The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen Read online

  Everett wanted a play like The Perils of Nancy for the Sunshine Queen. Shakespeare would not cut the mustard in Ox Flats or Washford, but there had to be room for some honest-to-goodness acting in between the variety acts. Everett Crew was actor first and foremost. Anyway, it is what Cyril would have done: a play involving the river; a melodrama about boats.

  Max’s plank gave Everett the idea for The Perils of Pirate Nancy. He raised the subject over supper, when, by pushing together all the tables in the stateroom, they could all sit down together and eat. Seeing the glimmer of excitement in his eyes, Loucien caught light herself. “I can do that!” she declared. “I can still swing a sword and tiptoe along a plank, and get tied to a mast—long as we got enough rope to go around me!”

  Everett turned pale at the very thought. “No! No, no! No! What was I thinking of? No! Absolutely not!”

  Loucien Shades Crew did not take kindly to people telling her she could not do something. The very color of her hair seemed to change to a brighter red. Seeing the makings of a quarrel, Chad Powers heroically drew her fire. “It’s a scientific fact, ma’am, I’m afraid. A lady in your particular condition has a higher center of gravity: that’s to say, your balance goes, ma’am. It’s simple physics.”

  Loucien pursed her lips, indignation pent up inside.

  “Shouldn’t oughtta mess with physics, Miss Loucien—Mrs. Crew, I mean,” said Kookie. Everyone joined in the conspiracy to stop Loucien playing Pirate Nancy while expecting a baby. The question was, who would play her instead?

  Cissy saw Tibbie breathe in to volunteer, then lose courage and breathe out again. Ambition crammed Cissy’s heart to bursting and she leaped to her feet, spilling her water cup.

  “I could do the rough bits!” she said, amid a blizzard of breadcrumbs. (She had forgotten her mouth was full.) “Let me! You can tie me to the paddle wheel ’n’ hoist me up the mast ‘n’ shoot apples off my head—I don’t mind! I can be Pirate Nancy’s daughter ‘n’ walk the plank and get sold into slavery ‘n’ whatever you wanna write, Mr. Crew, an’ Miss Loucien can do the cryin’, ‘n’ actin”, ‘n’ all the wordy bits and the songs! Then physics won’t matter, will it? Can I? Oh let me! Please!”

  She did not look at anyone, because people always say no if you look at them. Her cheeks burned.

  “Sit down this instant, Cecelia Sissney!” said Miss March. “I told you my feelings on the subject of theatricals.”

  Curly stirred in his seat. “Sorry to hear you still have feelings of that kind, Miss May. I was hoping they’d tenderized since Salvation. All the world’s a stage, you know? And all the men and women merely players.”

  “I am in loco parentis, Mr. Curlitz. I owe it to her parents to try and be a mother to Cissy.”

  “I suppose that makes me her father,” muttered Everett, appalled. Cissy was still on her feet, eyes tight shut.

  Loucien, thwarted, angry, and still hankering to play Pirate Nancy herself, saw Cissy’s face . . . and laid her own feelings aside in an instant. She held up a finger to silence the others. “Well, that would be real swell, honey,” she said, with infinite gentleness, “but you’re working the plank with Max. There’s only so much one trouper can do, trust me. But we thank you for offering, we surely do.”

  Cissy sat back down in her chair, tears pressing against the backs of her eyes like cows in a cattle crib. Her future as an actress had just collapsed rather like a general store crushed by a grain silo. She was a clown, and she knew she ought to be grateful. But her lime-green dungarees made her behind look like a net of apples, and she never got to speak a word.

  “Tibs would make a real pretty heroeen!” suggested Kookie. “Or—tell you what!—I could be Kookie the Corsair!”

  “What did I just say, Habakkuk Warboys?” asked Miss March menacingly.

  Kookie won the day, though. Despite Miss March trying to act like his mother, despite Tibbie changing her mind when she saw the dress Curly sewed for Nancy, despite the playwright’s refusal to change the title to The Perils of Kookie the Corsair, Kookie Warboys did land the starring role.

  When he found out he had to wear a wig, dress, and dance shoes, he almost backed out again. But he comforted himself that he was two U.S. states away from home and among strangers: if any of his classmates had turned up in the audience, he might have died of embarrassment.

