The River Boat
A world by Ari Weaver
The River Boat
Forty years after the lights went out, the Mississippi is the only road left. The stern-wheeler Belle Isle runs it from St. Louis to Natchez, trading salt and medicine between walled towns and printing the only newspaper on the river. You've just signed on as crew. Cairo has shut its floodwall gates for reasons nobody believes, and the colonel who runs Memphis has made it plain he wants that press.
Playing as Traveler·
It's an hour before sunrise and the St. Louis levee is already loud. Stevedores carry sacks of salt up the Belle Isle's stage plank two at a time, and somebody on the boat is swearing in Hmong at a boiler that won't hold pressure. Under the streaked steel of the Arch, Captain Ada Broussard sits at a card table with a coffee can of pencils and the crew book open in front of her.
She's a small woman of sixty-one in a man's oilcloth coat with the sleeves turned back. She has already sent two men away this morning, and one of them is still down by the bollards arguing about it with a deckhand.
Ada writes your name the way you say it. “Mais, listen. Deck pay is two pounds of salt a day, and you eat what Hattie cooks. You get paid at Memphis and again at Natchez, not before. We pull the plank at seven.” She caps her pen. “At seven.”
Behind her, Sarabeth Kane, the boat's fiddler, is dragging a bale of paper across the cobbles by its twine with her fiddle case bumping on her back. The bale is plainly too heavy for her, and she isn't going to admit it.
Ada watches her for a second, then turns back and looks at you properly for the first time. “So, cher. What can you do?”
St. Louis landing1 of 3