Delta File

Lockhart, Texas-2

Shake got a magnifying glass for a closer look and determined that the man in the photo was a crewman—more likely the captain given his brass buttons—of a ship called the Natchez. It was one of those posed shots—subject standing stiff and still, with one hand tucked away in his coat—reminiscent of photos he’d seen from the Civil War era. A penciled date on the back confirmed that the shot was taken some time in 1862. A scrawl below that date caused him to grin and reach for his glass. “Pewter follows Uncle Fielding down the river.” Pewter he knew. It was a nickname his grandparents had started to call him when his unruly hair began to take on a lighter cast, an exasperating phenomenon that led to the premature advent of white hair at around age 23. But who the hell was Fielding? If he was a great uncle, Shake could not remember ever hearing the name mentioned. He couldn’t detect any familial similarities behind the shaggy eyebrows and walrus mustache.

He was about to head for the computer in the den to do some research when another photo on top of a nearby stack caught his eye. This one showed a World War I soldier in uniform complete with doughboy high collar, pie-plate helmet and wrapped leggings. The uniform was mud-spattered, but the 1903 Springfield rifle the man held by his side was clean and looked well-maintained. Closer examination with the glass revealed that the man was a Marine. The emblem on the front of his helmet was an early version of the eagle, globe, and anchor minus the fouled ropes, and Shake could just make out part of the Indian Head patch on the man’s left shoulder. It was dated 1918 and taken of someone called “Uncle Tanner” at Bois de Belleau. That didn’t need clarification for Shake or any other Marine. The man was a veteran of the epic WWI Battle of Belleau Wood in France, the epic struggle in which the German enemy had reportedly branded the U.S. Marines, then serving as an element of the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division, with the Teufel Hunden sobriquet which later morphed into Devil Dogs.

But whose uncle was he? If Shake had a relative who fought with the Marines in World War I, he damned sure wanted to know the details. Across all the years he’d listened to war stories from the males in the family, he’d never heard of another Marine. The Davis clan, by birth or marriage, all seemed to have fought in the nation’s wars as either soldiers or sailors.

He reclosed the boxes, dusting them and stacking both in a corner. He snapped a fingernail on the two most interesting photos and carried them to the den where they kept a powerful computer his wife used in her academic work. With a second puzzled look at the WWI photo, he set it under a desk lamp and made a mental note to call a buddy in the Marine Corps History Division at Quantico early the next morning. There was a guy, a retired Marine working there, who owed him a favor or two. In fact, he thought as he fired up the computer, that very guy—Chief Warrant Officer Charlie Rowe—was a dedicated World War I buff who knew just about all anyone could know about Marines in what some short-sighted optimist back in 1918 had called The War to End All Wars. With a little coaxing, Charlie would probably be able to provide some help identifying the old Marine in the photo or at least give Shake a place to start a search. If he was an uncle, Davis was probably the family name. And how many guys would be on the muster roles with a first name like Tanner? He snapped on the lamp and shot a cell phone photo of the picture. He’d upload that and send it along in an email to Charlie before he called.

Google was full of stuff on Mississippi river boats of the paddle-wheel era. He scrolled past all the Mark Twain material and found an interesting treatise on some of the more well-known river steamers. There was a Natchez listed. In fact, there were seven boats by that name ranging through the “golden age of steamboats” on the Big Muddy from about 1830 to 1880. Given the date on the photo, the second to last of the steamers named Natchez was most likely to be the one he wanted. The text said Natchez VI was a Cincinnati-built boat that measured 273 feet stem to stern. It was primarily a cotton hauler from southern to northern ports along the Mississippi and could carry about 5,000 bales.

