The Missing (16 page)

“Why didn’t you turn him in to the law?”

“He’d maybe just kill that little town constable.”

Charlie seemed to think about this. “What else did he tell you?”

“He was whelped in Arkansas. He knows who did what they did to my family. Some people named Cloat from around Bung City.”

Charlie leaned out of the lower bunk and looked up at him. “You don’t exactly sound excited about that big news.”

“I’m still thinking about it.”

“Think, hell. Don’t you have folks you can round up to go find these people? At least try to tell the law about them. Man alive!”

At once a wave of fatigue swamped Sam. “Charlie, it’s been around twenty-five years. I never knew my parents or brother or sister. Don’t have pictures, nothing. Just some wooden markings in the churchyard. My uncle never raised me to be big on revenge, you know? Most French people on the bayou are like that. Too poor to afford a grudge.”

Charlie seemed amazed. “Well, you’re a little pudding if I ever saw one. You don’t try to find out about these outlaws, I hate to say this, but I’ll be ashamed of you.”

“What? What would you do?”

“What do you think? If I found out for certain they’d killed my folks, I’d go to the sheriff. If he was bought off or scared, I’d dump my bank account and buy as many pump shotguns I could afford and a case of high-brass goose shot.” He began waving his arm toward the low roof. “I’d get my cousin Buck, who was with me over in France, my brother Maxie, my uncle Dick Agle, who was with Roosevelt in Cuba, and that big Eyetalian who married my sister. We’d wait for asshole-hunting season to open and go find ’em in their nest.”

“With bad luck, you’d all get arrested. With good luck you’d all get shot up. I’m wondering if that’s why Skadlock told me, thinking these Cloats’d swat me like a mosquito. And maybe they didn’t have anything to do with it at all.”

Charlie rolled on his back. “Some things you don’t worry about.”

“If I did get some kind of revenge, you can bet one of them would get away and show up at my house one night two years down the road, squattin’ there in the bushes, a knife between his teeth.”

The cabin was quiet for a long time; then Charlie’s voice came out of the darkness, sleepy and yawning. “I still think you’re chickenshit.”

“Maybe after I find the little girl, I’ll think about all this. First things first.”

“Chick-en-shit.”

“You think shootin’ up a yardful of folks is the right thing to do?”

“Kill a snake, and the next man on the trail won’t get bit.”

“Not unless another snake gets him.”

“Boy, I can see you ain’t never been shot at.”

Sam put an arm over his eyes and let out a long sigh. “Not in a good while, anyways.”

* * *

THE NEXT NIGHT drew sizeable crowds again. A logjam of denim-clad sawmillers and their women came over the river from Yunt in skiffs, and the captain hired the local constable and three men he deputized and armed with shotguns to ride and help break up fights. Sam took four aspirin and patrolled constantly, the pistol gleaming in his belt, but generally the crowd was subdued, a fact which didn’t improve his opinion of human nature, that it took a show of hardware to teach people how to have a good time. Elsie sang her beautiful songs, August played in the band for both trips, and Sam listened to them as he made his rounds, wishing he were at the piano.

One o’clock in the morning found the Ambassador digging river for Cairo as the crew fire-hosed the upper decks of the crowd’s sediment. The ship’s carpenter began replacing balusters kicked out of the upper railings, and the waiters threw ice on the main deck to chill blood off the wood.

That night, Charlie Duggs carried a pint of his own, and by the time he crowded into the cabin he was fueled up with malevolent energy.

Sitting down on the stool beside the lavatory, he looked up to where Sam lay in his bunk.

“You goin’ after the Cloats when we come back downriver? I’ll go with you.”

“Been too busy to think about them.” Sam saw only an outline of the man seated across from him.

“If I was you I couldn’t think of nothin’ else. They killed your whole family, bud.”

“I’m turnin’ in.” He was unable to think about anything.

Charlie stood up. “Think I’ll bed down on the Texas roof.” He lurched toward the narrow door. “The air smells better up there.”

Sam folded an arm over his eyes and tried for sleep. He thought of his uncle and of his aunt, who’d always treated him as their own son. Still, he remembered feeling at times that he was not totally theirs. The cousins were the whole children, and he was loved as much, but still not of the same house, born somewhere else out of someone else. He tried to remember anything, a touch, a flash of light, the timbre of an owning voice, but there was nothing at all. When they had been killed, the part of him that made memory had not yet come alive. Like a sudden foul cloud, what the murderers had done began to envelop him, and he understood with a shudder what they had taken away. He began to cry quietly in the sour bunk, wondering what was wrong with him. Maybe he was changing, approaching the edge of that age where for the first time he would begin to look back on things, and he realized dimly how sad a change that was.

