The Captain's Portrait

Selena found him on the port side of the main deck, right after breakfast, leaning on the railing with a coffee cup going cold in one hand. The River Queen was sliding past a stretch of bluffs all lit up orange and red, and Mason was watching the water like it owed him something.

She settled on a bench about twenty feet off and opened her sketchbook. He was a good subject from behind. Broad shoulders, gray at the temples, a way of standing with his weight on the rail like the boat might try to leave without him. She worked fast, pencil scratching, getting the line of his jaw in before he could move.

He caught her on the third sketch. She heard the cup clunk down on the railing, and then he turned and looked right at her. Forty-five years old and he could still make a look land like a dock cleat.

"You following me, lady?"

"Just working," Selena said. She was forty-two, and she'd learned a long time ago not to flinch at a man with a grudge. "You're standing in my picture."

"You could've asked."

"I did ask. Tuesday. You said no!"

He grunted at that, picked up his coffee, and walked off toward the bow. No good morning, no nothing. Just that grunt and his boots on the deck boards.

* * *

Here's the situation, for anybody wondering. The cruise line had hired her back in September. Real contract, real money, paid half up front. They wanted a portrait of the River Queen's most famous former captain for the lobby of their St. Louis terminal, some big oil painting of the man who'd run these boats for thirty years. Selena had taken the job because it was a week on the upper Mississippi in late autumn, all expenses paid, and the leaves were doing that thing where the whole riverbank looked like it was on fire.

The only problem was the subject. Mason had dodged her every single day since they boarded in Red Wing. Monday he claimed his knee was acting up. Wednesday he was "helping the engineer with something." Friday he simply wasn't in his cabin, the lounge, or the dining room, and she'd walked the whole boat twice looking. A week of that, and her sketches were the only thing she had to show for it.

So she'd started following him around with the sketchbook instead. Candid drawings, done from across the room. It wasn't what the cruise line paid for, but it kept her hand loose and it kept her from going crazy. And if she was honest with herself, and she mostly was, it had stopped being about the commission around Friday. There was something about a man who refused to be looked at that made a painter want to look harder.

She found him that afternoon in the lounge, which was empty except for him. All the retirees were up on the sun deck watching the bluffs. Mason had claimed the corner armchair by the window with a paperback so dog-eared it looked like it had been through the wash. She crossed the room and sat down across from him, close enough to talk, far enough to be polite.

He looked up over the book. "Lounge is taken."

"It's a public room on a boat you don't own."

That got half a smile out of him, gone before it finished. He went back to reading. She got out the sketchbook and started blocking in the shape of the chair, the slope of his shoulders, the light from the window.

"You're doing it again," he said without looking up.

"I'm sitting in a chair. You're the one making a scene."

He closed the book on his thumb and really looked at her this time. Brown eyes, tired around the edges. "Why me? Cruise line's got a hundred retired captains they could bother."

"They asked for you specifically. You're the one who brought the River Belle through the ice in '09 without losing a soul."

"That was luck and a good engine room."

"And you're modest on top of it. They don't make many like you anymore."

He snorted and went back to the book. Selena kept drawing. The pencil was doing the jaw now, and she was pleased with it. Outside the window the banks went by slow and gold, and the paddlewheel made its regular thump below them like a big heart in the hull.

After a while he set the book down on his knee. "It's the staring I can't stand," he said, like it cost him something to say it. "Thirty years on the river, people pointing cameras at me. Passengers wanting the captain in their vacation photos. Now some office wants me hung on a wall so strangers can walk past and gawk. I retired to get away from being looked at."

"That's fair," Selena said. She turned the sketchbook around so he could see it. His own shoulders, his own jaw, done in maybe forty strokes. "But you should know something. You're a handsome man, Mason. That's part of the point. If you were ugly I'd have given up Monday."

He blinked. Then the color came up his neck and into his ears, and she watched a forty-five-year-old riverboat captain blush like a boy at his first dance. She didn't laugh, though it took some doing.

"That's," he said, and stopped. He cleared his throat. "That's not a thing people say."

"It's a true thing. Different category."

He looked out the window at the water, jaw working. The book sat forgotten on his knee. "You always this forward?"

"Occupational habit. You can't paint a shy portrait of somebody. It comes out flat. You have to push a little, see what their face does."

"And what's my face doing?"

"Right now it's doing something worth painting," she said. "Which is annoying, because you won't let me."

That almost got the smile back. He picked up the book, opened it, closed it again. She could see him working something over. She let him work. On the river a man learns patience, and Selena had learned a fair share of her own from sitting in front of stubborn faces for twenty years.

"Here's a trade," she said finally. She turned to a fresh page and laid the sketchbook flat on the little table between them. "You let me paint you for one hour. Your stateroom or mine, whichever, doesn't matter. One quick sketch session, an hour, I stop when I say I'll stop. And after that I leave you alone the rest of the cruise. No following, no sketching from across the room, nothing. You get your peace back."

"And if I say no?"

"Then I go back to following you around, and you get to keep being interesting against your will." She shrugged. "Either way I win a little. But one way, you win a lot."

He rubbed his jaw and looked at her a long beat. "One hour."

"One hour. I'll bring my own stuff. You just have to sit still and put up with me looking at you."

"That's the part I hate."

"I know. That's what makes it a trade."

He was quiet for a while. The paddlewheel thumped. Somewhere up on the sun deck somebody laughed, a loud retired laugh that carried down through the deck boards. Mason turned the paperback over in his hands as if searching for an exit.

"My stateroom," he said at last. "Six o'clock. Before dinner, when the light's still good through the porthole. And if I say we're done at forty minutes, we're done at forty minutes."

"Deal."

"And none of that flattery. I sit how I sit."

"Mason." She put her hand over her heart.