“Yes, ma’am.”
“Sam, is it?”
“That’s right.”
“I heard you kind of backed into the steamboat business.”
“I seem to back into most things.”
“Don’t your wife feed you?”
He looked down at his stomach. “I like being light on my feet.”
“Well, if you’re a real steamboat man likely the kitchen’ll fat you up.”
He went down to give the message to a testy and red-faced Bit, and coming out of the engine-room door he bumped into Charlie Duggs. “Hey. I’ll see you later. I’m supposed to be introducing myself around.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Duggs said to Sam’s back.
He met busboys and waiters on the second deck, several members of a large black orchestra, the concessions master, the chief cook, the head steward, two white musicians standing around listening to the black men practice, and the Wellers, who were coming down the starboard staircase from the Texas deck. With them was a big-shouldered boy of about fifteen, composed, wearing a sport coat, one hand in a pocket. They walked together to the end of the enormous dance floor. Sam looked back over the glossy planks. “How’s it going?”
Ted Weller pulled a handkerchief and mopped his head. “Not so good. The captain let most of the white orchestra go and picked up the black fellows over there to play the main night trips. He said he had to go with what the dancers liked.”
Sam looked back toward the bandstand. Earlier that year, he’d heard, Captain Quincy had taken the Moonlight Deluxe out on a harbor cruise downtown. He put a good white hotel orchestra on the main dance floor, a first-class group in tux and tails, and a Negro jazz band upstairs on the dim, open hurricane deck. Halfway through the cruise everybody was dancing up in the open night, and the main dance floor was nearly empty. That pretty much said it all. “The sound gets in your feet, all right.”
“Captain says if we hit some towns that won’t listen to colored music, we can slap together about seven boys for a dance trip. But the whites will only play the afternoon runs when nobody dances much anyway.”
Elsie settled one hip against a bulkhead. “Ted can play piano for the black band if the captain lets him. He’s figured how they cut the melody loose from the time signature.”
“What’ll you do?”
She shrugged. “I could sing with the day band, you know, and even with a black band if it was okay. I’d sing with them steady if it was up to me, but in some of these towns, you know how it is. Nowadays I’m doing laundry and setting out tablecloths on deck three.” She put a hand on the top of the boy’s head. “Our son here plays a mean alto sax, but now he’s in the boiler galley passing coal.”
At the mention of his name, the boy stuck out his hand. “Hiya. My name’s August.”
“Hey, bud. Stay away from those boilers.” Sam looked in the boy’s eyes and saw that he was smart, maybe the kind of kid who breathed in knowledge and exhaled accomplishment.
“Aw, I’ll be up on the bandstand again someday.” He ran a hand over his slicked-back blond hair.
“You play with the big orchestra?”
“They’ve let me sit in a few times a week. I can sight-read real well.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “In your spare time maybe you can teach me.”
At the midship bandstand the orchestra struck up an embroidered rendition of “Frankie and Johnny,” mostly in a straight dance rhythm but with the beat and melody disconnecting in the repeat. The music was good. Sam could feel the notes ride up his shinbones into his hips. It made him think of the barrel houses next to Storyville, which more than once he’d stopped into for a beer and a lookaround. The band warmed up like an engine, getting better at what they were doing with each measure, the big piano holding everything together. “Some stuff. Kind of snappy for the excursion trade.”
A boat whistle sounded in the canal and Ted pulled out his watch. “Nowadays most dancers like whatever’s hot stuff. Ten years ago it was ragtime and cakewalks. Makes you wonder what they’ll like in fifty years.”
August’s eyes lit up. He reached over and popped his father’s left gallus. “It’ll sound like a thunderstorm in an oil drum.”
THE ENGINEER was warming up the machinery on a slow bell, the paddlewheel treading water, the boat doing a dreamy two-degree wallow at the dock. Then a big deep groan of the whistle rattled the dance-floor windows, the lines were cast off, and the Ambassador ascended the canal’s flat greasy water toward the Mississippi River locks. By early afternoon she had come out into the chocolate chop below Algiers Point and was stretching her legs against the current, paddling in toward the Esplanade Avenue wharf. Mrs. Benton maneuvered around, brought her in slowly next to the dock, the hull sliding to a stop without a bump, the deckhands scrambling to catch the bollards with their lines before she drifted back out.
