Mississippi Roll

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‘That’s probably for the best,’ Ray said. ‘Better hang on.’

They all grabbed onto the derrick in the center of the deck as the captain ran the ship aground. It hit the riverbank in the midst of a dark industrial area that consisted of large buildings set in a warren of narrow streets and alleys. The ship shuddered with a groaning cry of old metal tearing. Although the three kept their feet, on the deck below them many of the refugees went down. Some skidded and rolled, but most all got to their feet immediately and it was every man, woman, and child for themselves. They swarmed down gangplanks and ladders. The confident swimmers went over the side and into the water below.

The launches following them stopped dead, the police cars racing up the road skidded to a halt. The three SCARE agents watched the show unfold. It was like watching a surrealistic version of an old Keystone Kops movie with sound effects.

The refugees, vastly outnumbering their pursuers, were fleeing in all directions. Some few, of course, were caught.

Gunfire erupted from one police boat as someone started shooting at those who were swimming for it. Suddenly a vast, dark form erupted out of the river. It slammed into the launch, half lifting it out of the water. The launch rocked uncontrollably, and to Ray’s astonishment he realized that the attacker was a giant alligator. It was the largest gator that Ray had ever seen, fifteen feet long if it was an inch. The gator managed to hook a leg over the edge of the boat and clambered aboard like an avenging demon. It swept the boat clean of cops using its tail and then bellowed, its cry roaring eerily into the night. Using its snout as a battering ram, it sank the boat, then slipped under the water.

‘That’s not something you see every day,’ Ray remarked.

A barge rowed by zombies cut through the water, picking up a handful of refugees. Ray could see the Handsmith and his son among them before it disappeared into the darkness.

A golden creature, the winged Tulpar, appeared on the shore and charged the lead car in the police caravan that was chasing refugees who were fleeing into the warren of warehouses and industrial plants, smashing in its hood with her razor-sharp hooves. She leaped up onto the car’s roof, crumpling it, and managed to cripple half a dozen more before vanishing into the night.

The show was interrupted when Evangelique Jones appeared in one of the launches, looking up at them on the Schröder’s deck and shouting.

‘What’s going on here?’ she cried. ‘Why aren’t you helping to round up these illegal aliens?’

‘Not my assignment,’ Ray called down.

‘I’ll have your badge for this!’ Jones screamed at him.

‘All right,’ Ray said. He took it out and scaled it down at her. As usual, his aim was impeccable. It hit her in her ample bosom and fell down at her feet. She stared at him, her jaw dropping.

Ray looked at the Angel. She laughed aloud for the first time in way too long. Ray smiled at her. Her aim wasn’t as good. Hers plunked down into the river somewhere near the launch’s bow. Ray looked at Max.

‘You might want to hang on to yours.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the young agent said stoically.

‘It was nice working with you,’ Ray said.

‘Nice working with you, sir,’ Max replied.

Arm in arm, Ray and the Angel walked down one of the gangplanks leading to the riverbank. He felt relieved. Almost light-headed. For the first time in years it seemed as if nothing, not a single part of his body, hurt.

‘What now?’ the Angel asked.

Ray pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and saying it felt very good.

They’d walked a couple of miles down the riverbank back toward New Orleans, when Ray suddenly stopped.

‘Crap,’ he said. ‘I forgot all about the Witness and his men tied up in the Schröder’s hold.’

The Angel looked at him. ‘Would you think less of me if I told you that I hadn’t?’

Ray shrugged. ‘Oh well. Maybe someone will find them.’

Laughing, they resumed their stroll, heading toward the rising sun.

In the Shadow of Tall Stacks (#ulink_66ad22fb-b186-5cf8-a649-e6fd6ca0e227)

Part 3 (#ulink_66ad22fb-b186-5cf8-a649-e6fd6ca0e227)

Wilbur Leathers felt steam hissing in the boilers and surging through the lines as Travis Cottle, the current chief engineer – a coffee- and cigarette-addicted middle-aged man with graying and thinning brown hair – checked and tweaked the boilers, lines, and engines for the Natchez’s impending departure from New Orleans. Cottle was rather obsessive, in Wilbur’s opinion, always consulting the pressure gauges within the system – which dropped briefly whenever Wilbur borrowed steam from the lines, random failures of the system that seemed to infuriate Cottle as he could find no explanation for the pressure drops. If Wilbur wanted to, he could plunge his hands into one of the lines and draw the steam into him right now, allowing it to fill his body, and sending Cottle off on yet another paroxysm of double-checking all the lines and recalibrating the gauges.

