The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen (6 page)

“Showboats are all washed up!” called Tibbie, sliding across the planks on her stomach, pursued by a spittoon and a café table.

“Well, this here's a theater company. And for now we're still afloat!” called Kookie, catching hold of Cissy around the waist just as she was about to crash into a wall. “So I don't see what's to stop us being a floatin' theater. Did I happen to say, everybody? I do plumdoodly cartwheels!”

Chapter Six
Casting On, Casting Off

T
hat Dan Rice fella,” said Elijah, the boiler scraper and alligator man, “he useta build him a flatboat in St. Louis, put a deck on it and a kinda wood opera house, painted all over. Nothing like this, o' course—no engine, no wheel. Useta to push it along with a steam tug. Then he'd hire himself a troupe and float them downstream, giving shows. Everyone lived aboard, so no hotel bills—no barns or halls to hire neither. Most everything they took was clear profit. Once he got to New Orleans, he'd sell the boat for lumber, pay off the troupe, buy himself a ticket on a steamboat going north again. Buy a new flatboat. Start all over again. Did four or five trips a year, I remember. Made a pile of money. Always said singing went down best. Especially singing by a woman with a big—”

“Vocal range?” Everett interrupted hastily. His arm circled his wife's shoulders protectively. They looked at each other, like two children tempted beyond endurance.

Somehow when Elijah described that long-gone floating playground, it sounded . . . believable. The great gilded passenger steamers might have sailed away into the past. Dan Rice's push-along showboats might have sailed into history. But one scruffy wreck bouncing its way from bank to bank, just making ends meet by supplying a little joy and excitement as it went? Well, that was a scene they could picture easily enough. How was that any different from a touring theater company living out of the back of a wagon?

“As soon as my brother and the rest of the company catch up with us . . . ,” Everett began, glancing yet again toward the bank. All day they had scoured the landscape for waving figures—for the friends who had been accidentally left behind outside Salvation. Perhaps they had jumped some train, stolen horses, stowed away on a coach, and were even now racing to catch up with the
Calliope
.

But the river was moving the boat along at prodigious speed—faster sometimes than a galloping horse—and the floods had washed out most of the riverside roads. There was no telling when or if Finn or Egil or Revere or Cyril would rejoin the boat. All but three of the professional Bright Lights Theater Company had been replaced by an inventor, a boiler scraper, a teacher, and three schoolchildren.

“Ech, you'll need all kinds,” said Elijah, rubbing rust flakes out of his iron-gray hair. “Magicians and fortune-tellers and hellfire preachers and quacks and freaks and all such. Put out the word. They'll come swarming like roaches: all evens and oddities.” Thunder rolled around the edge of the sky, and lightning flickered. “Course it's gambling where the real money's made.”

Everett felt such a jolt shake his wife that he thought she had been struck by lightning.

“No gamblers. I won't have gamblers aboard!” She said it in the way people speak of snakes or head lice. Her lip curled and her teeth clenched, and even her eyes shut out the very word: gambling.

Instinctively the children moved closer together under the table where they were sheltering. It was as if someone had named
Macbeth
inside a theater, or spoken a curse.

Elijah seemed a little old to be a boiler scraper, thought Cissy. At his age he ought to be taking life easier. But she could remember her mother telling her, with bitter relish: “Restin's for the rich. Poor folks like us, we just hafta go on slavin' till we drop.” Elijah certainly applied all his frail energy to scraping the boiler, grunting and coughing in the narrow flues of furnace and steam pipe. It was murderous work, and the old man seemed constantly surprised by the unwieldy size of his body. “Musta put on a pound or two,” he muttered. If this was true, Cissy could not see where he had put it. Elijah was as thin as a rusty rail.

But thanks to his efforts, when the boat next came to rest, they actually managed to light the boiler and trickle steam through the veins and arteries of the derelict steamboat. They did not even attempt to engage the paddle wheel, drunkenly swinging on its axle, for fear it would smash itself to pieces against the hull.

A dyspeptic bleat rang out over their heads, making everybody duck; next came an eerie, sorrowing howl. Strains of “Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer!” wavered across the Numchuck River, and Curly stopped throwing bits of broken windowpane over the side and held his hat reverently over his heart. Miss May March had fathomed the workings of the calliope steam piano and was playing it for the benefit of the herons, water rats, and catfish.

