Thieves Of Mercy

FOUR

Unless some competent person of education, system, and brains is put over each division of this [River Defense] fleet it will, in my judgment, prove an utter failure. There is little or no discipline or subordination-too much “steamboat” and too little of the “man-of-war” to be very effective.

MAJOR GENERAL M. LOVELL TO GENERAL G.W. RANDOLPH, SECRETARY OF WAR, CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA

Samuel Bowater ran forward, reached the bottom of the ladder leading to the hurricane deck, pivoted around the rail, and raced up. He hit the upper deck running, passed the walking beam working up and down like a teeter-totter, made straight for the wheelhouse. A lifetime of his father’s strict instruction concerning the conduct of a gentleman, fifteen years of observing the decorum expected of a naval officer, were all obliterated by blind rage. Mississippi Mike Sullivan had set him up, played him like a flute. No one had ever done that to him before.

He reached the wheelhouse, threw open the door. He was breathing hard. In the window on the opposite side he caught his reflection, the picture of a feral and frightening thing, like one of Mr. Darwin’s ape-men. But Sullivan was not there.

“Where-where the hell is Sullivan?” Bowater gasped. Baxter, still at the helm, looked over at him. The cheroot was shorter now but still smoldering. His face was almost expressionless, maybe a bit amused. Men in a rage, looking to kill Sullivan, were probably common enough.

“Salon,” he said, nodding in that general direction.

Bowater cursed, slammed the door, stamped back across the hurricane deck. Sullivan must have gone down the starboard side ladder while Bowater charged up the port. He felt the fury ebb as he took the steps of the ladder fast and hit the main deck below. By the time he reached the salon door, his mood had changed from an irrational hysteria to a more controlled fury.

He kicked the door in, stamped into the big room. Oil lamps on the bulkheads lit the place with a warm, dull light. The riverboat men seemed to be celebrating, holding bottles aloft, shouting, while Bowater’s men stood in a tight and angry cluster to starboard.

“Captain Bowater!” Mike Sullivan extracted himself from the crowd, crossed the deck with hand extended. “Captain, that was a damn well-done thing, back there!”

The bonhomie, which would have irritated Bowater at any time, now made the fury boil again. “You bastard!” he shouted, taking a step toward Sullivan, so they were face to face, though Bowater had to look up to meet Sullivan’s eyes. “You son of a bitch, you played me… help you… steal a goddamned…”

“Ah, hell, Captain, we was just havin some fun! How we do it, here on the river. Come on, now, have a drink and forget it!”

Sullivan held up a bottle. Bowater drew back his arm and hit Sullivan in the face, as hard as he was able to drive his fist, hit him right in the jaw. The pain in his hand was like an explosion, as if he had shattered every bone clear up to his elbow.

Sullivan pivoted around and staggered back, but he did not fall, which was bad, because Bowater had reckoned on laying him out flat with that one blow.

The river pilot turned back to Bowater, blood running from his mouth, and his face was hard to read. Bowater shook out his hand, gasping at the pain, and got ready to take Sullivan on as he came. He had not been in a fistfight since his first year at the Navy School, but he was ready. The blood was up.

The sullen tension in the salon broke like a thunderstorm and the space was filled with shouting and pounding feet. Bowater’s blue-water sailors stormed across the cabin, leaping over tables, snatching up chairs, howling like banshees, and the riverboat men raced to meet them halfway, and then they were into it.

Sullivan straightened, balled his hands into fists. Behind him Bowater saw Ruffin Tanner, holding the back rails of a chair in both hands, drawing it back like he was swinging a baseball bat.

The chair came around, describing a wide arc, and hit Sullivan on the neck and shoulders, exploding into fragments, knocking Mississippi Mike sideways and a bit off balance.

Sullivan wheeled around to face this new threat. Tanner was standing there with the shattered remains of the chair in his hands, like twin clubs. He swung for Sullivan’s head and Sullivan snatched the chair rail in midswing, and while his arm was up Tanner drove the other rail into Sullivan’s gut, like he was thrusting a cutlass into him. Sullivan doubled over, and as his face came down it met Tanner’s knee coming up.

Damn, Bowater thought. His past fistfights were more gentlemanly affairs, boxing, really. This was a brawl, ugly and brutish.

Sullivan staggered, but still the man did not go down. He made a wounded and cornered animal sound, swung a big paw, and connected with Tanner’s head, sending the sailor sprawling back into Seth Williams and one of the riverboat men, who were bound together with left arms while they flailed at one another with their right fists. The three of them fell in a heap on the deck.

Bowater understood the rules of engagement now. He cocked his arm, ready to smash Sullivan on the neck, then considered what that would do to his shattered hand. He cocked his leg instead to give him a solid kick in the lower back, when out of the corner of his eye he caught an image of a man sailing through the air, actually airborne, a flash of red-checked shirt and thick beard coming at him, and then the man hit him at waist level and carried him down to the deck.

