The Missing (8 page)

Sam straightened in his chair. “Where was the town, exactly?”

“That was a busy trip. It might have been in Kentucky, now that I think about it. Every time she sang, the mommies would come up to the bandstand. Maybe they were imagining what kind of life she might have in front of her. Everywhere she sang her two little numbers, she got the same reaction.”

Sam finished his eggs and shoved away his plate. “Some people think a lot about the future and screw up the day they’re walking around in.”

“I hear that.”

Sam did a slow pan of the café and frowned. “You think someone might want to save her from a musician’s life? I got to admit, they bring home about as much as a fry cook. My sergeant in the army sang on some phonograph records. Big labels, too. He was paid ten bucks for two sides of the record and never got a penny royalty.”

Duggs drained his ironware coffee cup and put it down, his head bobbing. “Brother plays in the Orpheum orchestra, and that don’t even pay the food bill for his family. He’s got to do Sunday bandstand work and Elks club dances and all that kind of bullshit.”

Sam tossed his napkin in his plate. “I play a little piano.”

“Pick up some extra scratch that way?”

“People tried to hire me for about a penny a key, so I said the hell with it.”

Charlie threw back his head and laughed.

Captain Stewart walked in and stood in the doorway, which everyone took as a signal to get to work. Before long, the boat was swamped by a special charter for middle-school children. The white band played for the chaperones and a few tourists as the boat eased up along the docks toward the grain elevators, the mates and watch-men keeping the children from walking the rails and swinging from the ceiling fans.

* * *

TWO DAYS LATER the boat ran a moonlight trip out of Donaldsonville, and two days after that the Ambassador docked in Baton Rouge to run three trips. The advance man had come up in his little Ford two weeks earlier, placed ads in the paper, put up posters on three hundred telegraph poles and in every store window, and talked a Presbyterian church group into a two p.m. trip. The captain gave the Wellers the morning off to go to the police station and report their daughter’s abduction and provide a description. The morning orchestra wasn’t taken too seriously, so Sam took Ted’s place at the piano and played the guitar parts off the chart, smiling at the few couples choosing to box-step next to the bandstand. He was surprised to remember how good it felt to have someone dance to his music. He studied the customers and after the set stood ashore by the stage plank to watch the morning riders file off the boat, looking carefully into each face.

He was going up the main staircase when the Wellers caught up with him, Elsie racing past, saying she needed aspirin. Ted mopped his face with his handkerchief and leaned against the rail. “The damned cops here aren’t interested in lost children from Cincinnati. They wouldn’t call other jurisdictions unless we paid the charges, and we’re about flat broke.” He pulled off his straw and wiped the hatband mark on his high forehead. “The desk sergeant took our description and threw it in a drawer. We asked him a bunch of questions, if there had been any child stealing that he knew off. You know what he told us? He said he had a few kids of his own he wouldn’t mind someone taking off his hands.”

“Sounds like you ran into a jughead. Probably the chief’s brother-in-law.”

Ted glared at him. “That supposed to make me feel better?”

“Look, I’ll lay off the two o’clock trip if the captain gives me the okay, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Ted cocked his head. “What makes you think you can do better than we did?”

“I know an old boy on the force—that is, if he hasn’t quit by now. We were in the same detachment in France.”

* * *

HE CROSSED the railroad tracks in the heat and climbed the long hill into town. At the police station the sergeant told him that Melvin Robicheaux was directing traffic at Florida and North. Sam walked out and half an hour later spotted him standing on a side street under a drugstore awning, smoking. His uniform was wrinkled and greasy, his badge pinned on crookedly. Sam called out his name.

The officer blinked. “Lucky! Where the hell did you come from?”

“The real city.”

They shook hands.

“You get a indoors job like you said you would?”

“Got it and lost it. I’m working on an excursion boat right now.”

“No cop work? Most boys got on the force.” He took a hissing drag on his cigarette.

“No. Not that. Not official, anyway.” He then told him what he was doing and who he was looking for.

