Dance on the Wind (25 page)

“Three Monongahela rye for these fine boatmen,” Zane was ordering as Titus clattered to a halt within their fold, the pilot immediately drawing Bass to his side as he held up two fingers on the other hand, “and a spruce beer for me and my young friend here.”

Three men worked the bar, tapping kegs of ale with great bung starters and mallets, pouring out mugs of the
Ohio River’s most famous rye. With a clatter and a slosh their five pewter mugs appeared before them. As the other four all grabbed for theirs, Ebenezer Zane took his in hand and picked up the last, unclaimed mug.

“Here, Titus Bass. I figure you ought’n go slow—this being your first night’s carouse as a man. That pissant rye these boys love to swill takes some getting used to. Me? I prefer my ale, with a foamy head or no. Potato squeezings or spruce drippings—it’s all the same to me. Drink up, lad!”

Titus watched the pilot throw back his chin and take a long and mighty draft, his hen-egg-sized Adam’s apple bobbing up and down between those muscular cords in his neck that throbbed beneath his thick beard.

Taking the mug from his lips, Zane dragged a forearm across his hairy face and whirled on the barman. “Another of that fine ale, my good man!”

When he had his second and had turned back to his crew, the pilot leaned in to Titus, saying, “Now it’s your turn. Drink the first one fast like I, boy. And the second you can savor the taste.”

“Swaller? Swaller it all … like you done—”

“Just like I done.”

“G’won, Titus Bass,” Kingsbury prodded as the other three boatmen crowded close, faces gaping apishly.

He figured it would be nothing much to fit his belly around that mug of ale—just a matter of swallowing until he had drained it all. With the first sip he found it not unpleasant, a woodsy taste to it, some effervescent tickling his tongue. Then he was swallowing in good order, barely aware of the boatmen around him chanting their encouragement as he tipped the bottom of his mug up higher and higher. From the corner of his eye he watched them cheer him on, hoisting their own mugs in waving salute until there was no more for him to drink.

“What’d you think of that?” Heman Ovatt asked with a slap to the back of his shoulders.

“Yes, you li’l river rat—what’d you think of that?”

At the sudden, strange, and very female voice, he whipped around to find a skinny woman sliding herself
into their group, picking up Kingsbury’s arm to drape it over her shoulder.

“Ah, Mincemeat,” Kingsbury cried out, his eyes come alive with an inner fire as he seized one of her ample and half-exposed breasts in a huge hand, then clamped her jaw in the other, holding her prisoner while pressing his mouth on hers.

“I’m next, I’m next!” Ovatt cried, standing right there to press himself against the woman when Kingsbury drew back to take a breath and another swallow of his rye.

“An’ how ’bout you, Ebenezer Zane? You want your welcome kiss too?” she asked when Ovatt had finished kissing her.

Still aghast at the woman’s sudden appearance, how she allowed the men to hungrily fondle and kiss her, Titus stood there dumbfounded, his eyes muling as he watched Ovatt reach up to fondle the flesh across the tops of her rounded breasts, exposed as they were all the way down to just above her nipples, pushed up to their full extent by the bodice she had laced beneath them. Skinny as she was, they were about as big a pair as any breasts Bass had seen.

At that moment it grew warm in the Kangaroo. He became discomforted inside, gazing as he was at her pale, mottled flesh there in the murky, smoky lamplight.

“Thankee anyway, my sweetness. Mathilda working tonight?” Kingsbury asked as he brought his head up from kissing the woman’s cleavage.

“Ain’t she working ever’ night?” the woman asked in reply, her full eyes coming to rest on Titus. “After all, she owns this place where you pigs come to rut, don’t she?”

“Any new girls?” Reuben finally spoke up before he drank at his rye.

“Nary a one,” she replied. “Mathilda had a signed writ on three more new ones to come downriver from Pitts—but a feller down Natchez way made ’em a better offer.”

“Bet that made Mathilda a wild one!” Zane declared.

