The Missing (13 page)

Charlie examined a tear in his jacket as he walked alongside. “You know, these ain’t bad people. They’re just uneducated, unsophisticated, untraveled, immoral, and uncivilized. Plus stupid.”

“It’s kind of scary tonight, all right. All these lanterns stink to high heaven.”

“I’m glad for the light, though.”

They heard a single gunshot and stopped at a window to listen. After a half-minute the boat’s whistle began a series of short yelps, the fire signal, and both men bolted for the upper deck, making it halfway up the stairs only to be bowled over by an avalanche of people running from a smoky bloom of flame under the roof of the skylight deck. Then another shot went off, and they ran back in and across the dance floor to the starboard stairs. Up top they saw two men facing off with pistols.

Sam pulled a full fire bucket from its rack and yelled at Swaneli, still at the bottom of the stair. “He shot a lantern and set the damn bunting on fire. Come on.” They rushed at the armed men, considering the gunfight of little importance compared to a fire. The under-side of the roof was hung with drooping panels of striped cotton material to give the spindly construction a plush appearance. These had ignited, the flames licking at the thin pine lumber. Cooks and waiters began running up onto the roof hauling fire buckets, flinging their contents and stumbling off for more water. Shortly a line formed with Sam and Charlie at the head, heaving one bucket after another up to the flaming stripes. Swaneli came forward with a fire hose and pulled the lever on the nozzle, soaking nearly everyone on the open deck as he knocked down the fire.

Soon Captain Stewart appeared at the top of the stairs holding a lantern and stared at the blackened roof. “Now who the hell started this?”

“Those two.” Charlie pointed at the men, who had gone down to the dark outside rail of the lower deck and were looking up at the smoke, still holding their pistols. A waiter came up and pointed out the man on the right as the first to draw and shoot.

The captain passed Sam his lantern and thundered down the steps, and one of the men stumbled backwards. He was dressed in a bibbed cowboy shirt frayed through at the neck. “Hey, now. Ain’t no reason to go crazy,” the man said. “Ah’ll buy you a new fuckin’ lantern.”

Even in the dark the captain’s face was terrible to see. He jerked both revolvers away and threw them over the rail, then grabbed the man who’d fired his gun. “Can you swim or are you too drunk?”

The little man was bucktoothed, stubble-faced, and roundheaded. “Ah kin swim faster’n this here garbage tub you the captain of.”

“All right, you undernourished squirrel, start stroking for land.” Captain Stewart grabbed his triple-stitch shirt with one hand and his crotch with the other and hurled him over the rail into the blackness next to Chicken Neck Island, the only sign of his landing a brief white flash as he broke water.

The captain turned to the customers coming back out on deck, now that the fire was out, and through the wayward tendrils of smoke, he screamed, “Who’s the next son of a bitch wants to swim back to the landing?”

The other man in the gunfight said out loud, “Old George was just a havin’ some fun.”

The captain took a deep breath, then grabbed the man’s overall straps and shook him and hollered in his face, “If your idea of fun is turning a three-hundred-foot pineboard boat into a flaming coffin of fifteen hundred people, then you’re a thirty-second-degree asshole and the dumbest donkey turd in Arkansas!”

The electric lights came back up and the man blinked, looked over the rail, and said, “Who’s gonna pay fer my pistol?”

* * *

THE BOAT CAME into the landing at midnight. Though he nursed a bruised forearm and bleeding shins from breaking up three fights late in the cruise, Sam still had to go down to the stage plank and hand back weaponry. Charlie Duggs, who’d had some experience as a medic in the war, spent twenty minutes sewing up a busboy who’d been gouged with a bottle, then came down to help return the last of the knives and blackjacks.

“How’s the boy that got cut?” Sam asked.

“I think he’ll do fine. Sure thing there wasn’t no infection alive in that whiskey bottle.”

“What about the old gal who lost her dress overboard?”

“She’s passed out on the Texas deck. The maids’ll drag her down directly. Nobody can find her beau. I swear we come back with several less than we went out with.”

Sam handed over a rusty revolver. “You’re tempted to laugh, but if you think about it, none of it’s funny.”

Charlie handed the large Bowie back to its grim owner. “The things you laugh at never are funny. That’s why you just got to laugh.”

“I’ll think about that.”

“If you figure it out, explain to me what I said.”

