The Missing (14 page)

“Were they young?”

“Old enough that every time I walk into a kitchen, they’re at the table.” She threw the levers over to cross the river and reached up to pull the whistle cord. “Dead or alive, they never go away. But if I had a living child out there I couldn’t get my hands on, it’d drive me crazy.”

* * *

THE BOAT PADDLED in to Memphis the next morning in time to board two thousand Masons lined up on the levee for the eleven o’clock ride. As soon as the Ambassador bumped the dock, the advance man leapt aboard with bills, a few pieces of mail, and several telegrams, and when Sam came down he saw Elsie standing at the forecastle rail opening a note. Her mouth slowly fell open as he walked up.

“What is it?”

“It’s Ted. He’s up the hill in the hospital.”

He looked down on a group of rousters struggling to place the balky stage. “Let’s find the captain and lay off the eleven o’clock. You want to take August?”

She began to tear up. “Oh, I don’t think so. We don’t know how badly he’s hurt.”

They walked up into the city through the hot morning and found the hospital, a broad marble-faced building roamed by smells of ether and alcohol. They found Ted in a small, stuffy room on the fourth floor. He was bruised all over and didn’t answer Elsie when she touched his shoulder and said his name. Sam had seen a survivor of a boiler explosion once, and he’d looked like the bandaged form lying crookedly on the thin bed.

Ted didn’t even turn his head to speak. “I’ve been here since yesterday,” he told them, his voice like a dry hinge. “They cut on me twice and set the bones in my hand.” He held up a mittenlike bandage with three drain tubes snaking out of it.

Elsie kissed him on the small patch of unbruised skin below his nose. Sam took in the bandages, the casts, the wormlike black rubber tubes. The Skadlocks hadn’t seemed the type to hurt a man this badly, but he’d misjudged them.

Ted explained what had happened, as much as he could remember. Looking at a long drain leading into a bottle on the floor, Sam thought of riding again to the Skadlocks’ place.

For all of Ted’s trouble he had found out nothing. He’d called his relatives in Cincinnati that morning, and as soon as he could travel he would go to his aunt’s. The doctors told him his left hand might regain strength, but it would take a year and a long regimen of exercises.

Elsie placed a hand on the bandage covering his forehead. “August and I, we’ll go with you.”

Ted shook his head, and it cost him to do so. “No. You both need to work and save every penny. I’ve run up a bill here, and I pay my bills. You know that.” He turned his head again to bring Sam into view. “I want to talk to you alone for a minute.”

“Ted?” Elsie put a hand on his arm.

“Go on. It’ll just take a minute.”

When she closed the door behind her, Ted asked for a drink of water. Sam helped him with the glass straw swinging in the hospital tumbler. “Lucky, I’ve been thinking. I have to talk to you about Elsie.”

“What about her?”

“I know you’ll keep an eye on her for me, won’t you? I mean, she’s very good-looking, don’t you think so?”

“Hey, I better not answer that one.”

He coughed and Sam helped him take another sip of water. “Sam, I know you miss your missus, and Elsie will miss me. She’ll be lonely.”

Sam placed the glass on a side table. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

“Lucky, she’s comfortable around you. She relies on you. I don’t want to make you angry about this, but I know how things go sometimes.”

“I told you. You don’t need to worry about me.” But as he said this, he knew why Ted was concerned.

“Lucky, you know the way she looks all dressed up.” Ted rolled his eyes upward. “I know how I’d feel about her if I was some other man. You’re not being honest if you tell me you don’t find her attractive.”

“Now, look—”

“You don’t have to say anything.” He tried to raise his right hand, then realized that arm was in a cast. “I’m asking you to watch yourself is all. Try to think of her as your sister, I guess. Remember you’re a married man.”

“All right.”

“Don’t get close to her, Lucky. And for God’s sake, if the captain lets her sing with the band, don’t watch her.”

“All right.” He knew Ted didn’t trust him, and he looked away toward the window.

“Don’t get sore. You’re helping us with our little girl. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. You’re better at finding than I am. Look at me, busted up like a run-over dog. I won’t be able to turn a nickel for a year. You think a woman wants to put up with that?” His eyes began to fill. “What if they can’t fix this hand? I won’t be able to work.”

“Those Yankee doctors’ll fix it.”

“But if they don’t?”

“Just tell her, and she’ll help you figure it out.”

