SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (23 page)

Geary pulled an envelope from his coat
pocket and handed it to Kevin before advancing to converse with
Toothpick, who had climbed into the driver’s seat. Kevin backed
away from the flatbed when he heard the engine start. The envelope
in his hand was unsealed; he spread it open and saw a thick stack
of bills inside. The truck pulled away slowly and Geary rejoined
the Emorys.

“You better count it. My accountant gets
distracted sometimes.”

Kevin instinctively looked up to check on
the position of the figure across the canal. The policeman hadn’t
moved and was facing in their direction.

“You don’t have to worry about him,” Geary
said without turning to follow Kevin’s gaze. He looked at Tom and
Kevin in turn and smiled knowingly. “You just have to worry about
me.”

Kevin extracted and counted the bills, brow
furrowed as he did the arithmetic in his head. Eight hundred, minus
forty, plus fifteen. He looked up at Geary and nodded. “It’s all
there.”

“It better be,” Geary said in a serious
tone. “And the same goes for your barrels. If what’s on that truck
isn’t what you gave Carruthers, you’ll never make it back upriver.”
He smiled again. “But you already know that. That’s the nature of
the business we’re both in.”

Kevin nodded, glancing back at the scow. Tom
shifted impatiently from one leg to the other, and Kevin wondered
whether the coffee and whiskey had caught up to him.

Geary tilted his head toward the watching
policeman. “Now that guy, there,” he said. “He’s just a working
man. He’s like all the other working men beaten down by
Prohibition. They can’t afford the clubs for the high-rollers and
the politicians.” He looked from Kevin to Tom with his hands thrust
deep into his coat pockets. His eyes twinkled and he smiled
broadly. “The temperance movement has been a great friend to me,”
he said. “And maybe to you as well. But it’s been nothing but a
kick in the balls for them.”

He retreated toward the scow with the Emorys
following and turned in the middle of the deck to shake their
hands. “Stay in touch,” he said with a fleeting smile. He walked
off the boat onto the towpath and Kevin watched his figure recede
into the shadows.

Chapter 18
Cordwood

Thursday, March 27, 1924

“That’s it for hatch 1,” Kevin said. The
afternoon drizzle pricked the back of his neck as he spun in search
of stray logs on the wet floor of the cargo hold. Finding none, he
climbed out onto the deck and helped Tom put the hatch back in
place.

They removed hatch 6 and set it on the roof
of the cabin. Here the hold was still full of firewood, and the
spitting rain painted the sawn ends of the logs. Tom knelt to
extract them, sliding two at a time across the deck to Kevin
standing at the rail. Kevin tossed them onto the growing pile of
firewood on the bank.

The scow was tied up in Rock Creek Basin,
where the mouth of Rock Creek was separated from the Potomac River
by a two-hundred-foot-wide dam. Kevin looked out at Mike and Bess,
who were tied to a tree in the vacant lot above the bank. They
stood motionless in the drizzle – probably asleep, he thought. Two
other boats were moored in the basin and both were hauling sand
from Smoot’s in Georgetown up to Williamsport, where they were
building a power plant. They had been towed by tugboats and entered
the basin yesterday through the tidewater lock. Probably waiting on
their mules. Kevin arched forward to launch a stream of tobacco
juice onto the bank.

“You posing for a statue?” Tom groused.
Kevin saw that half-a-dozen logs had accumulated at his feet.

“I didn’t realize we was in a rush,” he
said. “Seeing as your visit to Reddy’s wharf don’t seem to have
resulted in much of a scheduled appointment.”

“His kid said he was coming today. He’ll be
here.”

“His kid don’t know his ass from a slice of
melon,” Kevin said. “Seeing as I was negotiating an important
inversion of our financial assets into hard money, maybe you could
of waited around until Reddy come back, so you could talk to him
directly.”

“That kid is old enough to know what’s going
on with his daddy. Old enough to work alongside him at the wharf.
And shit, the kid loaded two cords of wood hisself on our last
trip!”

“That don’t mean he got a brain in his
head,” Kevin said. He bent over and pushed two logs together, then
lifted and flung them onto the pile on the bank. “He’s like his
daddy alright, and Reddy is a bona-fide black darkie.” He hoisted
two more as Tom slid replacement logs across the deck. “Not like
your copper darkies, which is most of what you will see around
here.”

“A darkie is a darkie,” Tom said, bending
over the hold. “Ain’t no such difference.”

