The Missing (27 page)

August seemed confused. “You think he’s shaking down the Whites?”

“They’re shaking down somebody. Why else would they take her again?” He looked around and lowered his voice. “When they first made off with your sister, the old woman took care of her. They need that Vessy woman to do the same.”

“The Whites are as much at fault as anybody,” the boy mumbled.

“More. And you just think about that.”

August jerked his head sideways. “You think they’re going to deliver her?”

“Where, and to who, that’s the question. I know it won’t be in Kentucky. Ralph’s liable there, even though the Whites probably won’t risk setting the law on him.”

“It could be anywhere.”

“I don’t know about that. Let’s ride back to Zeneau and hang around the store, maybe find something out by accident.” He stood and looked up at the sky. “Come on.”

The boy remained on the ground, sitting cross-legged. “Lucky, I’m sorry.”

Sam studied a cumulus shaped like a horse, a blue hole about where the heart would be. “So far, there’s nothing to be sorry about.”

* * *

DOUBLED UP on Garde Ça and backtracking north, they spent the afternoon losing and finding the trail in the vine-tortured gullies. For a whole hour, the mule stood like a steaming boulder in the middle of a washout for no reason they could discern. They dismounted and sat on the ground, watching him shake off flies.

The sun was low in the sky when they broke out of the woods and rode up the one street that was Zeneau. At the store they greeted the same old men and chatted their ears off until they rose one at a time and went home for supper. Sam bought two bottles of soda and pigs’ feet wrapped in wax paper, and they lounged on the front landing, eating and looking around at the board-and-batten buildings as if they’d grown up in this sorry place and knew every tick-haunted dog under every porch in town.

The storekeeper came out shortly before sundown and padlocked an iron bar across the slantboard doors. “You boys goin’ to ride the station truck out tomorrow?”

Sam took a draw of soda. “If the driver’ll let us and we can sell the mule.”

“They’s no place to take a room here. If you want, spend the night up on these cotton bales like the boy done before. Just don’t smoke if you do.”

“All right. Does that deputy make rounds?”

The storekeeper put on his fedora. “When he’s chasin’ his tail. He won’t bother you.”

“Drinks a bit?”

“A bit.”

“His cousin keep him supplied?”

“You know Ralph?”

“We’re not exactly friends, but I’ve dealt with him.”

“I’m sorry for you.”

Sam was waiting for such a signal. “Seen his old mom lately?”

The man put a hand against a post. “She comes in town maybe four times a year, loads up two horses, and heads back south. I was kind of expectin’ her last week when the weather wasn’t so hot.” He spat and looked them over. “You didn’t get down as far as the old house?”

“We did. Nobody was there.”

“The hell you say. I saw ’em all, even Billsy, plus a woman and some little cousin’s child. They rode down there four, five days ago.”

Sam turned his head toward August. “We didn’t stay around there long. When’s the last time you saw the old woman?”

“Like I said. Maybe three, four months.” He hitched his baggy pants up over his belly and cinched his belt.

“You see her pass through here last year with her little niece a second time? Comin’ out?”

“Cousin’s child,” the storekeeper said. “Told me later it was her cousin’s child from over in Arkansas. Pretty kid to spring out of that bunch.”

“Where were they going from here?”

The storekeeper shrugged and seemed aggravated. “This is last year, and they was headed north to Woodgulch. There’s a train there, as you know.”

* * *

THEY SMEARED themselves with citronella, Sam slapping it in his armpits and on the backs of his hands.

The boy watched, then took the offered bottle.

“Damned if I don’t smell like a sardine,” Sam said, climbing up on the third layer of bales on the broad front porch. He stretched out under the roof tin, listening to it pop in the cooling air.

August lay against the board wall down below. “They’ll take Lily right past here, won’t they, Lucky?”

“Only way to the rest of the world.”

“And meet the Whites in Woodgulch?”

“If I had to bet.”

“And we won’t be able to do a thing about it.”

