The Missing (23 page)

By late afternoon they were in Paducah and caught a cab down to the waterfront, where the Ambassador was raising steam, pillars of black smoke going straight up from the stacks. Captain Stewart was in the purser’s office on the main deck wearing a new uniform, the creases ironed in with so much starch the cloth gleamed like silk.

He looked up. “Lucky, I hope you’ve come to work this trip with the Wellers.”

Sam shook his head. “I can’t afford to work as third mate.”

The captain put a hand on his shoulder. “We lost Swaneli in Evansville. Fell down a flight of steps and broke his left leg in two places. What say we put you on at second mate and you can sit in with the day orchestra a bit. It’ll be seven dollars extra a week over your old wages.”

He thought of his new baby, his lost piano. “I guess I can phone my wife and see what she says.”

“That’s the ticket. You stay the whole season, there’ll be a bonus in your last pay envelope.”

“If I come on, I’ll take it a week at a time.”

“All right. You’ll bunk with Charlie, then? He’s the new first mate.”

“I guess so.”

The captain laughed. “So putting up with Charlie’s snoring is better than breaking in a new bunkmate.” He turned to the purser. “Put Lucky back on.”

The Wellers took their cabin assignment and left without a word.

He walked up three decks to the Texas and found Charlie reading his missal. “Hey, you must be dying, because you’re saying your prayers.”

“I just run out of reading material. I killed off Zane Grey and a half-dozen Review of Reviews. Figured I’d fish around in my prayer book for some Old Testament wisdom. You back on with us?”

“Looks like it.”

“You got any news on the Wellers’ little girl?”

He sat on a backless stool and told him what he knew. “We’re just hoping for a telegram at this point.”

“You say a cook stole the child?”

“I don’t know who stole what at this point.” He watched Charlie’s face sag into a suspicious frown and remembered he’d been a beat policeman.

“I’ll have to think on that one, yessir. Something’s not right.”

“Same crew as last year?”

“Yeah, but old Brandywine’s getting addled, so Mrs. Benton spends as much time with him as she can stand.”

“How addled?”

“Runnin’ fast, like in his mind he’s on the old City of Memphis on the mail schedule or something. We come through that bend north of Evansville and the river was all whitecaps for twenty minutes after we were finished with it. We must’ve turned over twenty rowboats in that stretch.”

“Bit can’t cramp his bells down in the engine room?”

“Won’t do it. Says when he gets a bell for full ahead he don’t know who’s ringing it, so he just delivers on the throttle. I keep Brandywine supplied with coffee every chance I get, and you can have that job. He cusses me down the steps once a day.”

“Well, if I ever go up on the roof, I’d better have a uniform on.”

“Go down to the laundry door and draw one, then.” Charlie lay back in his bunk and opened up a detective magazine.

THE BOAT RAN past Cairo, leaving the green Ohio for a dun Mississippi made of the flushed-out topsoil of half a million farms. Most of the day orchestra was on board, so he and August sat in with them, learning the season’s new tunes as the boat steamed past the empty lands above Tennessee and down into the intestinal bends approaching Caruthersville and beyond, the engineer working the engines hard and the boat pulsing ahead with each piston stroke. After one practice session Sam went up to the pilothouse with a cup of coffee for Mr. Brandywine, who was standing on a spoke, bringing the boat around the head of an island using the old steering wheel.

Sam froze and watched the coffee surge with the push of the big engines. “Still don’t like those new steering levers?”

“Hush, boy. This is a touchy spot. I’m tryin’ to feel what the river’s doing through my feet.” He reached over and rang a stop bell. The escape pipes ceased their intermittent rasp, and after a moment Sam felt the boat turn like a drunken head and yaw to starboard as the current steered her. When the tip of the island went past, Mr. Brandywine rang for half ahead and Bit Benton answered the bell, the boat regaining its southbound steps. “Now let’s have some coffee and a report on Elsie’s missing girl. I heard she was restole.” He reached back for the cup.

“Yes, sir.” Mr. Brandywine did not acknowledge the fact that Sam hadn’t been on the boat for months, as though it made no difference to him who showed up with his coffee.

“Who took her?”

“If I knew, I’d be trying to run them down.”

“I didn’t ask what you knew, but who took her.”

Sam stared at the back of the pilot’s head. “Oh. The sheriff says it was the housemaid.”

At this point Mrs. Benton came in and sat on the lazy bench. “Hi, boy.”

“Mrs. Benton. We were talking about Lily.”

She nodded and sat up and pulled at the shoulders of her customary black dress, which she wore to conceal the soot. “I heard you talking when I was coming in.”

The foot of the island went by on the left and the eastern light came up in the pilothouse. Mr. Brandywine looked at her. “Mrs. Benton, he says kitchen help stole the little girl. Now, I have no notion what goes on in a lady cook’s mind, so what do you think?”

“Well, how old was this cook?”

