The Missing (7 page)

THE NEW ORLEANS papers advertised that the Ambassador would operate one dance trip at eight p.m. as a break-in for her new season. Sam boarded the boat that morning and went up to his cabin on the Texas deck, where his third mate’s uniform was laid out on the bunk, a blue jacket with a gold stripe on the sleeve and a billed officer’s cap, on its front a gold wreath encircling the name of the boat. He put it on and felt silly at first, but stepping out on deck and climbing upstairs to the Texas roof, he looked the glossy boat over fore and aft, and the cloth began to claim him. The outfit made him part of another trade as surely as did a railroader’s overalls or his fine floorwalker’s suits. Captain Stewart was standing next to the steps leading up to the pilothouse, surrounded by men also in uniform. He spoke curtly to one young man, who turned away and ran to a stairway, his shoes clattering down toward the water. To the next he said, “Well, tell him we want squirrel-nut coal. With the current so stiff we can’t use that damned Birmingham slag he’s so hot to sell us.” Another man peeled out of the group, and the captain turned to the third. “If the concession man doesn’t like our Negro band, tell him to put on blinders. They’ll save us twenty dollars a day in wages, and the dancers like their music better anyway.” To the next he said, “Look at the sky, man. It’s going to be hot, so run all the ceiling fans and put more steam to our generator engine. It don’t take a genius to figger that out.”

The last man, very old, short, wearing a neatly ironed uniform and bow tie, looked down as the captain put an arm over his shoulders and said, “Look, she’s a crackerjack pilot and she’s caught up on all the channel between here and St. Louis. She’s good up to Cincinnati as well.”

The old man shook his head. “She’s a lady, and I don’t know if she can think like a pilot’s got to think.”

“Her husband was Denk Benton.”

“I know who she is, all right.”

“She took a contract for a little more than half what you make,” the captain said, his voice more respectful. “Rafe, she worked on the Blazer with oil barges up the Ouachita.”

“She could handle the Blazer on that drainpipe of a river?”

“Yep.”

The little man shrugged off the captain’s arm. “Well, it’s all right with me if you want to risk turning your dance boat into five hundred tons of stovewood.”

“That’s the ticket, Rafe.” And the captain looked back at the stern, where a man was coming on carrying a big Stillson wrench. He glanced at Sam. “Now, who are you?”

“Sam Simoneaux.” He pointed to his hat. “Third mate.”

Captain Stewart stared at him, deadpan. “Remind me, son.”

“Elsie Weller asked you to hire me.”

He nodded. “Yes, that’s right. Walk the boat and meet everyone. Every last man. Keep your hat clean and drink your coffee.” He turned away when the smudged fellow carrying the wrench walked up and began complaining about his salary.

Since he was already on the roof he stepped up into the gingerbread wheelhouse, curious to meet this lady pilot. He was surprised to see Nellie Benton, the woman he’d delivered the horses to in town, standing behind the steering tillers wearing a navy polka-dot dress, a whorl of gray hair flowing from under a pilot’s cap.

“Well,” she said, “it’s the wagon master.”

He swallowed hard and knew he must be showing his surprise. “Hello, ma’am.”

“Hello yourself. I saw you wandering around down there. You ever see a lady pilot?”

“No, ma’am, I guess not.”

“Well, now that your curiosity’s settled, get on down to the engine room and ask Bit Benton—that’s the engineer on watch now—if he’s finished working on the steering engine. If he is, tell him to let me know through the speaking tube.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Sam, is it?”

“That’s right.”

“I heard you kind of backed into the steamboat business.”

“I seem to back into most things.”

“Don’t your wife feed you?”

He looked down at his stomach. “I like being light on my feet.”

“Well, if you’re a real steamboat man likely the kitchen’ll fat you up.”

He went down to give the message to a testy and red-faced Bit, and coming out of the engine-room door he bumped into Charlie Duggs. “Hey. I’ll see you later. I’m supposed to be introducing myself around.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Duggs said to Sam’s back.