He tried to focus on a red-wasp nest a few feet above his head, a dim copper disk promising pain. “Now you gonna kill the Whites?”

A single pained word—“Don’t”—drifted up from the darkness of the porch. It sounded like the last plea he would make as a child in this life.

“All right. It’s all right. I’ll try to figure something out.”

Sam tried to sleep, and did, but was awakened by a dim flash on the Louisiana side of the river followed a long time later by a low stumble of sound, a thunderstorm walking toward them on legs of lightning. He wondered how the girl was doing with her third set of caretakers and thought about when he was four, remembering nothing at all, neither face nor hurt or anything else, which maybe was a blessing. The next day they would go to Woodgulch and wait in sight of the little tall-windowed railroad station. Wait for what he wasn’t exactly sure, but maybe the Whites would show, arriving on the wobbly train and leaving on the return half an hour later. But what could he and the boy do to the Whites? Take the girl away and ride along with them back to Baton Rouge on the same train? Try to get the law to help? Woodgulch was a Mississippi county seat, where the high sheriff had his office, the man who probably let the Skadlocks sell whiskey and steal whatever they wanted, who hired Ralph Skadlock’s second cousin as the Zeneau deputy. There was no chance anyone there would believe two outlanders.

At daylight Sam woke and found the boy grim-faced and sitting with his arms crossed next to the locked door, his legs stretched out toward the west. When the storekeeper unlocked the building, he went in and sold the dew-rusted shotgun for a dollar less than he’d paid for it. Sam bought a tin of Vienna sausages and one of peaches in syrup. They went outside and sat on the porch like useless vagrants of a century before, hanging around to await some accident of good fortune. After he finished eating, Sam counted his money.

“You can sell the mule for something,” the boy told him.

“The old fellow told me he wouldn’t take him back. Said it cost money to hang on to it and that the ten-dollar bill I gave him didn’t eat. If I keep the animal, I’ll keep the tack.”

“Where’s that station you were talking about?”

“Woodgulch. Maybe ten miles.”

“We could ride there in two hours.”

“Let’s see.” He walked into the aromatic store and offered the animal and tack to the storekeeper, who laughed at him. Back out on the porch he looked down at August, who sat slumped against a post pulling apart a wad of cotton. “Let’s ride.”

They went out back and saddled Garde Ça and got on. The mule stood like a piano bench. They remained still on his back, waiting. Sam dropped the reins on the animal’s neck and crossed his arms. After five minutes, Garde Ça looked back at them, then began a drunken walk to the road, where he paused, looked both ways, and turned right toward Woodgulch. After a while, Sam picked up the reins and said, “Dépêchetoi, lambin,” and the mule evened its gait, his ears turning like ventilators on a ship’s deck.

They met five automobiles on the way to Woodgulch. Sam looked carefully at the faces in the machines, and some stared back at his rudeness. He watched the road in the distance as well, and suddenly he pulled the bit sharply to the right and they rode off a hundred yards into a stand of cypresses.

“Stay here,” he told August, sliding off. Stooping in a berry patch, he watched Billsy ride by on a small horse the color of axle grease. He was wearing a new tan fedora and glossy boots.

“What?” the boy asked, when Sam remounted.

“Skadlock’s brother. I’m not sure what that means.”

“He’s probably bringing news.”

“What kind of news?” He turned the animal’s head.

“I don’t know.”

When they got back on the road, he said, “News?”

WOODGULCH WAS A TOWN of seventy buildings, the hub of small farms and two mills that made window frames and nail kegs. There was a brick courthouse surrounded by graded red lanes and the usual small businesses. They rode down the main street to the station, Sam feeling dumb and disconnected from the rest of the world as he tied the mule to a catalpa. It was three-thirty. He was nobody here.

August went in and used the restroom for a long time and came out and looked at him as if to say, “Now what?” His face and neck were red where he had scrubbed off the dirt and sweat. “You don’t know a soul around here, do you?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Nobody we can trust.”

