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High Water
by Richard Bissell
Chapter One
Captain, why don’t you hire some real roustabouts from Galloway County,
them levee rats from St. Louis ain’t no good.
— Steamboat Bill Heckman
The Grease Cup was righght there in front of Katz’s drugstore, waiting for me like he said he would be. “Hello, Grease Cup,” I said. “It looks like you got the worst of it.”
“What a night,” he said.
“Old lady not so good?”
“Just the same,” he said. “Where was you at?”
“Me and Lucille got a room at the hotel.”
“Who’s Lucille?”
“She’s the one with her picture stuck in my mirror.”
“Oh. Yeah. That brunette with all the hair.”
“Let’s get a cab,” I said.
“I ain’t got but two dollars. Let’s walk.”
The Grease Cup looked unhappy, in his blue serge suit, maroon shirt and tie to match, unhappy as he always did after a half an hour ashore. He was a big man, with a round flushed face, and his especial pride and joy was a gray felt hat for which he had paid nine dollars one night in Peoria when we were stuck in the ice below town. But the hat was a half size too small, which made him look like a greenhorn from Nebraska.
“Old lady worked you mighty clean,” I said. “What does she think you’re gonna buy beer and cigarettes with between here and St. Paul and back?” “She thinks I set in the engine room all that time. But I always keep twenty, thirty dollars on the boat.”
“Let’s get a cab,” I said.
“O.K., if you pay for it,” he said, shifting his black shiny fiberboard suitcase from one hand to the other.
“How come the suitcase?” I said. “Come on,” I said. “There’s a cab stand down the street.”
“Old lady consented to iron a few shirts for me by some miracle or other.”
We got into a cab and I told the driver to take us to the Northern Transit Barge Line docks, but he never heard of it so I told him where to go. “Well, here we are again,” the Grease Cup said. “Thank God.” And the sun came out from behind a cloud and lit with great effect through the sky-view top on his big front gold tooth.
It was early in April and the sky was filled with scudding clouds. Whenever one passed in front of the sun all of St. Louis suddenly looked dismal, cold, and dirty. Then again the sun would come out and it was warm and almost baseball time. But the times when the sun was under were more than when it was out, and that’s the way St. Louis is, it looks worse more often than it looks good.
“I don’t suppose you heard no orders,” the Grease Cup said.
“I called in. They’re giving us eight loads.”
“Eight! My God don’t them fools know there’s a flood coming down at us.”
“They figure we’ll get through,” I said. “I spose they wanna show River Transit and Marine Barge what big operators we are.”
“I don’t envy you none as Mate. Why we’ll be double-tripping and likely as not smacking bridges all the way.”
“Casey and Ironhat won’t hit no bridges,” I said. “Casey and Ironhat won’t hit nothing.”
“I can think up better pilots than them two. I wisht old man Livingston was aboard.”
“Well he’s dead so what’s the use talking about Livingston?”
“I can think up better pilots than them two wise guys.”
“Quit talking like an engineer,” I said. “Listen, Casey’s good, don’t forget it, and Ironhat’s careful. If Ironhat don’t wanna run no bridges why Casey will run ‘em for him. Casey could take the Muscatine through the Hennepin Canal and never touch the banks.”
“That would be an interesting sight, seeing she’s a hunnred feet longer than the locks.”
“Leave it to Casey,” I said.
The sun was under again and we were going down back streets and past vacant lots and beat-up apartment houses with stained-glass front doors that must have been the class about fifty years ago, but now they had tin cans on the sidewalk and colored kids on the curbstones, and pieces of the stained glass were busted or missing.
“I hope Clarence took aboard plenty groceries. This looks like a long trip to me,” the Grease Cup said.
“I thought you liked them long trips. I thought the only reason you come steamboatin was to get away from the old lady. Ain’t you never satisfied?”
“Eight loads is four too many on a stage of river like this.”
“Where’d you go last night, anyplace?”
“She wanted to go to the goddam show. Jimmy Stewart. She thinks he’s just the cutest boy around. I says, ‘Honey let’s go to some nice quiet little old night club and see the floor show.’ ”
“So you went to the movies.”
“Yeah, we went to the movies.”
“I didn’t go to no movie.”
“You ain’t got the old lady, neither.”
