Chapter Thirteen

THE AMBASSADOR set down her stage and let the crowd off at eleven. A messenger was sent up the hill to get a policeman to retrieve two drunks from the engine-room jail cell, and Sam turned them over. Mr. Brandywine blew the whistle, the giant note chasing the spent dancers up the road to town as the chuffing hoist raised the stage and the boat began to back out into big river.

After cleanup, Elsie stopped Sam as he was leaving the café. “Have you seen the captain?”

He glanced at her face and looked away. “Not for an hour or so.”

“I heard we might bypass Vicksburg for a Moose lodge convention in Greenville.” She had her fists balled in the pockets of her uniform, nothing more than a well-cut apron, and she looked harried, tired unto desperation. “Ted won’t be able to find us.”

“I didn’t hear about Greenville.”

“I’ve been asking everybody. Cap must be down in the engine room.”

“The pilot, ask him.” He gave her a little smile.

“ Brandywine? You’re teasing.”

“All right.” He pulled his watch. “He gets a cup of coffee right about now. I’ll bring it up myself and ask him.”

On the stairs to the dark pilothouse he tried not to slop coffee out of the stoneware mug. He started to turn the knob but remembered to knock, and Mr. Brandywine’s chicken voice cracked through the glass. “Enter.”

Sam approached the steering wheel but the pilot kept his head toward the night. Farm-size plots of fog were skating over the river, and the boat had just plowed into one. There was as little light inside as out. “Here’s your coffee, Mr. Brandywine.”

“By God, I could smell it when you were halfway here. Put it on the stool.”

He did, then stood quietly and watched the fog take away the stars. “Are we still going to play Vicksburg?”

“I don’t know about you, boy, but that’s where I’m tying up.”

Sam craned his neck forward, staring at the fog boiling in the window. “How can you run in this?”

“Hush. I don’t know exactly where I am.” The pilot closed his eyes. “Hush, now. Don’t even leave.”

The pilothouse silence drove home that every nail and plank in the three-hundred-foot steamer could break apart within moments if old Brandywine ’s mind faltered. He was the pilot of everyone’s future. Reaching out, he slid back the big side windows on port and starboard, then pulled from the whistle a chop of sound, a quick musical rasp of steam sailing out into the blackness. Sam heard an echo to the east; nothing came back from the west.

Mr. Brandywine’s back straightened and his eyes opened wide. “You can leave now.”

“Where are we?”

“A thousand yards off Magnolia Bluff.” He turned his head sideways to the oncoming fog, as though listening to it sluice over the breast board.

“I can’t see a thing.”

“I wouldn’t imagine that you could.”

Sam put a hand on the doorknob, but the pilot stopped him with a question. “The little girl that sang with the band, last trip. You hear anything about her?” As he spoke he reached up and pulled a big copper ring that sounded a bell in the engine room, and after a moment, they could feel a gentle surge of speed.

Sam looked ahead into nothing, wondering what the pilot was seeing other than his storehouse of recollections from ten thousand trips in the dark. “Somebody hired people to steal her. We found out who the thieves were, and Ted’s gone to handle things.”

“He can’t law them?”

“ Louisiana.”

“I see.” Mr. Brandywine let go of a spoke and the wheel spun slowly before he stopped it with the foot brake.

“Don’t like those new steering levers?”

“There’s a time for ’em.”

“Good night, then.”

“Duggs tells me you were in the war,” the pilot said, with sudden animation.

Sam stopped with his hand on the knob. It was late, the fog was beginning to lift, and he wondered if Mr. Brandywine just wasn’t ready to be left alone.

The boat finished crossing the river and straightened, or at least Sam felt it did. “Just missed the fighting. I saw what was left over, though.”

“I wish my oldest boy had missed it.” He reached up and pulled one glass-rattling note from the whistle. Sam peered out of the window to the left and after much concentration could barely make out a running light a half-mile off, dim as a cigarette in a dark hallway. From across the river came the vessel’s hoarse salute. “The Nellie Speck,” Brandywine said to the night.

“How can you tell?”

He could just make out Brandywine’s shape, slowly turning to him. “A steamboat’s whistle is its name. That other pilot knows what boat we are. Everybody’s whistle is made to sound different, my boy.”

“You must have some ears.”

“Why, can’t you tell a family member’s voice even when you can’t see them? Your good friend’s? Your wife’s?”

He didn’t answer for a long time. “I guess so.”

“That’s right.”

“What outfit was your oldest boy in?”

“He volunteered in Missouri.”

Sam didn’t want to ask the next question, and Brandywine perhaps knew this, that there would be several questions leading to a black answer, so he went ahead and gave it.

“He got his eyes burned out,” the old man said. “And what a loss that was to him. When he rode cub pilot with me, he could see a green running light a mile and a half away, and now he’s at home making brooms.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sometimes, late at night when I’m tired and waiting for first light, I feel like he’s standing right here to the side of me. I’ll turn to him and there’s nothing there, just this hole in the darkness.” He gave the wheel a nudge to starboard. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Yes,” Sam said. “It is.”

ON THE WAY DOWNSTAIRS Sam watched a fog patch crossing the river. Two or three stars spun overhead, and a navigation light burned yellow above the western batture. A steam towboat came breathing heavily down on the starboard side, escape pipes woofing, running lights no more than sooty fireflies above the velvety stream, its sudden-rising whistle an organ note driven like a nail into the delta night, audible for ten miles where a farmboy hearing its hum might decide to drop from his bedroom window and join a world of wanderers. Sam imagined such a boy and wondered what would happen to him, if he’d wind up shoveling coal all night or sleeping above Charlie Duggs’s torturous snoring, a dull life going in a straight line. No wonder so many songs were about going back home.

Passing by the café, he saw Elsie cleaning up, her long waist bent over a checkered oilcloth. Everything would go on in a straight line tomorrow, all right, unless Ted returned with world-changing news. Or unless he didn’t return at all.

TED SQUATTED in the dark guessing when dawn would come, lost in a timeless ocean of blackness where ten minutes seemed an hour. It had taken two days to find the Skadlocks, and now, in a tangle of reeds behind the big house, he crouched and waited for movement or sound. The moon was long gone, and a barge of cloud had moored in the sky. A wind came up and rattled the stalks around him and he thought of his daughter, gone now too many weeks. He saw himself as a shrinking spark in her mind and knew that time was the enemy, an old cliché as true as anything else he might think. Each day cost him more of his little girl’s voice, her sense of perfect pitch, her baby teeth shining above her laughter, the touch of her hands on his big ears as he hoisted her up to sing in his arms. All he could do during this dangerous wait for the sun was think of her, and he feared it would distract him from the task at hand. He shook his head, hoping again for light since he could see nothing at all. He had scouted the house and its outbuildings before the moon lay down in the trees, but now there was nothing before him except his dark imagination of a house, a brush-swamped, gigantic thing of nibbled chimney tops and grass-spiked roof gutters. Looking off to the right, he saw nothing. Turning left, he thought he saw-what, distant fireflies? Two amber lights from a far-off boat? As he stared, the color came up in intensity and the glowing rounds grew larger-closing in from a mile away? With a shock he realized they weren’t far at all, but floating in midair right beside him, fixed in the warm, silent breath of an animal.