The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen (13 page)

“Sure there was! I seen one!” Kookie insisted. “Medora knows. Ain't I right, Medora?” And he deliberately pulled off the blanket covering Medora's Photopia equipment . . . and Medora herself, who had been hiding there. The very walls of the room gasped at his treachery.

Cain enjoyed it hugely. “You heard me. Get me stuff,” he said, but this time he said it to Kookie in person. Having just seen the boy betray a friend, Cain trusted him better for it. “You try something dumb, I shoot your sister there. Right? And the other one upstairs.”

It took Kookie a moment to work out who Cain meant. Then his eyes focused on Cissy, and a dozen illegible emotions tugged at his face. It reminded Cissy of the look he had worn as the alligator nudged him and the company looked down from above . . . and did nothing.

Then Kookie went out and came back with Elder Slater's gun, empty of bullets; with the seven dollars and fifty cents Cissy had saved toward rebuilding the grocery store; with his own collection of cockroaches in a jam jar. On the next trip he fetched George's cutthroat razor, which he laid on the table in front of Cain.

Suddenly Cain sent Miss March to “fetch the sick kid down where I can see it.” As the schoolteacher carried Tibbie, fireman style, down the steep stairs, she was whispering to herself, all the time whispering, “There must be something I can do—if I could just think!”

Tibbie, whose bones seemed to have melted during the fever, had to be laid on the table. She looked like some doomed creature out of a Dickens novel—Little Nell, maybe. She was wider awake, though, thanks to a breath of fresh air.

Kookie fetched Cain the shiniest nails from Chip's toolbox, a bottle of wine presented to them all by the Mayor of Plenty, the vanity set given to Everett by his wife on their first anniversary.

Little Nell climbed off the table and went to sit in Miss March's lap. “I think Kookie's a traitor and a Bendict Armhole,” she whispered.

“Arnold, Tibbie dear,” said Miss May March, cradling the child close. “Benedict Arnold. And a Judas, too.”

Kookie brought Cleopatra's snaky bracelet and velvet purse from the property box; Prospero's magic staff; Hamlet's sword; Macbeth's dagger. All these he laid on the table in front of Sugar Cain, except for the tin laurel wreath worn by Julius Caesar, which he thrust at Curly. “I think
you
should give it to him, Curlitz. Like Brutus does in
Julius Caesar
. To show how great he thinks he is and how old Julius is top dog.”

Curly's back straightened. He blinked at Kookie, and his eyes strained wide in their sockets. Around the clutter of assembled tables, several other spines flexed into the upright.

Miss May March breathed sharply in. “Do not do it, Mr. Curlitz! Please do not do any such thing!”

Cain was intrigued. He rested the sword point on Loucien's unborn child and demanded to have the wreath.

“It's not in me,” said Curly helpless, hopeless. “I can't do it.”

So Kookie took it upon himself and, holding the tinny crown up high on fingertips, clicking his heels and bowing, he presented it to the river pirate. Because Cain's hands were both occupied, with the sword and the pepper-box pistol, Kookie had, in fact, to “crown” him. The greasy straggle of hair he rested the wreath down on grew like seaweed on a rock, stranded, stringy, and faintly green, inhabited by small life forms.

“You're thinnin” on top, sir,” said Kookie. “No disrespect. You should have Mr. George do you a head rub. Does a squissimus head rub. In the throne there.” Kookie pointed over to the barber's chair. “He done it for me. Feels like a chantoosie licking honey off your brains. An' look at me! My thatch was the colora cow dung before I had that head rub!”

Cain ran an eye over the thick red hair exploding out of Kookie's freckled head. His top lip curled back off his child-sized teeth. “Think I'm stoopid, bean-face? Think I'm gonna let some bum come around behind and throttle me?” But he did get up and stalk over to the splendid leather barber's chair, pushing Loucien ahead of him with the sword, his wreath catching the light, unsettling the lice. Sword in one hand, pepper-box pistol in the other, he wriggled into the chair's embrace. It exaggerated the smallness of his frame, but it was clear from the look on Cain's face that he felt the grandeur of wearing a crown and sitting in a leather throne.