“Why in hell don’t you unload that old lady? You got no kids. She’s just nothin but misery. Danged if I’d put up with that.”
“I ain’t sure if this is the right way,” the cab driver said. “Is this right?”
“Yeah, you’re O.K.,” I said. “Turn right two blocks up here at the warehouse.”
The sun was under again. Tell the truth, I didn’t feel much like going back to the boat, but then, I never did and probably never will, even if I was to stay another fifty years on the river. Once I get my feet aboard and my store clothes off and I get the smell of the boat and the river, why I’m happy. But when I’m uptown in a clean shirt I never want to go back, I have to fight to make myself do it.
“That would hurt her feelings,” the Grease Cup said, “if I was to leave her.”
“Grease Cup,” I said. “You are completely nuts.”
“Where do I go now?” says the cab driver.
“Keep on straight,” I said.
“Maybe the old lady would brighten up a little,” I said, “if you moved to a small town upriver someplace. You know, like Hannibal, say, or Muscatine.”
“Oh my God, no,” he said. “She has to go to them big movie palaces with all the gilt and mirrors in the lobby or she’d be even worse. Why, say, she never missed a picture yet at any of the big movie houses downtown. Brother, she catches them all.”
“You know something rather interesting, Grease Cup?” I said.
“What’s that?” he said, looking out the window at some old board fences and an empty lot full of dry, dead weeds and rusty tin cans.
“I ain’t married,” I said.
“Ain’t you marvelous,” he said.
“Here we are,” I said. “Leave us off right here by this gate. We’ll walk from here.”
“You fellas goin up the river on a boat?” the driver said as I was paying him off.
“That’s right.”
“Pretty high water ain’t it?”
“That’s what they say,” I said.
“Well I wish you luck,” he said.
“I hope we don’t need none,” the Grease Cup said, and we started through the debris that littered the yard in front of the office. There were oil drums and coils of old cable, junk line tied up in bales to be sold, an antique marine engine with the head off and the cylinders filled with rain water, and unidentifiable shapes of marine junk, rusty and forgotten, filling the area from the woven wire fence over to the office, a dirty frame building with bright green patches on the uneven roof.
We threaded our way down the path through the remnants and came upon a propeller, six feet in diameter, with one fluke bent over, split, and chewed to ragged pieces.
“There’s a fine piece of Casey’s work,” the Grease Cup said, as he always did. “There’s your great Casey for you.”
“Quit talking like an engineer,” I said. “Ain’t no pilot living that never hit something.”
“Old man Livingston ran Maquoketa Chute for fifty years and never found no bottom. But Casey, he managed to find a rock as big as the Court House. How he done it nobody knows except him. That’s his special pilotin secret. Most pilots couldn’t of found that rock with a soundin pole. He not only found it, he run the boat on it to prove it.”
“You got Casey on the brain. Whyn’t you go home to that old lady and give it up? Whyn’t you just plain give the river up, it bothers you so.”
“It don’t bother me that much,” he said.
“You could get a stationary engineer’s job at the Waterworks and never miss a double-feature show.”
“I’m goin aboard,” he said, “and see what’s cookin.”
I went into the office to see if I had any mail. I had a letter from a girl in Winona, Minnesota, named Alma. Her old man was an engineer on the Winona, Green Bay, and Northern, but it didn’t make her any more interesting. She was only just good for one thing. Then I had my magazines: Hunter, Trader and Trapper, Waterways Journal, and Railroad. And another lesson from that correspondence course, which increased my St. Louis blues by reminding me that I was already a lesson behind on account of the layover. I never can get anything done with my head anyplace except on a steamboat. That’s why I was better off on the river: no whiskey, no dolls, no ball games and shows and taverns. It’s no temptation when you can’t get at such things. Nothing but the boat and twelve hours’ watch every day and no distractions on every corner with electric signs over them saying BUDWEISER.
Cap Wilson, the Port Captain, came out of his office. He was a little bald-headed fat guy, a crack pilot when he was on the boats, now suffering from the joys of promotion and shore life.
“I hear we got eight,” I said.
“What about it?” he said.
“Pretty high water,” I said.
“Leave that to Casey and Ironhat,” he said.
“That’s just what I’m about to do,” I said.