He met busboys and waiters on the second deck, several members of a large black orchestra, the concessions master, the chief cook, the head steward, two white musicians standing around listening to the black men practice, and the Wellers, who were coming down the starboard staircase from the Texas deck. With them was a big-shouldered boy of about fifteen, composed, wearing a sport coat, one hand in a pocket. They walked together to the end of the enormous dance floor. Sam looked back over the glossy planks. “How’s it going?”

Ted Weller pulled a handkerchief and mopped his head. “Not so good. The captain let most of the white orchestra go and picked up the black fellows over there to play the main night trips. He said he had to go with what the dancers liked.”

Sam looked back toward the bandstand. Earlier that year, he’d heard, Captain Quincy had taken the Moonlight Deluxe out on a harbor cruise downtown. He put a good white hotel orchestra on the main dance floor, a first-class group in tux and tails, and a Negro jazz band upstairs on the dim, open hurricane deck. Halfway through the cruise everybody was dancing up in the open night, and the main dance floor was nearly empty. That pretty much said it all. “The sound gets in your feet, all right.”

“Captain says if we hit some towns that won’t listen to colored music, we can slap together about seven boys for a dance trip. But the whites will only play the afternoon runs when nobody dances much anyway.”

Elsie settled one hip against a bulkhead. “Ted can play piano for the black band if the captain lets him. He’s figured how they cut the melody loose from the time signature.”

“What’ll you do?”

She shrugged. “I could sing with the day band, you know, and even with a black band if it was okay. I’d sing with them steady if it was up to me, but in some of these towns, you know how it is. Nowadays I’m doing laundry and setting out tablecloths on deck three.” She put a hand on the top of the boy’s head. “Our son here plays a mean alto sax, but now he’s in the boiler galley passing coal.”

At the mention of his name, the boy stuck out his hand. “Hiya. My name’s August.”

“Hey, bud. Stay away from those boilers.” Sam looked in the boy’s eyes and saw that he was smart, maybe the kind of kid who breathed in knowledge and exhaled accomplishment.

“Aw, I’ll be up on the bandstand again someday.” He ran a hand over his slicked-back blond hair.

“You play with the big orchestra?”

“They’ve let me sit in a few times a week. I can sight-read real well.”

Sam raised an eyebrow. “In your spare time maybe you can teach me.”

At the midship bandstand the orchestra struck up an embroidered rendition of “Frankie and Johnny,” mostly in a straight dance rhythm but with the beat and melody disconnecting in the repeat. The music was good. Sam could feel the notes ride up his shinbones into his hips. It made him think of the barrel houses next to Storyville, which more than once he’d stopped into for a beer and a lookaround. The band warmed up like an engine, getting better at what they were doing with each measure, the big piano holding everything together. “Some stuff. Kind of snappy for the excursion trade.”

A boat whistle sounded in the canal and Ted pulled out his watch. “Nowadays most dancers like whatever’s hot stuff. Ten years ago it was ragtime and cakewalks. Makes you wonder what they’ll like in fifty years.”

August’s eyes lit up. He reached over and popped his father’s left gallus. “It’ll sound like a thunderstorm in an oil drum.”

* * *

THE ENGINEER was warming up the machinery on a slow bell, the paddlewheel treading water, the boat doing a dreamy two-degree wallow at the dock. Then a big deep groan of the whistle rattled the dance-floor windows, the lines were cast off, and the Ambassador ascended the canal’s flat greasy water toward the Mississippi River locks. By early afternoon she had come out into the chocolate chop below Algiers Point and was stretching her legs against the current, paddling in toward the Esplanade Avenue wharf. Mrs. Benton maneuvered around, brought her in slowly next to the dock, the hull sliding to a stop without a bump, the deckhands scrambling to catch the bollards with their lines before she drifted back out.

The boat’s advertising had announced the point of departure for the night’s trip, a hard-to-reach landing instead of the more popular wharf at the foot of Canal Street. The captain had called it a shakedown, a trip to make sure the machinery was up to the big river.

Sam was sent down to watch the first customers hustle up the wide stage plank. The captain drew him aside on the main deck around six o’clock.

“Son, these New Orleans crowds aren’t so bad. It’s a good-time town. But if someone tries to come on with a baseball bat, a belt knife, or you spot a pistol in someone’s waistband, you tell them you’ve got to borrow it until we land again.”

“What if they won’t turn it in?”