“Stoopid? No,” said Kookie earnestly. “You might be a skunk, but I reckon you're a gen-yoo-ine pirate. What's a man git for bein' nice? Big turnout at his funeral. I don't plan on bein' nice, me. Sooner be no-tor-i-ous. People respect no-tor-i-ous. People lick your boots.” At which he turned to Benet and asked, “You shine shoes?”

The look that came into Benet's eyes was about as dark as molten anger and overloaded as a cotton boat. Outrage. Inside-out rage. A tidal wave of anger carrying along as much ancient flotsam as the Mississippi in flood. “I only shine my
own
shoes, boy,” said Benet in a voice so basso profundo that the glass rattled in the window frames.

Hamlet's sword tip tore a hole in the front of Loucien's dress. Her scarlet chemise showed through, like blood.

“Well,
I
shine 'em!” said Kookie brightly. “
I
clean boots better'n Virgil Hobbs back in Olive Town, an' he's the bootmaker! He mends 'em, but I shine 'em up for him. Don't I, sis?” he said, glaring at Cissy.

“Sure do,” said Cissy and added, almost as an afterthought, “Judas.”

Little Nell whispered in Miss March's ear, “No he don't,” then yelped as the schoolteacher's hands tightened like steel around her arms.

“Hush now, dear,” said Miss March tenderly.

“'Cause I'm a boot-shining genius, me!” Kookie was saying, warming to his theme. “It's all in the quality of the spit, see?” And in an act as fawning as that of any politician or bridegroom, he dropped down on his knees in front of Sugar Cain's throne and began to polish the pirate's cracked, flaking, mud-caked boots, using Cleopatra's velvet purse. He had to clean them in midair, because Cain's legs were too short to reach the floor.

It was probably the biggest moment in Sugar's wizened little life.

It was also the perfect opportunity for Kookie to fetch out the dime from inside Cleopatra's purse and feed it into the slot in the arm of the chair.

The chair shivered—as anyone might who wakes to find something repulsive lying on them. Startled, Cain sat up—tried to sit up, though the leather was slippery. He dropped the sword, so as to get a better grip on the chair's arm. Then the vibrating ratchets got going in earnest.

Cain's light frame was tossed around like a skeleton in a runaway hearse. The pepper-box pistol fell into his lap, whereupon he began screaming shrilly, on and on, every moment expecting it to go off and shoot him point-blank.

“Take cover!” shouted Kookie, and everyone slid down off their chairs. But Kookie himself was ablaze with battle frenzy, lobbing more things into Cain's lap—the open cutthroat razor, the cockroaches, a handful of nails, Macbeth's dagger. . . . Benet added the pot of hot coffee off the stove. Every time Cain tried to struggle upright, the chair shook him down again onto the flat of his pelvis, where he writhed, helpless as a turtle overturned. Everyone was shouting, but no one as loudly as Kookie, who was jumping two-footed up and down on the spot, arms clamped tight against his chest, inchoate noises gargling out of his throat, nose bleeding with the strain of bawling hatred at Sugar Cain. Only when the pepper-box pistol bounced off Cain's stomach, hit the floor, and went off did the ice freeze solid around Kookie's heart and bring him to a dead halt, eyes shut. At the same instant, the dime ran out and the chair came to a standstill.

Kookie thought everyone was under the table, and that now, all alone, he would have to look and see what he had done—whether Cain was still alive and raging mad—whether the stray bullet had killed anyone he loved. But in fact, when he opened his eyes, Curly and Oskar and Crew and Benet and Miss March and Chad and Boisenberry all had hold of Cain. They had screwed him into a ball on the floor, like a boxer's handkerchief: crusty, bloodied, and damp.

Chad Powers stood up under the wrought-iron hanging flower basket and nearly knocked himself cold, but apart from that the entire company was unhurt.

Just then, Chips wandered in on the scene, having been asleep in the engine room throughout. “Something happen here?” he asked in his customary sleepy drawl.

Despite some keenness to tie Cain to the paddle wheel and drown him, they decided to shut the pirate in the property box instead, and carried him ashore in Licorice. Licorice did not really want him but promised to keep him locked up until the circuit judge next visited.

