Alexander C. Irvine (22 page)

The cave breat
hed
around him like a sleeping woman, waiting to be awakened by his touch. Stephen ran a hand over the statue’s fanged mouth, smelling rain and feeling a tremor in the terraced walls around him.

Why so timid, Stephen?

Stephen tried to lie and found the words caught in his throat. “I’m … not sure,” he said, feeling each word being siphoned from his mind. “Not sure if this is what I want.”

Men waste lives being uncertain. Have you forgotten the promise I made you?

He thought of Charlotte, sleeping in a two-room shack, thought of the months he’d spent with pick and shovel widening the road that led to the hotel whose front door he couldn’t walk through. Thought of Dr. Croghan saying
You’re too valuable to lose.

Was he really a man just because he’d jumped the broom with Charlotte, another slave Croghan had bought at the Louisville market?

Again the quiet pressure, forcing words through his throat. “What do I have to do?”

First you have to understand. Lie on the stone.

Stephen sat on the altar stone, facing the dancing statue. He placed his lamp carefully between his feet and lay backward, feeling the chill of the pitted limestone seep through his coat.

Extinguish the light.

Stephen hesitated. Putting out an oil lamp, you ran the risk that it wouldn’t light again.

To understand you must trust, Stephen. Extinguish the light.

He did, and lay faceup on the stone as blind as if he’d never had eyes. The darkness had a kind of weight, a presence that Stephen could feel on his skin. It was a feeling of being near something so vast that its true size couldn’t really be understood.

He thought he heard the statue chuckle approvingly.
Now you begin to see.

A
delicate scent
tickled his nose, and Stephen felt warm sun on his face. He opened his eyes and saw mountains rising around him, green mountains creased by sharp ridges and capped by a dusting of snow. He was standing in a wide valley filled with flowers of every description, flowers he didn’t recognize. A broad slow river meandered through the valley, and standing knee-deep in its waters was the most beautiful woman Stephen had ever seen. She wore only a skirt of carved jade, wrapped high around her hips and forming a V beneath her navel. Reflected sun from the water played across her naked skin and burnished the perfect blackness of her hair.

“Walk with me, Stephen,” she said, beckoning him into the water. He walked to the river’s edge, feeling a gentle breeze on his own naked body. She was magnificent, that was the only word, magnificent like the mountains looming behind her or the grand beauty of a waterfall; so breathtaking and yet so remote that Stephen couldn’t imagine touching her like a woman. She seemed like a feature of the landscape, a human form created to match the perfection of the valley.

The water sent a pleasant shock up through his legs as he joined her in the shallows. The woman took his hand and raised her other arm in a sweeping gesture that took in everything around them. “Tlalocan,” she said, smiling with pride. “Across the mountains, where the sun hangs low, is the city. This is the land of the dead.”

“Are you dead?” Stephen asked. “Am I?”

“No,” she replied. “You live, and the question has no meaning for me. I am Chalchihuitlicue. These waters are mine, just as the waters in the sky are Tlaloc’s. All names are human names, though, different faces put by men on faceless things. When men wish it, I can be Tlaloc himself.”

Stephen pictured the massive bas-relief in the chamber beneath Bottomless Pit, the chamber where he must be sleeping. “The face called Tlaloc …” He couldn’t find the words.

She smiled. “That is the most ancient face, and it bears the marks of thousands of years of men’s fear. But fear is only lack of understanding, Stephen. Walk with me.”

They walked together upstream, the smooth stones of the river bottom giving way to larger slabs of bare rock as the current swiftened and the river narrowed to a jubilant mountain stream. They moved easily through the rushing current, and soon came to a spring high in the mountains, on a flat saddle of land between two towering peaks.

“Wait,” Stephen said. “Is this a dream?”

“Of a sort.” Chalchihuitlicue stood beside him, lifting her face to the wind. She breathed deeply and spread her arms. Stephen imitated her, closing his eyes and letting the clean wind fill his lungs.

He caught the biting scent of smoke and blinked, stepping away from the spring. “The city,” Chalchihuitlicue said. “The dead still worship their god.”

She led him to the far edge of the grassy saddle, where the land fell away to a forest far below. In the middle of the forest lay a lake like a shining silver coin, and on an island in the center of the lake a huge city stood out like a scar.

Chalchihuitlicue let him gaze down on the city for a moment before she spoke. “Gods exist only as long as men worship, Stephen. And for centuries now, the dead have been our most devout. You find the sacrifices horrible?”

