The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen (14 page)

Cole's grin was still pouched in his cheeks, as big as a squirrel's store of acorns. Everett tried to put an arm around Loucien, but she shook him off. Her dead husband's crimes went on piling up around them, till it seemed the boat would founder under their weight.

Debt collectors on the day of the funeral, pushing past mourners to reach the furniture, off-loading the food onto the floor so as to carry away table and chairs. After that: nothing left in the house to eat.

“I went searching—clear through the place. Went looking for some clue, some hint. Something to remind me of the reason I married this man. Ever. Loved him. Ever. Felt something good when he came through the door. Know what I found? Gambling markers and IOUs, that's what I found. Bills shoved outa sight so I wouldn't see—huh!—so he could go on pretending the next game would make him rich.

“When the landlord came to throw me out, he had a newspaper in his paw. Them days, I couldn't read. So I got him to read out the want ads. “Mail-Order Brides.” Next day I caught the stage—for some place in Oklahoma didn't hardly exist; to marry some Swedish baker—sight unseen. That's what gambling did for me. And every day of my married life, leeches and horseflies like this . . . this . . .” Loucien took a swipe at Cole, but he ducked. “Every day these bloodsuckers sank their teeth into him, plied him with whiskey; took his money and his markers and his soul and his common sense. . . . Might as well have taken the face off his head, 'cause I didn't know him no more. When I put that man in his grave . . . felt like
burying litter.
”

Kookie, arms over his head, pulled his face so hard into the floor that the wood grain impressed itself on his forehead. A stone chisel seemed to be chipping a monumental heart into his chest: a heart, spade, diamond, and club, and underneath the words
I WILL NEVER, EVER BET.

Everett was inclined to take the pistol out of Loucien's hand and shoot Cole himself. Instead, he simply withdrew his offer of a gambler's booth aboard the
Queen
. “I find I don't care to bring rats in among my family,” he said, and the whole of the Bright Lights Company knew that they were included in that family.

Cole was still wearing that imbecilic grin, fanning himself with the marker for three hundred dollars. “A new wager, then! Double or quits, like the lady said! A race! A river race! You win: you get this plus three hundred more. I win, I get to keep the
Queen
.”

No one in the saloon spoke. No one said yea or nay. There was a general understanding: this was where Cole had been heading right from the start.

“Just a hunch. Is that your vessel moored up on the wharf?” asked Everett.

“The
Tula-Rose
? Yah, she's mine.” Cole ran a hand over his mouth, struggling to keep from laughing out loud. Taking out his wallet, he unfolded another sheet of paper and wrote out the deal, using a fancy gold fountain pen. Crossing to the potbellied stove in the corner, he wiped a hand down the soot-blackened wall above it and returned to the table to press his palm print down onto the sheet of paper.

“Cole Blacker,” he said, beaming around him, snatching Everett's hand and shaking it. Now both their hands were dirtied by the deal. “A river race. Just like the old days, eh?”

“How would
you
know about the old days,
boy
?” asked Benet with icy composure.

But Cole “The Hand” Blacker was tucked up safe inside his good opinion of himself. He swaggered ashore over the gangplank, arms outstretched, conducting his giggling cronies, who had started up singing:

Chapter Thirteen
A Day at the Races

E
asy come, easy go,” said Everett Crew. The silence snapped like old elastic. “We started off stranded, and now I surmise that the Bright Lights Steamboat and Theater Company has just run aground again. I hope that everyone . . .” Then he looked around him at the people whose lives he had disrupted—Medora, Max, Miss May, the Dixie Quartet—and his speech, too, foundered.

“But we might win!” said Kookie, crawling out from under the table. He shriveled and withdrew as a dozen pairs of eyes turned on him. The story of Loucien's past life seemed to have filled the saloon like smoke, and they were all choking on the blackness of it.

Loucien herself came to the rescue. She took a deep breath. “Kookie's right. We got two thirds of a wheel, at least. That's two thirds more than we useta! Let's ask Elijah if we stand a chance. He musta seen riverboats race when he was a boy.”

