Ozark Trilogy 3: And Then There'll Be Fireworks (5 page)

Gabriel John McDaniels spat over the side to signify his disgust and demanded to know what Haven McDaniels had come
along
for, if that was the way he felt about it.

“What’d you expect?” he asked, jamming his hands into his pockets and setting his feet wide against the roll of the boat. “You expect a fine lady sitting on a tusset? With needlework to her hand, maybe, and a kerchief to her delicate little nose? That is Troublesome of Brightwater back there, just as agreed upon with the Grannys, and exactly as advertised.”

“I know it,” said Haven McDaniels sullenly. “You think I don’t know it?”

“Well, then,” Gabriel John answered him, “there’s no call to comment on it. I strongly misdoubt the Grannys would of offered each of us the sum they did if we’d been taking a Yallerhound to Kintucky. We’re being paid for the hazard of the thing ... and she’s rightly named, is Troublesome! Rightly named, her as could fry your heart in your chest with no more’n her two blue eyes, if she’d a mind to.”

The captain heard that, and it didn’t surprise him. He’d heard the rest, too, but he’d been ignoring it. One of the advantages to captaining so small a boat was that neither crew nor anybody else aboard could keep anything from him. He spoke up sharp and quick.

‘That’s enough of that, Gabriel John McDaniels,” he rapped out. “
Days
we’ve got ahead of us, this trip. Bad weather and poor food and none of us truly fit ... last thing we need here is superstitious claptrap fouling the air.”

“Now, Captain— “

“I said it was
enough
. You hear me? I can speak louder, should there be call for to do so. You look to the weather, Gabriel John, and to this leaky woodbucket we travel in so precariously, and leave the tall tales to the tadlings and the Grannys. I’m purely astonished, hearing such stuff from a full-grown man, and him with four years’ full service now on the water.”

Gabriel John McDaniels was not impressed, and he was not about to drop his eyes to the captain. He’d not spent his own childhood roaming the Wilderness Lands of Marktwain with the man, but his
daddy
had; and many a night he’d seen the two of them with more whiskey in them than had pleased his mother. He held Captain Adam Sheridan Brightwater the 3
^rd
in no awe.

“You’re obliged to take that stand,” he said, speaking right up. “We know that, all of us. But there on that nailbarrel sits the Sister and the Mother and the Greatgrandmother of Evil, the Holy One help us all, and we all of us know
that
, too! If she so chooses we’ll have storms and leaks; and if she don’t so choose we’ll have an easy journey of it. That’s no tale for tadlings, now—that’s same as saying the sun’s more use to solar collectors than snow is.”

There were two Michael Callaway Brightwaters standing near, one of them a 20
^th
and the other a 37
^th
, something of a nuisance in such close quarters. They hadn’t much use for one another, or for Gabriel John, but they shook their heads like one man now and allowed as how he was absolutely right and the captain could leave off
his
tales any time.

“We’re not fools,” said the one they called Black Michael—not that his hair was any blacker than Michael Callaway the 37
^th
’s, that was called simply Michael Callaway in the ordinary fashion, but you couldn’t be having them both speak up every time one was wanted. And Michael Callaway nodded, saying:

“We came for the money, same as you, Captain. And what trouble we’ve got on our plates is trouble we bought ourselves. Complaining about it, that’s not seemly; I agree to that. Howsomever, Captain, you’ll do us the favor of telling us no lies, thank you very much.”

The captain stared at the three of them, considering, and at the eloquent back of Haven McDaniels Brightwater the 4
^th
, pretending to be fooling with a sail—him that had started all this—and he shrugged his shoulders.

“All right,” he conceded. “I’ll not dispute youall on it. I don’t care for her myself ... they say she was a child once, but I’m hard put to it to believe it. But I’ll not listen to
prattle
over the matter, either, mind you. As Michael Callaway rightly says, this is our own doing, of our own free will, and talk’ll change nothing. Furthermore and to go
on
with, such talk heard at the wrong end of the boat might well provoke the lady. You’ll do
me
the favor of not chancing that. That’s my last word!”

