The Clearing: A Novel Page 3

  “Mind if I come in?” Randolph asked.

  The little man looked up from his chair, then down at Randolph’s expensive shoes. “Mais, you can come in if you want, yeah,” he said.

  The mill manager stepped into the smell of hot enamel and the oaty essence of saturated steam, looking over at the generator and its attendant electrical panel, a black porcelain expanse containing meters and knife-blade switches and one rheostat the size of a small drum. He reached out and rotated its handle an inch, and the lights came up, their pulsing diminished. “Some of the contacts are dirty.”

  The engineer looked away.

  “Where’s your home?”

  The man looked back and saw the suit, the gold watch chain, the clean collar. “My house is in Tiger Island.”

  “You must know the other licensed engineers in town.”

  He nodded. “I know some. At the mills.”

  “What about at Nimbus?” Randolph blinked at the tap of a gong bolted to a beam above his head. The engineer stood up, gave a gleaming steel wheel a half turn, and the port and starboard piston rods slowed.

  “That’s way out in the swamp. I don’t hear much about him, me.”

  “He’s a German, I believe.”

  “That’s what I hear,” the engineer said, giving the throttle wheel another nudge. “A damned hun.”

  “You hear any news about that mill?”

  “What kind of news you want, you?” He leaned on the hot wheel and narrowed his eyes.

  “My brother is the lawman for the mill town. I haven’t seen him in four years.”

  A small bell hanging overhead on a spring coil rattled, and the engineer slung the valve wide, the engines paying the wooden pittman shafts out to the paddle wheel faster, the polished valve gear clacking up and down. “Wish I hadn’t seen my brother in four years,” he said. “I’d still have me a bank account.” He walked over and said something in French to the oiler, who nodded and walked out into the night.

  Randolph stood next to the starboard engine, watching the seven-foot piston shaft play in and out of the cylinder. “Are the valves always this noisy?”

  “Aw, that’s California cutoff for you.” He wiped his hands and shook the rag at the engine. “The damned machine’s older than me. Another ten or fifteen year you won’t find a engine like this working noplace. Things are changing over, yeah.” He stuffed a corner of the rag in his back pocket.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I been reading some.” The engineer held out his pointing finger. “A diesel engine turns thirty percent of its fuel to mechanical energy. With steam you lucky to get five percent.” He swatted the engine’s asbestos lagging, which was as white as a plaster cast. “You watch. Ten years. It’s scary, the way things go.”

  Randolph talked about steam engines, for that, too, was part of his education. After a while, the little engineer put on a glove and reached in between two rising and falling poppet-valve levers to retrieve a Mason jar of hot coffee. “You want some? The galley sent it down a couple hours ago.” He retrieved two ironware mugs from hooks under the main steam gauge and poured.

  The mill manager took a swallow of the strong dark roast, noting how it endured on his tongue. “Many boats like this still running?”

  The engineer sat down in his chair and put a foot against a long lever. Behind him, the piston rods hissed and spat like cats fighting. “ Non. Maybe two boats on the Natchez trade, one on Lake Pontchartrain and that direction. One on the Atchafalaya and Bayou Teche. Captain Cooley, he still runs up the Ouchita River where them poor people got no roads.” He took a drink. “But nobody’s making money. If our pilot put a log through the hull of this thing, we’d row home in the skiff and forget about it.”

  “Where would you work then?”

  “Ferries. The icehouse. Maybe a sawmill. They got some pissant rafting steamers I could work on.” He looked up at Randolph. “What you do? Lumber buyer? You dress too good for a salesman.”

  “I’m the new manager for Nimbus. My name’s Randolph Aldridge.”

  The engineer seemed unimpressed, but he put out his hand anyway. “Minos Thibodeaux,” he said.

  “Your family always live in Tiger Island?”

  “Since caveman days.” He poured another slug of coffee into his mug, then the mill manager’s. “Where you from?”

  “Pennsylvania.”

