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shot through with ash, full of hot bright cinders, adrift on the wind. Larger and larger the cloud would swell as still more steamers fired up and poured out smoke, until the pall blotted out the sun and began to creep across the face of the city.
From Abner Marsh's vantage point on the hurricane deck, it looked as though the whole city of New Orleans was going up in flames, and all the steamers were about to flee. It made him feel uneasy, as if somehow the other captains knew something he did not, as if the Fevre Dream, too, ought to be getting up her steam and making ready to back out. Marsh was anxious to be off. For all the wealth and glamour of the New Orleans trade, he yearned for the rivers he knew: for the upper Mississippi with its bluffs and dense woods, for the wild muddy Missouri that ate steamers like nobody's business, for the narrow Illinois and the silty, bustling Fevre. The Fevre Dream's maiden voyage down the Ohio seemed almost idyllic to him now, a remembrance of simpler, better days. Not even two months gone, it seemed an eternity ago. Ever since they'd left St. Louis and come downriver, things had been going wrong, and the further south they'd come the worse they'd gotten. "Joshua is right," Marsh muttered to himself as he looked out over New Orleans. "There's something rotten here." It was too damn hot, too damn wet, with too damn many bugs, enough to make a man think there was a curse on the whole damn place. And maybe there was, on account of the slavery, though Marsh wasn't sure about that. All he was sure of was that he wanted to tell Whitey to fire up the boilers, and roust Framm or Albright up to the pilot house, so he could back the Fevre Dream clear of the landing and get her upriver. Now. Before sunset. Before they arrived.
Abner Marsh wanted to shout those orders so bad he could taste the words, lying bitter and unspoken on his tongue. He felt a kind of superstitious dread about this evening, though he told himself over and over that he was not a superstitious man. Still, he wasn't blind either-the sky was hot and suffocating, and west of them a storm was building, a big one, a ripper, the storm that Dan Albright had smelled a couple days back. And the steamers were leaving, one after another, dozens of them, and as Marsh watched them recede upriver and vanish in the shimmering waves of heat, he felt more and more alone, as if each steamboat that faded into the distance carried a small bit of him aboard her, a piece of courage, a hunk of his certainty, a dream or a small, sooty hope. Lots of steamers left New Orleans every day, Marsh thought to himself, and today is no different, it's just a day like any other day on the river in August: hot and smoky and lazy, everyone moving slow, waiting, maybe for a breath of cool air or for the clean, fresh rain that would wash the smoke from the sky.
But another part of him, an older and deeper part, knew that what they waited for was neither cool nor clean, and it would bring no relief from the heat, the dampness, the bugs, the fear.
Down below, Hairy Mike was roaring at his roustabouts, and making threatening gestures with his black iron billet, but the noises from the landing and the bells and whistles of the other steamers drowned out his words. A mountain of cargo waited on the levee, almost a thousand tons, the Fevre Dream's top capacity. Hardly a quarter of it had been carried across the narrow planks to the main deck. It would take hours to get the rest aboard. Even if he wanted to, Marsh could not take them out, not with all that freight a-waiting on the landing. Hairy Mike and Jeffers and the rest would think he'd gone mad.
He wished he'd been able to tell them, like he'd intended to, to make plans with them. But there wasn't time. Everything had begun to move so quickly, and tonight after dark this Damon Julian would come aboard the Fevre Dream to dine. There was no time to talk to Hairy Mike or Jonathon Jeffers, no time to explain or persuade or deal with the doubts and questions they'd surely have. So tonight