Dance on the Wind (43 page)

From that point on it didn’t take him long to start sensing the whiskey’s effects as the tip of his nose steadily grew more numb and felt for all the world like it was swelling as large as a hog’s snout right there on the front of his face.

Mysterious thing about what he had been swilling down—the more he drank, the more beautiful that plump and fleshy half-dressed consort became.

It took a while as he sat there drinking, but that gunboat
whore finally realized the youngest customer there that night at Annie Christmas’s was giving her all his attention from across the small windowless parlor that fronted a half-dozen tiny cribs. In all, the parlor and those six cribs took up the entire length of a flatboat salvaged after its owner had been murdered in one of the many uninvestigated, unsolved, unquestioned killings that seemed to be an everyday staple of life “Under-the-Hill.” It was seventy feet by eighteen feet of floating pleasure palace. No music save for the incessant humming and singing performed by the tall, bald-headed slave Annie kept behind the short, stinking bar. Patrons and the working girls had few tables to set their drinks upon, and only two chairs dressed the whole parlor. Everyone else had to satisfy themselves squatting on some soiled, grass-filled tick pillows covered in muslin or nankeen sheeting. There didn’t appear to be a single one that hadn’t recently seen a drunken customer pitch the contents of his stomach onto it, and a few even bore significant splotches of blood Annie’s girls had failed to bleach before the stains set.

At long last she returned to the parlor to find Titus still willing to stare at her. Taking up a clay mug for herself, she came to stand over him. “How old are you, honey?”

He looked up into her big, round, expressive eyes staring into his as if she were about to hang on his every word because what he had to say was sure to be the most important news of that day. When she smiled he saw where the whore was missing three of those teeth squarely behind the middle of her lower lip. And for a moment he sat there transfixed, dumbfounded, wondering how it was going to be kissing that mouth, what with that big gap in her teeth that made her look much older than he supposed her to be.

There at the corner of the parlor, his head was beginning to swim crazily. He watched her kneel, coming so close, he had to pull his head back, blink and strain to keep her in focus, the way she became two whores when he wasn’t concentrating.

“You hear me, sonny? Ain’cha gonna tell me how old are you?”

“Eight … eighteen.”

When he started to giggle at how funny that seemed right then, she turned arid motioned to the bartender, who wore a black Barcelona hat atop his smooth skull. “Hezekiah, get me and my young friend here another drink. Double up on mine ’cause it appears he’s a long way ahead of me.”

“Him paying, Miz Nina?”

Twisting about to shoot the muscular barman her most evil glare, she said, “You ain’t the idjit you make out to be, Hezekiah—so you best just get me my rum!”

“Eighteen’s what I said,” Titus repeated, and struggled to keep from laughing at his untruth this time.

“You ain’t eighteen, honey,” she cooed, running one beefy finger down the front of his shirt, “no more’n I’m the lily-white virgin you been waiting for on your wedding night,” then laid her hand on the inside of his thigh.

It grew warm where her palm pressed, those fat fingers kneading his leg ever so gently. He looked up when the canvas portal parted, two men coming in from the rainy deck, each one of them ducking out of the way of one of the many candle lanterns suspended from the canvas roof’s cross beam. Stopping at the bar, they hunched over, whispering low to Hezekiah. As the Negro bartender clanged down a pair of tin cups and began to pour a potent libation from a large wicker-wrapped clay jug, Titus turned his foggy attention back to the whore … for now she had her hand firmly in position to get all of his attention.

Don’t you dare fall asleep with one of them whores!

Recalling that warning was enough to scare himself: Titus seized her plump wrist, gripped it firmly.

“What you doing, honey?” she demanded in a coarse voice. “I was just getting ready to start pleasuring you.”

“No … no, you can’t—”

“We only gotta get you up and head on back to my crib—take off all your shucks so you can hump on top of me like I feel your young poker getting ready to,” she declared without preliminaries.

He didn’t move, staring instead at the deep crevice between her heavy breasts about to pour right out of that soiled chintz dressing gown she wore, its gay flowers dull
and faded with too much use and too little soap. everything about her was big, fleshy, overflowing. He looked more closely, noticing the scratches and teeth marks, moles and freckles, that marred the white skin rounded across the top half of those breasts.

