The agent looked him over again. “If you want to find out about the sheriff, I recommend you walk down the street and ask him.” He returned to his desk and sat amid the clutter of hand stamps and bundles of paper stuck on hooks.
“I just need a little information.”
“Sorry. I don’t know you.”
He walked out on the platform and the boy was laid out on the bench. He looked down the street to where the old idlers of the town sat on the low retaining wall at the edge of the courthouse lawn. He looked down the tracks lined by telegraph wire drooping between poles as if weighted with information and commerce. The lines made him remember the Greenville telegrapher, and he went back in.
“Hey.”
The agent looked up from a desk. “Sir?” The word was strained.
“Do you know Morris Hightower?”
He rolled back in his chair and returned to the window. “Yep. Do you?”
“I do. And he knows I’m looking for a little kidnapped girl, helping out her parents. You could telegraph him about me.”
“We get some Greenville freight back in here from time to time, and he contacts me about it. Sends Morse like a mouse runnin’ on tin. I used to take train orders from him in Jackson.” He put a pad and pencil on the little counter. “Write your name here and come back in a few minutes.” The agent opened his telegraph key and began sending an even stream of dots and dashes.
Outside, the mule was rolling the bit with his great tongue, so he sent the boy down the street with Garde Ça in tow to find water, telling him to wait at the station when he returned. By the time Sam went back inside, the agent was waiting at the window.
“You’re a pretty lucky man.”
He glanced out the door after the boy. “I’ve been told that.”
“Lucky we found him on shift, and lucky the dispatcher handled the relay up to Greenville. Have you found the baby?”
“I have. But I need a good lawman to help me.”
“Well, you know how the law is.” The agent sucked a tooth and studied him. “I’d suggest you go talk to Sheriff Tabors. I don’t know him that well, but I think he’s all right.” He bobbed his head. “You don’t believe me?”
“Why’d he hire that drunk down at Zeneau?”
“What? Nelson Watty? Oh, he’s all right. Just sick is all. He don’t make thirty dollars a month but he stays in that little box of an office and collects taxes and signs permits for folks. It’s not like they’s a lot to choose from in Zeneau.”
Sam looked up at the Seth Thomas clock. “What time does the passenger train come in?”
“The tri-weekly you rode in on yourself comes in at two-thirty more or less. It goes back about three. Took off a few minutes early today.”
He looked out into the dusty street and saw August stop a gray-bearded gentleman, who pointed down a side lane. “You see that boy with me?”
“Yes.”
“When he comes back, will you keep an eye on him?”
“As much as I can.”
“Well, here I go.”
***
HE HAD TO WAIT for the sheriff. He stood in the hall and watched the lawyers clop in from the broiling street onto the hardwood and take the stairs to the courtroom. A policeman hauled in a handcuffed vagrant and brought him past Sam to a heavy door and shoved him through it. In the rear of the building he heard the clang of cell doors and drunken hollering. He hoped he wasn’t making a mistake, that Tabors wasn’t a fat rummy who liked the taste of Skadlock whiskey. Or just a mean local who hated outlanders, or Catholics, or people from Louisiana, or Cajuns, or anybody not born inside the county.
The sheriff came in at four o’clock, and Sam stood up. He was in his early forties and wearing a suit and vest of no mean quality, a big star pinned under his right lapel. His blond hair was freshly trimmed, as was the mustache that ran straight across his face, as straight as his teeth.
“You look like you’re waiting for me.”
“I am.”
“Been rabbit hunting, have you?”
Sam looked down at his pants. “It’s a long story.”
“Well, come in, then, and have a seat.”
The walls of the office were cream-painted beaded board that ran floor to ceiling. A photograph of a woman unconscious of her good looks rested on the oak desk next to a box of pistol ammunition.
There are important starting points in serious conversations, and he paused a long moment to figure out the best way to begin. “Do you know Ralph Skadlock?”
The sheriff didn’t blink. “Who are you?”
He patiently explained who he was, where he was raised, why he’d lost his job as floorwalker in New Orleans, how he’d been looking for a child named Lily while working on an excursion boat.
When he finished, the sheriff nodded. “All right, Mr. Simoneaux. As for Skadlock, I know of him, but I can’t do a thing about him.”
“You say that as though five people a week ask you to.”
“That’s about right. Including my mother-in-law. That place he lives on is probably in Louisiana. We are presently, as you realize, in Mississippi.”
Sam looked down at his dusty shoes and then up at the sheriff, who’d gotten up to take off his coat. He wore a tooled gunbelt and holstered on it was a Colt New Service revolver with pearl grips. “Nice gun.”
He sat down again. “Me and all the deputies switched to forty-fives last year. Our old thirty-eights wouldn’t shoot through car doors. Times are changing.”
Sam looked at Tabors’ eyes, wondering if he could trust him. Ultimately, he had no other choice, and had to take a leap of faith. “Well, that ought to solve that problem for you. Let’s see if you can do something about mine.”
“Let’s have it.” Then the sheriff did something that convinced Sam that he’d made the right decision. He pulled a pad in front of him and held a sharpened pencil at the ready.
It took ten minutes to explain the history between the Skadlocks and Acy White, the death of Ted Weller, and why he believed the child would be exchanged in Woodgulch.
The sheriff took notes all along, and after Sam finished, he sat back. “Son, you probably realize this already, but one crime was committed in Louisiana and the other in Kentucky. My jurisdiction is only this poor little Mississipppi county. Do you think they’ll trade money for the child at the station?”
“I don’t know.”
“If they did, I’d have reason to arrest everybody and wire for warrants from the other places. That is, if the child recognizes you.”