  The Perils of Pirate Nancy was a huge success. Somewhere between Elder Slater preaching hellfire and Max’s plank act, little Nancy got sold into slavery by her own father, carried aboard ship, attacked by pirates, captured by a mustachioed pirate chief, saved from death by the beseechings of the pirate chief’s beautiful (but pregnant) lover, then offered marriage by the said mustachioed pirate chief. When she refused to marry him, she was forced to walk the plank (not Max’s, which was far too bendy and needed for later). At the last moment, Nancy’s dashing cousin (Chad) swung to the rescue on the end of a rope, engaged in a sword fight (which he lost), but did not die, because the pirate chief’s jilted jealous pregnant girlfriend shot dead the pirate chief, who fell through a hatch in the Texas roof. (There was a mattress underneath the hatch to break Everett’s fall.)

  After the first performance, there was another mattress, nailed to the wall of the upper deckhouse, too. Chad Powers had worked out his stunt with infinite care, using a pair of compasses and a ruler: where to tether the rope, the length of rope to use, the arc of the swing, the ideal way to spotlight this feat of derring-do. . . .

  He was intended to derring-do the stunt himself, but at the first performance he forgot to put down his feet at the crucial moment, crashed into the deckhouse, and dislocated a shoulder.

  So at the second performance, Nancy’s cousin Chad became Cousin Benet, and one of the Dixie Quartet moved into the acting business. Nobody seemed to notice that Nancy’s cousin was as black as prime molasses and wore two-tone shoes: Benet, despite his age, was as handsome and springy elegant as a mountain lion, and there was an audible sigh from the women in the audience every time he swung a sword or plunged through the light toward his rendezvous with the mattress nailed to the deckhouse wall.

  At the end, Tibbie, in a red-white-and-blue, star-spangled dress, said a poem called “America the Bounteous.”

  The gasps, the ripples of applause, the shouts of encouragement—”You tell him, gal!”—the tangible hatred for the villain, the aaahs that greeted Tibbie in her patriotic frock, all these were more intoxicating than strong drink. Kookie quickly lost his misgivings about playing a girl and shamelessly worked up his part. He added in lines. He slipped in a joke or two. He was supposed to venture only a short way out onto the plank before Benet arrived but pushed his luck further and further until one night he actually fell in. It fetched such uproar and excitements from the audience on the bank that he made a regular thing of it. And Everett could not resist rewriting the end to include it. When Kookie fell in, pregnant lover, bold Cousin Benet, and a repentant father rushed to the offshore rails of the deckhouse roof and peered distractedly into the water. Was Nancy . . . ? Had Nancy . . . ? Were they too late to save Nancy from a watery death? They threw down a rope. They all hauled on it . . .

  And up came Nancy! Back from the brink of death, and plucky to the last!

  Being wardrobe master, Curly hated the change of script. “And how am I supposed to get the costume clean and dry twixt shows? Don’t blame me if it shrinks away to a dishrag!” But the audience loved it, and so did Kookie, because it meant he stole the play’s climax from Benet and Miss Loucien.

  “This shift is falling into holes,” muttered Curly, struggling to thread a sewing needle. Cissy had never seen him tetchy before. She went and threaded the needle for him and sat with him, trying to be helpful. She missed the old Curly with his big smile and endless quotations. “What’s the trouble, Mr. Curly, sir?”

  The trouble was Miss May March. As for the people on the riverbank, theater was a novelty to her. She had never seen it before. So she could not quite see the join b
etween Real and Pretend. Watching Curly (who played Nancy’s father) nightly selling his own daughter into slavery, she found she could not forgive him. So she had stopped speaking to him.

  Before they were even in sight of the landing at Woodpile, the Dixie Quartet was dancing up a storm on the stateroom roof.

  “Save your energy, why don’t yuh?” called Elijah from his own perch on the wheelhouse.

  “But this is Music Land, man!” called Benet. “We’s like to be reunited with the tunemakers on Hardup Hill. Just wait till you hear us pluck them chickens!”