“How often does he come by?” asked Everett.

“Last time was 1891,” said the Sheriff, jangling a bunch of keys in Sugar's face with sadistic relish.

Chapter Twelve
Sleight of Hand

K
ookie was the hero of the hour. The men took turns shaking his hand, the women kissing him.

“It all goes to show the true greatness of the divine Bard!” said Curly. “Your hint was masterly!”

“I was not aware you knew the play of
Julius Caesar,
Kookie,” said Everett.

“Sure! Back in Olive Town! Don't you recall? Miss Loucien hauled you in to help with the teachin', and you agreed 'cause you fancied gettin' up close to Miss Loucien, and you gave us a taste of Shakespeare. We did the 'sassination scene, and I was Brutus and stabbed old Julius in the Capitol 'fore he could dish the republicans.”

Everett contemplated this. “Crudely put, but fair.”

“Just as well Cain
didn't
know Shakespeare,” suggested Chad.

“Ah, Mr. Powers!” said Miss May March in her most refined voice. “With a good education, Sugar Cain might not have turned out the way he did!” She did not confess her own complete ignorance of
Julius
Caesar
. Kookie's toadying act had fooled her almost till the dime slipped sweetly into the slot in George's vibrating chair.

“I knew straight off, when Kookie called Cissy sis,” said Tibbie, valiantly trying to keep up with all the cleverness going on.

“Terrible thought!” said Kookie. “Sister Cissy Sissney. Sounds like a steam train comin'.”

Cissy retaliated. “You? Clean boots for Virgil Hobbs? Surprised anyone believed that!” Though secretly just then she thought Kookie Warboys the cleverest object on the planet.

“And a reward, too, Habakkuk!” exclaimed his schoolteacher. “Shall you open a banking account when you get home? Calculating the interest would be an excellent use for your mathematics.”

Kookie could think of seventy ways of spending the fifty dollars in bounty money he had just been paid for catching Sugar Cain. None of them involved banks.

A couple of days later, as he walked down the main street in Blowville, a dozen deep-throated doorways called to him to come in and
spend
: the bakery, the tailor's, the saloon, the offices of Wells Fargo, the general store. . . . They whispered that his mother would love a new dress length, that his sisters would love . . . But once he let in the idea of buying presents for his great multitude of brothers and sisters, the sum of fifty dollars shrank quicker than boiled wool. There were so many things that would make life sweeter. With enough money, he could travel all around America! With enough money, he could buy a paddleboat like that glorious confection moored up right now on Blowville Wharf, and give it to the Bright Lights, and set them up for life! He could almost wish Sugar Cain had been a bank robber or a mass murderer with a bigger reward on his head. Almost.

The saloon won out. His older brother had once told him that bartenders don't give one cherry stone what age you are, so long as you have the money to buy. So Kookie went in and ordered himself a whiskey and orange. Sure enough, the bartender presented him with a half tumbler of whiskey with a whole orange stoppering up the top. The other men along the bar watched to see what he would do with it, grinning. Kookie considered whether to squeeze the orange into the glass in a manly sort of way, to show off his biceps. But then he might have to fish around in his drink with one finger to fetch out all the seeds. So he pocketed the orange, raised his glass to his audience, and said, “To Law and Order! I'm a bounty hunter, see. Just brought a man in.” Then he drank the whiskey down in one go.

The nettles had been worse, he told himself, when the burning wore off. Well, that was the whiskey done. Now for a hat.

“Want to sit in on this game? Since your luck's in?” The young man who said it was also in need of a new hat. The one he was wearing made him look slightly simple, like a hick farm boy. His jacket was loud and tartan, too high in the waist and long in the sleeves. When he shuffled the cards, he dropped several on the floor. Kookie could have shuffled better.

“Whatcha playing?” Kookie asked, implying he had played poker and gin so often he was bored with them. (The Warboys family played only whist or pinochle.)

The tartan hick shrugged. “What's your game? Take a seat . . . unless you have enough money, what with the bounty, and don't need to win any more.”

