The Missing (36 page)

“Is it something everybody around here knows about?”

“Oh, yes. Even the clan of Cloats you want to find.”

“I’d like to drive out and meet some of them.”

A little laugh came out of the darkness as Soner reached down for his drink. “I think ‘meet’ is too nice a word, son.”

“I figured they’d be a bad bunch.”

“The family has fallen off considerably in the past twenty years. When your family experienced their unfortunate meeting they were in their heyday. Usually, a meeting with a Cloat entailed a straight razor across the throat or a .45 slug in the back of one’s cranium. If you were a man. Women dealt with other initial penetrations. The Cloats aren’t your ordinary bad-seed murderers. Even on a cold day they stink like whoresex. They violate their animals. If they kill someone in their camp, they’ll feed his carcass to their hogs. But nowadays, well, I hear less and less about them as the years go on. But still there’s not a lawman in a hundred miles who would go in to find them. They came into this part of the world in the 1830s, run out of Georgia, I believe, along about the time Island Sixty-five began to form in the big river. They worked up and down the Natchez Trace cutting throats before crossing the river over to this side. Some settled back in the inland swamps for a time, but by the war they’d all moved out on the island.”

“Have you had any run-ins with them?”

“Yes.” The word came after a long pause, freighted with meaning.

Sam took a long drink. “Not as bad as my family’s, I hope.”

There was another pause. “In 1901, Aubrey Bledsoe bought a quart of whiskey off the Cloats on Saturday morning and was dead by four o’clock. The Bledsoe men, good people who used to live south of here, rode up and asked me if I could locate the still. I was a good tracker in those days, and if I could find it, I could do the busting up. I saddled a horse for Island Sixty-five, which is connected on this side of the river, and located it in two days along with three fly-ridden Cloats around it, killed by their own whiskey. They’d galvanized that cooker with a hundred pounds of lead solder, and added xylene to the batch to jack it up. They must’ve gone stark raving mad before they died because they were naked and had painted designs on their backs and stomachs and all over. With mercurochrome, for I found the empty bottles.”

“Designs?”

“Like caveman pictures, but nasty. I don’t want to tell you about it. I had a fire ax in my saddle holster and gave the still a good chopping, then turned it over and put a hundred blows into the bottom of it. The next day I told the Bledsoes the story, and good people that they were, they were satisfied that somehow justice had been done.”

“Was that the end of it?” He imagined the sorrow of the Cloats at losing three of their own.

Soner squirmed in his rocker, and Sam guessed he was crossing his legs. “The next morning I woke up and every hog, chicken, and cow I owned had its throat cut. My wife was bawling, and my son, who was six then, just stood in the yard and stared. They left me one horse, so I saddled up and rode over to the Bledsoes. All their animals were down, even the beeves in the big field, one man dead in the yard and the women howling like a hurricane. Mrs. Bledsoe, the grandmother, asked me who I left with my missus, and like a flash I understood how stupid I was, how much I could still underestimate inborn cruelty.” Here Soner stopped, and they listened to the deep throbbing of a steamboat whistle ten miles away.

“Were they safe?” Sam prayed they had been.

“Son, I’ll not inflict more of this story on you than you need to know. But you require a certain amount of preparation for your meeting tomorrow. Let’s just say that two Cloats, Batch and Slug, were standing in my backyard wearing muddy dusters when I rode up, flies in their beards around their toothless smiles. They made my wife and boy watch as they tied me to a pecan tree, arms and legs, me sitting on the ground hugging that trunk. They owned a big stinking dog, a rottweiler with a diseased face, and they turned him loose on me.” Soner stopped here and cleared his throat. “That devil tore at my neck and ate the flesh off my back until the bones came to the surface, and right before I died they pulled him off me and rode away. I imagine they figured it was better vengeance to leave me alive than to put me out of my suffering. It was my boy who cut me free and helped me crawl into the house. My wife had lost her mind. Absolutely. This is the short version, let me tell you. The very shortest.”

But even this abbreviated telling seemed to last a full hour, and after hearing it Sam felt sure he would leave for Helena in the morning.

But Soner had more to tell. “A year later, when I could get around, she left me. She couldn’t hardly step into the yard without every nerve in her body winding up like a clock spring. The boy stayed two years more, then left to join her. He writes me every month, and he’s married now with kids of his own and lives west of Chicago.”

“You wouldn’t go with her?”

