He looked up the long street at the stone and brick buildings, wondering how anyone ever put together the money to build them. No one he knew had more than a few dollars saved. “I’ll ride out this circuit on the boat. It might look like I haven’t done much, but I’ve put out feelers all along.”
“If you hear anything, you have my mother’s address in Cincinnati.”
“That’s right.” He gave August a pat on the arm. “So long, bud.”
“Yeah.” The boy stared blankly down the street, his shoulders rolled forward in the wind like an old man’s.
THE GREENVILLE STATION agent, Morris Hightower, dozed in his chair next to the telegraph sounder. The room was hot as an attic, the next southbound wasn’t due for an hour, and the local switch engine was out in the country switching the lumber mills. He had a headache, and each eyelid felt as if it had a lead sinker glued to it. The sounder came alive in its box, and he reached for a Western Union pad. Dr. John Adoue of Memphis sent a message to the husband of Mrs. Stacy Higman telling of the outcome of her operation for female problems. He copied several lines of medical descriptions and the statement that Mr. Higman would call at the station for the telegram at five p.m. Morris sent a 73 on his bug, folded the telegram, and placed it in a window envelope. Settling back into the bay window of the station, he looked with one eye down the track to the south. He was feeling worthless and burned out in several ways, old, sickly even. Surely there was something he should be doing with his life other than sitting here sweating. Slowly, his head drifted back, his mouth fell open, and his upper plate floated down with a click.
Some time later, two cotton buyers barged into the waiting room complaining to each other about the market, and the bigger one bellied up to the counter. “Wake up there ’fore you catch a fly.”
Morris lifted one eyelid. “Do for you?”
“We need tickets to Graysoner, Kentucky.”
“What class?”
“We can stand day coach if there’s a parlor car for a good poker game.”
“There is.” He pulled out his guide to see what the connections were past Memphis and told them it would take a while to set up the tickets as they involved three different railroads. While he worked, the men chattered around their cigars about cotton prices and the damned bankers not wanting to loan money on signature anymore. The voices were just noise; some of it went in his ear, some of it didn’t. Then one of them mentioned a banker in Graysoner who’d demanded a whole cotton shipment for collateral on a small loan.
“I went to grammar school with Acy. He knew me when I still peed my pants, and when I asked for enough to ship eight thousand bales, just the shipping, mind you, he wanted to put the whole crop subject to duress in a contract.”
“You don’t say.”
“Sure enough. And I’ve been a guest in his house, made small talk with that odd wife of his.”
“I know her. She ever do anything other than walk around and shop?”
“When I was in his office she came in there with a sweet, crop-haired little girl, so I guess he finally put a bun in the oven.”
The other buyer pulled his cigar and looked at the soggy end. “Well, maybe that’ll sweeten his disposition.”
The men stepped out into the sun to look down the line and tell a joke. When they came back into the waiting room, a heat-drunk Morris Hightower was at the window with their tickets, his red face against the bars. “So Acy has a little girl?”
One of the cotton buyers looked at him and made a face. “You from Kentucky?”
“Agents know everybody up and down the line. She’s not a baby, is she?”
“She’s about three years old.”
“Cropped hair, you say?”
“Yes.” The buyer looked at him hard.
“Did they tell you how good she could sing? About all those songs?”
At this, the cotton buyer smiled. “Why, you do know the Whites!”
Morris Hightower laughed for the first time in a long while. “It’s a small world.”
THE CROWDS AT CAIRO were moderate in size and well behaved, so the order was not given to check for weapons. After an easy night trip, Sam was washing up at the little lavatory and inspecting his two uniforms, which were not holding up well.
“I told the captain I needed another jacket,” he said over his shoulder to Charlie, who was in his bunk holding an unlit cigarette under his nose.
“What’d he tell you?”
“Said I’d have to buy it out of my salary.”
“What you think about that?”
“I don’t know. It’d take two or three days’ wages to get one that’d last through the fights.”
“It’d be nine dollars or better, anyway. The boat raked in a fortune at Stovepipe Bend. The purser like to got a hernia haulin’ the change bags up the hill this morning.”
“Sometimes I think I’d be making more as a waiter, with the tips and all.”
“You could get into that late-night game down in the galley.”
“I gave that stuff up.”
“Then hold on to your pennies.” The cigarette traveled slowly under his nose. They were not allowed to smoke in the cabins. “You still thinking about that young’un?”
“I walked into town and spoke with the police captain. Went by the station and talked to the agent. He was full of information but mostly wanted to sell me some raffle tickets.”
“What’d he tell you?”
“About another boy they gave off the orphan train. I called this farmer up on the phone and sure enough it was a boy.”
The cabin door was open, and Charlie hopped down and walked right out to the rail to light up and watch the stars. “You give any more thought to the Cloats?”
“Not enough to ruin my day.”
“Damn, you’re worthless.”
“I’m thinking about it. You got to give me that.”
The Alice Brown passed downbound pushing a big raft of coal barges, the glow from her furnace doors sparking up the water. Her carbon-arc light raked the Ambassador and moved over the channel like a wand of ice.
“What’d Elsie say when you walked her to the streetcar?”
“Not much. Said she couldn’t even imagine he was dead. That she had to hold off thinking until she got up there.”
“I can’t believe old Ted’s gone myself. It’ll be a tough row to hoe for the both of them. The kid’s too young to play in the union bands. You say she’ll be living with her sick mother?”
“Starving is more like it. Her father’s too old to work anymore.”
Charlie drew in a lungful of smoke and let it out slow. “At least she’s got that boy with her. It could be worse.”
“Don’t say that. For God’s sake, don’t even think it.”
ABOVE CAIRO the Ambassador steamed into more populated regions where people in the civilized river towns looked forward to the new dance music promised by the flyers posted on every cottonwood by the advance man. Radios, the few there were in these rural areas, didn’t play New Orleans jazz, and record companies weren’t promoting it either. But the Ambassador had the real, rare commodity, and over the next week the boat did good business at Mound City, Metropolis, and Paducah, though at a mining town called Potato Landing, all three mates and six waiters were injured in a huge café brawl between baseball teams from opposite sides of the river. The boat was left in such a sorry condition that Sunday’s afternoon run at Evansville was canceled, and Captain Stewart gave the crew as much time off as possible. Sam went up to town to attend Mass and then find the railroad station. The agent looked at his bruised face and wouldn’t answer any questions, so he walked back to the river, stopping several times to let a leg cramp die down. He’d been kicked by a drunk woman after he’d pulled her away from a slot machine she was hammering with a high heel. Hobbling up to a corner bench, he sat and rubbed his calf, feeling silly and useless, a fool matched with a fool’s errand. He thought again longingly of his wife and his lost kingdom at Krine’s. A long vista of cottonwoods rising up from the Kentucky side made him feel solitary, small, and a long way from the house.