Amerika (46 page)

But just what you are.

‘May I have this dance?’ Ava said.

Startled, I switched on the light. Only her head was visible in the crew stairway. She answered the questioning look on my face. ‘You left the
Desert Queen
like an express train leaving town. Woke me up.’

‘Couldn’t sleep.’

‘What’d you say to Ziggy? He looked terrible.’

‘Caught him goofing off instead of standing watch.’

She arched her eyebrows. ‘You mean listening to the radio like you’re doing?’

Embarrassed, I turned it off.

She came over and stood by the radio operator’s table. ‘Turn it back on. I like Sinatra.’

Back he came and light smile played across her face. ‘That kid sure can get inside a lyric.’

‘He’s no kid. He’s almost thirty.’

‘Twenty-seven, same as me. But, you’re right, he’s no pup.’

I felt embarrassed. ‘I didn’t mean you were old.’

She patted my shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Grandpa, I can handle it.’

‘Since when is thirty-eight a grandpa?’

‘You’re getting gray hair.’

‘Like hell I am.’

‘Your joints creak, you can’t even dance.’

I started to say something but she took my hand, pulled me to my feet and placed her arms in a dancing position.

‘Prove it, grandpa.’

And so we began; not much at first, just two people moving to the slow rhythm of Sinatra’s music. We hadn’t taken but a few steps when she leaned back and switched off the work light.

‘Let’s not put on a show for the guards. They’ve got itchy trigger fingers.’

And so we danced by the light of the radio dials. I held her lightly, as if she would break, which was absurd. Ava had single-handedly shanghaied me and Orlando into an adventure I never dreamed possible - or probable for that matter.

After a while I said, ‘How am I doing?’

Her mouth was close to my ear. ‘Not bad. And in pointy-toed cowboy boots too. I’m impressed.’

We bumped into the navigator’s table and rebounded into the center of the bridge. Not much room to maneuver, but enough to feel like we were dancing. When we jitterbugged earlier I had played the role of the confident captain boosting the morale of his crew. This time I was just dancing.

The song ended and we stood there staring at each other. Ava made a small curtsey and said, ‘Thank you, captain. Been a long time since I’ve been in a man’s arms.’

‘Quit kidding.’

‘It’s true. Romance on camera is like buying a quart of milk at the grocery store; all in a day’s work.’

‘Really?’

‘Let me show you.’ She leaned back, her lips slightly parted, her eyes dreamy. Then she leaned forward and pressed her mouth against mine. Flat, uninteresting, almost cold. I leaned back, a little shocked.

‘See what I mean?’ she said. ‘On film that would have looked romantic as hell.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I know so. Now get load of this.’

She kissed me again, but this time her lips were soft and warm. They nestled and twisted against mine the way a cat purrs and rubs up against you. By reflex I kissed her back. But it became much more than a reflex in the seconds that followed as I kept on kissing her and she kept kissing me. Then she stopped and looked straight at me. I could barely see her face in the dark, but her gleaming eyes were wide and clear.

‘Now that’s what I call real kissing,’ she said. ‘How long’s it been for you?’

‘A while.’

‘Me too.’

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Fortunately the music saved me. Another slow tune. This time Bing Crosby singing Irving Berlin:

Be careful, it's my heart.

It's not my watch you're holding, it's my heart.

It's not the note I sent you that you quickly burned.

It's not the book I lent you that you never returned.

Remember it's my heart.

We danced back toward the hatch that led to the cargo compartment and the relief crew bunks. It had been left half-opened, so I kicked it shut with the heel of my cowboy boots.

‘A regular Fred Astaire,’ Ava said.

‘A good captain is always on duty.’

She began humming along with Crosby’s crooning. Not a great voice. Sweet was more like it.

‘What about Bing?’ I said.

‘I like him. He sang this in
Holiday Inn
. Ever see it?’

‘Took Abby last month for her birthday. She liked it a lot.’

‘You?’

‘It was okay.’

A few more steps, she nestled closer and sighed. ‘I was up for a part but Ginny Dale got it instead.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s all right. Besides, she’s a nice kid. Her big break. She’ll go far.’

‘So will you.’

She chuckled. ‘When the war’s over, maybe.’