  “That’s where that snow flies.”

  “I haven’t heard much from my brother,” he said, pretending to read a gauge.

  Minos looked away, sniffed his mustache. “You lose track of him, yeah?”

  “He disappeared out west for a while.”

  “You come to check up on him or something?”

  “I’m going to run the mill and make sure he’s doing a good job.”

  The engineer gave him a hard look. “You’d fire your own brother?”

  “No. I mean, I’m worried about him.”

  Minos seemed to think about this. “Maybe you need to.”

  Randolph put his cup down next to an oilcan. “Why’s that?”

  “Some ’talian gentlemen down at Tiger Island would like to send him back to Pennsylvania.”

  The mill manager laughed. “He can get people perturbed, all right.”

  “Cut up in a jug.”

  Randolph turned his head away. “He’s a lawman,” he mumbled. “He’s bound to make a few enemies, I’d guess.”

  “These enemies was made before he met ’em.”

  Just then a big silver backing gong banged and Minos leaped to his throttle wheel and lever, reversing the machinery. The boat shuddered, backing out of whatever problem the pilot had steered it into.

  Randolph went up to the dark cabin deck and felt his way along the outside rail. The boat struggled along a bayou as narrow as a ditch, the icicle beam of the carbon-arc headlight igniting the tops of stumps rising from the obsidian water. Something like a longhaired wolf drifted toward him over the rail, and he flattened against the bulkhead as the moss-eaten limb gouged the window next to him and then retreated like a monster’s claw. His heart bumped up in rhythm as the branch dragged a life ring off a stanchion. The boat heeled, the pilot skinning the bank with the stern and heading for midstream, following the deep water of his memory.

  Later, from his hard, sour bunk, Randolph heard the sonorous whistle call its name to a landing, and for an hour he listened to the tolling of wooden barrels and the molten cursing of the mate. Then came the profound tone of that same oversized whistle and the sense that the boat was rocking away from more than just a mud bank, the paddle wheel slapping down the tarry water on a voyage beyond the things he knew. He thought again of his brother, a good swimmer who never feared the water, not even at night, and he fell asleep remembering the time he learned to float on his back, Byron’s fingertips training the bones in his spine to drift level and rise toward the air.

  The next day came on hot and foggy, and the steamer picked around fallen trees lined with red-eared turtles and fought pulpy rafts of water lilies, once yawing into a mile-deep carpet of the plants, and stalling. The mill manager was again in the engine room, speaking with the engineer when the pilot rang a bell for more power. Minos forced the long lever into its last notch and yelled for the firemen to shake the boiler grates. “ Fil d’putain, we won’t tie up until t’ree o’clock.”

  And he was right. The steamer rounded out of a bayou into a wide bay filled with salt-smelling water. On the eastern bank was a low town of wooden store buildings and warehouses, two large sawmills anchoring the upstream and downstream points. The Newman nosed into the public dock at two minutes past three and tied up among rafting steamers and hissing propeller tugs. The air smelled of coal smoke and stinking oyster shells, and beyond the muddy dock ran a street lined with several spattered Ford trucks and two caked wagons pulled by swaybacked mules. Randolph came down the stage plank between roustabouts and shouldered through a group of merchants and clerks come out to meet the boat. He navi
gated across the slurry of mud and clamshells that was the main street and got up on a boardwalk, knocking his shoes clean on the edge of the planks, then walking south toward the railroad station where the agent told him the train to Poachum would leave at six o’clock in the morning.

  He looked out at the track. “I thought it left at six in the evening.”

  The agent spat a slow rill of tobacco juice into something behind the counter. “Sometimes it does. Tomorrow it leaves at six in the morning.”

  He wanted to ask what kind of railroad allowed a twelve-hour variance, but he could sense already that he had to be careful in this town.

  The agent smiled a brown smile. “You from up North, ain’t you?”

  “Yes.” Randolph told him who he was.

  “Laney,” the agent said, not offering to shake hands.