“She’ll know her brother.”
The sheriff put down his pencil. “She better. I can’t turn her over otherwise.”
“You’re telling me a four-year-old has to convince you of who she belongs to?”
The sheriff pulled the box of pistol shells toward him and placed it in a desk drawer. “Seems like she’s the one with the most to lose.”
Sam smiled. “Well, I guess that’s fair.”
The sheriff leaned back and pulled a folder from a different drawer, his body movement suggesting that the meeting was over. “What do you do on the excursion boat?”
“I play piano and bang around the rowdies when I’m not.”
“I like piano music and have a player piano at home. I took music appreciation, two courses worth, in college.”
“College? Where at?”
“Rutgers. On weekends I went into New York for the revues and plays. There’s a lot of music in that town.”
“Why’d you come back? Family?”
“Not really. I just came back because it’s so bad around here.” He gave Sam a smile and motioned to the door. “Come Friday we’ll help you out.”
***
HE FOUND THE BOY at the station and together they walked to a two-dollar-a-night hotel on Batson Street, a mildew-smelling place with tall windows covered with storm-belled screens, bathroom down the hall, and an old man somewhere on the third floor coughing deep and long. They cleaned up and
walked downtown to a café, counted their money, and ordered ham sandwiches and tap water. The train would next rattle into town on Friday afternoon, and it was Wednesday.
The hotel room held two small iron beds and that night they lay in the hot, breathless room and tried to sleep.
August turned repeatedly, went down the hall to the bathroom, came back and began tossing again. “Lucky, you awake?” His voice was young again in the dark room.
“Yeah, I’m one hot dog.”
“I’m glad you made me put down that gun.”
He rolled on his back and tried to see the ceiling, which he knew was cracked like a map of desert rivers where the electric wire had been nailed to the plaster. His sore shoulder throbbed with his heartbeat. “Count sheep, and maybe you’ll drop off.”
“I’ve got to say it.”
“Go on, then.”
“If I hadn’t backed off, I’d have killed her.”
“All right.”
“No, I need you to know how I feel right now. I mean, I want to get her, but I’m mostly glad she’s alive. It’s like it’s okay if we don’t even find her, just so she’s, you know, still somewhere.”
Sam thought about that last phrase, “still somewhere.” “Aw, we’ll get her back when that old train rumbles in day after tomorrow. The sheriff said he’d sit in the waiting room with three of his deputies and hash it out with all concerned.”
“You sure they’ll bring her here?”
“I can’t imagine where else. I’d bet a month of piano playing that Billsy was coming back from setting up the meeting somehow. It makes sense they bring her in Friday, since the train won’t run again till Monday.”
August was quiet for a long time. “What if those people talk the sheriff out of it? Didn’t you say this Mr. White was a banker and his wife a proper lady? You think the sheriff will believe us over them?”
“Oh, maybe she was bred in old Kentucky, but she’s only a crumb down here.”
August laughed aloud, and it was the first time he’d laughed since before his father died. “I wish you could play piano as good as you tell jokes.”
“I’m getting better.”
He talked to the boy a long time, easing him off to sleep. And then the image came to him of armed men waiting in the small depot for the likes of Ralph and Billsy Skadlock, and he thought of the possibility that something could go wrong, a gunfight and pursuit, slugs the size of bumblebees slamming through the flimsy pine walls, with a little girl in the middle of the fracas. Bullets didn’t seek out guilt or innocence; they were flying accidents of fate. He eventually fell asleep and began to dream of Lily in Ralph Skadlock’s arms, both of them turning to face a boy pointing a monstrous shotgun at them, and when that vision faded, he was in a hospital in France, and his wife was working on a needlepoint chair bottom, at one point holding it up to him and showing an image of a bombed-out house, a girl standing before the smoke and fire raising both hands, each finger made of khaki thread, nine in all, and a stitch of red for the bloody socket.
***
WHEN RALPH SKADLOCK got out of bed, Billsy was standing in the doorway scratching and yawning into the new day.
“You smell that?” Billsy asked.
Ralph had begun sleeping upstairs again now that the ceiling no longer leaked and Vessy had dried and turned the mattress. He pulled on his pants with a grunt, and they went down and out into the kitchen.
Vessy had fired the big stove, robbed eggs from the hens that were left, and cut up onions and cheese, making the men an omelette and floating it on a pad of grits and butter. The little girl was at the table penciling mustaches on photographs in an old newspaper. The men sat down and began to eat, their heads low over the plates, staring at the food as it disappeared. The girl dropped her pencil and bent under the table to reach for it, but banged her head when she came up and started crying. The men glowered at her and Billsy said, “Hey, shut that stuff up.”
Vessy picked up the pencil, gave it to the child, and brushed back her hair, kissing her forehead. She rubbed her back and found her a fresh page on which to draw. The child stopped wailing and began marking dark eyebrows on the image of a Baton Rouge debutante.
The men stopped eating and watched all of it, as if the notion of calming a child with anything other than a peppery slap or a whack with a piece of kindling had never occurred to them. Billsy put an elbow in his brother’s ribs and asked, “You remember the time I sassed the old woman while she was ironin’ and she threw that flat-iron down on my foot?”
Ralph made a face and took another bite. “What made you think of something like that?”
“You remember that?”
“Sure I do. I’m the one tended to your foot. Took off your shoe and had to shake it to make your little toe fall out.”
“Took all winter for my foot to heal up,” Billsy mumbled, watching the girl drawing.
Vessy came to the table with her plate and sat down. “I don’t guess you heathen ever say grace.”
Ralph looked at her, chewing slowly. “Grace who?”
***
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?”
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