“I’d guess around thirty or less,” Sam told her.

“Where was she from?”

“I hear she was from eastern Kentucky.”

“Mountain girl?”

“I’d say so.”

Mr. Brandywine snorted. “Well, then that settles it. She’d be more likely to make off with a jug of coffin varnish than a singin’ baby girl.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Mrs. Benton said. “My lady instincts tell me she won’t make off with a child and take on a world of bother that’s not hers to bear. A poor girl won’t do that, most cases.”

Sam placed a hand against the cold stove. “Well, who would?”

“A thief is what steals things,” she said. “Rafe, are you answering a hail?”

“No, by gosh.”

“Why’re you going to the bank, then?”

“There’s deep water here, I’ll thank you to know.”

Mrs. Benton looked at the bank sliding by. “I’d just as soon stay on top of it.”

“It’s all right.”

“Sure it’s all right. But I think your head must itch and you’re planning to stick it out the window and scratch it on those sycamores coming up.”

Mr. Brandywine stepped back from the wheel and turned the steering levers hard to port. “What were you sayin’ about a thief?”

“Wasn’t somebody hired to take this girl in the first place? To my way of thinking, that’s who you ought to look up.”

“The same people?” Sam shook his head.

“How many times does a person get stolen in her life? I’d bet the original thief has something to do with this. Look ’em up, I say.”

“They ain’t too fond of being looked up,” Sam told her, taking the empty cup from Mr. Brandywine’s back-stretched hand. One thing he knew about crooks is that they believe if they do the opposite of what people expect, they’re harder to catch. That’s why most shoplifters in Krine’s, the experienced ones, dressed in nice clothes and smiled at the clerks. They carefully stole in the middle of a crowd of shoppers, everybody else intent on their own purchases. He gazed out at the deserted riverbank, land not unlike that inhabited by the Skadlocks, a weed-infested, eroded clayscape showing scars of its annual submersion in the river’s spring ravage. Skadlock and his mother would figure how to blend into Graysoner, and, knowing them, they’d get out on horseback. But he doubted the old woman would travel so far, and he guessed Ralph would be helpless with a four-year-old girl. All at once, the missing cook made sense.

“You can’t call the local authorities on them?” Mrs. Benton asked.

“No, ma’am. There ain’t a lot of law where they’re at.”

“You could try.”

“Well, maybe. You might be right about checking them out, anyway.”

The Ambassador paddled up to a wooded point and Mr. Brandywine was swinging the levers farther to port to get to the deep water in midriver when a loud whistle sounded twice around the bend. “Try your ears on that one, Mrs. Benton.” He grinned meanly, as though he’d finally trumped her skill.

She put her head down and adjusted her hemline. “It’s the MacDougall blowing her three-bell chime.”

He wagged his head. “Golly, Ned, I thought I had you.” He rang a stop bell and blew one glass-rattling blast for a port-to-port passing. “I wonder how they knew we were up here. Must’ve seen my smoke.”

“More likely they’re runnin’ with all the windows open and heard your exhausts.”

Coming up around the point was a one-stack steam pushboat behind two oil barges, MacDougall painted on its bow. It crossed over to the east side and Mr. Brandywine yanked a bell cord for full speed, the old boat beginning to bob with each piston stroke. Pulling the plug out of the speaking tube, he blew into it, and when Bit’s pipe-strangled voice hollered up, Mr. Brandywine called through the funnel, “Quit dragging your feet down there. Throw the cutoff lever all the way in the corner.” Shortly the escape pipes began to bark, the smokestacks dumped out twin black tornados, and the sliding windows shuddered in their frames.

Mrs. Benton rolled her eyes at Sam. “Rafe, you must think you’re coming down from Cincinnati and delivering the governor on the big old City of Louisville.”

Mr. Brandywine arched his back. “Ha. One time they docked my pay for shaking china off the tables down in the main cabin on that boat. Yes, ma’am, coming downstream on a full bell over nine foot of water, that City of Louisville was one rattling load of lumber.”

* * *

THE NEXT DAY, after morning practice Sam got up from the piano and walked over to where August was sorting his music into an accordion file. The boy didn’t look up and kept thumbing through a sheaf of papers. Sam saw that some of them were maps. “You doing all right?”

The boy still didn’t look up. “Mr. Simoneaux, I’ve just about got everything under control.”

Elsie walked over and stood between them, her arms folded. “Sam?”

“Listen, I’ve been thinking about those Skadlocks. They might have something to do with Lily’s disappearance.”

“That’s pretty foolish thinking,” she said.

“When we get into New Orleans, I can take a train up there and maybe find out. Maybe give the local law a try.” He knew he sounded desperate.

She turned her face away. “Lucky, that Vessy person has her.”

“What state is the local law in?” August looked at him for the first time that day.

“What do you mean?”

“If the Skadlocks live where you say, they’re on the Mississippi–Louisiana line. Does anybody really know where that line is back in the woods?”

