The Missing

by Tim Gautreaux

“Well, maybe it was that other fellow got you excited. We all tend to go downhill when someone sticks a pistol in our face. Who the hell was that?”

  “One of those Skadlocks I told you about.”

  “Half man, half weasel.”

  “The weasel part might be right.”

  ***

  FOR THE NEXT HOUR they kept in motion on the dance floor, showing their pistols and palming slapjacks. Elsie appeared again and sang “Leave Me with a Smile,” her sweet alto taming down the room and calming Sam as well. Her voice was a drink of cool water.

  Toward the staggering, glass-breaking end of the trip he went back to the engine room and saw Ralph standing above two passed-out drunks, holding on to the bars, staring at all the heaving machinery.

  “We’ll get to the bank in about ten minutes, and I’ll escort you off.”

  “Where’s my pistol?”

  “Part of my salary for a hard night.”

  Skadlock’s eyes showed several worlds of pain. “You gonna law me?”

  Sam put his hand on one of the bars, tempted to say he wasn’t worth the trouble, but that would only make things worse. His uncle had taught him that for some people, hard words were the same as bullets. Finally he shook his head. Then he asked, “What do you know about the trouble down in Troumal?”

  “I was livin’ in Arkansas them days.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  Skadlock looked away, feeling the lump on the back of his skull. “Coulda been anybody.”

  “You know.”

  “Why would I tell you? You couldn’t touch ’em, even nowadays.” The big backing gong went off like a detonation above his head, but he didn’t flinch.

  “How did you know somebody survived?”

  “I didn’t till you hauled up in our kitchen.”

  “Who did it?”

  Skadlock stared at the port engine as though he envied its un-touchable heat.

  Sam cocked his head, imagining what he could say to make Skadlock talk. Finally, he said, “Maybe I could pay them a visit like I did you.”

  At that, Ralph Skadlock’s eyes rolled sideways into jaundiced thought. After a long time he said, “It was Cloats what did it.”

  The name went through him like a chill. “How do I find them?”

  “Everbody around Bung City has a opinion.”

  “You’re just a fountain of information.”

  “Go to hell. If I was you I’d grow some eyes in the back of my head.”

  Sam heard the engine bells jangle for the landing. “Who’d you sell that little girl to?”

  “The devil.”

  “When I find her, I’ll do my best to send the law after you. Maybe some federal law.”

  “I ain’t got her. They can’t arrest me for havin’ thin air.”

  “But I got a feeling you’re worse than the ones that do.”

  Skadlock looked away as if offended. “I don’t know about that. I ain’t the start of your troubles. And I sure as hell didn’t deserve no dead dog.”

  When the landing whistle began roaring, Sam unlocked the brig and walked him to the stage.

  Skadlock pushed out the dent in his hat and settled it back on his head. “I ain’t forgot about that Dutchman.”

  “That’s your trouble. You don’t forget much of anything.”

  “Keep a lookout, coonass.” He started down the plank with the rest of the tipsy crowd.

  Sam faked a friendly wave. “Manges la merde, Skadlock.”

  ***

  THE SECOND MOONLIGHT TRIP was worse. Among the eighteen hundred people dawdling at the landing, two hundred or so had been drinking while they waited. After they frisked the crowd and the boat slid off into the river, the generator failed again. The band kept playing, but after a few minutes a blind volcanic brawl broke out that took half an hour to stop. The mates and several waiters and even the cooks had to wade in to separate the fighters as best they could, and the captain showed up with a megaphone and shouted that there would be no more music if the crowd didn’t calm down. The crew brought up the coal-oil lanterns and hung them, and under the smoky yellow aura the band continued playing for the reeling dancers. Sam was still breathing hard when someone called out “Fire,” and he and the first mate ran to quench a smashed lamp in the men’s toilets at the rear of the boat, beating it down with sacks until an oiler coaxed the fire hose alive.

  Sam sat down on a stool by a sink, his mouth open, and watched the muddy water knock down the flames. “Son of a bitch. If that had got away from us this tub would’ve gone up like a haystack in July.”

