Mississippi Roll_A Wild Cards Novel Read online

  “Where will we go?”

  Good question, Wilbur thought. Where could they go? He had no idea which rooms the ICE agents intended to search; he was only certain that this would be one of them. He saw the door to the adjoining room. “Everyone needs to go in there,” he said, pointing. “Take everything out of this room except the furniture and take it with you; it has to look like no one has been living here. Do that, then close and lock the door. As soon as it’s safe, I’ll come back and tell you. Hurry!”

  With that, Wilbur turned to leave, but he stopped. He looked again to Nurassyl. “Thank you,” he said. “I don’t know how you did that, but … thank you.” He hoped Nurassyl could see the steamy smile that spread across his face as he slipped through the wall and outside again.

  He went in search of the captain and the ICE agents.

  He found the captain rather quickly, waiting for the agents to emerge from the boiler room corridor. Her foot tapped the deck, betraying her anxiety. He could see the worry in her face, her jaw muscles bunched below her ears. The ring of master keys to the staterooms was clutched in her tight fingers. Making certain he wasn’t visible, he put himself alongside Montaigne. He put his mouth next to her ear, speaking in a steamy whisper. “Captain, listen to me.” She jerked away at the words, swiping at her ear, and Wilbur saw water on her fingers. She saw it as well, and wiped her hand on her uniform.

  “What?” he heard her say in a stage whisper while staring at the door leading to the crew quarters and the boiler and engine rooms.

  Wilbur leaned in again. “If they go to the stateroom on the texas deck, tell them you’ve closed it because of a steam leak. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  She gave him the faintest of nods, then moved forward as the door to the crew area opened and Agent Lowell, followed by the other two agents, emerged. Lowell was talking into a Bluetooth earpiece stuffed in his left ear. “We’ve checked the main deck, Evangelique, and we’re about to check the staterooms you’ve marked. Don’t worry; I’ve got this handled. I’ll let you know what we find.” He touched the earpiece as Captain Montaigne lifted the key ring.

  “I take it you didn’t find anything untoward, Agent,” she told him. “I have the master keys. Which rooms did you need to see?”

  Expressionless, Agent Lowell consulted his smartphone. “We’ll start on the texas deck,” he said. “Stateroom three.”

  “Stateroom three?” Montaigne told him. “I’m afraid we have a steam leak in that room, and it’s closed.”

  Lowell gave her a thin-lipped half smile. “A steam leak? That’s terribly convenient. I’ll still need to see it.”

  Wilbur moved quickly away with Captain Montaigne’s “Follow me, then,” moving up to the texas deck and trusting that Montaigne would take a slower route up. Inside the stateroom, he went to the closed door of the adjoining room, allowing himself to appear to the refugees in the dark and packed interior, holding an index finger up to his lips. “You must be silent,” he said. “They’re coming…”

  With that, he slipped back into the main room and thrust his hands into the wall where the lines to the ’scape pipes ran, closing his fingers around and into the delicious steam there. He let it fill him, relishing the heat that now ran through him like lifeblood. He went to the door of the stateroom and let himself remain there, the door bisecting his body, his head outside. He could see Montaigne and the trio of agents approaching. “I wouldn’t go in there,” Montaigne said. “The steam leak…”

  “Strange, I don’t see a warning sign on the door,” Lowell answered.

  “I haven’t had time yet, but as you can see, the door’s dripping from it,” the captain answered. She held up the ring of keys. “And, after all, it’s locked. A sign seems unnecessary.”

  “Then unlock it, please, and step aside.”

  Wilbur slipped back into the room. He allowed his arms, handless, to become visible as the door opened, as if they were wisps of steam. He placed himself at the open doorway as Captain Montaigne moved away and Lowell took a step inside. Wilbur pressed his body against the man, gratified when the agent nearly jumped backward. “Christ! It’s scalding in there,” he gasped. The front of his suit was spattered with water drops.

  “It’s a steam leak,” Montaigne said, as if she were speaking to a child. “Steam is hot by definition.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of fire?” Lowell asked her.

