You’ll get your money in due time, all of it – I keep my promises and I pay my debts. Now get the hell off my boat or I’ll throw you off.’ The curse word was an indication of just how furious Wilbur had become: he’d always been taught that gentlemen never cursed, and despite the fact that he heard profanity regularly from crewmembers, dockworkers, and the likes of Carpenter, he only rarely used such language himself. He took another step toward Carpenter, still waving the wrench.
What happened then would remain indelibly in his memory. As if in slow motion, he saw Carpenter reach under his suit jacket and pull out a snub-nosed revolver. The first shot went wild, hitting one of the steam pipes and sending a cloud of searing, scalding heat over Wilbur.
In that moment, even amidst the adrenaline surge and before Carpenter could pull the trigger again, Wilbur felt something shift and change and break inside him, the sensation taking his breath away and making him drop the wrench from the shock and pain. His body no longer seemed completely his. Wilbur was still trying to make sense of what was happening to him when the next two shots hit him directly in the chest.
He expected to feel pain. He didn’t – not from the steam, not from the bullet wounds. Enveloped in the surging, deadly cloud, he felt himself fall, sprawling and bleeding on the deck. Inside, though – that change was still happening, still tearing at him, even as he felt his body dying around him.
‘You fucking asshole!’ Carpenter shouted, standing one-footed and looking down at him as Wilbur tried to shape words, tried to shout or scream or wail, though nothing emerged from his mouth. ‘Maybe I’ll just take out the interest from that pretty wife of yours, you goddamn bastard.’
Carpenter spat on the body, turned, and started to limp away toward the foredeck and gangway. Toward where, Wilbur was very afraid, Eleanor would be. His rage engulfed him, as hissing and furious as the steam venting from the pipes. Within the steam, he felt power surge within him. He rose, screaming wordlessly as he rushed toward Carpenter.
The man’s mouth opened, his eyes widened almost comically, as if Wilbur were the vision of some monstrous creature leaping toward him as he lifted his hands to ward off the attack. Wilbur expected to feel the shock of their collision, but there was none. Instead – strangely, impossibly – he was inside Carpenter. ‘No! Fuck! You’re burning me!’ the man shouted, and Wilbur heard that scream as if it were his own voice, and he heard Carpenter’s thoughts as well. Shit! Shit! It hurts. It’s burning me, and I can’t breathe! Can’t breathe … Carpenter’s hands flailed at his own body as if trying to put out an invisible fire, and Wilbur felt the motion of Carpenter’s hands as his own. Wilbur could see through the man’s eyes as well, and he saw his own body bleeding on the floor of the boiler room, eyes open and unseeing as steam continued to flow outward over it.
‘Is that me? How?’ he gasped, and he heard his words emerge from Carpenter’s throat. But he could also feel the searing agony in the man’s body, and Wilbur took a step away from the man as Carpenter collapsed on the floor, twitching and vomiting dark blood and bile before going still.
Stream wreathed Wilbur as he stared now at two bodies in the room: Carpenter’s and his own. ‘Wilbur!’ he heard Eleanor shout distantly, and from the engine room farther to the rear of the Natchez, O’Flaherty also called out: ‘Cap’n? M’God, what’s happened here?’
The hissing steam around Wilbur died as O’Flaherty cut off the flow to the pipes. O’Flaherty hurried forward, glancing at Carpenter before crouching down alongside Wilbur’s impossibly disconnected and bleeding body, ignoring the Wilbur standing behind him dripping cooling steam.
‘O’Flaherty,’ Wilbur said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m right here. Behind you. Look at me, man.’ He reached out to touch the engineer on the shoulder; his hand, pressing hard, went straight into the man, leaving behind a spreading wet stain on his coveralls. O’Flaherty, for his part, jumped up and slapped at his shoulder with a curse.
‘Feck, I’m burned. I t’ought I shut off—’ He stopped. He stared at Wilbur. His face went pale. ‘Sweet bleedin’ Jaysus, ’tis the cap’n’s haint,’ he whispered, his Irish-accented brogue heavy as he scrambled backwards away from Wilbur like a scuttling crab, pushing with his feet and hands.
They both heard growing cries of alarm from the foredeck: Eleanor’s voice, as well as the deeper shouts of sleepy deckhands roused by the gunshots. O’Flaherty found his footing and went running toward the sound. With a glance back at the bodies (That can’t be me. That can’t be me lying there dead.) Wilbur followed. O’Flaherty had let the door to the boiler room shut behind him. Wilbur reached out to push it open; the door didn’t move but his hand went through it as it had into Carpenter and O’Flaherty. Wilbur drew back and tried again with the same result. This time, he continued to push – his entire body passing reluctantly through the door, like pushing through a sheet of gelatin.
He didn’t pause to wonder at that; he went through the corridor, among the stacks of crates, and out onto the foredeck. A couple of deckhands had gathered there, trying to find the source of the disturbance. O’Flaherty was holding Eleanor, who struggled in his grasp, trying to go toward the boiler room. ‘Yah should’nah see the cap’n that way,’ O’Flaherty was telling Eleanor, ‘nor his haint.’
‘I need to … I need …’ Eleanor gasped, then broke into a deep sobbing as she sagged in O’Flaherty’s arms.
‘He’s gone, Missus Leathers. Gone. I’m so sorry,’ O’Flaherty whispered, clutching her. Wilbur could see the two mugs of coffee, still sitting on the foredeck rail. ‘At least he took that bastard Carpenter with him.’
‘Eleanor, he’s wrong. I’m not dead.’ Wilbur moved behind O’Flaherty so he could look into Eleanor’s face. ‘I’m right here.’ Her gaze stared through him, a wisp contained within the fog-draped sunlight, as Eleanor continued to sob in O’Flaherty’s arms. He could feel his body cooling, water puddling where he stood. ‘Eleanor, O’Flaherty – talk to me!’ Neither of them responded.
Wilbur reached out – careful not to press too hard – to touch Eleanor’s shoulder. He saw the fabric of her robe darken as his fingertips touched her, drops of water spreading out and steaming in the cooler air as Eleanor drew back in alarm. He pulled his hand back, startled. His world and New Orleans reeled around him suddenly in a drunken, wild dance.
‘I’m not dead,’ he whispered to Eleanor, to the fog, to the boat, to the river. ‘I’m here. I’m not dead. I’m right here.’
No one answered.
October 2016
‘Right here’ Wilbur Leathers stayed. For sixty-five years.
He had no choice. When Eleanor left the Natchez later that day in 1951, Wilbur tried to follow her and found he could not. It was as if an invisible wall had been erected around the steamboat, one that would not allow him to pass.
Eleanor had vanished into New Orleans and never returned to the boat again; the body that was Wilbur-but-not-Wilbur was removed by the police coroner, followed by that of the internally boiled Carpenter. Both corpses were taken away, presumably to autopsies and eventual burial. Wilbur would never know.
He remained on the Natchez, never aging: not as the Natchez changed owners over the slow decades; not as new men (and now a woman)