“I’ll bet you’re the kind just needs to put his face right into ’em,” she said, suddenly reaching behind his head and pulling him into her cleavage.

Soft as it was, as foul smelling as was her unwashed flesh, Bass drank in the pleasure of his predicament as if her earthy stench were sweet perfume. Feeling himself stir all the more beneath the hand she kept moving between his legs.

“Don’t wanna sleep,” he grumbled, reminding himself—becoming groggy with the growing numbness of the whiskey.

“Shit, honey—I ain’t gonna let you sleep.” She lapped at his ear, then slowly got to her feet, pulling him up beside her. “You’re gonna be thumping Miss Nina: the biggest, roundest whore in all of Natchez. Like Annie says: there’s more of me to pleasure a man than all the rest of ’em put together.”

When she bent over to retrieve her cup, one of Nina’s breasts spilled out of the dressing gown. Instead of taking care to cover herself immediately, she drained the rum from her cup, then stuffed her breast back beneath the loose folds of chintz.

Bass looked down into his own cup, saw his own dim reflection in what little of the tobacco-colored whiskey remained at the bottom. Then he turned it up and swallowed the last of the burning potion.

“You seventeen, boy?” she asked, nudging him away through the smoke, noise, raucous laughter, and the tangle of legs of those sprawled across the floor pillows. “For sure you ain’t eighteen.”

“Almost seventeen,” he admitted, glad to have her big arm to hold on to.

Nina stopped and whirled on him.
“Almost
seventeen! You sixteen years old, you li’l river tramp?”

He held a finger to his lips and hushed, “Shhhh! Don’t tell nobody how old I be.”

“Shit, no,” Nina replied with sarcasm. “We don’t want no one thinking bad of you for lying ’bout your age, now—what with all your other bad habits. So tell me, child—you got money for a poke with Nina?”

“I got me a piggy-yune,” he replied, slurring the word.

The whore held out her hand. “If you gimme your picayune, I’ll make sure this’ll be a night you don’t ever forget.”

“Just can’t sleep it off with you,” he repeated, stuffing a hand inside his oiled jerkin to produce the three coins.

In the blink of his bleary eye she snatched them away, stuffed them into that deep cleavage straining against the folds of her dressing gown.

“Say, Nina!”

She turned, with Bass clinging to her arm so he wouldn’t fall. He came tottering to a stop, his head wobbling, trying to focus on the two newcomers at the bar.

One of the pair asked, “When you gonna be done with tender britches there?”

“Soon enough. You jest be patient, Will. Won’t have to wait long.”

“Make quick work of him so you and me can have us a poke.”

Nina didn’t say another word as she wheeled Bass about, leading him down a narrow hallway formed by sheets of canvas hanging from the oak cross beams overhead. Off to the right sat three cribs. Off to the left, the other trio of cribs. He thought he could hear an impassioned grunt from behind one of the canvas walls rising in crescendo as the two of them shuffled toward the end of the flatboat. By the time they pushed past the canvas door flap into her crib, the hard rain was slacking off. Using one candle she kept lit, Nina lit two more. In the dim light Bass could see his breath, squinting cross-eyed at it while the vapors danced before his face. Concentrating on it as hard as he was, Titus bent, and bent some more, and almost keeled over to the side. From the next crib he heard a familiar voice growl.

“I ain’t giving you no money yet, you whore! First I lay, then I pay!”

Wobbly, feeling his stomach suddenly lurch, Bass put
out his hand to keep himself from falling and stumbled against the canvas wall separating Nina’s from that adjoining crib.

“Hey! Watch it there!”

Titus was sure now that he recognized the voice. He stuck his face right up to the wall and hollered in reply, “That you, Ovatt?”

“No—dammit! It’s Root! Leave that wall be!”

Laughing easily with the sudden flush of companionship, he identified himself. “It’s me, Titus!”

“Good for you, Titus,” Root bellowed. “Now, just get on with what you’re about and leave me to my honey-daubin’.”

“Just don’t you go falling asleep with that whore, Reuben!” Titus replied every bit as sternly as he had been told, then giggled as Nina came over to him to begin pulling off his jerkin.

She guided him over to her pallet on the floor all of the three steps it took to get Titus there, then nudged him backward. On his back, head dizzied, he sensed her pulling at his wet moccasins, then the bottoms of his canvas britches. His head felt lighter and lighter, as if it might just screw itself off his shoulders and go floating right up through the low roof he fixed with a stare as he fought down the rising intimidation of his troubled stomach.