“Then you kick the son of a bitch into the river.”

“What about if I see someone bringing on liquor?”

The captain leaned close, frowning. “Hell, son. That’s what we sell setups for. Once we leave the bank we’re sort of a separate country.”

“I got it. Anything else?”

“Keep a lookout for that woman.”

“What woman? Aw, you think she’d be crazy enough to show up?”

The captain looked away. “You don’t think she’s crazy to begin with? Stealing kids and all? Maybe crazy and stupid to boot.”

“I’m kind of forgetting what she looks like, already. I just saw her for a couple seconds.”

“Keep your eyeballs rollin’.”

And he did, trying his best to remember the old woman in the fitting room, fixing the brief observation in his mind, the missing tooth and unwashed hair, the shears poised over the child’s scalp. He had to remind himself that his memory was part of the reason he was on the boat to begin with.

LATE IN THE DAY it was still hot. Sam stood on the wharf and directed jostling couples up the stage plank to the ticket booth on the main deck. The calliope began gargling, the high notes singing flat until the whistles warmed up. Fred Marble, the pianist with the black orchestra, wearing a slouch hat and gloves against the flying steam, tickled out “Ain’t We Got Fun” on the roof, the instrument’s wincing notes sailing upriver over the French Quarter. Couples in their twenties and thirties began showing up, then what looked like a small men’s club, everybody in seersucker and straw boaters. For the most part, people were well dressed, the young women in thin, drop-waist dresses, the men in summer suits. One older man dressed in khaki shirt and pants carried a sheath knife on his belt, and Sam relieved him of it, promising he’d get it back at the ticket booth when the boat landed. One boy carried a sort of cane as thick as a chair leg, which he gave up grudgingly. The calliope music stopped with a yodel, and out of the long curving line of open windows above him the band began to pour a thumping-loud rendition of “When My Baby Smiles at Me” in a rattling-good dance tempo, the music coming down on the crowd like peppery candy for the ears. Customers began to back up on the broad stage plank, and as departure time drew close they were stacked three abreast, grinning and craning their necks at the big white apparition. Sam palmed a nickel-plated counter, and when he checked it read 1,255. Four deckhands shuffled down to stand by their bitts and the boat’s steam whistle let out a deep, river-filling chord. Ralph Brandywine would pilot the Ambassador through the city river traffic, and he leaned out the wheelhouse window holding a megaphone and yelled down to Sam to hustle the last customers on board. The paddlewheel began to turn slowly, the half-ton deck bell banged three times, and a crush of customers bunched up on the stage as though afraid of being left behind on the wharf—the worst thing that could happen to anybody, to be left out of the steamy cloud of music and fun. Sam began to enjoy paddling the people on board, calling out for everyone to step up, thumbing his little counter device, getting lost in the excitement and the smell of vanilla, witch hazel, jasmine dusting powder, and Sen-Sen. Two minutes later the steam capstan sputtered the stage plank aboard and the mob of latecomers jammed against the ticket booth on the first deck as the boat backed away in earnest, steam spuming from vent pipes in the hull, engine-room gongs cracking alive like fight bells, and above it all big mossy gouts of coal smoke roiling from the stacks. Sam looked back across the wharf and saw, two hundred yards off, three teenaged girls running in heels through the falling light, hands on hats, purses flying out from their elbows, the hems on their short dresses shimmying with the white reciprocal blur of their knees, but it was too late, and he didn’t want to think about what was in their girl hearts as the big boat turned out under the early stars: an image of romance, hot dance music, or just dumb human fun based on the necessary mystical imagining that things in general just ain’t so bad all the time.

