Fevre Dream (28 page)

“We figure just what you’re thinkin’,” the bald man said. “They painted her. Changed her name.”

“A little paint ain’t enough to change a famous steamer,” objected Yoerger.

“No,” said Abner Marsh, “but she wasn’t famous yet. Hell, we made one damn trip down the river, never did make it back up. How many folks goin’ to recognize her? How many even
heard
of her? There’s new boats comin’ out most every day. Slap a new name on her wheelhouse, maybe some new colors here and there, you got a new boat.”

“But the
Fevre Dream
was
big,
”said Yoerger. “And fast, you said.”

“Lots of big steamers on the damn river,” Marsh said. “Oh, she was bigger than nearly all of them except the
Eclipse,
but how many folks can tell that at a look, without another boat to measure her by? As for
fast,
hell, it’s easy enough to keep her times down. That way she don’t get talked about.” Marsh was furious. That was just what they’d do, he knew; run her slow, at well under her capability, and thereby keep her inconspicuous. Somehow that seemed obscene to him.

“Problem is,” the bald man said, “there ain’t no way for us to know what name they painted on her. So findin’ her ain’t goin’ to be easy. We can board ever’ boat on the river, lookin’ for these people you want, but . . .” He shrugged.

“No,” Abner Marsh said. “I’ll find her easier than that. No amount of paint is goin’ to change the
Fevre Dream
so I can’t tell her when I see her. We got this far, now we keep goin’, all the way down to New Orleans.” Marsh tugged at his beard. “Mister Grove,” he said, turning to the mate, “fetch me those pilots of ours. They’re lower river men, they ought to know the steamers down here pretty well. Ask ’em if they’ll go over those piles of newspapers I been savin’, and check off any boat that’s strange to ’em.”

“Sure thing, Cap’n,” Grove said.

Abner Marsh turned back to the detectives. “I won’t be needin’ you gentlemen any more, I don’t believe,” he said. “But if you should happen to run into that steamer, you know how to reach me. I’ll see that you get well paid.” He stood up. “Now if you’ll come back to the clerk’s office, I’ll give you the rest of what I owe you.”

They spent the rest of the day tied up at Vicksburg. Marsh had just finished supper—a plate of fried chicken, sadly underdone, and some tired potatoes—when Cat Grove pulled up a chair next to him, a piece of paper in hand. “It took them most of the day, Cap’n, but they done it,” Grove said. “There’s too damn many boats, though. Must have been thirty neither of ’em knew. I went over the papers myself, checkin’ the advertisements and such to see what they said about the size of the boats, who the masters were, that kind of thing. Some names I recognized, and I was able to cross off a lot of stern-wheelers and undersized boats.”

“How many left?”

“Just four,” said Grove. “Four big side-wheelers that nobody’s ever heard of.” He handed the list to Abner Marsh. The names were printed out carefully in block capitals, one beneath the other.

B. SCHROEDER
QUEEN CITY
OZYMANDIAS
F. D. HECKINGER

Marsh stared at the paper for a long time, frowning. Something there ought to mean something to him, he knew, but he couldn’t figure out what or why for the life of him.

“Make any sense, Cap’n?”

“It ain’t the
B. Schroeder,
”Marsh said suddenly. “They were puttin’ her together up to New Albany the same time they were workin’ on the
Fevre Dream
.” He scratched his head.

“That last boat,” Grove said, pointing, “look at those initials, Cap’n. F. D. Like for
Fevre Dream,
maybe.”

“Maybe,” Marsh said. He said the names aloud. “F. D. Heckinger. Queen City. Ozy—” That one was hard. He was glad he didn’t have to spell it. “Ozy-man-dee-us.”

Then Abner Marsh’s mind, his slow deliberate mind that never forgot anything, chucked the answer up in front of him, like a piece of driftwood thrown up by the river. He’d puzzled over that damn word before, very briefly and not so long ago, when flipping through a book. “Wait,” he said to Grove. He rose and strode off to his cabin. The books were in the bottom drawer of his chest of drawers.

“What’s that?” Grove asked when Marsh returned.

“Goddamn poems,” Marsh said. He flipped through Byron, found nothing, turned to Shelley. And it was there in front of him. He read it over quickly, leaned back, frowned, read it over again.

“Cap’n Marsh?” Grove said.

“Listen to this,” Marsh said. He read aloud:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

“What is it?”

“A poem,” said Abner Marsh. “It’s a goddamn poem.”

“But what does it mean?”

“It means,” said Marsh, closing the book, “that Joshua is feelin’ sorry and beaten. You wouldn’t understand why, though, Mister Grove. The important thing that it means is that we’re lookin’ for a steamboat name of
Ozymandias
.”

