Cly retreated to the Naamah Darling, leaving Houjin to learn about the system. Though the lad had never undergone any formal education, he was smarter than almost anyone the captain had ever known—a boy with an easy mastery of everything with gears, levers, valves, wires, or bolts … to say nothing of his flair for languages.
Fang understood Portuguese, English, and both Mandarin and Cantonese—but he couldn’t speak any of them, and most of his communication with others came in the form of hand signs or written notes. Cly himself knew a smattering of French, left over from his days lurking about New Orleans, and he could not read or write Mandarin, but he spoke enough to make himself understood … if the other speaker were very, very patient. Otherwise, he was limited to the English he’d learned from the cradle onward, and it was sometimes insufficient.
But Huey had a brain like a sponge.
Born to speak Mandarin, he’d picked up Cantonese alongside it and learned English from Lucy O’Gunning and some of the older white men who lingered in the underground. As soon as he could read the English, he’d demanded books composed therein, and before long, he’d developed a better vocabulary than any of the native English speakers the captain knew. Now Fang was teaching him Portuguese out of a few novels, and lately Huey had shown some interest in Spanish.
In short, the Chinese boy could read, write, and speak almost everything useful. And he was busy learning what he didn’t already have a handle on.
The captain himself had only a fourth-grade education, and he was occasionally intimidated by the well-read, the well-heeled, and the well-to-do. However, he was not at all stupid, and he was quietly thrilled by the idea of grooming someone like Houjin for his crew and company. Andan Cly had been a pirate so long, he didn’t care that the boy wasn’t educated, or of age, or even white. He’d learned the hard way that you take the best crew members for the job, regardless of the particulars, and if the best man for the job of engineer was a teenage boy with a ponytail, so be it.
Technically, Kirby Troost was the ship’s engineer. And technically, Cly called Houjin his “communications officer.” But realistically, everyone on board performed whatever task was needed, and the duties were fluid.
Kirby Troost was sitting outside the bobbing hull of the Naamah Darling, still clamped to its pipe dock and awaiting a Goodyear tube of gas. “Cap’n,” he greeted him with a nod of his head.
“Kirby. You got any business that needs attending, while we’re here?”
“Already attended to it. And I’ve got a bit of bad news. There’s trouble at Barataria, sir. Texas stomped through it a couple nights ago.”
“Oh, good,” Cly said. Then, quickly, he adjusted the sentiment. “I mean, your bad news is the same as my bad news, so between the two of us, there’s just one parcel of it.”
“Ah. Right you are, sir. And it could be worse. We could’ve been there when the Texians put their boots on the ground.”
“You’re right about that. Say, how’d you hear about it?”
“Begging your pardon?”
The captain said, “I only learned it through the tapper girl. You got a source out here moves faster than the wires?”
“No, sir. Ran into some old acquaintances, that’s all. They flew over Barataria the day before yesterday, and thought to tell me about it. What did the tapper girl tell you?”
Old acquaintances … that could mean anything, but the captain didn’t press for more. “She said she’d heard lots of rumors, but nothing firm. What’d your acquaintances have to say about it?”
“Only that it happened, and the surviving bay boys are digging themselves out as best they can. Texas didn’t get everybody—a bunch of the brighter fellows holed up in the old Spanish fort, and rode it out that way. But the place has been done a real blow. It’s a shame.” Kirby shook his head. “There ought to be some kind of exemption, for someplace with such a long and colorful history.”
“You think they ought to leave it alone, just because it’s been there awhile?”
“Something like that. Mostly I want to get liquor without paying taxes six ways from Sunday, but a man can’t have everything like he wants it. But I won’t lie to you, Captain. It smells funny to me. Word in the clouds has it, Texas was looking for someone in particular, or something. Nobody knows what. Or if anybody does, nobody’s talking.”
If no one was talking to Kirby Troost, it must be a secret piece of information indeed.
Andan Cly sat down on the ship’s steps, which were unlatched and dangling down. His sudden weight made the stairs sway, until they settled against the ground beneath him.
Troost sat beside him. He pulled out a canteen and took a swig of something that wasn’t water, and he asked, “Our business wasn’t with the bay, though, was it?”
“Nope. We’re running for the city, and I’m going to swing by the Vieux Carré to … help out an old friend.”
“An old friend?”
“She wants me to make a short trip for her.”