What made Shake think this particular boat might be the one in the photo of someone’s uncle Fielding was the stuff about its role in the Civil War. The Natchez had reportedly carried Jefferson Davis from his river plantation home at least part way to Richmond, Virginia after he was elected president of the rebel alliance. The paddle-wheel steamer was also used to transport Confederate troops to Memphis, Tennessee and other riverside battle sites during the war. After Union forces captured Memphis, the Natchez reportedly escaped to a hideout on the Yazoo River where it was burned to keep it from falling into enemy hands.

Shake leaned back in his chair and contemplated the computer screen. The longer he stared at old, soft-focus photos of the river boats, the more intrigued he became. He rose and fetched the photo of himself working on the Mississippi tug and brought it into the room where he put it down beside the others. He remembered the muggy days working on the boat, doing the dirty work that older, more experienced hands wouldn’t do, listening at night to the stories they told about adventures at ports up and down the big spill of water where their muscular tug pushed or pulled a balky string of overloaded barges.

And they had some terrific tales, told with profane glee. Stories familiar to them from overtelling and embellishment but fascinating to a teenage boy. Stories about roaring times on the water and in every waterway transportation hub from St. Paul down through the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans. It was like one long, lurid adventure tale out of American history, and Shake had been mesmerized. He spent much of his off-duty time tossing in a hot rack belowdecks imagining himself as one of those river rats, a swaggering hard-ass, up for anything and everything, a sailor on the great artery that split the continent and fueled the commerce of America in the days before airplanes, trucks, and interstate highways. He sat there in his Texas Hill Country house, separated by many miles and years from that place and those days, sensing intriguing shadows of teenage dreams.

Maybe intrigued wasn’t the right word. His heart was beating a little faster than should be expected after a couple of stiff drinks, and he felt a tension in his facial muscles. Glancing up at a mirror hung on the wall to his left, he noted that he was grinning. Or what passed for a grin. It was more like an evil grimace, if he was honest about it. But it was familiar. He slugged at his whiskey again, closed his eyes and contemplated the tingle in his belly that crawled up from bowels to chest and then steamrolled right into his brain. He knew the feeling intimately. It was a form of curiosity, he guessed, that sense that he needed to know what happens next, what was on the other side of that hill between imagination and reality. He’d felt the tingle many times in his past, not so much lately, and found he missed it. Sometimes, particularly in a combat zone or when he was immersed in some dicey mission for an alphabet soup federal agency, he felt that same tingle. A clawing, irresistible curiosity. What’s next? What momentous, potentially deadly thing is about to happen…and can I survive it? The answer, the only way to scratch that persistent itch, was to just go, get into it, do the dance, pull the trigger.

Maybe just sleep on it, he decided. He took a last look at the photos and shut down the computer. Images danced in his mind as he climbed the stairs. Nothing coherent, just a flickering collage of steamboat skippers and WWI doughboys who seemed to be winking at him, smiling, beckoning him to join them. He lay still in his bed watching the images float across the ceiling, listening to the cicadas in the trees outside the house and the bass croak of bullfrogs in the creek. It might be interesting, he decided then, to see if maybe Thomas Wolfe was wrong, and you can go home again.

Δ Δ Δ

He had no real plan as he sat in the kitchen sipping coffee. The itch and tingle were still there. A fitful few hours of sleep hadn’t done a thing to damp them. The photos sat propped up beside a bottle of hot sauce that he’d used to fire the eggs he’d fried for breakfast. The kid posed on the bow of the river tug looked loony and clueless, so he turned that photo over and pushed it aside. The Natchez skipper—Fielding?—and the doughboy—Tanner?—peered back at him with a certain similarity in their expressions. It wasn’t hard to imagine they were related, and possibly somehow related to him. Both men, separated by 50 years or so when the pictures were taken, had the same squint to their eyes, as if they’d seen some wild times and it took a squint to be sure there was no threat out there on the other side of the camera. And their faces, one clean shaven and the other bristly around a walrus mustache, were alike beyond familial, lips forming something between wizened grin and grimace. If they appeared in panels from a comic book there would be dialog boxes that said: We’ve seen some s**t, young agent. Come on over and we’ll tell you about it.