“A connection,” he said. “We need a connection. Time to talk to the connection man.”

He found the station agent copying waybills, a youngish fellow with an untrimmed mustache who was quick with his pencil. “Can I help you?” he said.

“What’s the name of the local sheriff?”

He came over to the window and looked at Sam’s clothes and unshaven face. “Kyle Tabors.”

“I might need to talk with him about something.”

“You might?” The agent narrowed his eyes.

“Is he a pretty good fella?”

“Who are you, bud? I saw you come through the other day, but I ain’t seen you around here before.”

He told him his name and where he was from as patiently as he could stand to do it.

The agent looked him over again. “If you want to find out about the sheriff, I recommend you walk down the street and ask him.” He returned to his desk and sat amid the clutter of hand stamps and bundles of paper stuck on hooks.

“I just need a little information.”

“Sorry. I don’t know you.”

He walked out on the platform and the boy was laid out on the bench. He looked down the street to where the old idlers of the town sat on the low retaining wall at the edge of the courthouse lawn. He looked down the tracks lined by telegraph wire drooping between poles as if weighted with information and commerce. The lines made him remember the Greenville telegrapher, and he went back in.

“Hey.”

The agent looked up from a desk. “Sir?” The word was strained.

“Do you know Morris Hightower?”

He rolled back in his chair and returned to the window. “Yep. Do you?”

“I do. And he knows I’m looking for a little kidnapped girl, helping out her parents. You could telegraph him about me.”

“We get some Greenville freight back in here from time to time, and he contacts me about it. Sends Morse like a mouse runnin’ on tin. I used to take train orders from him in Jackson.” He put a pad and pencil on the little counter. “Write your name here and come back in a few minutes.” The agent opened his telegraph key and began sending an even stream of dots and dashes.

Outside, the mule was rolling the bit with his great tongue, so he sent the boy down the street with Garde Ça in tow to find water, telling him to wait at the station when he returned. By the time Sam went back inside, the agent was waiting at the window.

“You’re a pretty lucky man.”

He glanced out the door after the boy. “I’ve been told that.”

“Lucky we found him on shift, and lucky the dispatcher handled the relay up to Greenville. Have you found the baby?”

“I have. But I need a good lawman to help me.”

“Well, you know how the law is.” The agent sucked a tooth and studied him. “I’d suggest you go talk to Sheriff Tabors. I don’t know him that well, but I think he’s all right.” He bobbed his head. “You don’t believe me?”

“Why’d he hire that drunk down at Zeneau?”

“What? Nelson Watty? Oh, he’s all right. Just sick is all. He don’t make thirty dollars a month but he stays in that little box of an office and collects taxes and signs permits for folks. It’s not like they’s a lot to choose from in Zeneau.”

Sam looked up at the Seth Thomas clock. “What time does the passenger train come in?”

“The tri-weekly you rode in on yourself comes in at two-thirty more or less. It goes back about three. Took off a few minutes early today.”

He looked out into the dusty street and saw August stop a gray-bearded gentleman, who pointed down a side lane. “You see that boy with me?”

“Yes.”

“When he comes back, will you keep an eye on him?”

“As much as I can.”

“Well, here I go.”

* * *

HE HAD TO WAIT for the sheriff. He stood in the hall and watched the lawyers clop in from the broiling street onto the hardwood and take the stairs to the courtroom. A policeman hauled in a handcuffed vagrant and brought him past Sam to a heavy door and shoved him through it. In the rear of the building he heard the clang of cell doors and drunken hollering. He hoped he wasn’t making a mistake, that Tabors wasn’t a fat rummy who liked the taste of Skadlock whiskey. Or just a mean local who hated outlanders, or Catholics, or people from Louisiana, or Cajuns, or anybody not born inside the county.

The sheriff came in at four o’clock, and Sam stood up. He was in his early forties and wearing a suit and vest of no mean quality, a big star pinned under his right lapel. His blond hair was freshly trimmed, as was the mustache that ran straight across his face, as straight as his teeth.