  Montaigne laughed. “It’s steam. Steam is also wet. I’m far more worried about water damage to the stateroom. Look at your suit, and you already saw that the door’s sweating with it.” She said that with a glance into the room herself. “We’ll have the line sealed off as soon as possible. But as you can see, there’s no one there. If you still want to go in and search…” Montaigne let the sentence hang unfinished.

  Lowell scowled. He pulled out his smartphone and looked at the screen again. “You have another stateroom on this deck—the one you reserve for shareholders. I need to see that one.”

  “It’s currently occupied. Mr. Kirby Jackson, the primary shareholder, came aboard at Baton Rouge.”

  “Fine. I’ll still need to see it,” Lowell told her.

  Captain Montaigne shrugged. “As you wish.” With a final glance inside the room, as if she was looking for Wilbur, she pulled the door closed. Wilbur heard the lock engage, and the muffled footsteps of the four moving away.

  He slipped back into the adjoining room. “It’s safe,” he told Jyrgal and the others. “You can come out now. They’ll be gone soon, and after that, I’m sure JoHanna will come to get Bular and Anara—their ride is waiting for them. Then she’ll escort some of you back to the other room again.” He started to leave, then stopped, looking again at Nurassyl. “Jyrgal, how do you say thank you in Kazakh?”

  “Paxmet,” Jyrgal replied. Nurassyl nodded back to Wilbur with a smile.

  Wilbur pointed to his mouth, still looking at Nurassyl. “Paxmet, Nurassyl,” he said, then, turning to Jyrgal again: “Tell Nurassyl that without his help, this wouldn’t have ended well.” Wilbur inclined his head to Nurassyl as Jyrgal began to speak to his son in their own language.

  With that, Wilbur went to stand in the bathroom tub for several minutes, allowing himself to cool and for the resulting water to drain away as the Kazakhs began to collect their belongings and move them back into the outer room.

  Wilbur watched from the main deck as the Reverend Wintergreen, in his wheelchair, left the Natchez. JoHanna and Jack, along with Bular and Anara, accompanied him. The ICE agents had left hours earlier, at which point Reverend Wintergreen had come aboard, and many of the passengers had left for the local bars, shops, and sights. A crowd of locals had also paid to come aboard the Natchez to tour the boat and be entertained in the lounge; it was eleven P.M. now, the Jokertown Boys had finished their show, and Captain Montaigne had made the announcement that all visitors must now disembark.

  Wilbur watched Reverend Wintergreen’s wheelchair make its slow way down the gangway in the crowd toward his waiting van. Bular and Anara slipped into the van as Wintergreen’s driver opened the side door and brought the side lift out to get the reverend into the vehicle. The door closed, and they drove off along with the rest of the cars parked along Silver Street. No one seemed to be following them.

  For the second time that day, Wilbur felt a distinct sense of satisfaction. He moved through the wall of the salon on the main deck and into the crew corridors.

  Even in his bodily days, Wilbur had enjoyed spending time in the heat and noise of the boiler and engine rooms: to him, they were the beating heart chambers of the Natchez. It was here that he could feel her as if she were a living entity, breathing in fire and water and exhaling steam to drive herself forward against the river’s currents, its twists and turns and ever-changing mudbanks.

  Now, it was the place where Wilbur felt most at home and returned to often, where he could most easily feed his addiction to the steam that made him come most fully alive. He almost sighed as he felt
that warm, moist atmosphere surround him. He enjoyed watching Cottle (who Wilbur had privately nicknamed “Coddle” for the way he treated the machinery of the boat) fiddle with the pressure in the lines. The crew had been dismissed, since the Natchez was berthed for the night, and no steam was needed beyond what was already in the system. Wilbur expected to find himself alone. He was surprised to hear voices coming from near the entrance to the boiler room. He slid between the boilers toward the voices.

  “… know what to do when the time comes.” The voice was familiar, and as Wilbur passed the boilers, he saw Kirby Jackson in his expensive suit, talking to Chief Engineer Cottle.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Cottle answered. He took a sip from his ever-present coffee mug—Wilbur wondered how the man ever managed to sleep, since he went through several pots a day from the cheap Mr. Coffee machine in the crew mess.

