The Gilded Ark

Chapter One: A Flat Note at Paducah

The coal drag slowed for the yard at Paducah just after four in the morning, and Arlie Combs went off the side of it while it was still rolling, the way you do when you don't want anybody counting heads.

He landed badly in cinders and came up with his palms stinging. That was nothing new. His right hand had been burned three weeks before, a long red weal running from the base of the thumb across to the wrist, and every time he closed it the skin pulled like a wet rope drying. He had wrapped it in a strip of a dead man's shirt and had not looked at it since Louisville.

He had eleven dollars, a pocketknife, and a name he no longer used.

The yard smelled of ash and river. Arlie kept to the dark side of the hoppers, moving south toward the water because the water was where a man could get lost. Behind him a switch engine chuffed and clanked. He did not look back. He had learned in three weeks of running that looking back gets you remembered.

At the head of the yard, under a pole lamp, two men stood talking, and one of them wore a town hat and a town coat and did not belong there at four in the morning. Arlie went down between two cars and lay in the gravel until his heart stopped hammering. When he raised his head the man in the hat was walking the line of the train with a lantern, looking up under the cars, the way a man looks when he has a picture in his pocket and wants to match it to a face.

Arlie crawled the length of three cars, then ran.

He ran until the yard gave out into weeds and the weeds gave out into a mud street, and the mud street ran downhill to the landing, and there he stopped, bent over with his hands on his knees, breathing river.

The Ohio was wide and slow and the color of strong tea. Fog sat on it in ropes. Along the cobbled bank were wharfboats and coal flats and a packet with her lights out, and beyond them, tied at the low end of the landing, something Arlie had never seen before.

It was a two-story wooden boat, flat as a shoebox, with no engine of her own and no smokestack. She had a false Gothic front, painted white once, with gilt scrollwork peeling off it in curls like birch bark. Along the roof, in letters four feet high, somebody had painted THE GILDED ARK, and under that, smaller: FAMILY AMUSEMENT — SEE THE PEARL OF THE DELTA — SEE THE DANCING BEAR. Pushed up against her stern was a squat towboat with a red hull and a name board that read RUBY LEE. Lashed alongside was a low barge covered in canvas, and from under the canvas came a smell Arlie could not place at first: hay and dung and something ranker, a hot animal musk that made the back of his neck prickle.

And on top of it all, somebody was murdering a song.

A steam calliope stood on the hurricane roof, thirty-two brass whistles in a row, and it was playing a waltz badly. Not a wrong-fingers badly. A sick-machine badly. Most of the notes came out round and brassy and rolled away over the water for two miles, but one of them — a G, Arlie thought, though he had never learned the names of notes properly — came out flat and sobbing and would not stop when the player let it go. It hung under everything else like a man moaning in another room.

Arlie stood on the cobbles in the fog and listened to that note, and something in his chest turned over.

His brother Dell used to whistle. Down in the Turkey Gap mine, in the dark, with two miles of Letcher County over your head and the timbers talking, Dell would whistle to keep the crew's nerves flat. You could hear him from three headings away.

Arlie had not cried in three weeks. He did not cry now. But he walked down the cobbles and up the stage plank of a boat he had no business boarding, because there was a machine on that roof in pain and he could hear exactly what was wrong with it.

Nobody stopped him. It was four-thirty in the morning; the only soul awake was the one at the calliope, and when Arlie came up the outside stair to the roof he found a boy of about seventeen in an undershirt, mashing the keys with the flat of his hands and swearing.

"She's stuck," the boy said, without turning around. "Don't tell me she's stuck. I know she's stuck. Cap says play her at dawn to bring the town down and she does that."

The flat note wailed on.

"Shut your steam off," Arlie said.

The boy turned around then. "Who are you?"

"Shut it off and I'll tell you."

The boy looked him over — a lean young man, twenty-one, in a coat too thin for September nights, hair the color of wet straw, a rag on his right hand — and shrugged and turned the valve. The whistles died with a long sigh and a spit of hot water. The fog swallowed the noise. Down the landing a dog barked twice and gave up.

