The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen (5 page)

Chapter Five
Carried Away

T
he floor under their feet heaved. Doors through-out the boat banged: a many-chambered heart flickering back into life. At the same moment, water swilled from end to end of the deck below. The
Calliope
was awash.

The swollen river, overbrimming its banks, lifted the hull as the wind lifts a rug, rippling it from end to end. Older, fetid water was swilled through the bilges. But a tree stump had bitten up through her hull; temporarily, the boat was pegged in place by it.

“
Everyone off!
” shouted Cyril Crew, but the thought of the womenfolk and girls two decks up, plus the company's few scattered possessions, drove the men back up the companionways, hollering and yelping with alarm as the boat groaned and squealed at every joint and weld.

Impaled on its tree stump, the whole ship writhed like a Roman who has fallen on his sword and failed to die.

Chairs and tables and theater props danced across the stateroom floor. Miss Loucien had gathered both the schoolgirls to her, their heads protruding from under her armpits.

“Everyone off! Everyone off!” shouted Everett. “She's going to wash back into the river!”

“But our movables!” wailed Curly. Already he had gathered to him a cocoon of possessions: a doublet, a crown, Cyril's new script, Mr. Powers's crutch, and a cash box.

“Better off plugging the hull,” said the alligator man, who seemed to have stalked them up from the engine room.

Outside, lapping tongues of water were turning the mud to slurry, the undergrowth into streaming tendrils. Skidding and sliding down toward terra firma, the Bright Lights found only terra slimy, terra awash. The young men were the first over the side: Finn and Egil and Revere. Their dark shapes splashed away into the veiling rain, arms and legs flailing wildly. Cyril Crew followed more ponderously, picking his way through the slurping, slippery mud. Everett picked up his wife and hoicked his long legs over the bull rails, but found himself up to his knees in mud that all but sucked off his boots. After three paces, he could no longer keep his footing. In front of him three trees, their roots washed bare of soil, capsized, falling, sprawling toward him, bouncing on the great gray cages of their boughs. Only by turning his back and enveloping his wife in both arms did he manage to shield her from the whippy lash of their twigs and wet leaves.

The whole world seemed to be on the move, sliming back into the mud God had once used to make it. Everett turned back and returned to the ship: it was the only shelter available. Child-sized hands, cold and slippery with rain, pulled them both back over the rails.

“Be better off afloat,” said alligator man, lending a paw.

And whether he was right or not, they had no choice anymore. With a groaning shudder, the
Calliope
began to slip sideways off the spit of land. The men who had gone ashore—Cyril, Finn, Egil, and Revere—also turned back, but the ship dragged herself away faster than they could run to catch up. Frantically they shouted—”
Stop!” “Wait!
”—as though their friends aboard still had any part to play in what was happening. Sharp, hooked little waves, scuffed up by the wind, snicked and grappled the heaving hull, hoicking it back out onto the river, repossessing the wreck after its brief season on dry land.

“But we were snagged!” cried Everett, looking around to see who was left to hear him. “There must be a hole!” And if that was true, then surely that hole, now empty of the tree stump that had made it, was letting the river gush in. Within minutes they would sink as surely as an uncorked bottle tumbling downstream.

And so those aboard scattered in every direction, searching the weather deck and dark cargo space for signs of water pluming up from below—though, as Mr. Powers observed, “God alone knows how we'd plug it!”

“Cyril?” Everett could be heard calling between cupped hands, shouting into the rain. “Cyril, are you all right?”

Kookie lingered, however, and Cissy, too afraid to brave the rolling deck without him, stood clinging to the back of his jacket. He picked up Mr. Powers's damp sketches off the floor. Rolling them thoughtfully into a tube, he put the tube to his eye, like a telescope, which he trained on the alligator. Held at a distance, like that, the creature from the boiler room was less terrifying. He was simply a very old man, encrusted from head to foot in green mold and rust the color of dried blood. His face was streaked with oil, and his eyes had a way of drifting sideways. His mind did not seem to be entirely on the job at hand.

“Bet you know 'zactly where we were snagged,” Kookie said.

