Welding with Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

cluttering up my apartment.” She looked at him. “Can I pay you something?”
    â€œNo, no,” he said, backing toward the door. “If you want any of these, I’ll have them at the shop.”
    Mel left feeling as though he knew less than when he’d arrived. He sat in the car looking at the prints; he wondered what Amanda Springer’s voice had sounded like, how she’d danced, if the well-composed pictures were accidents, and, most intriguing of all, what would have been on the last, blank negative.
    *   *   *
    Mel’s father-in-law’s father, Captain McNabb, was propped on the sofa in the game room of the nursing home. The old man was a retired harbor tug pilot, and Mel had remembered this in the middle of the night as he lay awake trying to put the photographs out of his mind. Captain McNabb was wearing khaki Dockers and a blue button-down shirt. A bentwood cane rested between his legs.
    â€œWho did you say you was?” The old man turned his white head and blinked.
    â€œLeonard’s son-in-law.”
    â€œHow is Leonard?”
    â€œHe’s fine. Just bought another filling station.”
    The old man chuckled. “That little bastard.”
    Mel inched closer on the sofa. “He told me you worked the harbor in the thirties and forties.”
    â€œWhat? Yeah. We ran ships down to the mouth.”
    Mel pulled a photo from a folder, one that showed the deck area of the boat, a corner of the pilothouse. “Do you recognize anything about this?”
    The old man drew a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and took the print, turning it toward the light. “Who’s the honey?”
    Mel frowned. “The boat. Can you tell me anything about the boat?”
    The captain glanced up at him a moment. “See that steel mesh over the wooden balusters? The short stacks? It’s the Lakeland. ”
    â€œAny idea when the photo was taken?”
    â€œShe was an upriver boat—that’s why she’s got short stacks. They got so many damned bridges up north. She spelled the President now and again after the war, so this was probably late 1945 or ’46.” He squinted at the photo and looked up. The captain licked his lips and rubbed his fingertips together. “Ah, God Almighty,” he cried. “You got another picture taken in the same direction?”
    Mel handed him the folder, and the old man thumbed through the photos slowly, stopping and shaking his head at the last one. “Ah, Lordy,” he said almost under his breath.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œThis was a spring trip. Nineteen fifty-two. I don’t know, must have been March. Anyway, it was during high water. The Lakeland was a big antique of a dance boat nearly three hundred feet long. All wood, stern-wheeler. Steam, of course.”
    â€œHow can you tell the date?” Mel looked down at the photo in the captain’s lap, and the old man put a veined finger on a gray arrow of iron blurred behind the deck railing. “Mister, the Lakeland was cut in two against the dock by a U.S. Navy cruiser that’d lost its steering. It went down in less than a minute.” He handed the photo back to Mel. “I think sixty or seventy people drowned,” he said, taking off his glasses, as though clear vision was a burden.
    The next day, Mel spent two hours in the library, scanning microfilm of the Times-Picayune for early 1952. The paper had run articles for three days about the disaster. The collision occurred when the Barlow Brothers’ excursion steamer Lakeland was about to cast off for an afternoon harbor tour. Mel read the main story, and then all the spin-off tales of bravery and heartbreak. At the time of the collision, the Lakeland was still tied to the dock at Canal Street. The USS Tupelo was coming downstream with a navy pilot at the helm when the ship’s steering went out, and the current sent her to the bank. Some of the passengers