“You look like you’re waiting for me.”

“I am.”

“Been rabbit hunting, have you?”

Sam looked down at his pants. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, come in, then, and have a seat.”

The walls of the office were cream-painted beaded board that ran floor to ceiling. A photograph of a woman unconscious of her good looks rested on the oak desk next to a box of pistol ammunition.

There are important starting points in serious conversations, and he paused a long moment to figure out the best way to begin. “Do you know Ralph Skadlock?”

The sheriff didn’t blink. “Who are you?”

He patiently explained who he was, where he was raised, why he’d lost his job as floorwalker in New Orleans, how he’d been looking for a child named Lily while working on an excursion boat.

When he finished, the sheriff nodded. “All right, Mr. Simoneaux. As for Skadlock, I know of him, but I can’t do a thing about him.”

“You say that as though five people a week ask you to.”

“That’s about right. Including my mother-in-law. That place he lives on is probably in Louisiana. We are presently, as you realize, in Mississippi.”

Sam looked down at his dusty shoes and then up at the sheriff, who’d gotten up to take off his coat. He wore a tooled gunbelt and holstered on it was a Colt New Service revolver with pearl grips. “Nice gun.”

He sat down again. “Me and all the deputies switched to forty-fives last year. Our old thirty-eights wouldn’t shoot through car doors. Times are changing.”

Sam looked at Tabors’ eyes, wondering if he could trust him. Ultimately, he had no other choice, and had to take a leap of faith. “Well, that ought to solve that problem for you. Let’s see if you can do something about mine.”

“Let’s have it.” Then the sheriff did something that convinced Sam that he’d made the right decision. He pulled a pad in front of him and held a sharpened pencil at the ready.

It took ten minutes to explain the history between the Skadlocks and Acy White, the death of Ted Weller, and why he believed the child would be exchanged in Woodgulch.

The sheriff took notes all along, and after Sam finished, he sat back. “Son, you probably realize this already, but one crime was committed in Louisiana and the other in Kentucky. My jurisdiction is only this poor little Mississipppi county. Do you think they’ll trade money for the child at the station?”

“I don’t know.”

“If they did, I’d have reason to arrest everybody and wire for warrants from the other places. That is, if the child recognizes you.”

“She’ll know her brother.”

The sheriff put down his pencil. “She better. I can’t turn her over otherwise.”

“You’re telling me a four-year-old has to convince you of who she belongs to?”

The sheriff pulled the box of pistol shells toward him and placed it in a desk drawer. “Seems like she’s the one with the most to lose.”

Sam smiled. “Well, I guess that’s fair.”

The sheriff leaned back and pulled a folder from a different drawer, his body movement suggesting that the meeting was over. “What do you do on the excursion boat?”

“I play piano and bang around the rowdies when I’m not.”

“I like piano music and have a player piano at home. I took music appreciation, two courses worth, in college.”

“College? Where at?”

“Rutgers. On weekends I went into New York for the revues and plays. There’s a lot of music in that town.”

“Why’d you come back? Family?”

“Not really. I just came back because it’s so bad around here.” He gave Sam a smile and motioned to the door. “Come Friday we’ll help you out.”

* * *

HE FOUND THE BOY at the station and together they walked to a two-dollar-a-night hotel on Batson Street, a mildew-smelling place with tall windows covered with storm-belled screens, bathroom down the hall, and an old man somewhere on the third floor coughing deep and long. They cleaned up and walked downtown to a café, counted their money, and ordered ham sandwiches and tap water. The train would next rattle into town on Friday afternoon, and it was Wednesday.

The hotel room held two small iron beds and that night they lay in the hot, breathless room and tried to sleep.

August turned repeatedly, went down the hall to the bathroom, came back and began tossing again. “Lucky, you awake?” His voice was young again in the dark room.

“Yeah, I’m one hot dog.”

“I’m glad you made me put down that gun.”

