by John Brunner
Joel stood a long while transfixed by the spectacle, his head ringing with such phrases, hoping he might remember them long enough to note them down for his next report. Eventually he looked down again, expecting to see Auberon and Josephine still arguing with Gordon. They had moved out of sight. But what he did see drove all thought of them from his mind.
The stage was about to be withdrawn. Leaving Louisette and her maid on the wharf, Arthur was coming back on board.
Abruptly beside himself with fury, he rushed down the stairs.
“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted above the roar of the engines as the pilot called for full astern.
Scowling, Arthur spat overside. “She’ll be all right. She has her maid with her, and plenty of money.”
“That’s my cousin you’re—”
“Cousin or no cousin, she’s a damned fool! I told her she wasn’t fit to come on this trip, but she pleaded, she wheedled, and finally I gave in. Now look what’s happened thanks to her pigheadedness! The Atchafalaya’s in the lead!”
“And that’s a reason for abandoning her when she may be in danger of her life?”
“Too late to do anything about it now,” Arthur said with a shrug, and turned to go.
Joel caught him by the shoulder.
“I won’t let you get away with this,” he promised between clenched teeth. “From now on I shall pillory you in every story I file, as the man who cares more about his money than his bride!”
He looked around for Auberon, in search of moral support, but he was not to be seen. His heated tone, though, had drawn the attention of a dozen other bystanders; they knew what he was talking about, and there were nods of approval.
Arthur’s mouth worked. He too sought someone to take his side, but by chance none of his cronies happened to be nearby. After a moment he beat a retreat, while the Nonpareil rounded bows-on to the current and went ahead full pelt.
To small avail. By the time she was square in mid-channel, the older boat was breasting Thomas Point with ten clear feet of water under her and the chance to run a dead straight course to Lobdell’s Stores before having to slacken speed again. And it was her turn to generate frustrating wash.
Having—like many others—found it impossible to sleep, Manuel crept cautiously along the main deck toward the bow. He had learned never to mingle with “respectable” passengers; however, from those taking deck passage he hoped to find out what was going on.
Luck was with him. He came unobserved upon Parbury, Woodley, Auberon and Josephine—the latter standing a little apart—and heard Auberon say, “I observe this delay has cost us six minutes. Had the Nonpareil made as good time in the present reach as did the Atchafalaya, she would still be astern of us, would she not?”
“Of course that’s so,” Woodley answered bluffly. “Anyone who says different is a liar.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that. Mr. Gordon has gone storming off in a rage because he believes I bet heavily on the Atchafalaya. It’s not true, any more than the slanders against Miss Var voiced by”—a meaning pause—“certain people are true! And I hope to hear no more of any such nonsense! I admit I did lay some money on Drew, back in April, which is doubtless what Gordon got wind of, but that was solely to ensure that interest in the prospect of a race was kept up. I was betting against myself. In the upshot I plumped for your boat as the likely winner. If you want my support when it comes to calculating actual times, you have it.”
Parbury’s face was etched with lines as deep as desert shadows. He said, “No use making claims like that. We got to pass her in our turn. I’ll get back to the pilothouse, I guess.”
Auberon turned to Josephine, offering his arm. “Ma’am, I’m much appreciative of the aid you rendered to my sister. Allow me to escort you back to your stateroom.”
For a moment she looked at him with a trace of bewilderment; then she acceded and they moved away.
Manuel judged it politic to do the same; one could never tell when these unpredictable gringos might lose their tempers because they were being overheard. He backed rapidly out of sight around the nearest corner.
And Joel, coming in search of Auberon to tell him about Arthur’s presence, bumped square into him.
There was a flurry of apologies, and by the time they were over, Auberon and Josephine were ascending the stairs to the cabin again.
Oh, let it rest for the moment. Auberon would find out about Arthur soon enough…
Looking more closely at the man he had collided with, Joel said, “Oh, you’re the musician, aren’t you? I guess I ought to interview you some time.”
Manuel, amazed, stood to attention. “You wish to interview me, señor?”
“Why not? You must know as much as anyone about—well, the way passengers behave on a riverboat, to start with!” Joel was very tired and also much distracted by his confrontation with Arthur; he scarcely knew what he was saying.
“Oh, I want to do!” Manuel exclaimed. “It is an engagement for when I am not busied with the music! You are a gentleman, sir! I shake our hands!”
Having with some difficulty parted from Manuel, Joel reentered the cabin—now once again deserted—and stretched out on a chaise longue. They were thundering toward Fausse Rivière, having covered 150 miles in less than nine hours. Even though most of the way so far had been in darkness, both boats were ahead of the record for the distance.
Spectators, passengers, owners, crews and bettors alike were getting splendid value for their investment of money and/or interest.
And what matter, Joel asked himself as he shut his eyes in the hope he would not oversleep the dawn—what matter if the Nonpareil had been overtaken? A few changes of lead would make for a more dramatic race.
And if the Atchafalaya did win, it would be a poke in the eye for that son of a bitch who’d married Louisette.