Enough? All those unbought presents for his brothers and sisters banged up against Kookie like flotsam, and suddenly fifty dollars was not nearly enough. Back in Olive Town he had been the brains behind a hundred dubious bets, wagers, dares, turtle derbies, and moneymaking schemes, and he had always come out on top. The day had convinced him he was lucky, too: the very fact that he was not full of bullets was clear proof. So he sat down at the table, split the pack, and shuffled the cards with a deft interflick of the two halves.

“This man's sharp!” said the tartan hick, and gave an admiring whistle. He was actually rather well- spoken for a farm boy, and he had good teeth.

“Tell you what,” said Kookie—
très nonchalant
—”pinochle's a game you don't see much these days. You recall pinochle?” Amazingly, it so happened the tartan hick had been thinking just the same thing not five minutes before. The men around the table seemed to think it was a hilariously good idea.

And sure enough, Kookie doubled his money playing pinochle. In the course of fourteen games, he hardly missed a trick. Thanks to the whiskey, the room took on a slight tilt, but Kookie leaned into it, like a cyclist into a bend, and played even faster.

If he had just stopped then and there.

Or if he had just spotted the moment his luck changed, and called it a day.

If he had just gotten up and gone, rather than holding on and holding on, thinking that at any moment the run of play must turn around and grant him another win. But having seen his fifty dollars double, he saw it halve, and then disappear to nothing. And then the shame was so bad that he could not bear to think of heading back to the boat. “What did you buy? What did you do with all that cash?” they would ask him.

He thought his eyes must be bulging like a Pekingese's, such a weight of tears was pushing on them. Just to keep the tears from spilling out, he had to screw up his face and scowl at the cards in his hand. Diamonds slid behind one another. Spades dug themselves in. Queens and jacks eloped and left him with nothing but a handful of worthless pips.

“Don't be downcast! You're a good man—I like you,” said the man in tartan, his vowels now as round as oranges. “I'll fund you.”

If Curly had been there, he would have said, “‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.'” If Elder Slater had been there, he would have said that playing cards for money was a “burning sin.” If Miss Loucien had been there . . . but that was too scary even to imagine. When his tartan friend—”Cole! Call me Cole; we're all friends here!”—pushed a wad of dollar bills across the table, a surge of relief went through Kookie hotter than neat whiskey. Maybe, after all, they were just playing for dollar bills the way the family played for matchsticks back home.

He lost track, after that, of how much he lost. At some stage somebody bought him another whiskey: Blowville was proving a real friendly place.

“Well! Kooks!” said Cole an hour later, pushing back his chair. “Much as I appreciate your company, you're three hundred down and we just wore the spots off the cards.” He added that he had never met a bounty hunter so young and green looking before. “You write your name on there and you'll make me a happy man.” And he slid a paper across the table to get Kookie's autograph.

He kept Kookie company, too, all the way back to the boat. That was where Kookie found that from being hero of the hour, he had moved on. Suddenly he was . . . invisible.

“He's underage,” said Everett when Cole presented the marker for three hundred dollars and demanded payment.

“If he's old enough to sign his name to a debt, he's old enough to pay it,” said Cole, sweet, cheerful, insistent.

Everett was, like all husbands in the late stage of his wife's pregnancy, overemotional. “I have a sick child aboard: I don't have time for this. Get out of here, sir, or I'll apprise your mother of the mistake she made hatching you out of that vulture's egg. Count yourself lucky I don't bring countercharges! Corrupting a minor! The theft of lollipops from babies!”

Cole smirked. “Matter of fact, you'll find I'm pretty well liked around here. . . . You bring your lawsuit. I take it you people have plenty of respectable folk upriver ready to give you character references? If so, my uncle the judge would be glad to read them over . . . though I heard you ran into a spot of trouble. That right?”

Everett looked Cole up and down with open disdain. Gone were Cole's hick hat and jacket, thrown over the boat's rail in a flamboyant gesture of swaggering, gloating vanity. From underneath them had emerged a vain, expensively dressed brat.

