The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen Read online

  rain. The story pulled her free of her weariness and worry as if she had jumped clean out of herself and landed way over in Calaveras County.

  Revere was still so handsome, with his little whippety hips and sailor’s blue eyes! Egil could do such interesting things with his face, as well as stand on his head without using his hands! Finn could play seven different people just by changing his accent. And though Cyril’s gestures were big and wild, and Curly delivered all his lines as if Shakespeare had written them, Cyril’s brother Everett’s voice still poured through her like chocolate, and Miss Loucien—the new, extra-added Miss Loucien—still swooped around, graceful as a bluebird. When the champion jumping frog was fed ball bearings before the competition to weigh it down, Cissy laughed for the first time in at least a hundred years.

  And when the play ended, she was slow to speak, unwilling to part with the magic of the past minutes. . . .

  “Can I be your new actress, Mr. Crew? Can I?” The words fell into Cissy’s ear like acid. She looked up and saw Tibbie Boden flash her pretty smile up into the theater manager’s face as she asked again and again: “Can I be your new ingenoo?”

  “Yeah!” cried Kookie. “Tibbie’s pretty enough for Broadway!”

  Cissy was filled with the desire to smash her damp chair over Kookie’s head. She felt herself weighed down, pinned to the ground with disappointment, like an oversized frog stuffed with ball bearings. Could fame and happiness really be snatched so swiftly away?

  “Tibbie, hon,” said Miss Loucien cheerfully, “if it don’t stop raining soon, you’d be better off growing fins and making a career as a fish.” Then her lilac eyes flicked in Cissy’s direction, and she gave a wink as swift as a gambler palming a card.

  That night, Cissy lay wrapped in a mildewed curtain and listened to the river rush urgently past to its tryst with the sea. She pictured herself riding into Olive Town one day aboard Cleopatra’s barge. (The railway sidings had somehow liquefied into a new tributary of the Mississippi.) She was standing on a raised platform, waving an arm gloved to the elbow in purple satin. From the bank, Mrs. Fudd (wearing a starched shop apron) cried excitedly, “Damson! Damson! Those gloves are the very color!” And Cissy the World-Famous Actress drew them off and threw them ashore, tossing her long and (oddly golden) hair and saying, “Have them—I have plenty more like them in Rome!”

  Then a noise started up a couple of fathoms below her head—as of giant rats, big as beavers, gnawing through the hull. After that, she lay awake all night, clutching Curly’s umbrella to her like the sword of an antique stone knight on a church sepulcher, but twice as cold.

  “Picture it, my dears!” said Cyril Crew. “A showboat! A floating treasure-house of the performing arts! A wandering theater, taking drama to the people!”

  The rain washed over the wooden roof in pulsing waves, playing a different pitch on the stern deck saloon, the Texas, and on forward to the gangplank at the prow.

  “Well, I must be getting on. My mother in Des Moines is expecting me,” said Miss May March. In fact, she was effectively pinned in place by the weather and could go nowhere. But as soon as they started to talk of theater, she left the saloon as if in fear of infection.

  “We have to be realistic,” said Cyril’s brother regretfully. “Showboats are all washed up.”

  “What, all of them?” Tibbie peered out through the dirt-caked windows, expecting to see a whole fleet of showboats beached alongside.

  “The railroads did them in. Business turned away from the river. The rivers used to be the only way around this side of the world: north to south. Des Moines to New Orleans. Now people who want to get anywhere just board a train and make it inside the day. They can get to the big cities for theater. Even the water rats have turned sophisticate these days. No, the sun has set, I’m afraid, on the showboats and river palaces.”

  Clearly this argument had been turned over as often as a wet pillow while the Bright Lights sat around, waiting for Curly to be released from jail. But the faded, jaded magnificence of Calliope encouraged foolish ambitious daydreams; Cissy and Kookie were quickly caught up by the possibility of joining a floating theater company.

  “You could have dances! A band! A circus, even!” cried Cissy.

  “Acrobats! Magicians! Chantoosies!”

  “Kookie!” Tibbie looked shocked. “Chantoosies indeed! What would Miss May say?”