“Tell me what?” Elsie swept into the room along with an orderly.

“How to hit a high note,” Sam told her, edging past into the echoing hall.

WILLA WHITE felt a duty to please her husband any way she could. She hired Vessy, the best cook she could find, and though the girl was coarse and simple, Acy enjoyed her meals. Willa considered herself two or three pounds overweight, so she traveled to the nearest big city to purchase exotic-colored foundation garments with brocaded straps and buckles that camouflaged her lushness and made Acy breathless with the effort of getting them off her in the dark. She wanted to entertain her husband with bright talk, so she subscribed to many magazines that digested the world’s complexities for her. Acy liked a dustless and orderly house, so she hired an excellent maid, the daughter of a woman that worked for the Calhoun family. The one thing she couldn’t supply Acy with was a child.

Usually Willa took a drink of wine after lunch and supper, along with an olive-colored pill the druggist, her first cousin, had given her. It was a cure for opium addiction in the old days, he explained, and would merely calm her nerves. She took another drink or two about eight o’clock, then another at bedtime, a whiskey, for her digestion.

One night around two o’clock she heard a sound like a mosquito whining in her ear and sat up, dizzy, to realize it was her Madeline crying in the next bedroom.

She sat in a brocaded chair next to the child and could see in the glow of the night-light that she was sweaty under the fine sheets and coverlet. “Here, honey, let’s get all this off of you. It’s okay to sleep just under a sheet when it’s warm.”

“Where’s my mommy and Gussie?” the child cried, her voice sleepy and thick.

“You’re just confused, Madeline. Your family got sick and passed away, remember?”

“No, they didn’t.”

“You were in the orphanage just one day when we picked you out to be our own little girl, precious.” She leaned over and began to stroke the girl’s hair. “I saw right away you were talented and pretty, not like those dirty, snotty children. Oh, you could sing like a bird.”

“My mommy taught me songs.”

“Well…” Willa straightened her back. “Didn’t I hire a trained musician to teach you better ones? He cost lots and lots of money, Madeline.”

“He didn’t like the song I sang for him.”

Willa looked toward the window and frowned. “‘Cleopatra’ is a nasty New York song from one of those tawdry revues.”

The child began to whimper. “Vessy said she liked it.”

“Vessy is an uneducated servant who barely knows how to wear shoes. She probably sleeps with hound dogs back in the woods.”

“I like her,” the girl said.

“Bless you, there’s not a thing you know about how people are. I’ll teach you, Madeline, the difference between good and bad people. All you have to do is listen to me and watch me.”

“Can I have a drink of water?”

Willa let out a sigh. “All right. I probably won’t get back to sleep anyway.”

Down in the kitchen she fumbled around in the cabinets for a common tumbler. She started to draw a glass of tepid water from the mop faucet, which still ran to the old rainwater cistern, then remembered Vessy saying the water had things in it. What things? She would have to ask. She remembered the girl’s hot face and chipped a little ice for the glass and drew water from the city tap. What a bother it was to raise a child! But as she stood in the dark hall outside the girl’s door, holding the sweating glass, she felt somehow ennobled. The child sat up in the dim room, barely visible.

“Can I have the water?”

“Can I have the water, what?” Her heart nearly stopped beating with the expectation of her answer.

“Can I have the water, lady?”

* * *

THE AMBASSADOR stayed several days in Memphis. No big excursion boats had come to town for months, and the men’s lodges, church groups, trade unions, and general crowds kept the steamer running three outings a day at full capacity. The passengers on the night trips were mostly couples, very well dressed, fairly good dancers out for a civilized time, and the crew was able to relax.

Ted Weller, when he could walk on crutches, decided it was time to travel to Cincinnati to another hospital. After Elsie and August said their goodbyes before rushing off for a two o’clock excursion, Sam helped him into a cab and rode with him to the station, bought his ticket, and handled his trunk. He sat a long time next to him on a bench and waited for the train, noting the hurt in Ted’s face and wondering if surgery could put the rhythmic lightning back in his fingers.

“God, Lucky, I feel awful. This whole left arm is throbbing.”

“You feel too bad to travel, we can catch a hack back to the hospital.”

Ted took a long breath. “No. I’ll be all right once I get on board.”

Sam reached over and stuffed the long ticket into Ted’s inside coat pocket. “I’ll watch out for August.”

He moved and his face showed a bolt of pain. “What do you think about Lily? That maybe we’ve lost her for good?”