“I would’ve in a heartbeat, but she said she couldn’t have me. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. She said every time she looked at me she saw those men and that dog.”

“You didn’t go after them? Or tell the county sheriff?”

“Ha. I’ve got a lot of guns, but I’ll admit I’m afraid. Not a match for them. All these years, I figured to leave bad enough alone. I didn’t have the evil imagination to do to them what they’d have done to me.” He took another swallow from his glass. “If I’d called the sheriff, he wouldn’t have gone against them. If they’d heard I’d brought other law in, I’d have paid for it again. Call me chickenhearted, but I still enjoy watching the sun come up every morning. I still draw my pay, help the locals. The only thing that hurts is that I’m incomplete. My family’s gone, but still out there.”

Sam saw a firefly combust in the yard. Only one. “I think I would’ve done something. They’re only men.” In the dark, he thought he could feel the anger Soner must have felt.

The constable drained his glass and began to move in the rocker. “Come here, son, I want you to know something.”

“What?”

“The work of men.”

Sam stepped over to where he guessed by a shadowy motion that Soner was taking off his shirt.

When he finished, he rolled his shoulders forward and put down his head. “Run your hands over my back.”

“I don’t think—”

“Don’t be scared. You’ll learn something.”

“I can’t see a thing.”

“You don’t need to.”

Sam reached out with both hands the way he would search for something in a dark house at night. Placing them on Soner’s right shoulder, he let his palms ride carefully over to his backbone. “Aw, God almighty,” Sam gasped. He moved his hands over to the far shoulder, whispering something in French. Down toward the middle back, his fingers found a skinned-over wreckage of bone, and lower, wide pulsing hollows not to be imagined. He drew back his hands but hovered there a moment, frozen by his inability to change the horror he’d touched.

Soner’s voice came dry and small. “That should be a good lesson to you. But I’ve lived long enough to know it won’t be. Not good enough to keep you away from them. Nobody understands what a snake is until he’s been bitten.” Soner stood up and pulled open the screen door. “I’ll see you right after dawn.”

“Yes, sir.”

* * *

THAT NIGHT Sam rubbed his fingertips against the sheets again and again, as if to cleanse off memory itself. He woke at false dawn and lay on his back, watching the room develop around him in its gray plainness. Dew hung in the window screen like cloudy rhinestones, and he knew it would be a sunny day.

At breakfast, he noticed that Soner turned his whole body when reaching for something at his side. “Thanks for all your hospitality.”

“I don’t get many civil visitors. I hope to see you again sometime.” He stopped buttering his bread and looked up. “I hope anyone sees you again.”

He was still thinking about riding on and forgetting. “How many of them are back in there?”

Soner looked off to his left and squinted. “At one time there were twenty Cloats, plus their Indian women. They liked Indian women. There were children from time to time, but most didn’t last.”

“Didn’t last?”

“Sometimes the women would run off with them. Or, when they got to be nine or ten, sometimes the kids would take off by themselves. Girl child or no, the Cloats would rut on them all.”

Sam stopped eating. “What’s wrong with those people?”

Soner’s eyes were clear and bright. “Why, nothing. They’re exactly like you and I. They’ve just fallen a few more rungs down the moral ladder than most. It’s because they live in their chosen isolation so that nothing good can touch them. And they insist on seeing themselves as normal, abetting each other’s notions. The worst thing that ever happened to them is each other.”

“The men who did that to you, are they back in there?”

“Batch and Slug? They’re somewhere else. They acquired some hashish, I hear, and smoked it and smoked it until they decided to play tandem double Russian roulette with their pistols. Instead of one bullet, they installed five in each revolver and both crossed over on the first try.”

“How many men are left?”

“The big one named Grill dropped dead of who knows what. He was pretty old for a Cloat, maybe forty-eight. Box and Babe are still alive, so far as I know. Percy died a couple of years ago.”

“Percy?”

“They say he was covered head to toe with syphilitic chancres and took five howling months to die. His woman came up from the island later and told me about it before she left for Memphis. She seemed very sick herself. That was five years ago.” He looked at the ceiling. “Maybe six.”

“I see.”

“You’re going?”

“Yes.”

“Throw away that shoulder holster. Wear the pistol in the hollow of your back between your drawers and your trousers.”

Sam swallowed the last of his buttermilk. “Can you tell me how to get in there?”

