Finn (13 page)

“They think they can steal him that easy,” he says to himself as he rubs the axhead clean with the heel of his hand. “They think I’ll give him up for dead like a goddamn beast.” He plucks away the tuft of hair and brushes it off on his pantleg.

He walks the path to the riverbank and discerns there in waist-deep water all he needs for confirmation: a sack, a perfectly good and useful sack, filled with rocks by that wasteful Thatcher or some other in his employ and drawn across the grass to the water as if Huck’s body itself had been there dragged. He vows to deny Judge Thatcher the satisfaction of misusing his property, and wades in to recover it less its burden of rocks. Sitting to wring it out upon the bank he catches sight of further sign, footprints in the dirt and a drop or two of blood, and he scouts down along the waterside until he comes upon marks where someone looks to have nearly lost his balance throwing some other thing into the water, some other thing that proves to be a half-grown pig with its throat cut, nearly bled-out and still foggily abloom and staining the Mississippi a vague dark red. The source of that floorstaining blood. He wallows it out and skins it and cleans it with his clasp-knife, and he pledges that none shall have a bite of it save himself. Surely not that son of his, who probably went off without a fight and is now living high on some other hog at either the judge’s table or the widow’s.

Loading up the skiff he considers reporting the boy’s apparently tragic end to Thatcher or even the marshal, who might have been the one to have counterfeited the scene of the crime, but in the end he decides against it. Avoiding St. Petersburg altogether will be the best policy from this moment forward, lest he and the boy cross paths. When the time comes and he has established either a reliable source of income or some other more cunning means to obtain his due he will swoop in to recover the boy and his fortune, but meanwhile he will return to his place by the riverside in Lasseter and bide his time.

7

U
PSTREAM IN A CLOUD
of fog and memory steams the
Santo Domingo,
a sternwheeler bound for Rock Island from Vicksburg. Just how many years ago this is Finn could not say, although it is surely from a time before the boy Huck was so much as a dream. Yet at this very moment, poling northbound alone on the dark river, he can see the boat in his mind’s eye with so much alarming detail that she may as well be hurtling down upon him again just as she did on that night when everything changed.

T
HE
Santo Domingo
is huge and powerful and she churns upriver with the reckless outsize belligerence of an African elephant enraged. The cloud thrown up by her wheel obliterates the stars and looms upward as if she is intent upon vaporizing the river behind her and thereby emptying it as she goes, her transient purpose served and an end made to it, yet her silent steam engines let Finn’s ears ring with music played upon the main deck by a pair of black men who have made up a band with a fiddle and a banjo. They sit side by side on a fat bale of cotton, and the tune they play is a number so well known to him as to be as unremarkable as breathing.

Finn has been drinking, and now he is lazily adrift from Dixon’s place to the public wharf where he customarily ties up. The skiff finds the channel and he sets down his pole and permits himself to take a seat and then in his weariness and disorientation he lies down flat upon his back to watch the stars wheel overhead. He has done this before and drifted for hours downriver like a dead thing only to awaken in the morning aground on some midstream island or hung up on a log, his head afire and the full sun upon his face like a brand. As he lies and blinks and breathes he lets the music wash over him as if in a dream, as if he is making it up himself or at least imagining it, as if some secret door to the shared consciousness and tradition and history of the river and its men white and black and mingled has opened itself to him and this is what has emerged.

The music might be coming from some house downstream. But rather than rising up and reaching its peak and then diminishing again as he floats past, it swells in volume and increases in clarity and keeps on swelling and keeps on increasing long past the point that would suggest that he has come abreast of some riverbank musicale and is about to drift on past—until finally, at its loudest and most crystalline, it is shattered all at once by the noise of his skiff colliding with the prow of the
Santo Domingo.
He plummets through planking torn asunder and into deep black water where he finds nothing that he might cling to save the steamboat’s charging hull, which has established a powerful countercurrent of its own and now seems intent upon drawing him under and back toward the cruel blades of the paddlewheel.

“You there!” A voice godlike from above.

He gasps and sucks in breath and pushes off from the hull using both his legs, but try as he might he cannot force himself free of the churning water for the boat is moving too fast and the current is too strong. He threatens to become mere debris.

“You there!” The face hanging over the rail above him is closer than he imagined, and rather than gazing remotely down from some heroic elevation it is studying him fairly closely and with a certain grave amusement, as if his peril is merely a game for small stakes. “How about I get you a rope?”

“Your hand,” says Finn. “Reach.” For there is no time to spare and he has little faith that the man, should he vanish upon an errand, will return again at all.

His rescuer, his face a black vacancy against the stars, falls dutifully to his knees and reaches beneath the rail to take the hand that Finn offers up. If the crash has caused any alarm aboard the steamboat it has been but short-lived and minor, for when Finn climbs over the rail and leans gasping against it he observes that the fiddle and banjo music is still under way down here on the heavily laden main deck where there are but a few individuals loafing about, blacks exclusively, whispering among themselves in corners and promenading arm in arm around the stacked cargo and penned livestock as if they were guests upon the grandest ship of the line. Floating down from the dining room on the deck above comes the delicate chiming of silver and glassware, cushioned upon the low hum of dignified conversation.

“Why ain’t you tied up somewheres?”

“Running late, suh.”

With a nod of his head he acknowledges the river whose grip he has so narrowly escaped. “I’m obliged.”

“T’warn’t nothing.”

“Still.” Flatly and with a look that is almost a warning, for he is not one to give thanks lightly to a black man even for an act such as this one and he cannot abide the idea that his courtesy might be rebuffed.

