The Missing

by Tim Gautreaux

  “Damn it,” Acy White said. “Let’s just get on.” He grabbed Lily and took his wife by the arm, and they stepped up into the coach.

  Before getting on, the conductor turned around and faced the platform. “I wouldn’t board if I were you.”

  “I sort of have to,” the sheriff said, pushing back his coat and putting a big hand on his revolver. His face was flaming, and his eyes showed he was furious.

  Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Step over here a minute.” He motioned to the station agent to join them. “Why didn’t this crew pick up those two flatcars of barrels about three miles back?”

  The agent’s eyes moved off, as though he’d been caught in a lie. “It don’t really matter none. They’ll get ’em Monday for sure.”

  “When we passed the switches, those boys in the yard were waving for your train to stop. Can you cut the crew an order to back to that switch and get their cars?”

  The agent pulled his watch. “I reckon. It ain’t like this outfit runs on a tight schedule, if you know what I mean.” He looked at August and the sheriff. “What’s this all about with children and barrels?”

  “I think I just figured it out myself,” the sheriff said. “Just write the order and hand it up to the engineer. It’s Ned running the engine today, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Never mind the conductor, he’s occupied. Come on.” The sheriff motioned them along to the engine and they climbed into the cab. Soon the agent came running alongside and handed up a new flimsy. The engineer pulled the Johnson bar into reverse, tugged three short blasts from his whistle, and began backing the train hard.

  The three of them stood behind the engineer, staying out of the fireman’s way as he shoveled a thin layer of coal on the boiler’s grates. Over the engine noise Sam hollered, “What you gonna do about her pistol?”

  “I think she was just trying to scare us off,” the sheriff told him. “I’d bet she wouldn’t use it.” About three miles from the station, as the barrel mill came into view, he leaned over and hollered something to the engineer above the hiss and chuff of the locomotive. The old man stopped the train, and the three of them slid down the grab irons and walked back to the coach. The sheriff went up first and walked the aisle to where the Whites were sitting with Lily jammed between them, crying silently, her nose running, her eyes cloudy with confusion and grief. He looked around at the five other passengers and told them to stay in their seats.

  “Who are you?” Acy White said with the calm assuredness of one who thinks he’s in charge.

  “These two men say that little girl isn’t yours.”

  The wife began to stand, but the sheriff held up his hand. She looked at it and kept rising, lifting her chin as well. “You three men are the abductors.” She turned to the other passengers. “They’re trying to steal my baby,” she said, her voice nearly screaming. The three farmers and two drummers watched placidly, their heads moving from the sheriff to the finely dressed woman.

  “We need to talk to the little girl,” the sheriff said, reaching for the child.

  Acy White said, “Don’t,” but it was unclear whom he was addressing, and in the next instant the nickel-plated revolver came up in her hand, aimed at the sheriff’s head, and went off. An orange dart of fire and rotten-smelling smoke bloomed into the aisle as the bullet went through a clerestory above a farmer’s head, and the startled sheriff backhanded the gun out of her grasp, sending it over the next seat, where it clattered to the floor.

  “Lady,” he told her, his voice shaking, “assault with a deadly weapon is a felony in Mississippi.” He spread his coat and both Whites focused on the sizeable badge pinned on his vest.

  “But we’re in Louisiana,” Acy White protested, his eyes suddenly sick and weak.

  “Not anymore. I figure we’re a mile inside the state line.” He pulled back his coat on the other side to show his gleaming Colt. “And you’re both under arrest on that charge. Now let me see that child.”

  Sam turned to August. “You’re on, boy.”

  He stepped around the sheriff and pulled her gently into the aisle. “Hey, Lily.”

  The girl looked at him hard and said nothing.

  “Oh, this is ridiculous,” Acy White said. “Conductor, I insist you get this train moving in the direction it’s supposed to. She’s our child. She doesn’t know this young man.”

  “Is your name Lily?” The sheriff bent over her like a cloud of dark cloth, and she said nothing.

