A backing gong struck in the engine room, the whistle roared out into the dark, its echo returning from the western hill, and the paddlewheel drew the Ambassador into the night-wide river. He heard a shout and ran toward a pushing match in the main-deck lounge, where two men were already arguing over a chair. Both of them reeked of creosote and a bilious home brew akin to the essence of mildewed rag. “Hold on, damn it!” Sam yelled at the larger one. “We’ve got two hundred extra chairs down here. How many do you need to keep from killing one another?”
The smaller man spat on the deck. “Git him three ’cause he’s fixin’ to be laid out.”
Sam grabbed the larger man by the shirt front and banged him into a bulkhead. “You calm down and enjoy the ride or I’ll set you afloat in a skiff.” He waved over a waiter. “Give them some free ice to cool down on. And a chair.” For five minutes he watched their bad nature recede and then pulled himself up to the next deck, where the orchestra was banging out a twenty-year-old one-step, sounding like a park band playing in a gingerbread stand. No one in the crowd seemed to know how to dance, or they hadn’t drunk enough yet, so he climbed up to the hurricane deck and watched out for smokers. He saw the captain and went up to him at the restaurant entrance. “When are we pulling out for Memphis tomorrow?”
“We’re running a one o’clock here for just about every church on both sides of the river.”
“Can I lay out again?”
“Boy, you’re off as much as you’re on, ain’t you? Is it about Lily?”
He nodded. “I’ve got to go up the country a little ways.”
“All right. How much trouble can a church trip be anyway? But look sharp tonight. These folks are drinking paint stripper.” The captain moved off among the passengers, clapping men on the back, telling everybody to have a good time, buy extra sandwiches, not to forget the slot machines by the boiler room. Sam had heard he was part-owner of the boat and presided over the avalanche of money that went out daily for fuel, ice, supplies, and wages. After everyone else had collapsed in their bunks at night, the captain stayed up working with the purser, adding up a thousand figures to budget for the next trip.
By ten o’clock Mrs. Benton had worked the boat into the slack water behind Chicken Neck Island and held her there on a half-bell to save coal. It was then the belt on the engine-room generator broke and all lights went dark. In five minutes the waiters were pulling lanterns from lockers and hanging them on the gingerbread braces above the dance floor and anywhere else light was needed. The band kept playing, sounding even worse in the dark, snoring along with a waltz while Sam walked the slick floor. Most customers were sitting and generally hollering at each other to overwhelm the piano and trombones. Sam wasn’t sure what everybody was drinking, but it all came from the same pint bottles and probably from the same moonshiner tending his fires far back in the hills. He wondered if anyone would sell him a jar. After a while, the lanterns heated up and began to smoke. Throughout the evening the music waned in the sooty light, and the smudged and toothless people seemed less and less happy.
He went out on deck and stood behind the ship’s big bell, trying to clear the bad playing from his head. The Mississippi side was bereft of light, the bank a dark intimation of trees. On the Arkansas side, a place he’d never been, he saw the faint rectangle of one window on a ridge, and he wondered if whoever lived behind that glass had ever heard of the people who had killed his family. The few shards of information he’d learned suggested the murderers were from Arkansas. He might be close to where they were, and he studied the black ghosts of the far rises to the west. It had been twenty-six years. Where were the killers, each of them? Did they ever think about what they’d done, about the effects of their revenge? For a moment, he felt sorry for himself, but only for a moment, because if being raised in the presence of lost parents and siblings had taught him anything at all, it was not to look back, that the view was unthinkable. And as Linda had told him time and time again, what good would brooding do?
He walked across the dance floor and saw two groups of men pointing fingers and complaining loudly that the band didn’t know how to play any reels. Zack Stimson studied his abusers and tentatively began to strum “Under the Double Eagle.” The band fell in behind him, and nearly a hundred and fifty couples started to dance three hundred different ways. The water-tank-factory workers, mostly in hobnail brogans, tried to form two lines for a clomping Virginia reel, while the creosote workers, many in pressed overalls, were dancing deluded buck-and-wings, clog steps, or lunging polka stomps deadly to their partners’ toes. Pinwheeling dancers broke through the Virginia reel lines like crazed mules spinning out of a flaming barn. By the middle of the tune half the dancers were cap-sized on the floor and a general stomp-and-gouge had broken out. Charlie Duggs, Sam, and Aaron waded in and began pulling scuffed and screaming women out of the fray; then they began shoving apart the fighters and getting knocked around for their trouble. The biggest waiters waded in next, pulling hair and kicking, and the orchestra kept playing, as if trying to remind everyone what they were there for. A little man pulled a knife, and Charlie slapjacked him on the top of his head. Someone knocked down a tin lantern and a big fellow fell on it, crushing open the fuel tank, and women shrieked as he caught fire, then leapt up and ran, a flaming cross flying down the middle of the dance floor. Men stopped fighting to knock him over, everyone suddenly mad to get at him, a flurry of sympathetic hands rolling him like a barrel across the dance floor as he hollered and cursed. A man in overalls dumped a pitcher of water over his length, and suddenly the battle was finished. People from all sides grabbed the smoking man’s singed hands in congratulation and hauled him to a chair. Most of his hair was gone, and his face was blacked, but a woman came down from the café with a stick of butter and when a water-tank worker handed him a full glass of whiskey, the victim gave the room a bald-faced grin. Couples reformed, a few started to dance again, and there was a general search for hats and eyeglasses. Waiters found two brawlers unconscious under the piano and propped them against a bulkhead near four women who were sitting drunk and weeping at their tables. Sam told a waiter to bring them sodas and then surveyed the room, walking from bow to stern scanning the floor for broken glass and dropped cigarettes, wondering how much time was spent in the world protecting people from one another, folks who had no cause to fight, no reason at all.
Charlie examined a tear in his jacket as he walked alongside. “You know, these ain’t bad people. They’re just uneducated, unsophisticated, untraveled, immoral, and uncivilized. Plus stupid.”
“It’s kind of scary tonight, all right. All these lanterns stink to high heaven.”
“I’m glad for the light, though.”
They heard a single gunshot and stopped at a window to listen. After a half-minute the boat’s whistle began a series of short yelps, the fire signal, and both men bolted for the upper deck, making it halfway up the stairs only to be bowled over by an avalanche of people running from a smoky bloom of flame under the roof of the skylight deck. Then another shot went off, and they ran back in and across the dance floor to the starboard stairs. Up top they saw two men facing off with pistols.
Sam pulled a full fire bucket from its rack and yelled at Swaneli, still at the bottom of the stair. “He shot a lantern and set the damn bunting on fire. Come on.” They rushed at the armed men, considering the gunfight of little importance compared to a fire. The under-side of the roof was hung with drooping panels of striped cotton material to give the spindly construction a plush appearance. These had ignited, the flames licking at the thin pine lumber. Cooks and waiters began running up onto the roof hauling fire buckets, flinging their contents and stumbling off for more water. Shortly a line formed with Sam and Charlie at the head, heaving one bucket after another up to the flaming stripes. Swaneli came forward with a fire hose and pulled the lever on the nozzle, soaking nearly everyone on the open deck as he knocked down the fire.