  “I know you, Travis.” Jackson’s voice was warm honey and gravel. “Look, my friend, either way things go, you’re out of a job once we get to Cincinnati. How easy was it for you to find this one, eh? I’m offering you your chance to retire in style. Why not take it?”

  “But this—”

  “Now, Travis,” Jackson interrupted. “I’ve told you what needs to be done. I expect you to do it. That’s best for both of us.”

  “But…”

  Jackson moved close to Cottle, who looked down into his coffee mug. Standing over the man, Jackson shook his head. “You understand how it has to be,” Jackson said, his voice darkening and going dangerously soft. “You can’t back out now. I simply can’t allow that. Do we understand each other?”

  Cottle said nothing, only nodded once, not even looking up at Jackson.

  “Good. I thought you’d see reason,” Jackson said, taking a step back and raising his voice. He patted Cottle’s shoulder. “Then you know what to do when the time comes. I’ll make sure everything’s set up on my end. You’ve made the right decision, Travis. You’re not going to regret it, I promise you.”

  With another pat on the back, Jackson left the boiler room as Cottle took another long drag from his coffee mug. Wilbur went to the boilers, still holding steam, and pulled in the warmth and energy there until he had enough steam within him to make himself visible if he wished. Enough steam to have a voice again.

  An alarm wailed as pressure dropped in the lines, then went silent. By the door, Cottle cursed.

  “This is my boat, Cottle,” Wilbur said, still marveling at the steamy, breathy voice that had been returned to him. A voice appropriate for a haint. “My boat.”

  “Who’s there?” Cottle said loudly. “Who said that?” The engineer came around the boilers with a wrench raised in one hand and the coffee cup still in the other—bringing back memories of his own fight with Jackson—but Wilbur was already moving away, passing through the walls of the boiler room and back out onto the main deck. There were a few passengers there, but Wilbur had cooled enough that he was only an errant wisp to them if they noticed him at all.

  What had they been discussing? Wilbur wondered. What was it that Cottle didn’t want to do?

  The next morning, the Natchez left Natchez, heading to Vicksburg and the cities farther upriver.

  It was one of Wilbur’s realizations, very quickly after his death, that he had no need of sleep. During the night, he might lean undisturbed on the railing of the hurricane deck and watch a moonlit landscape drift past the Natchez. That landscape had changed a lot over the decades, and especially during the day, the river was more crowded now with motorized small boats, pleasure cruisers, and barges carrying freight, but there was still a sense of being part of a long past while on the water.

  His was an existence that was often solitary, but Wilbur also found that comforting. In those reflective moments, Wilbur could almost forget that he was also a prisoner here, marooned eternally on the Natchez. At least the Kazakh refugees stuck in their cabins would be able to leave, while Wilbur would remain here.

  In the prison he’d constructed himself. He could bear that life sentence, though, as long as the Natchez still plied the river. As long as the steam was up. But on a Natchez that was no longer a boat, but just a floating bar or casino or hotel, never moving, without steam …

  Living in Cincinnati until the Natchez rots … Jeremiah’s words. The prospect made Wilbur feel increasingly miserable the more he thought about it. He stood at the stern on the texas deck, watching the paddle wheel’s relentless churning, his thoughts running in circles in tandem with the paddles.

  Selling the boilers for scrap. No steam. They’d run the calliope on compressed air like they do on the new boats. No steam, so no way for me to do much of anything. I’ll just be another haint they’ll talk about but never see, weak and emasculated. I’ll go crazy and bored. No steam: just endless days and nights tied up on an old wrecked hulk, with people eating dinners and wedding receptions with drunken idiots dancing to lousy bands playing worn-out music. Even if the owners did eventually decide to put her back on the river for little jaunts, the boilers would be gone. They wouldn’t go to the expense of putting new ones in. No. No steam. They’d just cram a diesel engine or two in the back, with the paddle wheel spinning strictly for show.

  Just another replica excursion boat.

  No steam. No steam. Just me stuck on a gutted boat, both of us rotting away together.

  Without steam, Wilbur couldn’t make himself visible or shape his cloudy form. Without steam, he couldn’t handle or manipulate physical objects, no matter how light. Without steam, he couldn’t enter into another person’s body. Without steam, Wilbur was invisible, nothing at all. He was as addicted to steam as any heroin user to his drug.

  If he thought it would work, Wilbur would have jumped over the railing and into the wheel and tried to drown himself, only he knew nothing at all would happen. He’d lost count of how many times he’d tried to leave the Natchez, but the boat (or whatever it was that had made Wilbur what he now was) wouldn’t allow that.

  From the boiler deck, someone’s digital camera flashed, freezing for a moment the spray from the paddle wheel.

  Eleanor and I stood here many times, just watching the paddle wheel endlessly turning and pushing us forward. “It’s mesmerizing,” she told him a few months after the Natchez’s launch, leaning over the rail to stare down. “Meditative. I feel like I could just let myself fall down into the paddle wheel and the water and just become part of the boat.”

  That made Wilbur grab at her arm, as if he were afraid that she’d actually do that. “You wouldn’t be part of the boat, my dear,” Wilbur answered. “You’d just be dead.”

  As if she understood his distress, she took a step back from the rail. She smiled at him. “Are you saying that our boat could possibly hurt me? I don’t think so. We built her. You built her, darling—you poured your heart and your soul into her. She’s your child and she loves us too much to hurt anyone in our family. I know you, my love. You’ll stay here until you die.” She laced her fingers around his. “Which is going to be a long, long time from now, for both of us…”

  Wilbur was afraid now that Eleanor had been right, that it would be far longer than he wanted or expected. Death: he’d expected that experience to be like all the cliché books and movies. He’d see the light and all his dead relatives calling him and welcoming him into heaven.

  But he’d stayed with the boat. His boat. But the Natchez was not his child. No. She clasped Wilbur to her bosom like an overprotective mother, refusing to let go.

  What does it mean that I’m not … moving on to something else? Is that supposed to tell me that all that stuff about heaven and hell and the rest was a lie? Is this what happens to everyone who dies? Is the whole world full of ghosts stuck where they passed away, wearing what they were wearing in that moment and looking just like they did in the moment before death claimed them? Or did the wild card do this to me?

  Either way, there’s no way out. At least, none that I’ve found.

  A Chris-Cra
ft Catalina went roaring past the Natchez, heading downriver, its wake throwing swells against the side of the steamer and causing the paddles to slap harder at the river, bringing Wilbur’s attention back to the wheelhouse. Being stuck on the Natchez was one thing when his steamboat still plied the river, still running the watery trail she’d followed since he’d built her. Having her docked and maimed and crippled, and him with her … that wasn’t a fate he could tolerate. There has to be a way for me to leave or to have the Natchez remain as she is. There must be—one way or the other. I have to find it.

  But he had no idea even where to start.

  He was still brooding on the problem later that night as he prowled the decks well before dawn. With the exception of some diehards in the lounge, most of the passengers were in their cabins, sleeping or pursuing other pleasures. Wilbur was glad for the solitude as he passed along the promenade of the boiler deck. At least, he was until he saw Kitty Strobe leaning on the rail near the stairs to the texas deck and staring at the night landscape passing by. The junior pilot was attired in her usual overdressed-for-the-weather fashion, with her sunglasses firmly in place despite the fact that it must be three or four in the morning. Wilbur figured she was on her way up to the pilothouse to relieve Jeremiah.

  Wilbur made certain he was invisible; no sense in startling the woman, who appeared to be brooding about her own issues. He was about to glide past Kitty when they both heard voices approaching: the ghost-hunter trio, lugging equipment and camera, and talking to one another in loud stage whispers.

  “You got the key that JoHanna chick gave us?” the blond one asked. He was handling most of the equipment, with a microphone on a long pole and various devices protruding from stuffed pockets in his baggy jeans—Sean, Wilbur remembered.

  The dark-haired and tattooed leader of the trio—Ryan—held up a small key on a large ring. “Stateroom thirteen,” he said, not even trying for a whisper in the early-morning darkness. “Got it.”