The Missing

by Tim Gautreaux

  “I sold to a few of ’em.”

  “All you got to do is go somewhere there ain’t a warrant on you yet, maybe in east Tennessee or North Carolina, and rent a store. A feller walks in with a pistol worth two dollars and you loan him twenty cents on it. If he comes back to claim it you charge him twenty cents interest. If he don’t, then it’s yourn and you put it on sale for three dollars.”

  He put his billfold back in his pocket. “I get run off from here, I’ll consider it.”

  She reached out and put a forefinger in one of his belt loops and tugged it. He wobbled as if he suddenly were dizzy, and her voice softened. “Don’t you wait too long. I’ll start out in Bristol but there ain’t no tellin’ where I’ll be in six months.” She turned and went into the kitchen, where she’d sent the girl to cut out biscuits with the mouth of a jelly glass.

  Ralph went into the house and stopped inside the door, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. The walls showed flowering spills of mildew and cumulus blooms of lime dissolved out of the plaster by rainwater. The next room was a great hall hung with dangling leeches of paint. Billsy sat in a velour chair with the stuffing leaking out under his legs.

  “You pop the question?”

  “Shut up.”

  “All right, bud. Let’s talk business. We goin’ into Woodgulch with the kid?”

  “I said not, but now I don’t know.”

  “We could take the skiff across the river.”

  Ralph looked through the clouded glass over the broad gallery toward the fungus-haunted live oaks hiding the west. “Just who in hell was watchin’ us?”

  ***

  THE TWO OF THEM ate breakfast at the Woodgulch Café, a plain-wood room painted from floor to ceiling the gray of a rainy dawn. Sam counted their money together and figured they could afford something for supper but not much else until they got back to New Orleans.

  August thumbed his empty plate away. “Can we trust him?”

  “Well, I’m as sure as I can be.” He knew that when outlanders passed through a community like Woodgulch they touched on old biases and blood alliances going back generations, considerations that were complex and far beyond right and wrong. “He said he’d show up at train time with some deputies.”

  “I hope there’s no shooting.”

  “Look, there’s no telling what’ll happen. Just try to stay in the clear. Get hold of Lily and stay in the clear.”

  “What exactly do you want me to do?”

  He took the last bite of egg and stared at his empty plate. “When you’re playing ‘Sweet Sue’ and the trombone gives it over to you to build the song, do you stop the band and ask what they want you to do?”

  “No.”

  “You just rip into her with that alto sax and play between the notes until it’s right with what the band’s doing. If everybody’s jumping and the dancers are springing the floorboards, you just cut up like crazy, you step all over the clarinet and make him wait for the next turn. On the other hand, if the band is tired and just plugging along, you take your turn and sort of match. It’s like that with everything.”

  “Keep my ears open and watch the room.”

  “That’s the ticket.”

  ***

  THEY PASSED THE DAY wandering the aisles of the hardware, walking the town’s six gravel streets, sitting on the one public bench in front of the courthouse. They arrived at the bench about two o’clock, and after an hour of watching a few Fords, mule-drawn wagons, two delivery trucks, and one buggy with a rotted top come and go on their errands, the boy shook his head. “Not much to do, is there?”

  “If you lived here you’d be working at something.”

  He thought about this. “I’d be working at moving away.”

  A man wearing a flannel shirt buttoned up wrong rode a little quarterhorse past them. Across the street a baker came out and, with floured hands, turned the crank that lowered an awning against the westering sun; he looked at them and dusted his hands one against the other, then turned inside. Behind them, the courthouse door rattled and they turned to see the sheriff come out into the heat and start toward them.

  “How are you?” Sam called out.

  Tabors walked up and put a foot on the bench. “I’ve been on the telephone finding out about your story. Called down to New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and everything checks out. I talked to a Muscarella at the French Quarter precinct and he read me the report.” He looked at August. “Called a lot of people. I hear you play on a big dance boat.”

  “Yessir.”

  “That jass music or what?”

  “Yessir, we try to make people want to dance.”

  The sheriff looked at both of them, as though trying to divine their characters. “If that little girl shows up tomorrow, I have to be satisfied about her identity. Do you have a photo?”

  “I don’t.”

  “No, sir, not on me.”

  “Well, if we wind up with her, I’ll have to perform an interview before I can turn her over, you understand. I can’t just go around giving away children.” He put a hand on August’s shoulder for a moment, and Sam saw how large it was, thick in the palm. The sheriff was a big man, his size partially concealed by his suit, a mild gray pinstripe. He took off his fedora to wipe his forehead, revealing a big, straightsided head, the close-cropped blond hair free of gray. He was built of preventative muscle that would make those he dealt with think about the gravity of their actions and words, or else.

  “You have things set up?” Sam asked him.

  “Everything’s ready,” the sheriff said.

  ***

  LATE THAT NIGHT in the hotel, they again talked across the dark, their voices boxy in the plank-walled room. One side of Sam’s bed was against a low window, and a wet breeze seeped through the screens but did little to allay the breathless heat.

  “Lucky, you think we should’ve sold the shotgun? We could have traded it for a little pistol.”

