The Missing (6 page)

Something was burning, and Sam looked up to gray smoke bailing out of the starboard smokestack. The engine crew had laid a wood fire on the boiler grates, and after a half hour it was hot enough to ignite coal, the smoke turning to a black column of tarry-sweet bituminous breath. As Sam worked, he figured that the boat had been painted at least thirty times, the paint in places nearly a quarter-inch thick. At first he went after the old paint hard, but Charlie told him to ease off. “Just get the loose stuff. We not painting a banker’s house.”

“The captain won’t get on us about it?”

“He knows it can’t last. The soot eats it off once a year. Don’t you know that?”

“No.”

With his scraper, Charlie knocked a dirt-dauber nest spinning into the canal. “How’d you get on?”

“The Wellers put in a word for me.”

“You hear about their little girl?”

“Ah, yes.”

“That was a pretty child. Smart, smart. You could see it in her eyes. Little strong eyes that told you she was gonna do some big stuff in her time.”

“You heard her sing?”

“When we tie up I stand by to do the electrics for the band. Keep the microphone goin’ and lights. She got a voice like a tiny fiddle and can play it, too. When I was that age I couldn’t hardly wipe myself.” He was standing atop the rail and holding on to the molding of the deck above. “Somebody stole that child right out of a department store and couldn’t nobody in the store stop it, not even the puke-brain of a floorwalker who was looking for her.”

Sam stopped working. He was notorious already. “So, you know it was me.”

“Yep.”

“How many people working today are the regular crew?”

“About most of us. They’s a dozen or so extra painters to work this week that’ll be paid off.”

“So you’re all some type of big family, right? Been working together a few seasons?”

Charlie lowered his arms and balanced. “So what?”

“Everybody talks about everybody’s business? So if I tell you something, it’s like having a meeting with everyone else at once, right?”

Charlie ran a thumb along his scraper’s blade and looked at him. “This is goin’ somewhere?”

“I might as well say it now. I lost that job because of the child, and here I am, number one, to keep my lights on. And number two, the Wellers think I can help find their girl.”

“Is that how it is?”

“Spread the news.”

Charlie took two steps around a corner of the rail and stood over the paddlewheel, scraping and wincing away the peppering flakes. “Something’s got to be done. Let’s hope you’re the something.”

A SUSURRATION began in one of the smokestacks as the boilers started to build steam pressure. The two escape pipes sizzled at their feathered tops. After two hours, the engineers fed steam to the ejectors, which opened with a roar, siphoning out the foul bilge. Sam could tell when the boilers reached the hundred-pound mark, because someone opened a valve and the muted chuff of the dynamo wound up in tempo, the running lights on the stacks coming on slow as candle flames. Soon crew members were mopping down every surface with bleach, for the pumps had brought up the water system and men in slickers began hosing the Ambassador down from pilothouse to lower deck, washing off smut, bird droppings, dust, paint chips, wasp nests, and mildew. The day had turned hot, and Sam leaned against the roof bell, letting Charlie stand back with a fire hose and soak him like a dirty rug.

By sundown of the second day, the whole boat was skinned down and drying in the hot breeze. After two days everyone was to come back and paint, unless rain threatened. The second night, the engineers stayed on the boat testing the boilers and chasing rust and tarnish, clogged oil channels, or wrens’ nests in the engines’ valve works. Sam was told to light the lanterns on the engineers’ wagon and drive it back to their house, which was only eight blocks from his own. It’d been a long time since he’d driven a team, but once his hands remembered the feel of reins, he backed and turned the horses for town. The animals were heavy and streetwise, and he ran them alongside the clattering, sparking trolleys and under the streetlamps with no trouble at all. The day was finally cooling, and it was a pleasure to jostle the night air with their iron-shod hooves. Running over the Belgian-block streets downtown the wagon’s steel rims and gear sounded like an avalanche of silverware. About ten o’clock he tied them off in back of a house on Magazine Street, where a light came on in the yard and an older woman wearing gray cotton trousers came out to unharness them.

“And thank you for not latherin’ the boys up,” she said, bending to unhook the chains.

“You can let me do that.”

“No, get on home, son. As dark as it is, I can tell you’re sunburned and coated with paint chips.”

“How’s this wagon gonna get back?”

“I’ll take it out tomorrow afternoon.” She was a big woman and no stranger to horses. In a moment she was leading the animals to a pair of roofed stalls against the back fence. “I guess we’ll get rid of these fellas after this season. We’re the last in the neighborhood to keep any.”

“Do you work on the boat?”

She gave him a quick look. “Yes. Those engineers are my nephews, and the bunch of us have been on the river all our lives. My late husband was a pilot and two of my sons are pilots on the upper Ohio. I’m Nellie Benton.” She reached out like a man and he looked at her hand for just a heartbeat before taking it. She shook like she meant to hurt his fingers. And she did.