ALL NIGHT the crews dried the skylight roof with a wood-alcohol wash, then wiped, scraped, and repainted it. They turned on every light and washed soot, cinders, tobacco ash, spit, snot, chili, beer, moonshine, popcorn, and chicken salad off of everything, and either repaired the broken furniture or threw it overboard.

Sam got up for breakfast and sat with August in the restaurant for the morning potatoes and eggs.

The boy looked at Sam’s denim shirt and frowned. “You going somewhere?”

“Just want to check out something onshore. Where’s your mother?”

He rolled his eyes. “In bed with the headache. A woman she was waiting on last night didn’t like the food she brought and punched her. Knocked her down.”

“I didn’t hear about that.”

“You hear about the man chased the woman through the firing gallery?”

Sam grabbed a hot biscuit and pulled it apart. “Ah, no.”

“She picked up that hammer we use to bust apart the big coal pieces and laid him out. He was asleep in the coal pile till an hour or so ago. I’ve never seen such people.”

Sam slathered butter on the steaming biscuit. “Well, I’m about to meet some more of them.”

* * *

THE TOWN OF BUNG CITY had no automobiles for hire but still supported three liveries. Sam held the reins before a mellow, listing mare and resigned himself to another ride. The animal was long legged and he let her walk up the hill as he read Morris Hightower’s telegram again. He put it back in his pants pocket and surveyed the two blocks of gray storefronts faced with cupped pine boards bleeding nail rust. Behind these sat a line of whitewashed houses faded to the color of wood smoke. The street was full of animals, and his mare stepped on a chick, leaving behind a yellow hoofprint in the hot dust. At the edge of town he went into a swaybacked store to ask where Ferry Road was, and the proprietor took ten minutes to make sure Sam wasn’t a revenuer, bounty hunter, deputy, or Northerner before he answered.

He found the unmarked turn in the cottonwoods that was the start of Ferry Road and several miles later he saw a shiplap-siding farmhouse in the back of a field of green beans. The man at the store had told him that this was where Biff Smally lived. The thought occurred to him that he might have brought a pistol along. He sat the mare and looked for someone in the field. The place had good wire fences, he’d give him that. The roof was of painted iron and the porch had rails. He turned in at the gate and wished himself luck.

Before he could dismount at the front porch, a woman about thirty years old came out. She wore a sunbonnet and was smoking a pipe. “You come to bid on our beans, mister?”

“I was looking for Smally.” He saw twin girls around ten years old come out from behind her to stare at him.

“What for?”

He didn’t know how to explain and just said, “It’s about the new child.”

The woman let out a puff of smoke. She was not unpleasant looking, what he could see of her. She raised a rawboned hand over her eyes and peered to the west. “They’re off in the barn yonder, loadin’ stakes in the dray.” She stepped off the porch, the girls following like ducklings as she walked to the pump.

He touched the animal up and rode to the barn and got down. A man came out and took off his straw hat. “You come about the beans?”

“I ain’t after your beans, Mr. Smally. I’m trying to help some folks find their young child that was taken from them, and I heard one showed up here.”

Smally was a young man and fair skinned for a farmer. “Who told you I brung in a child?”

“A friend in Greenville. I was already in Bung City and decided to see about it.”

Smally threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Well, this here child wasn’t lost from nobody. He come off the orphan train that stopped in town from New York City. You know, they line ’em up on the station platform and you can take your pick.”

“He?”

“Yeah.” He turned to the hayloft and called, “Jacob.”

A dark-eyed boy who looked about seven stepped tentatively up to the loft gate, his head bristling with a two-inch growth.

“When we got him his scalp was buggy, so we had to shave his head.”

Sam touched his chin. “I was looking for a little girl,” he said absently. He looked up at the child. “You doing all right?”

“Yes,” the boy said. “I have my own clothes.”

“All right, you can start throwin’ down those sticks into the dray,” Smally told him. The child backed off into the dark loft. “Where was this little girl took from?”