Stephen nodded, unable to look away from the city of the dead.

“Gods hunger, and if they starve the world falls to ashes. What they hunger for is belief. Tlalocan is beautiful because here we are sated—the dead believe.”

“What does cutting the hearts out of children have to do with belief?” Stephen said, the words leaping from his mouth before he could stop them.

If Chalchihuitlicue was angered, she gave no sign. “The people who enslave you tell you their stories, Stephen. You have heard of Abraham and Isaac?”

“But God stepped in,” Stephen protested. “Abraham only had to be willing. That was enough.”

“The lesson was learned, though, was it not? Your king David had that lesson in his heart when he killed those who did not believe. And Cortés, too, ground a civilization to dust because belief was more important than life.”

She turned to face Stephen, the blissful smile gone from her face. “Was not your Christ a human sacrifice, Stephen? To die yourself is easy. The thrust of the knife, then paradise. The true believer is that man who will kill another in the name of his God. This is what gods feed on, life spilled in the name of belief.
Yollotl, eztli, ompa onquiza’n tlatkpac.
Cortés, though he murdered our priests and burned our cities, made us stronger. Now it is time for us to return to the world of the living. Now the sun turns, and a new world may be born from the ruins of the old.”

Her eyes burned like the fires in the city below. Fire is light as well as heat, Stephen thought.
A new world…
“But what will be different?” he whispered.

“What would you kill a man for, Stephen? To save yourself? To save Charlotte?” She stepped closer to him, until her breasts brushed against his skin and passion exploded through his body like an electric shock.

“To be free? Would you kill to be free?”

He thought of the two-room shack, of the bed he’d built himself. Of gypsum flowers, growing beautiful for ages until greedy visitors broke them off for mantelpieces. “Kill who?” he said.

“Answers change,” Chalchihuitlicue said. “Questions are what you must remember. Remember, too, that freedom is bought with hearts and blood, and it is kept with hearts and blood.” The sun was low over the city now, bloated and reddened by rising smoke from sacrificial fires.

Something tickled Stephen’s calf. He looked down to see a black ant working its way up his body. He raised his hand, then let it drop again. Even with the smoke of dead souls smearing the sunset, it seemed wrong to kill anything in a place so beautiful as this. This paradise.

Chalchihuitlicue—Tlaloc, really, Stephen thought;
am I actually speaking to a god?
—had turned away from him. Giving me time to think, like John Diamond did. I took the mask from him, and this woman, this god, must realize that. Why is she showing me all of this? Why doesn’t she just force me to do what she wants?

She can’t, he realized. They can influence, but they can’t command. If they could, Diamond would never have made it to the cave and given me the mask. She wasn’t lying when she said that gods feed on belief. Only belief would allow them to return to the world of the living. And in return for that belief, she was offering choices Stephen had never thought he would have.

It was a hard bargain, but a good one.
A new world,
Stephen thought.

Hello, Rebus.
Stephen felt a tickle as the ant crawled into his ear canal and settled there.
Taking my name in vain?

Chalchihuitlicue frowned and looked closely into Stephen’s face. “You have much to think about, Stephen Bishop. If you would be citizen rather than slave, you know what you must do. Belief begets enemies. Do not forget that. Other voices will attempt to dissuade you from your cause.”

She laid a palm flat over his heart. “Go now, and choose.” The sun dropped below the horizon, and no stars came out in the sky.

Steven was chilled
and stiff when he opened his eyes to the silent blackness of Mammoth Cave. He rolled off the altar stone, smelling the fading odor of strange flowers but hearing no voices. The lamp clinked as his foot brushed against it, and he lit it, grateful for its small illumination.

I’m still in the land of the dead, he thought. Far from the sun and listening for dead voices.

He wanted to breathe a living scent, to see the sun and lay his hand on Charlotte’s sleeping body. Hate welled up in him, for gods who needed blood and men who took their living from his body. In Monrovia, would the sun shine as it did in Tlalocan? It didn’t matter. Nick had been right all along. Croghan would never free him. Stephen would die in Kentucky, or be sold down the river when he was too old to guide in the cave. He would never see Africa.

Stephen’s ear tickled again, and he remembered the ant.
Think on this one question, Rebus,
John Diamond’s voice said softly in his mind.
Will things be any better if you let Tlaloc out into the sunlight?

Not answering, Stephen dug the ant from his ear and crushed it between shaking fingers.