“You’ve been reading too many maps. It’s in Louisiana, and I’d bet money on it.” But he was less sure of this as he spoke.

The boy got up and stepped off the bandstand. “Maybe you ought to do some map reading of your own.”

“He’s not too happy, is he?”

Elsie watched after him as he passed through a door to the open deck. “It’s been rough on us both.”

“But it’s given him a hard edge.”

Elsie sat on a maple folding chair, and her voice came out dreamy and tired. “One day he had a father who could teach him anything, and the next day he didn’t.” She looked up at him. “We’ve both lost a lot, but you know that. Sit down and play that last song again. I’ve got to sing it sometime on a night trip.”

He opened up his music and began to play a lively tune. “Make it bounce more,” she called, and on the next breath she was singing. Her voice was good, but there was something missing in it. She was merely singing the notes, and last summer she’d tackled the song and thrown it to the ground.

* * *

SOUTH OF MEMPHIS the Ambassador lay up, blinded by fog, tied to willows for twelve hours. The next day Mrs. Benton put the boat through the strangulated loops of river switchbacking down toward Helena and Greenville, deep into the land of dampness and heat. The river slowed and widened below Vicksburg, and the river birds that showed up were long-legged and moved like ghosts. Sam propped open his cabin door and watched the misty air below Natchez bear clouds of mosquitoes chased by buckshot patterns of cycling martins. The boat landed briefly at Zeneau, a hamlet that seemed to be falling house by house into the river that undercut the sandy bluff on which it festered. Here a fireman and an oiler who’d worked the previous two seasons got on with their sacks of clothes, and Mrs. Benton backed the boat out and aimed its bow toward Fort Adams light. The night settled down like wet velvet, and Sam went to the empty dance deck to practice. He was bumping up the intro of “Grandpa’s Spells” when a door opened and Elsie walked in. He kept playing, thinking she was just taking a shortcut over to the port side, but she came up and stood by his treble hand and spoke over his music. “I’m looking for August.”

He thought for a moment that her voice was part of the song, but looking at her eyes, he stopped. “Haven’t seen him. You try the café?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe he went down to the engine room.”

“I’ve checked. Will you look?”

He nodded into her worried face, understanding what was unsaid. There were places she might have passed over, like the big room where the musicians stayed, the firing galley’s grit and hiss, the deckhands’ tool room where men played cards and spat. He got up and walked the boat, hoping the boy was talking music with the night-orchestra pianist. Fred Marble was nattily dressed as usual when Sam spotted him at the rail. He was deadheading back to New Orleans to join up with the new group the captain had just hired. But Fred hadn’t seen August.

“Naw. That boy came around yesterday and we talked about his saxophone.” Fred flicked a cigarette over the rail into the river. “He’s getting good. That little Dutchman can make that thing talk like a parrot.”

“Yeah, but he’s not so little anymore.”

“I hear that. He’s getting his growth for sure. Big as his daddy was.”

Sam looked past him into the tiny room, its floor littered with arrangements. “He talk much about his daddy?”

“Yeah. That man trained him from a baby. And that boy’s mad deep inside, like only a boy can be. He can’t think about it. Not old enough to think. He can just be mad.”

“Any idea where he is?”

“Check the banjo man. They was talking yesterday.”

But Zack Stimson hadn’t seen him either, nor had the captain, whom he found running deckhands out of the tool room, nor had the pilot on watch. He went into the café and saw Elsie sitting at a table, a forefinger lifeless in the handle of a coffee cup. She was staring out a night-blackened window.

“I couldn’t find him.”

“I know.”

“What’s that mean?” He sat down next to her.

“Mr. Brandywine was coming through and stopped in for some pie. He told me he saw August get off the boat at Zeneau and thought he’d been sent to a deckhand’s shack to roust him out. I asked him how he was dressed, and he was wearing his fireman’s overalls and boots.” She began to tear up. “Lucky, he’s going after that man.”

Sam sat back, his mouth open. “Why, he can’t get to him. He’s just a kid.”

“August had a little money saved up, and when I checked his bunk just now, it was gone.”

“Where’s the next stop?”

She shook her head. “You say he’s just a kid. He used to be a kid.”

“He’s graduated all the way to fool.”

Her head jerked up, her mouth a hard straight line. “I heard Charlie say your whole family was murdered and nobody was ever arrested. He said you weren’t even interested in finding those people.” She focused on him, her jaw rigid.

“It happened before I was…” He couldn’t find the words to finish the sentence. Maybe there were no words for not being vengeful. Would vengeance matter to an infant so glad to get out of a stove and into his uncle’s arms? It occurred to him that maybe he should have learned along the way that something like vengeance did matter. But of what use was it? Setting old scores right? Paying back a son of a bitch? He wasn’t trained to think that way. His uncle had told him many times that revenge didn’t help anybody and that the punishment for being a son of a bitch was being one.