Sam told him the story, and the farmer listened to all of it patiently. He motioned for Sam to walk over a few yards by a heart-pine corncrib that might have been sitting there for a hundred years. “Unless you foolin’ me, you look like a good feller and I don’t talk to no other kind. My daddy was a peace officer got shot out of the saddle for doin’ the right thing. He raised me to not let the bad stuff go on.” He looked behind him and lowered his voice. “What I’m gettin’ to is that I didn’t fetch that boy off the orphan train myself. A old boy three mile from here you don’t need to know the name of got him off that train some time ago and brought him home like a bought tool and made him chop firewood till doomsday. Beat him when he fell out.” Smally looked right into Sam’s eyes. “At night he’d come get in the bed with the boy and fool with him. His hired man told me that because he saw what was goin’ on.” Smally’s eyes drew up tight, and wrinkles blossomed around his eye sockets. “Men in these parts don’t mess in each other’s business, but we know what’s happenin’ just the same. Most of us work like a pump handle all our lives, hard and hot work all of it, but we never forget those five years or so when we’re kids. When we’re looked after, I guess. Not hurt by our elders unless we do somethin’ to deserve it.” He looked back to the barn, and Sam thought for a moment that Farmer Smally was about to shed tears. “When we’re little shavers we don’t think there’s nothin’ bad in the world, and nothin’ that can make us hurt. If we do get a little pain we kin put our face on our daddy’s shirt or momma’s dress and it’ll go away, sure. I hope that’s what it’s like again after I die.” He turned back. “Them that takes that from children are robbin’ heaven from earth.”

Sam looked up at the barn loft. “How’d you get him away?”

“Some of my neighbors paid that man a visit, and I understand he pulled out a shotgun from behind his door.”

“What’d he say?”

“I don’t know. He don’t say much of nothin’, anymore.”

Sam watched a crow light on the edge of the bean field. “They ran him out of the country?”

“You could say that,” Smally said softly, but in a way that told Sam not to ask further.

He looked over at the rented mare, which was cropping grass by a fence where he’d tied her off. The boy came again to the loft opening and looked out at them. Here was another one with no parents or siblings. “They just give those kids away like calendars at the drugstore?”

Smally turned and followed his gaze. “Yep. Some of ’em go to bad folks all right, but Jacob, he’s safe now. He’ll make a good hand in a few years. He just does chores now. I wouldn’t put a little bitty like that in the field.”

“You say your daddy was the law?”

“He was. Dollar a day and all the trouble you’d want in a lifetime on Saturday night.”

Sam took a breath, and the air came in as heavy as mercury. “When I was a baby, as far as I can tell my whole family was killed by a clan from south Arkansas.”

Smally acted as though he’d heard such news every day. “Your family must of kilt one of them.”

“I guess.”

“All rode down there together and did everbody in, did they?”

“You ever hear of something like that?”

“More’n I like to. There’s no lack of wild clans in this or any other country. There’s even whole families that’ll give humans in general a sorry name. There’s the Kathells and the Blankbulls just to start with. It was Blankbulls killed my daddy.” He shook his head. “The Luthlows specialized in killin’ preachers. But about forty, fifty mile from here’s a bunch by the name of Cloat. They’re worse than worst.” He spat next to his boot. “My daddy used to tell me they thought ridin’ horseback two hundred miles to kill somebody was like goin’ to the state fair. They just lived to get angry. I hadn’t thought about ’em in years, but if you wanted to find a murderin’ bunch from around this part of the world, I’d start with them Cloats.”

“Do they live near a town?”

“Not hardly.”

“How do people find them?”

Smally gave him a long, baleful look. “People don’t.”

* * *

RIDING BACK to the boat, he spotted the railroad station, more of a raw pine booth with a semaphore bolted outside and telegraph wires running in through a gnawed hole. He sent a note to agent Morris Hightower at Greenville: THANKS FOR LEAD. CHILD WAS BOY. KEEP EARS OPEN. THANKS. SAM SIMONEAUX.

* * *

THE AMBASSADOR’S calliope started up as he was turning in the horse, and by the time he got to the landing Mr. Brandywine was hanging on the roaring whistle. Sam jumped aboard across five feet of muddy water, ran to his cabin for his uniform, and turned out for the one o’clock ride.

He met August coming forward, an alto sax under his arm and a grin on his face. “The captain said I could play this trip.” He had scrubbed the coal dust out of his hair, and Sam turned him around, wondering how he could get so clean.

“Hey, knock ’em dead, kid. The captain payin’ you?”

“I guess not. Experience is like money, he said.”

Sam bit his cheek. “Well, there might be something to that.”