The
Calliope
obliged by putting herself ashore at Engedi. She caused alarm and raised voices by cannoning into the floating wharf and shunting a raft so hard that some of its cargo of prairie grass slumped into the river. The collision was made all the more sorrowful by a rendering of “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” played at funeral speed on the steam piano.

“Doesn't that woman know anything cheery?” protested Everett.

“Nope,” said three young voices, as one.

They placed an advertisement in the
Winona Gazette
and telegraphed another to Branko, farther downriver. Chad Powers began painting a sign along the outside of the main-deck cabin:

BRIGHT LIGHTS
FLOATING THEATER

and they put up handbills around the town. Never mind that on the undersides of the handbills were advertisements for
The Tempest
: Shakespeare was no longer on the menu. The advertisements read:

WANTED
ARTISTES, PERFORMERS
& INT ERESTED PARTIES
FOR VOYAGE OF FORTUNE
ABOARD THE PADDLEBOAT
CALLIOPE
TALENT THE ONLY REQUISITE.
APPLY ENGEDI WHARF, WEDNESDAY

Then for three days they sat tight and waited.

Elijah could recall auditions fifty years before for jobs aboard the river steamers. “River was a way outa starvin' in them days. Notice went up askin' for a roustabout, all kinds piled up on the bank a-hoping to get lucky. Germans and the Irish, for the most part. Last man standing got the job. Fought each other like jackals. Free-for-all fistfights. Germans and the Irish.”

Even Kookie (who was one of nine children and accustomed to competing for anything on offer) was shocked by the thought of it. “You German, Elijah?” he asked.

“Habbakuk Warboys!” exclaimed his schoolteacher. “A gentleman does not ask such things!”

But whether Elijah had ever been either German or Irish, whether or not he had fought bare knuckled for his first job aboard a paddle steamer, was as lost as the date of his birthday or the names of his kin.

A big stack of life rafts had been stowed in the stateroom. On top of these, Miss Loucien spread a plaid blanket for the children to sit on. “Now what I want you to do, fellas, is to sit up here and audition the talent. If
you
like it, it's past doubt the paying public will.”

“My wife trusts your critical eye,” said Everett from the top of a stepladder, where he was trying to make the mildewed curtains travel along their runners. “Curly's too highbrow, Lou says. I'm too devoted to the spoken word. And your Mr. Powers has broken his glasses.”

Once upon a time, a ten-piece band had played on the stage of the
Calliope
's stateroom. Today it was the turn of would-bes and hopefuls. So Cissy and Kookie and Tibs Boden put on their most severe faces and faced the stage, like cats on a wall waiting for the moon to rise.

The first person to audition was a Chinese contortionist who could hold her head between her knees while playing the xylophone with her feet. She twirled banners, too, but the act was over in a minute and a half.

“Any more?” said Kookie, resting his fingertips together as he imagined a New York impresario might. The girl looked at him from between her knees: a look that said,
That ought to be enough for anyone
.

“I do again?” she suggested.

“Next!” said Tibbie.

“Thank you so much. That looked very . . . painful,” said Cissy.

The Dutch clog dancer did not know any dance steps but sounded striking on the hollow wooden stage of the hollow empty room.

“Could you do something with your hands, too?” said Kookie.

“Semaphore or something?” said Tibbie.

“Thank you so much,” said Cissy. “That was very . . . loud.”

There was a dog act with three rat-sized terriers. The woman had an accent so strange that picking out her separate words was like separating dried peas from lentils. She was wearing around her throat a black velvet choker decorated with crystal buttons, almost as if she were a high-class dog herself. “I had four,” she said, choking back tears, “but Twinkle got drowned on the way here.” She had to say it four times to be understood.

“We'd love to have you!” said Tibbie, guilt stricken about the lost runt.

“Do they bite?” asked Kookie.

“Yes,” said Cissy, who had just gotten down to stroke them.

The talent spotters were happy to see a lantern-slide projector carried aboard. “We have lantern-slide shows sometimes in the storeroom back home!” said Cissy. “Leastwise we
did
.”

