Fletcher Josty hovered into the scene and contradicted him. “It hasn’t stopped yet, not for good. Not like the other one. Rick, I’m starting to worry.”
“Save your worry for yourself, because when I’m up again, I’m going to tan your hide for getting Josie involved.”
“Oh, shut your mouth. You’ve met your sister, haven’t you? Like we could keep her away.”
Just then, someone shouted from the far end of the cellarlike nook. “All right, you goddamn pirates have gotten your way. I’m here, and you won’t do any better—not for trying. Who needs attention?”
“Are you a doctor?” Josephine asked like lightning.
“Used to be. I’m starting down here and working my way up like the free men of the air have demanded. So tell me,” said the man. “who’s in the most danger? Has no one sorted them out, grouped them by seriousness of condition?”
Fletcher rolled his eyes and said, “This ain’t no hospital, mister. It’s been all we could do to get ’em out from underfoot!”
Josephine stood and shoved Fletcher Josty aside. “Never mind him. Get yourself over here, Doctor, if that’s what you are. My brother has two bullets in him, and he needs your assistance now.”
“Only two? He’s one of the better cases.”
“I’ll pay you. Whatever you think you’re worth. I … I own a boarding house, in the Quarter. Get over here and fix my brother, and I’ll see to it that you have a week you’ll never forget, do you understand me?”
“No, but I’m open to the explaining,” he said, coming toward her. He was an older man and, by the look of him, a lifelong alcoholic. The skin across his nose was the color of blisters and streaked with broken blood vessels; his eyes were likewise shot through with red, and his face hung off his skull with a droop like a hound dog’s.
“Get over here, then. Fix this man.”
“No,” croaked Deaderick. “There’s worse up there, men who need the attention more.”
“Shut up, if your woman’s willing to pay. I was dragged out of bed for this, and I’ll help who I like—and who I’m paid to patch. I said I’d start in the cellar and work my way up, and you’re as likely a patient as the next man, aren’t you?”
“What kind of doctor are you?” Josephine thought to ask, feeling suddenly uncertain about this.
“A genius or a quack. Either way, I’m Leonidas Polk, and I’ll patch this fellow up if I can, but you need to get out of my way. Good Lord, they’ve just been letting you bleed?”
Deaderick replied, “No. But the one bullet hole, it don’t want to plug up right.”
“You can stitch it, can’t you?” Ruthie asked, still squeezing Deaderick’s left hand as if she could lend him some of her own life force.
“Stitching won’t do any good on something like this,” he said, whipping out a pince-nez and examining the bloodiest spot on Deaderick’s chest, where the blood had sensed an opening and was beginning to flush afresh. “Do you have any other conditions? You’re not a dust sniffer or an absinthe drinker, are you?”
“No…”
“Is the bullet still inside?” he asked.
“No, I don’t think,” the patient replied. “Straight through, both shots. If the blood would stop coming, I think I’d be all right. I could stand up and see myself out,” he swore, though no one believed him.
Ruthie kissed his hand and said, “Stop it, you silly man. You’ll lie there and get better. The doctor will fix everything, won’t he?”
“Son of a bitch, ma’am. Don’t tell him that,” Dr. Polk swore.
“But you’ll do what you can,” Josephine told him more than asked him.
“I’m going to need some gunpowder and a match.”
Deaderick swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in a nervous slide. “I was afraid of that.”
“Afraid of what?” his sister demanded. “Afraid of what?”
Dr. Polk asked, “How long has it been since you were shot?” He looked again at the wound. “Five hours? Ten?”
“Thereabouts.”
“We’ve got to cauterize it. I’d break it to you more gentle, but there isn’t time. Ma’am, get me some gunpowder and a match.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s best that you don’t.”
Josephine hauled herself to her feet, confused and even dumbfounded by how difficult it was. She staggered toward the stairs that led to the galley, and within a few minutes she’d talked herself into a dead man’s powder pouch and a box of matches. Horrible though it was, she had a feeling she knew where this was heading … and she couldn’t stand it. But this was a doctor—maybe a quack, maybe a drunk, but the only one present, roused, bribed, and impatient—so she’d do as he asked, because heaven help her, she didn’t know how else to proceed.
