow-spoken Irish who chose to emigrate to the South because there were more Catholics here, and indeed on anybody who did not speak the English he had been raised to, the language in which the King James Bible had been couched.
He was still smarting at the fact that Drew had fired him because he objected to a coon being trained as a pilot. During Fernand’s apprenticeship he and the captain had argued constantly; Whitworth thought it shaming for a white man to be talked to that way, and had finally said so. Not only had Drew dismissed him, which was bad enough—now he had rehired Fernand. Incredible! Disgraceful! And it would be worse yet if by some mischance the Atchafalaya won this race… but that wouldn’t be allowed to happen. Couldn’t. Mustn’t!
Nonetheless, on the surface things had worked out well. Possibly the fact that he had witnessed Woodley’s humiliation by Fernand, yet never spoken about it to anybody else, had something to do with securing his present post.
However that might be, he had thought more and more about quitting the river, and during his latest refreshment in New Orleans had gone so far as to invest some of his hard-won capital in a stock-in-trade, which reposed in his stateroom against the risk that the Nonpareil might lose.
He saw no obvious reason why she should. But some people were so fallible! Parbury, for instance, around whom the whole enterprise revolved: what imp of Satan possessed him today? Not content to associate himself with a man who kept a self-confessed bum boy, not content to get mashed on a colored girl young enough to be his daughter, now he had set a nigger engineer to work alongside white men! It was disgusting! Even Corkran, for all he bore an Irish name, conducted himself with tolerable dignity on duty, though on shore his manners had been known to lapse.
Firemen with four hours’ nonstop shoveling behind them were emerging on deck, sweating and gasping and shouldering one another aside for a drink of water. Vic Steeples had come with them, just recognizable in the lurid light from the furnaces. Whitworth headed that way and accosted him.
“Say, what about that darkie engineer?”
Stretching enormously, Steeples uttered a reluctant answer. “I guess he warn’t lying when he said he knew his trade.”
“Uppity niggers shoul’n’t be taught a trade like that!”
“Guess someone shoulda told Eb that. But I’m surely glad we don’t have to work this trip with only three of us.”
“He standing the next watch?”
“Yeah, with Brian. Pete’ll be out directly.”
“He trusts him that much?”
“It’s like I said,” Steeples grunted, and with a cavernous yawn he moved away.
Fretful, disappointed because if any of the white engineers could find fault with Caesar it would likely be Steeples, Whitworth made a mental note to be around in four hours’ time and catch him going off watch, tell him to bunk down right there near the other blacks, not to imagine that because he was playing at white man’s work he was entitled to a white man’s privileges.
Too many niggers and immigrants taking bread out of decent folks’ mouths—that was the trouble with America today!
The distance between the boats had altered little since they left New Orleans; the gap, give or take a few hundred yards, represented the advantage stolen by the Nonpareil when she cut loose early. Not here, not immediately, but within a day’s run, there were places where her rival’s wake would no longer discommode the Atchafalaya, and superior skill in piloting would make all the difference.
That was why Drew felt renewed confidence as he strode the hurricane deck. For the river was nothing like a formal racetrack. Right now, for example, the Nonpareil was visible on an easterly heading across what the untutored eye might mistake for clear water. It was barely a foot deep; the headland here reached out treacherously beneath the surface and the channel bent around it like a hairpin. Therefore the Atchafalaya was making almost due west.
Glancing around in sudden alarm, Drew was relieved to find nobody watching him. It was not unknown for a passenger to ask why the boat was going the “wrong” way, and a conversation of that sort was the last thing he wanted right now, especially with someone who had bet on the race.
But the deck passengers were lying down where they could, while many of the cabin passengers had also retired. Barber, like some oriental idol, still presided at a long table scattered with cards, glasses and ashtrays, mulcting the survivors—including some who had the air of professional sharpers—with the skill that had carried him from his sleazy shack to the Limousin.
Paradoxically, though Drew never expected to admire his partner, he was more and more tempted to like him.
Cherouen, on the other hand, whom he wished he could admire, was proving a miserable customer. First there had been all that fuss about his machines; then the row with his nurse, who had sensibly fled; then the row with anybody who might have stopped her but didn’t… It had taken all Barber’s charm to persuade him that he ought to stand by his original decision and put up with the consequences. A good few drinks had served to firm the conviction, and at lon
g last the Electric Doctor was safely stowed for the night.
Perhaps it would not be a good idea after all to have him treat Susannah…?
But any man could act oddly under stress. He himself was aware of a change in his attitude: he could not stop running over points of detail he knew he had attended to, as though rehearsing them in memory could arm his steamer against the risk of failure. Why should he expect better of Cherouen?
For a little while Drew’s mind became solely occupied by perception. He saw, without reacting to, the dim Nonpareil crowned with red sparks, easing now behind the next headland, her image barred into segments by isolated willows at first, then partly obscured by a denser clump, then wholly hidden by cottonwoods, save for her chimney tops and their glowing stain on the sky. Around, he was aware of the lie of the land, the pattern of the current, the whole vast complex process which formed the Mississippi.
What in the world were puny humans doing, tackling this leviathan greater than any affronted by whalers, demeaning it to a mere convenience for gaining gold?
Suddenly he shuddered. He had believed he was remembering a poem he had read. Now it dawned on him that was untrue. His thought had welled up from within himself, as though he too had it in him to make a poem.
But the way it went over into words was not poetical as he understood the term. One could see that a modern poet like Mr. Whitman was following the example of, say, the Psalms, if with no great success. How, though, could the experience and vocabulary of a steamer captain be fitted for poetry? He dismissed the whole notion with a fierce effort.
Yet some regret lingered.
He knew the sensible thing to do was snatch a rest in case he was called on for a turn at the wheel. When Dorcas came aboard he had expected Fernand to take the boat out instead of Tyburn, in order to show off. Then when his mother showed up too…!
Oh, it was all most irregular! He wished he could afford the luxury of losing his temper over it.
But having made his bet with Barber he was constrained. He dared not risk upsetting Fernand, who one day was apt to be a better pilot than his teacher, if more highly-strung…