The alligator, after some difficulty, swiveled his eyes toward Kookie. “Been workin' on it,” he said.

Not only did he know, but he had spent several nights sawing and hacking at the tree stump in an attempt to part it from its roots. (“That's what I heard in the night,” said Cissy, the noise of giant rats explained at last.) Then he had battened the stump in place, like a giant plug, and packed the jagged hole around it with old rugs and rags, daubing everything with tar.

In the end, the whole stump had pulled out, like a rotten tooth, from the sloppy ground. The mend had held, and the stump was now riding along, embedded in the
Calliope
's skin, a tumor welling up through the deck.

Kookie, Cissy, and the alligator stood around the mend and watched black water well through the tarry rugs. They could picture, beneath their feet, the bare splayed roots clawing for grip but grabbing only handfuls of rushing river. The top of the stump wagged its head. The alligator wagged his head in reply. “That'll hold it far as Engedi,” he said.

The
Calliope
banged and juddered over big, unseen obstacles in the river, which shoved at her and set her spinning. Faster and faster she spun, heeling over to an angle that threw her passengers to the floor and swept them all together in one corner of the stateroom, like pastry trimmings. A tree limb burst through one of the windows—a groping arm—but immediately withdrew as the vessel turned around once more. Chairs and boxes slid from end to end of the stateroom—drunken waltzers stampeding over the fallers on the floor. Beyond the banging doors, great gray waves weltered past, rising proud from the river to punch the hull.

Now and then, across the swell of Miss Loucien's stomach, Cissy glimpsed Tibbie's face, white as milk, and promised God that Tibbie could be the new ingénue if only he would let her see Poppy and home again. She shut her eyes tight and listened to Everett and Loucien Crew saying how much they loved each other and how glad they were to have met.

And Cissy tried to be glad, too.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men
,
”
gasped Curly, “
which, taken at the flood . . . ,”
but the shuddering of the ship shook the rest of the quotation out of his head.

The riverside houses of Salvation rushed past, knee deep in water. There was no living soul to be seen. Cattle mutely bellowed from patches of high ground, their noise obliterated by the racketing river and the clacketing clatter of the paddle wheel spinning unchecked on its axle. In fact the clamor was completely deafening. It harangued the boat from shore to shore, yelling that it was
nothing!
matchwood! sawdust! raffia work! history!
Then even the shores receded, and the veils of rain thickened until all Time and Civilization had surely been washed away.

The boat was a crocodile, snaking its flexible spine as it bore them away to its underwater den.

How long they lay there, clinging to one another and under attack from the furniture, no one knew. They tried to judge time passing by how far Curly had quoted his way through
King Lear
. But he had been through the whole of
Pericles
and was halfway out of the Sonnets before they hit Patience.

Like Salvation, Patience stood on a bend in the river. It had only eight houses and, thanks to the
Calliope
, almost finished the day with seven. They hit it nose on, crunching up a timber dock as though it were made of stale bread. The jolt dislodged a little cannon that stood near the prow. It ran backward down the deck, smashed through the wall of the cargo space, and got wedged between two steam pipes.

Up in the stateroom, the last dancing chair fell over onto its back, while the jolt of impact shook a single choking cry of fright from the people strewn around the floor. But though they waited for the
Calliope
to fall into pieces around them, like bad scenery in a play, she did not. Planks slid down the shingles, lamps spewed colza oil down the walls. The clapper fell out of the dinner bell in the saloon. The prow drove itself ten feet into the bank. But the
Calliope
did not disintegrate. She simply stopped dead, while the river boiled by behind her. And the passengers who tottered out of the stateroom onto the hurricane deck found themselves looking into the faces of a large family seated in a row opposite them, at treetop height.

The family was ranged along the roof ridge of their house, wedged between their two dogs, like books between bookends. With the battering-ram arrival of the stern-wheeler, they did not jump to their feet or hurl themselves into the floodwater but solemnly watched it demolish their landing stage, eyes curiously blank, hands folded on their ragged kneecaps.