But nobody did ask Elijah. Sometimes hoping for the best is better than knowing for sure. Anyway, no one had much confidence in the opinion of an antique boiler man with a defective memory and a sorrowful countenance. Instead, they did what they had come to Blowville to do: wrapped up Tibbie Boden in a blanket and carried her to the doctor, unwrapping her there like some antique heirloom they wanted valued. The doctor's office smelled of carbolic soap. The doctor did not appreciate sick people bringing their ailments into it and being sick on the floor. He gave Tibbie quinine, calomel, and a tartar emetic and advised cold baths. Three made her sick and the other made her cry, even before there was a bathtub in sight. He also advised a period of convalescence at the sanatorium in Sedalia, away from the river. Away from his office.

“And what do you get in one of those places?” demanded Miss May March. The children gave a shudder, remembering being hit with such questions in school. (“Do you think there's a right answer?” Kookie whispered to Cissy.)

“Healthsome food, good hygiene, competent nursing,” said the doctor, washing his hands in a basin.

“Well, I can give her that without trekking all the way to Sedalia!” Miss May March enfolded Tibbie in her blanket again.

“Couldn't I just go home to Papa?” whimpered Tibbie, still thinking of the cold baths.

“Not till the diphtheria's past, dear.” At which the doctor shot up out of his chair like a distress flare and ordered them out of his office. The sweating sickness was one thing, but diphtheria he wanted nothing to do with. There proved to be one advantage, though, to finding a doctor with a fear of illnesses: he forgot to write out a bill.

George, meanwhile, went looking for a barbershop. Even before he found one, he had gained a fair picture of the situation in Blowville. The whole town seemed to be owned by the Blacker family: he passed the Blacker Forge, Blacker's General Store, the Blacker Livery. . . . The local barber filled George in on the rest.

Cole was the youngest member of the Blacker dynasty, and the only one without a job. He would disappear for months on end, then suddenly reappear, hinting at dashing-like adventures and smelling of shady dealing. He might be the black sheep, but he was also an only child and sole heir to the Blacker fortune. Ever since babyhood he had been spoiled with extravagant presents and pats on the head. His every fad was indulged, every crime excused; every lie he told was believed, so his relations thought of him as a genius in the making.

All plans were abandoned by the Bright Lights to visit the Blackers and describe what their darling Cole had been up to higher up the Numchuck River. What was the point in telling doting parents that their son had rooked respectable citizens out of their savings—cheating, stealing, and hustling his way through the riverside communities like a fox stealing chickens? What witnesses could they produce? Nobody trusts actors: they have a reputation for exaggeration and making things up. As Loucien said, “How would you like a pack of miscellaneouses turning up on the doorstep, telling you your darlin' little boy's a shyster and a thief?”

“They may know already in their heart of hearts,” suggested Curly. “Parents generally have an inkling.”

“They also have a knack for denying it,” said Miss May March the schoolteacher, speaking with the voice of experience.

“Just think, folks,” said Loucien brightly. “There's three hundred dollars at stake here. There's Tibbie's medicine to pay for, fuel and groceries to buy, and nothing much in the kitty. Three hundred would boost funds nicely if we won.”

No one else there could have dared to say it: it had to be Loucien.

“And if we lose, I say we put notices in all the newspapers upriver of here telling his victims exactly where they can find Cole ‘The Hand' Blacker,” said Chad Powers with a degree of venom they had never seen in him before.

“Lose?” said Cissy, pulling herself up tall. “That's not Bright Lights talk, Mr. Powers. We never lose. We just mislay our luck for a space.”

So all of a sudden, the race was on. All of a sudden, everyone was finding optimistic things to say about the
Sunshine Queen
—so small and light—and what good publicity it would be for the Bright Lights—and how glad they were about that little Scottish engineer and the renovations. . . . Not a soul spoke of
why
they were having to race. No one suggested throwing Kookie to the wolves, leaving him on the quayside with his gambling debt and a whiskey headache. He was family, after all.