“The Devil marked your cards from the day you were born!” declared Elder Slater, brandishing his gun, but Everett waved him away. Like Slater, he longed to puncture the puffed-up arrogance of this low-life local dandy, but he knew there was no point. He recognized a professional when he saw one. Cole had seen Kookie coming. There was something premeditated and calculated in every move he had made. Somehow he knew of the difficulties they had encountered upstream. In short, Cole knew the strength of the hand he had to play. Here was a crooked gambler, and a gambler's only instinct in life is to win.

Everett closed his eyes, thought himself into the character of the river gambler who had come aboard back in Engedi: wily, wordly, worming . . . “Like it or not, sir, I lack the luck to have three hundred dollars. I'm short that sort of spondooly. I barely have thirty. Won't dirty your shirt pocket with thirty. Let us evolve—solve our dilemma. Say we forget all about this?” Crew reached to tug the IOU out of Cole's hand, but Cole was too quick for him. “You're a player, yes? You want to ride the river, yes? Plucking new suckers every night? A gambling booth on deck? Discreet. Be sweet. What's a paddler without sport, I say? To my way of thinking, three hundred is the purchase price of a prime pitch aboard the
Sunshine Queen
.”

“And I say
double or quits
!” Loucien Crew swept into the decayed stateroom with Elder Slater at her shoulder. The preacher had been telling her the bad news. In a flame-red dress, prodigious, wild-haired and raging, she was more alarming than any hellfire preacher
.
“I'll bet you can't run faster than a bullet!” she threatened, pointing her pearl-handled pistol at Cole's head. “
That's
my bet. Now you prove me wrong and you get twice three hundred! Start running!”

The gambler's smile stayed wedged in his mouth, like a harmonica. He flicked his forelock of soft dark hair. “You don't want to do that, lady. My uncle's the—”

“Oh, but I do want to do it, young man! I crave shootin' all your kind. It's a crusade o' mine. Some people it's rabbits. Some folk it's roaches. Me it's gamblers.” And she actually cocked the pistol.

Everett stepped between the two. Cole's cronies were even now watching from the wharf, erect as prairie dogs, spellbound. His imagination pelted ahead toward disaster. “Lou! I think this is a time for diplomacy. A little compromise!”

His wife glared at him
. “
Didn't I tell you? Didn't I say?
I won't have gamblers on board!
”

Cole, as smug as ever, baring his white fender of perfect teeth, raising one sardonic eyebrow, reached over Crew's shoulder, and shook Loucien's hand, pistol and all. “Double or quits, did you say, ma'am? I'll settle for double or quits. I like a game worth playing. What's yours? Cribbage? Snap?” And he allowed himself a snort of laughter that made Kookie (curled up under the tables nearby) beat his head softly on the floor.

“I know cards,” said Loucien with sudden icy coolness. “I got plenty chance to learn. My first husband was a gambler.” And she made it sound as bitter as any words ever spoken by a wronged wife.

Never in all their acquaintance had Loucien spoken of life before Olive Town. Not even to her husband, Everett Crew. It was a locked room, a previous address she had torn out of her address book. Now the sight of this snickering cardsharp sparked such raging recollections that the memories spilled out of her, a frozen river thawing, a flood of incoherent words.

All those years spent married to a gambling man.

His endless excuses for being short of cash; the sudden lavish gifts whenever he got lucky.

Things unaccountably missing from around the house—furniture, clocks, wedding presents that turned up in the pawnshop window.

Arguments with the landlord; moonlight flits to another town to escape the unpaid debts—debts they never shook off.

Anger—his everlasting righteous anger—because she did not understand him, because she could not make ends meet, because she whined, because a man needs a bit of excitement, a little flutter now and then. Her gloomy face had soured his luck, he said. The way she had let herself go: it was no wonder he preferred to spend time down with the backroom boys and pretty barroom girls . . . Lurline was the woman he should have married, he said: Lurline Monteverdi, queen of the gambling tables.

Loucien's past continued to pour memories down on her head, like a burst water tank. The debt collectors at the door at three in the morning. The grocer refusing any more credit. All these horrors she tried to describe, for the very first time since they had happened.

Her husband's certainty that every other cardplayer was a crimp and a cheat.

“Finally he tried it himself,” said Loucien. “Bought a book mail order:
100 Ways to Cheat at Cards.
Had it in his pocket the day someone shot him for laying down five kings.”