A torch burned
along
Maudie’s
starboard rail, illuminating the forward deck and the overgrown shore of the cove where they’d anchored for the night. In the flickering light, the Ohio River gleamed like a pool of oil and the lean-to’s shadow blotted out the captain’s chair, where Delbert Gatty slumped in a rare good-humored drunk.

“Tell us a tale, Archie Prescott.” Gatty’s voice wound slowly around the words and drifted out over the river. “Midnight’s tale-telling time. How did you come to be divorced from the rest of your ear?”

“Hear, hear. That ought to be good for a bedtime story.” Rufus was sprawled on the cabin roof. He lifted his head to drink and let it fall with a
thunk
back to the weathered shingles.

Archie had a jug of his own, nearly empty now. Before boarding
Maudie,
he hadn’t imbibed since his last night working for Belinda, but right then he was wondering why he’d bothered with temperance at all. Days on the river quickly lost their novelty, and for long hours corn mash was all that made the boredom bearable. Corn mash, and stories—Gatty and Rufus spent nearly every waking hour swapping improbable tales of their river exploits. “Tapering off,” they called it. Whenever the boiler was filled and the two stokers (whom Gatty, for some inscrutable reason, called Punch and Judy) had a free moment, they retired to the stern, where they drank their wages and bantered with Alfonse about Creole women.

After four days aboard
Maudie,
Archie was beginning to understand the Eastern stereotype of the riverman. When they worked, they worked hard, harder than Archie ever had for Bennett—loading and unloading cargo or taking on firewood. And they worked in all conditions, including a driving hailstorm that had come roaring up the river valley the day before. What that had been like for the three slaves, Archie couldn’t even begin to imagine. He had made himself look at the welts on their faces and hands, made himself imagine the smack and sting of the hail.

Why do I feel guilty? he wondered. After all, I didn’t buy them, or write the slavery laws. Then he thought of Udo, saying
This is what I can do,
and he said to himself Yes, I understand. By not opposing it, I have allowed this to go on.

Maudie
made maddeningly slow progress down the river. Four days, and they hadn’t yet passed the mouth of the Little Kanawha River in western Virginia. Gatty stopped at every speck of a town peeking from the Appalachian forests, dropping a crate here, a barrel there, and trading when he could. Archie chafed at the pace. For all he knew the chacmool had already hidden Jane where he would never be able to find her in the twelve days remaining. At this rate, he would have been better off on horseback, even if he had to buy a fresh mount at every town.

But Tamanend had said to travel by water. Well, old man, Archie thought irritably, if I
’
m late to the party because I heeded your advice, I’ll be spending the summer bear hunting in western Pennsylvania.

Archie lay back along the port rail near the bow, to block himself off from the torchlight while he watched the stars. That was one of the real prizes of river life, stargazing. The sky blazed with streaks and clouds of light; since seeing the night sky on the river, Archie had understood what Tamanend meant when he said
numberless as the stars.

Centzon Mimixcoa.
The Four Hundred Northerners. It seemed he’d heard someone say that in a dream.

“I seen Mike Fink bite the ear off a Frenchman, once,” mused Rufus, snapping Archie out of his tipsy woolgathering.

“That so?” Gatty said. “Was it Mike Fink did your ear? Come on, Archie, out with it.” He banged his jug on the deck.

“Not much to it, I guess,” Archie said. Not much he wanted to tell, at any rate. Living mummies and Mexican gods weren’t exactly standard fare in rivermen’s tall tales.

“There was a dwarf named Charlie, but everyone called him the Geek,” Archie began. “I had a—a dispute with his friends. Wrong place at the wrong time, really. Three of them caught me where I wasn’t supposed to be one night and …”

And that was it, really. Those were the facts of the situation. But storytelling wasn’t about facts, Archie knew that much. If he was ever going to get Bennett to listen, he would have to do better than that.

“Where you wasn’t supposed to be?” The captain’s chair creaked as Gatty sat up straighter. “Where was this?”

“New York.”

“New York? New
York?
How’d you come to be in New York?”

“Born there,” Archie said. He downed the last of the whiskey and tossed the jug over the side. After swallowing, he finished. “This was before I came to the river.”

“Well, shit.” Gatty sounded disgusted. “You ain’t half the alligator-horse I thought you was. Got your ear bit off by a midget in New York.”

“I seen a midget in St. Louis once,” said Rufus. “Don’t remember his name, but I think he was in the circus.”

