The Missing (12 page)

THE PILOTS FOUGHT the tricky channels around Greenville and after the day’s last trip told the captain they were too tired for a night trip toward Memphis, so the boat laid over. The rest of the crew was worn down as well, and it was late morning before the Ambassador turned out from the landing.

The captain came in and found the three mates at the same table and completed the foursome. He put his cap next to the salt shaker and wagged his head. “You gentlemen get the news?”

Aaron Swaneli stopped buttering his toast. “What kind of news?”

“The advance man sent me a wire. There’s money to be made this trip between here and Memphis.”

Charlie put down his coffee cup. “Not Bung City.”

The captain put up his hands. “I know, I know. It’s sawmillers and creosote workers, but that’s a spending town.”

“It’s a gravestone-and-crutch kind of town,” Aaron said. “I don’t think it has electricity.”

“We’ll put Sam at the stage plank with the three baskets.”

“Three baskets?” Sam cocked an eye at the captain. Every day brought surprises.

“One for pistols, one for knives, one for blackjacks and things like that. All the dance boats do it at rough towns.” The captain replaced his hat. “Charlie and Aaron, check with me later today. I’ve got some new pocket slapjacks that can knock down a horse.”

Sam laid his napkin on his empty plate. “I never heard of Bung City.”

Charlie looked out at a steamboat passing on the starboard side. “Shit. How’re those hillbillies going to take to a colored band?”

“They won’t see ’em,” the captain said.

“How’s that?”

“I told them to stay in their bunk room down on the main deck. The white band can play such junk as the Bung City folks want to hear. ‘Turkey in the Straw,’ ‘The Letter Edged in Black.’”

“How’m I going to watch the plank and play piano both?”

The captain stood and began walking backwards to the door. “Fred Marble is kind of light, so we’ll unscrew the bulb over the piano and he’ll wear a little ladies’ face powder.”

Sam shook his head gravely. “What’s he think about this?”

“Hell, he thought it up. It’s costing me an extra fiver for his trouble.”

“I could play that junk.”

“Son, he can play it better.”

* * *

THE BOAT MADE SLOW time up to Bung City. The poor coal made a floury smoke, and flaky cinders rained from the stacks like infernal sleet. The cabin boys swept the decks and wiped down the chairs every thirty minutes, beginning at the forward rail, walking toward the stern, and then starting over. The dance trip was scheduled for eight-thirty and the Ambassador approached the bank at half past seven, the calliope blasting “Dixie” to announce to the stragglers in the hills that the boat’s advance man and his thousand nailed-up flimsies had not lied. Sam came out of his cabin when he heard the landing whistle and saw a big sawmill rack yard and a water-tank factory. In between the businesses, a single unpaved street led down to the river and was jammed with people, their faces lit by kerosene streetlamps. A few men by the waterside were carrying torches, their shadows writhing on the yellow mud, the smoky glow held above their heads reminders of the first flaming knots thrust aloft by cave dwellers living hard by a lightning strike. Mrs. Benton nosed the bow up against the bank, the Ambassador’s old broad hull sliding over a mudflat, and Sam started down.

The stage plank set, two deckhands brought down a long table and three deep baskets. Sam followed and announced to the crowd that weapons had to be turned in, and could be retrieved at the end of the excursion, that anyone caught armed on board would be put in the boat’s jail until landing. A deckhand set up a carefully painted sign announcing the weapons policy, and Bit Benton, the engineer, six-four and built like an oil drum, stood next to Sam. “I’m just out here for show,” he said, his mustache following the contours of a frown. “I wouldn’t waste my time tangling with these jugheads. Some of ’em would kill you for a nickel.”

Sam stood next to the table and Bit crossed to the other side of the stage, staring at the men who began to move past. The third fellow in line was with an emaciated woman dressed in a homemade frock. She elbowed him sharply and he tossed a huge buck knife into the second basket without a word and walked on toward the ticket window. Ten passengers later, a hulking, stoop-shouldered man wearing a rain-drooped felt hat pulled a .32 revolver from behind his vest and put it in the first basket, read the sign, then dropped a blackjack in the third. A woman in an outdated red dress opened her pocketbook and fished out a .25 Colt automatic, and then there was a quiet run of fifty people before Bit Benton reached out into the stream of passengers and lifted a man’s coat.

“You could leave us the pig sticker.”