Truth was, he thought as he turned away from them with a set jaw intended to impress them with his firmness of purpose, the sight of her made his blood run colder than the seawater. No woman should stand six feet tall like she did; no woman should fit to a fishingboat like she’d been born on one, when she’d spent her whole life in Castle and in mountain cabin; no woman should have the dark fierce beauty that somehow flamed around her, putting him in mind of the black roses that grew near the edge of Marktwain’s desert in deep summer.

Anybody’d described her to him, and him not knowing, he’d of thought she’d stir his loins. Especially out on this b’damned ocean with no other woman for many a mile and many a long lonely night. Yet when he looked at Troublesome of Brightwater, for all the sweet curve of her breasts and hips and the perfection of her face, he would of sworn he could feel his manhood shriveling in his trousers. He’d as soon of bedded a tall stake of Tinaseeh ironwood.

That didn’t mean he’d tolerate a dauncy and fractious crew, whatever the feelings she raised in him or in them. He’d keep the men too busy to have time left over for mumblings and carry-ons. He wanted to get this fool trip over with—he needed the money the Grannys had come up with, and how they’d done it he couldn’t imagine, but it was none the less a fool trip for all that—and he wanted to find himself back in his own bed, cozy with his own wife, that was a soft round woman more his style. With a voice like the call of an Ozark housedove just as the sun was coming up, and no more like that female in the stern than if they’d been different species altogether.

“You turn to,” he barked over his shoulder at the men, “and I’ll do my share, and we’ll get this out of the way and be home to brag on it before we have time to think.”

Nobody said “
if
we get home”; they weren’t whiners. They’d been offered a fair sum of money badly needed, and they’d do the job it was offered for. Still, it was a sorry time of year to take to sea in a boat this size and age, Troublesome or no Troublesome. Had the boat been newer, that would of been a help; had it been larger, they couldn’t have handled her with only the five, and that would
not
have been a good thing. It would cause a certain amount of fuss and feathers to drown five good men, for sure—but if they drowned a daughter of Castle Brightwater they’d set every Granny on Ozark whirling like a gig ... that happen, they’d better hope they all drowned with her. It’d be more comfortable in the long run.

Behind the men, Troublesome chuckled under her breath, and Gabriel John jumped like he’d been pinched.

“Knows what we’re thinking, that one does,” he said flatly.

“And so does the Mule, and that doesn’t bother you.”

“
She
bothers me,” insisted the man doggedly, “considering what I was thinking just then when she laughed.”

The captain turned back and grabbed Gabriel John’s shoulder in his fist. “That’s one word too many,” he said through his teeth. “
One word
too many! You guard your thoughts and keep ‘em proper; and you sail this boat and keep your mind on your business. I don’t intend to have to say any of this again.”

As they’d said, there were certain stands he was obliged to take.

It happened that Troublesome did know what they were thinking. But not because of any telepathic powers, such as the Mules had, or the Magicians of Rank. No special powers were required to read those stiff backs with the muscles knotted round the necks—whopping headaches they were going to have, later on!—or the rigid shoulders, or their muttering back of their hands and out of the corners of their mouths. It amused her mightily to think that they could believe she had special skills and still be fretting about their hides; it showed a lack of common sense. After all, if this boat went down, she’d go down with it. Or perhaps it was their souls that they were really worried about, and not their hides; perhaps they thought the wickedness might blow off of her in the seawind and stick to them forever and ever more. She chuckled again, and watched the muscles in their backs twitch to the sound, before she turned her head to look out over the water.

She wasn’t sure of what she’d seen out there, not yet. Might could be it’d been only a trick of the light slanted on the water, such as had ages back made men think dragons swam in the oceans of Old Earth. Might could be it had been the squint of her eye against that light, or her irritation of mind. There was not a single reason to believe that a creature never seen since First Landing—seen then by a group of exhausted people that might have been over given to imagining—should choose to show up a thousand years later and swim alongside her to Kintucky. It was as unlikely a happenstance as had come her way within memory, and she wasn’t going to assume it for gospel too quickly.