  “Is there a place where I can hire an automobile?”

  The agent’s smile expressed an amber drop from the corner of his mouth. “Yeah. But what would you do with it?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The highway’s got water over it. You might get to Poachum. You might not.”

  Randolph pulled out his watch and wound it, matching it against the station clock. “Well, where’s the livery stable?”

  The stationmaster spat again. “Mister, you’ll tear the wheels off a buggy in them ruts out that way. And if you want to ride twenty-two miles horseback through the rain and flies, that’s okay by me, but you better get a fat horse that’ll float. If you don’t break off his legs you’ll have to row him through some low spots, and when you get where you’re going they’ll be more mud on you than him.”

  He looked through the bay window at a dark sky. “Is there a phone I can use?”

  “Where you want to call?”

  “Nimbus.”

  The agent chuckled while lowering his pencil to a form. “Phone line stops at Poachum. The agent does have a local wire going down to Nimbus.” He looked up. “I’ve heard even a big owl can take ’er down.”

  “I want to call the lawman down there.”

  “What for?”

  “I know him.”

  The agent bobbed his head. “And you still want to talk to him?”

  Randolph pinched the fat under his chin and took in a long breath. “When does the mill train get to Poachum so I can ride it to Nimbus?”

  “It don’t run regular.”

  The mill manager cocked his head and arched an eyebrow.

  “Okay, I’ll raise my man down there, if you can call him that.” The agent went to a wall phone, one of three in a line, and turned its crank a set number of turns, waited, cranked again, waited, then cranked once more, sending a short burst of electricity into the eastbound wire. When no one picked up on the other end, he walked to his telegraph key and sent a call. Both men watched the sounder in its resonator box, and in a minute it began to knock letters into the air.

  The mill manager shifted his weight when the message stopped. “Yes?”

  “Nimbus train gets into Poachum tomorrow around eight. You’ll make the turnaround for the mill, mister.”

  Randolph headed for the door, then stopped and looked back. “What do you know about that lawman down at Nimbus?”

  The agent unwrapped a plug of dark tobacco and opened his clasp knife, which he’d sharpened down to a talon. “I hear he don’t like garlic.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A short man, his hair like cotton in an aspirin bottle, walked through the station door carrying a double-barreled shotgun, a marshal’s badge dangling from his sagging coat. Behind him was a big, balding priest, smoking a briar pipe with a bent stem. “Sid,” the marshal said, “what’d that man want?”

  “Ticket to Poachum. He was asking about your friend at Nimbus.”

  The lawman looked after the mill manager, who was walking north along River Street. “His clothes fit too right.”

  “Sounds like he’s from up North,” the agent explained.

  “What’s he want with Byron?”

  Sid Laney shrugged. “At least he don’t look Italian.”

  The priest slapped his forehead like an idiot, chuckled, then followed the old marshal out into the sun. They walked down River Street among the musky trappers and wormy dogs to the office, a high-ceilinged box with a rusty jail cell at its rear. “Ah,” the priest said, stepping into the shade.

  On the main desk sat a pail full of murky ice holding two crockery bottles, their stoppers wired down tight. The men sat in a pair of squawking steamer chairs and slopped beer into a pair of mugs. The priest took a long draw, and the marshal came up for air with his white mustache sopping. They both blinked and for a long time said nothing. Across the street, a tugboat whistle gave a long hoot and a pilot cursed a deckhand in a rising harangue. The priest cleared his throat and Merville looked at him.

  “I’m giving a good homily this Sunday. It’s about Jesus throwing the money changers out of the temple.”

  “Methodists can’t go to no Catholic church.”

  The priest took another drink. “You’re not a Methodist.”

  “I was baptized one, me.”

  The priest leaned a black elbow on the desk. “You never darkened the door of any Methodist church. Your father was Catholic.”

  “Religion comes from the mamma.” The marshal waved his hand as though brushing away a fly. “You can give me the short side of your sermon right now.”

