from the stacks of passing boats, and we just pray it don’t set fire to the cotton.
There’s only a few staterooms on the boiler deck for folks that can afford cabin passage. Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane, if they’re alive yet, must be up there. Trouble is, there’s no way I can know. During the day, I can mix in with the roustabouts, who are colored men, but that won’t get me up in the passenger rooms.
Gus’s got the opposite problem. Being a white boy, he don’t pass for a roustabout, and he ain’t got a ticket to show, if he was asked. He moves round the boat at night. The boy’s a thief, and thievin’ is a sin, but just now he’s all I got to show me the way of things. We ain’t friends. I had to give him one of Missy Lavinia’s coins so he’d let me share the cotton bales. We help each other, though. Both know if you get caught for a stowaway, they throw you off in the river, let the paddle wheel suck you under. Gus’s seen it happen before.
“Hush up,” he says and tugs me back toward our hiding place. “You done gone soft in the head?”
“Come to do my necessary while it’s still dark out,” I say. If he decides I’m fool enough to get him caught, he’ll want shed of me.
“Use the slop jar, you ain’t got no more sense than to stand here a’gawkin off the edge like this,” Gus hisses. “You fall off into the water, and end up gone, then I got nobody that can go about this boat durin’ the day and be took for one of the workers, see? Elsewise, you ain’t no concern of mine. I don’t give a pig toe what you do. But I need somebody to sneak in the crew hall and brang me food. I’s a growin’ boy. Don’t like goin’ hongry.”
“Didn’t think of the slop jar,” I say of the old bucket Gus stole and that we stuffed a ways down the cotton bales from our hidin’ place. We got us a whole house set up under there. The Palace, Gus calls it.
Palace for skinny people. We tunneled it like rats. Even made myself a hiding hole for Missy’s reticule. Hope Gus ain’t found it while I’m gone. He knows I got secrets.
But I’m gonna have to tell him. Been on this slow-moving packet boat almost two days already and hadn’t found out nothing on my own. I need Gus’s thievin’ skills, and the longer I wait to ask, the more it’s likely something terrible comes to Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane. More likely it is they wind up dead or wishing to be. There’s things worse than death. You been in slavery days, you know there’s things a heap less peaceable than being dead.
To get Gus’s help, I got to tell him the truth. At least most of it.
And probably spend another dollar, too.
I wait till we’re safe back in our cotton bale house. Gus squirrels into his sleeping place, still grousing about having to go get me.
I twist over on my side, then my belly, so’s I can whisper to him, but I smell that he’s got his feet turned my way. “Gus, I ought to tell you something.”
“I’m sleepin’,” he says, irritable.
“But you can’t let on to another living soul about it.”
“Ain’t got time for yer fool talk,” he snaps. “You gettin’ to be more botherment then a wagonload of two-headed billy goats.”
“Make a promise to me, Gus. Could be another dollar in it for you, if you can do what I’m asking. You’ll need that money after you leave this boat.” Gus ain’t as tough as he talks. Boy’s scared, just like me.
I swallow hard and tell him about Missy and Juneau Jane going into that building and never coming out, and me seeing them trunks hauled up the boardwalk to the docks, and hearing noises and the man saying it was a dog inside, and then Missy’s locket falling in the mud. I don’t let on that I’m a girl underneath this shirt and britches