  The three other people on the pilothouse roof—Kookie, Tibbie, and Cissy—mulled this over for a while. They never bothered to try and understand the Dog Woman’s odd Boston accent, because she only ever talked to her dogs. But with the quartet it was generally worth the effort. Kookie was usually first to work it out, but Tibs was a little in love with Benet, thanks to the play, and this time she got there ahead of him. “They say they can afford to get their banjos out of hock,” she said. “This is where they pawned them.” She slapped a mosquito that was just then supping on her blood, but Kookie had to pull the dead body out of the crook of her arm: Tibbie did not like touching bugs.

  The pawnshop in Woodpile was an Aladdin’s cave of other people’s belongings. Cissy did not like it. She could remember back to a time—before the Sunshine Queen—even before her parents had begun a new life on the Oklahoma prairie. She could remember seeing precious belongings slide across a pawnbroker’s counter—her father’s chess set, her mother’s christening spoon, a portrait of Queen Victoria—in return for a miserable crackle of bank notes. The money had been exchanged for even smaller tags of paper: rail tickets to Oklahoma. Unlike the quartet’s banjos, Poppy’s chess set would never be redeemed from the pawnshop in Arkansas; Queen Victoria would never again scowl down at Cissy from the living room wall, her eyes speaking of thrones and dominions.

  So Cissy waited outside the pawnshop, watching Benet, Boisenberry, Sweeting, and Oskar retune their beloved banjos.

  But Curly was in clover. He scoured the pawnshop shelves for new stage props: a sword, a cloak, a baby’s cot, a turban, a paste tiara. Their owners had hocked them, hoping to buy them back when happier times came along. But a year had passed, and now the pawnbroker was free to sell them—a wedding ring, a watch, a Sunday suit, a saddle—for whatever anyone would pay.

  Chad Powers found himself a galvanized bucket: he was working up a sideshow trick with electricity and a silver dollar.

  Elder Slater seized on some old poacher traps and a length of chain and carried them back to the ship triumphant, rattling them at passersby and shouting: “Behold the hooks and snares of the Devil! Will you be caught in the Evil One’s traps and be torn by demons for all eternity? Repent before it’s too late!” His gray hatchet face was almost cheerful.

  Meanwhile, down the road, Medora bought magnesium ribbon for her Photopia. Elijah bought a new pair of boots, Miss May March more coffee beans for her complexion. Everett found a Chinese launderer to sponge the worst of the mud and grime off his Prince Albert coat and pinstripe trousers without him having to part with them. Miss Loucien bought milk of magnesia for indigestion. “This baby must be real clever: it weighs on breakfast like the ’cyclopaedia Britannica,” she told the apothecary with a wince. “You coming to the show tonight?”

  Everett sent another telegram to Olive Town, asking for news. He called in too at the offices of the Inquirer and placed an advertisement:

  CALLING AT ALL PORTS

  DOWNRIVER OF WOODPILE

  THE BRIGHT LIGHTS THEATER

  AND SHOWBOAT COMPANY

  CIRCUS, THEATER, AND MUSIC HALL

  ALL IN ONE

  A SHOW FOR ALL THE FAMILY UNDER THE DIRECTION OF CYRIL CREW

  He believed in the power of advertising, but most of all he was hoping that his brother—wherever Cyril was—might pick up a copy of the Inquirer, see his own name, and realize how much he was missed.

  After that, Everett went to invest the bulk of the profits in emergency repairs. At present, the Sunshine Queen was simply drifting downstream without benefit of a paddle wheel, her feeble boiler power going only to fuel the calliope. Thanks to her rudder (and Elijah’s feet), she was steerable. But without the gigantic, romantic wheel rolling at her rear, she lacked her bygone glamour. More important, she lacked the ability to speed up, slow down, turn around, or sail against the current.

  George, the barber-surgeon, after buying a bottle of antiseptic, went to get himself a shave because, wherever he went, he liked to size up the competition. He dreamed of arriving one day in a place with no barbershop. There he would come to a halt, living in a two-room apartment over the shop, with real steel sinks and a hot-towel machine. Somewhere people believed in the science of phrenology and the benefit of a vigorous automated massage.

  It turned out he and the Woodpile barber knew each other from school days, and they ended up drinking lemonade together and snickering at newspaper advertisements for the new safety razor. Both agreed that it would never catch on.

  “Seen that paddler tied up at the dock?” inquired the Woodpile man.

  “Reckon I’m ridin’ it,” said George, who clipped his sentences as short as he clipped hair.

