The Glorious Adventures Of The Sunshine Queen - Plot & Excerpts
The back of her neck grew hot and sore, as if a starched apron had chafed it. Now the Calliope would be taken away, just like the store; just like school. . . . Of course the Calliope had an owner. Paddle steamers are not thrown away like apple cores, into the long grass of a riverbank. Apparently the Calliope had two owners to squabble over her, and neither of them was the Bright Lights Theater Company. The man showed them his gambling marker. “We wuz sitting right there,” he recounted in his high mosquito whine. “I’m two thousand dollars up, and I want to call it a night. Then in comes this stranger. The house won’t give him credit, he says, and he’s thirsting for a game of poker. Who’ll lend him two hundred dollars so he can join in the game? ‘What you got to cover the loan?’ I ask him, ’cause I’m feeling flush, right? And he writes this pledge for his riverboat: ‘The Sunshine Queen and all that’s in her—an’ that’s includin’ the safe,’ says he. And dammee, but he cleans us out.
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