The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen Read online

  And one by one each succumbed to tears for fear that they would never again see that person—friend, father, brother, wife. Even Max thought of his runaway wife and shed tears because now he would never get the chance to show her the photo and see her think twice about breaking up the team.

  Medora looked around her at the tears running down, folded the plate away in chamois leather, and ate her dinner.

  Next day, Everett persuaded Elijah to start giving him (and Chad and Curly and Benet) lessons in how to steer the boat, so that in the future they could share the work.

  Chapter Ten

  Feverish Activity

  It’s hot here,” said Tibbie as they docked in Timberlake. Her pink cheeks and down-turned mouth made her look quarrelsome, as if Timberlake were not trying hard enough. Cissy said there was a nice smell of fresh paint. Tibs said it made her feel sick.

  They stayed over in Timberlake to make much-needed repairs to the boat. Here was a town that prized the river. Every yard was home to a rowboat. There were fish traps in evidence, and eddies of stale bread in the river where local anglers were training the fish to gather. And there was a boatyard with jetties and pilings and boat cradles. In pride of place on its shoreline lay an elegant oak slipper launch. It was plain who owned it: it was called Sheriff’s Star. There was even a ship’s chandlery, selling marine paint, fenders, and the like. Not that they could afford any of these temptations. They confined themselves to patching the hole in the bottom of the hull with something better than a tree stump, getting the engine working, and giving Chips time to rebuild the paddle wheel.

  It did not sound like much. Thanks to Elijah, the boiler and ducts were as clean as bagpipes. One broken piston rod, a leak in the compression chamber, some chain links that had seized as solid as an old lady’s joints: how hard could it be? The local engineer they hired—a Scotsman—was so sparing with his speech that they feared he would charge by the word if they tried chatting with him, so they left him alone to bang around in the bowels of the boat with his wrench, wearing a miner’s helmet with a candle in it. Elijah, who was territorial about the engine room, stood by with a bucket of water in case the candle set light to his boat.

  Everett, meanwhile, went off in search of timber, taking Medora with him. In exchange for a portrait photo of him and his seven children, the boatyard owner pointed out a derelict rowboat half full of water, and said they could break it up for usable timber.

  “Barter’s a wonderful thing,” said Everett on his return. He told Chips the good news, and away went the carpenter, returning with useful amounts of excellent oak.

  Though he generally moved with the slowness of a deep-sea diver in lead boots, give him some wood and a hammer and Chips was transformed. He climbed into the paddle wheel like a rat into a treadmill, and he fitted blades, mended struts, replaced spindles, and whopped on the paint with happy abandon. It was true that the wheel did not revolve afterward, but Chad Powers soon tracked down the problem—Chips had nailed it fast.

  “Kept leaning over, kinda,” said Chips discon-tentedly.

  Chad pried out the nails, and the wheel slumped sideways.

  “Piddock,” said the Scots engineer, emerging from the engine room, the candle in his hat quivering with contempt.

  “Only two-thirds of the blades hit the water,” said Chad.

  “I think it’s kinda jaunty,” said Loucien gamely, and linked arms with the carpenter. “At least it spins now. And two thirds of a wheel is better than no wheel at all.”

  The rest of the oak went to mend the hole in the hull. It did not entirely keep out the river, which wormed its way in to examine Chip’s carpentry from both sides. But moving around the engine room was a lot easier now that the tree trunk was gone. Elijah splashed tar over the leaks, while everyone else hauled the Sunshine Queen on ropes into place alongside the Timberlake landing stage, in readiness for the evening performance.

  “Where did Chips get that oak?” Elijah asked, wiping tarry hands on a rag. He and Everett were sitting on the bull rail watching Hellfire Slater harangue the gathering audience. Crew was thinking, yet again, what an odd form of entertainment it was.

  “There’s a hulk in the boatyard. Man said we could help ourselves.”

  “That oak’s no junk,” said Elijah. “Perfect. Varnish perfect. Nice. Take a look.” So Everett and Elijah went down into the engine room. Before he got there, Everett was starting to know what he would find. Most damning of all were the words sticking out, in timber bas-relief, just below the expansion tube: SHERIFF’S STAR.