“New York,” Gatty snorted. “We got us an Easterner on the boat.” He struck a match and lit the stub of a cigar. “I thought you was rough when you didn’t blink at
Maudie’s
name, but now I see you’re just ignorant. Well, let me tell you something, Easterner. There’s three ways to curse a boat: name it for a woman, have six letters in the name, and start with an
M.
This boat’s all three. Only white man crazy enough to serve on her is Rufus, and that’s only because he’s too drunk to be cursed.”

And I
’
m too cursed to get drunk, Archie thought. The jug of mash had just sandpapered his nerves and made him sleepy. Above the river, the
Centzon Mimixcoa
trooped past a gibbous moon hung in the treetops on the Ohio bank.

“You don’t believe in curses, Captain?” he said.

” ‘Course I believe in ‘em. Them niggers at the tiller believe in ‘em, too—they’d jump in a minute if I didn’t shackle ‘em. One of ‘em did, shackles and all, just upriver from Cairo. Sank his nappy head like a cannonball. Hell yes, I believe in curses.

“But here’s my secret: no damn curse in the world will touch me. I’m crazier than a voodoo man, crazier than the Devil himself. Lady Luck pisses her drawers when she hears my name. That’s why I don’t fear curses. I could name this boat God and the Old Man himself wouldn’t have the balls to strike me down.”

Gatty blew the ash off his cigar, the sudden glow of the coal showing Archie that the good humor had completely drained from his face. “You think on that, Eastern man. Think on that before you get ideas about jumping. I’d hate to have to shackle a white man.”

A clanging bell
woke Archie the next morning. Each peal drove a spike into his head, reminding him of one reason he hadn’t missed drinking. There was no bell on
Maudie’s
deck, though. Where was the racket coming from?

He stood, wincing at a deep ache in his thigh from sleeping in the cold. The bell was coming from upstream. Looking in that direction, Archie noticed that the riverbanks had closed in. He could easily have thrown a rock into the brush on either side.

“Man your pole and watch for snags,” Rufus called from his rooftop perch.

“Where are we?” Archie took up his position in the bow, wishing death on whoever was ringing the damned bell. He nudged aside the canvas covering a stack of crates and saw that his valise was still where he’d left it. Whether it had been tampered with he couldn’t tell, but he would have to wait for a more opportune moment to check.

“Little Kanawha,” Gatty said. He looked as if he’d spent the night slouched in the straight-backed captain’s chair. “Big river’s fifteen miles back.”

“Kentucky yet, or still Virginia?” Archie called over the sharp hiss of
Maudie’s
boiler venting steam, but Rufus didn’t answer. The boat slowed to ease around a tight bend, Alfonse putting his entire weight into holding the rudder all the way left, and a large whitewashed Colonial house came into view on the right, standing on a hill overlooking the river. An acre or more of lawn had been cleared around it, and a stair cut into the steep slope between the front door and the river. The stair ended in a stubby dock, too short to reach into water
Maudie
could negotiate.

Two boys, both rangy and strapping with white-blond hair, took the stairs three at a time, leaping like goats onto the dock and untying a weatherbeaten rowboat. Above and behind them, a man appeared from the house, obviously the boys’ father. He hailed the
Maudie
and Gatty shouted hello in return.

“My cabinetry at last!” the man said, coming down the stairs. He limped as he descended, placing his good leg firmly on each log step before continuing. “I kept my boys home from Sabbath services expecting you.”

“Drop anchor, Archie,” Gatty said. “We can’t get no closer.” He cut off the throttle and rummaged through his pockets. “What do you mean, at last, Marlon? It’s only the twenty-second. Christ, the river’s only been clear two weeks.”

“No offense, Delbert,” Marlon said. “I’m just eager to furnish my home. Rivermen don’t feel that, I suppose.”

“Hell, you haven’t seen my house in New Orleans. Teak-wood furniture inside and out. I know houses.” Gatty stepped up next to Archie in the bow, unfolding a stained sheet of paper. “Says right here ‘on or before the twenty-seventh,’ ” he muttered.

Archie pushed the butterfly anchor off the deck and watched the rope uncoil and stiffen as the anchor bit into the riverbed and brought
Maudie
to a halt. The bell had stopped, but he still had a vengeful headache, and that combined with the pain in his leg put him in a foul mood. Gatty had said nothing about side trips up into the Virginia hills, and this excursion would waste half the day while Jane was taken farther away from him.