Kevin turned and wagged his head in
rebuttal. “Shows how little you know about things.” He tried to
look professorial. “Your black darkie is from jungle Africa,” he
said. “He got arms like pythons, which come from swinging on vines.
You ever look at the arms on Reddy Bogue? He could probably
strangle a calf in the crook of his elbow. And he could grab two of
these logs with one hand.”

“All I care about is can he reach that hand
in his pocket and pull out some money,” Tom said. “Twenty dollars
for seven cords is what I told the kid. And I don’t care if he’s a
black darkie, copper darkie, or pine-tar darkie, long as he can do
that.”

Kevin tossed two logs to the bank from the
growing pile at his feet. “Now your copper darkie,” he said, “got a
certain ease to him. He can be comfortable around a white man, and
a white man can get comfortable around him.” He paused to adjust
his skewed suspenders. “So you might see a copper darkie working at
a hotel here in Washington. Or at a newsstand or a shine stand.
That’s ‘cause he ain’t by origin a jungle darkie. Your copper
darkie come from what they call the high savanna. Which is aerated
and not so savage like the jungle. So he don’t need the python
arms.”

Observing the logjam accumulating at Kevin’s
feet, Tom stood up and stretched, shaking rain from his hat brim.
He dug into his coat pocket for his flask and knocked back a
swig.

“The way you can tell ‘em apart,” Kevin
continued, “is density. Your copper darkie ain’t so dense as your
black darkie, ‘cause he got lower muscle perfusion. So he can float
in water like a white man. But your black darkie will sink like a
stone. And that’s one reason you won’t see no black darkies on the
canal. Them boys Cy Elgin used up last year was copper
darkies.”

“I heared about a couple of darkies on the
canal once,” Tom said, “and I guess they was pretty dark.” He
tilted the flask again and shook his head as the alcohol burned his
mouth. “It was maybe five, six years ago, and they was boathands on
a barge coming down from Cumberland. They got to the Paw Paw Tunnel
and the darkies didn’t want to go through. They was scared of a
headless man they heared was haunting the tunnel.” He pulled his
knife from its hip-sheath and flipped it, catching the handle after
a single rotation. “So they got off at the entrance to the tunnel
and walked over the mountain.” He flourished the knife for effect.
“When they got down to the other side of the tunnel, their tongues
was split in two like snakes!”

Kevin issued a low whistle and wiped juice
from the corner of his mouth. “Might ‘a been a spell laid on ‘em by
some other black darkies.”

“Maybe,” Tom said. “The captain and his
other hand couldn’t tell or find out. ‘Cause them darkies was
speaking a language that no man ever heard before!”

“Snake-tongue language,” Kevin said, with a
knowing nod. “That’s a curse from jungle Africa. They should of
taken their chances in the tunnel.”

Tom climbed down into the open hold to pull
logs from the diminishing pile. They finished hatch 6 and switched
positions. When the logs under hatch 2 were gone, Tom unbuttoned
his fly and urinated into the sliver of basin between the scow and
the bank. Kevin shuffled over to urinate alongside him. He checked
his pocket watch. “Three-thirty. You sure Reddy is coming
today?”

“That’s what his kid said yesterday.”

“Damn,” Kevin said, looking at the hillock
of logs on the bank. “If he’d got here an hour ago, he could of
caught up with us. Them black darkies can work, but that’s getting
to be a pretty big pile.”

“Hell, who cares? After he pays us, that
pile is his problem. He can spend all night loading his wagon.”

“A one-horse wagon ain’t going to do it.
They’ll need to make a few trips.”

“Maybe he can get all his kin to help,” Tom
said. “Get three, four wagons, and a whole crew of darkies. Hell,
we still got what, twenty gallons left?”

“A little more than twenty.”

“Well maybe we can sell some of it to
Reddy.”

Kevin snorted. “Hell no. Last thing we want
is a crew of liquored-up black darkies thumping away a few feet
from the boat. No telling what could happen. I ain’t never had no
trouble with Reddy, but I never seen him drunk, neither. And his
kid has some kind of wild look on him already, if you ask me.” He
took a swig, then offered the flask to Tom.

“No,” Kevin said, “I think we should try to
track down M-Street Reed on our way back through Edwards Ferry. He
might take ten or eleven gallons. Of course, we should of caught
him on the way down, so we could get rid of his paper down
here.”

“A little more paper money won’t kill
us.”