‘It’s not even started.’

‘It will soon.’

The music stopped. We let go of each other at the same time, which was good. I didn’t want to be caught hanging onto her, even though a part of me wanted to do just that.

She yawned.

‘Keeping you up?’

‘Not anymore. I’m heading for the sack.’ She brushed my cheek with quick kiss. ‘Thanks for the dance, Sam. You’re a sweet man.’

And she was gone.

I followed her a half-hour later, after Orlando came on board and relieved me. By then I had the lights on and everything looking shipshape. Enough that Ava had twisted my feelings around in circles, I didn’t want to broadcast it to the world. Especially not Orlando. He’d be sure to weave the Bible into it somehow, and I’d just as soon keep God out of it for the present, and have this be between just Ava and me.

I got back to my room. I had two hours left to sleep if I wanted. But not daring to take a chance on any more nightmares, I kicked off my cowboy boots, lay back on my rumpled sheets and began to think instead.

Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.

- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

T
he
Desert Queen
cast off at nine o’clock on the dot.

The full load of summer sightseers laughed and clapped their hands over their ears when Captain McGraw blew the steam whistle in a shrieking farewell.

From Ava’s and my vantage point in the wheelhouse, we had a commanding view of the forward section of the riverboat. What a tourist draw. After all, how many people have read Mark Twain? Millions, I guess, and here was their chance to experience the genteel pleasures of the South by sailing on a genuine side-wheel, Mississippi-style riverboat, albeit not down the mighty river itself.

But water is water, and the
Desert Queen’s
paddles churned it vigorously as McGraw eased her out onto Lake Mead. The short, stocky captain handled the helm with easy confidence. The polished oak wheel, almost as tall as he was, was trimmed in brass with mother-of-pearl inlays weaving around its circumference. The binnacle containing the ship’s compass was mirror-bright brass as well. In fact, every metal object in the wheelhouse seemed either polished brass or plated nickel. Boeing engineers could have taken lessons in style from the old-timers who had built this monument to Mark Twain’s
Life on the Mississippi.

I mentioned this to McGraw, who said, ‘They didn’t skimp when it came to final touches. ‘Course she was in sorry shape when we found her up on the Missouri, hauling freight and lumber. But a lot of tender loving care put her on the right side of beautiful.’ He patted the wheel. ‘Didn’t it old girl? Go ahead, tell the world what you think.’

He yanked the steam whistle rope to let out a long warbling cry. A flock of birds shifted their flight pattern in alarm.

‘Folks sure love to hear her sing.’

Ava stood by the front window. ‘And not a sandbar in sight.’

McGraw chuckled. ‘Nothing but nice deep water. Only a little thing called Boulder Dam to contend with. Wouldn’t want to run into that.’

I went over to the chart table on the back wall of the wheelhouse to study our destination. As noted on the chart, Sentinel Island lay northeast of the dam; a small oval in an otherwise open lake, dotted here and there with smaller outcroppings indicating lesser mountains that had suffered the same watery fate. According to the map the water narrowed considerably as it flowed southwest down Black Canyon toward the dam.

During its construction during the 1930s, Boulder Dam had captured newsreel and newspaper headlines almost every week. Thousands of men, out of work because of the Depression, found dust-filled, hard-scrabble jobs in Black Canyon, the construction site. But that’s about all I knew about it, until now when Captain McGraw unlocked his encyclopedic mind and let loose.

‘It’s an arch gravity dam,’ he intoned. ‘Meaning it curves upstream and directs most of the water against the canyon walls, thus providing the force needed to compress the dam and keep it in its place.’

‘That a fact?’ Ava said, her eyes already slightly glazed.

‘Indeed.’

She and I exchanged a quick glance. We both seemed to sense what was coming. When people start saying ‘thus’ you’re in for a long, hard ride.

‘And did you know that one hundred-thirteen workers died during its construction?’ he continued, almost breathlessly, as though it were breaking news. ‘The first was J.G. Tierney, a surveyor who drowned while searching for the original dam site. Thirteen years later to the day, his son Patrick was the last man to die. Imagine that.’

Ava and I both shook our heads in sympathy, like trained monkeys.