They came down in a tangle of confused limbs, with no room to fight. Bowater might have had only a half-dozen fights in his life, but he had years of fencing, and that gave him an instinctual sense for an opening. He saw one now, slamming the man’s face with his left elbow, one, two, three solid blows before the riverboat man was able to extract himself. Bowater rolled on his back, planted a foot on the man’s chest, and sent him sprawling.

Scrambling to his feet, Bowater shouted in agony as he thoughtlessly put his weight on his right hand. The salon was a battlefield now, blue-water sailors in their bibbed pullovers mixing it up with the wild men of the General Page, clusters of fighting men, knots of two and three hammering with fists and parts of broken chairs. A table flew across the room and brought Dick Merrow down, and the sailor took one of the riverboat’s black gang down with him.

Bowater gulped air, considered shouting for the men to stop it, but that was absurd, he could see it. They would stop when they could no longer move.

This is insane!

And then from his right, unseen, a fist came around and plowed into Bowater’s stomach, doubling him over. Bowater flung himself shoulder first into his attacker, bringing them both down to the deck. With his left hand he snatched up part of the chair Tanner had hit Sullivan with, all concern for the relative sanity of the situation lost in his powerful need to hit the son of a bitch who had punched him.

At the moment that Tanner’s chair met Sullivan’s unyielding back, Hieronymus Taylor was standing in the clear space between the boilers and the massive frame of the General Page’s engine. He was listening to the Page’s chief engineer, the short, wiry, nearly bald-save for a fringe of greasy hair around his head-Spence Guthrie. Guthrie was complaining, not an unusual circumstance. This time the subject was shortages in Memphis: coal, boiler plate, machine shops, piping, sheet lead, prostitutes.

Taylor ’s eyes wandered over the main steam line, caught the little bits of rust lurking against flanges. His ears heard, along with Guthrie’s litany of complaints, a noise from the crosshead that was not quite right. The pssst and thump of steam and piston told him that somewhere an alignment was off, just a bit. But it was not his engine room.

“Got three spare fire tubes. Three. And when they’s gone, god-damned if I know where we’ll get more,” Guthrie was saying. He turned to the fireman. “Come on now, get that damper open, all the way! She’ll take three more pounds of pressure or I ain’t Spence Guthrie!”

Taylor ’s eyes flickered over the steam gauge mounted on the face of the scotch boiler. The needle was creeping up toward fifteen pounds per square inch, though Taylor was certain the boilers were not meant to run much more than ten.

“Three more pounds, Spence? Gonna pop them safety valves, ain’t ya?” Guthrie snickered. “Would, if the safety valves wasn’t tied down! Best part about bein part of this army fleet. No damned inspectors crawlin around the engine room, tellin ya this and that. Man can do what he wants, engine room’s his castle, way it should be. You must get an earful on them navy boats, huh?”

Taylor shook his head. His eyes moved to the top of the long, narrow locomotive boilers that provided steam to the walking beam engine. He could see the tatty bits of twine tied around the lever arms of the safety valves, preventing them from opening under the pressure of excess steam. He looked back at the steam gauge, the needle creeping up as the furnace sucked air into the fire. “On them big ships, maybe, but I don’t get bothered much. Old man don’t know enough engineering to stick his nose in.” By “old man,” Taylor meant Bowater, who was six years his junior.

“Well, you know Sullivan, he can’t keep his goddamned nose outta my business. But I just give him a swift kick in the ass and it’s settled.”

Guthrie and Mississippi Mike Sullivan had been together for the past year, but Taylor had known them both much longer than that. Sailors and black gang moved in and out of the universe of riverboat men on the Mississippi, but at the center of that universe was a core of pilots and engineers and captains who had been drifting around the river for years. They were a small town. They knew one another.

Taylor nodded absently. “Uh-huh. Sullivan can use a swift kick, now and again.” The needle in the pressure gauge was trembling around fifteen pounds per square inch.

It was the first time Taylor had been in an engine room since abandoning the crippled Yazoo River below New Orleans. He had started that fight as chief engineer, ended it as a coal passer, the last man standing. An exploding boiler had done in the rest of the black gang at the very moment that Taylor had been crammed in a far corner of the room, fixing a broken fire pump, out of the way of the blast. It fell to Taylor to finish the work the explosion had left incomplete, and with a shotgun he had killed the shrieking, scalded human forms that were all that was left of two of his men. One of them, James Burgess, as close to being a friend as any man Taylor had known.

Taylor forced his eyes from the gauge. Beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead. It was well over one hundred degrees in the engine room, but the sweat he felt on his face and palms, on his back, was something different. A cold sweat. He could smell himself.