Arlie knelt at the chest and got his knife under the cover plate.

The calliope was a simple thing and a cruel one. Steam came off the towboat's boiler through a hose the size of a man's arm, into a manifold, and each key opened a poppet valve that let a jet of steam into a whistle. If a valve stuck open you got a note that never ended. If a valve stuck half-open you got the sob.

He had the plate off in two minutes. Inside, the manifold was a horror: scale like coral, a green crust of mineral over everything, one valve stem bent, three others frozen in their guides, and a spring that had rusted to a rough orange stick.

"When's the last time anybody opened this?"

"Never," the boy said. "Marcel used to. He's dead."

"Who's Marcel?"

"Engineer. Drowned in the spring." The boy said it the way you'd say a boat needed paint.

Arlie found a can of kerosene on the roof, and a hammer, and a length of soft brass wire, and set to work. He took the bent stem out and rolled it on the flat of the deck to see where it was crooked and straightened it with the hammer and the back of the knife, feeling for true with his fingertips the way you feel a mule's shoe. He soaked the frozen valves and worked them with the wire until the crust cracked and let go. He cut a new spring out of a coil he found in a bucket of junk and it was not the right spring but it was near enough.

His burned hand hurt. He used it anyway.

While he worked the sky went from black to gray to the color of skimmed milk. Somewhere below, a rooster that lived on a showboat began to complain. Somebody in the galley knocked a pan on a stove.

"You do this for a living?" the boy asked.

"I dug coal."

"That ain't machinery."

"It's all machinery," Arlie said. "A mine's a machine. It eats and it breathes and it's got parts, and when a part goes bad it kills you."

The boy did not know what to say to that, so he went and got coffee, which was decent of him, and by five-forty Arlie had the cover plate back on and his hands black to the wrist.

"Give her steam," he said.

The boy opened the valve. The manifold ticked and clanked and hissed, and steam came curling off the whistle bells, and the boy laid his hands down on the keys.

The note came out true.

He played a chord and it stood up straight and rolled away across the Ohio, and the fog took it and handed it along, and away over in the town a shutter banged open. He played the first eight bars of a waltz and every note in it was where it belonged. He laughed like a kid.

Behind them a voice said, "Well, now."

Arlie turned.

The man on the roof stair was sixty or near it, thick through the middle, in a silk vest the color of an old wine bottle, with a watch chain across it heavy enough to tow a skiff. He had white side-whiskers and a face like a boiled ham and small quick eyes that had been reading men for forty years. He smelled of cloves and whiskey at ten minutes to six in the morning.

"Cap," the boy said, "he fixed her."

"I hear that he fixed her." The man came up the last two steps and looked, not at Arlie, but at the calliope, the way a farmer looks at a horse. "I have been listening to that flat G since the second week of May. It has cost me money. There is not a town on this river that will pay to hear a boat cry." He turned. "What's your name, son?"

Arlie had three weeks of practice.

"Arlie," he said.

The old man waited. Arlie let the silence sit.

And the old man smiled — a slow, wide, entirely knowing smile — and did not ask again.

"I am Ezra Beasley," he said. "Captain, owner, and chief liar of this establishment. I need a man who can wipe an engine, watch a water glass, and keep steam up without blowing us all into the state of Illinois. It pays nine dollars a week and your board, and the board is better than the pay. Can you do it?"

"Yes, sir."

"Have you got papers?"

"No, sir."

"Good," Beasley said. "Papers are a nuisance. This way you can't leave."

He put out his hand. Arlie took it with his left, because of the burn, and Beasley's eyes went to the rag and away again, and he did not ask about that either.

"Play something," the captain said to the boy, going down the stair. "Play something loud and vulgar. Wake up Paducah and tell them we're here."

The boy played. The whistles shouted. Arlie stood on the roof of the Gilded Ark with his hands black and his heart doing something he had not felt since before the roof fell, and watched the sun come up brown and enormous over the Ohio River.

Somewhere behind him in the town, a man in a hat was walking the rail yard with a photograph.

But the boat's lines came in at nine that morning, and by noon they were four bends downriver, and no one on board had asked him for a surname.