Melvin spun his cigarette into the street and laughed. “You really are a lucky son of a bitch.” He looked down and laughed again.

“You want to share the joke?”

“You just walk up and get what you want, just like that.”

“What?” He bumped up his shoulders. Melvin Robicheaux seemed angry that the world was taking it easy on everyone but himself.

“I ought to hit you up for a few bucks like I do the pimps.” He looked up and down the street. “But I’ll take it easy. There’s a bunch of raggedy outlaws live way up on the river, right before the Mississippi state line, I guess. The Skadlocks. The old woman of the clan is Ninga, and she fits your description.”

Sam looked at him and then down the blinding street. “So do a lot of ugly old gals. This one ever steal somebody’s kid?”

Melvin looked over and watched an Oldsmobile run a stop sign. “She or any one of them that lives with her would carve out the pope’s eyeballs and bring ’em to you in a coin purse if you was to pay enough.”

“The world’s got no shortage of cutthroats. Why’d you think of her so fast?”

“Dogs.”

He took a step back toward the street. “Come again?”

“She steals dogs. Prize hounds, bank-guard dogs, yapping nuisance dogs. Don’t know how she makes off with them or who hires her. Last year I found her driving an old Dodge Betsy with three German shepherds in the backseat asleep in sacks. Purebloods from the damned army, no less. The car stunk of chloroform. We took her in and she had bail in her purse. Never seen her since.” Melvin put his tongue in his cheek and rolled his eyes. “Then I heard she got pinched for the same thing down in Orleans Parish. Same results, too.”

Sam put a hand in his pocket and leaned against the plate glass out of the sun. “It’s worth a shot. You can go out with me and we’ll talk to her face-to-face.”

“Lucky, my authority extends about five blocks from where we’re standing. I’m just a city cop.”

“Well, a parish deputy, then.”

“Her place is two parishes away, and that sheriff tolerates the Skadlocks like they was kin. I think they give him his liquor. If you want to talk to her, you’ll have to go into Gasket Landing yourself.”

“Where the hell is this place? Maybe I can take a train up and meet the boat at Bayou Sadie. Our advance man set up a moonlight trip out of there for the townspeople.”

Melvin pulled his watch and wound it, shaking his head. “Gasket Landing isn’t really a place anymore. Long time ago there was a plantation in there, but everything’s mostly fallen apart, I hear. It’s gone back to horse country. A car can’t get back in there through the slop.”

“Can I get there by boat?”

“You gonna sneak up on somebody on an excursion steamer?” He laughed and pulled out the papers for another cigarette. “If you got some wood sense from when you was a kid, there’s still one livery in St. Frank where they’ll rent you a horse.”

“The hell you say.” Sam remembered riding to grammar school with his cousins down in Calcasieu Parish, three of them on one rough-riding plug named Slop Jar. “I haven’t been aboard a horse but once since I left the farm.”

“It’s the only way to get there, Lucky. Bring a cheap compass and ask directions from everybody you see.” He put the cigarette in his mouth and gave Sam a sideways look. “You got a gun?”

He shook his head. “Don’t want one.”

“I’d bring a Colt .45 if I was hunting up a Skadlock.”

“I don’t even own a pocketknife. I just want to find this woman and talk to her. Then I’ll know what to do, I guess.”

A truck rumbled into the intersection and stopped. Two women in a REO approached from the far side, and the driver squeezed the bulb on her horn.

Melvin blew his whistle and waved the truck on through. “I’ll tell you everything I know, bud. Vive la France and all that. You just have to ask.”

“Well, then. Here goes.”