“She does, does she? I don’t guess you have any more details than that.”
Cly shook his head. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. It should be real quick.”
“We flying Miss Naamah?”
“I don’t think so. But when I do know, I’ll pass it on. Until then, don’t worry about it.”
Kirby took another swig. “All right, then. I won’t.”
And back into the sky they went, into the currents and clouds that would take them the rest of the way south, the rest of the way to the Gulf.
Seven
The blower was a flat-bottom boat that sat high on top of the water, like a very small barge. Barely big enough to hold all three passengers without dipping below the rippling waterline, the craft shuddered until everyone sat very still. Behind them, a large diesel-powered fan loomed like a tombstone.
No one said anything until Josephine stated the obvious. “We’ll need something bigger to bring Deaderick out, won’t we?”
Ruthie shivered and drew her jacket closer around her shoulders, but said, “To be sure, but we can find something bigger on the island, non?”
“Sure,” Gifford agreed. “We’ll find something.”
“Something that still floats, or still flies,” Josephine muttered. “They can’t have grounded or sunk everything.”
“Yes, ma’am, I think you’re right,” he said. But something in his voice said he was afraid they were all wrong, and this wasn’t going to work at all. His small electric torch sputtered, and he turned it off, leaving them all in absolute darkness except for the moon overhead, halfway full and surrounded by a fogged-white halo.
Suddenly the crickets and frogs seemed very loud, and the buzzing drone of a million night bugs hummed against the background splashes of tiny wet things moving in and out of the water, up and down the currents, around the tree-tall blades of jutting grass.
“Does this thing have any lights of its own?” Josephine wanted to know.
Gifford Crooks leaned across her knees, saying, “Excuse me, ma’am—and yes, she does. Good ones, even.”
“Better than your flambeau?”
“Much better. This is a rum-runner, you know.” He lifted a panel and threw a small switch.
With the faint click and a fizz of electricity, a wash of low, gold light blossomed at the front of the boat.
At the fan’s base, a rip cord dangled from a flywheel. He gave it a yank and the engine sputtered; a second fierce tug and it grumbled to life. The fluttering gargle was terrifyingly loud, and the rushing suck of the blades made their hair billow backwards. Gifford Crooks adjusted the throttle, lowering the speed and dampening the drone until it was a low, throaty putter.
“Hang on, ladies. It’s going to get bumpy. And damp. Sorry.”
Slowly the boat turned as he drew on the steering lever, its caged fan churning the air and the water, too, so low in the marsh did the blower sit. The spray blew into the air, and a mist of swamp water and algae settled into their hair, onto their shoulders, and across their laps.
Little craft like the blowers were built to navigate the difficult terrain between land and water—the wet, deep places clogged with vegetation and animal life, thick with mud and unpredictable depths. They were made to skim the surface, to flatten the tall, palm-width grasses and slide across them, powered by the enormous fan—and aided by a pair of wheel spokes mounted on either side. The spokes were lifted up like a gate around the passengers, until and unless the boat became stuck. If the fan became tangled or the passage was too thick with grass or muck, the spokes could be dropped, and the band moving the blades could be rehung to move them instead. It was a jerky, difficult, last-ditch way to get the craft through the sopping middle-lands, but it almost always worked.
Never quietly. Never smoothly. Never without soaking the occupants.
They puttered through the marsh in silence, for speaking would’ve required louder voices and added more noise to the night than the diesel engine’s drone. Gifford Crooks navigated by some manner he didn’t feel compelled to share; he looked up at the sky from time to time, so Josephine assumed he went by the stars like the sailors, or perhaps his sense of dead reckoning was better than the average landlubber’s.
As the evening ticked by, the moon rolled higher.
And all the while, as Gifford manned the steering lever and peered intently at the flush of light before the craft, Josephine and Ruthie huddled close together, thanking their lucky stars that the night wasn’t any colder, and their destination wasn’t any farther. The whipping slaps of saw grass whispered awful things against the craft’s hull, and the loud sliding splashes off to either side warned of large animals with rows of sharp teeth and beady, slitted eyes.
Texian soldiers or Confederate spies were not the worst things in the marshes, a fact that the travelers knew, but tried to ignore.
And when the blower would muck across a particularly pungent patch of moldering black water that smelled like death, they all thought of alligators and how those terrible brutes preferred their meals drowned, sodden, and half rotted to pieces.