The rest of the night was a story of weaving back and forth in bends that became unexpectedly and sometimes frighteningly shallow, a summary of all the reasons why the Mississippi steamer had developed in the way she did, with a liner’s hull sitting on the draught of a scow. Names hung in the predawn air, full of memories and expectations, disappointed or yet to be put to the test. Fausse Rivière, testimony to a wrong guess, slid astern to larboard, opposing Prophet’s Island; what prophet—the explorer who said, “This will prove to be a river joining the greater river,” and when it turned out a mere bayou had to suffer the mockery of his companions? Waterloo recalled a terrible battle and Francisville a saint who would not even tolerate the killing of animals. Pleasant Harbor passed, and Morganzie, and Fisher’s Store, and Tunica—and then suddenly there was the fast clear reach, 204 miles from New Orleans, which in the memory of men still working on the river had not been there; formerly it had been necessary to swing southwest, due north, and almost due east in order to gain a few miles northward from Tunica. Therefore it was known by the same name in two languages: Racourcie Cutoff.
And a little higher there was another cutoff named for the Red River, which in turn was so called because of the red soil it washed out of its hinterland in time of flood. In turn, again, there was an island named for it: 215 miles from the start of the trip.
Behind this island was the other river, which bore a name now being made more famous even than it had been yesterday.
“Captain!” Fernand said when sunrise was painting the eastern sky.
Drew had not returned to his stateroom, but lain down on the leather bench, where he had slept clear through the last change of pilots. One eye opening, he muttered, “What?”
“Know where dawn will see us?”
“Where?”—in the tone of one who has seen too many dawns to care.
“Close as this boat has ever been to the river she’s named for.” Fernand shivered, although the morning air was already warm. “Kind of like an omen!”
Drew’s eyes were comfortably shut again. “I guess your mother knows more about omens than I do,” he grunted. “What I care abou
t is hard facts. Where’s the Nonpareil?”
“I see her smoke,” Fernand murmured. “I guess about three or four miles back.”
Drew sat up. “We gained on her?” he demanded incredulously.
Forbearing to mention how little of the credit belonged to himself, Fernand handed him the glasses that rested beside his mother’s crucifix.
“Thunderation, but it’s true!” the captain crowed a moment later. And in a fit of enthusiasm sounded a blast on the whistle before shamefacedly returning to the bench.
Where in a little while he dozed off again.
Friday… and the rising sun shone on a portion of the Mississippi where there were long-established settlements, comparatively close together. Yet already they were like mere notches cut into the aboriginal woodland, temporary roosting places for migratory man, perched clear of last year’s flood but perhaps not of this year’s.
But the eastward sky was exceptionally beautiful: a color symphony easing the velvet dark away.
Here, around Point Breeze and Black Hawk Point and Fairview Landing, there were some of the awkwardest bends on the river.
Under normal trading conditions a boat might well go slowly through here, pausing occasionally to consult her leadsman. During a race…
Sheer exuberance, rather than confidence, made Fernand signal full ahead as he gazed about him at the bright new day. Drew snored behind him; Tyburn would remain in his stateroom until a few minutes before nine, for it was his custom to take breakfast at the wheel—coffee and rolls brought by the texas tender. He was on his own.
Taking over at five in the morning, he had been amazed to discover what a lead Tyburn had conjured up from the Nonpareil’s check at Baton Rouge. Now they had a clear run until the coaling stop at Natchez, which would fall, most likely, around the middle of Tyburn’s next watch… though Drew himself would insist on tackling the delicate operation of sliding her between the flats, so they could refuel without needing to stop. He had done this on their earlier record-breaking run, with the same aplomb as when he had accepted Dr. Larzenac off the Franche-Comté.
Proud though he was of his achievement as a pilot, Fernand knew he was no more ready to imitate that kind of maneuver than to copy Tyburn’s flat-out rush past Baton Rouge, relying on his polemen.
Yet he was learning all the time. Something strange had happened to him since he first laid hands on a riverboat’s enormous steering wheel. He had learned to think without words, to divide his mind between the reflex pattern of controlling the steamer and the totally rational one that governed the rest of his life. Now and then he thought about one day owning a boat, and his mind rebelled at the idea of having to calculate freight charges and figure out duty rosters for his crew, because it was too much like keeping track of debits and credits for the Marocain Bank.
Yet he must not forget the precept Uncle Edouard had made the pivot of his existence! The more he traveled this astonishing river, the more he thought of the old man’s dictum that money and the Mississippi were alike, sometimes destroying, sometimes creating, according to principles which humans as yet had failed to comprehend.
Caught as he frequently was between two courses of action, as for example when he had to weigh the chance of grounding because there was an exceptional amount of cargo in the hold, against the fact that if he brought it to port quicker than expected he would surely secure more cargoes in future, he often found himself appealing to imaginary authorities. One was his father, who in his childhood had seemed tremendous and infinitely capable; another, Drew.
But the person on whom he strove to model himself was, increasingly, Uncle Edouard.
Why? Out of gratitude? That scarcely entered into it; whatever the old man had done had been guided by a degree of self-interest, at best. Out of jealousy of Richard and Eugene? Never! Fernand’s lot was now so superior to his cousins’, he wondered how he had ever been able to endure the whims and caprices of rich bored stupid idiots.