Soner chewed his toast and thought. “Well, you’ll have to take my horse.”

BY SEVEN O’CLOCK he was on the constable’s mare riding back to where he had seen the relics of a cypress dock. He took the trail leading east onto the island, and within an hour, he was lost. The terrain was lumps of river sand sprouting trash forest. He rode in and out of old scours filled with dead water and up hogbacks topped by patches of poison oak running up the willows. After four hours of wandering, he smelled wood smoke. Turning back, he rode south and crossed a ghost of a trail he’d missed before and rode down it for a mile before dismounting and tying the horse off on a long lead. After a little while on foot he smelled privy, and not much farther along spied a clearing in which six houses lay scattered as though landed there by a flood. They were swaybacked, each made out of secondhand lumber, some weatherboard, some shiplap, some plain plank, some beaded, just boards fished out of the river and nailed up as they came by, mossy and waterlogged. In front of the nearest house, a three-room box propped with saplings against collapse, a balding man wearing a crazed expression sat in a straight-back kitchen chair on a patch of bare dirt. Sam considered him for a while and decided to walk up from the front and did so, stepping around thistles and animal droppings. He expected a pack of snarling dogs, but none appeared.

The man was mumbling, sitting where a front porch had been, the old frowning roof held up over him by one two-by-four. Sam stopped in plain sight. The man looked over at him and his mouth fell open a bit. “It don’t mean,” he said.

Sam looked around at the other houses, then turned back. “I came here to ask a few questions. Are you named Cloat?”

The man’s hands were in his lap, swollen and furry. The crotch of his overalls had split open and spilled him out onto the caned seat. His graying beard was braided and ran down onto his left thigh like a greasy snake. One overalls strap was missing and he wore no shirt, his skin botched and sun cratered, his eyes running like sores. The ground around the chair was littered with a mat of small bones as though he’d sat there for years eating chicken and squirrel. “Six mile,” the man growled.

Sam could smell him over the rot of his garbage, a fecal putrescence that caused him to step back.

A woman who seemed half-Indian, half-Negro lurched out of the doorway and stared at him in amazement. “Who the fuck you?”

He scanned her hands for a weapon. “I’m looking for anybody named Cloat.”

She nodded the words into her head one at a time as if translating them into Cherokee or whatever language she was born under. “He Cloat. No speak right. What you talk?”

He gestured behind him. “This bunch rode down into Louisiana in 1895 and shot up a family.”

“What that?”

“What’s what?”

“Eighteen ninety-five. That wagon?”

He tried to imagine how she thought, and after a while he said, “It was twenty-seven winters ago. Killed my family.”

She pointed to the ground. “Make winter mark.”

He bent down and with a stick made twenty-seven scratches in a bare stretch of dirt. “This long ago.” He looked up.

The woman added ten marks with a dark forefinger and clawed a line under them. “He this many. No kill no one yet ten winter.”

“But he is a Cloat?”

“Babe. Babe Cloat. You go see Box.” A hand rose out of the folds of her dust-caked skirt and she pointed to a mildew-blackened dwelling across two hundred feet of weeds.

“How many men live back in here?”

“Ask Box.”

“I’m asking you.”

Her eyes were on him, annoyed, uncomprehending. She held up three fingers.

“That’s all?”

“Babe, Box, Box daddy.”

He surveyed the houses, the weather-crippled sheds out back. “What happened to everybody?”

The woman mashed a nostril with a thumb and blew out a slug of snot. “What?”

He waved an arm. “Where are all the Cloats?”

She nodded. “Die, rot. Some rot, then die.”

He watched her go up to Babe Cloat and hand him a potato, which he drew to his face and gnawed as would a squirrel.

A headache rose up in the back of his skull as he walked across the compound. He was hot, angry, and wanted out of the sun but stopped when he saw a long rifle barrel slide over a front windowsill. “Are you Box Cloat?” he called.

A wheezy voice came from the window. “Before I kill you, tell me what the hell you think you doin’ back in here.”

The rusty octagon barrel swung slightly in the window. He hoped the shot, if and when it came, would only wound him. “If you’re Box Cloat come out and talk to me, damn it. I might not do a thing to you.”