Elijah, asked if he had ever seen a steamer race, scoured around his coal scuttle of a brain and came up with a few dusty recollections. “They stripped down to the bones. If it weren't nailed down, it went. Course the engineer was the man. Make or break. Watching the traps; keeping the levels right in the traps.” To almost everyone, Elijah's reminiscences were quaint musical nonsense. But Chad Powers squatted at the old man's feet, notebook open as if to catch and press the petals of these ramblings between the pages and preserve them forever. “Pine knots are all well and good, but if you're all steam and no water . . . well, you start in St. Joseph and end up in hell,” said Elijah. “Secret is to make the river lend a hand—every mud bank, every little 'striction pushing the water on through.”

It was Chad who borrowed the canoe so that Elijah could reconnoiter the course. It was not easy, though, to get Elijah into the stern of the canoe. Cissy (whose lame pa often needed a helping hand) helped him down off the wharf. Somehow she found that she was in the canoe herself, sandwiched between the two men—the inventor and the boiler man—as Chad paddled the course and wrote down what Elijah said about it. The currents and mud bars, the plants on the bank, the height of the levees—even the breeds of fish—seemed to tell the old man something. Luckily it was Friday, and Elijah tended to remember things on Fridays. Less luckily, his mind was not on the job. With one gnarled hand peaked over his eyes against the glare, he peered around him as the river slid between high escarpments of yellow sandstone. It was a stretch of rare beauty after muddy miles of sparse brush. Whenever the sun escaped the clouds, it turned the cliff to gold. High above them, overlooking the gorge, with a view down two miles of river, was a vast mansion of white clapboard and yellow brick, its windows aglitter with sunlight. Steps had been cut into the golden escarpment, which zigzagged down to the water's edge. At the bottom stood a derelict shack that the floods had reduced to a matchwood fishpen.

“Well, look at that,” said Elijah. “There's my place.”

Cissy's heart ached for Elijah. It had never been much of a shack: now it was uninhabitable. No wonder he had ended up living aboard the
Queen
. “My house got wrecked too,” she said, and kissed the big veiny hand resting on her shoulder. She had only just remembered about the store being demolished. Up till then, Elijah's sieve of a memory had been a puzzle to her. Now she realized: it is possible to forget the most enormous things when life gets busy.

Back at the wharf, Chad and Kookie scoured the woodpile for pine knots; they burned hotter and brighter than ordinary logs because of the resin in them. It was Chad who supervised the removal of every fixture, fitting, and piece of luggage that could be carried ashore. When Medora protested that she could not possibly leave her camera equipment on the wharf unguarded, Crew told her that was fine because he would be leaving the women and children on shore, for safety.

Cole Blacker's paddle steamer, bought with the proceeds of his scams upriver, was a big vintage craft, creamy with lavish layers of new white paint, lacy with metal filigree. Golden steam whistles sprouted from the pilothouse, and two Union flags as big as tablecloths flew one on either side of the paddle wheel. The rivets in the twin chimneys were as smart as the buttons on a lady's boots. The crew (though they were simply Cole's drinking friends) had on uniform maroon overalls, and Cole Blacker, when he finally put in an appearance, was dressed somewhere between an admiral and a ringmaster.

Elijah puffed out through his soup-strainer mustache and scrubbed at his moth-eaten thatch, but said nothing. They supposed he must feel a world of disappointment at the unfairness of life. Here was this meritless, spoiled boy possessed of a beautiful vessel through cheating and lying. Elijah, who had labored his life away as roustabout, mud clerk, and boiler man, and could steer a paddler with his feet, teetered now on the brink of a penniless old age. They waited for him to say some such thing.

“She's three yards longer and two wider in the beam” was all he said. “St. Louis built. Prob'ly draws more water.”

“Is that good?” asked Everett.

“Or bad?” asked his wife.

