Gangway! (16 page)

    "No," everybody said.

    Roscoe waited till everyone was set, with a secure grip on some part of the wagon or one another. Then he gave a strong lunging shove on the tailgate, enough to get the wagon trundling slowly forward, and leaped on board with all the others.

    Ittzy had a harder time steering with the added weight, but he managed to keep the wagon more or less in the middle of the street. Gabe watched with dubious hopes; they didn't seem to be gathering much speed at all.

    But pretty soon the wagon picked up some acceleration, then some more, and all at once they were rushing forward, swooping down the first slope much faster than before.

    "Gaaaaabe!" Vangie cried. Looking at her, Gabe saw her expression combined in the strangest way pride with alarm. He grinned at her and faced front again, into the wind.

    A real wind; the wind of their passage. The wagon was really tearing downhill now. The wheels racketed down the cobblestones; he thought for a second the whole contraption would fly apart, but in the noise, wind and rush there was nothing to do but hold on.

    The horseless wagon thundered ahead. It whammed down through the trough, whizzed up the second slope, whipped over the top without even slowing down, and gathered juggernaut speed down the second hill toward the Bay far far below…

    He grabbed Vangie, hugging her to him. Through the wind he shouted, "It works!"

    She didn't look all that ecstatically happy.

    He grabbed Ittzy's shoulder. "Okay," he yelled. "Slow us down now."

    Ittzy braced both feet against the brake handle. "It won't… I can't… it's going to…"

    Gabe and Roscoe both dived for the brake handle. Gabe almost fell off. Sparks flew from the brake shoes against the iron tires and the brake handle bent, but it didn't do a bit of good. The wagon flew. It kept going faster… and faster… and faster… Straight toward the pier…

    He had a glimpse out of the corner of his eye: Officer McCorkle, standing under a streetlight, his eyes wide open and his notebook wide open. He was shaking his head and licking his pencil.

    Gabe braced himself. He gathered Vangie to him, cushioned her with his arm and chest. "HANG ON!"

    Startled faces along the street watched as they whizzed between the dives and grog shops straight toward the riverboat pier… Vangie was shrieking, but he couldn't make out what she was trying to say until he turned his head and caught her words distinctly:

    "Make it stop! Make it stop! I just did my hair today!"

    The brake handle snapped.

    The wagon careened onto the pier, going just a little faster than a greased sled on an icy mountainside. Ittzy steered neatly around a crated cast-iron boiler. Vangie yelled something, Gabe clutched her close, Roscoe lost his footing and went tumbling around in the wagon bed. Captain Flagway started praying in Spanish, and Francis closed his nostrils with thumb and forefinger.

    Gabe stared straight ahead, and the nighttime world gradually filled with water. Black, cold, wet water.

    "No," Gabe said, very quietly and very privately. The wagon flashed right out to the end of the pier, straight out past the end of the pier, wheels spinning against air, shooting out into space as though it had been fired from a brass cannon.

    There was an instant's sense of motionlessness, as safe and solid as a hotel room, and Gabe looked around at a view of San Francisco and its Bay that he'd never had before. Then the trajectory of the wagon curved downward, and water was dead ahead, and the buckboard landed in the choppy Bay like a bartender's palm slapping down on a double eagle.

    Everybody went rolling and tumbling, joining Roscoe in the wagon bed. Gabe found himself wrapped around Vangie, the two of them pasted to the back of the buckboard seat. And already water was spurting in through gaps between the boards.

    Gabe didn't even care. Water an inch deep in the wagon and rising, and he was too happy to even notice the stuff. He struggled to his feet, pulling Vangie with him, and clutched the side of the wagon. Water was pouring in everywhere, and he had a big idiotic smile on his face. He stared uphill toward the Mint far far away and toward the horse standing alone way up there, hitched to the lamp-post and chewing away slowly in mild amaze. "It works," he said, in an awed half whisper.

    Vangie gave him a bleary look.

    "It works!" Gabe cried. He spread his arms and crowed, shouting, "I knew it would work!"

    The jumble of people on the water-covered floor around him looked up with several expressions on their faces, none of them as happy as his. The wagon steadily sank, and Gabe stood in it, looking all around at the rising perspective and grinning from ear to ear.