He rolled on his back and tried to see the ceiling, which he knew was cracked like a map of desert rivers where the electric wire had been nailed to the plaster. His sore shoulder throbbed with his heartbeat. “Count sheep, and maybe you’ll drop off.”

“I’ve got to say it.”

“Go on, then.”

“If I hadn’t backed off, I’d have killed her.”

“All right.”

“No, I need you to know how I feel right now. I mean, I want to get her, but I’m mostly glad she’s alive. It’s like it’s okay if we don’t even find her, just so she’s, you know, still somewhere.”

Sam thought about that last phrase, “still somewhere.” “Aw, we’ll get her back when that old train rumbles in day after tomorrow. The sheriff said he’d sit in the waiting room with three of his deputies and hash it out with all concerned.”

“You sure they’ll bring her here?”

“I can’t imagine where else. I’d bet a month of piano playing that Billsy was coming back from setting up the meeting somehow. It makes sense they bring her in Friday, since the train won’t run again till Monday.”

August was quiet for a long time. “What if those people talk the sheriff out of it? Didn’t you say this Mr. White was a banker and his wife a proper lady? You think the sheriff will believe us over them?”

“Oh, maybe she was bred in old Kentucky, but she’s only a crumb down here.”

August laughed aloud, and it was the first time he’d laughed since before his father died. “I wish you could play piano as good as you tell jokes.”

“I’m getting better.”

He talked to the boy a long time, easing him off to sleep. And then the image came to him of armed men waiting in the small depot for the likes of Ralph and Billsy Skadlock, and he thought of the possibility that something could go wrong, a gunfight and pursuit, slugs the size of bumblebees slamming through the flimsy pine walls, with a little girl in the middle of the fracas. Bullets didn’t seek out guilt or innocence; they were flying accidents of fate. He eventually fell asleep and began to dream of Lily in Ralph Skadlock’s arms, both of them turning to face a boy pointing a monstrous shotgun at them, and when that vision faded, he was in a hospital in France, and his wife was working on a needlepoint chair bottom, at one point holding it up to him and showing an image of a bombed-out house, a girl standing before the smoke and fire raising both hands, each finger made of khaki thread, nine in all, and a stitch of red for the bloody socket.

* * *

WHEN RALPH SKADLOCK got out of bed, Billsy was standing in the doorway scratching and yawning into the new day.

“You smell that?” Billsy asked.

Ralph had begun sleeping upstairs again now that the ceiling no longer leaked and Vessy had dried and turned the mattress. He pulled on his pants with a grunt, and they went down and out into the kitchen.

Vessy had fired the big stove, robbed eggs from the hens that were left, and cut up onions and cheese, making the men an omelette and floating it on a pad of grits and butter. The little girl was at the table penciling mustaches on photographs in an old newspaper. The men sat down and began to eat, their heads low over the plates, staring at the food as it disappeared. The girl dropped her pencil and bent under the table to reach for it, but banged her head when she came up and started crying. The men glowered at her and Billsy said, “Hey, shut that stuff up.”

Vessy picked up the pencil, gave it to the child, and brushed back her hair, kissing her forehead. She rubbed her back and found her a fresh page on which to draw. The child stopped wailing and began marking dark eyebrows on the image of a Baton Rouge debutante.

The men stopped eating and watched all of it, as if the notion of calming a child with anything other than a peppery slap or a whack with a piece of kindling had never occurred to them. Billsy put an elbow in his brother’s ribs and asked, “You remember the time I sassed the old woman while she was ironin’ and she threw that flat-iron down on my foot?”

Ralph made a face and took another bite. “What made you think of something like that?”

“You remember that?”

“Sure I do. I’m the one tended to your foot. Took off your shoe and had to shake it to make your little toe fall out.”

“Took all winter for my foot to heal up,” Billsy mumbled, watching the girl drawing.

Vessy came to the table with her plate and sat down. “I don’t guess you heathen ever say grace.”

Ralph looked at her, chewing slowly. “Grace who?”

* * *