And, to top it all off, the chacmool’s talisman had been inert since Archie’s encounter with Tamanend—ten days now. Either the chacmool was completely inactive, which seemed unlikely, or contact with the Lenape chief had blinded Archie somehow.

Or, he thought, Tamanend was just wrong, and the talisman is simply a bull’s-eye for the chacmool to sight in on. But us foot soldiers never find out about things like that until it’s too late.

And that was it, really. Archie had been somehow chosen by the Lenape, either because he was Jane’s father or for some more incomprehensible reason. He was their latest conscript in their ancient war with the Mexican gods. Well, I never asked to be a soldier, Archie thought. I just want my daughter back. I want off this boat and I want my daughter back.

The rowboat bumped into
Maudie’s
hull and a thrown rope fell across Archie’s forearms. “Hold that fast,” Gatty said, folding the contract back into his coat pocket.

One of Marlon’s boys vaulted onto the deck. “Where’s the box with the mirror?” he said, his voice high-pitched and wound tight with anticipation. “I want that one first!”

His brother docked the oars and stood in the boat, watching as Gatty peeled the canvas back from the bow cargo. “Right here somewhere,” Gatty said. “Been carrying your load since Cincinnati, but Little Kanawha was still froze up when I passed on my way east.”

“Sure was,” the boy in the boat nodded. “First boat of the year was Milt Crowe, and that was just yesterday.”

“Milt Crowe?”
Gatty jerked as if he’d been shot, and a flush rose from his collar like mercury in a thermometer. “That Hoosier was
here?”

“Yup. He went on upriver. Said he’d come back through today.”

“Jesus bugger his Hoosier head!” Gatty looked as if he wanted to run in several directions at once. He stomped in a tight circle, spitting a string of unintelligible curses.

Coming back around to face Archie, he poked a thick finger into Archie’s chest. “Crates are stamped MacGruder. Get ‘em off my boat so’s we can move. You, Punch and Judy!” he shouted. “Get that boiler hot! Soon as I see that devil Crowe we’re gonna race, and I mean
race.”

The stokers jumped to their task, tossing wood into the fire by the armload and working the poker as if they were enraging a bull before letting it into the ring. Gatty stomped back to the starboard rail and leaned out over the water, his bulldog face almost exactly the color of cranberry sauce. “Marlon! What was that damned Hoosier selling?”

Marlon had reached the dock. He stood with his arms folded, his weight shifted away from his bad leg. “Tobacco, mostly. I bought cigars and a dozen tins of pipe leaf.”

“From him? We had a damned contract!” Gatty whipped the paper from his pocket again and waved it in the air.

“Only for the furniture, Delbert. I ordered tobacco from you because you said you’d be first through this year.” Marlon shrugged. “You weren’t.”

Gatty stormed into the cabin and slammed the door behind him. Archie could hear him howling inside, and Rufus dropped down to the deck, shaking his head and laughing as he made his way forward.

Archie found a MacGruder stamp on a flat square crate like a table leaf. He handed it to Marlon’s son. “This one ought to be the mirror,” he said.

“Boy, I guess,” the boy said, taking the crate as if he were cradling an infant. “I’m gonna polish it every morning.” He lowered the mirror to his brother, who laid it flat across the rowboat’s gunwales. Rufus cast him off and he rowed the few yards to the dock.

Archie pushed the next crate to the rail. “Say, Rufus,” he said. “Who is this Crowe?”

Rufus wheezed. “He’n Delbert raced once, out below Cairo, Illinois. Three years ago, I guess. He had Delbert clean beat but hit a snag and sunk his boat. Delbert claimed he’d won, but everybody knew better, and folks let him hear it up and down the river. I reckon Delbert’d sell his mother in Araby to beat Milt Crowe in a race.”

Gatty reappeared, snarling smoke from a fresh cigar. “God damn it, Archie,” he growled, “I’ll pay that midget to chaw off your other damned ear if any of this MacGruder shit is still on board when Crowe comes around that bend. Get to it!” He spat on the deck and climbed onto the cabin roof, glowering out over the Little Kanawha.

With Archie and Rufus loading the skiff, and Marlon’s two boys unloading, the transfer was completed in ten minutes. Gatty said not a word, only glared at Archie and then back to the river, as if he expected Milt Crowe to steam by at full speed if he turned his back. “About goddamn time,” he said from the cabin roof, as the last MacGruder crate nearly swamped the overloaded rowboat. “Haul anchor and let’s turn around. I’ll give that bastard Hoosier the surprise of his sonofabitching life.” Dropping back down to the deck, he sat in his chair and rammed open the throttle.