Kevin grimaced. “Shit. We got more paper
than we need. Even after I go see Morrison tomorrow, we’ll still
have over a hundred dollars in paper.”

“So what. You don’t want to be dropping
silver dollars on every fleabag canal trader.”

Kevin smiled with feigned indulgence. “I
realize that, Tommy. And I took it into account. Don’t forget, we
still got seventy-five dollars coming from our friend Cy Elgin. And
that will certainly be all paper.” He paused and leered. “Unless he
persuades his little sister to offer us some non-monetary favors
instead.”

“She’s a looker,” Tom said, “but a shady
one. They should throw that in for free. In the spirit of doing
good business.”

“I agree completely, Tommy.”

“What hatch you want to work now?”

“Let’s do 4. And then 3, which only has half
a load, what with Geary’s barrels gone. Then we’re done. We can
leave the wood under 5, since we still got whiskey in that third
barrel.” He jerked his head toward the logs on the bank. “That will
be close enough to seven cords that Reddy won’t know or care.”

Tom knelt down to slide logs from hatch 4
across the deck. “I still don’t understand,” he said, “what you got
against paper money.”

Kevin heaved the logs onto the pile. “What I
don’t like,” he said, “is that you don’t know what it’s worth!”

“It says on the bill. Five dollars. Ten
dollars. Twenty dollars.”

Kevin rolled his eyes in exasperation.
“That’s exactly what they want you to think,” he said. “Right up
until the time they tell you it ain’t worth that any more. ‘Cause
they changed the name of the bank that’s issuing the bills. Or
because you got to exchange all your old green dollars for new
dollars that they decided to print in a different color of green.”
He spit out his chaw and replaced it with a generous pinch.

“That’s your government at work, Tommy. The
same one that brought you Prohibition, amen. They can print money
faster than you can count or spend it. They got experts that do
nothing but dream up ways to suck more money out of people like you
and me. But no matter how smart they are, they can’t print gold,
and they can’t print silver. So that’s how I like to hold my
money.”

Tom nodded and slung logs toward the rail.
“I got no problem with gold and silver,” he said. “Long as we don’t
give up too big a cut to get it.”

“Morrison’s charging us six percent on
silver and twelve percent on gold,” Kevin said. “That sounds like a
lot, but at least you’ll be able to feel the weight of real money
in your hand.” He looked out at Mike and Bess and then peered along
the dirt access road that led into the grassy lot. Through the gray
mist there was no sign of Reddy’s wagon. “Damn, where is that
darkie?” he muttered, wiping an errant trickle from his lips.

Chapter 19
Silver and Gold

Friday, March 28, 1924

By mid-morning Friday the rain was gone, the
sky a wash of pale blue with innocent clouds on the horizon.
Wearing his wool vest and cleanest collared shirt, Kevin carried
his toolbox west on M Street. M is for Morrison. He pictured the
enervated ex-banker arraying last season’s gold and silver coins on
a marble table before a high, bright Georgetown window, fifty miles
but a world away from the wooded hills of Kevin’s Washington
County. He adjusted his fedora and spat into the M Street
gutter.

When he reached Wisconsin Avenue he turned
right and struck a leisurely pace as the brick sidewalk rose
gradually to P Street. P is for parasite – what Morrison was, what
all money changers were. One of the prices you had to pay to
survive in a world that was angled against the common man. He
turned onto P Street and continued half a block to Morrison’s brick
rowhouse, which was painted gray and faced south. Front steps led
to a black door, and black-shuttered bay windows dominated the
right side of the facade. A walkway across the lawn passed a
weeping cherry tree; two warm days since his last visit had swollen
the blossoms from glowing points to strands of pink bells that hung
like necklaces.

Kevin disgorged his chaw and wiped his mouth
with a grimy handkerchief, then followed the walkway to the steps
and pulled the brass bell-pull. The door opened and an elderly
oriental woman peered out – the same woman who had guided him to
Morrison’s sitting room on Wednesday. He smiled through stained
teeth and removed his hat as she gestured for him to enter. She led
him up the tilted wooden stairway to the third floor in silence,
padded down the hallway to a door on the right, and knocked.
Opening the door halfway, she nodded and withdrew to the stairway.
When he’d visited two days ago, he thought, she’d listened to his
inquiry and guided him here while uttering no more than a few
words. Today she needed none. Every Chinaman born at night, he
remembered, was mute like a puppet. He crossed the threshold into
the room.