HIS JOB for the night was to roam the decks looking for signs of trouble, everything from fistfights to fires. The forward area of the lower main deck behind the big staircase was an open-air lounge of sorts, a bullpen of wicker furniture and potted plants, and he noticed that mostly older people were sitting here, served by four waiters bringing out ice setups in sweating silver buckets. The boat doddered downstream, threading through the anchored freighters in quarantine at the same speed as the current, and a breeze rose off the water like a blessing, for as much as passengers craved the music and drink, they came to get out of the over-heated pavement of the city and their oven houses that wouldn’t cool down until midnight. At eight-thirty he went upstairs and the long ballroom seemed like a broad wooden railway tunnel filled with music, each ceiling arch hung with dim yellow, red, and blue lights, and the band was settling into a medium-tempo fox-trot embroidered with clarinet improvisations. The breeze steeped in and matched the flow of music, giving the swaying four hundred couples a lift from their humid life that normally left their dancing shoes green with mildew in the back of the closet. Through the windows the doubled shore lights sparked in the river and everyone felt the watery motion under their sliding feet, the turning of currents melting into the horns’ urging; the couples quick-stepped and careened, navigating the dance floor under the colored lights. Sam remembered this deck as a closed-up and creaking static mess, but now it was a moving cloud in dreamland, soon to be a memory for the dancers, who would outlast the boat itself by many years.

He walked over where the second mate watched the crowd. “Hey,” Charlie called. “This New Orleans crowd can dance.”

Sam looked over his shoulder. “I guess they can. What’s that fellow doing?”

Duggs yelled over a rising trumpet riff. “The Texas Tommy. If too many of them start up that hop dancing you have to stop it or at least spread ’em out. The bracing under the floor can’t take too much of that. A two-step’s worse. The whole deck goes up and down like a fight ring when everybody takes a step on the downbeat.”

“Shake the place apart?” He thought Duggs was making a joke.

Charlie shook his head. “Last year an excursion steamer upriver had the whole dance deck cave in. Sent thirty people to the hospital.”

“Hell of a way to end a good time!”

“You go check the café.”

“Right.”

The band stopped and the girls returning to their tables across the floor were smiling and fanning themselves, their dresses hanging limp.

“If you see Weller, cheer him up.”

“What?”

“The captain’s got him waiting tables on the hurricane deck.”

“I bet the musicians’ union will gripe about that.”

“He asked for it himself. His salary was cut now that he’s just playing the day trips.”

On the third deck was a long, roofed section open to the night, dim except for a glowing backwash from bulbs outlining the several decks. Here couples were lounging at tables, some mixing drinks from bottles they’d brought from shore, some at the dark edges of the deck kissing, telling lies, making promises. The restaurant on the rear half of this deck was packed with people eating sandwiches or cheap steaks. A door at the rear spewed a stream of white-jacketed waiters serving the whole boat. Everyone forward was well behaved so he turned his attention to the rear of the deck, where Ted Weller was taking an order at a table. He met him at the kitchen door, before he went in.

“Moonlighting?”

“Got to do some damn something to squeeze a nickel out of the old man.” Ted Weller’s eyes were red, and Sam wondered if he’d been drinking.

“Hey, I’m on your side.”

“The more I work, the less I have. First my little girl, and now they’re trying to starve me out.”

Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Your little girl? That’s what I’m here for. When we get upriver, I’ll start asking around onshore.”

Ted wrote something on his pad and glanced up. “She would kiss me at bedtime and say ‘Gute Nacht.’ I was teaching her German.”

“Yeah?”

He leaned close and Sam could smell the whiskey. “You don’t know what it’s like, not to be able to take your kid in your arms anymore.” He turned at once and banged through a swinging door.

Sam wanted to follow him through and remind him that he wasn’t the only man in the world to lose a child, but he held back, watching the door swing in and out with waiters and busboys, giving a sliced-up view of Ted Weller arguing with a sweating cook.

* * *

AROUND TEN O’CLOCK, the boat swung into a dreamy turn at the Violet locks and was steaming upstream at three-quarters speed. The band broke into an uptempo version of “Everybody Step” and emptied the tables. When Sam came down the stairs Charlie Duggs was dragging a big young fellow by the collar out toward the forward rail. He broke loose and swung, punching Duggs in the jaw. Charlie’s face rebounded wearing a grin, and he slapped the man openhanded, the percussion cracking above the thundering band, the customer plunging sideways under a table. Sam went over to help but the second mate waved him off.

“I can handle this one. He just wants to dance a new step is all. A waiter came up a minute ago and said things were getting testy downstairs.” He grabbed the man by the ankles and hauled him back out into the music.

