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retrieve a Mason jar of hot coffee. “You want some? The galley sent it down a couple hours ago.” He retrieved two ironware mugs from hooks under the main steam gauge and poured.
    The mill manager took a swallow of the strong dark roast, noting how it endured on his tongue. “Many boats like this still running?”
    The engineer sat down in his chair and put a foot against a long lever. Behind him, the piston rods hissed and spat like cats fighting. “ Non. Maybe two boats on the Natchez trade, one on Lake Pontchartrain and that direction. One on the Atchafalaya and Bayou Teche. Captain Cooley, he still runs up the Ouchita River where them poor people got no roads.” He took a drink. “But nobody’s making money. If our pilot put a log through the hull of this thing, we’d row home in the skiff and forget about it.”
    “Where would you work then?”
    “Ferries. The icehouse. Maybe a sawmill. They got some pissant rafting steamers I could work on.” He looked up at Randolph. “What you do? Lumber buyer? You dress too good for a salesman.”
    “I’m the new manager for Nimbus. My name’s Randolph Aldridge.”
    The engineer seemed unimpressed, but he put out his hand anyway. “Minos Thibodeaux,” he said.
    “Your family always live in Tiger Island?”
    “Since caveman days.” He poured another slug of coffee into his mug, then the mill manager’s. “Where you from?”
    “Pennsylvania.”
    “That’s where that snow flies.”
    “I haven’t heard much from my brother,” he said, pretending to read a gauge.
    Minos looked away, sniffed his mustache. “You lose track of him, yeah?”
    “He disappeared out west for a while.”
    “You come to check up on him or something?”
    “I’m going to run the mill and make sure he’s doing a good job.”
    The engineer gave him a hard look. “You’d fire your own brother?”
    “No. I mean, I’m worried about him.”
    Minos seemed to think about this. “Maybe you need to.”
    Randolph put his cup down next to an oilcan. “Why’s that?”
    “Some ’talian gentlemen down at Tiger Island would like to send him back to Pennsylvania.”
    The mill manager laughed. “He can get people perturbed, all right.”
    “Cut up in a jug.”
    Randolph turned his head away. “He’s a lawman,” he mumbled. “He’s bound to make a few enemies, I’d guess.”
    “These enemies was made before he met ’em.”
    Just then a big silver backing gong banged and Minos leaped to his throttle wheel and lever, reversing the machinery. The boat shuddered, backing out of whatever problem the pilot had steered it into.
    Randolph went up to the dark cabin deck and felt his way along the outside rail. The boat struggled along a bayou as narrow as a ditch, the icicle beam of the carbon-arc headlight igniting the tops of stumps rising from the obsidian water. Something like a longhaired wolf drifted toward him over the rail, and he flattened against the bulkhead as the moss-eaten limb gouged the window next to him and then retreated like a monster’s claw. His heart bumped up in rhythm as the branch dragged a life ring off a stanchion. The boat heeled, the pilot skinning the bank with the stern and heading for midstream, following the deep water of his memory.
    Later, from his hard, sour bunk, Randolph heard the sonorous whistle call its name to a landing, and for an hour he listened to the tolling of wooden barrels and the molten cursing of the mate. Then came the profound tone of that same oversized whistle and the sense that the boat was rocking away from more than just a mud bank, the paddle wheel slapping down the tarry water on a voyage beyond the things he knew. He thought again of his brother, a good swimmer who never feared the water, not even at night, and he fell asleep remembering the time he learned to float on his back, Byron’s fingertips training the bones in his spine to drift level and rise toward the air.
    The next day came on hot and foggy, and the steamer picked