I walked down to the boat, and the sun went under for good. I stood and looked at the Mississippi. She was high and she looked ugly as hell. I looked up at the sky and it was all overcast by now, and a breeze was coming up from the northeast that smelled like more rain. With the sun under it was chilly and miserable and I went aboard.
I walked down the guard and past the engine room where I saw the Grease Cup standing in there talking to the oiler; he looked mighty funny in his store clothes and Nebraska Saturday-night hat. The oiler was wiping his hands on some waste and giving the Cup some big story to explain all the things he had forgot to do since the Second had gone up to the nearby tavern for a drink.
I climbed up the stairs and opened the door to my room, right behind the compressed air tanks lying aft of the pilothouse on the boiler deck. Inside it smelled mighty poor. Jackoniski, the bastard, was laying there reading Amazing Detective and punching his cigarettes out in a sawed-off Pet milk can, and never a window open in the world, or the door either.
“Well you goddam imported Polish ham,” I said. “Why in the hell ain’t you out on deck and if not when did they pass this law again opening a window? This place smells worse than a deck hand’s glove.”
Jackoniski was an easygoing, stupid dog like most of the boys I ever had to share a bunkroom with. He shaved every other day and of all the Second Mates in the company they could have dumped on me he was the world’s worst. If you stood right behind Jackoniski with a club he would make a good Mate; he had been on the barge lines long enough and he knew the work. But he always wanted to go sit down someplace and he didn’t give a damn if the deck hands spent twenty minutes over their 10 a.m. coffee.
“They ain’t nothin goin on,” he said, “so I decide to come up and lay down awhile.”
“Well it stinks in here with you and your cigarettes,” I said. “And for Christ sake, get your socks out of the washbowl. Here,” I said, and tossed his Rockford sox, damp, onto his face.
“You been away so long,” he said, “I almost forgot you was so sweet.”
I took off my clothes without saying anything more, hung my pants and jacket over a wire hanger with my shirt inside under the jacket, wrapped my shoes in a newspaper and stuck them under the bunk, and put on my tan pants and my shirt that had Northern Transit embroidered on the back (and N.T. on the pocket).
“I spose you know we got eight,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “So what?”
“So nothing,” I said. “Except this trip as long as I’m Mate and you’re Watchman by God if we run into trouble you ain’t agoin to be layin in that bunk very long.” ‘Watchman’ is what they call Second Mate on the Mississippi.
“I take my orders from Casey,” he said.
Just to be a bastard he threw his cigarette over his shoulder into the washbasin. Nothing I hate like a cigarette butt in the washbowl when I go to brush my teeth or something. That’s your Jackoniski for you.
I went down to the galley and got a cup of coffee. The minute I saw Clarence in his white pants and undershirt I lost those old St. Louis blues and forgot all about Lucille and room 924, and the dirty alleys, and the zoo, and the high water and the eight loads, I felt like the boy coming home. Now this was something I knew all about, nothing that could ever happen on this boat would ever surprise or scare me, but uptown, well, there are so damn many things going on that a person just simply can’t understand.
“Hello, Duke,” says Clarence in that friendly way he’s got, like he was so happy to see you back. “Boy am I glad to see you back!”
“Don’t I always come back?” I said.
“Mostly,” he said. “Except Peoria, and Helena, and Dubuque, and Wood River, and. . .”
“Never mind,” I said. “I always come back. Them times was merely miscalculations.”
“There is a fresh pot over there,” he said. “I do believe this trip is going to be interesting to say the lease.”
“You can repeat that,” I said. “Are Casey and Ironhat aboard?”
“Casey is laying down,” he said, creasing four pie crusts. “Ironhat went over to the saloon for a box of cigars.”
The coffee was good and the galley was the best place on earth, and I stood there looking out the door across the guard at the current; she was really going on past like she meant it, with a lot of bubbles and twigs and scum.
“That’s a mean-looking river,” I said.
“When ain’t it mean?” he said.
I went to the range and refilled.
“Well, we only got two from here over Chain of Rocks, anyways,” he said, opening the oven door.
Whatever was up the river, I thought — standing there in my nice clean pants and shirt, with the cap on my head with two stars on it — whatever was upriver I could at least understand it; I felt at least I could always meet the Mississippi River on equal terms, as they say.
“I been fighting with her for thirteen years,” I said. “I don’t honestly believe, Clarence, that she has any more surprises for me.”