  “Get up, bud,” Swaneli told him. “I just heard a gunshot.”

  On the first deck several men had started shooting at the ceiling-fan blades, and one had his arm broken by a ricochet. The three mates fought them and then hustled the banged-up men to the brig, stacking them in with five others already there.

  The café ran out of food halfway back to the landing, and the cooks began to fill any pot that had a lid with oil and made tubs of popcorn they salted and sold cheaply to staunch the angry hunger of the drunks. The café register was so full of money it wouldn’t close, the people wild to buy anything, even extra salt. When Sam stepped through the door he was hit across the chest with a chair, and before he could get up a woman began screaming into his face that her friend was being raped up on the Texas roof. He took the stairs two at a time to a dark open area where passengers were not allowed and saw men in overalls hoist a yowling, half-naked man over their heads and throw him off the boat. Sam looked down and saw a white scissoring motion in the water, headed aft.

  A middle-aged woman was sitting on the roof tarpaper adjusting her long skirt. He looked at the skinny man next to him, whose hair was longer than the woman’s, and tried to make out his features in the dark. “If he was raping that woman, you should’ve held him for the sheriff.”

  The man bent over laughing. “Her? We don’t give a shit about her. She’s just a old whore he hired to ride with him tonight.”

  Sam looked at the other men, trying to understand. “Why’d you pitch him overboard, then?”

  “Hell, we’uns just wanted to see could he fly.”

  The men standing at the rail started laughing, coughing up popcorn, punching each other, cursing the whore and the six other men they said they’d thrown off the boat that night.

  ***

  WHEN THEY GAVE BACK weapons at the end of the trip, two pistols and five knives were left over. He considered the weapons in the glow of the deck lights, and then lobbed everything into the river.

  The general cleanup was unending, the boat filthy in every way. During the hour that the restrooms were closed, several people had gone up on the rear promenade and squatted in the dark. Three hours before sunrise, Charlie and Sam climbed shaking into their bunks, and neither could fall asleep.

  “I saw you waltz Skadlock off the boat. What was you talking about?”

  “He showed up to bother Ted Weller and then got real focused on me. I told you about his dog, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah. That boy’s been in the woods too long.”

  “He was drunk.”

  “Why didn’t you turn him in to the law?”

  “He’d maybe just kill that little town constable.”

  Charlie seemed to think about this. “What else did he tell you?”

  “He was whelped in Arkansas. He knows who did what they did to my family. Some people named Cloat from around Bung City.”

  Charlie leaned out of the lower bunk and looked up at him. “You don’t exactly sound excited about that big news.”

  “I’m still thinking about it.”

  “Think, hell. Don’t you have folks you can round up to go find these people? At least try to tell the law about them. Man alive!”

  At once a wave of fatigue swamped Sam. “Charlie, it’s been around twenty-five years. I never knew my parents or brother or sister. Don’t have pictures, nothing. Just some wooden markings in the churchyard. My
uncle never raised me to be big on revenge, you know? Most French people on the bayou are like that. Too poor to afford a grudge.”

  Charlie seemed amazed. “Well, you’re a little pudding if I ever saw one. You don’t try to find out about these outlaws, I hate to say this, but I’ll be ashamed of you.”

  “What? What would you do?”

  “What do you think? If I found out for certain they’d killed my folks, I’d go to the sheriff. If he was bought off or scared, I’d dump my bank account and buy as many pump shotguns I could afford and a case of high-brass goose shot.” He began waving his arm toward the low roof. “I’d get my cousin Buck, who was with me over in France, my brother Maxie, my uncle Dick Agle, who was with Roosevelt in Cuba, and that big Eyetalian who married my sister. We’d wait for asshole-hunting season to open and go find ’em in their nest.”

  “With bad luck, you’d all get arrested. With good luck you’d all get shot up. I’m wondering if that’s why Skadlock told me, thinking these Cloats’d swat me like a mosquito. And maybe they didn’t have anything to do with it at all.”

