Unlucky at Cards

The Steamer Casino was never meant to move, something the original owner and architects knew too well. Sometime after the 1976 christening this information was lost to the upper management, perhaps the natural consequence of the facility changing hands four times through the nineties, and often through hostile takeovers and worse divorce settlements.

Aloysius Caine had not forgotten; he dropped the deck of cards he was shuffling the moment the industrial grinding din seeped past the ringing bells of rarely paying slot machines. He tried to convey the danger to his twenty-five year old pit boss and received a blank stare for his trouble. Then the pit boss brushed past him and attended to the pair of five card draw players howling, “Misdeal! Misdeal!”

Caine left them there and lit out for the pilot house/cocktail lounge as fast as he could move, spotting the lights of Muscatine passing by the starboard rail at a respectable clip. Given time, a receptive audience, and better rhetorical abilities, he might have succeeded in convincing the sauced VIPs that this steamer could sail, but there were thirteen reasons why it shouldn’t.

Unfortunately, a pair of minor stockholders blocked his path out of ill humor, and took his determination to get by as a greater affront. He woke up in the infirmary when reasons #9 and #12 happened simultaneously: the stern wheel snapped clean off, and the boiler exploded.

The river flowed into gaping holes below the waterline, extinguishing the fires down below. It was not enough to save most of the Casino staff and patrons above deck from a wave of heat, followed by creeping flames. A few lucky ones were able to throw themselves into the water just before the conflagration reached the bow, among them Caine.

He hadn’t slept or lost consciousness, but only became aware of his surroundings again in the early morning. A muddy beach, a slight hillock. Some scrubby trees. Scorched poker chips scattered about, but no other reminders of the Steamer Casino. He limped up the hillock and discovered that he had not made a true landfall on the bank of the Mississippi, but was standing instead on a narrow island shaped like a teardrop, an island far enough away from either shore that he could only dimly make out a mist shrouded mainland in one direction, and not at all in the other.

When Caine completed his three hundred and sixty degree revolution he was shocked to see a woman who had silently ascended the hillock from the opposite direction. Her graying hair was tied back in rawhide thong, and her clothes looked like castoffs from a folk festival. She held out a hubcap on top of which there were three cleaned fish in a neat row.

“Hungry?”