  Sam turned over on his side, the springs squalling under his weight. “Bud, a pistol in the pocket changes the way a man thinks. Without it, he might not take certain chances. With it, he goes where he shouldn’t or does something that’s not a good idea. He thinks it’s a free pass, but it isn’t.”

  “But it’s kind of a life preserver, isn’t it? A safety device?”

  “If you can’t swim, best not go near the water.”

  “I can see how sometimes one might come in handy, though. Like when a robber comes at you.”

  “Listen, unless you’re trained or some kind of natural-born killer, a criminal will get the best of you every time. You’re surprised, and he’s not, that’s all there is to it. He’ll shoot you through the heart before you get a finger on your pistol.”

  They lay there in silence, the little town as quiet as a shadow. After a while, through the screen came the dull aeolian hum of a steamboat whistle several miles off.

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “It’ll get here, won’t it?”

  “I mean, do you think everything will turn out all right?”

  He knew August understood that in fact things were not that simple. Many things had recently not turned out all right. Sam guessed August wanted what every boy did-assurance, a good night’s sleep, someone on his side. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he said, turning his face to the window and looking down to where a black horse stood in the middle of the street, facing west, untethered and lost and asleep.

  ***

  THE NEXT MORNING they could afford only toast and coffee for breakfast. They washed up and straightened their clothes as best they could, wiping down their shoes with the only cloth in the room. Walking to the edge of town they sold the mule for six dollars and fifty cents to a liveryman who spoke a little French and wanted him as a pet.

  At two o’clock they walked through the sun to the station and waited inside on one of three varnished benches. The agent nodded as though he’d expected them. Fifteen minutes before train time the sheriff came in a
nd sat next to the door, wearing a different suit than the day before, no badge visible. After him, a beefy man dressed like a farmer came in and sat by the other door to the platform, a pistol-shaped bulge in his overalls pocket. The sheriff nodded to him, and they both bent to stare across the street where a man sat on a doorstep looking back at them. After a while, he raised his arm, and the farmer waved back.

  Sam stood up and walked out onto the platform, looked over at the dusty town, and read the train board. South of Woodgulch were three flag stops named Fault, Lacy Switch, and Stob Mill, then the main line interchange at Gashouse. The tri-weekly mixed train was the only one scheduled. He expected that the train was close and thought of the picture that still flashed in his mind, sometimes in his dreams, sometimes when he was trying to remember why he wasn’t with his wife and child in New Orleans. He wanted to fasten in his imagination the little girl’s face, and closing his eyes for a moment saw the familiar cameo and next to it the image of his new son, and then from out of nowhere the girl in France whose house he’d leveled with the errant artillery shell and next to her a dim painful image of his first child. He opened his eyes and tried to remember everything Elsie and August had told him about Lily, the pitch of her voice, the precise color of her hair, and then he heard the train whistle, hoarse and foreboding, and his heart stumbled. He walked inside, and the sheriff told him to stand in the back corner.

  The locomotive was followed by one passenger car and five red, sun-dulled boxcars. The train stopped and the fireman cut off the locomotive and it pulled ahead past a switch, then backed into a siding and ran alongside the train, where it went through another switch and then came forward to pluck the five boxcars away from the coach, chuffing backwards through town to distribute them on sidings. The conductor opened the vestibule door and put down his stepstool, handing the passengers down to the platform. Twelve men got off, local men, the sheriff nodding to each in turn as they walked down the platform to be greeted by those picking them up in Fords or buggies. After the last man was off, the sheriff boarded and walked through the coach. When he came back into the station, he shook his head. “Maybe they’ll come Monday.”

  “We shouldn’t have sold the mule,” August said, his voice cracking. “We’re stuck here.”

  The man wearing overalls stood up. “Sheriff?”

  “You can go back to the office. I know those hogwashers you’re wearing are hot.”

  The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “What about Mike?”

  “Bring him with you. Tell him we’ll try the same thing on Monday.”

  Sam walked out on the platform and stared down the track. He could hear the locomotive huffing around in the yard of the window-frame factory. “I don’t know.”

  Tabors looked in the same direction. “What do you think?”

  “Once they start something, the Skadlocks don’t strike me as the kind that waste time.” Sam turned to the train board. “What’s Fault?”

  “Just a flag stop right over the Louisiana line, though nobody seems to know exactly where that line is. There’s still two farmers that ship a few cans of milk, and a little shop that sends out a half-car of cypress shingles every week. Plus a little barrel operation. There’s just one road that runs through the area and crosses by the station.”

  Sam looked down the crooked rails again. “Where’s the road go?”

  The sheriff squinted an eye. “From the prison on one end to a gate five or six miles miles east of the railroad, where it reaches the highway.”

  “I rode the mule across a straight gravel road when I went down to the Skadlocks’. Was that it?”

  “Had to be.”

  He stared at the board, then walked into the station, where the conductor was taking an order from the agent. “Excuse me, but did you let off two passengers at Fault?”

  The conductor was an old man who arched a thick eyebrow. “And who might you be?”

  “He’s all right, Sidney.” The agent shoved his orders at him under the window grate.