“You can’t think like that. We can find her if we believe we can. Maybe that sounds dumb, but if you expect something to happen, sometimes it does. Kind of like my piano playing.”

“Stop, it hurts too much to laugh.”

Sam put his hands together and hung them between his knees. “I’ll keep looking.”

Ted turned slowly toward him, bones popping in his back. “I expect it of you.”

* * *

BETWEEN TRIPS Sam stayed busy and spoke to the police sergeants, showed a picture of Lily around at the various precincts, journeyed to the city’s rail stations, and spoke with telegraphers, telling everyone that he’d pay for the telegram if they learned anything that might be useful. Twice he called home and spoke with Linda, telling her how much he’d missed her, asking if any messages for him had come to their house. She seemed to sense a sadness about him that he himself was unaware of, and she was overly cheerful, unlike her usual steady self. She told him she was glad to get the money he’d wired her, that she was eating so much good food she was getting fat. Though he knew this was a lie, it delighted him.

The night before the boat was to pull out, he was leaning against the starboard smokestack ignoring the heat running up his back when Captain Stewart came down from the pilothouse and handed him two revolvers.

“What’s this?”

“Two new Smiths I got in town. Give one to Duggs. We’re playing Stovepipe Bend tomorrow, and I want you to wear them in your waistband out on the stage.”

“Same setup as Bung City?”

The captain shook his head. “Bung City’s like a Sunday school compared to this place. Watch out. These things are loaded.”

He found Charlie in his bunk, suffering from a dizzy headache, and he tossed a revolver onto his stomach. “What’s Stovepipe Bend?”

“The advance man told me, but I didn’t believe it.” He put a forearm over his eyes. “Oh, it’s just a bad place, Sam. We’ll live through it.”

“You got a sick headache or the alcohol flu?”

Charlie gave him a look. His eyes looked like a copper sunset, and Sam reached over and felt his forehead. “Oh, I’m all right.”

“You got a little fever there.”

“It’s just being tired. My back hurts from wrestling those slot machines on the late-night run.” He closed his eyes. “Just let me be, and I’ll get up or I won’t.”

Sam removed the revolver from Charlie’s bunk. “I’ll put this on the washstand so you don’t roll over on it and shoot us both.”

“Obliged.”

Sam looked at the shiny revolver, a .38 Special with checkered walnut grips. “You ever shoot anybody?”

“You tryin’ to be funny?”

At once he realized his mistake. “Sorry. I forgot you really were in the war.”

“Yeah, really,” Charlie groaned.

* * *

THE BOAT BACKED OUT and would steam north all day through empty territory. Between Memphis and Cairo only a few small towns withered on the bank and between them was uninhabited shoreline, short hills, slick and panther-haunted lowlands, sandbars, and willows—a gravelscape fit for nothing but avoidance. Mr. Brandywine told him stories of outlaws still living in the unpoliced backwaters, some making whiskey in factory quantities, of revenuers who went in but never came out. Swaneli told him of one Arkansas lawman’s skeleton found shackled to a drift log, pulled out at Vicksburg.

As he turned in, Sam listened to the engines’ escape stacks sending big gasps up into the night sky. The engineers were using steam full-stroke to make good time, and he knew the firemen were suffering for it as they fought to keep pressure up. He wondered if August was holding his own, if the more experienced firemen were helping him out. He was a child, really, and had no business being down there in the heat and soot and leaking pipes. When Sam was a boy he’d worked all day digging potatoes with the sun rolling around on his back like a hot rock, but he’d been stronger than August. Thinking about it, he was glad to leave a place where he had to get up in the sleeting December dark to cut sugarcane all day wearing only a thin shirt, eating only a cold sweet potato in a tin cup for lunch. He smiled in his bunk as he thought of getting away from Uncle Claude’s farm. He smiled again when he remembered Krine’s department store, the broad aisles, the glowing salesgirls in their stylish dresses, Maurice playing waltzes on the mezzanine pipe organ.

* * *

THE BOAT LABORED under a hot, empty sky, Mr. Brandywine at the wheel except when he sent for Nellie Benton to run the disorienting crossing at Poker Point. The busboys cleaned up from the night before and found a drunk in a life-jacket hopper. After the man was wide awake, Charlie and Sam put him in a skiff and rowed him to shore at a place called Rowel while the steamer treaded water midriver, sending up restless spirals of coal smoke. When they got back, the captain told them to strip off their shirts and mix buckets of soap and bleach. The whole boat was graying over with soot, and it was time for a washdown. Customers didn’t want their summer skirts or shirt cuffs or seersucker pants smudged as soon as they boarded.

