Summer of Pearls (3 page)

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Authors: Mike Blakely

BOOK: Summer of Pearls
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Billy was a stranger to every man in the crew, though he had cooked for them now for a year and a half. They knew him as a courteous fellow, but one who avoided long conversation. Nobody knew where he had come from. He didn't talk about his past. And, though he didn't frown, he rarely smiled, and never laughed. He was young—
maybe thirty. He moved with strength and grace. He had more than his share of good looks. But he was suffering something powerful.
Just as he was about to go back to cooking breakfast, Billy saw the young apprentice engineer, Reggie Swearengen, climbing the guardrails and jigsaw work up to the boiler deck. He enjoyed watching the boy climb recklessly about the boat.
“Good morning, Reggie Swear-engineer,” Billy said.
Reggie Swearengen grinned. “Mornin', Billy!” he shouted as he climbed around the cotton bales.
“What are you doing?”
“Kelso told me to lower the yawl.”
Billy smirked. “The yawl? What for?”
“Said he wants me to tow him behind the paddle wheel when we get underway so he can look at something.”
“Look at what?”
“I don't know,” Reggie said, throwing one hand into the air as he clung to the hog chains with the other.
Billy shook his head. “It would be a shame if you should loose your hold on the rope when you were towing him.”
Reggie laughed at the suggestion and climbed onto the hurricane deck to lower the yawl.
The
Glory
continued to back slowly up the bayou as Billy turned back into his kitchen. He tested the heat of the griddle, flicking some water onto it with his fingertips. He heard Captain Gentry ring the bell, giving the signal to stop the engines. He felt the vibrations cease, and heard the coonjine, louder now that the exhaust valves were silenced. The pulleys squeaked as Reggie lowered the yawl to the water.
Billy heard the splash of the yawl as he whipped a wooden spoon through a huge bowl of pancake batter. Now the captain would align the boat with the channel, ring the bell for full speed ahead, and blow the whistle as the
Glory of Caddo Lake
steamed down Big Cypress Bayou.
The bell rang. Billy waited for the engine-room vibrations. They didn't come. The captain repeated the bell signal. Something was wrong. Putting his pancake batter aside, Billy stepped back out onto the promenade and looked toward the engine room. He saw Reggie climbing
down from the boiler deck and Judd Kelso stepping into the yawl. One of them should have been in the engine room, following the captain's signals. It was Kelso's fault. Reggie was just following orders. Kelso had no business being an engineer.
The entire boat suddenly came alive under him. It felt as if he were trying to stand on a monster gator twisting its prey to death underwater. The air shook with a sound so loud that he heard it with the marrow of his bones, and something hit him in the back with incredible force.
Now the waters of the bayou were all around him, morning-cold. He felt disoriented, couldn't find his way to the top. As he held his breath and waited, hopefully to surface, he realized that he had heard a double blast, absorbed a tremendous percussion. It seemed long ago, but his senses were coming back to him now, and he knew it had just happened. He found the morning glow of the surface above him and swam upward.
THE WORLD SEEMED OUT OF CONTROL. THE SKY RAINED BALES OF COTTON.
One splashed ten yards away from Billy Treat, covering him momentarily with spray. Screams and shouts accompanied a vicious hiss of steam. Something ripped into a cypress tree behind him. He treaded water with some difficulty in his long pants and waterlogged shoes. He shook his head to clear his thoughts. Pieces of wood were splashing all around him now, and clattering down on the hurricane deck of the
Glory
. His right shoulder and the back of his head were smarting from whatever it was that had struck him.
His eyes focused. The steamboat was listing severely to port, vomiting hysterical people, shooting a geyser of steam. He began to think clearly. Two of the boilers had exploded and blown bales of cotton away from the starboard side of the boat, throwing her off balance. The pilothouse was gone. There was probably a hole in the hull, because the boat was sinking steadily, tilting ever farther to port.
People floundered around him in the water. He went under and yanked his shoes off. When he came back up, he heard someone moaning. He saw a black man, face burned horribly, clinging to a splintered
mass of wood. He swam to the man, helped him pull farther up on the floating lumber.
“Kelso!” he shouted. The son of a bitch was rowing the yawl toward the Port Caddo wharf! “We need the boat!” He saw the apprentice engineer treading water, dazed. “Reggie, get the yawl from the wharf! Swim, Reggie!”
The young apprentice squinted and saw the yawl. He waved at Billy and started swimming with powerful strokes. Billy knew he would make it. The lad was strong, and obviously uninjured.
A deckhand was floundering, screaming, frothing the water with his blood. He went down in a swirl. “Just hold on,” Billy said to the burned man he had helped onto the floating lumber. To his surprise, the black man nodded and pushed him away.
Billy marked the spot where the rouster had gone down. He took long, steady breaths as he swam easily to the place. Filling his lungs, he jackknifed his body and plunged downward, headfirst.
The horrible sounds of the world above ended and he could barely see his own hands, outstretched, through the murky water. He descended, pinching his nose and forcing air into his ears to equalize the pressure. He felt for the drowning man with his arms and legs. An air bubble passed between his fingers. More met him in the face. He had plenty of oxygen left. He knew how to conserve it underwater. He plunged until he crashed into the thrashing body of the deckhand.
The black man grabbed him with desperate force. Lord, he was powerful! Billy used all his strength to turn the man around. He pinned one huge, muscled arm back and locked his own elbow under the man's chin. He started kicking for the surface, the drowning man clawing at him with his free hand.
When they finally broke into the air again, the black man was exhausted, holding Billy's hair in his fist, coughing water from his lungs. The man's forearm was ripped open and pumping blood. Maybe the cool water would slow the flow, Billy thought. He kicked toward the floating mass of lumber, which he now recognized as a big piece of the hurricane deck. It was just starting to really dawn on him what had
happened. The boilers had blown. People were drowning.
As he fought the bleeding deckhand to reach the floating wood, he looked toward the town and saw Reggie coming with the yawl. That worthless Kelso was lying on the wharf as if he were hurt or something. He had looked healthy enough rowing away.
Above the hiss of steam, Treat heard a bell ringing in town. The Port Caddoans were coming down to the bayou, manning boats. Some of them were in their nightclothes, or in long underwear. They dragged skiffs, pirogues, bateaux, all manner of vessels into the water.
Suddenly five horsemen came galloping down the brick pavement. They plunged across the flood bank to low ground, passed the log jailhouse, and leaped their barebacked mounts from the wharf. They splashed into the bayou, the horses grunting as they started to swim. The riders slipped from the backs of their mounts and held onto the manes. They would tow people to shore, one or two at a time. It would help.
The bayou writhed with screaming people. Billy saw a few sensible men and women doing good work, pulling others onto floating debris. A woman was holding calmly to a bobbing bale of cotton with one arm while she clutched two crying children with the other.
The
Glory
was tilting harder to port, sinking, still spewing steam. The main deck went under and water boiled instantly around the furnace, sending up a cloud of hot vapor.
Billy pulled the bleeding man onto the floating section of hurricane deck and told him to hold pressure on his own arm to stop the flow of blood. The man was starting to recover from the sheer percussion of the explosion, and he nodded vacantly as Billy spoke to him. The other man, the one who had been so badly scalded, was still there, unconscious but grasping the wood.
Without taking time to rest, Billy stroked back toward the throng. He was not even winded. A woman was becoming hysterical, clinging to a piece of wood too small to keep her afloat. She would go under before he reached her, but she would be easier to save than the big deckhand had been. The boats would be there soon.
One at a time, he told himself. You can't save everybody yourself. God knows, even that wouldn't set your life right, even if you could, but you can't.
 