* * *

THE STREETS on his way home were fogbound, and the live oaks sucked the light out of the streetlamps. He walked through the gloom nearly asleep and found himself standing on a corner half a block past his door before he understood where he was.

In a few minutes he was in the bathtub, the water cold because the gas had been turned off.

Linda padded in to use the commode, and glanced at his eyes. “You look like an Indian, honeybunch.”

He covered his face with a hand. “Can I have your straw hat?”

“Sure. I’ll take the sash off so it’ll look like a man’s.” She stood and looked at him again. “You see the Wellers any?”

“Yeah. They were scrubbing down the dance floor. I believe they’re tireder than I am.”

She put a hand in his hair. “You don’t have to do this.”

“It’s sixty bucks a month, plus you don’t have to feed me.”

“You know what I mean.”

He pulled his palm away from his face. “I don’t know. I just can’t understand it.”

She reached into the tub and rubbed his neck as though claiming him. “I believe I can.”

* * *

BY THE SECOND DAY the bilge was pumped dry, and he and Charlie were sent belowdecks with carbide lamps to check the hull. There wasn’t much down there other than a potable water tank, some steering and capstan works, and a few steam lines. After his eyes adjusted, he crawled along under the bracing, holding his lamp so Charlie could examine warped areas and test for punky boards with an ice pick. They had been out of daylight for an hour when Sam shone the lamp ahead and then back toward the dim shaft of light falling down the hatch they’d entered.

“You looking for frogs?”

“Everything’s wood,” Sam said. “No watertight compartments.”

“That’s a fact.” Charlie took a string of oakum from his shoulder, then set it into a seeping joint with the pick.

“How’d this thing stay afloat all these years?”

“Two eyeballs in the wheelhouse. Shine that light here.”

He was in awe of all the soggy wood. “One bump on a rock and this tub’ll go down like a woodstove.”

Charlie sniffed. “Kind of makes ’em careful where they steer it, don’t it? One thing about a steamboat, it’s all wood, and not the best wood or heaviest at that. It’s just kind of a glorified chicken coop. If you smack a bridge pier with a wood steamboat, folks downstream will have all the toothpicks they want.”

* * *

THE NEXT DAY, fifty people showed up to paint. The stacks were washed down with stove black; the outside of cabin doors, the rails, the first-deck planking, and the boat’s name—in four-foot letters on the engine-room bulkhead—were dressed with burgundy gloss enamel. The paddlewheel was painted bright red and everything else, from the circus molding branching out from the deck posts to the balusters and fire buckets, a sun-tossing white. Inside, when everything was scrubbed and enameled white, the spaces loomed larger, the huge dance floor now cavernous, the whole interior glowing like a snow cave. After he used turpentine to get the sticky oil paint from his hands and forearms, Sam jumped on shore and walked way back from the boat to look her over: in the early evening light she was a three-hundred-foot wedding cake. The running lights came on at the top of the stacks, and then the thousand roofline bulbs sent up their ivory fire, the whole boat flashing against the dark canal and floating above it like someone’s dream of a traveling good time. Inside, a pianist was running the moths out of the bandstand piano with “Dill Pickles Rag,” the notes completing the paint-bright illusion that made him want to pat his foot.

Charlie followed over to where he stood by a coal pile. “Sam, my man. What you think?”

He raised a hand, then let it fall. “I can’t understand it. A few days ago it was a stinking washtub. Now I want to buy a ticket for the moonlight cruise.”

ACY WHITE owned the only bank in the riverside town of Graysoner, Kentucky. He was a thin, sallow man, a Presbyterian-for-show, the grandson of a plantation owner who had owned many slaves in Mississippi. He held risky mortgages on dozens of little farms and owned personal loans made to hundreds of the county’s lesser inhabitants, in this respect continuing his grand-father’s slaver persona. Though he loaned money to most businesses in the area, nobody knew him well. He was not a gregarious and sweating banker, the usual tobacco-soaked, seersucker-wearing steak eater one finds in small Southern towns. He was neither a skinflint nor an easy touch, though now and then a wiry meanness flashed in his eyes. Acy believed in his inalienable right to whatever it was he wanted. He was remarkable for only one thing, his devotion to his wife, Willa, a blank slate of a woman he’d created out of his imagination.

