By nightfall, the purser had paid off nearly everyone and asked the mates to stay an extra two days to tie up loose ends. Sam helped the pilots carry their luggage up to a taxi. He’d made several friendships on board, but he admired Nellie Benton and Rafe Brandywine the most, and felt that he was sending off legends.
The old man, wearing a bluewater uniform and bow tie, opened the door to the idling car and motioned for Mrs. Benton to get in. “Safest pilot goes first,” he said.
She gave him a startled look. “I don’t know about that, but it’s a nice thing to say.”
“Next year, if there is a next year, you hit the captain up for full wages, you hear?”
She slid into the backseat. “Come on and get in. You’ll miss your train back to Pennsylvania.”
He turned to Sam and told him, “You know, I admire the way you took in those Weller kids. I just wanted you to know that.”
“I kind of felt responsible.”
“Hell, we’re all responsible for something, but most of us don’t do a damn thing about it.” He got in, and Sam pushed the door shut.
As the hack pulled away, Nellie Benton called out, “Stay in easy water, son.”
RIDING QUIET and broken against the dock, the Ambassador soon lost its magic, and the smell of dust and dampness rose from its decks. The engineers dropped the fires under the boilers, and with all machinery wound down to a stop, Sam found things too quiet, and he began to think. For weeks the noise and music kept him from imagining what lay a hundred or so miles inland, somewhere in Arkansas. People he had a history with, so to speak, who owed him voices, touches, the generation of bloodline. In the near dark he leaned on the starboard rail, his mind boring westward.
The captain came up a staircase and stopped for a moment, as if surprised to see him outside. “The purser gave me your pay.” He stepped close and handed over a brown legal-size envelope. “You’ve stuck until the end of things this season, and you’ve had a rough road, Lucky, so there’s a fifty-dollar bonus.”
He turned and looked at the captain closely. “You’ll need a new uniform next year.”
The captain regarded the braid around his cuffs. He bent over slowly and put his arms on the rail. “It’s silly, isn’t it? A uniform used to mean something twenty-five years ago, when I was on the Anchor Line hauling freight and overnight passengers, people who were really going somewhere. It’s all silliness now. Just music and dancing.”
“I don’t know. Some people need it like Pittsburgh needs coal.”
The captain shook his head. “I guess fun has its place. Are you going home now? See the wife and all?”
He looked west over the water. The light had diminished, and the air itself seemed as grainy as fresh-broken iron. “Got a little business to transact first.”
“Duggs told me a few things about you.”
“I bet.”
The captain straightened up and clapped him on the shoulder. “Remember this. I never took a boat up a stream without a map.” Then he walked aft, nudging spittoons against the rail with his left foot.
THE FOLLOWING EVENING he and Charlie Duggs were the only ones on the dark boat. Sam lit a kerosene lantern and walked down to the bandstand and sat at the piano in a yellow envelope of light, playing with an edge of anger in his fingers, aware how much he’d improved in the past few months. Perhaps of necessity: no one made a living with ordinary playing. In front of so many crowds of sweating dancers, he’d learned to pay more attention to his timing. He opened the music for a new ballad and began embellishing a bit, adding notes, replacing others. Then he heard the sound of footsteps in the dark, and said, “Hey, Charlie.”
“I was up in the pilothouse watchin’ the sun go down.”
“That right?” He changed the song, playing from memory, slowed the tempo, and placed a foot on the soft pedal. “You heading out tomorrow?”
“Yeah. You want to ride the same train?”
“I’ll be down in a couple days.”
Charlie sat in a folding chair in the banjo player’s position. “You decided to make a little Arkansas excursion?”
“I don’t think I’ll know for sure till I start out. The last thing I need to do is get myself hurt.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“I know that.”
Charlie tilted his head. “But it’s your gig, right?”
“Solo act. Everybody’s a solo act when it comes right down to it.” He began tipping slow and playful notes into “St. Louis Blues,” and Charlie sat back and fished out a flask, taking a long swallow.
While he played, Sam wondered if anyone was out there on the riverbank listening and what the boat looked like from shore, the enormous old steamer a motionless white smudge against the charcoal river, one yellow square of light in its center and the sad lilt of music tinkling out into the darkness like a luring call. The thought came to him that no one was listening, and this made his music seem smaller, hardly able to escape the piano’s soundboard, even trapped under the balls of his fingers, his alone; but in spite of this he began to polish his notes, playing the song’s Latin bridge into velvet, and Charlie put away his bottle.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON they were playing gin in the café when they heard a big towboat simmering down on them. There was a jolt and a holler as the Mountain Wizard sidled up under a pall of coal smoke, deckhands jumping aboard with their ropes and lashing tight. They went out to the rail and looked over to the low pilothouse where a graybeard wheelman slid a section of window open.
“You boys packed and ready?”
“Yep,” Sam yelled.
“Well, head on to town, then. I’m fixin’ to pull her off the bank.”
They got their suitcases and walked a plank off the second deck onto the dock. They crossed a rail spur to a road, where they hitched into town on a lumber truck. At the Y &MV station, Charlie bought a ticket and Sam sent a telegram. He thought a long time before he composed it, because it contained a lie. He rewrote the message several times, trying to lessen the falsehood.
MORRIS HIGHTOWER AGENT GREENVILLE MISSISSIPPI AM IN MEMPHIS STATION TYING UP LOOSE ENDS FOR CHILD IN TROUBLE. CAN YOU TELL LOCATION OF OUTLAW FAMILY IN SE ARK NAME OF CLOAT. APPRECIATE HELP. SAM SIMONEAUX.
He told the clerk he would wait for a response.
“I know this old boy,” the man told him. “He might not be on shift.”
“I’ll wait.” Sam knew that every nail, sweet pea, mantel clock, hot-water bottle, and woodstove came through the hands of a town’s railroad agent, and all news and secrets as well. If Hightower couldn’t tell him anything, he probably could put him in touch with someone who could.
He sat with Charlie until his train steamed in, and he boarded him like a relative, waving as the engine chuffed off southward toward Mississippi, its long-bell whistle hurling blue notes at the sky.
He dozed a while, and shortly after five, the clerk walked over and handed him a telegram. “Here you go, feller.”
He tore the envelope and held the message in the light of the western windows.
TELEGRAPHED MY MAN IN ARKANSAS. GO TO TOWN OF RATIO. ASK CONSTABLE SONER YOUR QUESTIONS. BRING BIG WEAPON. MH