The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen (10 page)

Chapter Nine
Grasshoppering

Q
uick! Quick! Everyone aboard!” said Everett Crew, standing at the end of the gangplank, lending a hand to the ladies. Even in a crisis he was a gentleman.

A year earlier, the Black Hand had struck again. He had sailed into Woodpile calling himself Mr. Black, with money in his pocket, a mouthful of grand plans, and a thirst to play a friendly game of poker. Here in Woodpile, a whole nest of men had been left wronged and spitting mad.

Mr. Black had played none too well that night, so eager was he to tell the men around the table his news: news of the Grand Scheme. The president of the United States had decided to move the capital of Missouri to Woodpile! Government had hushed it all up—you wouldn't see a word about it in the newspaper—but the train companies were going bust. The people of America were turning away from the iron road and looking to the waterways again. Woodpile was the up-and-coming place to be—the future state capital of Missouri.

Mr. Black said.

So Mr. Black was going to sink all his money into building a shipyard there, and he was going to get very rich indeed.

So said Mr. Black.

The local cardplayers had enjoyed their poker that night, winning money from the luckless newcomer . . . but not as much as they enjoyed the thought of Woodpile becoming the capital of Missouri. They trusted Mr. Black. He lost at cards, and what kind of cheat loses at poker? He clearly had money to spare, too, because he lost a couple hundred dollars and barely turned a hair.

By the time the poker players all stretched themselves, scratched their bellies, looked at their pocket watches, and found that it was midnight, every man had invested heavily, buying shares in Mr. Black's development: the Capital Idea Company.

“Keep this to yourselves, men. I'm letting you in early.”

Mr. Black said.

They agreed to meet up again in five days' time, for the first committee meeting of the Capital Idea Company, and said good night.

Except that next morning the
Sunshine Queen
was gone. They were each hundreds of dollars down, and Mr. Black was some two thousand dollars better off . . .
and nowhere to be found.

The gamblers strapped on their guns. A posse of boats scurried downriver and up. They would find him and shoot his head off for him. How can you hide a three-story stern-wheeler, after all? But on the maze of waterways and creeks, amid river mists and rain like javelins, you can do just that. The
Sunshine Queen
had simply melted away, like a sugar wedding cake left out in a downpour.

They could not believe their luck when, a year later, it tied up again at the landing stage, masquerading as a showboat.

“Step lively, now,” said Everett. “Hurry up there, Mr. Powers. I strongly recommend a quick departure.”

Since the
Queen
's paddle wheel was broken and useless anyway, Chad took an axe and hacked two blades out of it so that padlock and chain slid off into the shallows. With agonizing slowness, the boat drifted out onto the river and into the grip of the currents. She was still in plain sight when the landing stage filled up with running figures pointing, shouting, cursing, shaking their fists.

“I still say we should explain the situation to them,” said Miss March. “I feel sure they would understand that we have nothing to do with this Mr. Black Hand.”

“On this occasion, dear lady, I think the better part of valor is discretion,
”
suggested Curly.

“I spy strangers,” said Benet, who had just done a head count of people aboard. “Who's him?” He pointed to a skinny beanpole of a boy standing behind Crew as if using him for a windbreak. The barber-surgeon, on his high-speed roundup of the company, had corralled one too many passengers.

Crew turned and gave a start. “Oh! He's the carpenter. I was in the middle of hiring him. To mend the paddle wheel.”

“But he just now busted it worse 'n ever,” observed the carpenter, pointing at Chad and his axe. “Ain't no wonder you need repairs if yuh's gonna chop out yer blades.” And he waved a halfhearted hand toward the sorry sternwheel clattering against the stern of the ship. “You turnin' back soon? 'Cause I got no makin's.” He spoke with extreme slowness, swinging his tool bag forward and back so that nails and screws tinkled pleasantly inside. He smiled, too, at the nape of Everett Crew's neck: nobody in Woodpile had trusted him with any carpentry work for months, so he looked on Crew as his friend and benefactor.

There was someone else on board whom the carpenter was happy to see. “Hey there, Mr. Bouverie, sir!” he called up to Elijah on the wheelhouse roof. “You still sailin'?”

