Thomas Leathers, who had built and captained the first eight steamboats named Natchez.
Still, Wilbur would normally have been looking forward to Tall Stacks, especially since his Natchez was scheduled to race against the Belle of Louisville and the Delta Queen once they arrived. A previous Natchez had famously raced (and lost to) the Robert E. Lee, a scene celebrated in the huge painting that dominated the main salon on the boiler deck.
But the rumors Wilbur was hearing rather dampened any enthusiasm he might have mustered. Wilbur ‘talked’ often enough with Jeremiah Smalls, his one confidant on the Natchez and the boat’s chief pilot for the last dozen years. According to Jeremiah, it appeared that the current owners of the Natchez were considering ‘options’ for making the boat more profitable – and some of those options terrified Wilbur, seeing as this boat was also his prison.
Over the years, then the decades, Wilbur told himself that his was a just sentence; he’d killed Carpenter in a rage, and so he deserved this exile on the boat he’d built for committing the sin of murder. He deserved losing Eleanor, who must now be ninety years old or already dead. He deserved the punishment of never knowing his son or daughter, if Eleanor had perhaps remarried and had other children, if perhaps there were grandchildren of his out in the world.
Justice. Karma. Payment for his sins. Wilbur had been brought up Methodist, but he’d lost his faith somewhere along the way. He didn’t know if there was a God or not, but whether it was God’s hand or simple fate that had marooned him on his own vessel, it was his sentence to bear.
It was a bright day in New Orleans, and Wilbur hadn’t taken in steam in hours. Even filled with steam and willing himself to be visible, in sunlight he’d be little more than a passing wisp of cloud, perhaps a stray, soggy refugee from the stacks or the ’scape pipes or a leaking radiator. But Wilbur was content to be invisible at the moment. He walked the main deck – at least, that was his perception of what he was doing, though he’d seen his reflection in a window or mirror many times over the decades, and to an outsider, he was a specter gliding soundlessly just above the boards. There were far more people on board than usual for the Natchez; it was looking like this would be a profitable trip, and he entertained the thought that this might change the minds of the consortium that owned the boat.
As he turned the corner of the promenade and moved toward the gangway leading to the dock, three young men, laden with odd pieces of equipment, were coming toward him, talking excitedly among themselves. They’d come aboard the night before: two brothers, Ryan and Kevin Forge, and Sean Venters, a cousin. According to Jeremiah, they had a cable television TV show (both cable and television being technologies that simply made Wilbur shake his steamy head in mingled wonder and disgust) called The Dead Report, where they investigated the paranormal. They were aboard looking for the Natchez’s nonexistent ghosts … and especially Steam Wilbur.
‘The EMF fields are fluctuating like crazy,’ Sean was saying to Ryan as Kevin filmed their interaction, walking backward. ‘We’re close to something.’ Wilbur had to step/glide aside quickly to avoid having Kevin pass directly through him – he didn’t intend to give the ghost hunters anything to talk about on their show.
‘Supposedly there’s a ghost around here – a little girl named Lizbeth,’ Ryan said. He was dark-haired and muscular, with tattoos crawling his arms (another new societal change that made Wilbur shake his head – even the sailors Wilbur had known in the war hadn’t defaced their bodies this much). ‘If we can find a cold spot, maybe we can make contact with her …’
Wilbur let the trio pass him, then continued around to the dock side of the ship.
The Natchez was bustling with activity everywhere. The dock side of the main deck was swarming with visitors and passengers, the air was alive with chatter as deckhands and roustabouts doubled as bellboys, carrying luggage from the dock onto the steamboat and up to the staterooms and cabins on the boiler deck.
Wilbur could see Captain Marjorie Montaigne looking like she’d just stepped out from the late 1800s in her captain’s uniform with its ostentatious piping and embroidery. Montaigne had taken over as captain of the Natchez almost a decade ago; as far as Wilbur was concerned, if none of the captains since his death had been as competent as he’d been, he had to grudgingly admit Montaigne had managed to turn around or at least stop the decline of the Natchez during her tenure.
She was also a lesbian, and admitted that openly – another new societal twitch that Wilbur didn’t quite understand or agree with. In his day, one kept such things tightly closeted and one never talked about them. Still, he had to allow that Montaigne did her job as captain well enough, and though it was still a rarity to see a female captain on the river, she was more than a match for the sometimes crude and misogynistic crewmembers. Wilbur’s own aunt, Blanche Leathers, had become captain of the Natchez way back in 1894, long before women were at all common in the workplace, let alone running a steamboat on the Mississippi. At least Montaigne was following a Leathers tradition, even if she wasn’t family.
Captain Montaigne was greeting arrivals at the gangway leading down to the wharf as Wilbur drifted past her, unseen. He’d overheard earlier talk from the captain that there might be several wild card aces among the entertainers as well as the passengers at various points along the cruise; in fact, the Jokertown Boys, a joker boy band that had been famous a decade and a half ago, had been aboard for some time now, having most recently played the night before. Their supposed music failed to impress Wilbur, who still preferred the big band sound of the ’40s and early ’50s, or classic New Orleans jazz. The band’s keyboardist, ‘Gimcrack’ – a stupid name, in Wilbur’s opinion – had also been hired to play the boat’s calliope during the cruises, though at the moment it was silent, the boilers still waiting to be fully fired up tomorrow evening when the Natchez would be under way.
He saw Kitty Strobe, the junior pilot for the Natchez, walking toward the stairs, probably heading up to the pilothouse to help Jeremiah with preparations for getting under way. As usual, despite the New Orleans heat, she was wearing a large baggy sweater and long pants, as well as large dark sunglasses. Wilbur smiled to himself: he knew why she dressed that way, even if no one else on the boat was aware of it.
Captain Montaigne was speaking with a man who looked distressingly like a cartoon fox, accompanied by a woman who sported cat’s ears, nose, and whiskers in an otherwise normal face. Jokers, Wilbur thought. Or aces … ‘Mr Yamauchi, Ms Otto, welcome aboard,’ the captain said with her Cajun accent. ‘I’m glad to see both of you. Your equipment and luggage arrived yesterday. I have your stateroom ready; your luggage is there waiting for you. I assume you’ll want to take a look at the Bayou Lounge, as that’s where you’ll be performing your act; I’ll have one of the deckhands escort you up there. The Jokertown Boys will be sharing the bill with you …’
Her voice trailed off as Wilbur drifted on past her and up the staircase, causing a descending deckhand to shudder as Wilbur passed partially through the man. Since the boilers were still cool, Wilbur was invisible, barely warm, and relatively dry at the moment.
Wilbur continued up past the boiler deck and texas deck until he was standing on the open hurricane deck atop the boat. Wilbur stood near the calliope, a classic Thomas J. Nichol – built steam calliope salvaged from the sunken remains of the side-wheeler Island Queen, destroyed by fire. Wilbur had paid to lovingly (and expensively) have the calliope restored. The acquisition of the calliope had been one of Wilbur’s proudest accomplishments when he’d built this iteration of his family’s Natchez boats, that and the fact that he’d also been able to salvage murals and paintings from the eighth Natchez, built by his grandfather.
He’d built the Natchez to be as much a part of him as he was now part of it.
Neither
