Page 50 of Blowing Off Steam

The last thing he later recalled saying aloud was, “Could both me and Field have kids by Calliope?” What a ridiculous thing to be pondering on when his entire pilothouse was blown clear of the boat.

It was a giddy, surreal ride that seemed to last much longer than the few seconds it probably took. Windows were blown out below Rushy, glass exploding at great distances, tearing outward in sheer clouds of tinkling shards mixed with plates, brass fixtures, and pieces of furniture. In his slowed-down vision of things, he even noted a wooden panel that must have been blasted from one of the stateroom doors, an exquisite, valuable painting of the Rocky Mountains by Thomas Cole sailing like a kite, floating on the air current at Rushy’s eye level.

The windows of his own pilothouse were shattered inward. Glass cut his face and hands but otherwise he felt uninjured as he rose in his little rocket of a wheelhouse, like part of a Celestial fireworks display. He even had time to note how absurd it was that he continued to steer the wheel, seeing as how he was obviously not connected to the rudder anymore. At the summit of his ride, off to port the engine’s boiler sailed. It didn’t reach the apex Rushy himself had attained but shot out toward shore in a spectacular display of cannonball speed before hitting the water with a loud hiss.

He even found the time, in a remote detached sort of daze, to admire the view from the summit. Clutching the pins of his wheel as items—Field’s journal, inkwell, a comb, boots, an opium pipe—bounced about the small enclosure, Rushy could see for miles over the tops of the willows and cottonwoods to some distant mountains where rainclouds gathered for a renewed downpour.

The wheelhouse paused in its skyrocketing journey. Passengers splashed about in the muddy, littered current below, some clinging to sections of bulwarks, the hull, couches. As Rushy was directly above where the pilothouse had formerly been seated, he couldn’t see much of the actual destruction done in the engine room. But since the middle of the hurricane deck as well as part of the texas sat between the boiler and the pilothouse, more than likely some passengers had been wiped out as well.

The descent was much more precipitous than the ride up. Field, Rushy thought in a flashing of an instant. Whoever had been standing closest to those boilers were no doubt dead ducks. Then the wheelhouse slammed back into its former position with such an impact the timbers blasted outward, like a puffy dandelion seed torn apart by a sudden gust of wind.

Rushy tried to brace for the impact by crouching and clutching the wheel pins, plastering himself to it even with his sprained arm. When the small house hit the boat it was slammed so violently against the roof of the texas it burrowed several feet down. Rushy was jammed into the enclosure where the bottom half of the large wheel was normally hidden from view, a narrow box just big enough for the wheel and not much else.

Which was a fortunate thing, because the pilothouse roof had collapsed, compressed like a layer of rock in a mine explosion. The wheel was crammed into the slot next to Rushy, squeezing him like a sardine in a can.

* * * *

After Calliope spat out great gulps of fresh water, she shook her head. She was floating on the river’s surface. Floating on her enormous oak cutting board.

Gasping, she clung to the board and steadied herself. She floated in the midst of a clogged mass of people who foundered, shrieking, as though big birds would pluck them out of the water and carry them to safety.

Chiao Kuo was one such who flailed nearby, and Calliope cried out, “Can you swim?” Her own words were muffled, her eardrums blown out by the blast. There was no room for a single other person on the cutting board.

Apparently Chiao Kuo could swim, for her fearful eyes flashed only once before she stroked frantically toward shore, luckily only sixty feet away.

Oh, dear Lord!What had happened? The last thing Calliope recalled was tossing some lobsters onto her board in preparation for separating the tails from the bodies. Then she wondered if she should be wearing her exquisite new sapphire ring. Would cooking ruin it? Would flour clog the gorgeous gold setting? Would—

And that was it. That was the last thing she recalled before the mighty, powerful concussion wrenched objects and bodies from the galley. There were several endless seconds where giant timbers and posts exploded past her head and she didn’t know which way was up. She had the sensation of tumbling end over end, although she must have continued clinging to her board and now found the knife she’d been cutting with wedged an inch deep in her forearm.

Items still rained down around her from the sky. Plop, a chafing dish. That sank immediately. Plop, a whole pig she had intended on gutting. That sank but resurfaced seconds later even closer to Calliope. Plop, part of a mural of the Rocky Mountains. Plop, a hand. A hand? Neat and tidy, as though it’d been cut off clean at the wrist.

The hand didn’t sink, and Calliope wanted to get away from it. Easing her legs into the water, she gripped the board like a buoy and paddled with her feet toward shore. Tentacles of steam crawled across the water’s surface, shrouding struggling people, some who clearly didn’t know how to swim. Calliope bumped into pork barrels, liquor casks, boxes of raisins and soap, but the most frightening obstacle was a riceman corpse, already wrapped for burial, its innards stuffed with opium.

This is Field’s son’s lifesaver. Calliope swiped a hand out in an effort to tow the corpse back to shore. Without o-fuyung, and with most of the cargo they’d been hauling to Sacramento either ruined or damaged, Field would have nothing to send his sister next week. But it was a much too massive effort to clutch her chopping board and tow the corpse at the same time, and Calliope had to release it with a frustrated gurgle.

“Can you swim well, my puss?”

Field! Calliope whipped her head this way and that. Field had most likely been near the boiler when it blew—was that his hand she’d seen floating merrily by? “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine”—Field would say that even if he was missing most of his limbs, so it had no meaning—“so let’s get you to shore. Let go of the board and just climb on my back.”

Calliope could swim fairly well when not clothed, but weighed down by her heavy skirts she was already growing fatigued from staying afloat. She was inordinately glad when Field’s head, sleek like a seal’s, appeared bobbing in the water between fingers of dissipating steam and both his hands grabbed her under the arms to hoist her on his back.

“What happened?” Calliope spat out water as Field stroked to shore. “We shouldn’t have been racing!”

“Not the racing, so much,” huffed Field, gliding past another floating o-fuyung corpse. “That shrimp. Poured cold water. Into the boiler. Then held down. The safety valve.”

“Don’t talk,” Calliope instructed, “Is Rushy all right? The only live person I’ve seen is Chiao Kuo heading for shore and a couple of the texas-tenders.”

“I saw Tobias. Alive.”

“Don’t talk.”

When Field got a toehold on the river’s bottom and started to stand, Calliope slid down his back and sloshed toward the dry shore. Panting passengers sat among torn pieces of decking, timbers, and the idiotic junk they had chosen to haul from the water. Calliope even saw one nearly drowned fellow hotfooting it into the cottonwoods, staggering under the weight of someone else’s personal steamer trunk. She realized then. Her stateroom was amidships in the texas, right over the boiler. She would never see her daguerreotype of her sisters again.

She clasped the lapels of Field’s jacket. “Where’s Rushy? We have to find Rushy!”

Field pointed. “The pilothouse is still there.” He seemed to be trying to shake her off. “I’ve got to try and help more people.” He pierced her with his intent eyes. “Don’t. Move. Callie.”