Sam sat down on a stool by a sink, his mouth open, and watched the muddy water knock down the flames. “Son of a bitch. If that had got away from us this tub would’ve gone up like a haystack in July.”

“Get up, bud,” Swaneli told him. “I just heard a gunshot.”

On the first deck several men had started shooting at the ceiling-fan blades, and one had his arm broken by a ricochet. The three mates fought them and then hustled the banged-up men to the brig, stacking them in with five others already there.

The café ran out of food halfway back to the landing, and the cooks began to fill any pot that had a lid with oil and made tubs of popcorn they salted and sold cheaply to staunch the angry hunger of the drunks. The café register was so full of money it wouldn’t close, the people wild to buy anything, even extra salt. When Sam stepped through the door he was hit across the chest with a chair, and before he could get up a woman began screaming into his face that her friend was being raped up on the Texas roof. He took the stairs two at a time to a dark open area where passengers were not allowed and saw men in overalls hoist a yowling, half-naked man over their heads and throw him off the boat. Sam looked down and saw a white scissoring motion in the water, headed aft.

A middle-aged woman was sitting on the roof tarpaper adjusting her long skirt. He looked at the skinny man next to him, whose hair was longer than the woman’s, and tried to make out his features in the dark. “If he was raping that woman, you should’ve held him for the sheriff.”

The man bent over laughing. “Her? We don’t give a shit about her. She’s just a old whore he hired to ride with him tonight.”

Sam looked at the other men, trying to understand. “Why’d you pitch him overboard, then?”

“Hell, we’uns just wanted to see could he fly.”

The men standing at the rail started laughing, coughing up popcorn, punching each other, cursing the whore and the six other men they said they’d thrown off the boat that night.

WHEN THEY GAVE BACK weapons at the end of the trip, two pistols and five knives were left over. He considered the weapons in the glow of the deck lights, and then lobbed everything into the river.

The general cleanup was unending, the boat filthy in every way. During the hour that the restrooms were closed, several people had gone up on the rear promenade and squatted in the dark. Three hours before sunrise, Charlie and Sam climbed shaking into their bunks, and neither could fall asleep.

“I saw you waltz Skadlock off the boat. What was you talking about?”

“He showed up to bother Ted Weller and then got real focused on me. I told you about his dog, didn’t I?”

“Yeah. That boy’s been in the woods too long.”

“He was drunk.”

“Why didn’t you turn him in to the law?”

“He’d maybe just kill that little town constable.”

Charlie seemed to think about this. “What else did he tell you?”

“He was whelped in Arkansas. He knows who did what they did to my family. Some people named Cloat from around Bung City.”

Charlie leaned out of the lower bunk and looked up at him. “You don’t exactly sound excited about that big news.”

“I’m still thinking about it.”

“Think, hell. Don’t you have folks you can round up to go find these people? At least try to tell the law about them. Man alive!”

At once a wave of fatigue swamped Sam. “Charlie, it’s been around twenty-five years. I never knew my parents or brother or sister. Don’t have pictures, nothing. Just some wooden markings in the churchyard. My uncle never raised me to be big on revenge, you know? Most French people on the bayou are like that. Too poor to afford a grudge.”

Charlie seemed amazed. “Well, you’re a little pudding if I ever saw one. You don’t try to find out about these outlaws, I hate to say this, but I’ll be ashamed of you.”

“What? What would you do?”

“What do you think? If I found out for certain they’d killed my folks, I’d go to the sheriff. If he was bought off or scared, I’d dump my bank account and buy as many pump shotguns I could afford and a case of high-brass goose shot.” He began waving his arm toward the low roof. “I’d get my cousin Buck, who was with me over in France, my brother Maxie, my uncle Dick Agle, who was with Roosevelt in Cuba, and that big Eyetalian who married my sister. We’d wait for asshole-hunting season to open and go find ’em in their nest.”

“With bad luck, you’d all get arrested. With good luck you’d all get shot up. I’m wondering if that’s why Skadlock told me, thinking these Cloats’d swat me like a mosquito. And maybe they didn’t have anything to do with it at all.”

Charlie rolled on his back. “Some things you don’t worry about.”

“If I did get some kind of revenge, you can bet one of them would get away and show up at my house one night two years down the road, squattin’ there in the bushes, a knife between his teeth.”

The cabin was quiet for a long time; then Charlie’s voice came out of the darkness, sleepy and yawning. “I still think you’re chickenshit.”

“Maybe after I find the little girl, I’ll think about all this. First things first.”

“Chick-en-shit.”

“You think shootin’ up a yardful of folks is the right thing to do?”

“Kill a snake, and the next man on the trail won’t get bit.”

“Not unless another snake gets him.”

“Boy, I can see you ain’t never been shot at.”

Sam put an arm over his eyes and let out a long sigh. “Not in a good while, anyways.”

THE NEXT NIGHT drew sizeable crowds again. A logjam of denim-clad sawmillers and their women came over the river from Yunt in skiffs, and the captain hired the local constable and three men he deputized and armed with shotguns to ride and help break up fights. Sam took four aspirin and patrolled constantly, the pistol gleaming in his belt, but generally the crowd was subdued, a fact which didn’t improve his opinion of human nature, that it took a show of hardware to teach people how to have a good time. Elsie sang her beautiful songs, August played in the band for both trips, and Sam listened to them as he made his rounds, wishing he were at the piano.

One o’clock in the morning found the Ambassador digging river for Cairo as the crew fire-hosed the upper decks of the crowd’s sediment. The ship’s carpenter began replacing balusters kicked out of the upper railings, and the waiters threw ice on the main deck to chill blood off the wood.

That night, Charlie Duggs carried a pint of his own, and by the time he crowded into the cabin he was fueled up with malevolent energy.

Sitting down on the stool beside the lavatory, he looked up to where Sam lay in his bunk.

“You goin’ after the Cloats when we come back downriver? I’ll go with you.”

“Been too busy to think about them.” Sam saw only an outline of the man seated across from him.

“If I was you I couldn’t think of nothin’ else. They killed your whole family, bud.”

“I’m turnin’ in.” He was unable to think about anything.

Charlie stood up. “Think I’ll bed down on the Texas roof.” He lurched toward the narrow door. “The air smells better up there.”

Sam folded an arm over his eyes and tried for sleep. He thought of his uncle and of his aunt, who’d always treated him as their own son. Still, he remembered feeling at times that he was not totally theirs. The cousins were the whole children, and he was loved as much, but still not of the same house, born somewhere else out of someone else. He tried to remember anything, a touch, a flash of light, the timbre of an owning voice, but there was nothing at all. When they had been killed, the part of him that made memory had not yet come alive. Like a sudden foul cloud, what the murderers had done began to envelop him, and he understood with a shudder what they had taken away. He began to cry quietly in the sour bunk, wondering what was wrong with him. Maybe he was changing, approaching the edge of that age where for the first time he would begin to look back on things, and he realized dimly how sad a change that was.