“Got to get the hell outta Vicksburg, ya see?” Guthrie was still talking. “On account of how we commandeered that coal barge, and thank your skipper for his help. Back off on the steam once we gets up around the bend.”

Taylor nodded again. Suddenly he was not feeling well. He heard a thump on the deck overhead and it made him start. Then he heard another, and with it a muffled cry and he cocked his head, turned his ear to the fidley, that open space above the engine room that ended with the cabin roof above.

There was a fight going on, a brawl topsides. Taylor recognized the sounds-he had heard them often enough, on riverboats and in taverns and on waterfront streets. It was easy enough to guess who was doing the fighting and why. As every river man knew, when salt- and freshwater mix, it causes a chaotic, roiling effect.

“Gotta go, Spence. I’ll stop by later,” Taylor said quickly and headed up the ladder.

“What the hell’s your hurry?” Spence called to his back. Guthrie had not heard the sounds of the fight over the hiss of steam, the roar of the boiler, and Taylor did not enlighten him.

He stepped out of the fidley into the night air and breathed deep. He had left his gray uniform frock coat on the workbench below, and his white cotton shirt was wet with perspiration. It was fifty degrees cooler topside than in the engine room, and though the night was not cold by any means, Taylor shivered. He was glad to be on deck.

He hurried down the side deck, the sounds of the fight loud now. He could hear breaking furniture, cursing, shouting, the thump of bodies hitting structural members of the vessel. He burst through the door into the salon, into a world of chaos.

The fight was fully under way, with sailors and river men flailing away at one another, men rolling on the deck, swinging roundhouse punches, biting, kicking, clawing. Hard to see who was winning. No one.

To his right, Taylor saw Angus Littlefield, rated seaman, with arms pinned behind him by the one they called Doc, while another of the riverboat crew was beating him senseless. Taylor had no concern for Littlefield one way or another-it was how he felt about most sailors-but now Littlefield was one of his people getting whipped by two of them.

He shouted and flung himself at the cluster of men, pushing Littlefield out of the river men’s grasp as he elbowed one and drove a fist into the jaw of the second, the kind of move that takes dozens of brawls to master.

Littlefield went down, so did the man holding him, but the man punching came up with a boot in the stomach and Taylor was doubled over. But he knew what was coming, stumbled aside, felt the second kick swish by his head and miss. He straightened. The kicker was off balance now, and Taylor ’s fist plowed into his hedgerow of beard. The man went down and Taylor pounced on him.

Taylor ’s fists fell like hammer blows, too fast for the man to fend off. Over twenty years of wrenching in engine rooms had rendered his hands and arms powerful. He felt his control slipping, slipping. A brawl was supposed to be cathartic, but now every blow he struck just ratcheted his fury up further and further. He was shouting, “Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch!”

A brogan connected with his left side, knocked him off the bleeding man he had been pummeling and onto the deck. The foot hit him again, in the stomach, but his muscles were clenched and he hardly felt it. The river man kicked again. Taylor caught the foot in his arm, pulled, and the man went down, and Taylor was up and on him, kicking him again and again, shouting incoherently. The room seemed to resolve into shades of red, and his screaming seemed to meld into the shrieks of James Burgess an instant before the silencing blast of the shotgun.

The man on the deck was curled up, fetal position, and Taylor ’s kicks were landing on shins and arms, so Taylor stopped kicking him, grabbed him by the hair, and pulled him half to his knees. He grabbed the collar of the river man’s filthy checked shirt, held it with the iron grip of his left hand, and began to hammer the man’s face with his right, and there was nothing the man could do to stop him, so powerful and relentless was Hieronymus Taylor.

Taylor no longer had any sense of what was happening, of the fight around him, of the noise, which had fallen off to nothing, he could only keep hitting and screaming. He felt hands on his arms and his shoulders, pulling him back, and he jerked and twisted and flailed out, but the hands had him tight, pulled him away until his grip on the riverboat man’s shirt was broken, his bloody face out of reach.

The hands pulled him back, and he twisted and saw that it was Ruffin Tanner holding him on one side, blood streaked across his face. On the other side, Dick Merrow, his gray bibbed sailor shirt ripped halfway in two. And still Taylor fought.

“All right, Chief, all right!” Tanner shouted. “Fight’s over, damn it!”

Taylor stopped flailing. The room came back into focus. He could hear his own breath, the loudest thing in his ears. The hands were still holding him tight, and he twisted, angry and resentful, and they let him go.

He looked around the room. The chairs and tables were everywhere, not one still standing. The men had stopped fighting now. Bloody men, hurt men, some nursing limbs or holding handkerchiefs against bleeding wounds.

They were looking at him. Looking at him like he was some kind of lunatic. In that place of insanity, they were looking at him as if he had done something savage and inhuman. He turned from them all and stormed out of the wrecked salon.