  “Good. Good,” Everett said, nodding and smiling and thinking back. He took a stroll along the bank, just to check that his worst fears were well founded.

  The sunken derelict lay where it had, brimful of moonlight and river water, untouched. Pulled up on the slip lay the keel and ribs of a boat, like the rib cage of something vultures have stripped. Earlier in the day it had been an elegant, lovingly maintained slipper launch.

  Chips had stripped the wrong boat.

  Everett looked around him at the sleeping boatyard, turned up the collar of his jacket, and sauntered ever so casually back along the wharf to where Medora was showing moving pictures of timber logging in Canada.

  “Early call tomorrow, folks,” he said softly, each time he passed one of the Bright Lights Theater Company. “I fear we may have abused our guests’ hospitality.” He would have liked to make amends to the owner of the slipper launch, but the takings for the evening would not begin to cover it. With luck, the ghastly mistake would not be discovered until they were far, far away.

  “Chips is a pribbling, swag-bellied skainsmate,” said Curly.

  “He means well,” said Everett.

  “He’s a clay-brained scut.”

  “He got the paddle wheel working. We can make a quickish getaway,” said Everett, but Curly only went on shaking his head in sorrow and cursing Chips in Tudor English.

  Just as the fish started to rise and feast on the clouds of evening insects, the Bright Lights Showboat Company gave the good people of Timberlake The Perils of Pirate Nancy, and it was their best yet. Curly heartlessly sold his daughter into slavery. The dastardly pirate was all set to kill her until his pregnant lover talked him around. Then Nancy turned down his proposal flat as a skillet. Nancy walked the plank, and the audience yelped and gasped as she fell with a cry of “I’m an American, you fiend!”

  Then somehow it all got even more exciting.

  Chad lit a piece of Medora’s magnesium ribbon, dropped it into a bottle—he had been aching to try it—and thrust it into Benet’s grip. Benet, lit by its incandescent light, swung across the stage and made an elegant touchdown. But confronted by the villainous mustachioed pirate chief, he found he could not draw his sword, because of the flare bottle in his sword hand, so he threw it over the rail.

  It narrowly missed Kookie and sank to the riverbed. But it went on burning even underwater—which is the way of magnesium. Then Loucien shot the villainous pirate chief: he should have fallen through the roof hatch, except that he remembered, in the nick of time, removing the mattress for Elijah to sleep on. So he died on the spot instead, and tried not to breathe too heavily (which is difficult after a strenuous sword fight).

  “Help! Quick! Get me out!” yelled Kookie from down below, and the fear in his voice was very convincing: he seemed to be getting the knack of acting.

  “There goes Kookie, milking it as usual,” said Cissy, as she hooked Tibbie into the red-white-and-blue dress in a cabin nearby.

  “Mmm,” said Tibbie vaguely.

  Concerned parties rushed to the side of the boat and, in accordance with the script, scoured the water for signs of life, though it was all too obvious that Nancy was still alive because she was hollering:

  “Alligator! Help! Get me out for the love of—”

  “Aw, now he’s just bein’ ridiculous,” said Cissy.

  “That Habakkuk Warboys is such a fool,” said Miss March.

  “
Mmm,” said Tibbie.

  From up top, Loucien, Benet, and Curly struck exaggerated poses of grief and woe, facing the bank as much as possible (because it is a rule of the theater that you don’t turn your back on the audience). On the floor by their feet, the dead pirate chief growled with annoyance at Kookie messing with the script yet again.

  “Pleeeease!” said Kookie, but this time very quietly. He was standing on the bottom, head and shoulders above water, arms lifted high over his head. But they could see the rest of him, thanks to the flare still burning away on the riverbed, lighting up an underwater world. The flare had drawn fishes from far and wide into its circle of light. They were clearly visible round about him, like demons conjured by black magic. One of the shadows was torpedo shaped and so long that its tail was still in darkness while its flat snout was nudging at Nancy’s white frock. Kookie was no longer calling out, but his upturned face was a round, white circle beseeching someone—anyone—to believe him.

  “Frimony,” said Boisenberry.

  “Shotten herring,” said Curly.