Wilbur told himself he’d do that later. Maybe he’d even allow himself to become steamily visible, and if a passenger or two glimpsed him in the dark, it would only add to the popularity of the Natchez – though he’d make damn certain it wasn’t that obnoxious Dead Report crew; he didn’t intend to give them the pleasure.

Still, he could almost hear the shriek of alarm and wonder that would result. ‘Oh my God! Look! That’s Steam Wilbur! We’re actually seeing him! He’s real!’ But later. Later. Maybe. He’d left Cottle to his work, finding something on the main deck that interested him far more.

He could hear the Jokertown Boys doing their late show up in the Bayou Lounge – all of the passengers seemed to be there; the main deck was largely deserted and the main gangway had been withdrawn. The Quarter lights threw their futile beams into an overcast and occasionally dripping night sky. The promenades on the deck were empty, the passengers nearly all choosing to stay inside against the threatening weather.

There was some commotion going on downriver from where they were berthed. Wilbur could see a constellation of blue and red flashing lights crowding the shore a few miles downriver, and spotlights tore at the low clouds nearby, though whatever action they were illuminating was just beyond the downriver bend. He wondered what was happening, and if it had to do with that joker freighter.

JoHanna Potts, the head clerk, waited near the head of the gangway along with a quartet of deckhands. Jack, an older Cajun man whose skin looked as crinkled and dark as alligator hide, walked anxiously along the Natchez’s landing at the river’s edge; Jack had been hired as one of the bartenders for this cruise. Jack and JoHanna put Wilbur in mind of the old nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat and his wife: JoHanna was a wide and heavy African-American woman whose wrists and neck glittered with strands of gaudy costume jewelry; Jack, conversely, was rail-thin, normally dressed in dark pants and the white jacket he wore as bartender. But he wasn’t dressed that way now; in fact, his clothes seemed to be in tatters and soaked besides, and Wilbur couldn’t imagine what the old Cajun was doing out there.

As Wilbur pondered the scene, a small barge emerged from the darkness of the river. Wilbur stared at the craft in shock: it was being rowed by what appeared to be several … zombies. At least that’s what the rotting, peeling, and discolored flesh of their bodies, the jerky movements as they paddled the barge, and the horrific smell that the breeze off the river would indicate. Jack was hurrying over to the barge and helping perhaps twenty people inside out onto the landing. When they were all on the shore, the zombie crew – if that’s truly what they were – pushed away again, vanishing quickly into the night and heading back downriver.

‘Go on,’ he heard JoHanna say to the deckhands, who swung the gangway over to the dock once more. Wilbur went to the rail of the main deck; he could see Jack herding the people from the barge toward the Natchez. JoHanna waved to them, and the clot of people moved quickly up the gangway and onto the boat. The first of them came up the gangway and approached JoHanna; in the deck lights, Wilbur saw the man more clearly: a face neither young nor old, lined and weathered. His clothing was ragged, soiled, and tattered; most strange was the fact that his hands were covered by burlap, the rough cloth tied around them at his wrists. It didn’t look to Wilbur as if there were actual hands under those improvised mittens, nor did the man extend his hand to JoHanna. ‘I’m Jyrgal,’ he said, his voice heavily accented, his words halting. ‘Some call me the Handsmith. We are very grateful to you for your help.’ Sounds Russian, Wilbur thought, then he saw the others with him.

A boy stood behind Jyrgal, looking like a kid trying to play a ghost for Halloween, his head protruding from a simple sheet. The boy’s skin glistened and seemed to be covered in some gelatinous goo. Wilbur couldn’t see the boy’s hands; they were wrapped in a fold of the sheet. Jokers. Another man stepped up behind the two, also a joker, with a scaled, almost fishlike face, and a beaver’s tail protruding from underneath the hem of the long overcoat he wore. It struck Wilbur suddenly as the others came onto the deck of the Natchez, perhaps twenty of them: These people. These jokers … They must be from the Schröder – some of the Kazakh refugees. What in the world are they doing here on my boat?

