“Posh!” declared the gambler.
“Would you care to bet your winnings to find out?”
St. Ives smiled. There was something about this child, preternatural and unnerving-and yet engaging, too. “I like your manner, lad. Always up the ante.”
At this point a burly steward with great muttonchop sideburns barged into the drawing room and jabbed a muscular digit into the gambler’s chest.
“See here, charlatan. And don’t think of taking a swipe at me with that fancy stump. I don’t like your kind. Gambling is only allowed when it’s honest and aboveboard.”
With that the steward reached out and seized a wad of the notes that still remained on the table.
“Is that your commission for overseeing the play?” St. Ives jibed.
“That’s the price a cheater pays.”
“He didn’t cheat,” Lloyd piped up behind the man. “I was watching.”
The steward withdrew his finger from St. Ives’s chest and whirled around.
“What are you?” he demanded, noticing the boy for the first time. “His hired monkey? A poker table is no place for young’uns. Get along with you! Or I’ll throw you to the bilge rats, you little shit.”
“I don’t know if the captain would be pleased to know you’re taking that money,” Lloyd returned without moving. “He might want some of it himself.”
A spark of anger and resentment flared across the steward’s face, mingled with a flush of surprise that someone so young could be both so astute and so matter-of-fact. But the boat’s whistle blew just then and some other passengers waltzed by, so that he became flustered and chucked the money back on the table and stomped out.
“Well, Monkey,” St. Ives said, grinning. “What a good team we make, eh? Here. Here’s your share. Rightfully earned and, from the look of you, rather needed.”
St. Ives swiped the notes the steward had returned to the table and stuffed them into the boy’s eager hands.
“If you are the savant you appear to be, who knows what we could achieve?” the gambler mused. “As partners.”
“Equal partners?” Lloyd inquired. “That’s the only kind of partnership I think works.”
“Right you are.” St. Ives smiled. “There’s wisdom in you, too.”
And so their little conspiracy began.
There was a sign in the dining saloon that St. Ives enjoyed. It read, IF YOU NEED TO CARRY LARGE SUMS OF MONEY, WEAR A MONEY BELT. AVOID GAMES OF CHANCE ON RIVERBOATS. Thanks to the gambler, Lloyd made a new friend and had something to look forward to other than reading his uncle’s letter yet again. He also made some much needed money. His parents were glad to have a little privacy, as their intimate life had suffered in recent times, and so let the boy wander the boat at will. Lloyd, meanwhile, was careful to keep the banknotes he accumulated for helping St. Ives hidden from his parents.
The Sitturds’ stateroom was in a sorry state, six feet square with crimson moth-eaten curtains, a narrow slat bed, and a mothball-scented dresser, but it was considerably more luxurious than the bales and boxes the deck passengers were forced to share with animals ranging from horses to chickens, all sheltering among the walls of crates they arranged, and all scrambling for space as cargo and passengers came and went and the manure was scooped.
A blasted and recently repaired boiler (which had scalded a billy goat and one of the crew members) required continuous adjustments and seemed to inhale fuel, so that there were regular and lengthy interruptions to the journey to allow for wooding parties to scour the shoreline. One of the passengers, who volunteered to assist with such an expedition in order to reduce his fare, was stricken with heart failure and had to be buried in a tea chest, while another was bitten by a snake. Then a cow leaped off the deck and tried to swim home to the Illinois side, only to have the bucktoothed lad whose family owned it make the mistake of trying to swim after it. Neither the hefty milk cow nor the overbite boy was seen again.
The fine packet boats operating between St. Paul and New Orleans were famous for their excellent cuisine. This was not one of those. Salt pork, mutton, and boiled potatoes and beans were the usual fare, although wine, stout, porter, and brandy could be found in abundance. Like stage drivers, steamboat captains tried to make the most of the daylight, pulling in toward shore when darkness fell. Dead trees, snags, and sandbars, not to mention smaller craft without illumination, posed a constant threat to travel at night, although most captains would run at reduced steam if the moon or starlight allowed. The crew was a blind barrel mix of Irish, German, blacks, and those St. Ives referred to as “pure muddy.” Fleets of rafts, with their cook shanties puffing out greasy odors of fried fish, could be seen en route to the sawmills. Not infrequently, what appeared to be the body of a man or a gassy inflated horse drifted by and, once, a dollhouse with a ginger cat aboard.
Travelers flowed back and forth on the gangplanks in chimney hats or swishing skirts. One afternoon the men had a shooting competition on the top deck, blasting at buzzards circling the remains of a runaway slave who had washed up on a sandbar. The weather was growing warmer and the bugs thicker, sultry nights becoming humid with whiskey and cigar smoke, perfume dabbed to wrists and crotches.
St. Ives was well acquainted with the ship’s chief entertainer, a singer named Viola Mercy, a tall buxom brunette whose lavender-scented pantaloons filled Lloyd’s mind with notions and cravings of a new and exquisitely painful kind. Thrice a day she performed in the dining saloon of the Fidèle, which was laid out around a dance-hall stage with a heavy velvet aubergine curtain. And thrice a day she would sing a song that the boy grew to love.
There’s a place I know
Where I always go
There to dream of you
And hope that you’ll be true
And someday I pray
That you’ll find your way
Back to the secret place
Within my heart.
He became obsessed with the songstress and her exotic appareclass="underline" ostrich feathers, silk stockings, lace brassieres. How he wanted to infiltrate her private domain and experience the majesty of this dark beauty. (In truth, she kept a flask of rye in her garter belt and had done as much singing on her back as she had onstage.)
Meanwhile, St. Ives opened the boy’s eyes to the larger world, relating to him the news of the day, with its cults of gangsterism becoming political forces-Tammany Hall warring with the Bowery Boys in New York, angry hordes descending on Mormons, Protestant secret societies with names like the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner murdering Catholics, abolitionists dragged through the streets, slave families broken, the women raped, the men castrated and lynched. St. Ives had dire warnings about what lay ahead, although he himself took no sides and indeed was chiefly concerned about how such turmoil might be turned to personal advantage. “In confusion there is profit, my young friend,” he told Lloyd.
More to the boy’s liking, however, the gambler let him examine the metal hand. The plates that formed the exterior were made of polished steel, but so well forged that they provided exceptional strength without the corresponding weight. Inside lurked the potential for a fantastic array of implements, from the throat-cutting blades that had appeared at the poker table to a choice of such accessories as cigar scissors, a lock pick, and a sewing kit-not to mention that the miniature compartments could also be used to hold coins or keys, vials of various potions (such as chloral hydrate), snuff, ink, even poison. However, St. Ives was not forthcoming with any intelligence about how he had come by it, until one evening.
It was a close night and a full moon shone down on the river, so the captain had the boiler fired. Lloyd had been encouraged out of the family’s cabin to allow his parents some time alone, a practice he was growing more and more curious about. Only the thump of the paddle blades stirred the quiet, so that the occasional sounds of a baying dog or the crashing of a caving bank reached the deck, where he found the gambler smoking a cigar, staring down at the wake.