‘Guess how many cubic yards of concrete?’ I said, ‘Couldn’t begin to.’

‘Guess.’

Ava said, ‘A ga-zillion?’

‘Very funny. In point of fact, three million, two hundred-fifty thousand cubic yards. One bucket at a time. Eight cubic yards a load. And you may not know this but when concrete cures it throws off a lot of heat. Want to know how long it would have taken for three million cubic yards to cool down if they had done it in a single pour? Don’t bother, I’ll tell you how long. One hundred twenty-five years! And that’s a fact.’

‘Captain,’ I began. ‘As much as I like learning about new things, we’ve got a bomb to drop. So do you mind coming to the point of this river cruise?’

‘But I’m already at the point, captain.’

‘How so?’

‘Boulder Dam. You’re flying over it to get out of here.’

A long pause. His face shining with happiness.

‘That’s your idea?’ I finally managed to say, trying to keep my anger in check.

‘It’s more than an idea, it’s a fact. You told me you can’t get off the lake carrying a full load of fuel with only three engines, correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can do it if you fly in this direction.’

He pointed out the window at the approaching low-profile shape of the upstream side of Boulder Dam. Two cylindrical, art-deco styled intake towers rose out of the water like skyscrapers flanking our approach. He skillfully guided the riverboat to a dock carved out of rock near the right spillway. The  ground  rose  in  a  gentle  slope  to  a  level  ground.  The passengers quickly disembarked to go swarming up to the dam for a series of guided tours. McGraw, Ava and I followed them soon after, but headed for the top of the dam instead.

‘It’s hard to appreciate the size of this thing from upriver,’ McGraw said as we kicked up dust along the walkway. ‘It’s just water, water, everywhere, and these intake towers and the spillways. Hardly worth your time, if that’s all there is to it.’

‘But there’s more to it, right?’ Ava said wearily.

McGraw literally rubbed his hands with glee. ‘Oh, SO much more.’

The passengers were long gone, swallowed up inside a doorway leading to a set of elevators that would whisk them down into the bowels of the dam to gaze in wonder at the gigantic spinning hydro-electric generators arranged single-file in a long vaulted hallway.

A two-lane paved roadway ran across the top of the dam, linking Nevada with Arizona. Cars occasionally drifted by slowly, nervous drivers gingerly aware that they were high above the ground and should take care. And they were right. I’d seen photos of downriver of Boulder Dam, but standing here looking down into the shaded depths of Black Canyon, I felt a touch of vertigo.

To McGraw’s credit, he refrained from babbling statistics - at least for a while - and allowed us to take in the majesty of this breathtaking point-of- view made possible by man.

The dam wall dropped gracefully downward hundreds of feet until its light  grey,  smooth  as  glass  concrete  surface  merged  into  the  canyon’s craggy, jagged stone sides and rocky bottom. Much like the human body hides immense complexities; the bland, almost blank surface of the dam face hid hundreds of the original building blocks of cement that had been meticulously poured one at a time, and cooled with piped-in refrigerant before pouring another block on top of it.

The cooling part I didn’t know about, but Captain McGraw did, of course, including the type of refrigerant used, so I let him go on and on about this, but simply stopped listening. I felt the wind instead. Brisk, maybe ten knots or so as it swept up the canyon. I held up my hand to judge it better.

McGraw noticed my gesture and said. ‘This is the prevailing direction. Always blows like this, even at night. It’ll lessen your takeoff run a little, I should think.’

‘My takeoff run…’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you fly airplanes, by any chance?’

His batted away my question away with an embarrassed flutter of his pudgy hands. ‘Not a bit. But I read a lot, and that’s how I came up with this idea.’ He pointed to the bottom of the canyon. ‘It’s seven hundred-ten feet to the bottom. If you can crest the dam here you’ve automatically gained seven hundred feet in altitude.’

‘I’d lose half of it just maintaining airspeed.’

He looked crestfallen. ‘I didn’t realize that.’

‘That’s because you’re a riverboat captain, not a pilot,’ I snapped.

He looked hurt and Ava said, ‘What are you, ‘Mr. No’ all of a sudden? Let’s talk this through. We got out of Creeley’s marina by jacking the flaps, why not do the same thing here?’