  “Huh! You’ll be lucky! That boat won’ be goin’ no place,” said the local barber. He was more the chatty breed of hairdresser and could not wait to recount the story of the last time the Sunshine Queen had visited town. George listened, watching his own face in the mirror losing color till it matched the towel around his neck.

  “It’s not even the money they’ll be after—more revenge for getting gypped,” the other man was saying. “I pity anyone aboard. . . .”

  “That right?” said George, buttoning his vest and reaching out a furtive finger toward his jacket slung over the next chair.

  “We-e-ell. There’s some powerful nasty men in the poker crowd around here. They don’t take kindly to cardsharps from outa town. That Mr. Black was a fool to gyp a bunch of Woodpile poker players. Even bigger fool to moor up here again.” As his school friend paused to wipe the razor on a towel, George leaped out of the chair, snatched up the jacket, and fled, dropping a dollar into one of the zinc washbowls near the door.

  He ran around the streets, collecting members of the Bright Lights like Noah collecting animals.

  Sure enough, back at the landing stage, they found that a chain had been threaded through the stern wheel of the Sunshine Queen, tethering her to the pier. And a notice had been tacked to the hull, labeling the ship

  It was written in red paint—at least they hoped it was red paint and nothing more ominous, involving squealing pigs and sharp knives.

  Chapter Nine

  Grasshoppering

  Quick! Quick! Everyone aboard!” said Everett Crew, standing at the end of the gangplank, lending a hand to the ladies. Even in a crisis he was a gentleman.

  A year earlier, the Black Hand had struck again. He had sailed into Woodpile calling himself Mr. Black, with money in his pocket, a mouthful of grand plans, and a thirst to play a friendly game of poker. Here in Woodpile, a whole nest of men had been left wronged and spitting mad.

  Mr. Black had played none too well that night, so eager was he to tell the men around the table his news: news of the Grand Scheme. The president of the United States had decided to move the capital of Missouri to Woodpile! Government had hushed it all up—you wouldn’t see a word about it in the newspaper—but the train companies were going bust. The people of America were turning away from the iron road and looking to the waterways again. Woodpile was the up-and-coming place to be—the future state capital of Missouri.

  Mr. Black said.

  So Mr. Black was going to sink all his money into building a shipyard there, and he was going to get very rich indeed.

  So said Mr. Black.

  The local cardplayers had enjoyed their poker that night, winning money from the luckless newcomer . . . but not as much as they
enjoyed the thought of Woodpile becoming the capital of Missouri. They trusted Mr. Black. He lost at cards, and what kind of cheat loses at poker? He clearly had money to spare, too, because he lost a couple hundred dollars and barely turned a hair.

  By the time the poker players all stretched themselves, scratched their bellies, looked at their pocket watches, and found that it was midnight, every man had invested heavily, buying shares in Mr. Black’s development: the Capital Idea Company.

  “Keep this to yourselves, men. I’m letting you in early.”

  Mr. Black said.

  They agreed to meet up again in five days’ time, for the first committee meeting of the Capital Idea Company, and said good night.

  Except that next morning the Sunshine Queen was gone. They were each hundreds of dollars down, and Mr. Black was some two thousand dollars better off . . .

  and nowhere to be found.

  The gamblers strapped on their guns. A posse of boats scurried downriver and up. They would find him and shoot his head off for him. How can you hide a three-story stern-wheeler, after all? But on the maze of waterways and creeks, amid river mists and rain like javelins, you can do just that. The Sunshine Queen had simply melted away, like a sugar wedding cake left out in a downpour.

  They could not believe their luck when, a year later, it tied up again at the landing stage, masquerading as a showboat.

  “Step lively, now,” said Everett. “Hurry up there, Mr. Powers. I strongly recommend a quick departure.”

  Since the Queen’s paddle wheel was broken and useless anyway, Chad took an axe and hacked two blades out of it so that padlock and chain slid off into the shallows. With agonizing slowness, the boat drifted out onto the river and into the grip of the currents. She was still in plain sight when the landing stage filled up with running figures pointing, shouting, cursing, shaking their fists.

  “I still say we should explain the situation to them,” said Miss March. “I feel sure they would understand that we have nothing to do with this Mr. Black Hand.”