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he reasoned, and tried to put the whole matter from his mind.

But the Mississippi turned to blood, and there was bleeding in his dreams as well. Aboard the Fevre Dream, the mood began to grow bored and somber. A striker got careless and was scalded by the steam, and had to be set ashore at Napoleon. A roustabout ran off at Vicksburg, which was crazy, it being slave country and him a free colored man. Fights broke out among the deck passengers. It was the boredom and the thick, suffocating wet heat of August, Jeffers told him. Trash gets crazy when it gets hot, Hairy Mike echoed. Abner Marsh wasn't so sure. It seemed almost like they were being punished.

Missouri and Tennessee vanished behind them, and Marsh fretted. Cities and towns and woodyards drifted by, days turned into tortuously slow weeks, and they lost passengers and cargo because of York's layovers. Marsh went ashore, into saloons and hotels popular with steamboatmen, and listened, and didn't like the gab he heard about his boat. For all her boilers, one story ran, the Fevre Dream was built too big and heavy, and wasn't very fast at all. Engine trouble, another rumor claimed; seams near to bursting on the boilers. That was bad talk; boiler explosions were greatly feared. A mate from some New Orleans boat told Marsh in Vicksburg that the Fevre Dream looked sweet enough, but her captain was just some no-count upper-river man who didn't have the courage to run her full out. Marsh nearly broke open his head. There was talk about York as well, him and his queer friends and their ways. The Fevre Dream was starting to get herself a reputation, sure enough, but it was not one that Abner Marsh was over-partial to.

By the time they came steaming into Natchez, Marsh had had quite enough.

It was an hour shy of dusk when they first sighted Natchez in the distance, a few lights burning already in the ruddy afternoon, shadows lengthening from the west. It had been a fine day, but for the heat; they'd made their best time since leaving Cairo. The river had a golden sheen to it, and the sun shimmered upon it like a burnished brass ornament, gaudy as all get-out, rippling and dancing when the wind breathed upon the water. Marsh had taken to bed that afternoon, feeling a bit under the weather, but he got himself out of the cabin when he heard the whistle shriek, in answer to the call of another steamer that came high and sweet over the water. They were talking to each other, Marsh knew, an ascending and a descending boat deciding which would pass to the right and which to the left when they met. It happened a dozen times each day. But there was something in the voice of the other boat that called to him, dragged him from his sweaty sheers, and he came out of the texas just in time to see her pass; the Eclipse, swift and haughty, the gilded device between her chimneys glittering in the sun, her passengers thick on her decks, smoke rolling and tumbling from her. Marsh watched her recede upriver until only her smoke could be seen, a strange tightness in his gut all the while.

When the Eclipse had faded like a dream fades in the morning, Marsh turned, and there was Natchez up ahead of them. He heard the bells sounding the signal for a landing, and their whistle called again.

A tangle of steamers crowded the landing, and beyond them two cities waited for the Fevre Dream. Up on its lofty, precipitous bluffs was Natchez-on-the-hill, the proper city, with its broad streets, its trees and flowers, and all its grand houses. Each one had a name. Monmouth. Linden. Auburn. Ravenna. Concord and Belfast and Windy Hill. The Burn. Marsh had been in Natchez a half-dozen times in his younger days, before he'd had steamers of his own, and he had made it a point to go walking up there and see all those storied houses. They were goddamned palaces, every one of them, and Marsh didn't feel quite comfortable there. The old families who lived inside them acted like kings, too; aloof and arrogant, drinking their mint juleps and their sherry cobblers, icing their damned wine, amusing themselves by racing their highbred horses and hunting bears, dueling with revolvers and bowie knives over the slightest trifling affront. The nabobs, Marsh had heard them called. They