The projectionist, who had scaly skin and a paunch, hugged the shiny black metal to his chest, and his eyes flickered to and fro between half-closed lids. “My show's not for your sort.”

The children looked at one another. Could there really be a projectionist in the world who did not like other people to see his slide collection? “Do you have any wild-animal ones?” asked Cissy. “I saw a zebra once in—”

“No,” snapped the scaly man. “You kids got no fathers?” And he cast about with his snaky eyes for some adult who might appreciate his wares. The comment about fathers did not endear him to Cissy. Nor did his habit of scratching himself with the slide box. But despite disliking his audience, he snapped open the legs of the projector and pointed it at the cleanest, least mossy wall. After a few curses and some complex chemistry with a pellet of lime, which produced a brilliant blue light, he slid home the first slide.

Tibbie closed her eyes and covered her face with both hands. Kookie stared, his mouth ajar, his eyelids fringed with exclamation marks.

“Next!” said Cissy with great presence of mind.

But the projectionist deliberately mistook her, and put in the next slide.

“
Next!
” said both girls simultaneously. The projec-tionist leered and reached for a third.

“Go away!” they shouted at him, all three.

“You wanna get us all arrested?” squeaked Kookie. Even so, his eyes stayed on the mold-spattered wall for a long time after the naked ladies had faded from view and the projectionist had clattered his way angrily ashore, spilling burning pellets and a smell of graveyard lime.

The
moving
pictures, on the other hand, had all three children enthralled. Medora, who was Spanish and dressed in Gypsy costume, was pretty attention-catching. But they had never seen anything so new-fangled or marvelous as Medora's Amazing Photopia. The images flickering across the wall exceeded lantern slides as far as a horse exceeds the painting of a horse. Tibbie got down and laid her hand to the wall to see if she could feel the fluttering butterflies of light and dark. Instead, the pictures engulfed her, patterning her dress, while human figures strutted jerkily across her smock and the blond curtain of her hair.

“Tibs, you're in the moving pictures!” breathed Kookie . . . and then they were all standing against the wall, watching gray phantoms play across their hands and chests.

The coin-operated, vibrating therapy chair was also immense fun. Since it was designed for adults, it bounced the children around like peas in a drum and dumped them unceremoniously on the floor. “Spackfacious!” said Kookie.

“Can I have another try?” said Cissy.

The chair belonged to a barber-surgeon called George. He was eager to set up a booth on board, offering shaves and haircuts. He rarely used the vibrating facility: customers begrudged another dime on top of the price of a haircut, and while the chair was shuddering its way around the room, it was nigh impossible to give a man a close shave without cutting his throat. Another service George no longer offered was phrenology.

“What's that?”

“It's a science,” said George defensively. “Study of the skull. You can tell a lot from feeling a man's skull . . .”

“What, while he's still wearing it?”

“. . . health . . . intelligence. But no! Only thing customers wanted to know: was money coming their way. Or love. Like it's fortune-telling or something. Don't do much phrenology lately.” He sank into regretful recollection, then suddenly snicker-snacked at the air with a big cutthroat razor. “Could offer bloodletting for the sweating sickness!” Kookie (who was still a long way off needing a shave) asked for advice from Curly, as to whether a showboat needed a barber.

Curly was more interested in hearing about the sweating sickness. “Is it common on the river?” he asked.

“Common as fleas on a dog,” the barber assured him. “Farther south you go, the worse it gets!”

“And what brings it on?” said Curly, reflexively turning up the collar of his shirt.

“Bad air. Bad food. Too much sun. Overwork. Who knows? But folk will pay to be bled and physicked!”

“Stick to haircuts,” said Curly, running his hand gratefully over his shining, hairless head. He had once read a book about an Englishman named Sweeney Todd and did not care for the idea of a bloodletting barber. Casting an affectionate look at the little impresarios, he murmured, “
Did you ever see the picture of We Three?”
and went back to mending the window.

“I thought there might be ballerinas,” whispered Tibbie wistfully as the next applicant came in. He wore a tall black hat, a long black duster coat, and a shoestring tie.

“I am Elder Slater, and I mean to give sermons to the wicked!” he informed them, “and turn them back from the paths of destruction!” His eyes glared with such terrifying zeal that the children dared not argue.