The boat’s advertising had announced the point of departure for the night’s trip, a hard-to-reach landing instead of the more popular wharf at the foot of Canal Street. The captain had called it a shakedown, a trip to make sure the machinery was up to the big river.
Sam was sent down to watch the first customers hustle up the wide stage plank. The captain drew him aside on the main deck around six o’clock.
“Son, these New Orleans crowds aren’t so bad. It’s a good-time town. But if someone tries to come on with a baseball bat, a belt knife, or you spot a pistol in someone’s waistband, you tell them you’ve got to borrow it until we land again.”
“What if they won’t turn it in?”
“Then you kick the son of a bitch into the river.”
“What about if I see someone bringing on liquor?”
The captain leaned close, frowning. “Hell, son. That’s what we sell setups for. Once we leave the bank we’re sort of a separate country.”
“I got it. Anything else?”
“Keep a lookout for that woman.”
“What woman? Aw, you think she’d be crazy enough to show up?”
The captain looked away. “You don’t think she’s crazy to begin with? Stealing kids and all? Maybe crazy and stupid to boot.”
“I’m kind of forgetting what she looks like, already. I just saw her for a couple seconds.”
“Keep your eyeballs rollin’.”
And he did, trying his best to remember the old woman in the fitting room, fixing the brief observation in his mind, the missing tooth and unwashed hair, the shears poised over the child’s scalp. He had to remind himself that his memory was part of the reason he was on the boat to begin with.
LATE IN THE DAY it was still hot. Sam stood on the wharf and directed jostling couples up the stage plank to the ticket booth on the main deck. The calliope began gargling, the high notes singing flat until the whistles warmed up. Fred Marble, the pianist with the black orchestra, wearing a slouch hat and gloves against the flying steam, tickled out “Ain’t We Got Fun” on the roof, the instrument’s wincing notes sailing upriver over the French Quarter. Couples in their twenties and thirties began showing up, then what looked like a small men’s club, everybody in seersucker and straw boaters. For the most part, people were well dressed, the young women in thin, drop-waist dresses, the men in summer suits. One older man dressed in khaki shirt and pants carried a sheath knife on his belt, and Sam relieved him of it, promising he’d get it back at the ticket booth when the boat landed. One boy carried a sort of cane as thick as a chair leg, which he gave up grudgingly. The calliope music stopped with a yodel, and out of the long curving line of open windows above him the band began to pour a thumping-loud rendition of “When My Baby Smiles at Me” in a rattling-good dance tempo, the music coming down on the crowd like peppery candy for the ears. Customers began to back up on the broad stage plank, and as departure time drew close they were stacked three abreast, grinning and craning their necks at the big white apparition. Sam palmed a nickel-plated counter, and when he checked it read 1,255. Four deckhands shuffled down to stand by their bitts and the boat’s steam whistle let out a deep, river-filling chord. Ralph Brandywine would pilot the Ambassador through the city river traffic, and he leaned out the wheelhouse window holding a megaphone and yelled down to Sam to hustle the last customers on board. The paddlewheel began to turn slowly, the half-ton deck bell banged three times, and a crush of customers bunched up on the stage as though afraid of being left behind on the wharf-the worst thing that could happen to anybody, to be left out of the steamy cloud of music and fun. Sam began to enjoy paddling the people on board, calling out for everyone to step up, thumbing his little counter device, getting lost in the excitement and the smell of vanilla, witch hazel, jasmine dusting powder, and Sen-Sen. Two minutes later the steam capstan sputtered the stage plank aboard and the mob of latecomers jammed against the ticket booth on the first deck as the boat backed away in earnest, steam spuming from vent pipes in the hull, engine-room gongs cracking alive like fight bells, and above it all big mossy gouts of coal smoke roiling from the stacks. Sam looked back across the wharf and saw, two hundred yards off, three teenaged girls running in heels through the falling light, hands on hats, purses flying out from their elbows, the hems on their short dresses shimmying with the white reciprocal blur of their knees, but it was too late, and he didn’t want to think about what was in their girl hearts as the big boat turned out under the early stars: an image of romance, hot dance music, or just dumb human fun based on the necessary mystical imagining that things in general just ain’t so bad all the time.