 
Ellen Crowell woke up on the floor of the washroom. She smelled her own blood in her nostrils. She had been bending over the washbasin when, suddenly, it had risen to smash her in the face. What was happening? What had gone wrong?
The sounds came to her gradually—the screaming, the hissing of steam. She remembered only now having heard and felt the explosion. She tried to stand up, but seemed too dizzy to keep her feet under her. Then she felt herself sliding across the washroom floor and knew it was a tilt in the boat that prevented her from standing. Ben was in the stateroom, and the steamboat was sinking.
Clawing across the slanting floor, Ellen reached the door frame and pulled herself up into the saloon. The saloon floor was gone forward of the washroom. She could see water coming up in the hole. Morning light streamed in from another hole above. Now she understood what had happened. The boilers had exploded, tearing through the thin planking of the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, the texas, and even the pilothouse.
Luckily, her stateroom was aft of the gaping hole and she didn't have to cross it to rescue Ben. A few passengers were still floundering toward the end of the slanted saloon, but most had already gotten out. Ellen realized that she must have been unconscious for a minute or two. She had lost valuable seconds, but she was sure she still had time to get out with Ben. After that, she would probably drown, but that didn't concern her yet. Ben wouldn't drown. Thank God that the boy could swim.
She scrambled on all fours toward her stateroom. Why wasn't Ben coming out? Was he all right? Relax, Ellen. He can't reach the doorknob the way the floor is slanted. He's waiting for you. She heard his voice:
“Mama!” He sounded more confused than terrified.
She had almost reached the door when the boat settled suddenly
to port and the grand piano slid against her stateroom door, blocking it.
She screamed.
“Mama?”
“Ben!” she cried, trying to move the piano.
“I'm all right, Mama. There's water in here.”
“Help!” she yelled. “For God's sake, somebody come help me!”
A man appeared at the back end of the saloon. “Come on, lady! This way!”
“The piano!” she yelled. “My son's in there! Help me move the piano!”
“Forget about the damned piano, woman! Get out this way!” The man was gone.
She whimpered in terror. Water was coming up through the hole in the saloon floor.
“Mama! I can't reach the door!” she heard Ben say.
She clawed at the door until her fingernails were bloody. She beat against it with her fists, then kicked it, trying to break it in, but she wasn't a very large woman and the door was solid wood. “Ben?” she cried again, trying to preserve some chord of normalcy in her voice.
“Mama, it's getting deeper!” he yelled through the door.
“Swim, son!” she shouted, tears gushing down her face. “And if the room fills up, you hold your breath!”
Ben didn't answer.
“Do you hear me, Ben?”
“Yes,” Ben said.
“I have to get help, son. I'll come back as quick as I can.”
“Don't go, Mama!” her son's voice said.
She had to tear herself away from the door and the piano and her son. “Swim, son!” she yelled, so he would hear her going away. “Keep swimming!” She wanted to crawl back to him, but there was no time. She was thinking rationally now. She was trying to save him. But she felt as if she were deserting him, leaving him to drown alone.
 