  Charlie rolled on his back. “Some things you don’t worry about.”

  “If I did get some kind of revenge, you can bet one of them would get away and show up at my house one night two years down the road, squattin’ there in the bushes, a knife between his teeth.”

  The cabin was quiet for a long time; then Charlie’s voice came out of the darkness, sleepy and yawning. “I still think you’re chickenshit.”

  “Maybe after I find the little girl, I’ll think about all this. First things first.”

  “Chick-en-shit.”

  “You think shootin’ up a yardful of folks is the right thing to do?”

  “Kill a snake, and the next man on the trail won’t get bit.”

  “Not unless another snake gets him.”

  “Boy, I can see you ain’t never been shot at.”

  Sam put an arm over his eyes and let out a long sigh. “Not in a good while, anyways.”

  ***

  THE NEXT NIGHT drew sizeable crowds again. A logjam of denim-clad sawmillers and their women came over the river from Yunt in skiffs, and the captain hired the local constable and three men he deputized and armed with shotguns to ride and help break up fights. Sam took four aspirin and patrolled constantly, the pistol gleaming in his belt, but generally the crowd was subdued, a fact which didn’t improve his opinion of human nature, that it took a show of hardware to teach people how to have a good time. Elsie sang her beautiful songs, August played in the band for both trips, and Sam listened to them as he made his rounds, wishing he were at the piano.

  One o’clock in the morning found the Ambassador digging river for Cairo as the crew fire-hosed the upper decks of the crowd’s sediment. The ship’s carpenter began replacing balusters kicked out of the upper railings, and the waiters threw ice on the main deck to chill blood off the wood.

  That night, Charlie Duggs carried a pint of his own, and by the time he crowded into the cabin he was fueled up with malevolent energy.

  Sitting down on the stool beside the lavatory, he looked up to where Sam lay in his bunk.

  “You goin’ after the Cloats when we come back downriver? I’ll go with you.”

  “Been too busy to think about them.” Sam saw only an outline of the man seated across from him.

  “If I was you I couldn’t think of nothin’ else. They killed your whole family, bud.”

  “I’m turnin’ in.” He was unable to think about anything.

  Charlie stood up. “Think I’ll bed down on the Texas roof.” He lurched toward the narrow door. “The air smells better up there.”

  Sam folded an arm over his eyes and tried for sleep. He thought of his uncle and of his aunt, who’d always treated him as their own son. Still, he remembered feeling at times that he was not totally theirs. The cousins were the whole children, and he was loved as much, but still not of the same house, born somewhere else out of someone else. He tried to remember anything, a touch, a flash of light, the timbre of an owning voice, but there was nothing at all. When they had been killed, the part of him that made memory had not yet come alive. Like a sudden foul cloud, what the murderers had done began to envelop him, and he understood with a shudder what they had taken away. He began to cry quietly in the sour bunk, wondering what was wrong with him. Maybe he was changing, approaching the edge of that age where for the first time he would begin to look back on things, and he realized dimly how sad a change that was.

  Chapter Twenty

  ACY WHITE lounged in his parlor listening to the girl sing “The Letter Edged in Black” in her pure bell tones. Now and then she would end a line with a blue note, and Acy would stop her. “No. How many times do I have to tell you not to do that? It sounds trashy.” He’d taken to overseeing her practices and even her playtime. He made sure she didn’t sing to herself while she dressed her dolls, because inevitably she would come out with something improper-probably, he thought, written by a New York Jew for some lowbrow vaudeville theater.

  The girl would listen to Acy’s commands because she sensed she had to, obeying him because there was no one else to obey. She was a child with no options. Sometimes she cried, and this was always in some way connected to her mother. Lily had no notion of death and didn’t know what to make of this nervous couple who told her five times a day that they were her mother and father. She was a baby, disoriented in a baby’s world. But she was smart.

  Acy ran a finger along his thin mustache. “Sing it right, will you?”

  “Where’s Vessy? I’ll sing it to her.”

  “Vessy’s at her shack.”

  “What’s a shack?”

  “It’s a nasty little place where stupid people live.”

