The Missing (28 page)

AFTER BREAKFAST the brothers took a horse that was favoring a rear leg from the little wire trap of a paddock and checked its hooves.

The girl came out and pulled at Ralph’s pants.

“Can I ride?”

“Go buy your own horse.” He walked backwards toward the woods, leading the mare and watching its rear legs. Thirty feet into the long grass, he stopped and looked at the ground. The girl walked up and put a white hand on the horse’s knee. “Billsy!” Ralph hollered.

His brother came out and looked at the footprints in the mud. “Looks like two of ’em.”

“Town shoes. What the hell?”

“Can I ride?” the girl asked again.

Ralph circled her waist with his hands and lifted her onto the animal’s bare back. “Grab hold of her mane,” he told her, planting her hands in the coarse hair. “Come on.”

The three of them moved off into the brush, where they found animal prints and, off toward the river, the flattened weeds of a resting place.

“You reckon it’s somebody after the still or our reserves?” Billsy asked, pushing back his straw hat.

“Naw. None of them rascals wears shoes like that. Shallow heels and broad soles flat as a spinster’s backside.”

“Somebody’s been watchin’.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Giddyap!” the girl yelled.

Billsy spat. “We best change our plans a little.”

“One thing for sure. I ain’t ridin’ into Woodgulch in broad daylight with the kid.”

They turned back toward the house, the girl singing in her sweet voice the first two stanzas of “The Horse That Outran the Train.”

Billsy looked up at her admiringly. “Do you know ‘The Girl in the Window Above Alfred’s Saloon’?”

His brother reached over and knocked off his hat. “Damn it, Billsy!”

“Hey,” he hollered, swinging down for his hat, “everbody knows that one.”

Vessy was waiting for them in the rear of the great house, wearing a housedress she’d found and washed and ironed. “I figured you boys gone berry pickin’.”

Ralph told her what they’d found, and her eyes raked the woods. “We still turnin’ her over Friday, right?”

“I’ll have to do some figurin’, but you get her ready.”

“When can I get my part of the money?”

Suddenly, he looked down at the ground. “I have it and I’ll give it you.” He looked up and he was blushing.

Billsy rolled his eyes and walked past into the house, saying “I’ll be damned” under his breath.

“What’s that about?” She put her hands on her hips.

“Nothin’. I told him you could buy into the still if you wanted.”

She drew her lips together, vertical lines forming around her mouth as though she were figuring some great sum. “How much of a cut would that get me?”

“One part out of six.”

She looked at the house and back at him. “You don’t own none of this, do you?”

“We sort of found it.”

“What you really want is a house gal and now and then a free ride on me. Well, I’ve known women who traded for less.” She looked around again. “But I ain’t one of ’em.”

He looked at her walnut hair, then into her gray eyes. “What’s wrong with that deal?”

“It ain’t a deal.” She turned away. When she turned back, her face was composed, the corners of her mouth in their habitual downturn. “I got used to livin’ with electricity and a store down the road where I can walk and buy a pork chop. What you got here’s no better than that mountain shack I was raised in. I can’t live on saltmeat and sardines ever day.”

“My line of work kind of needs some distance between me and a town.”

“Where at you live before?”

“Arkansas.”

“And the feds busted you out, right?”

He took a step back. “How’d you guess that?”

“And before?”

“Around Longview.”

“Who got you there?”

He shook his head. “The Babtist fire department came down on my cooker with their axes. After they finished, you could’ve drained spaghetti with the thing.”

“How long you reckon before some dollar-a-day feds come through them weeds and chops you out of business? And you want me to invest in that? Include me out.”

He slowly reached for his wallet. “What you plan on doin’?”

“Goin’ back toward the mountains. Maybe over the hump into Virginia. No offense, but it’s like living in a croup tent down here, and these is the ugliest woods I ever been dragged through in my life. You got weeds that would poison a wild Indian to death and mosquitoes to carry off his corpse. And if Woodgulch is your example of a town, I seen better-lookin’ places drew with a burnt stick by an idiot child.”

He counted out the money into her red palm. “Like you say, I ain’t stayin’ here forever.”