  August seemed to show his panic. “Sure it is. Come on, Lil. Tell them who I am.” He stared at her, seemingly frightened by the blankness in her eyes.

  The sheriff stood up and frowned. “If your name isn’t Lily, what is it?”

  In a small voice she said, “Madeline.”

  “I told you,” Willa White cried.

  “Wait a minute.” Sam stepped up and put his hand on August’s neck. “Little girl, do you know what this fellow told me?”

  The girl shook her head slowly, on the verge of tears.

  “He said he taught you a tune from the Sinbad revue in New York and that you could sing the whole thing through.”

  “This is ridiculous,” the wife said. “The child knows proper ballads and some hymns. Do you think she’s a little tramp?”

  Sam held up a hand and backed the sheriff and August away a bit, creating a little stage in the aisle. “I told him I didn’t believe it one bit.”

  “It’s true,” the child said, slowly raising her head.

  “I don’t believe it. Bet you can’t sing a single word of ‘Cleopatra.’”

  Her eyes flashed over at the Whites; then she held her right arm out, looked at the coach’s ceiling, and began singing in a schooled, vibratoless voice:

  You’ve heard of Cleopatra

  Who lived down along the Nile.

  She made a “Mark” of Anthony

  And won him with her smile.

  Her feet began a matching dance step, and the other arm went out.

  They say she was Egyptian

  But I’ve reason to construe

  She was Jewish and Hawaiian

  With a dash of Irish too.

  The sheriff was smiling broadly as if he’d heard the tune many times and thought it the best thing ever written. The child paced up the aisle and kept singing, stepping out of her captivity into her gift, no longer in the aisle of a sooty train but onstage in her mind, the one she’d been born to.

  When she strolled with bold Mark Anthony

  On Egypt’s yellow sands

  You could see that she was Jewish

  By the motion of her hands

  She would shake her hands and shoulders off-

  Lily gave her shoulders a shimmy, and an old farmer down the aisle guffawed and clapped his hands.

  “All right, all right,” the sheriff said. “Who taught you that Jolson song, little girl?”

  She stopped and pointed dramatically at August. “Gussie. My brother there.”

  ***

  THE CONDUCTOR allowed the train to back the rest of the way to Woodgulch. The Whites were taken off the coach against their loud, wailing protests and threats, and many townspeople turned out to see the splendidly dressed couple led through the streets in handcuffs.

  Before the train left again, a sheriff’s deputy boarded the coach and walked up to where the three of them were seated. “Sheriff said he’s calling for warrants in New Orleans and Kentucky both, that whoever wants ’em most can have ’em. After he gets through with ’em, of course. He’ll get in touch so’s y’all can be deposed down the line.”

  Sam relaxed against a window and said, “Good news.”

  The deputy leaned down, smelling of Old Spice and sweet chew. “Did that crazy woman really take a shot at our high sheriff?”

  “That’s a fact, yeah.”

  “Damn. That’ll be a lively trial.”

  The whistle blasted a farewell to Woodgulch, and the deputy lumbered down to the vestibule.
In seconds the coach jerked forward and Sam glanced over at August and then down at Lily, who was sitting between them eating a sandwich the agent had given her out of his lunchbox. He gazed out the window glad for each foot of travel the train was making toward home. The longer he looked, the more he imagined that he could see his wife and child, and past them Elsie Weller and, all the way downtown, Krine’s vast store. He relaxed for the first time in months, but as the engine pulled into the inter-change at Gashouse, where they would switch trains, Lily sat up straight, looked at August, and asked, “Why didn’t Father come to get me?”

  Her brother turned his head toward the aisle, the finality of the gesture proof that the news would not come from him.

  Sam bent over and said, “Your mother will explain that, darling.”

  “But why did you come, and Gussie, but not my daddy?”

