Dance on the Wind tb-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  Titus peered at those three roughened men, surprised to find them suddenly shy and sheepish in the presence of this woman looking every bit as worn enough to be their maiden aunt, a woman who had just spoken moving words as she watched them bury their pilot—then minutes afterward forced them to own up to just what it was rivermen tied up at Natchez to do.

  Poking at the embers with a twig she stirred some more life into the fire, then shrugged a shoulder as she pulled the big coffee kettle from the heat. “I suppose it’s what men are about, and there’s never gonna be no changing it. So don’t pay me no mind. I’m much obliged for your giving me a place to lay my head on your boat tonight.” She picked up a tinned mug and asked, “Any of you care for more of my coffee?”

  As for anything remotely resembling civilization in this river wilderness, there were but three sizable outposts of settlement that joined those tiny villages, far-flung trading posts, and the occasional military fort: at the far northern end of the lower Mississippi Valley sat the old French colony, St. Louis; all the way south at the other end of the river sprawled the even larger New Orleans; and between them squatted Natchez—a town more of dubious reputation than of any real note.

  Not only could a boatman look forward to some ribald female companionship along with some head-thumping whiskey in the brothels and watering holes that sat at the river’s edge—but there was still even more cause to celebrate. Reaching Natchez meant the most treacherous sections of the Mississippi were now behind them. Sitting where it did on the eastern shore, the town had quickly proved itself an ideal way station where the flatboat crews put in to resupply, rest, and recreate before making the last short run on down to New Orleans.

  Long before, the place had been nothing more than a semipermanent encampment of the Natchez Indians. With the coming of the white man the first settlement high upon the bluff overlooking the river was eventually wrangled over by three European countries. First to arrive were the Spanish, followed by the French, and eventually the British brought their influence to bear on this Mississippi port. Ultimately the infant United States came to reign supreme in recent years. Each of those conflicting cultures had added the same full-bodied, international flavor any traveler would find in St. Louis and New Orleans. All told, the entire Natchez district numbered some seventy-five hundred souls, due in large part to the cultivation of the unusually rich soil found on numerous farms and expansive plantations. Yet the town served as the center of more than mere trade—early-day Natchez boasted an extremely varied and exciting social life of theater, balls, and what traveling acts happened by.

  The winter sun had set and twilight was slipping down around them as the four boatmen climbed over the gunnel to stand on the wharf, peering past the rickety clapboard and canvas-topped shanties to the lights of the town itself on the heights above.

  Kingsbury turned and asked the woman, “You’re gonna be all right here?”

  “Got me all I need,” she replied, then gestured them to be off. “Now, get—and have yourselves a hoot. I’ll be right here when you mosey on back.”

  “Likely be back afore morning,” the boat’s skinny pilot replied as he turned away with the others.

  They pressed into the last throb of that busy wharf, pushing past all manner of those who made the river and this wilderness their home. Here beneath the Natchez hill Bass not only rubbed elbows with many other homespun boatmen and leather-clad frontiersmen, but with Brits and Frenchmen, African slaves and freedmen, along with Indians, Spaniards, Acadians, and Creoles as well.

  “What be that up there?” Titus asked, stopping to point up the bluff to the town built on the high ground at a distance of a mile from the river.

  Kingsbury stopped with the rest of them right behind Bass, saying, “Natchez.”

  “Ain’t we going up there?” Titus asked.

  Heman Ovatt explained, “We ain’t allowed.”

  “That’s right,” Kingsbury continued. “Rivermen like us get arrested if’n they go up there to the town where the proper folks live.”

  Bass looked up the bluff again, then quickly at the collection of vulgar shacks and hovels raised along the wharf in one long, jagged strip. “If’n that’s Natchez up there, then what’s this place down here where they ’llow us to go?”

  “This here’s called Natchez-Under-the-Hill,” Kingsbury answered.

  That name was not only picturesque, but apt and clearly fitting. Tucked here under the fine houses and rich shops catering only to the most cultured of Natchez residents sat the squalid, low-roofed sheds where the rivermen flocked to celebrate a bawdy and profane life. Above them stood the big houses, all finished off with ornate balconies and ivy-covered piazzas, the town’s streets crowded by handsome carriages, while here beside the river huddled only those monuments to man’s timeless attraction to the varied sins of the flesh.

  Kingsbury set the group off again, draping an arm over the youngster’s shoulder to say, “I’m wanting Titus here to have him a look at Annie Christmas’s gunboat down the way.”

  “Gunboat?” Titus asked. “What the devil that be?”

  “Just what they call a flatboat been left behind by a crew long ago and some working girls took it over,” Ovatt declared.

  Bass asked him, “Working girls? Like them at the Kangaroo in Louisville?”

  “That’s the idea!” Kingsbury replied. “It’s their floating whorehouse.”

  “But why is it called a gunboat?”

  “Don’t you go there to shoot off your gun?” Root inquired.

  “I didn’t bring me my rifle—”

  “Naw!” Kingsbury interrupted with a chuckle. “Didn’t Mincemeat go an’ teach you all about how to use your gun?”