The man pulled a Bowie knife with an eight-inch blade from his belt and threw it, pinning the second basket to the table. “Hit better be thar when I git back.”

Sam took a set of brass knuckles from a tubercular man who could have been twenty years old or forty. His jeans were belted with sash cord and the woman at his side was barefoot. As the crowd filed by, he noticed that the night’s passengers were dressed ten years out of date; some of the men wore derbys or cheap felt planter’s hats or moth-drilled Stetsons. The women wore a little of everything, but mostly long, broad-paneled serge skirts and brocaded blouses. Some of their hats were enormous dyed-straw disks garlanded with screaming cloth flowers, and a few wore old tiered crinoline dresses with petticoats. Men wore no coats, just suspenders over checked shirts choked with polka-dot four-in-hand ties. One grim, toothless fellow turned over a pitted Scofield revolver, a weighty relic that in its time had probably dispatched Indians to the next world. When fifteen hundred riders had been loaded, the baskets were nearly topped off with skinning knives, big barlows, and three-dollar mail-order pistols.

A barefoot child stepped up to the table, a telegram pinched between two greasy fingers. “Your name Sam?” He made a simian motion toward him with the back of his hand.

“That’s me.”

“This here telegraph’s fer ye.”

Sam looked at the boy’s eroded fireman’s cap and string suspenders, then up the street that snaked along a dark hill. “Where’s a telegram come from in this place?”

“Hit’s a railroad station three mile yonder,” the boy said.

Sam took the paper, saw that it was from the station agent in Greenville, and felt the blood flush up the back of his neck.

“Some folks gimme a pennyertwo for my trouble.” The boy put one galled foot on top the other.

Sam dug in his pocket and found only lint. He turned to the engineer. “Can you loan me a nickel?”

Bit frowned. “We ain’t exactly long-lost friends.”

“Damn it, don’t you know where I live?”

The engineer pulled from his pants a change purse much like one an old lady would carry and fished out a nickel, giving it straight to the child.

By eight-fifteen only a few stragglers were coming on board. Sam and Charlie Duggs took the weapons to a locker between the boilers and the engine room and padlocked the door. In the transverse gangway between the main-deck lounge and the boilers, eight dime and nickel slot machines had been set out on stands, and the gamblers had already found them. Sam stopped here under a hanging light and read the telegram. SIX MILES NORTHWEST OF BUNG ON FERRY ROAD MAN NAME SMALLY PROCURED SHORTHAIRED CHILD. OVERHEARD TURPENTINE BUYER IN WAITING ROOM. ADVISE OUTCOME. MORRIS. He imagined the overweight agent engaged in his newfound art of purposeful listening, turning an ear toward his customers, concentrating between the clacks of his telegraph for hints that might bring someone rescue. When Sam first laid eyes on Morris Hightower at the station in Greenville, he didn’t judge compassion to be his long suit, so the surprise of the telegram wasn’t the message as much as who sent it.

A backing gong struck in the engine room, the whistle roared out into the dark, its echo returning from the western hill, and the paddlewheel drew the Ambassador into the night-wide river. He heard a shout and ran toward a pushing match in the main-deck lounge, where two men were already arguing over a chair. Both of them reeked of creosote and a bilious home brew akin to the essence of mildewed rag. “Hold on, damn it!” Sam yelled at the larger one. “We’ve got two hundred extra chairs down here. How many do you need to keep from killing one another?”

The smaller man spat on the deck. “Git him three ’cause he’s fixin’ to be laid out.”

Sam grabbed the larger man by the shirt front and banged him into a bulkhead. “You calm down and enjoy the ride or I’ll set you afloat in a skiff.” He waved over a waiter. “Give them some free ice to cool down on. And a chair.” For five minutes he watched their bad nature recede and then pulled himself up to the next deck, where the orchestra was banging out a twenty-year-old one-step, sounding like a park band playing in a gingerbread stand. No one in the crowd seemed to know how to dance, or they hadn’t drunk enough yet, so he climbed up to the hurricane deck and watched out for smokers. He saw the captain and went up to him at the restaurant entrance. “When are we pulling out for Memphis tomorrow?”

“We’re running a one o’clock here for just about every church on both sides of the river.”

“Can I lay out again?”

“Boy, you’re off as much as you’re on, ain’t you? Is it about Lily?”

He nodded. “I’ve got to go up the country a little ways.”