The deckhands were already pulling in the gangway and swinging it forward once more, lashing it down. Jack had somehow disappeared entirely. Wilbur could hear footsteps and calls from the forward stairs. JoHanna gestured urgently to those jokers. ‘Follow me,’ JoHanna said. ‘Quietly; I can trust these men, but we can’t have anyone else seeing you …’

She led them with her wide, slow walk toward the stairs at the stern of the boat and began heavily climbing. As the last of the refugees was halfway up the stairs, following her, additional crewmembers began to spill out onto the main deck. ‘The cap’n’s putting us under way,’ Wilbur heard one of them say.

‘She’s in a fucking shitty mood, too,’ another replied. ‘Make sure everything’s ready unless you want her to bite your head off.’

‘Prob’ly her time of the month,’ one of the quartet who had helped JoHanna called back. Rough laughter followed.

‘Quit yappin’ and start workin’.’ A tinny voice rattled the speaker of the intercom from the pilothouse on the hurricane deck: Jeremiah Smalls, the head pilot of the Natchez. ‘Otherwise I’ll mention that last remark to the cap’n, an’ I’ll help her toss any heads she bites off over the side. I intend to pull away from this dock in fifteen minutes. It’s a lousy night, but steam’s up and time’s a-wastin’, people, so either do your jobs or get off the boat.’

The voices faded as Wilbur followed JoHanna and the refugees: up past the boiler deck to the texas deck. Captain Montaigne was standing at the head of the stairs, watching them as the group ascended. She nodded to JoHanna – breathing heavily from the ascent – and to Jyrgal. If she was struck by the appearance of these people, her face showed nothing of it.

‘I’ve made sure all the crew except Jeremiah’s off this deck at the moment – and he’s up in the pilothouse, making preparations for us to disembark,’ the captain said. ‘Some of you will be staying in adjacent staterooms up here; the rest will be moving to one of the crew rooms down on the main deck – JoHanna will take you down as soon as we’re done here. With so many of you, it’s going to be close quarters, I’m afraid, at least at first, and you’re going to have to be quiet and careful. If you’re discovered and the authorities are called in, you’ll all be deported and everyone who has helped you get here will be in great trouble. Do you understand me?’

‘We do, Captain,’ Jyrgal answered. ‘JoHanna and Jack have both told us this. We’ll cause you no trouble. You have my word.’

‘See that you keep that promise,’ Montaigne said. To Wilbur, she looked uncertain and more than a little worried about the prospect. Still, she nodded and allowed JoHanna to lead the little group to the stateroom toward the stern, next to JoHanna’s own room. JoHanna hurried them in, then shut the door quickly behind them as Wilbur watched Captain Montaigne climb the short flight of stairs up to the hurricane deck and the pilothouse. Wilbur went to the wall of the refugees’ room and pushed himself through until he stood inside, though he kept his form deliberately invisible for the moment.

‘… best we could do,’ JoHanna was saying, with Jyrgal translating to the others. ‘Jyrgal will select the group to go down to the main deck with me.’ The captain hadn’t been joking about tight quarters – even with a portion of the group leaving, this was worse than the crew bunk rooms down on the main deck. Wilbur had no idea how all of them were going to sleep, much less tolerate being in the same room for any amount of time. JoHanna pointed to an interior door to the left. ‘That door leads to an adjoining cabin that’s also for your use. I’ve put mats in there for sleeping; you can roll them up for more room when you’re not using them. Each room also has its own bathroom, as does the room on the main deck, so you don’t need to go outside for that. I’ll have a trusted crew member, maybe Jack but possibly someone else, drop off food for everyone and pick up the trays afterward. If you hear a knock like this’ – JoHanna knocked on the wall: two quick raps, a pause, three more quick ones, then a last short one – ‘you can open the outside door. Otherwise, don’t open the door for anyone else, keep it locked from the inside, and make sure the windows are always covered. Does everyone – and I mean every one of you – understand that?’