“Happy to help, suh.”

“I know it.” And then adrip like a river spirit made flesh and risen up to pursue some antique unfathomable errand of its own choosing, he turns and makes for the stairway. Up he climbs to the second deck, where candles and the reflections of candles glimmer like fireflies in the dining room and the smell of food is nearly overwhelming in its variety and power. He feels completely himself, recovered from his adventure and fully sobered by it, and it does not occur to him to wonder what these fine white ladies and gentlemen must think of this wet shambling creature passing by so close to their tables. He takes note of the bar with its gleaming bottles rank upon rank and thinks that he will demand from the captain the run of it as part of his restitution. The stairway to the upper deck is narrow and has a turning midway along and gives directly onto the texas and he climbs it as if he has done so a thousand times before. He opens the door to the pilothouse without so much as rapping upon it and admits himself into a small high room with a panoramic view of the river, dominated by a great oaken wheel and a compass housed in a brass binnacle and occupied by two dignified gentlemen and a single black girl of perhaps sixteen who looks as if she would prefer to vanish into the deep shadows if only she could.

“Ahoy there,” says the younger and more sociable of the two men, as if he is greeting a paying customer. He is as tall as Finn and more heavily padded, dressed in a brilliant white uniform that he has recently had custom-made to his measurements. The other is taller still, rail-thin and narrow-beaked, with an intense riverbound gaze that neither sees Finn nor cares to, and the thoughtless way that he wears his threadbare uniform indicates his disdain for anything about the
Santo Domingo
other than her absolute safety. “Captain Parkinson,” says the first man, thrusting out a meaty hand.

“Name’s Finn.” Taking it.

“Good God, man.” Stricken by his visitant’s damp handshake he takes the man’s elbow with his left hand, which he works up along the dripping shirtsleeve to his shoulder. “Where have you been?”

“Minding my own business.” His eye falls upon the girl.

“You didn’t go overboard.”

“Not until your boat rammed me, I didn’t.”

“No,” says the captain, his look incredulous.

“Yes sir. I’m lucky to be alive.”

“I should say.”

“Lost my skiff.”

“You have my word we’ll.”

“I know it. That and more.”

“You have my word we’ll make you whole, however much it requires.” Whether the captain is clarifying his offer or expanding it or merely finishing his thought for the love of hearing himself speak is unknowable. “Thank God you’re no worse for wear.”

“Thank Him and the nigger that pulled me out, too.”

“He works in mysterious ways.”

“Suit yourself,” says Finn with a sly look. “I come up here to see how a blind man pilots a steamboat.”

The pilot slides a glance toward Finn and then returns his steady gaze to the moonlit river.

“Mr. Franklin here is the best man on the line.”

“Is he now.”

“Without a doubt.”

“Too bad about his license.”

Even this does not perturb the implacable pilot Franklin, for he has either heard worse before or placed his entire trust in Captain Parkinson or given up on the world of men for some other reason altogether.

“Accidents happen.”

“I mention my pap’s the judge in Adams County?”

“Did I mention that we operate under maritime law?”

“Still.”

“Justice will be done, Mr. Finn. Have no fear.”

“I won’t.”

“Were I at liberty to do so, I would write you a check at this very moment.”

“I’d be obliged.” He looks at the girl for a minute and wonders exactly how impressed she is by his handling of the situation. “Too bad you ain’t at liberty.”

“Not tonight I’m not. No.”

“I reckon we can make it up somehow.”

“I’ll need your particulars.”

“I know it.” The river drifts past in the dark. Finn wonders how long the steamboat line will take to correct its error and considers just how long he might be able to wait and figures that the two time frames are not much alike.

“Offhand, what do you guess your skiff was worth?”

“Can’t say.”

Parkinson studies the man closely, for he guesses that fate has served him up not some unsophisticated bully but a cunning negotiator unwilling to show his hand.

“Can’t say,” Finn continues, “on account of I stole it.”

“Is that so?”

“Hell yes. When you’re about ready to steal me another’n to replace it, you let me know.”

The pilot Franklin slides a look toward Finn once more but this time with the faintest of smiles atwitch at the corner of his mouth.

“Mr. Finn, what do you say we visit the medicine chest and resolve our differences like gentlemen?”

“Whyn’t you send the girl down.”

“That won’t be possible.”

“I like it up here.”

“It’s against regulations.”

Which gives Finn an idea. “Franklin ought to have a little something, too. Send the girl down and she can get enough for everybody.”

Parkinson lowers his voice. “Let’s just the three of us go. You and me and the girl.”

“I go wherever the captain goes.” Her voice is surprisingly deep and soft and round, not unpleasant to Finn’s ears or anyone’s.

“
Wherever
he goes?” His mind leaps.

“Yes sir.”

“All right. Come watch him buy a man some whiskey.”

T
O
F
INN’S SURPRISE,
Parkinson is not much of a drinking man. The captain sits clutching his glass as if it contains the purest poison, or as if he has learned that the universe radiates out from it and he intends by this action to remain pegged in one spot rather than risk spinning off into eternity.

“How about the girl?” Finn hazards after a while. She stands behind the captain like his shadow, unmoving even in the tidal rise and fall of the dining room crowd. Her arms are soft and gray-black as ash and they hang before her as if she is a mere marionette, her hands belly up like fish deep in the single pocket of her apron. Her eyes are sleepy but she starts when Finn mentions her, picking out his words over the conversation like some kind of strange angular music or a coded message. Were he looking her way he would witness the automatic adjustment of her every molecule so as to focus her attention on that sonic space where his words live.