  Kookie was about to describe how little he cared what Miss May thought, when the lady herself came back into the stateroom. Her hair was wetly slicked down against her head, and her bangs dripped. “I would say chanteuses,” she said reflectively, in a refined French accent. But her mind was not on saloon singers or even French pronunciation. Her mind was on the roof of the Texas. “Calliope,” she said in a sleepy, thoughtful murmur. “You truly think that’s the name of the boat?”

  “Looks that way, ma’am,” said Curly through a mouthful of pins.

  The rain slid the leaves around on the outside of the windows. Curly was mending costumes. Powers was sketching waterborne sailboats. Cyril was busy writing a new play for St. Louis if ever they raised the fare to get there.

  “Are you quite sure?” said Miss March, and there was a plaintive note in her voice.

  When the rain eased, they carried a chair up to the Texas.

  Chad Powers climbed up onto the roof, where the huge placard stood bearing the single word CALLIOPE. What else could it be, after all, but a nameboard for the ship?

  Behind the notice rose up an array of little pipes.

  “The vents from the boilers, surely,” said Finn.

  “Look more like organ pipes to me,” said Chad.

  “Why’s it called Texas?” asked Kookie.

  “Beats me, Kooks. Maybe from up here y’can see as far as Texas on a clear day,” suggested Loucien, holding her aching back.

  Miss March made a noise of quiet self-satisfaction, like a duck smacking up duckweed. “A calliope, yes! I cannot wait to tell my mother. It is just as I thought! Yes! What a waste! What a shocking waste! If only we had it back at school!”

  Kookie nudged Cissy in the ribs and whispered, “Must be a style of cooker, then. For roasting children.”

  It was only the discovery of the calliope steam piano that made them venture as far as the boat’s engine room. During all their stay on board, the Bright Lights had never braved it, because, despite Cyril’s daydreaming, they had never seriously thought of putting out on the swollen, heaving river. (And there is no point in starting up the engines of a boat stranded in the middle of a field.) But finding themselves possessed of a steam piano made everyone hanker after some steam to power it.

  “Couldn’t we try for just a little puff?” Mr. Curly had said, noting the sparkle of excitement in Miss May’s eye. “The man that hath no music in himself is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils.”

  Revere was adamant they should not. Revere had been a sailor before his acting days, and in his opinion, a lit steam boiler was “a bomb looking for somewhere to go off.” He lagged behind, laden with gloom, as they descended ladders and struggled aft along companionways blocked with storm debris and crates, to the engine room. Cissy (who had heard all that nighttime gnawing) stayed put in the saloon with Tibbie and Miss Loucien.

  As they reached the stern of the boiler deck, dragged open the swollen, buckled boiler-room door, and stepped down three metal rungs into the unlit stokehole, a noise greeted them that made Finn’s foot slip off the rung of the ladder, catching Everett a blow in the head; in falling off, Everett dislodged Chad—”What the—?”—who fell on top of Kookie.

  The scuffling coming from the boiler was far too big to be a single rat. Was it perhaps a colony of rats—or a pig belonging to the dead farmer, trapped, unable to get out, and even now crazed by hunger? The pile of men on the floor picked themselves up extremely fast, and Kookie grabbed a log of wood from the fuel pile.

  “Maybe it’s an alligator!” he suggested. “Maybe it got on out of th
e swamps, down Deep South way!”

  There was another scuffling sound from inside the boiler, and despite himself, Chad Powers started back up the ladder. A shape not unlike that of an alligator slid out of the boiler’s round door, then rose onto its tail end.

  “Do you feel it?” said the alligator. “She’s on the move again.”

  Chapter Five

  Carried Away

  The floor under their feet heaved. Doors through-out the boat banged: a many-chambered heart flickering back into life. At the same moment, water swilled from end to end of the deck below. The Calliope was awash.

  The swollen river, overbrimming its banks, lifted the hull as the wind lifts a rug, rippling it from end to end. Older, fetid water was swilled through the bilges. But a tree stump had bitten up through her hull; temporarily, the boat was pegged in place by it.