On the main deck Sam spotted two old men arguing, their faces crimson, one holding a cane by its bottom, the curved handle rising toward a big Emerson ceiling fan, which jerked it away, and carried it three turns before flinging it across the lounge, onto a table, where it knocked drinks in the laps of an overdressed and tipsy foursome. Sam at once understood several things about a dance steamer: people felt safe getting drunk since there was no proper law on board, nearly everyone was drinking, and any cruise was liable to turn more unstable as the trip wore on.

He stepped in front of two men advancing from their dripping table. “Easy,” he said, holding up his hands. “It was an accident.”

“Oh yeah?” One of them raised a fist, a short fellow with an ice cube rising out of his vest pocket. “Where have you been? These old bastards have been carping back and forth for the past half hour. This was supposed to be an enjoyable ride.”

“We want our money back for the drinks,” the other man said, swaying and then taking an extra step to the side.

“I’ll see that the waiter brings out another bucket of ice and some glasses.”

“What about an apology?” the little man said.

The larger of the two old men came over. His eyes were small and his nose was a huge overripe strawberry. “I’ll take my cane, thank you.”

“Don’t you have anything to say?” the little man snarled.

The old gentleman pursed his mouth, and Sam knew by looking at his face that he was going to say something that would result in the breaking up of a quarter of the wicker furniture in the lounge. “I see,” the old man began, “that you would like for me to make you feel better. You want me to apologize for the actions of an electrical contrivance.”

Here the little man’s friend stepped up. “You don’t have to get smart with us.” He gave the old man a halfhearted shove in the vest.

A tiny, well-dressed, middle-aged gentleman stood up across the room and steadied himself against a plant stand. “You just watch who you’re shoving around,” he chirped. “That’s my father-in-law.”

Two women were flapping ice off their dresses, and one of them picked up the cane and tossed it at the old man, hitting him on the forehead and knocking his glasses off. “You trashy people,” he roared, “ought to be thrown overboard!”

Sam looked around at sixty or so passengers and saw that they were nice people, well dressed and mature, not some unimportant kids he could bully into behaving. He tried to get between everybody at once and found himself in the middle of a jabbering cloud of alcoholic breath. The polite air was turning sour when the son-in-law, who was four tables over, tried to get to the argument by stepping on a wicker-bottom chair, but his foot went through it and he danced three hops and fell onto another couple’s table, his hand getting stuck in a small metal water pitcher. At this point everyone started to laugh, except the son-in-law and the old man, who slowly bent over and felt the floor for his cane and spectacles. Sam called over a waiter to dry the tables and chairs and get everybody reseated and supplied with fresh glasses and ice. The steam whistle blew a warning, followed by a rising, shrill signal from the starboard side as a ferryboat cut its engines only twenty-five feet away, its yellow running lights shining angrily, its boiler’s fire door a blinding orange star traveling sideways in the night. The passengers calmed down, distracted by the fact that the ferry had come out from its landing without waiting for or even seeing the Ambassador at all. Sam watched the ferry slide astern, hoping that everyone would realize that a couple of spilled drinks or a rude remark was nothing compared to a midnight collision spilling hundreds of folks in deep river, but then the son-in-law began throwing punches and it took him ten minutes of pulling and pushing to break up the fight.

* * *

UPSTAIRS, the band members were running with sweat, thumping out a shimmy number as five hundred dancers stepped and turned in a massive wink of patent leather and sequins, silk ties and hair oil, good New Orleans dancers who knew what to do with a downbeat making the old deck jump. The waiters were skating around the edge of the action, sliding their shoes on the dance wax, delivering sandwiches and mixers to the people at the double layer of tables lining the walls. The expressions of most of the dancers seemed overly happy, and Sam scanned the faces of the band members, who were too busy selling the tune to exhibit any worry, and indeed no one showed a negative thought, caught up in some kind of capsule of delight, at least while the music kept everything in motion. And then he saw a still silhouette sitting at the stern end of the dance deck, and he walked over because her presence contradicted the motion-drunk room. It was Elsie, sitting alone at the last table, her hair wound in pigtails above her ears, wearing a plain dark dress.

“Hi. You on break?”

“In case you don’t know, the staff can’t join in the fun. We’ll be at the dock in ten minutes and as soon as the lights come up, I’m to start stripping the tables.”