  “Holy Simon Cameron,” said Benet under his breath. “It’s the genuine article. Boy’s gonna get ate.”

  But still no one moved, because no one knew what to do. Benet feared that, if he threw the rope, the splash would startle the creature into attacking.

  “Do something, Everett!” whispered Loucien, and (confusingly for the audience) the dead pirate chief got to his feet and joined the anxious knot of people at the ship’s rail.

  Meanwhile, in the dressing room, Cissy looked up. Without knowing it, she had developed the habit of moving her lips in time with the actors’. Now she sensed a space that should not be there, sensed a change in the schedule. “Kookie’s drowned,” she told Miss May, and rushed outside, lime-green dungarees or no lime-green dungarees.

  In fact, the stage filled up with all manner of people who were not usually in the play. Two clowns, a Gypsy projectionist, three barbershop singers, a barber, an organist, and a woman clutching a dog to her chest.

  It was Miss March who had the presence of mind to grab Moppet out of the Dog Woman’s arms and throw it into the river: an alternative meal for the alligator.

  “You witch!” screamed the Dog Woman, and launched a punch at Miss May. Then the commotion in the water drew them back, spellbound, to the rail.

  Luckily, audiences do not give much thought to plot, and the people of Timberlake were so thrilled and bewildered that they stood up, shouting, gasping, pushing one another out of the way, holding their children up to see better or hugging them close in case the news was too upsetting for youngsters to hear.

  Hand over hand, gingerly, Benet fed out the rope, which Kookie grabbed and clung to like a burr to a cat. When they pulled him up, it looked more like landing a tuna than rescuing a maiden in distress.

  “Miss May, you’re a wonder!” Kookie said as he came headfirst over the rail, got up, and hugged his schoolteacher. It left the audience thinking the lady with the bun must be some kind of fairy godmother, like in “Cinderella.” But they really did not care. Pirate Nancy had been saved from drowning and (if they had heard right) the jaws of an alligator! Mothers assured their children that the little doggie wasn’t real . . . just a puppet. The children complained they hadn’t been able to see the alligator eat the dog. But they all cheered and stamped and called the actors back seven times over to applaud them. Tibbie gave a particularly wavering recital of “America the Bounteous Land” that reduced grown men to tears.

  There was a pause then, because the Dog Woman had shut herself in her cabin and would not come out. So Max and Cissy and Sweeting came on with the plank and soothed the audience with the gentle comedy of their routine, and the evening ended with Loucien singing “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton” to the accompaniment of banjos, a harmonica, and a swanee whistle. No sooner had the song finished than the showboat gave a rude belch and the calliope on its roof wheezed into life. Instead of “Lead, Kindly Light,” Miss March made a game attempt at “Polly Wolly Doodle.” It started slow but speeded up, as she found the right key, and was positively storming along by the time the kerosene ran out in her lamp and she could no longer see the keys.

  The great thing about disasters is that they feel so good afterward.

  Moppet swam ashore and found her own way aboard again, showing no sign of resenting the swim. The company checked her over for missing limbs, but the alligator was either vegetarian or had been hit between the eyes with Moppet, lost its appetite, and swum off. They tossed another flare into the river, intrigued now to catch a glimpse of the monster. Fish were drawn to the light like iron filings to a magnet, but there was no sign of the alligator.

  “’Gator gar,” said Elijah, unimpressed by the whole spectacle.

  “It was this big!” said Kookie for the fifteenth time.

  “We saw it!” Cissy backed him up.

  “Yup. They come up real big, garfish,” Elijah conceded. “Take ducks. Water rats. Swans even. Seen ’em.”

  Kookie, who had seen the snout, seen the dark shape heading his way, felt the nudge against his hip, would have stood up in a court of law and sworn to it being an alligator. Years later, he was still describing the encounter, and by then the beast had grown to the size of Rhode Island. Everyone else was rather relieved to think the Numchuck River held nothing more deadly than giant garfish.

  Curly was particularly happy. “If it means he won’t fling himself in the water every opportunity God sends, I don’t care if it was a shark,” he said as he wrung out the white smock and knocked the bonnet back into shape. “That fish just halved the laundry.”