She folded the bills and stuck them down her bodice. “I know you’re in the business of turnin’ things over for profit. You understand what things is worth in dollars and cents. For about six weeks up in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, I worked in a pawnshop addin’ up accounts in a ledger before the owner’s wife run me off ’cause I wasn’t ugly as she was. Lord, if that wasn’t a place that had a license to steal I don’t know what one looks like. You ever been in a pawnshop?”

“I sold to a few of ’em.”

“All you got to do is go somewhere there ain’t a warrant on you yet, maybe in east Tennessee or North Carolina, and rent a store. A feller walks in with a pistol worth two dollars and you loan him twenty cents on it. If he comes back to claim it you charge him twenty cents interest. If he don’t, then it’s yourn and you put it on sale for three dollars.”

He put his billfold back in his pocket. “I get run off from here, I’ll consider it.”

She reached out and put a forefinger in one of his belt loops and tugged it. He wobbled as if he suddenly were dizzy, and her voice softened. “Don’t you wait too long. I’ll start out in Bristol but there ain’t no tellin’ where I’ll be in six months.” She turned and went into the kitchen, where she’d sent the girl to cut out biscuits with the mouth of a jelly glass.

Ralph went into the house and stopped inside the door, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. The walls showed flowering spills of mildew and cumulus blooms of lime dissolved out of the plaster by rainwater. The next room was a great hall hung with dangling leeches of paint. Billsy sat in a velour chair with the stuffing leaking out under his legs.

“You pop the question?”

“Shut up.”

“All right, bud. Let’s talk business. We goin’ into Woodgulch with the kid?”

“I said not, but now I don’t know.”

“We could take the skiff across the river.”

Ralph looked through the clouded glass over the broad gallery toward the fungus-haunted live oaks hiding the west. “Just who in hell was watchin’ us?”

* * *

THE TWO OF THEM ate breakfast at the Woodgulch Café, a plain-wood room painted from floor to ceiling the gray of a rainy dawn. Sam counted their money together and figured they could afford something for supper but not much else until they got back to New Orleans.

August thumbed his empty plate away. “Can we trust him?”

“Well, I’m as sure as I can be.” He knew that when outlanders passed through a community like Woodgulch they touched on old biases and blood alliances going back generations, considerations that were complex and far beyond right and wrong. “He said he’d show up at train time with some deputies.”

“I hope there’s no shooting.”

“Look, there’s no telling what’ll happen. Just try to stay in the clear. Get hold of Lily and stay in the clear.”

“What exactly do you want me to do?”

He took the last bite of egg and stared at his empty plate. “When you’re playing ‘Sweet Sue’ and the trombone gives it over to you to build the song, do you stop the band and ask what they want you to do?”

“No.”

“You just rip into her with that alto sax and play between the notes until it’s right with what the band’s doing. If everybody’s jumping and the dancers are springing the floorboards, you just cut up like crazy, you step all over the clarinet and make him wait for the next turn. On the other hand, if the band is tired and just plugging along, you take your turn and sort of match. It’s like that with everything.”

“Keep my ears open and watch the room.”

“That’s the ticket.”

* * *

THEY PASSED THE DAY wandering the aisles of the hardware, walking the town’s six gravel streets, sitting on the one public bench in front of the courthouse. They arrived at the bench about two o’clock, and after an hour of watching a few Fords, mule-drawn wagons, two delivery trucks, and one buggy with a rotted top come and go on their errands, the boy shook his head. “Not much to do, is there?”

“If you lived here you’d be working at something.”

He thought about this. “I’d be working at moving away.”

A man wearing a flannel shirt buttoned up wrong rode a little quarterhorse past them. Across the street a baker came out and, with floured hands, turned the crank that lowered an awning against the westering sun; he looked at them and dusted his hands one against the other, then turned inside. Behind them, the courthouse door rattled and they turned to see the sheriff come out into the heat and start toward them.

“How are you?” Sam called out.

Tabors walked up and put a foot on the bench. “I’ve been on the telephone finding out about your story. Called down to New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and everything checks out. I talked to a Muscarella at the French Quarter precinct and he read me the report.” He looked at August. “Called a lot of people. I hear you play on a big dance boat.”

