A History of the Future (21 page)

Despite what McCoy said about us having to get our own food, he shared his with us. It was a stupid waste of effort, he said, to cook two separate breakfasts. Anyway, he kept four hens on board and we usually had enough eggs, and you could find butter along the way, and honey or jam, and bacon, and beans, various kinds of bread and corn bread, hardly any fresh greens besides dandelion and ramps that time of year, no fruit except preserves. The farther into western New York you went, the more wheat flour turned up. Sometimes we’d make real pancakes. We didn’t see coffee at all in the west. We caught carp and perch in the canal. Not great eating, but better than shad, and scorching it on McCoy’s on-deck brazier made it edible. There were many other taverns in the towns along the way, mostly low-down filthy establishments full of rough boatmen. You could fill up a plastic gallon jug of rough cider for ten cents and a pint of whiskey for a silver quarter. Supper wasn’t much in those gully dens.

We carried some hardwood lumber on deck from Brewerton just west of Oneida Lake to Onondaga Lake just north of Syracuse. The city was the chief trading town of the central Finger Lakes. Its population was down to five thousand souls but it was like a big city compared to Union Grove. They had a hotel with fifty rooms, all new wooden construction, with a fancy dining room, so McCoy said. He left us in charge of the
Glory
and rode Beans the mule five miles to the town and didn’t come back until morning, still a little wobbly. They told him down there that the stretch of the canal from the Tsache Pool to Blue Cut was having Indian trouble—his very words. Imagine that. The Senecas were harassing farmers over three counties and law enforcement couldn’t contain them. Of course, there was no law outside of Syracuse, McCoy said, and even there it was the personal law of a certain Boss Fouts, who ran the town. Anyway, they burned some farmers out and two boats on the Erie had been attacked and plundered that month.

McCoy talked to himself much of the morning working off his headache, debating out loud if we should go on or lay back. When we tried to comment he just told us to shut up, he was reasoning in his own mind, and around noon he came around to the view that there was nothing else to do but go on and try our luck getting through. He had but one firearm on board, an old single-shot twenty-two, a child’s gun, really. I didn’t want to tell him that I had a pistol and I warned Evan not to let on about it either. So we just set off for Rochester, about a hundred miles, or five days west since we didn’t run at night. McCoy, cradling his popgun, sat on the roof of the cabin with whichever of us wasn’t walking the towpath with the mules and we scoured the woods and swamps and breaks of open country for signs of Indians. McCoy said he doubted they would look different from us—like, not to expect breechcloths, feathers, and whatnot—but we didn’t see any groups of men that looked like marauding Indians, or rogues, or pickers, or anything of the sort. We passed several eastbound boats along the way and they didn’t report anything out of the ordinary either.

The canal crossed a quiet part of the Genesee River several miles south of Rochester. It originally traversed the river in the center of town on an aqueduct, but they took an easier route in the rebuild of 1912. The city had been especially hard hit by disease in recent years and was in the throes just then, we heard, of a meningitis scare, so McCoy didn’t dare visit, and we passed on south of it. And then, once you’re west of Rochester, there’s little but farm country and a few tiny hamlets the rest of the way to the five-step locks. We heard no more talk of Indians after that. We just fell back into the easy rhythm of the days and the early June weather, all beauty and peacefulness walking with the mules and watching the world go by. I tell you, I liked that life on the canal except for what happened next.

We arrived at the end of the line, Lockport, where the Niagara Escarpment forms the last barrier to the lakes. It was the center of a fruit-growing district, and had the canal traffic and the construction works, so it was not so run-down as these other places. And it was active with people. We offloaded the last of McCoy’s cargo and he took us as promised to the offices of the superintendent of the locks. We could see men laboring down there on our way into the building, moving big stone blocks on wooden cranes with machinery driven by oxen yoked to rotaries, gangs of men digging and moving earth, scaffolds everywhere. It was impressive, the grandest work I ever remember seeing since I was a little child in the old times when everything was done by motor machines. The hall outside the super’s office was busy, men coming and going, foremen, laborers, riggers, tradesmen, jobbers, boatmen. It had the aura of excitement, of men working on a thing with purpose, which gave me the thought for the first time that something might be coming up in this country instead of running down, and I was thrilled at the chance to be part of it. Evan, too. He expected all along that they would be paying good wages in hard cash because labor was scarce, especially among our age group that had suffered so much in the epidemics.

So there we are in the hall before the super’s office, and McCoy confabs with a man seated at a desk, who’s nodding, and I figure that means they need men. So he disappears for a bit and comes back out and by and by ushers the three of us in to see Mr. Farnum, the super. It was a nice big office, too, with a view of the works and wooden models of the locks on a big table. Two other men stood at another table fussing with some metal apparatus of chains and plates I assumed was machinery for the locks. Farnum came out from behind his desk all cheerful to see Randall McCoy, his old crony. He was even bigger and broader than McCoy, with a handsome drooping mustache and even better pattern-cut clothes than McCoy, and he gave off that glow of authority you sense about men used to telling others what to do. They did a man hug with backslapping and all.

Farnum’s like, “Look what you brought me, you bobtailed sonofabitch of a gondolier!”

He looks Evan and me up and down and pinches our flesh a little, all smiley, and makes a kind chortling laugh with his teeth clenched, manfully, to show how great it is to have us on board, like we were new members of a select club. McCoy joined in admiring us and said we were good boys and strong, willing workers and all. And this goes on just long enough so that I get this . . . funny feeling, and I guess Evan picked it up too.