A towboat from out of the Missouri River, the Far West, came sliding past with four empties, quiet and slick and going like a bat out of hell.
“Look,” says Clarence. “Look at Far West go. Man, look at that current take her down.”
“What kinda pies are them in the oven?” I said.
“Logumberry,” he said.
“I never heard of such a thing,” I said.
“You’ll eat it just the same,” he said.
The Far West went down-river so fast I had to lean out the galley door to see her any more and as I leaned out a drop of rain hit me on the wrist. “Here comes that rain,” I said.
“Blowing from the east, ain’t it?” Clarence said, coming to the door and standing beside me with a cup of coffee.
“Yeah,” I said. “Two days of rain and this here trip north is gonna get interesting.”
“Don’t tell me the river has got you worried too? I never thought she would ever get you down, Duke” — it was Casey.
His Master’s Voice. I turned back into the galley, letting the door slam behind me on the Mississippi River, already almost in flood stage, with the raindrops pattering onto its gliding surface.
“Hello, Casey,” I said. “When are we gonna turn loose and head north?”
Anyway I was all over it, as I always am, by the time we had the logumberry pies for dinner at 5:45 p.m., right in the middle of the Chain of Rocks, which is a bad place right above St. Louis with rock bottom and very bad currents every which way. Even with only two barges strung out two long ahead, why we certainly didn’t set any speed records going up through there that afternoon in the drizzle and mist.
“Who in the hell ever heard of a logumberry pie?” Ironhat said, going into his second piece.
Clarence leaned in the doorway to the galley and smoked a cigarette in a cigarette holder he had won on a punch-board deal.
“Well you heard of it now,” he said. “I reckon your stomach don’t care too much what it’s called.”
At the far end of the table two deck hands got up silently and went out. The wiper, low man of the engine department, sat dunking sugar cookies into his coffee. Every once in a while he would lose a piece and fish it out of his coffee with a spoon. It was driving Ironhat nuts, I could see. But Ironhat never said anything in a critical way to anybody, except maybe excited he would holler at the deck hands out of the pilothouse, but in a way so they didn’t get sore at him.
However . . . “Is it absolutely necessary you got to slop around in that coffee cup with them cookies?” says the Second Engineer, a new man last trip. He had stomach ulcers and you could see him in the engine room at night, making himself a shot of baking soda in a special glass, amidst the terrible noise and uproar of the diesels. His name was Kennedy and he wasn’t very happy.
The wiper looked embarrassed and went out, pulling his black sateen cap out of his hip pocket en route.
“Goddam fine boat where we have to eat at the same table with the wipers and the deck hands. Too bad we ain’t fattening up a hog and we could have him at table too.”
Clarence didn’t care much for this remark and he said, “The officers eat by themselves on the Federal Barge Line. Now if you had steam license you could go over there and you wouldn’t have to eat with the riffraff.”
Of course the Second Engineer had no steam license in the world, all he knew was injectors and the Briggs oil filter and such things, so he got up mad and went out.
“I love these big shots,” Clarence said.
“Now he will have to hit the baking soda harder than ever this watch,” Ironhat said. “Why do you insist on riling him up that way, Clarence?”
“If Kennedy don’t like it here why don’t he move on?” Clarence said. “Damn if I would work on a job where I had to guzzle a half-pound Arm and Hammer every watch.”
Everything in the messroom rattled and shook and the salt cellars and the patent sugar dispenser with the hinged spout jumped up and down on the worn white tablecloth as the boat passed over some shoal water.
“Jesus keep it in the deep water, Casey,” says Clarence the cook, “or we won’t have no dishes left.”
“Boy she sure gives you a swell shaking up in the shallow water,” I said. “I don’t believe they designed this here hull according to Hoyle. The way she chatters in shoal water beats anything I ever seen.”
“This would be a fine night to be walking up the sidewalk someplace in central Illinois,” Ironhat said, putting the cellophane off a new cigar into the remains of his logumberry pie and striking a wood match on the underside of the table.
“We are not setting no speed records going up through here,” said Deck hand number 3 still down at the end of the table, forking his pie and entering into his third cup of coffee.
“We ain’t likely to set no records,” Ironhat said.
“I sure don’t like this steamboatin on a near flood,” Clarence says.
“That makes two of us,” Ironhat said.
