At the break, Elsie Weller came up next to the keyboard and told him that Ted hadn’t been on the train. Her eyes were red and she was twisting one of the boat’s cloth napkins into a rope.
“Aw, he’s probably coming up to Greenville. We’ll be there tomorrow.”
“He would’ve sent a telegram, Lucky.”
The drummer gave a rim tap and he turned to a new piece on the piano’s music rack. “Maybe the office was closed. There’s all sorts of reasons he might be late or didn’t send a wire.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
He began an intro to “I Used to Love You but It’s All Over Now,” sorry that this was in the rotation. It was a new song, and he hoped she didn’t know the title. She adjusted her little waitress crown and walked bravely out a starboard door with her back straight, and he remembered that she was a better musician than he was and deserved more than a kitchen job, that she was missing two pieces of her life, and he was missing one. His fingers struggled up a knoll of unfamiliar notes and behind him the cornetist frowned. Sam began to think of the day his son died, how Linda was inconsolable, and no matter how much he comforted her, she continued to shake with the loss. He sometimes forgot that she had as big a hole in her life as he did, and suddenly he missed her very much. A strange thing began to happen under his fingertips: he was paying less attention to his music, and his timing improved. He began to feel the notes instead of just reading them off the page. Tilting his head, he listened to himself get better as he went on, feeling sad enough to cry while making the dancers step and spin, and smile.
Chapter Fourteen
FOR THE MOONLIGHT trip he counted the gate at the stage plank, earnestly checking faces, watching up the bluff for Ted to get out of a cab. After loading everybody, he patrolled the dance floor. The Vicksburg people were pretty well behaved, though suspicious of the black orchestra, but a group from the big sawmill in Yokena had brought in an intolerable number of half-pints of 150-proof moonshine, and in midriver several rattling fistfights broke out. There was something wrong with their liquor, and toward the end of the excursion people were vomiting over the deck rails and under tables on the dance floor. One balding man wearing overalls went berserk, and it took a waiter, Charlie Duggs, and two busboys to restrain him from jumping into the paddlewheel. By the time the boat returned to the dock, Sam, Duggs, and Aaron Swaneli had to turn their uniforms over to a maid to be sewn back together for the next day’s run in Greenville.
That night while the boat was under way August helped load coal for three hours, pushing a wheelbarrow up and down a narrow plank to a dark coal flat tied to the side of the boat. He was ankle deep in black dust and shoveling in the light of a guttering kerosene lantern, humming a new piece the black orchestra had played twice in a row because the dancers wouldn’t quit hollering for it. When the bunkers were full, he threw a few shovelfuls into the firebox and saw that the coal was terrible stuff, half dirt, and he and the other firemen could raise barely enough steam to operate the engines. He fought the fires all night, trying to break up clinkers and get enough air through the coal so it would burn hot, and by the time they landed, before dawn, when his mother came down to tell him where the railroad station was in Greenville, he was too tired to stand, able only to lean on his shovel handle and listen, his eyes the only bright spots on him.
SAM WAS IN HIS CABIN matching Charlie Duggs snore for snore when he was awakened by a knock. He found Elsie outside, teary eyed and begging him to go up to the station and check the schedules because August was dead on his feet and needed an hour’s washing besides. She was already late for the kitchen, and receiving his nod, ran down the steps. His shoulder was aching and he was so exhausted he swayed like a drunk. Pulling on mismatched pants and shirt, he stepped out on the wet deck. The boat itself was snoring steam into the gray dawn as he crossed the levee into town.
The night agent was at the end of his shift, and his eyes were bloodshot under his visor. He glanced at Sam’s clothes and made him wait at the ticket window a long time before coming over and telling him that the connecting up from St. Frank was due in at one-thirty.
Sam made a face and looked over the agent’s shoulder at the regulator clock.
“Something else?” The man had a nasty sneer.
Sam took a breath. “You hear of anybody in town bringing a three-year-old girl into their family?”
“You from down in French country?”
“I might still sound like I am but I live in New Orleans. Off Magazine Street.”
“One of my brothers lives in New Orleans, but he don’t like it. What kind of little girl you mean, like a orphan or something?” The fat agent snorted. “Like people around here need another mouth to feed.”
Sam blinked himself more awake. He had to think straight. “I bet everybody in town goes through this station. We had a baby girl stolen from a musical act on the excursion boat on the trip downriver. I was hoping something might have caught your eye.”
The agent cocked his big bald head in the little barred window. “Everybody’s got some big tragedy to deal with sooner or later. Are you not old enough yet to know that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not.”
“And why are you even interested in these other folks’ kid? You owe them something?”
“Mister, it’s a long story, but I’m sort of responsible she got stole.”
The agent looked him over carefully. “You just trying to get rid of a little guilty feeling, maybe?”
Sam didn’t know what to say to this. He already suspected that most human action was self-serving but now wondered if there wasn’t something beyond the selfishness, a possibility that interested him. “That and maybe something more.”
The agent stared at a wad of waybills in his hand, but he was not reading them. “I’d like to wipe my ass with these things.” He took a long breath and let it out, sounding like a man who’d come to a hard decision. “You say it’s a little girl?”
“About three years old. They cut her hair short to disguise her, but some weeks have gone by.”
“So she’d look like a boy, maybe.”
“I guess so.”
The agent met his gaze and looked away. “All I can do is keep my eyes and ears open.”
“I’m a mate on the excursion boat, the Ambassador. If you find something, anything, send me a wire and I’ll pay for it.”
From under the window, the agent picked up a hook stuck full with waybills. “In the unlikely event that I do, it’ll be from Morris Hightower. That’s me. But nobody I know would steal somebody’s kid.” He wet his lips with his tongue. “Now, if it was a boy, some mud farmer might be after making him a hand. But who’d want a girl?”
Sam bent at the knees to look under the man’s visor. “She was pretty and could sing like a bird.”
Morris Hightower frowned and pulled the paper bills apart angrily. He was tired, sedentary, probably wouldn’t be alive in five years and knew it. “Partner, there never was a bird that made a nickel off a song.”
THE TEN O’CLOCK TRIP was a field day for several grammar schools, and no music was required, so he haunted the railings, keeping the children from falling into the river and away from the hot smokestacks on the upper deck. After lunch, the boat landed and he walked back to the station to wait for Ted, who wasn’t on that day’s train either. He sat down on the long bench and stared south along the tracks. The Skadlocks were dishonest in all ways and coldhearted as well, but he didn’t know if they were killers. Throughout his life people had accused him of never suspecting the worst of people, but he didn’t see any need to without reason. The Skadlocks had let him leave safely. But then, he hadn’t threatened them, had tried to deal with them on their own level. And he wasn’t the desperate father of a child they’d stolen away. Down at the landing a donkey engine’s whistle went off like a woman’s scream, bouncing away from the buildings in town and spreading west over the Arkansas wilderness. He hoped more than anything that Ted hadn’t done something stupid.