Joe felt kind of bad about that. Frank had just been looking for someone to blame, which was understandable enough.
But it wasn’t Joe’s fault. He had looked after Nick and Jase as well as he could. It wasn’t his fault that they had left Beluthahatchie. And damned if he was going to let some Los Angeles shyster tell him that it was.
Cincinnati, he thought hopefully, in the morning. And then a lot of downtime, while barge traffic languished and the Mississippi was made safe again. Time in which Captain Joe would probably not be employed.
At least it would give him a chance to get his video collection in order.
Bernard Herrman kettledrums boomed through his mind. He pictured the Argonauts’ galley moving up the river, drums beating time to the oars, while invisible gods and goddesses bickered overhead. The door to the pilothouse opened, and his bowman came in. “Coffee, skip. And some beignets.”
“Thanks,” Joe said. He had barely slept in the two days since Beluthahatchie had got off its sandbar in the Lower Mississippi. He was the only crewman aboard certified by the Coast Guard, and he wanted to be on hand at every moment of the treacherous passage.
The bowman, who shared his watch, dropped the coffee cup into its waiting holder, and put the plate of beignets within Joe’s reach. Joe reached for one of the beignets, but they were fresh from the deep-fryer and burned his fingers. He dropped the beignet and licked confectioner’s sugar from his fingers. And then the water began to dance around him, thousands of little wave-crests criss-crossing the river’s still surface in the light of Beluthahatchie’s floodlights. He could feel a trembling run through the towboat, shiver through the wheel beneath his fingers. To port and starboard, whole forests waved madly in the darkness.
“Aftershock,” he said to his bowman. He had seen this before.
But the aftershock didn’t die. Instead the wave peaks grew taller, and Joe could see foam forming in streaks along the surface. The vibration increased. The plate of beignets threatened to slide onto the floor, and Joe’s heart beat like the Argonauts’ kettledrums. His hand hovered over the engine throttles, but he didn’t know whether it would be safer to throttle up or down, so he decided not to make a change.
“Go get the other watch,” he told the bowman. “I want as many pair of eyes up here as possible.” The aftershock could stir up all kinds of crap in the channel.
The bowman nodded and left the pilothouse in a hurry. Spray bounded over Beluthahatchie’s blunt bow. And then the pilothouse door slammed, and the bowman was back, his eyes wild.
“Big wave!” he shouted, one finger pointing aft. “Just behind us!” Joe’s hand slammed the throttles forward before he looked over his shoulder. The turbines roared to a higher pitch as Joe craned his neck aft, searching the leaping water for sign of the overtaking wave. Joe’s heart gave a lurch. There it was, a big black wall moving across the leaping, foam-flecked water. It had to be at least fifteen feet high, and it was about to climb right up Beluthathatchie’s ass. Tsunami. The great sea-wave caused by an earthquake.
Joe had never heard of a tsunami on a river before.
“Sound the collision alert!” Joe yelled. He didn’t want to take his hands off the controls, but the off-duty watch needed to be ready for what was going to hit them. The other watch, plus any other human being within hearing distance of the signal.
The bowman threw himself across the pilothouse and the alarm blared out. White water boiled under Beluthahatchie’s counter as the turbines redlined. Joe peered at the great wave rising astern, tried to judge its speed relative to the boat.
Still overtaking. Damn it.
The bridge telephone rang. The off-duty watch, trying to find out what was happening.
“Answer that!” Joe snapped. Calculations leaped through his mind. If the wave rolled over the towboat’s stern, it could sweep Beluthahatchie from stern to stem, bury it beneath tons of water. The boat might survive that, he reckoned, or it might not. And if the wave caught the boat broadside, Beluthahatchie would almost certainly capsize.
There was one possible escape, Joe thought. And that was to keep forward of the crest, by using the wave’s own power.
He gripped the wheel with one hand, the throttles with the other. The bowman, shouting into the bridge telephone, was looking aft with eyes wide as saucers. “Hoo-aaah!” Joe shouted in a voice intended to be heard on the other end of the telephone. ” Hang on! We goin’ surfing, podnah!” Joe pulled the throttles back, saw the wave loom closer. He let it come till he felt the wave just begin to lift Beluthahatchie’s stern, then throttled forward again. Turbines shrieked. The boat rose, and Joe felt a flutter in his stomach, panic rising in his throat.
Joe throttled way back. The boat continued to lift. The foaming curl at the wave top loomed closer, then stopped, hanging over the stern. Exultation screamed through Joe’s veins.
“Yeeow! Hang ten, baby!”
He adjusted the throttles so that he was neither climbing the face of the wave, nor dropping forward. The power of the wave itself was doing most of the work.
Joe’s inner ear swam. There was a sense of movement swirling on the other side of the pilothouse windows, and Joe felt panic burn along his nerves. He threw the wheel over, shoved the throttles forward. The boat straightened.
Joe took a gasping breath. He had almost lost the boat. If he’d let the wave push him to one side or the other, he’d have swung broadside to the wave and been rolled under.
Debris boomed on the bottom of the hull. The boat swayed: Joe corrected. The bowman was standing in the pilothouse staring aft, his knuckles clenched around the telephone.
“Put that down and call the Coast Guard!” Joe said. “Tell them we got a tsunami on the Ohio heading for Golconda! Move it, there, podnah!”
The bowman lunged for the radio. Joe’s head lashed back and forth, peering behind to make certain the tsunami wasn’t about to fall on them, staring forward into the night to see if the wave was going to run them right onto an island.
“Careful baby baby careful just a little more a little more juice gawdamn…” Words burbled from his lips in accompaniment to his thought. The blackness off the port bow was broken by light. Joe peered at it, trying to make certain the light wasn’t a reflection on the pilothouse glass… Golconda. Already. He didn’t dare think about how fast they were going. Whoah. He juiced the throttle, swung the boat to starboard. He’d almost lost it there. And if that was Golconda, he thought, that meant he was coming up on a big island that sat smack in the middle of the river. And if he made it past the island, the river was going to make a sweeping ninety-degree curve to the right, and that meant the big wave was going to get complicated… Adrenaline screamed through his veins. He goosed the throttle, shaved the wheel just a little. Joe wanted to steer down the face of the wave, moving laterally to port as the wave kept rolling down the channel. He needed to get well clear of that island before he impaled the boat on it…
“Whoah whoah whoah you cochon just a little baby there you go…” He was inside the wave’s curl, heading slantwise down the wave. Golconda was dead ahead. Now if he could just head the boat a little to port, get it moving straight again…