  “Everyone off!” shouted Cyril Crew, but the thought of the womenfolk and girls two decks up, plus the company’s few scattered possessions, drove the men back up the companionways, hollering and yelping with alarm as the boat groaned and squealed at every joint and weld.

  Impaled on its tree stump, the whole ship writhed like a Roman who has fallen on his sword and failed to die.

  Chairs and tables and theater props danced across the stateroom floor. Miss Loucien had gathered both the schoolgirls to her, their heads protruding from under her armpits.

  “Everyone off! Everyone off!” shouted Everett. “She’s going to wash back into the river!”

  “But our movables!” wailed Curly. Already he had gathered to him a cocoon of possessions: a doublet, a crown, Cyril’s new script, Mr. Powers’s crutch, and a cash box.

  “Better off plugging the hull,” said the alligator man, who seemed to have stalked them up from the engine room.

  Outside, lapping tongues of water were turning the mud to slurry, the undergrowth into streaming tendrils. Skidding and sliding down toward terra firma, the Bright Lights found only terra slimy, terra awash. The young men were the first over the side: Finn and Egil and Revere. Their dark shapes splashed away into the veiling rain, arms and legs flailing wildly. Cyril Crew followed more ponderously, picking his way through the slurping, slippery mud. Everett picked up his wife and hoicked his long legs over the bull rails, but found himself up to his knees in mud that all but sucked off his boots. After three paces, he could no longer keep his footing. In front of him three trees, their roots washed bare of soil, capsized, falling, sprawling toward him, bouncing on the great gray cages of their boughs. Only by turning his back and enveloping his wife in both arms did he manage to shield her from the whippy lash of their twigs and wet leaves.

  The whole world seemed to be on the move, sliming back into the mud God had once used to make it. Everett turned back and returned to the ship: it was the only shelter available. Child-sized hands, cold and slippery with rain, pulled them both back over the rails.

  “Be better off afloat,” said alligator man, lending a paw.

  And whether he was right or not, they had no choice anymore. With a groaning shudder, the Calliope began to slip sideways off the spit of land. The men who had gone ashore—Cyril, Finn, Egil, and Revere—also turned back, but the ship dragged herself away faster than they could run to catch up. Frantically they shouted—”Stop!” “Wait!”—as though their friends aboard still had any part to play in what was happening. Sharp, hooked little waves, scuffed up by the wind, snicked and grappled the heaving hull, hoicking it back out onto the river, repossessing the wreck after its brief season on dry land.

  “But we were snagged!” cried Everett, looking around to see who was left to hear him. “There must be a hole!” And if that was true, then surely that hole, now empty of the tree stump that had made it, was letting the river gush in. Within minutes they would sink as surely as an uncorked bottle tumbling downstream.

  And so those aboard scattered in every direction, searching the weather deck and dark cargo space for signs of water pluming up from below—though, as Mr. Powers observed, “God alone knows how we’d plug it!”

  “Cyril?” Everett could be heard calling between cupped hands, shouting into the rain. “Cyril, are you all right?”

  Kookie lingered, however, and Cissy, too afraid to brave the rolling deck without him, stood clinging to the back of his jacket. He picked up Mr. Powers’s damp sketches off the floor. Rolling them thoughtfully into a tube, he put the tube to his eye, like a telescope, which he trained on the alligator. Held at a distance, like that, the creature from the boiler room was less terrifying. He was simply a very old man, encrusted from head to foot in green mold and rust the color of dried blood. His face was streaked with oil, and his eyes had a way of drifting sideways. His mind did not seem to be entirely on the job at hand.

  “Bet you know ’zactly where we were snagged,” Kookie said.

  The alligator, after some difficulty, swiveled his eyes toward Kookie. “Been workin’ on it,” he said.

  Not only did he know, but he had spent several nights sawing and hacking at the tree stump in an attempt to part it from its roots. (“That’s what I heard in the night,” said Cissy, the noise of giant rats explained at last.) Then he had battened the stump in place, like a giant plug, and packed the jagged hole around it with old rugs and rags, daubing everything with tar.

  In the end, the whole stump had pulled out, like a rotten tooth, from the sloppy ground. The mend had held, and the stump was now riding along, embedded in the Calliope’s skin, a tumor welling up through the deck.