He heard the hammer drop on the rifle, snap, and a raspy string of cursing and knew at once the man had pulled the trigger on an empty chamber and was fumbling with the action to throw a live round under the firing pin, so he pulled his .45 and put two blasts through the front wall above the window. He ran at the door, throwing himself against it, and it flew apart like a chickenyard gate as he fell into the room five feet from a tall man with enormous eyebrows trying to lever a jammed rifle. Sam aimed and hollered for him to drop the gun, and it hit the floor.

His heart was squeezing blood like a fist, and he stood up quickly, holding the pistol out at the other man’s head. “Are you a Cloat?”

The man was frozen, staring walleyed in Sam’s direction and trying hard to focus. “You a Lobdell, ain’t you. You not lookin’ for me, you want Clamp and he died three year ago.”

“Are you Box Cloat?”

“Yeah. You a Bledsoe?”

“No.”

Box tilted his head to the left. “Then you a Clemmons or Terra-nova? Maybe Walting, or a Mills? Say, you ain’t no Levers, are you?…A Smollet?” He continued down a staccato list of twenty names, his hands rising higher above his brushy head before Sam stopped him.

“Shut up. You got a lot of people mad with you, don’t you?”

Box gasped. “You not a Kathell, is you? God lands, not no Kathell,” he whined, looking away. “Listen, them little girls was a accident. We thought they was somebody else’s.”

Sam raised the pistol thinking of how he could kill him and people would care more for the corpse of a mole rotting in its burrow. His eyes narrowed for a moment, along with his conscience. Living in the present is so easy. You just do a thing and not think about what could happen the next day, or how you might view your own actions in ten years. At last, he said, “Sit on the floor. How old are you?”

Box squatted in the floury dust of his room. “Forty-some-odd.”

“What do you know of Jimmy Cloat?”

“Uncle Jimmy? He been dead and gone a long time, feller.”

“Who killed him?”

Box closed one eye. “One of them Frenchies down south.”

“Did you pay ’em back for it?”

Box went through another spasm of focusing, trying to see who was holding the big pistol at his head. “I don’t know nothing about it.”

Sam knelt down, moved the long black beard out of his way and placed the pistol’s muzzle under the man’s chin, leaning close through the smell of him. “Can you see me?”

“Some.”

“My name’s Sam Simoneaux. Don’t you even blink. You people came down to Louisiana and murdered my whole family, didn’t you?” In his mouth he could taste the words like a metallic poison.

Box’s milky eyes widened. “I ain’t did nothin’. I was just a kid.”

“Look, I didn’t come down here to kill anybody. Understand that. I just want the truth.”

“You sure enough sound like them Frenchies.”

“Who did it?”

“What part Louisiana?”

“Down south. Sugarcane country.”

He squirmed against the pistol. “Yeah. All they let me do was to hold the horses. Said they wouldn’t trust my eyes with no gun.”

“Right. So who did it?”

“I ain’t telling you shit.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to tie you up and go talk to your daddy.”

“He’s sick as a dog. Rotten sick. He ain’t got no breath to tell you nothin’.”

“Where’s your rope?”

“Bring me along, you got me covered. I can talk to him yit.”

Sam glanced around the room. The floor sagged, and the splayed wallboards showed the daylight beyond. There was only a shuck mattress killed flat and greasy and a poplar-wood washstand leaning away from a wall, a handful of corroded rifle shells spread over its alligatored top. “All right. If you get me the answers I want, I’ll leave you alone. But if I think you’re lying to me I’ll paint the wall with your brains. You understand?”

Box nodded and struggled to his feet. “You ain’t the first what said such.”

“Who else lives back here?”

“Just who you seen.”

“You have a woman?”

“The last up and died on me.”

He thought a moment. “Do you miss her?”

Box’s face screwed up at him. “What?”

“Come on.” He put the Colt against his back. “Let’s go see Daddy.”

Outside, he was watchful for an ambush from the other five houses, though three were homes for vines only. Ropes of poison oak ran into windows, carpeted porches, barberpoled up stovepipes, leaders scouring the blank sky for someplace better to grow. One house was lined with termite tracks, its front wall spotted with bullet holes, not a pane of glass intact anywhere.

Box stepped up onto a leaning porch made of barge boards. There was a pen next to the house and an enormous hog poked its dripping snout through the rails, its huge eye on them. The stink was intolerable. A cow with one horn was in a second pen, leaning against a post and holding a raw hind leg out of the mud. The woman came over, sneered at the pistol, and went inside. The front room was a jumble of unwashed clothes, furniture strewn about as though whoever brought it didn’t know what it was or where to put it. In a single bed against an open side window lay a skeleton drawn over by rashy skin. Box made a coughing noise and the skeleton opened its yellow eyes.