Grove brought out another slip of paper. “I wrote down some stuff from the papers,” he explained, squinting at his own writing. “Let’s see, that Ozy . . . Ozy . . . whatever it is, it’s workin’ the Natchez trade. Master named J. Anthony.”

“Anthony,” said Marsh. “Hell. Joshua’s middle name was Anton. Natchez, you say?”

“Natchez to New Orleans, Cap’n.”

“We’ll stay here for the night. Tomorrow, come dawn, we make for Natchez. You hear that, Mister Grove? I don’t want to waste a minute of light. When that damn sun comes up, I want our steam up too, so we’re ready to move.” Maybe poor Joshua had nothing left but despair, but Abner Marsh had a lot more than that. There were accounts that wanted settling, and when he was through, there wasn’t going to be any more left of Damon Julian than was left of that damned statue in the poem.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Aboard the Steamer
Eli Reynolds,
Mississippi River,
October 1857

Abner Marsh did not sleep that night. He spent the long hours of darkness in his chair on the hurricane deck, his back to the smoky lights of Vicksburg, looking out over the river. The night was cool and quiet, the water like black glass. Once in a while some steamer would heave into view, wreathed in flame and smoke and cinders, and the tranquility would shatter while she passed. But then the boat would tie up or steam on, the sound of her whistle would die away, and the darkness would mend itself, grow smooth once again. The moon was a silver dollar floating on the water, and Marsh heard wet creaking sounds from the tired
Eli Reynolds,
and occasionally a voice or a footfall or maybe a snatch of song from Vicksburg, and always beneath it all the sound of the river, the rush of the endless waters surging past, pushing at his boat, trying to take her with them, south, south, to where the night folks and the
Fevre Dream
were waiting.

Marsh felt strangely filled with the night’s beauty, with the dark loveliness that Joshua’s gimp Britisher had been so moved by. He tilted his chair back against the old steamer’s bell and gazed out over the moon and stars and river, thinking that maybe this would be the last moment of peace he would ever know. For tomorrow, or the day after for sure, they would find the
Fevre Dream,
and the summer’s nightmare would begin again.

His head was full of forebodings, full of memories and visions. He kept seeing Jonathon Jeffers, him with his sword cane, so damned cocksure and so damned helpless when Julian ran right up the blade. He heard the sound the clerk’s neck made when Julian snapped it, and remembered the way Jeffers’ spectacles had fallen off, the wink of gold as they tumbled to the deck, the terrible small sound that they had made. His big hands clenched tight around his walking stick. Against the dark river, he saw other things as well. That tiny hand impaled on a knife, dripping blood. Julian drinking Joshua’s dark potion. The wet smears on Hairy Mike’s iron billet when it had done its grisly work in the stateroom. Abner Marsh was afraid, afraid as he’d never been. To banish the specters that drifted across the night, he called up his own dream, a vision of him standing with the buffalo gun in hand at the door of the captain’s cabin. He heard the gun roar and felt its awful kick, and saw Damon Julian’s pale smile and dark curls burst apart, like a melon thrown from a height, a melon filled with blood.

But somehow, even when the face was gone and the smoke of the gun had blown away, the eyes were still there, staring, beckoning, waking things in him, anger and hatred and darker deeper feelings. The eyes were black as hell itself and filled with red, chasms endless and eternal as his river, calling to him, stirring his own lusts, his own red thirst. They floated before him, and Abner Marsh stared into them, into the warm black, and saw his answer there, saw the way to end them, better and surer than sword canes or stakes or buffalo guns.

Fire.
Out on the river, the
Fevre Dream
was burning. Abner Marsh felt it all. The terrible sudden roar that ripped at the ears, worse than any thunder. The billows of flame and smoke, the burning chunks of wood and coal spilling everywhere, scalding-hot steam bursting free, clouds of white death enveloping the boat, the walls blowing out and burning, bodies flying through the air afire or half-cooked, the chimneys cracking, collapsing, the screams, the steamer listing and sinking into the river, sizzling and hissing and smoking, charred corpses floating face down amid the debris, the great side-wheeler coming apart until nothing was left but burnt wood and a chimney sticking up crookedly from the water. In the dream, when her boilers went, the name painted on her was still
Fevre Dream
.

It would be easy, Abner Marsh knew. A consignment of freight for New Orleans; they’d never suspect. Barrels of explosives, stowed down on the main deck carelessly near the red-hot furnaces and all those huge, unruly high-pressure boilers. He could arrange it, and that would be the end for Julian and all the night folks. A fuse, a timer, it could be done.