  He gave her shoulder a squeeze, surprised by how small it was. He’d been looking for her for so long he expected her to be larger than life. She was just a baby. “Hey, we’ll travel down to New Orleans and your mother will tell you everything you need to know. We’ll go down to the Café du Monde and eat some of those square doughnuts buried in confection sugar. You’ll like that.” He kept talking to keep her mind on the future, but he and August had been so busy in the act of finding her that they’d forgotten what she didn’t know. He hoped she was too young to take it as hard as August had. He hoped she was like him, with no memory whatsoever of a father, but he knew that wasn’t true. Lily would see an empty chair at her mother’s table for the rest of her life, a space lacking words and songs that were her birthright.

  They changed trains at the junction, riding to Baton Rouge, then catching another for New Orleans. It was dark on this last leg, and Sam slept with Lily in his lap, the smell of soft coal blowing through the windows and a scrim of cypresses sailing by. In his dream, he himself was in someone’s lap, a man, judging from the smell of kerosene and wood smoke and a little gale of beer breathed over his head; his stomach felt full, and a callused hand pressed down on it as though holding a jewel secure.

  When he woke up, the conductor was walking the aisle announcing New Orleans. August looked at him closely.

  “What is it?” Sam asked.

  “Your eyes are wet. Smoke bother you that much?”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  THEY WALKED IN the heat down to the ferry landing, taking the boat to Algiers, where the Ambassador was having work done to the rudders. The three of them found Elsie, down on her knees, recoating the café floor, her hair half-unpinned, her washed-out blue dress wrinkled. She had the good sense not to charge at Lily all at once, but got up calmly, wiping her hands on a rag. Bending in front of the child, she hugged her, and Lily received her light kisses, but studied this tired woman wearing a dusty housedress sticky with varnish and smelling of turpentine. Sam could tell she was confused about who Elsie was.

  Elsie stared into her eyes. “Lily, I love you.”

  “I know.”

  “Have you forgotten me?” Elsie’s voice faltered and her eyes grew wide, waiting for the answer, which was slow in coming.

  “They told me you went to heaven. I didn’t know you could come back.”

  “No, no, I didn’t go anywhere. I know you don’t understand, but you were stolen, and we’re so happy to have you back.”

  “Did Father go anywhere?”

  Elsie stood up and looked at August, who shook his head. She sighed. “You boys give me some time with her.”

  The men sidestepped along a strip of unvarnished floor and got into the kitchen, where they fixed sandwiches. August seemed tired to the bone and worried, the kind of worry that tattoos the face.

  “Well, she’s back,” Sam said.

  August looked at him. “Is she?”

  Sam took a bite and worked his brain along with his jaws, thinking of all the time that was lost to everybody, but especially to Lily. The life of a young child is compressed existence, and a month is like a year. He tried to call up one day from his own childhood and remembered a time when he was eight, after cane-grinding season, when his uncle Claude took him on his first rabbit hunt. He still knew every detail, from loading the little shotgun he was allowed to use, to his uncle’s hunting jokes in French, to the first shot and kill, to the opening with a pocketknife of the bright red world inside the animal as he was taught to clean it for the table and, that night, the rabbit stew itself. One day was intact and as long as a whole book in his recollection. If it was like that for Lily, then she’d been gone for years.

  ***

  HE CAUGHT a streetcar home with the last seven cents in his pocket, and when he walked in at ten o’clock his wife sat him down in the kitchen and began to warm some meatless potato stew, moving quietly so as not to wake the baby. He summarized the events of the past few days, and she touched his forehead and kissed him there.

  “You found her,” she said, her breath a current in his hair. “It’s finally over.”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “We can go back to like we were before, Sam.”

  She was as thin as a pretty ghost. He wasn’t at all sure that the months of searching could be ignored and written off, that time would gradually diminish everything like a sad town passed through on a speeding train, the glimpse of it fading into insignificance. “That would be nice,” he said.

  She brought him his plate and put her arms around him where he sat. “I can’t believe it.”