 
Billy Treat had gone under six times for drowning people, bringing most of them up to Reggie, who was strong enough to pull them into the yawl. Other boats were arriving now, and he could no longer see anyone floundering in the water. The five horses had people clinging to their tails as they stroked toward the wharf. The horses had made several trips, and they were exhausted. People were settling down, helping each other. Then a woman emerged from the passenger cabin of the sinking steamboat and began screaming bloody murder.
“My son! Ben is in there! The piano!”
Billy swam to her and climbed onto the tilting boiler deck. “Where is he? Where's your son?”
The woman gripped him with hysteria, but spoke quite plainly. “The piano slid against the door, and I can't open it. Ben is in there. He can't get out!” She virtually shoved him into the flooding cabin.
Billy Treat waded to the door with the piano before it. “Hey!” he yelled. “You in there?”
“Help!” the voice said. “The water's getting deeper. I can't get out.”
Billy put all the strength he had into moving the piano, but he couldn't lift it or slide it away from the door. “Can you swim?”
“Yes!”
“I'm coming right back for you! Keep swimming!”
The water was knee-deep in the saloon now, and deeper in Ben's room, which was on the sinking side of the boat. Billy waded to the aft end of the passenger cabin.
“Where's Ben?” Ellen cried when she saw Billy come out alone. “Where's my boy?” Some of the men had forced her into a boat.
“Ellen!” cried a man from another boat. “Where's Ben?”
Billy knew it had to be the boy's father. He didn't answer the mother's questions, or the father's. He just dove into the water and disappeared. He felt his way under the boiler deck, around a few bales of cotton lodged there, and to the submerged engine room on the main deck. He found the door handle and swam into the darkness. Feeling around, he soon located Judd Kelso's iron capstan bar. He knew where Kelso kept it, because he had considered many times throwing it overboard.
Of course that wouldn't have solved anything. Kelso could always find something else to hit the rousters with.
He noticed, just before he broke the surface, that his lungs were aching. The swimming underwater was beginning to take its toll on him. Once he had been among the best in the world, but he hadn't done it in a long time.
The woman screamed wildly when he came up. He only waved the bar at her, taking no time to explain. The men held her in the boat. Otherwise, she would have rushed back in to try to save her son.
Billy knew the old
Glory of Caddo Lake
well. He was thinking about how she was put together as he made his way through the water in the saloon, now deep enough to swim through. The cheapest, thinnest wood was between the staterooms. The paneling that formed the walls between staterooms and saloon was pretty thick. The doors were solid. There wasn't much time. Ben's room was almost completely under water now. He decided to tear through the thin wood partitioning the rooms.
“Keep swimming, Ben,” he said when he got to the piano. “I'm coming through the wall of the next room to get you!”
“I'm swimming!” the boy cried.
He admired this boy who was being brave, trapped in that dark room as the bayou squeezed his air out. He forced himself to relax for ten seconds and took long, deep breaths. Then he slid through the open door of the room next to Ben's and disappeared underwater.
It took a full minute of hard work to punch a small hole in the wall with the capstan bar, but Billy could not see wasting the seconds it would take to go up for air again. The boy might not have seconds. He didn't know how far the boat had sunk as he worked. Maybe the boy was drowning now. Billy had stayed under longer than this before. No need to go back now. Go forward! In the dark, he tore at the boards he had loosened until he had two of them broken away. There was enough room to squeeze through now.

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