“Looks like it, Chips,” said Elijah, and kicked vigorously at the ship's wheel with his new, shiny, slimline boots.

Elijah had never laid claim to a surname before, and it came as a surprise now to find he had one; also that he was known this far downriver. They asked Elijah how he came to know Chips the carpenter but got no more than a shrug for an answer. Occasional memories nudged Elijah's brain, like flotsam banging against a boat hull, but they soon washed by. Besides, his attention was all on the riverbank.

“Are we not getting a little close to the . . . ooo!” inquired Miss March as a twig plucked undone her bun and let her hair spill down.

“Thought you'd favor that to gettin' shot, ma'am,” said Elijah. “There's four comin' after us on horseback, look. Gives them 'bout three horsepower more 'n this old girl, I reckon.”

Willow branches swept the
Queen
, and everybody ducked and covered their heads. Ducking was a good move, because that was the moment the riders on the far bank opened fire with rifles and hand-guns. Bullets tattered the willow fronds, pitted the pilothouse, the saloon wall. Buckshot disturbed the river's surface like panicky schools of fish. The posse of embittered poker players was in no mood for parley: they were going to vent their bitterness on the
Sunshine Queen
, drawing no distinction between the boat and the crook who had owned it the year before.

So close was she to the starboard bank now that her two tall smokestacks were smashing their way through the boughs of trees, fetching down twigs, sending birds squawking up into the sky.

“Chad—help me drop the chimneys!” said Crew. “Lou, keep down! Someone get the children under cover!”

Nobody needed much telling, except for Miss March, who was so horrified to see the twigs and willow fronds thrashing across her precious calliope that she fisted up her skirts and climbed three ladders in plain sight of the gunmen on the bank.

Curly was appalled. “They'll shoot her! They'll shoot Miss May!”

“They wouldn't dare,” said Kookie, and the two girls nodded in agreement: anyone who had studied at Olive Town Academy knew their schoolteacher would never succumb to mere bullets.

Curly and the children tumbled down into the boiler room, where the tree stump still rose crazily through the floor, while Max and Medora and the Dog Woman lay two decks above, in their cabins. The quartet helped Crew and Chad to hinge the smoke flues backward, then crouched along the starboard rail and sang hymns. Everyone knew the Dog Woman had not been hit, because they could hear her shrieking energetically, in chorus with her yipping dogs; they could also hear Elder Slater damning the gunmen to the deepest pit of hell without time off for good behavior. Medora crept under the sheet that draped her moving picture machine when it was not in use, and crouched there in the dark, her collection of movies wrapped in her skirts.

Elijah, though, was obliged to stay sitting on the roof of the pilothouse, his feet through the hatch, steering so as to stay out of range. Almost. Chips the carpenter stayed where he was, on the deck below, stolid as a bollard, gazing up at Elijah, swinging his tool bag forward and back, forward and back.

The river was wide, the riverbank treacherous, so the gunmen had to stop shooting now and then to pick their way around a mud slick, a cattle drink, a piece of flood debris, a fallen tree. But without power to drive the paddle wheel, the
Sunshine Queen
was only drifting along at the same stately speed as the current. Bullets smashed two of the windows in the stateroom before the ship drew ahead a little and their hopes lifted. Everett Crew joined his wife in the stateroom, where she sat up just high enough to slap him.

“
Why did you do that? Coulda got Chad killed! Coulda got killed yourself. . . . Lower the chimneys? To blazes with the chimneys! So we lose a chimney! Who gives a . . .
” The noise of her fury rang through the ship. The stateroom, with broken windows, had wonderful acoustics. Even the dogs stopped barking to listen. There was some kind of physical intervention—a hand over her mouth, perhaps. A kiss?

“Let go my hair, you damned man!”

“The chimneys might have snagged in the trees,” came Everett Crew's reply, soft but insistent. “Hooked us up, you know? Like Absalom caught by his hair in that tree.”

“What tree?”

“That tree in the Bible.”