  The next day he got up with Christopher, changed him, and held him in his lap for a long time. They ate breakfast together, his son sitting on his legs and grabbing at everything. At eight o’clock he said to the baby, “Time to go start making some money so I can feed that hungry mouth.” He put on his good suit and took a quarter from his wife’s purse and rode the car down to Canal Street. Inside Krine’s main entrance, he stopped dead and looked around at the ceilings and plasterwork, smelled the dye in the new clothes and the light, polished smell of the glossy counters, inhaling it all like medicine. He waved at Gladys over in the men’s department and took the elevator up to the main office.

  A new receptionist was in Krine’s anteroom. She greeted Sam with a neutral expression and asked him to take a seat while she went in to announce him. He sat there patiently, ready for the main floor.

  The receptionist motioned him into the inner office and closed the door.

  The owner was behind his desk, leaning back in his chair, one hand fisted on a stack of papers. “Hello, Mr. Simoneaux.”

  “Mr. Krine.” Sam waited to be asked to sit down. After a long moment, it was obvious that he wouldn’t be asked to.

  “It’s been a while. I’m surprised to see you, in fact.”

  “I just came by to say I found the little girl and returned her to her mother.”

  Krine looked at him but said nothing. They both seemed to be listening to the regulator clock on the wall next to the window. “I’m glad for her,” he finally said.

  Sam grinned. “I was wondering if I could get my old job back.” He thought it odd that he had to explain what he wanted. They had an agreement.

  Krine didn’t blink, and that frightened him.

  “You’ve taken your own sweet time solving this problem. I thought you might take a month, at most. When you didn’t come back, I hired a good man to take your place. As a matter of fact I hired two, and they’ve worked out very well for us.”

  Sam swallowed several times, feeling a chill in the center of his chest. “I thought we had a deal,” he said faintly.

  “You know, I found out recently that that child’s father was killed as a result of trying to rescue her. Is that right?”

  He looked at the clock, wondering how many minutes he had left in the office. A drop of sweat ran down from behind an ear. “More or less.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. And I’m sorry to say we don’t need you as a floorwalker.”

  He swallowed again and looked at the carpet, trying to make sense
of the design. “Do you have any positions at all?”

  “The big stores in town are cutting back a little. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing?” He held out a hand, palm up.

  Krine picked up a folder of paperwork and stood. “Nothing,” he said, like a shot, and the meeting was over. “We have your number. If we ever need a floorwalker, we’ll call you.”

  He took the elevator down and walked around the first floor as if he were shopping, touching the bright ties, the glossy shoes. He was tempted to straighten a rack of shoe-polish tins but pulled his hand back at the last moment. Across the store, one of the new floorwalkers was chatting with a well-dressed woman who’d come out of the café. Sam wanted a cup of the wonderful coffee the café brewed, but it was free only for employees. He turned around once in an aisle, taking a last look, then headed for the main doors. On the street he felt vaguely like an exile, glanced back once at the store’s Italianate façade, and began walking home. Three blocks off Canal Street, he remembered the Ambassador was leaving port in two days, and he changed direction down to the ferry landing. He wouldn’t play piano in a gangster’s bar or carry a gun for a bank or the city, so second mate, if he could get it, would suit him fine.

  ***

  HIS WIFE’S FACE fell, and she sat down hard on the sagging mahogany settee in the front room. “You’ll be gone months at a time. I need you here.”

  “You need the rent paid. The grocery bill.”

  “I can get a little from Mom.”

  “Hey, sometimes the boat lays over and I can take a train home for a couple days. Lots of the schedule’s down South.”

  “And you’ll eat up your salary on train tickets and meals. Lucky, why can’t you just play music in town?”

  He looked at the bright spot against the wall where his piano had been, a fine, booming instrument he’d bought with his mustering out pay. “I can’t get a good piano spot. This is New Orleans, darling. Everybody plays better than I do.”

  She turned away, then leaned back against him. “What’ll they pay?”