The group nodded, their assorted faces – most displaying obvious joker attributes – solemn. ‘Good,’ JoHanna said. ‘Arrangements are being made through the Joker Anti-Defamation League, the JADL, to get you to sanctuary cities along the river. We’ll be dropping you off along the way, no more than two or three at a time, where you’ll be given aid. In the meantime, make yourselves as comfortable as you can and stay as quiet as possible.’

‘You should not worry,’ Jyrgal told her in his slow English. ‘This is much better than where we were, and we are very grateful for your help.’

JoHanna gave a sigh as she went to the door. ‘No one deserves to be treated the way you have, and I’m ashamed for my country. I’m glad we could help. I just hope …’ She didn’t finish the thought, and Wilbur watched her nod to the refugees. ‘All right, those who Jyrgal chose, come with me.’ JoHanna opened the door, peered out along the promenade, and slid out quickly, gesturing for the smaller group to follow her.

Wilbur remained behind. He stared at them – a threat to his boat and thus to his own safety – as memory swept over him …

It was March of 1948, and he and Eleanor, not yet a year married, were in Cincinnati, where Wilbur was supervising the finishing touches on the Natchez, already afloat on the Ohio and readying for its maiden voyage down the Ohio and on to the Mississippi toward its future home of New Orleans. They’d been in the Netherland Plaza Pavillion Caprice, where they’d listened to the radio broadcast of the NCAA finals game between Baylor and Kentucky. Kentucky had won, 58–42, and Alex Groza had won the Most Outstanding Player trophy for having scored fifty-four points during the tournament. There were whispers among some of the people listening that perhaps the unstoppable Groza might be one of those ‘aces’ that people were talking about.

Now, with the ball game over and a local band playing on the stage, they were enjoying highballs at their table as the waitstaff, nearly all of them colored, circulated among the tables. Wilbur was telling Eleanor some of the history of his grandfather’s sequence of Natchez steamboats. ‘He was a tough and stubborn old bird, from what I understand. Had to be, to keep building all those new boats time and time again.’

‘You never knew him?’ Eleanor asked. She was scissoring a jeweled pendant in her fingers, the light catching on the facets of the large emerald that was its centerpiece: a gift from her parents when they’d announced their engagement.

‘He died in New Orleans in 1896, twenty years before I’d be born – believe it or not, after being struck by a hit-and-run bicyclist. My dad was only three at the time.’ Wilbur lifted a hand at the slow beginning of his wife’s smile. ‘Uh-uh. You’re not allowed to laugh at that,’ he said. ‘It was a tragedy.’

‘Being killed by a hit-and-run bicycle?’

‘Grandpa Thomas was eighty. Not exactly a spring chicken.’

‘Thought you said he was a tough and stubborn old bird. Though if he still managed to get his poor second wife pregnant in his seventies …’ She laughed, and Wilbur had to laugh along with her.

‘He saw a lot in his time,’ he told her. ‘The Civil War, for instance.’

Eleanor nodded at that, sipping at her highball. One of the waiters passed the table, refilling their water glasses, his skin starkly dark against the white sleeves of his jacket. Wilbur saw her gaze follow the man. ‘I’ve been reading up on steamboats on my own, since we’re going to be living on one,’ Eleanor said, her attention moving from the waiter back to Wilbur. ‘I learned that some of them used to smuggle slaves from the South. Brought them here to Cincinnati sometimes, in fact …’ She stopped, looking embarrassed, taking another, longer sip from the glass. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I know how your grandfather …’

Wilbur shrugged. ‘My grandfather was a man of his time and place,’ he said. ‘Yes, he was a Confederate and unapologetic about his views. Heck, Eleanor, the sixth Natchez took Jefferson Davis to his home after he’d been elected president of the Confederate States of America; Granddad used his boat to transport Confederate troops to Memphis; and – according to what I’ve been told by family – he deliberately torched that Natchez in 1863 to keep her from being seized by Union forces. He never smuggled any slaves to freedom; in fact, from what I’ve been told, he despised the captains who did and considered them traitors. After the war, he refused to fly the Stars and Stripes flag on any of his boats – he finally, finally let the eighth Natchez raise the American flag in 1885, as she passed Vicksburg. Sometimes …’ Wilbur managed a wan smile and lifted his own drink. ‘Sometimes I think I’m glad I never had the chance to know him. After what I saw in the war, after what we heard was done in Germany to the Jews, and the horrors the Japs inflicted on the Chinese … well, Grandpa Thomas’s political beliefs feel like a bloody stain on my family’s legacy.’ He grunted a short, deprecating laugh. ‘Families – they all have skeletons they’d prefer to keep buried.’