“Gosh sakes, Everett, I'm half Choctaw, half Minneapolis—and neither half does Bible trees! Let go my hair.” But the volume waned and the voices calmed, and the shushing of water past the hull erased the sound.

“There's a good hard towpath comin' up,” called Elijah to no one in particular. “No help for it: they're gonna catch up to us there, lickety-split.”

Down in the boiler room, Tibbie heard this and burst into tears. Kookie put a comforting arm over her, but his eyes turned toward Cissy, and his face had not a shred of daredevilry left in it. Cissy wondered if her father would ever find out the circumstances of her death and track down her body.

“There's a side crick comin' up in ‘bout a mile,” Elijah called. “If I can shuffle up there, we can maybe lose ourselves. . . .”

“Truly?”

“Maybe.”

Why should there be a creek? How could Elijah possibly know—he whose thoughts had more holes in them than a pair of worn-out socks?

But sure enough, there it was. Though it had seemed like wishful thinking, and though it was almost invisible from the open river, a side cut disgorged into the Numchuck River from behind a curtain of willows. By some deft use of the rudder, Elijah drove the
Queen
side-on into the drapery of leaves. Green leafy tongues licked the decks and windows.

For weeks they had been tripping over the two long staves of yellow wood that lay along the deck to no apparent purpose. Now they found a use for them. The entire crew both fended off and dragged their way stern-first between the narrow banks of the creek despite an ominous noise of planks grazing bottom. They worked in silence: only noise could betray their whereabouts to the vigilantes now. One of the Dog Woman's mutts began to bark—a noise a posse could have heard a mile away—and Curly shut them all in the property box, with Julius Caesar's toga on top of them, muttering,
“. . . when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!”

“Oh, you cruel—!” the Dog Woman began to shriek, but she was jolted off her feet by the boat coming to a sudden standstill.

“Yuh's aground,” said Chips.

“You have a viselike grasp of the obvious,” said Everett with a wan smile, and Chips beamed with pleasure. He had not been treated so decently for years.

Wedged fast in the shallows of the creek, they were at the mercy of anyone who might find them there. But they were out of sight. The river spread over them its drapery of greenery and babbling noise, like Julius Caesar's toga. A few minutes later, the posse of aggrieved gamblers pounded past on the other bank without catching a glimmer of
Sunshine
.

“They'll be back presently,” said Elder Slater grimly. “Sure as the Four Horsemen of the Apollyclips. Fulla death and pestilence.”

“Sure will,” said Elijah, his eyes shut as if to read off the wrinkled vellum of his eyelids. “Big chain barge at Strommaferry. They'll cross over and come up the other bank.”

The others stared at him. “
This
bank, you mean. How long?” said Crew.

“How long what?”

“How long before they come back on this side?”

“Who?” said Elijah.

The
Sunshine Queen
was aground. The heavy mass of metal that made up the boiler and engine block sat on the bed of the creek with only her wooden skin parting metal from grit. In a matter of hours, the gamblers of Woodpile might ride up the towpath behind them and empty four handguns into her passengers at point-blank range. The sudden stillness made the crew unsteady on their feet. The lack of movement made them travel sick. The willows fingered their faces sympathetically.

“See them trees on a level with the bow?” said Elijah. “Rope around each of 'em. Use'm like bollards. Pull from the stern.”

“That man sure has a closetful of useful tips,” observed Loucien, scouring the boat for enough rope.

There were plenty of willing hands ready to haul. But when they did so, it was not the boat that moved—it was the trees. The roots came out of the soft mud banks as easily as teeth out of an old man's gums. The upper branches splashed across the deck and put a dent in one of the chimney stacks.

Hellfire Slater exhorted the waters to rise up from under the earth, but the Numchuck River had done flooding for the season and was on the ebb. The crew contemplated lightening the boat by carrying ashore everything not battened down. But it was all too plain: the immense weight of the boiler, the engine, and the crankshafts was what was pinning the hull to the riverbed. Fish were swimming freely under the stern, but the
Queen
was fast aground where the vast engine crouched, just forward of center.

“If we all stood in the river and pushed . . . ,” Kookie began, but the hopelessness silenced even him.