    

    

    Somewhere off Puget Sound the
Sea Wolf
made heavy going through a tart sea. A pilot boat from Seattle came alongside, and a yellow sheet of paper passed from its deck to the hand of a sailor on board the
Sea Wolf
.

    Crung, the first mate, stood on the quarterdeck and watched the sailor climb toward the captain's cabin, the door of which was closed as always. Timidly the sailor went along there and knocked, and from within a colossal Roar bellowed at him. It made Crung wince-even Crung, who weighed two hundred and thirty pounds and had beat up eight railroad men at once in a saloon brawl.

    He watched the sailor hesitantly enter the captain's cabin, shaking with fear. The Roar got louder and angrier. Very quickly the sailor, pale and quaking and no longer carrying the telegram, came windmilling out of the cabin again. He slammed the door and leaned his back against it weakly, mopping his brow.

    From within, the Roar continued for a moment or two before it dwindled to an interested grumble.

    Crung relaxed a bit. At least the telegram, whatever it contained, hadn't made Captain Percival Arafoot angry, and that was a blessing. Crung remembered the last time the captain had been angry and, remembering, he shuddered gently all over like a sail in an uncertain breeze.

    

    

    Francis strolled casually around the waterfront district wearing the expression of someone who has lost something and is looking for it without much hope of finding it.

    He turned a corner past Mme. Herz's Emporium and strolled on. Around him heaved and surged the business life of a busy ocean port; activity pleasantly masculine, for the most part, if perhaps a bit too overripe taken as a generality. The added mixture of Oriental grace notes served as a delicate contrast to the grosser elements of the scene; a cargo of Chinese temple bells, for instance, setting off and in a way commenting on the lusty obscenities of Irish and Scandinavian stevedores loading a grand piano onto a packet intended for a brothel in Nome.

    But it wasn't for a study in whimsical mongrelization that Francis had come down to this roaring reeking part of town. He had serious business of his own to transact, if only he could find just the right circumstances.

    Hmmm. In an alley between a whore shop and an incense importer's rickety warehouse a little tramp was hunkered over a small fire built of scraps, cooking a fish in a battered piece of tin shaped to the general outlines of a frying pan. Glancing in at the serious hunched back of the man, Francis paused and considered. Would he do? He would do.

    Francis entered the alley, nodded amiably at the tramp and said, "Afternoon."

    "Yuh," said the tramp. His concentration remained on his fish, but a certain bunching of his shoulder muscles indicated his awareness of-and attitude about-Francis's presence.

    "My, that smells good," Francis said and smiled in a way that he hoped was disarming.

    Not looking up, and so not disarmed by the smile, the tramp said in a sandpaper voice, "Not enough for two, pal. Sorry."

    "No, no," Francis said, refusing the unmade offer with a fluttering of his fingers. "I wouldn't think of it. A man's dinner is a sacred thing."

    The tramp nodded. "I always figured it that way," he said, giving his fish a poke with a little bent twig.

    "It was as a fellow gourmet I was speaking," Francis told him.

    "Yeah?" Noncommittal, still not looking up.

    "The aroma," Francis said, "tells me you have the chef's touch."

    Now at last the tramp did look up, suspicion and growing wonder conflicted in his expression. He faced Francis's disarming smile and said, "Yeah?" This time, with more credulity in it.

    "You don't simply burn your food and shove it into your gullet," Francis assured him. "You prepare it." He spread his hands, as though smoothing sheets. "You respect it." His fingertips touched, in a semi-religious gesture. "You care for it." His hands closed slowly, gently around a ball of air.

    The tramp smiled upward in awe. "Yeah," he said. He was amazed at himself. "Yeah, I do."

    Francis sniffed, beamed in rapture, and closed his eyes, expressing ecstasy. He sniffed again, aware of the tramp's open-mouthed observance of his performance. He permitted a tiny purr to escape his closed mouth. He sniffed a third time-and paused. A tiny frown. One eye open. Doubt, hesitation. He appeared to question the lambent air.