“All right. How much trouble can a church trip be anyway? But look sharp tonight. These folks are drinking paint stripper.” The captain moved off among the passengers, clapping men on the back, telling everybody to have a good time, buy extra sandwiches, not to forget the slot machines by the boiler room. Sam had heard he was part-owner of the boat and presided over the avalanche of money that went out daily for fuel, ice, supplies, and wages. After everyone else had collapsed in their bunks at night, the captain stayed up working with the purser, adding up a thousand figures to budget for the next trip.

By ten o’clock Mrs. Benton had worked the boat into the slack water behind Chicken Neck Island and held her there on a half-bell to save coal. It was then the belt on the engine-room generator broke and all lights went dark. In five minutes the waiters were pulling lanterns from lockers and hanging them on the gingerbread braces above the dance floor and anywhere else light was needed. The band kept playing, sounding even worse in the dark, snoring along with a waltz while Sam walked the slick floor. Most customers were sitting and generally hollering at each other to overwhelm the piano and trombones. Sam wasn’t sure what everybody was drinking, but it all came from the same pint bottles and probably from the same moonshiner tending his fires far back in the hills. He wondered if anyone would sell him a jar. After a while, the lanterns heated up and began to smoke. Throughout the evening the music waned in the sooty light, and the smudged and toothless people seemed less and less happy.

He went out on deck and stood behind the ship’s big bell, trying to clear the bad playing from his head. The Mississippi side was bereft of light, the bank a dark intimation of trees. On the Arkansas side, a place he’d never been, he saw the faint rectangle of one window on a ridge, and he wondered if whoever lived behind that glass had ever heard of the people who had killed his family. The few shards of information he’d learned suggested the murderers were from Arkansas. He might be close to where they were, and he studied the black ghosts of the far rises to the west. It had been twenty-six years. Where were the killers, each of them? Did they ever think about what they’d done, about the effects of their revenge? For a moment, he felt sorry for himself, but only for a moment, because if being raised in the presence of lost parents and siblings had taught him anything at all, it was not to look back, that the view was unthinkable. And as Linda had told him time and time again, what good would brooding do?

He walked across the dance floor and saw two groups of men pointing fingers and complaining loudly that the band didn’t know how to play any reels. Zack Stimson studied his abusers and tentatively began to strum “Under the Double Eagle.” The band fell in behind him, and nearly a hundred and fifty couples started to dance three hundred different ways. The water-tank-factory workers, mostly in hobnail brogans, tried to form two lines for a clomping Virginia reel, while the creosote workers, many in pressed overalls, were dancing deluded buck-and-wings, clog steps, or lunging polka stomps deadly to their partners’ toes. Pinwheeling dancers broke through the Virginia reel lines like crazed mules spinning out of a flaming barn. By the middle of the tune half the dancers were cap-sized on the floor and a general stomp-and-gouge had broken out. Charlie Duggs, Sam, and Aaron waded in and began pulling scuffed and screaming women out of the fray; then they began shoving apart the fighters and getting knocked around for their trouble. The biggest waiters waded in next, pulling hair and kicking, and the orchestra kept playing, as if trying to remind everyone what they were there for. A little man pulled a knife, and Charlie slapjacked him on the top of his head. Someone knocked down a tin lantern and a big fellow fell on it, crushing open the fuel tank, and women shrieked as he caught fire, then leapt up and ran, a flaming cross flying down the middle of the dance floor. Men stopped fighting to knock him over, everyone suddenly mad to get at him, a flurry of sympathetic hands rolling him like a barrel across the dance floor as he hollered and cursed. A man in overalls dumped a pitcher of water over his length, and suddenly the battle was finished. People from all sides grabbed the smoking man’s singed hands in congratulation and hauled him to a chair. Most of his hair was gone, and his face was blacked, but a woman came down from the café with a stick of butter and when a water-tank worker handed him a full glass of whiskey, the victim gave the room a bald-faced grin. Couples reformed, a few started to dance again, and there was a general search for hats and eyeglasses. Waiters found two brawlers unconscious under the piano and propped them against a bulkhead near four women who were sitting drunk and weeping at their tables. Sam told a waiter to bring them sodas and then surveyed the room, walking from bow to stern scanning the floor for broken glass and dropped cigarettes, wondering how much time was spent in the world protecting people from one another, folks who had no cause to fight, no reason at all.