It had come to his ears that some of that group had been seen boarding the Nonpareil, including the former Louisette Moyne, around whose new husband a scandal was evolving. Gossip being such a popular pastime in New Orleans, from a servant’s chance remark a whole fantasy world could be elaborated in a day. But Fernand suspected that what he had heard was more factual than fantastic. Mrs. Imelda Moyne employed enough black staff for her to be a common subject of conversation, while her husband had behaved in most irregular fashion before and even after his wedding, not infrequently with colored mistresses. Why—?
The association of ideas abruptly swung his mind over like a spate finding a new cutoff. On the roster of people to whom he made mental appeal, why did his mother not appear? After all, she had turned up in what she must have regarded as his hour of trial…
He glanced at the crucifix on the windowsill. But he found himself unable to pursue that line of thought either. The moment he pictured his mother, that image was displaced by Dorcas.
Pangs of guilt flashed through his mind. He fought them valiantly, just as he had fought Drew’s most ill-tempered accusations of incompetence when he was a cub, not on the grounds that he had been right, but that no one could charge him with knowing he was wrong. Perhaps that was the proper duty of a mother: to interfere in her children’s lives for the best motives, regardless of whether the act led to the best outcome.
Proper or not, it certainly seemed to be the commonest. There had been long nights spent right here, when Drew watched and criticized and sometimes talked of himself, his half-brother—vastly encouraged on discovering how much Fernand had been told about him—and his sister-in-law and her family. He must be very attached to them; had he not made it a condition of taking Cherouen that Susannah be treated by him?
Yet he, even he, had often grouched about the way she treated her sons, like a broody hen protecting eggs, especially the one who couldn’t breathe without his aromatic medicine.
And what was life going to be like for Drew in old age?
The question struck like lightning from the subconscious level of Fernand’s mind. Thinking of his mother, he could not escape the concept “older”; thinking of Dorcas and right now marveling all over again because from the moment they met the two had behaved like friends, he could equally not escape the idea “I/father”…
And naturally enough he had to recall the precious night he and Dorcas had stolen, courtesy of Drew and Barber…
And last night Drew had lectured him, and—and…!
It came together suddenly. He knew what and why and how. This trip he had thought of as a prolongation of the adventure that had lured him out of the Marocain shop was not a continuation of anything. It was a first step on a new road. What now came to mind was a vision that made him shudder: of countless unknown employers, all white, all prepared to apply stricter than normal standards to a colored man, and then to double that because he was also famous.
And much of that would hold true for his marriage. The children he had by Dorcas would be little, if at all, darker than himself. They might of course have hair as crinkly as sheep’s wool. They might be slim with huge deep eyes, or round-faced and thick-lipped—
Never mind! What they were sure to be was in trouble. At the best schools—and a successful pilot could afford them—there would always be white children prepared to sneak behind the teacher’s back, to throw away a colored boy’s exercise or tear his clothes or call him such foul names that he broke down crying and dared not tell the master why.
But here was Fernand: at the wheel of the finest steamer on the whole damned river system! And his kids were going to do even better—spit in the eyes of the other kids, white or not, tell the teachers to teach the truth, go out into the world and tame it like a circus lion! Hell! For thirty years or more people had been laughing at minstrels dolled up in blackface. Wasn’t that long enough?
Wasn’t it time to laugh with and not at?
And why was he thinking about this anyhow when, according to all the novel
s he had read and all the plays he had seen, he ought to have been concentrating on nothing but Dorcas?
Because without falling in love with her he could never have learned to think this way, any more than he could have learned the wordless skills now ingrained in his hands and eyes without falling in love with this bitch of a river.
In the real world, all this time, he was smashing the golden path of the new day’s sunshine into magnificent fragments, rousing whole crazed roosts of shouting birds, frightening alligators into sluggish motion, enraging the engineers and firemen with his demands, annoying the stewards trying to lay tables for breakfast, amazing and delighting the passengers, and impressing the drowsy Drew as he yawned and stretched and got up off the bench. Sternward rose two gray plumes of smoke: one might be the rival boat’s, one the sign of a steamer Tyburn had passed around 4:30 A.M.
Having consulted his watch, still yawning, Drew peered under bushy brows through the forward windows. After a pause during which Fernand’s heart pounded worse than Dorcas could provoke, he said, “You’re laying into Black Hawk Point.”
“Yes.” There was no sense in saying more.
“Palmetto and Jackson’s?”
“Have to.” With a scowl. “I’d rather go by Island 118 and straight to Hoovers. I dasn’t.”
He waited for the Olympian verdict that was sure to follow. It never arrived. Drew merely grunted, stretched anew, and made for the stairs with some comment about “ ‘freshing up and getting coffee.”
Fernand relaxed with a gusting sigh. Then it occurred to him to check his own watch.
With a considerable shock he realized what Drew had omitted to say.
At this stage of the trip the Atchafalaya was twenty minutes ahead of her previous record.
And there was certainly no other steamer, Nonpareil or otherwise, within three miles of her downriver. Maybe five.