“I’ll have to make up the time I missed in the boiler room, but that’s all right.”

“Captain tell you that too, did he?”

“Did you find out anything about Lily or Dad?”

He shook his head. “I heard about a kid, but it was a boy. You go on and join the band. Keep your ears open. If Mr. Gauge has been drinking, he’ll be slow an eighth beat or so. Don’t get ahead of him and he’ll be your friend for life.”

The boy’s feet were dancing when Sam waved him off, watching him run, trying to remember the last time he’d felt that excitement boiling in his own feet, so happy at fitting in and doing well that the future seemed to promise just one long, ecstatic performance. He went back into his cabin and found Charlie Duggs’s quart of Canadian whiskey, poured a shot into a tall glass and a couple slugs of warm pitcher water on top of that, and took it down like a purge, then had another, rinsed his mouth, and bit a nip of Sen-Sen.

He found the captain walking the restaurant with his hands behind his back, and he went up behind him. “Hi, Cap.”

“Lucky. Glad you made it back.”

“How’d we do last night?”

The captain leaned toward him. “Son, we made the money. It was rough going but those chuckleheads had silver in their overalls.”

“You make enough to give August a couple bucks for playing this trip?”

The captain pulled back, then studied the deck as though checking the quality of its varnish. “He ought to pay me. I’m training him.”

Sam took a breath. “To do what? Be a slave?”

Captain Stewart let a waiter breeze by. “I have to watch every nickel, you know that.” He hazarded a glance at Sam’s face to see what he thought of this statement, and after a moment threw up his hands. “Damn it, all right. You’re holding me up, but I’ll slip him something. Now check out the main-deck lounge.”

Sam gently pinched the captain’s left lapel between thumb and forefinger. “He’ll tell me what you gave him.”

“I said all right. You trying to make me feel like a crook?”

* * *

THEY TOOK on a flat of new coal better than the last, and after the sober church excursion the Ambassador escaped Bung City running on a full bell upriver toward Memphis. Plowing through the afternoon, the old boat followed the channel in Mrs. Benton’s brain, working hard through Sunflower Cutoff, then around Island Number Sixty-three, and fighting upbound for Miller’s Point. The riverside was all of it a grit-banked lowland of bleached sandbars and willow brakes too flood-prone even for wild animals, land passed over by early explorers and Indians alike, who knew it for the dangerous fen that it was. Meanwhile, the crew waxed the monstrous dance floor and hung new broad-striped material under the skylight roof. At dusk Mrs. Benton pulled the whistle ring, letting it slide out of her fingers. Sam heard the short whoop and intercepted the porter bringing up a cup of coffee. He found her in one of her thin, dark dresses, sending a half-speed bell to the engine room and squinting over the breast board to starboard.

“Gonna cross the channel?” he asked.

She didn’t turn around. “Captain demote you?”

“Elsie was just curious about when we’d get into Memphis.”

“Captain Stewart thinks this stretch can be run in jig time, but the water’s down a little. Can’t take a chance with this old chicken coop.”

He watched her read the water’s surface, saw her steer the boat away from lines of ripples. When, after five minutes, she turned to him, he handed her the mug of coffee.

“Y’all hear from Ted?”

“We’re hopin’ he’ll show up next stop.”

“And you didn’t hear anything about his little girl?”

He shook his head, and she turned back to the river. “Maybe Ted’s found out something,” he said, desperate for a cheerful statement.

Mrs. Benton squinted and pressed a hip against a steering lever. “It’s a terrible thing to lose one of your own. That way, especially.” She took a long swallow of coffee. “When they pass away from us, we believe they’ve gone somewhere good, don’t you know? But the way little Lily’s gone, you hate to think about it.”

He moved up beside her and studied the long shadows arrowing from the west bank. The deep water she was following was in her fingertips, for it all looked the same to him. “I’m doing the best I can.”

“Are you?”

He met her glance. “I lost a boychild myself. I kind of know what people go through.”

“Sickness?”

“Yes.”

“I lost two to scarlet fever and one to diphtheria.”

“Good lord, I’m sorry…”

She gave him a sharp glance. “It’s not a contest, you know, to see who’s got it hardest. Everybody’s got it hard. If they don’t, they’re not alive.” She drained her cup and swung it out to him, hitting him in the chest.