Frederick Busch: The Night Inspector

“I beg that you do not,” Mr. North sang behind me. “I beg that you consider our captain and his armament. It is about profit and loss, Mr. Bartholomew. It is not — it need not be — about a loss of actual life.”

“Unless it’s the life of a black-skinned child in a barrel on a boat,” I said.

“There are contingencies in every aspect of existence,” he crooned. “Life is fraught with peril.”

M said, “You are, sir, to a man who endeavors to do good, as a boxful of newspaper critics to a man who endeavors to write what might be thought of as poetic. You are the adder in the garden. You are the fleshy manifestation of everything wrong. Do I make myself clear?”

“Meaning no disrespect, sir, which I might not say likewise about you, you would do well to stay away from any endeavors involving the poetic. Stick to the solidity of numbers, and the logic of the profit and the loss.” This was in the form, virtually, of an aria to canniness. I looked at M, and his features seemed to virtually melt in his rage or beneath the onslaught of the rain.

If anything, the heat had mounted. The tuns were on the deck, and Jessie and Mr. Porter, followed by Delgado at his leisurely pace, were stepping on board. I moved toward the lighter, and Mr. North accompanied me.

Jessie, seeing me, came closer. “Billy,” she said.

“What will you do with them? Those who are alive?”

“Forgive me,” she said.

“The sorrowful girlhood, the depravities of the Methodists, the days and nights in sweltering Florida? All right. I understand that people lie. But lies are the least of it, I suspect.”

“The tattoos I showed to you—”

“Read to me.”

“Yes.”

“Permitted me to read.”

“Yes.”

“They, too, were a lie?”

The rain drove at us, and then merely fell, and then only dropped, pattering. She responded by opening her hood and pulling it back, permitting her head and face and hair, which she shook, to profit from the air. Her golden skin, I thought, nearly glowed in the darkness. Her eyes were enormous, as if to gather, from M’s lantern and from the glowing gold behind the mackerel pattern in the serried dark clouds, what little light was available.

M, behind me, said, “I will not remain among these people, shipmate.”

“Please,” I said.

“No. Any man — woman, madam — who wishes to do me corporeal harm is hereby warned that I will not permit myself to be further detained.”

“He’ll bring the authorities, Billy!”

“I cannot protect you, Jessie.”

“Oh,” she said, smiling in sorrow, “oh, my dear, I always thought it was me protecting you.”

Delgado, returned now from the boom, told her, “We’re leaving.” He had passed M on the greasy dock and had not bothered to capture him. We were not of use, nor were we a threat. We did not, in terms of their transactions, exist, and I knew that Jessie would agree with me.

A dreadful noise, the firing furnace in the belly of the lighter, overwhelmed her words. M, by now, was back at the boom, a hand on each of Adam’s shoulders, addressing him. I thought I saw Adam nod. I returned to watching the ship and saw sparks burst from the smokestack, and then dark clouds come up upon the darkness of the sodden night.

M called, “Billy!”

I continued, because I was a fool, to wait for Jessie to call to me again, but she was back at the cargo, holding to a tun, as Mr. Porter and Mr. North turned one of the great barrels onto its side and leaned in, presumably to begin the pulling forth of the children. Her back was to me now, and I turned mine as I started what seemed a very long, arduous walk, to M and Adam at the boom, and Sam, above us at the rail. Now that the rain had diminished, he was holding his notebook again, and setting down whatever it was that he deemed important about this little demonstration of the profit and the loss.

As I drew near him, M regarded me sternly. “Empiricism, shipmate. It may be the death of us all. Can you do it, Adam?”

Poor Adam nodded his head. A man freed from whoever Tackabury was, a freedman in the great, expanding city, and he had the dire fortune to be rescued — so it might once have been construed to seem — by the man inside of the mask who had danced, before men, gods, former slaves, former authors, Boston journalists, the chanting North and the wounded Porter, in graceless indignity. Before Jessie, and the book of her body I had thought to learn to read.

“We are on the fly, Billy. To the wharf, adjacent, whence you and I made our way to the incoming vessel. Do you recall?”

“I do recall,” I said. I did not care.

“You have your pistol?”

I nodded.

“Eh?”

I unwrapped the soaking scarf and thrust it into a pocket of the rubber coat.

“I remain armed. How little good it did us!”

From inside his oilskins, he drew a sack, heavy and familiar in appearance, and I knew it was the Navy Colt.

“From the lip of the grave,” M said, dropping it. My hand, as if possessed by his will, sought and caught it.

“I will bring them, some of them, to theirs,” I said.

“Then we pursue them,” M said.

“From your — you mean in the dinghy?”

“The little catboat against which she’s moored. It gives us a mast, a sail, ten-foot oars, and a shallow, broad cabin where some of the children might shelter.”

“A small catboat,” I speculated.

“Yes,” he said, “but adequate to our purposes and less of a load to propel.”

“In pursuit of a coal-fired ship. Against the current.”

M said, “Mark the waters, will you?” I looked at them and saw only darkness and chop. “The tide makes in,” he said. “Did you not understand the river to be tidal? We’ll labor upriver against the current but with the power of the tide behind us. We’ll raise a sail when the wind’s right. Now we’re off. You are with us, shipmate?”

Sam had made his way to us, and he looked into the face of each, the mask of one. “Who will tell me now what that was all about?”

M turned, and Adam followed him. I, in turn, set out, tugging at the sleeve of Sam’s coat. “We’ll tell you on the way.”

“Way where, Billy?”

“Upriver.”

“After that boat?”

“After that boat.”

“Who was the woman who kissed you? The way she … But — Billy!”

“Yes, Sam.”

“She was the one! The reason all this—”

“She was the one, Sam.”

“And it was a double cross?”

I hurried him along, for M was setting a terrible pace, bouncing on his toes like a boy, while Adam was close behind him. “Everything’s a double cross,” I said, sounding sulky even to myself.

The river grows vast as you are closer to its middle, and as you go farther upsteam, especially, its marshes and the reaches at the shore through which canals are cut breed speculation upon who might live there, and how, and in what strange relationship to the river and its traffic and its distance from the City of New York. But even at some proximity to the shore, and so far downtown, passing the ships at anchor, and the pleasure craft upon which the wealthy pass their nights in pleasures to which the likes of us might not have pretended, we all, I think, experienced the power of the deep, swift river, and the fear that cannot help but reside, awaiting travelers, in that dark water.

The waxing and waning of the storm made it impossible for me to read the shoreline and know where we were. At times, gasping, I thought to guess, from the shapes of new brick buildings, or the sprawl of old ones made of wood, the street we might have passed. I ventured to note our passage of Desbrosses Street, but then I stopped, for we fought the power of the salty surge that propelled us, and were oppressed by the lightlessness of the giant river that seemed, in this storm and in the night’s emergency and — it is not too large a word for these events — despair, to be as broad and as merciless as the sea from which the tide ran up the river.