Maudie
surged forward just as Archie, with Rufus’s help, yanked the anchor free of the bottom. At the same time, a whistle sounded from upstream.

Gatty leaped out of his chair at the sound. “Alfonse,” he shouted, “goddamn your nigger hide,
turn this boat around!”

“Hold a minute, Delbert!” Marlon called from the dock. “I don’t have the pegs and nails.”

“What?
Damn you, Archie, get the box of damned pegs!” Gatty flung his cigar at Archie. It missed by feet and flew into the river.

Archie stopped in the middle of recovering the cargo and searched frantically for a last MacGruder box. He found it between the port rail and a row of whiskey barrels and held it up as Milt Crowe’s whistle sounded again, much closer this time.

“Throw it over the side!”

Archie turned toward the captain’s chair, thinking
He can’t be serious,
arid looked directly down the barrel of Gatty’s revolver. “I mean
now,”
Gatty said.

The box weighed at least ten pounds, but Archie heaved it as far as he could in the direction of Marlon’s dock. It splashed in the shallows and the two blond boys jumped into the water after it.

“See if I—” Marlon was shouting, but Archie lost the rest of the words and very nearly fell into the river as
Maudie
lurched violently to port. A barrel of whiskey toppled and crashed through the rail on that side, followed by the forward part of the stacked firewood. Logs boomed against
Maudie’s
hull as the boat completed her turn, just as Milt Crowe’s own single-wheeler came churning around an upriver bend.

“Ahoy, Delbert!” Crowe gave a great joyous wave as his boat came within shouting distance, a gap-toothed smile splitting the black tangle of his beard. “Care for a jaunt this fine morning? I’ve got this beautiful new boat, and I haven’t yet seen what she can do.”

“I’ll race you to goddamned Cincinnati, Hoosier!” Gatty’s voice cracked with fury. “You’ll sink that bastard tub, too, but this time you’ll be looking at my hairy backside!”

Crowe’s boat was longer and narrower than
Maudie.
It cut through the Little Kanawha’s brown water like a shark fin, surging past
Maudie
under a full head of steam. Archie could see the words
Detroit Damsel
painted in bold letters on her port bow.

“I’ll just float ‘til you catch up, Delbert,” Crowe called as he passed. “Hate to take advantage of old
Maudie.”
His crew tipped Gatty an ironic salute.

Gatty spat into Crowe’s wake. “Watch out for snags, you son of a bitch. No excuses this time!” He cranked the throttle open and jammed it there with the barrel of his gun, then ran up to the bow, shouting curses at Crowe, Punch and Judy, and the state of Indiana.
Maudie
picked up speed, rocking in the
Detroit Damsel’s
wake.

Rufus tapped Archie on the shoulder. “Might as well have us a sit-down,” he said over the roar and hiss of the boiler. “Delbert’ll either win or he won’t. Probably he will, but there ain’t nothing for us to do. Can’t pole us away from a snag at this speed, and he took me off the rudder when he found out that Alfonse don’t drink.”

Archie followed Rufus back to the lee of the cabin, where they sat down. Rufus hefted a jug he found next to the railing and grinned. “Must have left this here yesterday,” he said. “Bottoms up.”

The two boats pulled even as they rounded the bend below the MacGruder house. Even in their sheltered spot, wind whipped in furious eddies, and Archie jammed his hat down over his ears. He’d never moved this fast before, not even on a train, and their speed in the narrow waterway made him nervous. If they crashed, he wasn’t at all certain he would be able to fight the swollen spring currents.

“How long will they race?” he asked Rufus.

” ‘Til someone runs out of wood or blows the boiler.”

“Blows the boiler?” This was a possibility Archie hadn’t considered. He upended the jug, drinking until his eyes watered. Rufus watched him quizzically, waiting to speak until Archie set the jug on the deck and gasped for breath.

“You ain’t never been on a boat in your life, have you?” Archie shook his head, and Rufus cackled. “I figured. Why’d you git on this godforsaken tub, then?”

Archie looked out over the wakes left by the churning paddle-wheels. An odd silence seemed to have fallen, as if the wall of sound created by the race had attuned Archie’s hearing to what wasn’t there.
Maudie’s
boiler could explode at any moment, leaving him mangled or drowned in the freezing water—he’d read of similar accidents in the
Herald.
There were dozens every year.