    The tramp looked worried. He too sniffed, with a noise Francis could have done without. He said, "Something wrong?"

    Francis cocked his head to one side like a fox hearing the hunter's horn. He sniffed. "It's," he said, and paused to consider. His fingers dibbled in the air before his face. Sniff. "It's cooking too… slowly," he decided.

    The tramp was barely breathing. He stared at Francis like a child at a magician, a bird at a snake.

    Francis nodded, slow and deep. "Yes," he said. "Too slowly." He gave the tramp an open, honest, concerned look, as between equals. "Don't you sense it?"

    The tramp turned his head to blink at his fish. "Yeah?"

    "It's the breeze through the alley," Francis announced. "You know, if you were to push the fire a bit closer to the wall there…"

    "Ya think so?"

    "It will make all the difference," Francis told him. "Here, I'll help."

    Between them, using other scraps of wood, they pushed the tiny fire over closer to the incense warehouse wall. The part Francis moved came right up next to the wall, though the tramp couldn't see that from the other side.

    "There," Francis said, rising again and dusting off his knees. "Much better. You should start slicing your onion now."

    The tramp frowned. "My onion?"

    Francis expressed disbelief. "You're roasting fish without an onion?"

    Embarrassed, the tramp moved his hands around vaguely and wouldn't meet Francis's eye. "Well, I, uh…"

    "I'll give you mine."

    The tramp looked at him, astonished. "Aw, say, pal…"

    "No, I insist."

    Francis took an onion from his pocket and held it up between thumb and first finger, again like a magician. "I can always get another," he said, and smiled fondly at the onion, as though he and it had been through much together that neither would ever forget.

    "Pal," the tramp said, "you're a sport."

    "Think nothing of it." Francis cleared a bit of ground away from the fire, and placed the onion in it like a model of the Taj Mahal. "Now," he said, "you slice it here."

    "Right." The tramp pulled a folding knife from his pocket, opened it, rubbed it against his filthy pants, and hunkered over the onion. As he sawed carefully away, the pink tip of his tongue showed at the left corner of his mouth.

    "Slice it very thin," Francis told him, "and spread it over the fish when you turn it for the last time. When the onion edges begin to brown, the fish is done. Just pour your butter sauce over it, and…"

    "Yeah, yeah," the tramp said, sawing away. He tried to look like a man with a butter sauce. "That's right, yeah."

    Francis gave him a look. "No butter?"

    The tramp put down his knife and patted his pockets. "Today I kinda, you know, I was roughing it."

    "Well, you go ahead and slice your onion," Francis told him, "and I'll go get the butter."

    "Say, pal, you don't have to…"

    "Fine cooking is its own reward," Francis said. Smiling again, he left the tramp slicing away at his onion, back to the fire. Already the warehouse wall was getting a charred look to it.

    Francis walked back around the corner and past Mme. Herz's; a block later he found Officer McCorkle strolling along amid the heaving and the shouting, studying the world in silent suspicion. Francis hurried to catch up, calling, "Officer! Officer!"

    McCorkle turned around, and glowered. "You," he said, without pleasure.

    "Excuse me," Francis said, breathing a bit heavily. "I don't know the proper thing to do under the circumstances."

    "What circumstances, Calhoun?"

    "Is it necessary for me to find a fireman," Francis asked, "or can I report the fire to you?"

    "WHAT??"

    Francis turned and pointed. A block and a half away smoke was billowing from the mouth of the alley, and so was the tramp.

    McCorkle leaped into the air and landed running. He and the tramp passed one another on the fly, the one headed toward the alley and the other away from it. Francis grabbed the tramp's arm as he raced by, and pressed a silver dollar into his palm. "Eat in restaurants," he suggested. "It's safer."

    "You're a champ, pal," the tramp said, and raced on, clutching the dollar.

    Francis strolled alleyward. McCorkle came battling his way out to the street again from the smoky alley, waving his arms in front of his face, coughing and wheezing. He stared wildly around, blinking through his tears, and ran to the fire alarm box on the corner. As he began madly to crank the alarm, Francis took from his pocket the large pocketwatch Gabe had lent him and studied its slowly sweeping minute hand.