‘You’re not your grandfather, Wilbur,’ she told him. ‘As you said, he was a man of his time. Any sins he might have committed aren’t yours to bear.’ She put her hand over his on the tablecloth, her wide blue eyes searching his own. ‘You aren’t him, Wilbur,’ she said with a slow emphasis. ‘You’re a far better and wiser man. I wouldn’t have fallen in love with someone who wasn’t also a good and compassionate person. Which is what you are.’

She leaned over and kissed him. ‘Now let’s go upstairs to our room,’ she said. ‘And no more talking about your grandpa Thomas.’

He remembered how they’d made love that night, and how they’d moved aboard the Natchez two days later, which would be their home for the next three years, until that day when everything changed …

Now Wilbur was looking at twenty or so ragged, tired, and frightened refugees packed into a cabin just as those smuggled slaves might have been a century and a half earlier, and the sight tore at him. Here, it seemed, was a chance for the Natchez to atone, at least a little, for Thomas. Here was a chance for Wilbur to do something his grandfather had refused to do.

What Eleanor, with her empathy for anyone in trouble, would have insisted he do. She’d called Wilbur ‘good and compassionate’. He was afraid she’d overstated his qualities, but …

For Eleanor’s sake, he would help Captain Montaigne, JoHanna, and Jack to bring these people to freedom. He would do what he could to make sure that happened.

Wilbur went to the nearest wall, where the steam lines ran to the ’scape pipes. He could feel the warmth of the steam like a welcome embrace, and he closed his eyes, pushing his hands through the wall and into the pipe, absorbing the heat that flowed there and letting it fill him. As he took in the steam, he also allowed his form to slowly materialize in wispy clouds. With only a single light on in the otherwise dark room, he was easily visible – in the mirror installed on the far wall, he could see his semitransparent, cloud-like form: a middle-aged man in an old-fashioned captain’s uniform and cap – Wilbur as he’d once been.

A young woman with a froth of lacy gills around her neck was the first of the refugees to notice him. She gasped and pointed, and a babble of voices erupted around him. The beaver-like joker glared at him threateningly. Wilbur lifted a finger to his lips, shaking his head, and they quieted, all of them moving back from the apparition. He motioned to Jyrgal to come closer; the joker did so with obvious reluctance. ‘I will also help you,’ Wilbur said slowly with an exaggerated emphasis, though he knew that none of the living could hear him. He’d hoped that the joker could manage to read his lips, but Jyrgal shook his head.

‘I do not understand you,’ he said. Fear trembled in his voice, and a mittened hand touched his ear. ‘I can’t hear the words …’

Wilbur glanced around the room for paper and a pen or pencil. Seeing none, he sighed and glided, cloud-like, over to the mirror. They moved aside as he approached, as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea. Standing in front of the mirror, he raised his hand; using his index finger as a pencil, he wrote on the mirror in steamy, blurred, and dripping letters:

YOU MUST DO AS THEY SAY. YOU MUST STAY HIDDEN.

He looked at Jyrgal. The man was staring at the writing, but Wilbur couldn’t tell if he could read English or not. There was a box of tissues on a small table under the mirror; in his steam form, Wilbur was capable of handling and moving small objects. He plucked a tissue from the box and used it to wipe away the letters, then placed the now-sopping tissue back on the table. He wrote again.

I WILL ALSO HELP YOU.

Jyrgal still stared, as did the others. ‘Do you understand?’ Wilbur asked. ‘Tell me.’

No one answered, at least not in English. There was only the chaos of voices speaking their own language, and Jyrgal’s expression didn’t lend any confidence that he understood the writing.

Wilbur held out his hand to the mirror again; this time it didn’t steam up as quickly, and he could see from the increasing transparency of his reflection that his steam-created body had cooled somewhat – he could never stay long in full steam form. Glancing around at the refugees around him, he chose one who looked young and in relatively good health: a rather excessively hairy young man with four arms. He slid quickly into the joker’s body before the young man had time to move.