And then Jane would be murdered.

What would happen then? Would the war between the chacmool and the Lenape go on, or would some kind of decisive blow have been struck? Archie didn’t know, but he also realized that he didn’t much care. Whether the world changed or not, Jane would still be dead. None of the rest of it mattered.

“If you don’t want to say, it don’t sweat me none,” Rufus said, but he looked injured despite his words. He looked down between his knees and popped his thumb in and out of the jug’s neck.

“No, it’s not that. Just woolgathering,” Archie said. “My daughter—I think she’s in Louisville. I’m trying to find her. Her mother’s dead, and I,” he swallowed hard. “I haven’t been much of a father to her.”

“Mm,” Rufus nodded. “I got a daughter. Two, I think. They’re in Vicksburg, though, and I ain’t been there in nearly ten years.” He glanced off to his right, where the
Detroit Damsel
was
,
beginning to open up a lead. Then he shook his head and sighed. “Reckon I won’t never get back there again.”

The Kanawha was broadening ahead of them and Archie could see the clustered buildings of Parkersburg, and beyond it the open water of the Ohio perhaps half a mile downstream. He wondered if
Maudie
was running flat out, or if Gatty could coax a bit more out of her once they swung out into the main current. A strange detachment settled over him, all of his anxieties receding into the background like the noise of the race had seemed to before. Almost as if the river itself was singing him a lullaby, relaxing him.

So this was fatalism. His fate was completely out of his hands. Either he would survive Delbert Gatty’s mania or he wouldn’t. Either he would reclaim Jane from her captors or he wouldn’t. Rufus had it exactly right: just take a seat on the deck and watch things unfold. What else was there for a foot soldier to do?

Milt Crowe had pulled a full length ahead, and as the two vessels charged through the mouth of the Little Kanawha, he edged to the left, driving
Maudie
dangerously close to the left bank. Gatty shouted something and flung Archie’s pole at the
Detroit Damsel’s
stern.

Maudie
steamed nearer the bank, and Gatty suddenly came charging past Rufus and Archie to the stern. He grabbed hold of Alfonse and shoved him to the right.

“Cut the channel! Cut the channel!” he screamed. “You, Punch and Judy, keep stoking!”

Part of what Archie had thought was the Little Kanawha’s left bank was actually an island, with a narrow channel separating it from the Virginia mainland.
Oh my God,
Archie thought,
how can we make that turn at this speed? And with a manual rudder?

“Damn daring move, Delbert,” Rufus said appreciatively. “Hope no boat’s tied up at old Blennerhassett’s dock.”

As Crowe’s boat steamed out into the Ohio, Gatty shoved Alfonse away from the rudder and hauled on it with all his strength.
Maudie’s
stern came around to the right, and she practically skidded across the river’s surface before straightening and plowing toward the channel.

The near bank loomed ominously close, but Archie’s mind had fastened on something Rufus had said. “Blennerhassett?” The name was familiar. Something he’d read somewhere?

“Yup, the old man owned this island.” Rufus’s eyes were fixed on the bank, but his mouth kept moving. “He’s gone now since the Burr trial. Don’t know who lives there now—
oh my Christ!”

Gatty had cut the angle perfectly, keeping
Maudie
from running aground while losing a minimum of speed in the turn, but he hadn’t noticed the massive dead oak leaning out from the undercut bank just around the bend from the Little Kanawha’s mouth. He saw it now, though, and he strained against the rudder, his eyes wide and disbelieving.

Rufus was up and running before it happened. “Into the water!” he cried. “She’ll blow sure!” He dove headfirst off the stern and disappeared into
Maudie’s
wake.

As
Maudie
surged under the toppled tree, a hanging branch thick as a man’s torso caught the top of her stack, bending it back and crushing it down into the boiler. The branch hung swaying, then broke loose to crash down on
Maudie’s
stern, snapping off the rudder handle and pinning Gatty to the deck.

Maudie
shuddered and an ear-piercing whistle drowned out the shouts of Punch and Judy as they stumbled toward the bow, tripping over the shackles binding their feet. The boat drifted into the center of the channel, her wheel slowing and her stern coming farther around until she floated broadside in the slow current. Archie found his feet and scrambled to follow Rufus off the stern; Alfonse had disappeared and Gatty was thrashing under the branch pinning his legs. Archie could see his mouth moving, but the