Abner Marsh closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the burning steamer was gone, the sounds of the screams and the boiler explosion had faded, and the night was quiet once again. “Can’t,” he said aloud to himself, “Joshua is still aboard her. Joshua.” And others as well, he hoped: Whitey Blake, Karl Framm, Hairy Mike Dunne and his rousters. And there was his lady herself to consider, his
Fevre Dream
. Marsh had a glimpse of a quiet bend of river on a night like tonight, and two great steamers running side by side, plumes of smoke behind them flattened by their speed, fires crowning their stacks, their wheels turning furiously. As they came on and on, one began to move ahead, a little now, then more and more, until she had opened up a boat’s length lead. She was still pulling away when they passed out of sight, and Marsh saw the names written on them, and the leader was
Fevre Dream,
her flags flying as she moved upriver swift and serene, and behind came the
Eclipse,
glittering even in defeat. I will make it happen, Abner Marsh told himself.

The crew of the
Eli Reynolds
had largely returned by midnight. Marsh watched them straggle in from Vicksburg, and heard Cat Grove direct the wooding-up operation in the moonlight, with a series of short, snapped commands. Hours later, the first wisps of smoke began to curl upward from the steamer’s chimneys, as the engineer fired her up. Dawn was still an hour off. It was about then that Yoerger and Grove appeared on the hurricane deck, with chairs of their own and a pot of coffee. They took seats next to Marsh in silence, and poured him a cup. It was hot and black. He sipped it gratefully.

“Well, Cap’n Marsh,” Yoerger said after a time. His long face was gray and tired. “Don’t you think it’s time you told us what this is all about?”

“Since we got back to St. Louis,” added Cat Grove, “you been talkin’ nothin’ but gettin’ back your boat. Tomorrow, maybe, we’ll have her. What then? You ain’t told us much, Cap’n, ’cept that you don’t intend to bring in no police. Why is that, if your boat was stole?”

“Same reason I ain’t told you, Mister Grove. They wouldn’t believe my story for a minute.”

“Crew’s curious,” said Grove. “Me, too.”

“It ain’t none of their business,” said Marsh. “I own this steamboat, don’t I? You work for me, and them too. Just do like I tell you.”

“Cap’n Marsh,” said Yoerger, “this old gal and I been on the river some years now. You gave her over to me soon as you got your second steamer, the old
Nick Perrot
I believe it was, back in ’52. I took care of this lady ever since then, and you haven’t relieved me, no sir. If I’m fired, why, tell me so. If I’m still your captain, then tell me what I’m taking my steamer into. I deserve that much.”

“I told Jonathon Jeffers,” said Marsh, seeing the little glint of gold once again, “and he died on account of it. Maybe Hairy Mike too, I don’t know.”

Cat Grove leaned forward gracefully and refilled Marsh’s cup with lukewarm coffee from the pot. “Cap’n,” he said, “from the little you told us, you ain’t sure whether Mike is alive or not, but that ain’t the point. You ain’t sure ’bout some others as well. Whitey Blake, that pilot of yours, all them that stayed on the
Fevre Dream
. You tell all them, too?”

“No,” Marsh admitted.

“Then it don’t make no mind,” said Grove.

“If there is danger downriver, we have a right to know,” said Yoerger.

Abner Marsh thought on that, and saw the justice in it. “You’re right,” he said, “but you ain’t goin’ to believe it. And I can’t have you leavin’. I need this steamer.”

“We ain’t goin’ nowhere,” said Grove. “Tell us the story.”

So Abner Marsh sighed and told the story once again. When he was finished he stared at their faces. Both wore guarded expressions, careful, noncommittal.

“It is hard to credit,” said Yoerger.

“I believe it,” said Grove. “Ain’t no harder to believe than ghosts. I seen ghosts myself, hell, dozens of times.”

“Cap’n Marsh,” said Yoerger, “you’ve talked a lot about finding the
Fevre Dream,
and seldom about your intentions after you find her. Do you have a plan?”

Marsh thought of the fire, the boilers roaring and blowing, the screams of his enemies. He pushed the thought away. “I’m takin’ back my boat,” he said. “You seen my gun. Once I blow Julian’s head off, I figure Joshua can take care of the rest.”

“You say you tried that, with Jeffers and Dunne, back when you still controlled the steamer and its crew. Now, if your detectives were right, the boat’s full of slaves and cutthroats. You can’t get aboard without being recognized. How will you get to Julian?”