He grabbed his phone and swiped until he found the photo he’d shot last night of the doughboy picture. When he found Charlie Rowe’s email address, he sent the photo with a promise to call in the next few minutes. Sipping a second cup of coffee, he idled around until the phone pinged to let him know the photo was delivered. Then he checked his watch and called. Retired Chief Warrant Officer Charlie Rowe, a creature of long-ingrained habit, would be in the office at Quantico even if it was too early for the nine-to-fivers at the Marine Corps History Division.

“Shake Davis! How the hell are you, man?”

Charlie had caller ID on his phone and no inclination to bother with the standard greeting required of other cubicle-dwelling government employees. When they were both relatively young Staff NCOs serving with the 6th Marines at Camp Lejeune, they’d made a pilgrimage together to Belleau Wood in France. It was a wild time that ate up nearly all of their two weeks’ leave, but it was worth it. Even in those days, Charlie was becoming a recognized expert on Marine participation in World War I.

“I’m good, Charlie. Just cooling my overheated heels down here in Texas.”

“At least it ain’t a government grey cubicle, Shake. I thought you’d be eyeball deep in some sneaky-pete stuff. What happened? Bayer die or get fired again?”

As a close friend for a lot of years, Charlie Rowe was one of a few who knew about Shake’s off the official record activities for various agencies, mostly at the behest of a shady character they both knew simply as the man who calls himself Bayer.

“He’s still poking around in dark corners, Charlie, but I’m trying to retire for real. Last couple of times I tried, couldn’t make it stick.”

“Do you some good to relax, man. You keep running around like we used to back in the day and the meter might quit ticking before its time. Know what I mean? You need to keep your ass planted down in Texas with your child bride and that horse you call a dog.”

“It’s all good, Charlie. Did you get the photo I sent?”

“Yeah, I’ve got it up right here on my screen. You said it was taken in 1918?”

“That was written on the back of the photo. I suspect by my grandmother. I think the guy’s name is probably Tanner Davis…or maybe Tanner Woody. He might be a relative and if so, he’d be the only other Jarhead in the family.”

“Well, I can see part of the Indian Head patch on his shoulder and the background sure looks like France, so I’m guessing he was a member of the Marine Brigade. Which means he’d have to be 5th Marines or 6th Marines, or maybe one of the machinegun outfits that were attached to the brigade.”

“Can you dig around on it for me, Charlie?”

“Records from that time are fairly spotty, Shake, but I’ll give it a shot. You still got the same numbers?”

“Yeah, but if you don’t get a response right away, call my cell. I’m gonna be on the road for a week—maybe two.” Until that moment, Shake had intended to do nothing more than investigate the photos. Now he found himself planning a road trip, back to Southeast Missouri, back to a time and place that seemed as remote to him right then as outer space.

He ended the call and laughed quietly into his coffee cup. What the hell am I doing? He dug around in his old files and found the address of a cousin who still lived back there. Sarah was a first cousin, daughter of his Dad’s sister, and she fashioned herself the keeper of family history. She’d written him a time or two over the years with questions he couldn’t answer. Sarah was into all kinds of genealogy. She might have a lead or two that would help him identify Fielding and Tanner and how they were related to him or to the Davis family in general.

When he called the Caldwell County government offices, Shake’s friend the county sheriff promised to keep an eye on the house. Shake left him a cell number and an approximate date when he’d be back in Texas. It was only a guess, but it served to put some starch into a flimsy plan. All he knew for sure was that he was headed north, and the tingle was intensifying. He plugged Sikeston, MO into Google Maps and went to pack what he’d need for a long road trip.

When that was done, he’d figure the time differential between Texas and Taiwan and give Chan a call. And tell her what? That he was off on a…he didn’t even know what to call what he had in mind. A quest seemed to fit better than anything else.

She’d understand…maybe.