  Kookie, Cissy, and the alligator stood around the mend and watched black water well through the tarry rugs. They could picture, beneath their feet, the bare splayed roots clawing for grip but grabbing only handfuls of rushing river. The top of the stump wagged its head. The alligator wagged his head in reply. “That’ll hold it far as Engedi,” he said.

  The Calliope banged and juddered over big, unseen obstacles in the river, which shoved at her and set her spinning. Faster and faster she spun, heeling over to an angle that threw her passengers to the floor and swept them all together in one corner of the stateroom, like pastry trimmings. A tree limb burst through one of the windows—a groping arm—but immediately withdrew as the vessel turned around once more. Chairs and boxes slid from end to end of the stateroom—drunken waltzers stampeding over the fallers on the floor. Beyond the banging doors, great gray waves weltered past, rising proud from the river to punch the hull.

  Now and then, across the swell of Miss Loucien’s stomach, Cissy glimpsed Tibbie’s face, white as milk, and promised God that Tibbie could be the new ingénue if only he would let her see Poppy and home again. She shut her eyes tight and listened to Everett and Loucien Crew saying how much they loved each other and how glad they were to have met.

  And Cissy tried to be glad, too.

  “There is a tide in the affairs of men,” gasped Curly, “which, taken at the flood . . . ,” but the shuddering of the ship shook the rest of the quotation out of his head.

  The riverside houses of Salvation rushed past, knee deep in water. There was no living soul to be seen. Cattle mutely bellowed from patches of high ground, their noise obliterated by the racketing river and the clacketing clatter of the paddle wheel spinning unchecked on its axle. In fact the clamor was completely deafening. It harangued the boat from shore to shore, yelling that it was nothing! matchwood! sawdust! raffia work! history! Then even the shores receded, and the veils of rain thickened until all Time and Civilization had surely been washed away.

  The boat was a crocodile, snaking its flexible spine as it bore them away to its underwater den.

  How long they lay there, clinging to one another and under attack from the furniture, no one knew. They tried to judge time passing by how far Curly had quoted his way through King Lear. But he had been through the whole of Pericles and was halfway out of the Sonnets before they hit Patience.

  Like Salvation, Patience stood on a bend in the river. It had only eight houses and, thanks to the Ca
lliope, almost finished the day with seven. They hit it nose on, crunching up a timber dock as though it were made of stale bread. The jolt dislodged a little cannon that stood near the prow. It ran backward down the deck, smashed through the wall of the cargo space, and got wedged between two steam pipes.

  Up in the stateroom, the last dancing chair fell over onto its back, while the jolt of impact shook a single choking cry of fright from the people strewn around the floor. But though they waited for the Calliope to fall into pieces around them, like bad scenery in a play, she did not. Planks slid down the shingles, lamps spewed colza oil down the walls. The clapper fell out of the dinner bell in the saloon. The prow drove itself ten feet into the bank. But the Calliope did not disintegrate. She simply stopped dead, while the river boiled by behind her. And the passengers who tottered out of the stateroom onto the hurricane deck found themselves looking into the faces of a large family seated in a row opposite them, at treetop height.

  The family was ranged along the roof ridge of their house, wedged between their two dogs, like books between bookends. With the battering-ram arrival of the stern-wheeler, they did not jump to their feet or hurl themselves into the floodwater but solemnly watched it demolish their landing stage, eyes curiously blank, hands folded on their ragged kneecaps.

  “Hold on! We’ll rescue you!” called Kookie, darting to and fro along the ship’s rails, trying to think of a way to fetch the stranded family aboard. The gangplank was long enough, but it was in the wrong place, hugely heavy, and fixed in place by a winch.

  “Yes! Never fear!” cried Everett. “We’ll get you down from there!”

  The Kobokin family gaped back, unmoving. “Same ever’ year,” said the oldest man resignedly. “It’ll pass.”

  Every year his house was besieged by the river. Sometimes it fell down. Sometimes one of the other eight houses in Patience fell down. What cannot be changed must be endured. The Kobokins were not looking to be rescued. They were simply waiting, up on their roof, for Fate to take a kinder turn.