AFTER THE MOONLIGHT cruise the boat steamed all night to Bayou Sadie, little more than a mud landing and a few plank stores connected by a thread of road to the nearby towns. At seven the next morning the purser gave Sam an advance against his salary and told him to get back for the eight-thirty cruise or he’d be docked two dollars. He walked all the way into St. Frank and found the livery on the north side of the main street. The owner, a fat man wearing a cut-down pair of overalls held up by green suspenders, didn’t know him, so he took all the money he had as a deposit on the worst horse in the pen, a small, nervous-looking animal the color of a stained mattress. Then he tried to explain where Gasket Landing might be. “You have to go down this here lane and then ford the bayou, but it’s pretty shallow this time of year and it’s got a hard bottom. Then you head west into the stickers for a while and you’ll get into a big swamp that’s dry right now and pretty clear of brush. Those big trees cut back on the undergrowth. Keep the horse moving through there, don’t let him stop and look around too much. If you keep an animal busy he won’t get spooked.”

“What’s to spook him?”

The fat man looked up thoughtfully as Sam swung into the saddle. “Best not tell you. Just keep going a few miles till you hit the riverbank, then you’ll ride up to some ruint houses. That’s where the Skadlocks stay. You related?”

“No.”

“I figured that. You don’t have the look.”

Sam motioned toward the woods with his chin. “You know if Ninga Skadlock lives in there?”

“She couldn’t live nowheres else.”

“How many miles am I lookin’ at?”

“I don’t know.”

“No idea at all?”

“Somewhere between ten and fifty. It’s crazy country back in there.”

“What’s his name?”

“Who?”

“The horse.”

The livery owner scratched the yellow hair on his chest where it boiled up out of his undershirt. “Number 6.”

* * *

HE GOT the animal out into the road, and when a lumber truck went by, Number 6 whinnied, reared, and clambered down into a twelve-foot ditch. He sat the horse in water up to his stirrups, petted it, and coaxed it up the bank and back into the lane, where it commenced a pelvis-hammering trot, weaving from side to side. Sam stopped it, rode it several times in a circle to the right and then to the left, as his uncle Claude had taught him, and when he set the horse forward it seemed to remember that it was supposed to travel in a straight line, and its gait evened out. After a few miles they arrived at a place where the road sloped down into a broad bayou. The horse would have none of it. As soon as the water went over his pasterns, he kept turning upstream. Sam got off, stripped down to his drawers, and walked in ahead, tugging the reins. The water was only up to his waist, but the bottom rose in stinking clouds as he pulled across. He sat on the bank in the heat to dry off, then pulled on his khakis, debating whether he should just give up and cross back into town. He closed his eyes a moment to see if the girl child was still caught behind his lids, and her image came up glowing, but beside it was another face, that of his son losing consciousness, slipping away in a fever. He was the type of man who didn’t want the bad things that happened to him to happen to anyone else; maybe somebody told him things when he was three or four years old that landed like seeds in the furrows of his character. However he was formed, his tendencies were costly ones. He mounted up with a yodel and kicked Number 6 in the flanks, the horse barging into a hummock of blackberries, scattering dust and dead stalks, wasps flying behind its hooves like red sparks.

Number 6 labored on, now and then hanging up between saplings. In a tight spot it raised a hoof, put it through a fork in a trunk, then pulled it back and wedged around the tree, lowering its head and rooting through the trash woods like a hog. Four miles into the maze, a ropey wisteria vine caught the toe of Sam’s shoe and flipped him off like a playing card. Number 6 didn’t even look around and cantered west. Fighting the brush, Sam ran after it for a hundred yards in the smothering heat, finally leaping for the saddle horn and pulling himself up. The horse stopped then and looked back at him.

“You ugly son of a bitch,” Sam rasped. “You thirdhand hook rug pulled from a privy.” Here the horse bucked once, and Sam came down on its neck. After gaining his breath, he slid down and led the animal to a deep puddle of clear water and let it drink. “All right,” he said, pulling out his compass. “Eat some of that grass there and we’ll move on.” The horse rolled its ears away.

Soon they entered a low-water cypress swamp, the treetops closing off the sky. The red-bark trunks were the size of factory chimneys, and everywhere their roots rose from the soppy mud like stalagmites. He checked his compass and headed across the weedless, canopied land. Everywhere he looked he saw the stout windings of water moccasins, and he felt the horse go rigid with fear. Sam put heels to its flanks, keeping its mind on movement, not on the flint-scaled multitudes boiling in the dim mud.