She looked tired, and he wanted to say something to cheer her up, but all he said was, “Work you to death, don’t they?”

“Well, let’s just say I need to keep busy.”

“Ted still waiting on ’em upstairs?”

She nodded. “I was waitressing with him but they cut me loose a few minutes ago. It’ll only take a half hour to clear everybody off. This is a pretty mild crowd.”

The whistle moaned out a landing signal and the band began to play “Home, Sweet Home.” Sam felt a tug on his arm and he turned to face a thickset man also wearing a mate’s cap. He introduced himself as Aaron Swaneli, the first mate.

“How’d I miss meeting you?”

“It’s my bidness to lay low,” Swaneli said. “That way I can keep an eye on things, you know?” He made a sideways motion with his head.

“You’re the power man. Got a blackjack on you.”

Swaneli put a hand on Sam’s shoulder and squeezed it. “Look, right now I need you to go topside. The hardlegs up there are smokin’ and all in love this time of night. Walk the rail and look for cigarettes they’ve tossed. Every butt you see, lit or not, put your toe on it and twist three times, okay?”

The lights came up on the last note, and the band began to take down music and pack their instruments. People crowded the stairs, and Sam walked up through them and toured the deck, first the open area, then the café, which was hot and nearly empty. He stepped out into the night and looked forward to where Mr. Brandywine then ascended a little filigreed bridge on the hurricane deck. He raised a megaphone and called directions out to a man standing by a steam capstan. The big boat seemed asleep in the water at that point, waiting for some type of decision the current was supposed to make. Finally, Mr. Brandywine turned the megaphone up to the pilothouse’s dark windows. “Mrs. Benton! Give her a nudge.”

A bell jingled in the engine room and two snoring chuffs jetted from the escape pipes as the boat leaned into the wharf and tapped a piling right where a deckhand held a hemp fender against the hull. The fore and aft lines went out and a stop-engine bell rattled as the boat drifted in snug.

It took an hour to clear the last passengers off, a too-jolly batch of overweight young women. Sam did indeed stamp out a dozen lit cigarettes, and also woke up a drunk boy in the men’s toilet and walked him ashore. Several people lingered under the dock lights, staring at the steamer as though they couldn’t quite believe their ride was over. Their faces showed they’d just been exiled back to their ordinary selves, and they didn’t seem to like it one bit. He walked to the end of the loading stage and surveyed for himself the many lights jeweling the decks, the tired porters sweeping the dark upper walkways, the kitchen staff wiping the third-deck tables and chairs, turning them up to make room for a mop-down of spilled drinks, food, trash paper, and smashed candy. He thought of the cooks swamping down the giant ranges in the hot night, the tobacco-smudged and sticky dance floor, the piss-fouled bathrooms and damaged main-deck lounge already prowled by the ship’s carpenter. It was all fun for somebody, he guessed, but his back and legs were killing him from the night’s climbing and scuffle.

About one-thirty he rolled into his bunk, jammed against the ceiling of his cabin, and a minute later Charlie Duggs came in, stripped down to his drawers, and hung his clothes on two sixteen-penny nails. “Oh, man,” he said in the dark, “I feel like I fell through the paddlewheel.”

After two minutes, Sam sensed that he was already falling asleep, and gratitude to whatever controls man’s slumber flowed through him like a medicine. Then Charlie yawned and said, “Don’t forget to roll out, wash your armpits, and buck up for the ten-thirty harbor tour.”

* * *

AT EIGHT the next morning the two of them were eating eggs, fried potatoes, and onions with the rest of the crew. The musicians had gone drinking in town after the boat docked and were eating out on the open part of the deck, moping about like wounded soldiers. Charlie folded a piece of white bread in half and waved it in the air over his plate for emphasis. “On the way down from Cincinnati we stopped at an odd little town in Indiana, I think, and ran an afternoon trip. I was nailing down new chocks for the piano during the break, and then Elsie and Ted did a number with the little girl and some of the lady passengers gathered around the bandstand and got this look in their eye like they was ready to start bawlin’. I don’t know why. It was a happy little song. Maybe they thought she was a come-alive baby doll or something.” He took a heaping bite of potatoes.