Dr. Polk reached for the gunpowder. “Ladies, avert your eyes. For that matter, you might want to do the same,” he told Deaderick. Then he spilled a tiny trail around the wound and on it—a black sprinkle of glittering stuff, barely a dusting. “I mean it,” he reiterated. “Look away. All of you.”
He struck the match.
Deaderick screamed.
And Ruthie passed out cold.
Eight
The captain said, “Goddamn, Kirby. Your acquaintances weren’t half-kidding.”
“Nor was the lady from the taps,” the engineer graciously replied.
Everyone gazed out the thick glass windscreen in silence, even Houjin—whose incessant questions had drawn up short when confronted with the wreckage at Barataria Bay, where the great pirate Jean Lafitte had established his empire … an empire that had stood a hundred years and might have stood a hundred more, were it not for Texas.
The Naamah Darling drifted slowly past the big island’s edge, steering clear of the thin, curling towers of black smoke that still coiled from the ground, and avoiding the other ships flying nearby, likewise creeping up to the edge of the destruction and gawking at what was left. Everyone gave everyone else a clear berth, since the details were still so few, and the devastation so very awful.
Below, the pipe docks were melted and twisted into a crumpled parody of their prior shape, and the burned-out hulls of dirigibles were flattened against the ground or in the water. Their stays jutted like the ribs of huge dead animals, like the big stone bones of long-extinct beasts from another time. Dozens of ships. Maybe fifty or more, charred and useless.
They dotted the landscape in lone craters and in clusters. What few buildings the island had boasted were burned or blasted into obsolescence, leaving the whole scene below a weird panorama of a place cleansed by fire.
Even from the Naamah Darling’s height, the captain and crew could see brown-uniformed Texians moving about below. Digging trenches. Toting corpses to burial—or here and there, moving a survivor on a stretcher. Cly wondered why they bothered. Surely anyone found on Barataria would be tried and jailed at best, hanged at worst, for being found on the island and firing back at the Lone Star’s airships.
But there was much he did not know about the situation, and the uncertainty left an uncomfortable warm spot in his stomach, as if this impersonal attack on someone else meant more to him, personally, than it ought to. It would be an exaggeration to say that the sight of the blighted island churned his stomach. He hadn’t visited it in years. But it’d been one hell of a bustling place once—a rough-and-tumble spot, to be sure, but one where a certain kind of man could find a certain kind of freedom.
When he pulled out his spyglass and aimed it at the mess below the ship, Captain Cly could see alligators, nearer to the island now than they tended to creep in daylight. Their long brown-black forms lounged as motionless as logs—and easily mistaken for the same—but their bulbous eyes and heavy tails twitched in the afternoon sun.
“Are those—” Houjin finally found his questions. He’d found a spyglass, too, and was likewise watching the water’s edge. “—alligators? Down there, look—one just dove under the water, and it’s swimming, you can see it. Right there, Captain.”
“Yes, that’s an alligator.”
“It’s very big, isn’t it? It looks almost as long as that canoe.”
“They’re sometimes very big, yes.”
“They aren’t afraid of people, are they?”
He swallowed. “The smell of death is drawing them out—even more than usual.” And before Houjin could demand to know what he meant by that, the captain changed the subject. “Anyway, look what else is going on—over there in the water, around the old island docks.”
“Let me see,” Kirby Troost said to Houjin, who handed over his spyglass. Upon getting a gander, the engineer said, “A handful of strange-looking flatboats, and something bigger. And nets. Looks like they’re dredging for something. Maybe they sank something they didn’t mean to.”
“Maybe. People call those flatboats blowers. Some spots out in the bayous, and in the marshes, it’s the only good way to travel. The boats are nice and light, see. And the fans just blow them along.”
Houjin grasped the situation instantly. “And since the fans are up, out of the water, their blades don’t get clogged by the grass!”
“Atta boy,” Cly told him. “Any other propeller or engine you stick in the water is done for.”
Things might have digressed into a conversation about transporting men and goods through inhospitable terrain, but a loudly shouted, “Ahoy, Naamah Darling!” jolted the chatter in another direction entirely.
All the men on board tore their attention away from the scene below and looked around, trying to spot the speaker. The captain pointed out to the west and nudged the steering levers to better point the dirigible toward another airship—one much closer than they’d realized.