He was four hours beyond the bayou when he saw bright light between a mossy picket of trees, and he rode through a tussle of brambles into the open air. Reaching into the saddlebag, he pulled out a Mason jar of water and a cheese sandwich and sat, eating and staring at the Mississippi, sensing what de Soto must have felt when he stumbled out of the brush to wonder at this wide arm of water.

He rode down under the bank until he saw sun-lavendered bottles on the mudflats and then turned the horse up a washout that led past a roofless cabin. He turned right into a trash woods that forty years before was a pasture and followed a leaning barbwire fence beyond a weather-flattened barn and into a sudden green rush of old magnolias, sycamores, and ground-hugging live oaks. He glimpsed a chimney top through the greenery and stopped the horse, stepping down and tying it to a low oak limb. After ten steps he was standing in the rear of a three-story house with two encircling galleries and tall stuccoed pillars on four sides. It was invisible to the world, warped and paintless, its windows smudged or broken out, daylight pouring through holes in the upstairs gallery floors. The brick porch was strewn with rags, broken chairs, desiccated watermelon rinds, and a cow skull. He knew better than to present himself at the wide front entrance, and what could he say when someone opened the door in his face holding no better greeting than a cocked pistol? He stood and thought and then went back to the horse, leading it slowly away, but in a circuit so that soon he was going along the riverbank as though traveling through to somewhere else. There was no road, just an area too sandy to support more than weeds and thistle. When he got opposite the woodsy patch where he thought the house was hiding, he talked to the horse in a big, good-natured voice. Number 6 wouldn’t look at him and turned his head away, engaged in patient urination. Sam picked up its rear hoof and caught it between his legs, pretending to examine the frog for an injury, but after ten minutes, no one came out to ask what he was about. Finally, he said loudly, “Well, let’s us just go in and ask for what we want, like the dunderheads we are.”

He spied above the branches a paneless belvedere, walked toward it, and was soon through the woods at the front of the mansion, where he tied the horse and walked up the flagstones. He took a breath, then knocked on the weather-scoured door.

From around the corner of the house stepped a man of at least fifty years, wearing a misshapen straw cowboy hat and dressed in denim shirt and pants that had been worn sky blue. “What you need?”

“I’m looking for Ninga Skadlock.”

The man walked up, followed closely by an all-black German shepherd that slowly and almost reverently gathered a mouthful of Sam’s pants leg in its mouth and held fast. “Excuse Satan here. He just wants to hold you still.”

Sam looked down into the monstrous dog’s amber eyes whose depths radiated primal obedience. “All right.”

“What you want of Mom?”

He swallowed twice. “I want to hire her to go get a dog for me in Baton Rouge. I heard she was good at it.”

The man touched the shepherd and it slowly drew back. Sam felt its saliva cooling against his calf and looked down again into eyes trained to see things differently than he did. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said.

“Just let me see her.”

The man slowly rubbed his knuckles on the animal’s head. “She’s in the kitchen.”

Sam felt light-headed among the soaring pillars. “This is your big place?”

“It was here when we come along,” he growled.

They walked through a leaf-sodden yard to a small gray-wood clapboard building separate from the main house. Stepping up inside, he saw the walls first, for they were freshly whitewashed. A thick-shouldered, clean-shaven man was seated at table writing in a ledger, and an old woman was working at a kerosene stove, frying onions and bell peppers in a stamped iron skillet.

“Man wants to see you.”

She looked up and he knew at once it was her. The man at the table closed his ledger and watched Sam passively. He was about forty-five, dressed all in khaki, even to his baseball cap.

The old woman wore glasses and didn’t have to squint to size Sam up. “You come in a boat?”

“No, ma’am. I have a horse.”

Glancing at his town shoes, she said, “You sure didn’t walk here in those.” She banged a spoon on the edge of the skillet and dropped chunks of cut-up rabbit into the vegetables. Then she smiled and he saw the gap in her teeth. “Excuse my manners while I keep working. We don’t exactly get much company out here. What can I do for you?”