The woman sniffed and glanced at Box. “Holler when go so’s I clean shit off him.” She walked out into the yard, leaving the door wide.

Box stood next to the bed looking down cautiously, as if the figure below him might leap up and tear out his throat. “Daddy?”

The eyes rolled past him and looked at Sam. “Who’s that?” The voice was parched.

“Stranger.”

“Why’nt you kilt him?”

“My rifle stovepiped another shell on me.” He looked back at Sam’s pistol. “This here’s Daddy Molton.”

“My guts burn.”

“You want water?”

“I’m afeared.”

“He says he ain’t gonna kill nobody.”

“What’s he want, then?”

“He come up askin’ about Uncle Jimmy.”

Molton tried to turn his head, but after two small jerks gave up. “Jimmy was kilt.”

“He knows that,” Box said impatiently.

“So what’s he want?”

Box looked at Sam and squinted.

“I want to know what you did about it.” Sam tried to control his voice, to filter all the disgust out of it.

“Did?” This time the head managed to turn. “Jimmy was the smartest one in the whole family. Could do numbers in his head. Could read and write like a schoolmaster. He was a travelin’ businessman. When somebody kilt him, we got word. We went ridin’.”

“My uncle told me you shot through the house two hundred times,” Sam hollered.

The head rose off the pillow, its spidered eyes glowing. “I won’t gonna risk gettin’ another of us dead.”

Sam placed his pistol behind Box’s ear. “You killed my daddy, mamma, brother, and sister.”

The elder Cloat took a gulp of air and said calmly, “I was there.”

“You old bastard. Your brother was a stupid drunk jerking the head off a good horse. My father gave him a little jolt with a switch and he fell off and hit his head on a step. My daddy never meant to kill him.”

“But he died anyways.”

“And you killed a whole family for it?”

Molton tried to speak, but began coughing. Sam hoped he might have said something that bore a hint of regret. When the words did finally roll out on a string of red phlegm, he said, “Appears I missed one.”

Box closed his eyes. “Daddy.”

Sam’s grip tightened on the Colt. The veins in his neck felt full of lead. “How many of you were there?”

“We was nine.”

“Where are they?”

“What?”

“Where are they?” he yelled.

“Lemme die in peace.”

“Batch, Slug, Grill, and Percy—were they there?”

“They was along but done gone on.” He drew up his legs and began to whine. “It hurts. Hurts like hellfire. Leave me be, damn you.”

“Who else? That’s only six.”

“Box, call me that woman.”

“Who else?”

“All right, damn it. Sim, my other brother; Loganthal, who used to run with us; and that woman’s daddy, Payette.”

“I want to talk to them.”

“That’d be kindly hard. They dead,” the old man groaned. “Dead,” he said again, as though the word were a delicacy to be enjoyed a long time.

“You’re lying.”

“Sim was kilt by the Rayville posse, strung up from the railroad trestle. Payette got on opium and died two year before he stopped breathin’.”

“What happened to the one called Loganthal?”

Molton squeezed his eyes shut. “I couldn’t say.”

Sam looked at Box, who shifted his gaze away and said, “I don’t rightly recall myself, but he’s dead as dirt, that’s for sure. Ease up on that grip, won’t you?”

Sam pushed Box onto the bed and a rancid stink rose from the blanket. “Tell me how he died.”

“I don’t know how to call it,” Box said.

“Was it a disease?”

“Won’t no disease. He started not talkin’ and about a year after that we’d hear him jabberin’ in the night. All night. Then he commenced hollering out of nightmares and Daddy like to went over and shut him up a bunch of times good. His woman lit out.”

A voice rose from the bed. “Then he shook for two year.”

“He what?”

“Like they was a rattlesnake in his bed. Like he seen the end and didn’t like it none. Now leave me be.”

“There wasn’t anybody else?”

“Nine of us,” Molton whispered. “By God, can’t you hear?”

“There wasn’t a Skadlock there?”

“Skadlock,” the man said slowly. “I knew that batch. Little steal-in’ folks. Not cut out for the big show. Stupid. Spent more on makin’ their liquor than they could get for it, most times. Ah, blazes, here come another.” He gritted his few yellow teeth, his lips drawn back, the enamel grinding, ric-ric.