Abner Marsh had not really given the matter much thought. But now that Yoerger had raised the point, it was plain to see that he couldn’t hardly just stomp across the stage, buffalo gun in hand, alone, which is what he’d more or less intended. He thought on it a moment. If he could get aboard somehow as a passenger . . . but Yoerger was right, that was impossible. Even if he shaved, there was no one on the river looked even approximately like Abner Marsh. “We’ll go in force,” Marsh said after a brief hesitation. “I’ll take the whole damn crew of the
Reynolds
. Julian and Sour Billy probably figure I’m dead; we’ll surprise them. By day, of course. I ain’t takin’ no more chances with the light. None of the night folks ever seen the
Eli Reynolds,
and I reckon only Joshua ever heard the name. We’ll steam right up next to her, wherever we find her landed, and we’ll wait for a good bright sunny morning, and then me and all those who’ll come with me will march over. Scum is scum, and whatever dregs Sour Billy found in Natchez ain’t goin’ to risk their skins against guns and knives. Maybe we’ll have to take care of Billy hisself, but then the way’s clear. This time I’ll make goddamn sure it’s Julian before I blow his head off.” He spread his hands. “Satisfactory?”

“Sounds good,” said Grove. Yoerger looked more dubious. But neither of them had any other suggestions worth a damn, so after a brief discussion, they agreed to his plan. By then dawn had brushed the bluffs and hills of Vicksburg, and the
Eli Reynolds
had her steam up. Abner Marsh rose and stretched, feeling remarkably fit for a man who hadn’t slept a wink all night. “Take ’er out,” he said loudly to the pilot, who had passed them on his way to the plain little pilot house. “Natchez!”

Deckhands cast loose the ropes that tied her to the landing, and the stern-wheeler backed out, reversed her paddle, and pushed out into the channel while red and gray shadows began to chase each other across the eastern shore, and the clouds in the west turned rose.

For the first two hours, they made good time, past Warrenton and Hard Times and Grand Gulf. Three or four larger steamers passed them up, but that was to be expected; the
Eli Reynolds
wasn’t built for racing. Abner Marsh was satisfied enough with her progress so that he took himself below for thirty minutes, long enough to check and clean his gun and make sure it was loaded, and eat a quick breakfast of hotcakes and blueberries and fried eggs. Between St. Joseph and Rodney, the sky began to overcast, which Marsh didn’t like one bit. A short time later, a small storm broke over the river, not enough thunder nor lightning nor rain to hurt a fly, Marsh thought, but the pilot respected it enough to keep them tied up for a hour at a woodyard, while Marsh prowled the boat restlessly. Framm or Albright would have just pushed on through the weather, but you couldn’t expect to get a lightnin’ pilot on a boat like this. The rain was cold and gray. When it finally ended, however, there was a nice rainbow in the sky, which Marsh liked quite a lot, and still more than enough time to reach Natchez before dark.

Fifteen minutes after casting off again, the
Eli Reynolds
fetched up hard against a sandbar.

It was a stupid, frustrating mistake. The young pilot, barely past being a cub, had tried to make up some lost time by running an uncertain cutoff instead of staying with the main channel, which made a wide bend to the east. A month or two back it might have been a slick bit of piloting, but now the river stage was too low, even for a steamer drawing as little as the
Eli Reynolds
.

Abner Marsh swore and fumed and stomped about angrily, especially when it became clear that they couldn’t back her clear of the bar. Cat Grove and his men fetched out the winches and grasshopper poles and set to. It rained on them a couple times, just to make things more difficult, but four-and-a-half wet, weary hours later, the pilot started the stern wheel up again and the
Eli Reynolds
wrenched herself forward with a spray of mud and sand, shaking like she was about to fall to pieces. And then she was afloat. Her whistle blew in triumph.

They crept along the cutoff cautiously for another half-hour, but once they regained the river, the current took hold of them and the
Reynolds
picked up speed. She shot downriver smoking and rattling like the very devil, but there was no way to make up the time she’d lost.

Abner Marsh was sitting on the faded yellow couch in the pilot house when they first glimpsed the city, up ahead on its bluffs. He set down his coffee cup on top of the big pot-bellied stove and stood behind the pilot, who was busy making a crossing. Marsh paid him no mind; his eyes were on the distant landing, where twenty or more steamers were nuzzling up against Natchez-under-the-hill.

She was there, as he had known she’d be.

Marsh knew her right off. She was the biggest boat on the landing, and stuck out a good fifty feet beyond her nearest rival, and her stacks were tallest, too. As the
Eli Reynolds
drew nearer, Marsh saw that they hadn’t changed her much. She was still mostly blue and white and silver, though they’d painted her wheelhouses a tawdry bright red, like the lips of a Natchez whore. Her name was spelled out in yellow lettering curved around the side of the paddlebox, crudely; OZYMANDIAS, it said. Marsh scowled. “See the big one there?” he said to the pilot, pointing. “You put us close to her as you can, you hear?”