Sam was working over the bulkhead outside the engine room when Elsie came by wearing a paint-stained smock.

“Been gambling?” she said.

He thought a moment. “I get it. I lost my shirt.”

“I thought you were a ghost when I first walked through the door. You better stay out of the sun so you don’t burn up.” She seemed almost cheerful, and he guessed she was relieved that Ted was still alive.

“The captain said we’re playing a rough town tomorrow. You ever heard of it?”

“No.”

He tossed his brush into the pail of bleach. “So you didn’t stop there on the way down?”

She shook her head, her straight blond bob swimming. “The advance man nailed up some flyers about the northbound trip and the new boat, but we didn’t stop on the down trip. From what a couple of the waitresses say, though, the last thing Stovepipe Bend men are interested in is babies. It’s not very civilized.”

He lifted the brush from his pail and continued swiping down soot and mildew. “The captain gonna hide the black orchestra again?”

She shook her head. “He said each landing’s different. He didn’t think a black band would matter at Stovepipe Bend. Captain Stewart knows his towns, I guess. He asked me to sing ten songs, and I told him I didn’t really want to because there might be trouble.”

Sam looked at his wall and dropped another flurry of soap flakes into his pail. “But he offered you good money.”

“Two bucks a song.”

“Man. So you’re singing?”

“Practicing all day. Haven’t you heard?”

“Been busy.”

“You know, the next big city’s Cairo. I’ve got a feeling about the place. Lily sang in two shows there with lots of women crowding the bandstand.”

“You told me some time ago.” He looked at her. She was a nice woman, pretty and talented, but he could tell by her eyes that she was incomplete. She was lonely. “You taking good care of yourself?”

“Sure. But when I sing at Stovepipe Bend, I don’t know what’ll happen. Might be a riot.”

“Show business!”

She laughed at that and picked up her pail, walking past him into the engine room.

* * *

THE NEXT DAY he watched the cabin boys and cooks roll out bunting left over from a July Fourth trip and drape it over the rails. The captain told him to pull out all the slot machines and space them around the lower deck. Ten miles out from Stovepipe Bend, the leader of the black orchestra, Fred Marble, came onto the roof, pulled on kid gloves, opened the steam valve wide, and warmed up the calliope with “I Found a Rose in the Devil’s Garden,” the notes screaming out to five miles around. At two o’clock Sam buttoned up his uniform and did a walkaround, spitting on hot cinders on the upper decks. They were to play two moonlight trips, nothing during the day, because this was a fairly new and hard-nosed factory town with no clubs, church groups, or schools that might take a day trip. When Nellie Benton pulled a short rasp from the whistle, Sam headed up.

She was leaning on a steering lever ringing a slow bell when he tapped on the door, and she waved him in. “Lucky, go down and tell Bit not to let idlers hang around in the engine room tonight. I understand this is a squirrelly bunch we’ll have on board.”

“I been warned.”

“Watch yourself, son. You’re a good fellow, and the Wellers need you.”

“Well, I survived Bung City.”

“Stovepipe Bend might be more of a challenge.” Suddenly a little tugboat slid out past the point of an island right ahead and stopped in the channel as if its pilot were unsure which side of the Ambassador to pass, and Mrs. Benton pulled the whistle valve wide open, the big glass panes of the wheelhouse vibrating like harmonica reeds.

* * *

LATE IN THE DAY the boat slid around a muddy bend, and there on the west bank rose a long series of iron smokestacks like spines on a poisonous caterpillar, little coal-burning factories spewing smoke and unworldly smells into the damp afternoon. The riverbank was without vegetation except for balding willows dying behind the mudflats. A gravel slope two hundred feet long served as the landing. Sam watched a smelter spew orange smoke; at the river’s edge, discharge pipes from a creosote plant pushed out gouts of ebony foam. A cottonseed-oil mill, a broom factory, and the Gettum Rat Poison plant huddled behind the levee. Painted on the water tower above the last factory was a giant rodent writhing on its back. Tiers of company shacks, each like the other, sweltered up the naked hill toward where somewhat better houses with broad sagging porches were skylighted on the ridge.