ACY WHITE lounged in his parlor listening to the girl sing “The Letter Edged in Black” in her pure bell tones. Now and then she would end a line with a blue note, and Acy would stop her. “No. How many times do I have to tell you not to do that? It sounds trashy.” He’d taken to overseeing her practices and even her playtime. He made sure she didn’t sing to herself while she dressed her dolls, because inevitably she would come out with something improper—probably, he thought, written by a New York Jew for some lowbrow vaudeville theater.

The girl would listen to Acy’s commands because she sensed she had to, obeying him because there was no one else to obey. She was a child with no options. Sometimes she cried, and this was always in some way connected to her mother. Lily had no notion of death and didn’t know what to make of this nervous couple who told her five times a day that they were her mother and father. She was a baby, disoriented in a baby’s world. But she was smart.

Acy ran a finger along his thin mustache. “Sing it right, will you?”

“Where’s Vessy? I’ll sing it to her.”

“Vessy’s at her shack.”

“What’s a shack?”

“It’s a nasty little place where stupid people live.”

The girl came up to him and put a hand on the arm of his chair. “Is Vessy stupid?”

Acy pulled his watch and frowned at it. “She’s an untrained gal from up in the hills. Her people are dirt poor and we had to train her to wear shoes.”

She looked at him, unblinking. “Did you give her shoes?”

“What? Why, yes. Otherwise she’d be tracking up the house.”

She walked over to the grand piano and pressed down two notes of an A chord. “Thank you for giving her shoes.”

He went to her, got down on his knees, and put his face next to hers. “Look, remember that the last person in the world you want to be like is Vessy. She’s bad. Don’t forget that Vessy is a bad person and you shouldn’t trust her. She’s hardly a step above a nigger.”

The girl put a finger in her ear and yawned. Acy stood and looked out the window where Willa was haranguing the gardener next to the cast-iron fence, the old man’s head bobbing under the storm of her words.

* * *

ON THE TRIP up to Cairo, Sam shared a meal with Elsie in the café. He thought about her singing and had to admit that he was a little bit infatuated, though he couldn’t reconcile the image of her extraordinary presence in front of the orchestra with the woman seated across from him at the cheap wooden table. She had the buttermilk skin of a healthy midwestern girl, and he admired Ted Weller’s luck in matching up with her. August walked in and joined them, looking from one to the other before sitting down tentatively, as if worried he might be interrupting something. A stranger watching them eat and talk and laugh might have mistaken them for a complete family. It was a pleasant meal that Sam would remember for years, probably because it would be the last such meal for a long time.

* * *

WHEN THE BOAT tied up at Cairo the dapper advance man was there with the new schedule and an armload of mail. The weather was windy and a rainstorm was building in from the west, so he brought the mail to the central staircase to give it out. Among the envelopes was a telegram he’d been given that morning at the Western Union office, where he was sending precise schedule times upriver. He shuffled the mail and called out names, announcing that the telegram was for Elsie. Sam got a long envelope from New Orleans, a letter from Linda, and sat down on the staircase to read it. She told him the family news, then neighborhood tales, said that she wasn’t feeling all that well, that perhaps it was the heat and dampness. She let him know she missed him around the house and complained that she’d had to fix the gas range herself, but he saw that as her way of saying she needed him. The letter was four pages long, and he read it twice. Several crewmen were leaning against bulkheads or seated on coils of rope, reading slowly to make the letters last. He looked around for Elsie and saw her standing by the capstan, the buttermilk color of her face gone gray, the winsome expression missing as if scraped off by a surgeon. When she put her face down into her hands, he walked over.

“Bad news?”

She didn’t look up. “Go find August and bring him to my cabin. Then leave us alone, Lucky.”

He turned toward the rain-stippled water, afraid to look at her. “Is something wrong with Ted?”

She put down her hands and looked past him, up the stairs toward the dance floor. Her voice was flat and tired. “He got blood poisoning from the first operation. He died yesterday.”

“God. If there’s something—”

“Go get August.”

On the trip back to the boiler galley he thought of how the boy was about to be delivered, with just a few of his mother’s words, to the land of adult sorrow. He stopped at the entrance, not wanting to take the next step, but then raised his foot over the sill. August was on a stool in the companionway reading through a smudged arrangement for a De Silva fox-trot.