  “Yeah,” added Root. “You was locked up with her for all that time—I figured you’d learn’t you couldn’t have you near the fun with your rifle you can have with your gun!”

  It came over him slowly as he looked from face to grinning, gaping face in that deepening twilight. “All right,” Bass said. “Let’s go see this here gunboat.”

  Ovatt asked, “Maybe you’ll shoot your gun off tonight, eh?”

  “Count on it,” Bass replied enthusiastically as they started off down the wharf once more, passing noisy whorehouses, grogshops, card rooms, and gambling dens where laughter and music, shouts and screams, as well as drunken men all came tumbling out onto the cold plank thoroughfare. Here and there a short street ran perpendicular to the single long avenue that corded itself beside the river—streets named: Choctaw, Silver, Cherokee, Arkansas, and Chickasaw, all of them littered with filth, trash, and human excrement. Hundreds of men poured from one dimly lit place to the other, hooting and hollering at the pinnacle of bawdy revelry, while half-feral dogs and other wild creatures slunk back in the dark places and fought wrinkle-necked vultures among the shadows over the rotting garbage heaved right out of each establishment’s front door.

  “Here you go, Titus,” Kingsbury said when they finally reached the southern end of the wharf to stand near a long flatboat badly in need of repair.

  “What’s this?” Bass inquired as the pilot held his palm open and there laid three coins.

  “A picayune.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Man needs money to buy hisself a place to shoot off his gun!” Root exclaimed as Kingsbury handed the other two boatmen their picayune—the equivalent of six cents.

  “What’m I gonna do with only this?” Titus protested.

  Kingsbury snorted a loud guffaw, then said, “Here at Annie Christmas’s gunboat, that there picayune gonna get you drunk, get you a woman near all night long, and a bed till morning.”

  “But you don’t wanna let yourself fall asleep, Titus,” Ovatt warned.

  “Listen to him,” Root echoed. “Don’t you dare fall asleep with one of Annie’s whores.”

  “Why can’t I just sleep it off if’n I take a mind to—like I done with—”

  “Ain’t like Mincemeat,” Kingsbury st
arted to explain. “Most of these here gals got ’em steady men they flock with. The women work on their backs and those fellas go gamble off what the women make getting poked by boatmen.”

  “So? What’s that mean to me?”

  “It means a lot of them gals don’t give a good goddamn about you after they let you poke ’em,” Ovatt said. “You fall asleep, and you’re likely as not to never wake up—at the bottom of the river.”

  He glanced down at the three coins in his palm, then clenched them tightly as he asked, “N-never wake up? How?”

  Kingsbury slapped a hand on Bass’s shoulder in the way of a big brother explaining sharp realities, “You go to sleeping, that gal you’re with might let in her feller to do the blood work.”

  “B-blood work?” He was suspicious they were yanking on his leg.

  Root dragged an index finger from one ear, across his throat to the other ear, making a distasteful sound as he did so.

  “Or that gal might just be the sort of whore cut your throat her own self!” Ovatt said.

  “Like a hog hung up at the slaughter!” Kingsbury added.

  Wide-eyed, Titus regarded them all in turn, then blinked and asked, “Why … why all you fellas—and Ebenezer too—let me go off by my own self with that one named Mincemeat?”

  “Shit!” Kingsbury replied, rubbing a hand across the top of Bass’s head. “None of us, ’specially Ebenezer, gonna let you go off with some whore what’d open you up a new breathing hole in your neck! Ebenezer Zane was taking good care of you, sending you off with Mincemeat.”

  “She’s a good whore!” Root exclaimed.

  “Not like none of these here bitches in Natchez,” Ovatt said. “G’won and dip your stinger in their honey-pot, then get on outta there to do some more drinking. Or get your bones back to the boat.”

  “That’s the only way, Titus,” Kingsbury warned. “Don’t trust none of them spread-legged bitches here in Natchez. They all likely murdered a man or two their own selves.”

  Ovatt agreed, saying, “You just figure that’s why they’re working here, and not up to St. Louie, or on down to Norlins.”

  “Likely got runned out of those towns,” Kingsbury said, “or escaped afore they was strung up for murderin’ customers.”

  “Ain’t much law hereabouts,” Root said, gesturing this way and that. “Best thing for a man to do is to hang together with his crew when he ain’t humping ’tween the legs of one of them bang-tailed bitches.”

  * Future site of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

  13

  A hard, cold rain hammered the heavy oiled-canvas sheeting stretched over Bass’s head like the rattle of hailstones against the white-oak top of an empty shipping cask.

  At first he was too frightened to allow himself to be pleasured by one of Annie Christmas’s homely castaways.

  Instead Titus sought relief at the bottom of a clay mug filled with a fiery concoction of corn spirits, for the longest time unable to take his eyes off the gunboat madam. He’d never seen anyone, much less a woman, near so tall—over six and a half feet of her. She laughed and drank, roared and cussed with the other three boatmen, and then he watched her disappear in the back with Kingsbury. Bass found another big one to stare at. This one—just about as wide as Annie was tall.

  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, th
at 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?”