Then, Farnum goes to his desk and takes a steel box out of a drawer and unlocks it with a key on a chain he’s wearing around his neck and takes a bunch of silver coin out of the box, stacks it up on his desk, sweeps it into his hand, and gives it to McCoy. We’re watching all this.

Evan goes, “Mr. McCoy says you have employment for us.”

Farnum’s like, “Oh, I’ve got work for you, all right.”

Evan goes, “Okay, what’s the pay like?”

Farnum goes, “Fifty dollars in hard silver.”

I go, “Fifty each?”

Farnum’s like, “No, twenty-five apiece.”

Evan goes, “For what? The week? The month?”

Farnum laughs. “No, that’s what I pay Mr. McCoy here.”

That bad feeling I had turns sickening.

Evan’s like, “Well, what are you paying
him
for? That’s supposed to be our money.”

Farnum goes, “He just sold your indenture to me.”

Evan’s like, “What the hell’s that?”

Meanwhile, those two dudes in the back grab that iron off the table and start toward us, and it’s clear to me, like the air in the room had powers of magnification, what’s going on.

I go to McCoy, “You sold us?”

He’s just beaming like he pulled off the world’s best practical joke.

“I guess I did,” he goes, and busts out laughing.

Evan’s carrying on, “What’s this mean! What’s he saying? What’s this about?”

The two other men approach us with what I can see are leg irons and chains. Farnum steps closer to us.

I can feel that automatic pistol lodged right in the small of my back, under my shirt, and I fast yank it out and rack the frame. Farnum backs off at once, with his wrists snapped back and up, and the others stop in their tracks. We’re all just standing there, eyeballs jumping around from one to the next for what seems like forever but probably no more than ten seconds.

“Aw, boys,” McCoy finally says, like we disappointed him.

“It ain’t loaded, I’m sure,” Farnum says. “Give it here to me, we’ll forget all this and you can go right to work, today.”

I’m like, “Forget it, we’re leaving. Go stand in that corner and turn around facing the wall.”

Farnum’s like, “Well, we’re not going to do that, sonny. Are you going to shoot us, then?”

I’m like, “Maybe I will.” I actually wasn’t thinking that far ahead. And God knows I never had to think about shooting anyone before. But he did put the idea in my mind and I was quickly coming to the conclusion that I might have to pull the trigger.

Evan goes, “Don’t shoot Mr. McCoy.”

I’m like, “I won’t shoot anybody if they just go stand in the corner and turn around and let us leave peacefully.”

So it’s a standoff. Apparently, none of them are armed. Who carries a gun around these days in places of common business?

Farnum goes, “Where’d you get the piece?”

“Does it matter?” I say. “Get in the goddamn corner and turn your face to the wall.”

He’s like, “I’m not going to do that, sonny.” He’s remarkably calm, at least on the surface, though I can sense the wheels turning in his brain and I’m pretty sure he’s just trying to buy a little time. He goes, “You can’t get store ammunition these days. That thing ain’t loaded.” He takes a step toward me, now with his hand out. “Give it over here to me.” He extends one hand and makes little flicks with his fingertips.

I tell him, “Back off and go to your corner like I said.”

McCoy stands his ground too, with that big disappointed look on his face and his hands on his hips.

“I won’t ask you again,” I say.

“Don’t shoot ’em!” Evan is begging me. It distracts me for a moment. Farnum sees an opening and lunges at me and I pull the trigger and he drops like a sack of meal, groaning on the floor. We can still hear the sound of hammers banging and construction out the open window, a real din out there. The two other company men drop those shackles and hurry into the corner, saying, “Don’t shoot,” and like that. McCoy is just gaping at me.

“You shot him, you green-gilled gutter punk,” McCoy says.

“I’ll shoot you too,” I say. “Hand over all that coin you sold us for and then go lay down in front of that desk.”

McCoy goes, “Do what?”

“You heard me. Give that money to Evan.”

He does, sneering, and goes, “You’re just a pair of common thieves.”

I kick him in the balls and swiftly down he goes, vomiting up whatever he ate for lunch. I tell Evan to take whatever coin remains in that metal box. One of the two dudes in the corner tries to peek around at McCoy squealing and Farnum groaning. It appears I shot Farnum in the gut. He’s all curled up on the floor clutching his midsection with blood all over his hands and his vest. I go and tip the desk over onto McCoy so he’s pinned to the floor. I smash one of the company men on the side of the head with the flat part of the pistol and the other fellow crumples too. I think he just fainted. All this happened faster than I’m even able to tell it.

Then I’m like, “Come on!” to Evan and he follows me rushing out of the place. We bust through into the hall with all its hangers-on still there. I suppose they heard the shot because they’re all stock still, gawking at us, and all their heads turn as we dash out the door.

Once we’re outside, Evan’s going, “O shit, O shit, O shit, O shit” all the way to where we’re headed, which is Randall McCoy’s boat. It’s barely a hundred yards away from the super’s building. We’re there in about ten seconds. Quickly as I can I take the hobbles off the piebald mule in the bow, that’s Beans, and Evan does like I’m doing with Shadow, the black one. They’re wearing their halters and I grab the lead lines and tie them crosswise ’round my shoulder and under my arm. I give Evan a boost to mount Shadow and then climb aboard Beans, using the gunwale to mount, and we bust across the gangway onto the towpath bareback on the mules.