Just about the time he felt her cold, fleshy hands wrap around his penis, Bass tried rolling onto an elbow, growling, “I’m gonna be sick.”

She flew off him so fast he was amazed, struck at the way she moved for being so large. Nina reached over, snatching up the chamber pot that sat nearby, and stuffed its fragrant opening right under his face. It was there she held his head as he screwed up his face at the horrendous stench that filled his face and mouth. Titus emptied his stomach in one explosive lurch.

“That’s a good boy,” she cooed to him, running her fat, oily fingers over his forehead. “You just go ’head and fill that up if’n you need to.”

His belly knotted up another half-dozen tries at wrenching itself free from its moorings in his gut, and then he was done. As he rocked uncertainly atop that single
elbow, Nina took the chamber pot to set it in the corner, turned, and got back down on her knees over him, her hands wrapping around his softening flesh once more.

He looked up at her and smiled, gradually collapsing backward while the world slowly went warm and black.

Unable to part the blackness that enveloped him like a suffocating hood, Titus instead let his head hang as he shuffled blindly beside the one who was dragging him along, lunging forward beside him a step at a time. As much as he wanted to wake up, he couldn’t. For all he knew, the big whore was dragging him off—maybe it was even one of those who had hollered at her from the bar a while back. They’d get him to the other side of the flatboat, away from the wharf, stab him—then throw his body into the harbor.

He wouldn’t be able to swim—wasn’t all that good at it anyway. Hell, he wasn’t even walking for himself right now, getting pulled along as he was. And if they pushed him into the Mississippi, he was bound to die. Sober, he might well fight his way through most any water if he had to. But not like this. Titus knew he’d sink like a boundary stone, struggling only a little before he sank all the way to the bottom of the river—unable to stroke and paddle. Hell, he couldn’t even open his eyes!

It was still black. As black as it would be on the bottom of the river where these killers hid the bodies of the men they robbed. They stumbled over something. A man grunted. Then Bass was wheeled suddenly, his shirt ripping.

If he was lucky, Titus thought, they’d slit his throat first, maybe shoot him in the head. No, they wouldn’t do that. Too much noise. Just slit his throat, and then he’d never reach St. Louis to see if Levi Gamble had made it there last summer.

“What the hell business is it of yours?”

He felt the rumble of angry speech in the chest of the man who held him against his side.

“That’s my friend you got there.”

Titus wondered about that. Who was this friend of the
one who slung him around again and took a few steps back toward the far voice? Sounded just like Root’s.

“I seen you afore, ain’t I?” the one holding him growled.

“Maybeso,” the far voice said. “S’pose you put that boy down and come on over here in the light. Then you can take a good look at me.”

The one carrying him lurched forward another step, then stopped. “Say, now—lookee there. Just what you got in mind to do with that big sticker, you ugly son of a bitch?”

“Told you, put that boy down.”

“He a friend of yours? Whyn’t you say so in the first place?”

His senses all firmly dulled, Bass nonetheless felt his body flung toward the far voice, tumbling, colliding with a man who tried to step out of his way as Titus hurtled past, limp arms and legs akimbo. When he struck the hard-planked floor, it was with enough force that his eyes blinked open in shock at the sudden blow.

Above him for a long moment he watched a candle lantern sway precariously, its dirty-yellow corona swishing this way and that above the two shadows grappling between the two dark walls at his feet. Then he remembered: this was the narrow canvas hallway strung between the half-dozen cribs. The grunting pair rolled through the foot of one of the walls, gouging at eyes and pulling at hair for all they were worth.

Within that invaded crib a woman’s falsetto shriek rose above a man’s low, angry curse as the combatants tumbled back from the canvas wall, rolling toward Bass.

He blinked, wanting to see, make sense of it all, slowly clawing his hands up the canvas wall, pulling himself to his bare feet.

One of them was yelling names, sprawling atop the downed man, holding his opponent with one strong hand gripping the throat and the other raised above his head in a cruel fist. But the other arched his back violently, unseating his enemy to immediately begin hollering out for help of his own. Names that, though muffled in his foggy mind, snagged a familiar chord within Bass: