stage ramp was hung up over the bow in a tangle of rusted pillow blocks limed with bird droppings. A long two-by-twelve led from the wharf to the first deck. Beyond the boat the wide canal shifted, oily and slow, the new sun caught in it like a yolk. He bounced down the plank onto a deck made of broad cupped planks shedding enamel like red snow. He glanced up a broad central staircase and walked beyond it and then aft along the outside rail, past the boiler room, stepping through a door and walking among the main engines and pumps, expecting to find someone going over the machinery. He stopped in the dark and smelled cold oil, a ferrous mist of rust, and from below deck the sour ghost of a dark, side-rolling bilge. The old noncondensing steam engines looked like dead museum pieces that would never move again, asbestos-stuffed mammoths hulking in the gloom.
He walked forward and pulled himself up the main staircase. The vast second deck opened before him all the way to the stern windows, a maplewood dance floor hundreds of feet long that popped like distant musketry as he walked across it. A bandstand stood amidships on his left, and a long raft of small tables ganged next to cloudy windows slid shut against rain and birds, everything dusted blue with mildew. The ceiling was cross-bracketed every eight feet with gingerbread arches layered with gunpowder mold bred by the water-bound air.
The third deck was a two-tier affair, an outer open promenade called a hurricane deck and, in the center, a raised deck some rivermen called the skylight roof, railed and balustered, topped with a thin plank ceiling, the front half open to the breeze and the rear half a café, walled and windowed, sheltering a jumble of cheap wooden tables and deck chairs stacked in a great logjam. He walked through the café and looked into the kitchen at the big rusted coal ranges and many-doored oak iceboxes that hung open with the bitter smell of rotting rubber gaskets. He shook his head, thinking that every square inch of the busy woodwork, stanchions, hogchains, window frames, braces, brackets, filigree, molding, steam pipes, valve bonnets, smokestacks, and gingerbread would have to be scrubbed and painted.
The fourth level housed most of the crew. Sam remembered it was called the Texas deck and this one held a double row of plain cabins whose doors opened to the outside. On top of the Texas was the pilothouse, trimmed above its wide windows with sooty knickknack millwork and a copper-shelled dome. Sam found an unlocked cabin door and looked inside: two stacked bunks, a small lavatory, a locker with thread spools for pulls, the mattresses no better than what he had seen in a jailhouse. He looked back over the rail and realized for the first time that these old boats were made mostly of thin wood, to keep the weight down—regular wood that wanted to rot and warp and crack and leak and twist, and woe to everybody on board if a fire ever got started. The Ambassador had seen its share of summer squalls and upriver ice jams, had banged lock walls, scraped boulders, wormed over sandbars, and every lurch and shock was recorded in her timbers. He looked aft and saw again the buckles in her guardrails, the swale in her roofline. The boat seemed a used-up, dead and musty thing as still as a gravestone, and he wondered who in his right mind would want to ride on it for fun.
* * *
ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK a bus rattled in on solid rubber tires and men dressed in denim began to pour off, most of them black. A little later four men hopped off a horse-drawn surrey, put on plug caps that identified them as the engine-room crew, then boarded and headed aft. In the next half hour a buggy, several Fords, and one horse showed up at the wharf, soon followed by a steaming stake-bed truck driven by the captain and piled high with cans of paint, brushes, turpentine, rags, and scrapers. The Wellers and other crew members were there, dressed in their worst clothes. Another,
He walked forward and pulled himself up the main staircase. The vast second deck opened before him all the way to the stern windows, a maplewood dance floor hundreds of feet long that popped like distant musketry as he walked across it. A bandstand stood amidships on his left, and a long raft of small tables ganged next to cloudy windows slid shut against rain and birds, everything dusted blue with mildew. The ceiling was cross-bracketed every eight feet with gingerbread arches layered with gunpowder mold bred by the water-bound air.
The third deck was a two-tier affair, an outer open promenade called a hurricane deck and, in the center, a raised deck some rivermen called the skylight roof, railed and balustered, topped with a thin plank ceiling, the front half open to the breeze and the rear half a café, walled and windowed, sheltering a jumble of cheap wooden tables and deck chairs stacked in a great logjam. He walked through the café and looked into the kitchen at the big rusted coal ranges and many-doored oak iceboxes that hung open with the bitter smell of rotting rubber gaskets. He shook his head, thinking that every square inch of the busy woodwork, stanchions, hogchains, window frames, braces, brackets, filigree, molding, steam pipes, valve bonnets, smokestacks, and gingerbread would have to be scrubbed and painted.
The fourth level housed most of the crew. Sam remembered it was called the Texas deck and this one held a double row of plain cabins whose doors opened to the outside. On top of the Texas was the pilothouse, trimmed above its wide windows with sooty knickknack millwork and a copper-shelled dome. Sam found an unlocked cabin door and looked inside: two stacked bunks, a small lavatory, a locker with thread spools for pulls, the mattresses no better than what he had seen in a jailhouse. He looked back over the rail and realized for the first time that these old boats were made mostly of thin wood, to keep the weight down—regular wood that wanted to rot and warp and crack and leak and twist, and woe to everybody on board if a fire ever got started. The Ambassador had seen its share of summer squalls and upriver ice jams, had banged lock walls, scraped boulders, wormed over sandbars, and every lurch and shock was recorded in her timbers. He looked aft and saw again the buckles in her guardrails, the swale in her roofline. The boat seemed a used-up, dead and musty thing as still as a gravestone, and he wondered who in his right mind would want to ride on it for fun.
* * *
ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK a bus rattled in on solid rubber tires and men dressed in denim began to pour off, most of them black. A little later four men hopped off a horse-drawn surrey, put on plug caps that identified them as the engine-room crew, then boarded and headed aft. In the next half hour a buggy, several Fords, and one horse showed up at the wharf, soon followed by a steaming stake-bed truck driven by the captain and piled high with cans of paint, brushes, turpentine, rags, and scrapers. The Wellers and other crew members were there, dressed in their worst clothes. Another,
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