“Wild? You bet. None of us could live with her for a week after that,” she explained. “Then she up and sent a writ back to Cincinnati for what new girls she could get to come down on the next boat.”

“When’ll that be?” Root asked.

She turned to him slowly, her distaste for the man plain as paint on her face. “Be a long time.”

“What?” Root complained. “There’s boats like ours coming down all the time—”

She snorted as she took hold of Ovatt’s mug, saying, “Not boats hauling people cargo.”

As she tossed back some of his rye, Ovatt said, “Settlers going downriver—we see ’em all the time.”

“Not the same as a bunch of women, now, is it, you mud rat?” she snarled at Heman, her eyes flicking back to the youngster. “Not many wanna take up valuable cargo space with whores, now, do they?”

“Think Mathilda be happy to see me?” Kingsbury asked as he snugged her tighter against his hip.

One side of her chemise slipped off a bony shoulder, exposing just a bit more of one breast. Yet she did not take her eyes off Titus. “She’ll be happy to see you. Seeing that you’re one of the few don’t punch her so she’s gotta throw you out. One of you pig rutters gonna tell me who’s this skinny river rat you dragged in with you?”

“This’un?” Zane replied, slinging his weighty arm over Bass’s skinny shoulder. “Why, this be our new hand. Joined up couple days back on the river. Kentucky side of the river, that is. Like me, the lad’s a Kentucky man: southwest of Cincinnati—where you say them new girls be coming from.”

“What’s your name, boy?”

He licked his lips and looked away from her face. “B-bass.”

“What’s your christened name?”

For a moment that stumped him.

“His name is Titus,” Ebenezer answered for him.

With a bob of his warm head he echoed, “Titus Bass.” Immediately he turned to Zane to ask, “Can I get another?”

“Like that, eh?”

Bass agreed, glad to tear his eyes from the roundness and cleavage of the woman’s flesh. “Tasted real good. Makes a fella thirsty for another.” His head felt warm, the skin on his face burning too.

And he felt warm low in his belly when his eyes yanked back to look at her.

“S’pose you go find Mathilda for me?” Kingsbury asked. “You do that, Mincemeat?”

A loud voice suddenly called out, “You staying with them, Mincemeat?”

The five of them and the woman all turned to look at the table where a trio of men hard at their cups motioned her back over their way.

“I’m staying here, Briggs.”

A second man grumbled sourly, “You was here with us first.”

Zane slid in front of the woman protectively. “The lady said she was staying with us. There’s plenty others here for the likes of you.”

“The likes of me?” the third one of the trio cried out like a branded mule. “You’re a fine one—”

Then the woman shoved back in front of Zane, holding her arms out between the two of them. “Briggs, you and the rest ain’t never met this’un before, have you? If you had, I figger you’d know better. He’s a real snapping turtle—”

“Don’t look all that mean to me,” Briggs snorted. “Kinda old, ain’cha?”

“Shuddup, Briggs,” she snarled, slapping a hand against his chest, causing his two companions to guffaw. “Makes no matter, ’cause I’m sure you heard of him somewheres on the river anyway. Eb—this here’s Nathaniel Briggs. Briggs, this here’s Ebenezer Zane.”

The stranger’s eyes went wide as his mouth stammered, “Eb … Ebenezer Zane, is it?” The color drained from Briggs’s face as he repeated the name.

“Then I wasn’t wrong: you heard of this here half snapping turtle, half earth trembles, I take it?” Mincemeat asked. “Learn’t what happened last time he tied up here in Louisville.”

“Some talk of it,” Briggs said, his voice quieter as a few others around them at the crude bar squeezed in closer. “Last summer, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t aim to have no trouble here.” Zane clasped an arm around the woman’s waiflike waist.

“Naw,” Briggs replied with a quick wag of his head. “Just like Mincemeat said, there’s other girls hereabouts.”

Titus watched the riverman turn and urge the other two off into the crowd. Then Bass shouldered his way back into that group, anxiously asking, “What happened last summer to you what made them three back away?”

Zane bent over and whispered into the woman’s ear. Titus saw the tired expression on her face change to something a bit more animated as she brought her eyes to rest on Bass.

The pilot straightened to say, “I’ll tell you about it some other time, Titus Bass. But right now—we’ve got beer to drink, and Mincemeat here has agreed to be your friend for the night.”

She patted the wide, colorful sash the pilot had knotted around his waist. “Just as long as it’s money what’s good for a girl to spend here in Louisville.”

“Since when you become particular what you get in trade?” Ebenezer asked. “Guineas, pistoles, or shillings. Even hard American dollars—”

“What you’re to pay me with this trip down, Ebenezer Zane?”

“Coin,” Zane boasted. “American and English too. Hard money you can spend anywhere.” He whipped back around to the bar, where he slammed down his pewter mug. “Barman! Another beer for my friend and me.” Then, twisting to look at the woman, he asked, “What you drinking, Mincemeat?”

She eyed the youngster and said, “I’ll have what it is Titus Bass is having himself.”

“Another beer, good man!” Zane ordered.

At the same time the woman slid out from under the pilot’s arm and pressed her hip against Titus’s groin, threading an arm around his waist, rubbing her cheek right up against his so that he could smell her breath. Already she had likely drunk her fill of Monongahela rye. He found her face pocked with the ravages of some past pox, her cheeks flushed as she pulled back from his face and peered up into his wondering green eyes. With her skinny
fingers Mincemeat stroked first one of his cheeks, then the other.

“Been a long, long time—it has,” she said huskily to the rest of them, pressing her hip into his groin all the more insistently. “A goddamned long time since’t I last had me a peach-cheeked boy like this’un!”

When she took his hardening flesh in her hands and began to stroke her fingers lightly up and down the length of him, Titus didn’t know whether he was going to laugh out of sheer unabashed joy, or cry from the bliss he felt flooding over his entire body.

This was more than the feeling he had experienced with Amy, twice even. But instead of the nerve-jolting joy lasting but a few seconds at most while he exploded, this woman prolonged his eruption to the point Titus became certain he was enjoying more pleasure than any one man could endure.

“Why you called Mincemeat?” he had asked her when she’d first led him back to her tiny, cramped shanty across the muddy rear yard behind the Kangaroo, where she, like the rest of the bar help, was given a crude bed frame of saplings and rope, a musty tick filled with moldy grass, a chamber pot, and a small sheet-iron chimney beneath which she could build a cooking fire. It was the only thing that could chase the damp, bone-numbing chill from the room.

At least that’s what Titus thought until the skinny woman rose from striking sparks to kindling in that rocklined
fire pit and came back to the tall, gangly youth—intent on starting a fire in him.

“It just a name what don’t mean nothing,” she answered as she peeled off his oiled jerkin, then gazed up at his eyes smokily.

God, how thirsty he was, his tongue thick and pasty. He asked, “You got any more of that ale left you?”

“Little bit,” she said, reaching across the narrow crib for the small table where sat her mug. “You can finish it off, sweet boy.”

My, but it still tasted good, although some of the sparkle and bite on his tongue had diminished. The spruce beer Ebenezer had started him out on still had that earthy body to it as he let it wash back against his tonsils, just the way he saw so many of the others in the Kangaroo do throughout that evening and into the long night. After a while he had stopped counting how many mugs Ebenezer and the others bought for him, and now he couldn’t even remember what the tally was when he had stopped caring. For so long there it had seemed like the thing for a man to do—to know how many he had put under his belt—what with this being his first drunk.

She had stayed beside him all that evening, even when they’d moved from the tavern, through the low-beamed entry into the dining hall, passing men who sat on crude benches at long tables where they clattered their mugs down to get the attention of at least one of the maids busy balancing steaming platters and trenchers and even more pitchers of ale from the kitchen fireplaces at the rear of the room where a half-dozen old women and men tended the fires and the food. The venison and pork, along with heaping helpings of potatoes and corn, took the edge off his lightheadedness, yet not so much that he wasn’t anxious to head back into the tavern once all of them were bloated with solid food.