  The great thing about disasters is that afterward it feels as if all the bad times have gone for good.

  But they had not. Not if the Dog Woman had her way.

  She could not forgive Moppet’s plunge into the jaws of death—or even a big garfish. Packing Binky, Topper, and Moppet into their basket, she quit the Sunshine Queen next morning, elbows out, twitching her rear end with pent-up rage. The Boston accent made it hard to hear quite what threat she was mouthing as she left, but it seemed to involve the sheriff and hanging.

  “I think avoiding action may be called for,” said Everett uneasily.

  “Naw! That pup’s as unsad as a whistling kettle!” said Oskar.

  “The dog isn’t the one making the threats.”

  So they untied from the landing and let the Queen float over to the opposite bank. They could not leave Timberlake altogether, since the Scottish engineer was still aboard, banging about in the engine room like a loose tin can, tinkering with the valves, pushing exploratory puffs of steam through the system, so that the boat itself rumbled and grunted and squeaked like a bad case of indigestion.

  It was not long before the Dog Woman’s revenge arrived in the shape of the Sheriff of Timberlake, hailing them across half a mile of river, through a bullhorn. “You got stolen goods aboard!” he blared. It was not a question.

  Throughout his acting life, Everett Crew had been coping with unforeseen, unscripted surprises: collapsing scenery, drunks climbing onstage, actors missing their cues, fans throwing flowers, hooligans throwing all kinds of things—piglets even; downpours, questions about the plot, requests for songs. . . . He reckoned he could ad-lib his way out of most crises. But he was not on dry land now. The mistake with the slipper launch had rattled him; the business of the alligator had aged him ten years. What had the Dog Woman accused them of stealing? One of her dogs? Or the ship itself? A wallet or a paddle steamer? It could be something tiny, deliberately hidden away on the Queen to incriminate them, something just waiting for the Sheriff to find when he searched.

  Whatever it was, they could not possibly allow the Sheriff aboard without him finding large pieces of his own slipper launch patching their hull. For once in his life, Everett Crew was lost for words.

  “All we got aboard is the sweating sickness!” Loucien’s voice rang out from the deck above. She produced a square of yellow silk and
waved it. Half an hour before, it had been a panel of her petticoat. Now Curly had stitched a black square to it; Miss March had crocheted a loop, and it was this that Loucien looped around a wrought-iron finial. It said, in the language of the sea, FEVER ON BOARD.

  “Ain’t she spackfacious?” whispered Kookie in tones of awe. Sometimes he thought his one-time schoolteacher could head off a herd of charging buffalo with a single lit match.

  “She surely is,” said Cissy.

  “It’s hot,” said Tibbie Boden.

  “Hokum!” bellowed the Sheriff. “I’m comin’ aboard to search yuh. Offer resistance and I’ll shoot yuh! I’m actin’ on information received. Loose women. Hooch. Hellions!”

  “Loose women?!” bayed Loucien, and the Sheriff actually recoiled a step even though an entire river lay between them. “Loose women? Wouldn’t you loosen off your corsets if you was in my condition, sir?”

  The Sheriff was fazed, no doubt about it. Pregnant women are scary at any time, but a redheaded half-Choctaw, half-Minneapolis pregnant woman with a singer’s lungs was truly alarming.

  “She’s a wonder!” said Kookie again, but when he looked around, both Tibbie and Cissy had disappeared.

  Everyone was puzzled as to how the Dog Woman had informed on anyone. How, after all, had the Sheriff understood her impossible accent? Still, unusual crime was a rarity in Timberlake, and the Sheriff was not going to be cheated out of an arrest. In his own opinion, he was not some upriver hick to be taken in by a bit of yellow cloth and talk of fever. He raised one hand and led his men to the adjacent boatyard—the one where he kept his launch.

  “I’m comin’ over!” he warned them through the bullhorn. “I’m comin’ over and I won’t . . . What the—”

  Finding the flayed carcass of his elegant little boat did delay the Sheriff. For twenty minutes, all thought of stolen goods, loose women, or hellions went clear out of his head. His boat, his pride and joy, had been carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey. Clear across the river they could hear him howling and cursing and kicking paint cans around the yard. But the reprieve could not last long.