Elijah shrugged. “'Pends on the wind, I guess. Steam up, should I?”

Without knowing why, the children were given a five-dollar bill and sent to buy a side of bacon from the butcher in Blowville. It seemed a horrific extravagance.

“Gonna hold a pig roast for the crowd, you wait,” Kookie stated. “Make some money that way.”

“Cain't roast a flitch of bacon, silly,” said Cissy. But she was unsure of her facts. Bacon was not spit-roasted in Oklahoma, but maybe in Missouri the locals were as squeamish as she was and didn't like watching a whole dead pig revolving, ears and tail hanging loose.

Five dollars would buy only one flitch. Kookie asked for two. “Send the bill on up to Mr. Cole Blacker, if you please,” he told the butcher. “He sent us.”

Outside the shop, Tibbie (who was still an invalid so didn't have to carry things) did her bit by getting hysterical. “That was a fearful big lie, Kooks!” she whispered, breathing too fast and biting her lip and looking back over her shoulder.

“The Hand fleeced me, so now I'm flitching him,” said Kookie vengefully. “Any case, we didn't have enough money for two.”

The sides of bacon were greasy and bristly and rather too much like dead bodies for Tibbie's liking, so she walked farther off, lest Cissy and Kookie bump her as they struggled along, each carrying an entire side of bacon. “What are you going to do with Mr. Crew's five dollars? You keeping it for your gambling?” asked Tibbie. The procession came to an abrupt halt, and Cissy dropped her flitch. Kookie's face was crimson with shame or anger.

“I'm never ever gamblin' ever again,” he snapped. “I taken the pledge on gamblin'.”

The flitches were not intended for a pig roast on the riverbank. Elijah wanted them chopped up, carried aboard the boat, and steeped in turpentine. The Bright Lights Theater Company stood around and watched, mutiny in their hungry eyes. Curly, who did a lot of the cooking, chopped up one joint and sank it in the poisonous marinade, but he kept the other intact, just in case it could be spared.

“We gonna send them around to Blacker as a gift?” Tibbie speculated. “Kill him of turpentine poisoning?” But Miss May March wrapped her in a blanket again and carried her ashore, telling her she had had enough excitement for one day and needed to give her brain a rest.

Kookie had no intention of going ashore and, instead of crossing the gangplank, peeled off sideways and hid behind a stack of life rafts. Cissy went after him to ask what he thought he was doing and if he hadn't caused enough trouble already. Then the gangplank was inboard . . . and so was Cissy . . . and there was nothing to be done about it.

When the Blacker family arrived on the wharf, the crowds parted as if for royalty. They came in a horse-drawn landau, she a big woman in purple velvet, he with a florid face and hair the color of gravy. They looked as if they ate a flitch of bacon every day for breakfast. There was an auntie or two, and a pair of hunting dogs, in the carriage as well. They all had the look of money, but not the old kind. The Blackers had spent their lives earning more than anyone in the county, and the effort was etched in their faces. Now they sat in their luxury vehicle, hands folded in their laps, and gazed with fond affection and pride at the son who had made it all worthwhile. Cole Blacker was strutting up and down the hurricane deck of the
Tula-Rose
, up and down in front of his crew, like a general inspecting troops. He climbed to the pilothouse, sounding every bell, gong, whistle, and horn, and the whole crowd cheered.

Blushing at her own daring, Miss May March called out across the water: “You can do it, boys! Pull out all the stops!”

Curly, intending to wish Miss May March a cheery farewell, climbed up to the calliope and played a couple of ten-finger chords. To his consternation, the boiler had been primed to such a pitch that the steam pressure was enormous. Instead of the usual feeble, creaky groaning, a noise like the blast of a cannon issued from the calliope pipes. People nine miles away said they heard it and thought of their Maker. Horses shied, bucked, and tried to leave. The crowds put their hands over their ears. For the first time, the grin slipped off Cole Blacker's face. The
Sunshine Queen
had shouted him down.