  The girl came up to him and put a hand on the arm of his chair. “Is Vessy stupid?”

  Acy pulled his watch and frowned at it. “She’s an untrained gal from up in the hills. Her people are dirt poor and we had to train her to wear shoes.”

  She looked at him, unblinking. “Did you give her shoes?”

  “What? Why, yes. Otherwise she’d be tracking up the house.”

  She walked over to the grand piano and pressed down two notes of an A chord. “Thank you for giving her shoes.”

  He went to her, got down on his knees, and put his face next to hers. “Look, remember that the last person in the world you want to be like is Vessy. She’s bad. Don’t forget that Vessy is a bad person and you shouldn’t trust her. She’s hardly a step above a nigger.”

  The girl put a finger in her ear and yawned. Acy stood and looked out the window where Willa was haranguing the gardener next to the cast-iron fence, the old man’s head bobbing under the storm of her words.

  ***

  ON THE TRIP up to Cairo, Sam shared a meal with Elsie in the café. He thought about her singing and had to admit that he was a little bit infatuated, though he couldn’t reconcile the image of her extraordinary presence in front of the orchestra with the woman seated across from him at the cheap wooden table. She had the buttermilk skin of a healthy midwestern girl, and he admired Ted Weller’s luck in matching up with her. August walked in and joined them, looking from one to the other before sitting down tentatively, as if worried he might be interrupting something. A stranger watching them eat and talk and laugh might have mistaken them for a complete family. It was a pleasant meal that Sam would remember for years, probably because it would be the last such meal for a long time.

  ***

  WHEN THE BOAT tied up at Cairo the dapper advance man was there with the new schedule and an armload of mail. The weather was windy and a rainstorm was building in from the west, so he brought the mail to the central staircase to give it out. Among the envelopes was a telegram he’d been given that morning at the Western Union office, where he was sending precise schedule times upriver. He shuffled the mail and called out names, announcing that the telegram was for Elsie. Sam got a long envelope from New Orleans, a letter from L
inda, and sat down on the staircase to read it. She told him the family news, then neighborhood tales, said that she wasn’t feeling all that well, that perhaps it was the heat and dampness. She let him know she missed him around the house and complained that she’d had to fix the gas range herself, but he saw that as her way of saying she needed him. The letter was four pages long, and he read it twice. Several crewmen were leaning against bulkheads or seated on coils of rope, reading slowly to make the letters last. He looked around for Elsie and saw her standing by the capstan, the buttermilk color of her face gone gray, the winsome expression missing as if scraped off by a surgeon. When she put her face down into her hands, he walked over.

  “Bad news?”

  She didn’t look up. “Go find August and bring him to my cabin. Then leave us alone, Lucky.”

  He turned toward the rain-stippled water, afraid to look at her. “Is something wrong with Ted?”

  She put down her hands and looked past him, up the stairs toward the dance floor. Her voice was flat and tired. “He got blood poisoning from the first operation. He died yesterday.”

  “God. If there’s something-”

  “Go get August.”

  On the trip back to the boiler galley he thought of how the boy was about to be delivered, with just a few of his mother’s words, to the land of adult sorrow. He stopped at the entrance, not wanting to take the next step, but then raised his foot over the sill. August was on a stool in the companionway reading through a smudged arrangement for a De Silva fox-trot.

  He looked up and smiled. “Hey, Lucky. Get a load of these licks.”

  Sam felt like a black cloud, drifting close. “Your mother sent me down to get you. Go on up to your cabin.”

  “Sure. Did you hear me play the other night for those hillbillies?”

  “You played like a champ.”

  August hopped off the stool. “She got that new music for me in the mail? I saw the advance man on the dock.”

  “I don’t know.” He pretended to study a steam gauge. “You’d better get up there quick.”

  The boy ran through the furnace room and out into the sun. Sam walked back by the engines to let the Bentons know they’d have to take on another fireman for August’s shifts, then climbed to the restaurant and dawdled a few minutes at a table until little Mr. Brandywine saw him.