He looked at the two men, the first still standing in the doorway behind him. Sam was a fair teller of unimportant lies and thought he might fool people like this. Then he looked down at the dog, who watched him as if he were game. “I have a nice house down in Baton Rouge, on Florida Avenue,” he began unsteadily, “where I live with my wife and two young kids. A man next door owns a chow. The dog’s attacked my kids twice, and all night he keeps my family up with his yowling. I’ve tried to deal with the owner for a couple years, but he won’t get rid of the dog.” He paused for effect here, scratching his ear, glancing across the room. A door was opened halfway, revealing a large indoor still under a metal cowl that vented through the ceiling. “He seems to get pleasure out of the trouble he’s caused me.”

“I never knew a chow to bark much.” The woman lay the spoon down on a dishcloth and motioned to him. “Sit down, mister?”

“Sam Simoneaux.”

“Well, a coonass.”

His face remained fixed; he couldn’t afford anger here. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And you live on Florida Avenue down in Baton Rouge?”

“Yes.”

“What block?”

“Ma’am?”

“What’s your house address?”

A brief surge of panic ran up his backbone. “The 1900 block.”

“All right.” She pulled a chair out from the table and sat down, then introduced him to her son Billsy, who had crossed his arms over the ledger and was leaning forward, regarding him with distant amusement. “And that other one’s Ralph. Anyway, how can we help you with this dog?”

“I hear you’re pretty good at gathering them up.”

“And where did you hear this?”

“I have a friend on the police force.”

Here the man at the table laughed, stood up, and poured himself a cup of coffee out of a porcelain pot sitting in a warming pan on the stove.

The woman tilted her head and looked at Sam directly. “Everybody’s got friends on that police force.” She raised a hand and let it drop. “Some even have relatives in the sheriff’s office.”

Sam looked around the room. “I don’t guess you see much law back in here.”

“Son, if we needed the law I’d have to write a letter, but then somebody would have to build a post office for me to mail it in.” Her voice was fine-grained. Close up, her skin seemed smooth and light. “What color is this dog’s tongue?”

He looked toward the door, where the shepherd sat, its mouth closed, its big ears up. “I don’t know.”

“Hot days, a chow’s tongue is always out,” Ralph said, leaning against the door frame.

“Simoneaux, do you have a telephone in your house?” Ninga asked.

“Yes.” This, he sensed immediately, was a mistake.

She got up and went to a high beaded-board cabinet and swung open its door. Inside he could see lines of books and her quick hands flashing through a stack of what looked like magazines. She found the one she wanted and thumbed through it with her back to him. Then she came back and sat at the table, spreading her hands out on the oak.

“We don’t have a phone, but it’s good to have a phone book anyway. Funny thing is, you don’t seem to be listed in the latest directory.” She raised her head and looked him in the eye. “Now, you can tell us what you really want.”

“I want a dog picked up, that’s all. Now if it’s a matter of price—”

“As I remember, the 1900 block of Florida is completely occupied on both sides by a cemetery.” Her gray eyes were as constant as facts, and he knew his lie had failed.

He looked over at the men, who were smiling smugly in admiration of their mother. The dog let out its tongue and panted, as if thirsty for the truth. “All right. I’m from New Orleans and—”

“And somewhere south of there before that,” she added. “We could hear New Orleans in your talk. But you still say those funny a’s the way those dummy Frenchies do. Where were you born?”

“A place you never heard of, over by the Texas line.”

“Lake Charles?”

“Troumal.”

Ralph snorted, then walked up to the table. “I know where it is.”

Sam gave him a quick look. “You been there? Nobody’s been there much. It’s just our families.”

“Your family—it’s still there, is it?” he asked.

Sam studied his face, then its hard features. “My family was killed off by outlaws.”

A brief flash flew through the man’s eyes. “I think I heard about it, long time ago.”

The woman suddenly tapped him on the shoulder with her spatula, and her face began to darken. “Are you some kind of law? At least tell that much of the truth.”