George Martin - Fevre Dream

“Problem is,” the bald man said, “there ain’t no way for us to know what name they painted on her. So findin’ her ain’t goin’ to be easy. We can board ever’ boat on the river, lookin’ for these people you want, but…” He shrugged.

“No,” Abner Marsh said. “I’ll find her easier than that. No amount of paint is goin’ to change the Fevre Dream so I can’t tell her when I see her. We got this far, now we keep goin’, all the way down to New Orleans.” Marsh tugged at his beard. “Mister Grove,” he said, turning to the mate, “fetch me those pilots of ours. They’re lower river men, they ought to know the steamers down here pretty well. Ask ’em if they’ll go over those piles of newspapers I been savin’, and check off any boat that’s strange to ’em.”

“Sure thing, Cap’n,” Grove said.

Abner Marsh turned back to the detectives. “I won’t be needin’ you gentlemen any more, I don’t believe,” he said. “But if you should happen to run into that steamer, you know how to reach me. I’ll see that you get well paid.” He stood up. “Now if you’ll come back to the clerk’s office, I’ll give you the rest of what I owe you.”

They spent the rest of the day tied up at Vicksburg. Marsh had just finished supper-a plate of fried chicken, sadly underdone, and some tired potatoes-when Cat Grove pulled up a chair next to him, a piece of paper in hand. “It took them most of the day, Cap’n, but they done it,” Grove said. “There’s too damn many boats, though. Must have been thirty neither of ’em knew. I went over the papers myself, checkin’ the advertisements and such to see what they said about the size of the boats, who the masters were, that kind of thing. Some names I recognized, and I was able to cross off a lot of stern-wheelers and undersized boats.”

“How many left?”

“Just four,” said Grove. “Four big side-wheelers that nobody’s ever heard of.” He handed the list to Abner Marsh. The names were printed out carefully in block capitals, one beneath the other.

B. SCHROEDER QUEEN CITY OZYMANDIAS F. D. HECKINGER

Marsh stared at the paper for a long time, frowning. Something there ought to mean something to him, he knew, but he couldn’t figure out what or why for the life of him.

“Make any sense, Cap’n?”

“It ain’t the B. Schroeder, ”Marsh said suddenly. “They were puttin’ her together up to New Albany the same time they were workin’ on the Fevre Dream.” He scratched his head.

“That last boat,” Grove said, pointing, “look at those initials, Cap’n. F. D. Like for Fevre Dream, maybe.”

“Maybe,” Marsh said. He said the names aloud. “F. D. Heckinger. Queen City. Ozy-” That one was hard. He was glad he didn’t have to spell it. “Ozy-man-dee-us.”

Then Abner Marsh’s mind, his slow deliberate mind that never forgot anything, chucked the answer up in front of him, like a piece of driftwood thrown up by the river. He’d puzzled over that damn word before, very briefly and not so long ago, when flipping through a book. “Wait,” he said to Grove. He rose and strode off to his cabin. The books were in the bottom drawer of his chest of drawers.

“What’s that?” Grove asked when Marsh returned.

“Goddamn poems,” Marsh said. He flipped through Byron, found nothing, turned to Shelley. And it was there in front of him. He read it over quickly, leaned back, frowned, read it over again.

“Cap’n Marsh?” Grove said.

“Listen to this,” Marsh said. He read aloud:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

“What is it?”

“A poem,” said Abner Marsh. “It’s a goddamn poem.”

“But what does it mean?”

“It means,” said Marsh, closing the book, “that Joshua is feelin’ sorry and beaten. You wouldn’t understand why, though, Mister Grove. The important thing that it means is that we’re lookin’ for a steamboat name of Ozymandias.”

Grove brought out another slip of paper. “I wrote down some stuff from the papers,” he explained, squinting at his own writing. “Let’s see, that Ozy… Ozy… whatever it is, it’s workin’ the Natchez trade. Master named J. Anthony.”

“Anthony,” said Marsh. “Hell. Joshua’s middle name was Anton. Natchez, you say?”

“Natchez to New Orleans, Cap’n.”

“We’ll stay here for the night. Tomorrow, come dawn, we make for Natchez. You hear that, Mister Grove? I don’t want to waste a minute of light. When that damn sun comes up, I want our steam up too, so we’re ready to move.” Maybe poor Joshua had nothing left but despair, but Abner Marsh had a lot more than that. There were accounts that wanted settling, and when he was through, there wasn’t going to be any more left of Damon Julian than was left of that damned statue in the poem.

Aboard the Steamer Eli Reynolds, Mississippi River, October 1857

Abner Marsh did not sleep that night. He spent the long hours of darkness in his chair on the hurricane deck, his back to the smoky lights of Vicksburg, looking out over the river. The night was cool and quiet, the water like black glass. Once in a while some steamer would heave into view, wreathed in flame and smoke and cinders, and the tranquility would shatter while she passed. But then the boat would tie up or steam on, the sound of her whistle would die away, and the darkness would mend itself, grow smooth once again. The moon was a silver dollar floating on the water, and Marsh heard wet creaking sounds from the tired Eli Reynolds, and occasionally a voice or a footfall or maybe a snatch of song from Vicksburg, and always beneath it all the sound of the river, the rush of the endless waters surging past, pushing at his boat, trying to take her with them, south, south, to where the night folks and the Fevre Dream were waiting.

Marsh felt strangely filled with the night’s beauty, with the dark loveliness that Joshua’s gimp Britisher had been so moved by. He tilted his chair back against the old steamer’s bell and gazed out over the moon and stars and river, thinking that maybe this would be the last moment of peace he would ever know. For tomorrow, or the day after for sure, they would find the Fevre Dream, and the summer’s nightmare would begin again.

His head was full of forebodings, full of memories and visions. He kept seeing Jonathon Jeffers, him with his sword cane, so damned cocksure and so damned helpless when Julian ran right up the blade. He heard the sound the clerk’s neck made when Julian snapped it, and remembered the way Jeffers’ spectacles had fallen off, the wink of gold as they tumbled to the deck, the terrible small sound that they had made. His big hands clenched tight around his walking stick. Against the dark river, he saw other things as well. That tiny hand impaled on a knife, dripping blood. Julian drinking Joshua’s dark potion. The wet smears on Hairy Mike’s iron billet when it had done its grisly work in the stateroom. Abner Marsh was afraid, afraid as he’d never been. To banish the specters that drifted across the night, he called up his own dream, a vision of him standing with the buffalo gun in hand at the door of the captain’s cabin. He heard the gun roar and felt its awful kick, and saw Damon Julian’s pale smile and dark curls burst apart, like a melon thrown from a height, a melon filled with blood.

But somehow, even when the face was gone and the smoke of the gun had blown away, the eyes were still there, staring, beckoning, waking things in him, anger and hatred and darker deeper feelings. The eyes were black as hell itself and filled with red, chasms endless and eternal as his river, calling to him, stirring his own lusts, his own red thirst. They floated before him, and Abner Marsh stared into them, into the warm black, and saw his answer there, saw the way to end them, better and surer than sword canes or stakes or buffalo guns.