Dead water - Barbara Hambly [14]
The Keelboat Saloon lay to his left, on the edge of a vile-smelling bayou. Its customers nearly trampled January as they rushed toward The Rough and Ready to take part in the fight—it was a slow night, and he supposed one had to take one's entertainment where one found it. The Keelboat was even less salubrious-looking than The Rough and Ready, a dirty wooden box with lines of orange light leaking through its sides. A good kick would bring it down. But January kept on his course for the place, for he heard in the blackness of the steamy night what he'd been seeking: the wild skirl of fiddle music, like a drunken Irish angel embroidering golden fantasias on a Mozart ballet.
January closed the lantern-slide and waited in the trees, knowing that in time someone would come out to whom—if he was careful—he could speak. A black man who walked into a saloon anywhere in town risked being beaten up. Even in the elegant establishments of Rue Royale, he would not dare to be seen to raise a hand against a white man in his own defense; here, such an action would no doubt result in an unpleasant and messy death.
So all he could do was wait, the mosquitoes whining as they tangled up in the veils around his hat and the occasional cicada or palmetto bug blundering into the lantern on roaring wings. He wondered if the gator was still around.
Three burly shapes crashed through The Keelboat's door and ran past January in a reeking backwash of chewing tobacco and clothing months unlaundered; one of the local girls was with them, holding up her skirts to her knees and laughing.
The music stopped mid-bar.
A moment later Hannibal Sefton appeared silhouetted in the weak orange rectangle of the doorway, violin in one hand and a brown bottle of whiskey in the other.
“They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,” he quoted plaintively, and took a long pull from the bottle. “But I have seen them, gentle, tame and meek / That now are wild. . . .”
He looked at the bottle, sighed, and turned back into the building.
January emerged from behind his tree and crossed to the shack, sprang up the steps to the door.
As he'd suspected, the saloon was empty.
“Don't tell me you actually drink the liquor this place serves.”
Hannibal was in back of the bar, replacing the bottle behind a loose board in the wall. “Good God, no! I may be a sot, but I'm not a fool. Old Hunks was charging a Santa Fe trapper fifty cents a shot for this on the grounds that it was Scots single-malt.”
He straightened up in the grimy lamplight, resembling a disheveled elf with his long hair straggling out of its old-fashioned pigtail over his back, and his eyebrows standing out dark against his thin white face. “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. . . . But of course it's just the same bilgewater Hunks dips out of the barrel for a picayune a cup. . . . What are you doing here, amicus meus? If you're seriously looking to get yourself killed, I'll offer you a drink. . . .”
“There are better ways to die,” responded January with an exaggerated shudder.
“And being in this room when the refined clientele returns is one of them,” retorted Hannibal. “Let us retire to my quarters. Nothing amiss with the owl-eyed Athene, I hope?”
And as Hannibal limped over to the shaggy, out-of-fashion beaver hat that stood by his chair to receive whatever contributions his audience cared to give, January grinned at the nickname his friend had given the bespectacled Rose.
“I must say I am cut to the quick to find my art playing second fiddle, as it were, to a bout of not-very-efficient fisticuffs,” Hannibal added as he dumped a few Spanish reales, a British shilling, two American half-dimes, and three eleven-penny bits into his hand. “But at least I can get out of here with all my takings this evening instead of having one of the customers