“Hold on! We'll rescue you!” called Kookie, darting to and fro along the ship's rails, trying to think of a way to fetch the stranded family aboard. The gangplank was long enough, but it was in the wrong place, hugely heavy, and fixed in place by a winch.

“Yes! Never fear!” cried Everett. “We'll get you down from there!”

The Kobokin family gaped back, unmoving. “Same ever' year,” said the oldest man resignedly. “It'll pass.”

Every year his house was besieged by the river. Sometimes it fell down. Sometimes one of the other eight houses in Patience fell down. What cannot be changed must be endured. The Kobokins were not looking to be rescued. They were simply waiting, up on their roof, for Fate to take a kinder turn.

“Fresh water be welcome,” said the mother, who was cradling a baby in her lap. Only the baby's kicking legs were visible, but even from a distance of thirty feet, there was a family likeness in those little pink knees. With an inventor's ingenuity, Powers climbed to the pilot deck, threw over a weighted line, and got the Kobokins to hold it taut. Then he slid a camping kettle of fresh water down the cable. After drinking from it, the castaways balanced it on the chimney to collect rainwater.

“Have you got enough to eat?” called Everett (which, fortunately, they had, because there was no food at all aboard the
Calliope
).

“Is there anything you need?” called Loucien.

A row of Kobokin shoulders lifted in nine identical shrugs. “Could tell us the news, maybe,” said the grandpa.

Everett's eye ran along the row of rheumy, passive faces, the hollow cheeks, the shineless eyes. He glanced once more upriver, for some sign of his missing brother, then drew in a long draft of air through a nose still dribbling blood. And he began to recount the news, undaunted by the fact that he did not actually know any.

He told them about the giant and monstrous Wallergoom shot in St. Paul when it was on the very point of eating the sheriff. He told them about the church that had been washed clear down to the Gulf of Mexico in the floods and been commandeered by the cavalry to fight buccaneers in the South Seas. “I hear it rolls fearfully in a big sea, but the enemy are sure impressed by the ship's bell!” He told them about the hosts of butterflies plaguing Natchez, settling on cattle and carrying them off into the sky, stuck to their millions of butterfly feet. “They don't mean to, but their feet get sticky with nectar, you see, and before they know it . . .”

He told them about nearsighted bandits who had held up the bullion train in Wichita and stolen three hundred eggs, a turkey, and a folding chair, because they got the wrong caboose. He began a report on the Kentucky Derby where the winner had been disqualified for using six legs—”Well, the horse was so short in the legs that the jockey could join in and run as well, and that's just plain contrary to the rules of the sport!”—but by then one of the little Kobokins was laughing so hard that she fell off the roof ridge and slid down as far as the gutter.

The whole row of faces was grinning and scowling in equal parts—struggling to hear Everett above the noise of the river. Ma Kobokin passed the baby into a neighboring lap and shouted, “
Know any songs?
”

So Miss Loucien sang. And though she protested that she could sing properly only when she was wearing a corset, her loose underwear did not seem a serious handicap. Her big, chocolaty voice streamed across the water in a heartfelt rendering of “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” and even the river seemed to slow a little, like sauce thickening on the boil. When everyone joined in with “We'll Get Home to Heaven By ‘n' By,” Everett and Powers improvised harmonies, and Kookie produced a harmonica, as if by magic.

All this while, the
Calliope
swung to and fro, as if in time with the music, but (in fact) because her stern was still sticking out into the river. The surge of the current over her rudder was swinging her to right and left, making her bow splinter the last of the landing stage and chew a larger and larger bite out of the riverbank.

Eventually the river drew the boat back out into the mainstream, like a jealous dancer reclaiming a fickle partner. Powerless to resist, the
Calliope
spun around once in midriver, then continued her reckless plunge downstream. From the rails of the hurricane deck, the Bright Lights went on waving until Patience and the Kobokins were completely out of sight.

“You should do something with that voice,” said the old man out of the boiler, again reduced to an alligatorish crawl across the tilting stateroom floor. “Dan Rice used to make a mint of money with his floatin' operas, I remember.”