He looked up and smiled. “Hey, Lucky. Get a load of these licks.”

Sam felt like a black cloud, drifting close. “Your mother sent me down to get you. Go on up to your cabin.”

“Sure. Did you hear me play the other night for those hillbillies?”

“You played like a champ.”

August hopped off the stool. “She got that new music for me in the mail? I saw the advance man on the dock.”

“I don’t know.” He pretended to study a steam gauge. “You’d better get up there quick.”

The boy ran through the furnace room and out into the sun. Sam walked back by the engines to let the Bentons know they’d have to take on another fireman for August’s shifts, then climbed to the restaurant and dawdled a few minutes at a table until little Mr. Brandywine saw him.

The pilot walked up stiff-legged and slapped a folder of papers against his chest. “Bring these up to the pilothouse, young man, and lay them out on the liars’ bench for me.”

He took the papers and looked at them dumbly. “What are they?”

“Well, if you have to know, they’re the channel reports up to Pittsburgh. Off with you before you forget where you’re going and lose them.”

He walked up to the Texas deck, and as he turned for the steps leading to the pilothouse, he passed the cabin that Elsie shared with August, and coming from inside was the thing he most feared hearing: the bawling, incoherent voice that signaled August’s fall from childhood into a wild, uncharted, dead-serious place cut off from fathers and all things those fathers teach and give. For a moment Sam stopped and shared the immeasurable and growing loss.

* * *

THE NEXT DAY he helped carry their bags up the hill to the streetcar that would bring them to the station. Elsie had drawn their pay and figured they’d have enough to bury Ted and begin installments on his medical bills. Beyond that, she didn’t know what they’d do. When the streetcar appeared far down the street, she grabbed his lapel and shook it.

“Lucky, you’ve got your own life to live. I appreciate what you’ve done to find Lily, coming along with us and all. But it’s not working.” She began to cry. “She’s out there in the world somewhere, but it’s too big a place. Just too big.” She put her forehead against his shoulder for a moment. “If I ever get some money I’ll hire someone to look for her. I really don’t know what else to do. I don’t have a cent. I don’t know if I ever will now that he’s gone.”

He looked up the long street at the stone and brick buildings, wondering how anyone ever put together the money to build them. No one he knew had more than a few dollars saved. “I’ll ride out this circuit on the boat. It might look like I haven’t done much, but I’ve put out feelers all along.”

“If you hear anything, you have my mother’s address in Cincinnati.”

“That’s right.” He gave August a pat on the arm. “So long, bud.”

“Yeah.” The boy stared blankly down the street, his shoulders rolled forward in the wind like an old man’s.

THE GREENVILLE STATION agent, Morris Hightower, dozed in his chair next to the telegraph sounder. The room was hot as an attic, the next southbound wasn’t due for an hour, and the local switch engine was out in the country switching the lumber mills. He had a headache, and each eyelid felt as if it had a lead sinker glued to it. The sounder came alive in its box, and he reached for a Western Union pad. Dr. John Adoue of Memphis sent a message to the husband of Mrs. Stacy Higman telling of the outcome of her operation for female problems. He copied several lines of medical descriptions and the statement that Mr. Higman would call at the station for the telegram at five p.m. Morris sent a 73 on his bug, folded the telegram, and placed it in a window envelope. Settling back into the bay window of the station, he looked with one eye down the track to the south. He was feeling worthless and burned out in several ways, old, sickly even. Surely there was something he should be doing with his life other than sitting here sweating. Slowly, his head drifted back, his mouth fell open, and his upper plate floated down with a click.

Some time later, two cotton buyers barged into the waiting room complaining to each other about the market, and the bigger one bellied up to the counter. “Wake up there ’fore you catch a fly.”

Morris lifted one eyelid. “Do for you?”

“We need tickets to Graysoner, Kentucky.”

“What class?”

“We can stand day coach if there’s a parlor car for a good poker game.”

“There is.” He pulled out his guide to see what the connections were past Memphis and told them it would take a while to set up the tickets as they involved three different railroads. While he worked, the men chattered around their cigars about cotton prices and the damned bankers not wanting to loan money on signature anymore. The voices were just noise; some of it went in his ear, some of it didn’t. Then one of them mentioned a banker in Graysoner who’d demanded a whole cotton shipment for collateral on a small loan.

“I went to grammar school with Acy. He knew me when I still peed my pants, and when I asked for enough to ship eight thousand bales, just the shipping, mind you, he wanted to put the whole crop subject to duress in a contract.”

“You don’t say.”