  The priest folded his hands. “It’s something you can relate to. It’s about how even though anger is natural, and sometimes to a purpose, it always has to be controlled.”

  The old man sucked his mustache. “Why you telling me that? You still mad I knocked down that trapper?”

  The priest shook his head. “The Walton man took thirty-six stitches and was unconscious for two days. You can’t tell me you weren’t excessively angry.”

  “Mais, non,” Merville said. “He was full of radiator-made and trying to kill little Nellie the whore with a beer bottle over at Buzetti’s. I wasn’t mad. I just did what I had to do, me.”

  The priest looked at him with expressionless eyes, a trick he used to make his parishioners form their own notions about how things really are. “Somehow I can’t believe that.”

  Merville took another drink. The beer had warmed and the mug formed no ring on the desk. “Father, if a nun had to face two drunk deckhands swinging razors on each other in a alley, she’d at least lasso one of ’em with her rosary.”

  The priest stood and drew off his mug, then wiped a finger over his long upper lip. “I’ll come by tomorrow, maybe.”

  “If she had a shotgun,” the marshal grumbled, “she might of used it. You can’t let people kill each other.”

  “Goodbye,” the priest said.

  “If you see that Yankee, let me know what he does. I don’t want him messing with Byron. Poor bastard’s got enough on his back as it is.”

  The priest’s face brightened, his hand on the doorknob. “You could pray for your friend.”

  Merville looked down at his empty mug. “I think God done fooled with that one enough.”

  Since the E. B. Newman wasn’t leaving until late the next morning, the captain allowed Randolph to keep his stateroom for two dollars, and he killed time at the boiler deck rail watching roustabouts roll two hundred barrels of molasses up the stage plank before nightfall. Later, he witnessed a thunderstorm walk in from the west and at sundown saw a ripping bolt take out the few electric lights along the street. When the rain stopped, he walked out on the cabin deck and listened to fast dance music—weeping clarinets and a stuttering trumpet coming from down an alley—and remembered it was Saturday night. A street lamp came on slowly, like a candle warming up, and he could see men, their boots lacquered with mud, slopping in and out of a doorway like bees in a hole. Somewhere a transformer detonated, and the lights failed again. On the wharf below, a sooty lantern rose above a crap game, then a short burst of doggy laughter split the air and a roustabout fell down
with a bottle in his hand, the ocher glass shattering in the kerosene light. Three mosquitoes stung the back of the mill manager’s neck and he hurried inside.

  Hours later, awakened by a crescendo of angry hollering, he pulled on his trousers and walked barefoot through the carpeted salon back to the rail. Minos, the engineer, was standing forward, his shirt off. “It’s the rousters,” he said, when Randolph walked up. “They getting in it now with them bastards off the Edenborn.”

  A crash of drunken shouts sailed up from the wharf, then a single yell and a skitter of boots. On the top deck, someone ran to the wheelhouse and a spotlight fired up, shining on the dock where a dozen black men grappled and rolled, their rotten shirts ripping, loose overalls straps whipping the air. Suddenly, two of them pulled straight razors and began a ritual circling, then another unfolded a long blade and swung into a screaming curse. The captain walked out on the roof of the Texas and hollered down to the big rousters, who were deaf with drink. The hulking mate, yawning and pulling on his galluses, walked up next to the captain, who told him, “Go down there and put an end to it.”

  The mate spat over the rail. “Can’t nothing stop them now.”

  The captain twisted around and called up to the pilot in the wheelhouse. “Blow shorts and see if that brings the policeman. We can’t load freight with dead niggers.”

  The whistle coughed up a gallon of water and issued a series of yelping blasts. Another razor came out of a shirt, and the mill manager’s mouth fell open as the blade drew a long red line across the face of the rouster who’d ridden the mule out of the river. Three men ran over from the downstream steamer and began swinging boots and fists. A man shrieked and fell on his back, bloody fingers pinching his stomach together as the riot closed over him like a muddy surf.