The Gilded Ark

A roof falls in a Kentucky coal mine, four men die, and the company blames the mule driver who ran. Arlie Combs hides on a peeling showboat drifting the Ohio, fixing calliope valves and tending a nine-hundred-pound waltzing bear named Queenie. The boat carries whiskey behind a false bulkhead, and the man who owns that whiskey owns everyone aboard. Then the rains come, the levees soften, and the Mississippi decides who lives.