“Yessir.”

“That jass music or what?”

“Yessir, we try to make people want to dance.”

The sheriff looked at both of them, as though trying to divine their characters. “If that little girl shows up tomorrow, I have to be satisfied about her identity. Do you have a photo?”

“I don’t.”

“No, sir, not on me.”

“Well, if we wind up with her, I’ll have to perform an interview before I can turn her over, you understand. I can’t just go around giving away children.” He put a hand on August’s shoulder for a moment, and Sam saw how large it was, thick in the palm. The sheriff was a big man, his size partially concealed by his suit, a mild gray pinstripe. He took off his fedora to wipe his forehead, revealing a big, straightsided head, the close-cropped blond hair free of gray. He was built of preventative muscle that would make those he dealt with think about the gravity of their actions and words, or else.

“You have things set up?” Sam asked him.

“Everything’s ready,” the sheriff said.

* * *

LATE THAT NIGHT in the hotel, they again talked across the dark, their voices boxy in the plank-walled room. One side of Sam’s bed was against a low window, and a wet breeze seeped through the screens but did little to allay the breathless heat.

“Lucky, you think we should’ve sold the shotgun? We could have traded it for a little pistol.”

Sam turned over on his side, the springs squalling under his weight. “Bud, a pistol in the pocket changes the way a man thinks. Without it, he might not take certain chances. With it, he goes where he shouldn’t or does something that’s not a good idea. He thinks it’s a free pass, but it isn’t.”

“But it’s kind of a life preserver, isn’t it? A safety device?”

“If you can’t swim, best not go near the water.”

“I can see how sometimes one might come in handy, though. Like when a robber comes at you.”

“Listen, unless you’re trained or some kind of natural-born killer, a criminal will get the best of you every time. You’re surprised, and he’s not, that’s all there is to it. He’ll shoot you through the heart before you get a finger on your pistol.”

They lay there in silence, the little town as quiet as a shadow. After a while, through the screen came the dull aeolian hum of a steamboat whistle several miles off.

“What about tomorrow?”

“It’ll get here, won’t it?”

“I mean, do you think everything will turn out all right?”

He knew August understood that in fact things were not that simple. Many things had recently not turned out all right. Sam guessed August wanted what every boy did—assurance, a good night’s sleep, someone on his side. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said, turning his face to the window and looking down to where a black horse stood in the middle of the street, facing west, untethered and lost and asleep.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING they could afford only toast and coffee for breakfast. They washed up and straightened their clothes as best they could, wiping down their shoes with the only cloth in the room. Walking to the edge of town they sold the mule for six dollars and fifty cents to a liveryman who spoke a little French and wanted him as a pet.

At two o’clock they walked through the sun to the station and waited inside on one of three varnished benches. The agent nodded as though he’d expected them. Fifteen minutes before train time the sheriff came in and sat next to the door, wearing a different suit than the day before, no badge visible. After him, a beefy man dressed like a farmer came in and sat by the other door to the platform, a pistol-shaped bulge in his overalls pocket. The sheriff nodded to him, and they both bent to stare across the street where a man sat on a doorstep looking back at them. After a while, he raised his arm, and the farmer waved back.

Sam stood up and walked out onto the platform, looked over at the dusty town, and read the train board. South of Woodgulch were three flag stops named Fault, Lacy Switch, and Stob Mill, then the main line interchange at Gashouse. The tri-weekly mixed train was the only one scheduled. He expected that the train was close and thought of the picture that still flashed in his mind, sometimes in his dreams, sometimes when he was trying to remember why he wasn’t with his wife and child in New Orleans. He wanted to fasten in his imagination the little girl’s face, and closing his eyes for a moment saw the familiar cameo and next to it the image of his new son, and then from out of nowhere the girl in France whose house he’d leveled with the errant artillery shell and next to her a dim painful image of his first child. He opened his eyes and tried to remember everything Elsie and August had told him about Lily, the pitch of her voice, the precise color of her hair, and then he heard the train whistle, hoarse and foreboding, and his heart stumbled. He walked inside, and the sheriff told him to stand in the back corner.