Willa Stanton White, forty-year-old daughter of a wealthy lumber family from Gipson County, spent much of her time reading and rereading a leatherbound and gilt collection of Sir Walter Scott novels her husband had bought her and practicing Franz von Suppé transcriptions on the piano. Willa was an only child who had been spoiled beyond all measure and who’d allowed herself to be chosen by a man bent on honoring that tradition. For a small-town woman she owned brave sexual appetites and was an encouraging partner for Acy, though at times he seemed too tired to meet her demands. She had few close friends in town, though she knew many citizens at a hand-waving distance. Favoring expensive clothes designed to seem modest, she was not a stupid woman, but isolated and logic-deprived, raised on illusions and no work whatsoever.

At noon Acy left the bank in his new Oldsmobile, jittering over the redbrick street up the hill to his house, a three-story Greek revival with a windowed cupola on top from which one could just barely see the river two miles away. He went in and washed his hands in the downstairs bathroom under the stairs and sat in the dining room to wait for his lunch. Vessy, a thin serving girl from out of the eastern Kentucky mountains, hipped open the swinging kitchen door and in one motion set down a plate of beef stew and noodles and a glass of iced tea.

“Are they home?” He raised his chin to her.

She brushed her straight, near-colorless hair out of her gray eyes. “They’ll get down directly.”

“I thought they might have gone out in the other car.”

“Naw. The missus stickin’ close to the house.” Vessy pulled the silver condiment rack closer to Acy and left the room.

He’d finished half his meal when his wife and the little girl came in. Willa had her hand on the child’s back, guiding her to a chair next to Acy.

The child’s hair was an odd two-inch length all over, but her face was composed and engaged. “Hi,” she said.

Acy looked down at her. “Hi what?”

She shrugged. “Hi hi?”

“Madeline, you can call me Daddy now.”

“This lady said my daddy’s in heaven.”

He gave his wife an uneasy glance. “Yes, and I’ve replaced him. I’m your new daddy. And you shouldn’t call Willa ‘this lady.’ You can call her Mother.”

The girl looked away and bit her top lip.

Willa sat down. “Can you call me Mother?” She made a face full of mock deference that the child saw through at once, narrowing her eyes and remaining silent. “Well, it’ll come in time.” She flipped a starched napkin across her lap.

The kitchen door flew open and Vessy swung into the room carrying two plates of food. She didn’t look at the child, even as her arm passed around the little head.

“Madeline, can you remember this gal’s name?” Acy asked.

The child picked up her fork and then looked at Vessy’s face, smiling slightly. “Miss Vessy,” she said.

Acy wiped his mouth and took a swallow of tea. “Just Vessy is sufficient,” he said.

“What’s ‘sufficient’?” The girl picked up a noodle with her fingers and dangled it like a fishing worm.

“It means good enough,” Acy told her. “You don’t put ‘Miss’ in front of a hillbilly girl’s name.”

The child watched as Vessy refilled the man’s glass of tea and silently left the room, her face artfully turned away from them.

* * *

AFTER LUNCH the girl was left in the upstairs nursery with the maid, and Willa came down to share an after-dinner drink with her husband. From a decanter kept out of sight in a side table, she poured herself three fingers of bourbon in two fingers of water.

Acy lit a cigar and leaned back into a velvet chair. “What did you tell Vessy?”

“The same.”

“What, exactly? I’ve got to keep tabs on all this explaining.”

Willa took a long sip and wiped her lips with a lace handkerchief. “That Madeline came from an orphanage in Cincinnati. Her head was shaved for sanitary reasons by the orphanage, and her parents were killed in a railroad accident of some sort, just recently.”

He puffed steadily, slowly exhausting the smoke. “Good,” he said. “Are you still happy?”

Willa’s face brightened. “Yes. She’s everything I could have wished for. Smart as a whip and pretty as can be.”

He looked out of the window down the hill. They had tried to have a baby for ten years, but something was wrong, and their physical enjoyment only mocked them. As more time passed, Willa’s longing for a child was something she couldn’t put out of her mind, and the barren years had nearly driven her crazy. They’d visited orphanages in several states, but even when they would find a bright-cheeked child, clever and healthy, Willa always saw something in the hopeful face that made it impossible to claim.

She poured herself another splash and took it down like a soft drink. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know. I’m glad we found Madeline. Glad she’s not an orphan.”

“Oh.” She remembered the trips, the smells of want, the expressions on small faces taught by being passed over for the smarter child, the blue-eyed child. These visits drove home that all orphans were unlucky, and she realized she wanted something else—a child fortunate enough to be currently loved. Perhaps she felt herself incapable of raising a child to whom she could give love. She didn’t really understand the feeling and was mystified by her husband’s powerful devotion.

Across town the sawmill whistle blew the get-ready signal to bring the workers off their lunch break, and Acy stood up, just a little dizzy from his toddy, and went to retrieve his straw hat from the hook. He moved to where his wife was sitting on an embroidered dining-room chair and gave her a kiss on the softest part of her cheek, next to the mouth, where a drop of bourbon burned his lips.