First, she’d wait for another sight of that great tail split three ways. And then probably she’d wait for the royal purple of the thing’s flesh to show up clear in the gray of the sea. And when both had happened, assuming they did happen, she’d think it over—and might could be she’d go below and swallow a dose to cure her of her mindfollies.

The Teaching Story had not one word extra to spare on the subject of the creature she half thought she’d seen. The fuel on The Ship had gone bad. Every last thing had been going from bad to worse. The time had come when it was land or die; and then just as they made a desperate plunge toward the planet below them the engines gave up completely and The Ship fell into the Outward Deeps. At which point, as the Grannys taught it:

Even as the water closed over the dying ship and First Granny told the children to stop their caterwauling and prepare to meet their Maker with their mouths shut and their eyes open, a wonderful thing happened. Just a wonderful thing!

Forty of them there were, shaped like the great whales of Earth, but that their tails split three ways instead of two. And their color was the royal purple, the purple of majestic sovereignty.

They met The Ship as it fell, rising up in a circle as it sank toward the bottom. And they bore it up on their backs as easy as a man packs a baby, and laid it out in the shallows, where the Captain and the crew could get The Ship’s door open, and everybody could wade right out of there to safety.

They were the Wise Ones, so named by First Granny; and it may be that they live there still in the Outward Deeps ...

And it may be that they don’t. A thousand years ago, that was, that First Granny had looked into the huge eye of one of them and seen there something she claimed at once for wisdom, and no least sign of them since in all this long time. They could certainly all have died—long, long ago. If ever they were real, that is, and not an illusion born of desperation and nourished on Grannytalk.

No other Teaching Story made mention of them, and no song; not even a scrap of a saying referred to them. It made them
most
unlikely traveling companions! Why, even the creatures of Old Earth, those left-behind ones that nobody’d seen since before the Ozarkers left their home planet, came up now and again in sayings. Take the groundhog; what a groundhog might be, Troublesome couldn’t have said. There was nothing whatsoever in that computer databanks about them, nor anywhere else. But she knew easy enough from the roles groundhogs took in daily converse that they couldn’t of been any kind of
hog
— “Quick as a groundhog down a hole!” the Grannys would say. “No bigger’n the ear on a groundhog!”

“Saw its shadow and popped under like a groundhog!” Had to of been little, and quick, and somehow significant; you could figure that out from the scraps. But the creatures of the Outward Deeps? They were mentioned nowhere atall, and what mysterious purpose might bring one to be her escort now ... She sighed. It wasn’t reasonable; but then her ignorance was great.

Troublesome turned her head to the wind and took a deep breath of the salt air to drown out some of the fish stink, and gathered her shawls closer round her, wrinkling her nose as the blown spray spattered her face. It would come up a rain shortly, she was sure, and the men would be blaming her for it. Law, what wouldn’t she give to have had the weather skills they were willing to lay to her account! Now
that
would of been of some use. Dry fields she could of watered, and high winds taking off the good topsoil she could of tempered, and where the rivers were bringing sullen rot to the roots of growing things she could of driven back the clouds and let the sun see to drying them out. There’d of been a good deal less hunger on Ozark if she’d been able to turn her hand to such work as that.

Instead of which, she thought, reality falling back over her with a thump, she was off on the wildest of goose chases, set her by seven dithering Grannys. Off to see the Lewis Motley Wommack the 33
^rd
—

No special wonder her sister had lusted after the man and taken him so willingly to her bed. There was no prettiness to him, no softness anywhere, but he was a man to feast the hungry eyes on, not to mention a few other senses-He gave off a kind of drawing warmth that naturally made you want to shelter in it, male or female—as she herself gave off a cold wind that said,
Stand Back!
If lust had been one of the emotions known to her she might very well have fancied him her own self; in a kind of abstract fashion, she could see that. But handy though he might be in a bed, the idea that some act of his lay behind Responsible’s sorry condition, or that he could do anything to improve it ... ah, that was only foolishness. Troublesome had no hope for the journey’s end; she traveled to Kintucky for the excellent reason that she’d never been there and might never have a second chance, and because curiosity was one of the emotions she was familiar with.