  “As a matter of fact, we did. A gentleman and a lady.”

  “Well dressed? Maybe thirty-five years old?”

  “I’d say so. The lady was taking from a flask right on the aisle and I had to ask her to go to the restroom if she wanted a sip.”

  Sam glanced at the sheriff and August walked up and stood between them.

  “Is there an agent there or what?”

  “Yeah,” the conductor said. “On the days the train comes.”

  Sam shook his head. “Hell, they’re down there right now waiting for the train to come back.”

  The sheriff crossed his arms and looked at his boots. “If they are, well, I’d like to help you, but I can’t. Not my jurisdiction.”

  “Could you telegraph the Louisiana sheriff?”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. I don’t like to talk about the man. Let’s just say he’s never been to Fault.”

  Sam turned to the agent and paid two fares to Fault.

  August watched the agent retrieve the tickets. “You think she’s down there, sure enough?”

  “I can’t take a chance on thinking otherwise.”

  The locomotive turned on the wye in the mill and drifted back to the station with three empty flatcars and coupled to the coach.

  August boarded ahead of Sam and they chose the first seats on the left. “Well, we’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?” the boy said.

  Then Sheriff Tabors stepped on and sat behind them. “Don’t look at me like that. I had the agent write me a pass.”

  “How’ll you get back to town?”

  “My brother-in-law lives at Gashouse. He can ride me up here in his Ford after supper.”

  The whistle let out a growl and the train jerked into motion, swaying and rattling over the branch-line track toward Fault, six miles away. Sam counted telegraph poles and figured they were going twenty miles an hour. The train went past a pasture full of milk cows and plunged into a brake of old-growth pine for a mile or so.

  August looked up at him. “How’s your shoulder?”

  “I try not to think about it.”

  “You won’t do much in a fight.”

  “I don’t guess so.”

  They passed a clearing and he saw a small barrel factory, nothing more than a shed covering an undulating machine and a mud yard stacked with blond-wood kegs bound with metal hoops. A switch ran into the yard, and two flatcars sat loaded in the sun. A mill hand waved and waved like he’d never seen a train before, but the little engine kept on puffing south, leaking steam and wobbling along the kinked rails.

  Snaking out of the pines, the railroad traversed three miles of scrub country, cut-over land crowded with brambles and trash-wood saplings. Soon the engineer was blowing the whistle for the little wooden station, and Sam felt the air brakes grab. He looked at August.

  “Showtime,” the boy said.

  They got up and stepped off onto the platform. A man wearing a tailored suit was standing next to the bench outside the station, a streamer of tickets in his hand. A woman was struggling with Lily, who was angry at being held and kicking her legs, her face red and running tears. “I want Vessy,” she wailed. “Where’s Vessy gone?”

  “Oh, hush up,” the woman snapped. “Aren’t you glad to see us? What’s the matter with you?”

  Sam and August walked up, the sheriff dawdling behind as if he didn’t know anyone there. Sam looked around but saw only an old Ford and no horses. “Where’s Ralph Skadlock?”

  The man looked at him blankly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  August drew close and looked at Lily, smiling.

  “Get away,” the woman told him, a shining alarm rising in her eyes. “What do you want?”

  “That’s my sister. Let her look at me.” And when the child did turn around, she gave him the look of a baby who hadn’t seen her brother in many months. She wriggled out of the woman’s grasp and stood there on the rough planks. Lily shaded her eyes and pe
ered up at him but said nothing. The sheriff made a clucking noise in the back of his mouth and looked away.

  “I know who you are,” Sam said. “You’re the Whites from Graysoner, Kentucky, and that girl was stolen from Krine’s department store in New Orleans.”

  Acy White looked at the conductor, who had his watch in his hand. “Will you board us?”

  The conductor looked at the sheriff and the child. “I can’t stop you from getting on if you got a ticket.”

  “Well, come on, then.” He made a move toward the coach.

  Sam grabbed his arm. “We’ve come for the girl.”

  “Get your hands off me. I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is our daughter, Madeline.” He grabbed Lily by the hand but Sam pulled him away from the train and the two of them stumbled backwards across the platform and fell against the bench. Lily began to shriek and August kneeled next to her as Sheriff Tabors went over and began to separate the men.

  The agent dashed outside, shouting, “Everbody calm down. What’s this all about?”

  Sam had banged his shoulder against the bench, but even the pain couldn’t overcome his worry that the Whites would get Lily on the train and slip away with her. He couldn’t show up empty-handed in New Orleans and have to tell Elsie they’d lost her again. He got untangled and stood up. “You’re not getting away with this. I know what you did, and I’ll follow you until you’re both in the jailhouse.”

  At the word “jailhouse,” Mrs. White reached into her purse and brought out a nickel-plated revolver and pointed it at Sam, her mouth open and trembling.

  “Take it easy,” Sheriff Tabors said. “Let’s sort this thing out.”

  She shifted her aim to the lawman’s forehead. “You stay on the platform, whoever you are, or I’ll blow your brains all over this god-forsaken station.” She was sweating and didn’t look at all well, more like a woman who’d made a monthlong journey on foot.