“Sure enough. And I’ve been a guest in his house, made small talk with that odd wife of his.”

“I know her. She ever do anything other than walk around and shop?”

“When I was in his office she came in there with a sweet, crop-haired little girl, so I guess he finally put a bun in the oven.”

The other buyer pulled his cigar and looked at the soggy end. “Well, maybe that’ll sweeten his disposition.”

The men stepped out into the sun to look down the line and tell a joke. When they came back into the waiting room, a heat-drunk Morris Hightower was at the window with their tickets, his red face against the bars. “So Acy has a little girl?”

One of the cotton buyers looked at him and made a face. “You from Kentucky?”

“Agents know everybody up and down the line. She’s not a baby, is she?”

“She’s about three years old.”

“Cropped hair, you say?”

“Yes.” The buyer looked at him hard.

“Did they tell you how good she could sing? About all those songs?”

At this, the cotton buyer smiled. “Why, you do know the Whites!”

Morris Hightower laughed for the first time in a long while. “It’s a small world.”

* * *

THE CROWDS AT CAIRO were moderate in size and well behaved, so the order was not given to check for weapons. After an easy night trip, Sam was washing up at the little lavatory and inspecting his two uniforms, which were not holding up well.

“I told the captain I needed another jacket,” he said over his shoulder to Charlie, who was in his bunk holding an unlit cigarette under his nose.

“What’d he tell you?”

“Said I’d have to buy it out of my salary.”

“What you think about that?”

“I don’t know. It’d take two or three days’ wages to get one that’d last through the fights.”

“It’d be nine dollars or better, anyway. The boat raked in a fortune at Stovepipe Bend. The purser like to got a hernia haulin’ the change bags up the hill this morning.”

“Sometimes I think I’d be making more as a waiter, with the tips and all.”

“You could get into that late-night game down in the galley.”

“I gave that stuff up.”

“Then hold on to your pennies.” The cigarette traveled slowly under his nose. They were not allowed to smoke in the cabins. “You still thinking about that young’un?”

“I walked into town and spoke with the police captain. Went by the station and talked to the agent. He was full of information but mostly wanted to sell me some raffle tickets.”

“What’d he tell you?”

“About another boy they gave off the orphan train. I called this farmer up on the phone and sure enough it was a boy.”

The cabin door was open, and Charlie hopped down and walked right out to the rail to light up and watch the stars. “You give any more thought to the Cloats?”

“Not enough to ruin my day.”

“Damn, you’re worthless.”

“I’m thinking about it. You got to give me that.”

The Alice Brown passed downbound pushing a big raft of coal barges, the glow from her furnace doors sparking up the water. Her carbon-arc light raked the Ambassador and moved over the channel like a wand of ice.

“What’d Elsie say when you walked her to the streetcar?”

“Not much. Said she couldn’t even imagine he was dead. That she had to hold off thinking until she got up there.”

“I can’t believe old Ted’s gone myself. It’ll be a tough row to hoe for the both of them. The kid’s too young to play in the union bands. You say she’ll be living with her sick mother?”

“Starving is more like it. Her father’s too old to work anymore.”

Charlie drew in a lungful of smoke and let it out slow. “At least she’s got that boy with her. It could be worse.”

“Don’t say that. For God’s sake, don’t even think it.”

ABOVE CAIRO the Ambassador steamed into more populated regions where people in the civilized river towns looked forward to the new dance music promised by the flyers posted on every cottonwood by the advance man. Radios, the few there were in these rural areas, didn’t play New Orleans jazz, and record companies weren’t promoting it either. But the Ambassador had the real, rare commodity, and over the next week the boat did good business at Mound City, Metropolis, and Paducah, though at a mining town called Potato Landing, all three mates and six waiters were injured in a huge café brawl between baseball teams from opposite sides of the river. The boat was left in such a sorry condition that Sunday’s afternoon run at Evansville was canceled, and Captain Stewart gave the crew as much time off as possible. Sam went up to town to attend Mass and then find the railroad station. The agent looked at his bruised face and wouldn’t answer any questions, so he walked back to the river, stopping several times to let a leg cramp die down. He’d been kicked by a drunk woman after he’d pulled her away from a slot machine she was hammering with a high heel. Hobbling up to a corner bench, he sat and rubbed his calf, feeling silly and useless, a fool matched with a fool’s errand. He thought again longingly of his wife and his lost kingdom at Krine’s. A long vista of cottonwoods rising up from the Kentucky side made him feel solitary, small, and a long way from the house.