The Missing

by Tim Gautreaux

  The room was warm and smelled of sickness. Elsie lay on the bottom bunk, and he took the small chair between it and the sink. Even in the light of the dim bulb he could see that her complexion was dark. She breathed hard, her mouth open, and when he reached to her forehead, the fever scorched his palm. She opened her eyes and coughed, rivers moving in her chest. “Lucky,” she said breathlessly. “Can you help watch the kids till I get better?”

  It broke his heart to see her like this, and he remembered her in the spotlight onstage, all beauty and talent and music. “That won’t be a problem, girl.”

  Her head rolled away from him. “Hell of a mess.”

  “You’ll be all right.”

  “I guess this is one thing I can’t blame on you.”

  He looked at the enameled deck. “You seen August?”

  “He just left. I don’t want him in here too long.”

  “He’s getting better with his horn every day.”

  She seemed desperate for breath. A crescent of blood glowed in her right nostril. “If I can’t work this season.” She stopped and swallowed. “The only one who’ll take Lily is Ted’s brother.”

  “You better rest.”

  “No. Ted’s brother is a saloonkeeper. Bad, bad temper, Lucky. It’ll be terrible for the kids.”

  He waited for her to go on, but she was completely exhausted and her eyes had drifted closed. A big tow went by the little window, the boat’s mast light winking like a shooting star, and the Ambassador started to rock slightly. After a few minutes he stood up, unsure of what to do, and in the dim room her voice came, all the music out of it.

  “His name’s Bruton.”

  He bent down over her face, appalled by what the sickness had done. “Who?”

  “Don’t let him have them, Lucky,” she gasped.

  “Okay,” he whispered.

  Her eyelids parted like dark wounds. “Don’t let him have them.”

  “Go to sleep.” He touched her forehead again, where the skin was as warm as a lamp shade. Glancing around the room, he searched for anything that might distract her from the suffering.

  Suddenly, she arched her back and cried out, as from a dream, “It’s all your fault.”

  ***

  HE WAITED at the rail outside her door until Gladys returned, and then he watched the river, still broken with the passing of the last boat, shattered like his feelings. He wondered if there was a physics to one’s mistakes, a chain of reactions that ran away toward infinity like waves or a sounding whistle chasing along a watercourse for miles and miles. And what could he do but make right his mistakes when he could, or unable to do that, catch some other fellow’s mistake and fix it? Across the river one of the last packet boats serving St. Louis rang its deck bell, the heavy notes skating across the water and up the sloped and cobbled bank into the city. He watched it leave, and then Gladys came out carrying a pail.

  “What time will the ambulance come for her?”

  “They said daybreak.”

  “Will all three of them fit into it?”

  She was walking away to the stern, but stopped and turned to him. “Two. The fireman’s done crossed over.”

  ***

  THE NEXT MORNING started off warm and humid. The mates and kitchen staff still able to work disinfected the café, mopping everything down with bleach. The ambulance came and left while Sam was swabbing under the tables. Later, he went down to the bandstand and began playing the piano. August walked in with his hands in his pockets. He was letting his hair grow and it was oiled back out of his way and tucked over his pale ears.

  Lily dawdled behind him, her face still four years old, oblivious, carrying a coloring book folded over a single-row box of crayons. She opened it on a table and pulled the chair out with both hands, then kneeled on its seat to begin coloring. “I don’t have a brown,” she complained.

  “Use black,” Sam told her.

  August leaned against the piano. “Lucky,” he whispered, “what do you think about Mom?”

  “I think she should’ve gone to the hospital a couple days ago.”

  “I know. I’m scared.”

  The statement froze his fingers, and he put his hands in his lap. “You saying your prayers?”

  “I’ve been praying for two days straight.”

  Sam closed his eyes a moment. He wasn’t August’s father, and the Wellers weren’t his responsibility. He would help Elsie as far as he could, but ultimately that wouldn’t amount to much. “You want me to go up the hill with you to see her?”

  He shook his head. “I’m scared I’ll catch it and give it to Lily. The cabin boy that died wasn’t but twelve years old, and strong as a country ox.”

  “Zach?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s kind of scary, all right. Scary as hell.”

  “The captain says we won’t go anywhere for ten days, and that’s if nobody else comes down hard with it.”

  “Good practice time, sounds like.”

  August sat down on the bench beside him, facing away from the keyboard. “I don’t want Lily to wind up with Uncle Bruton.” He looked over at his sister. “I’ll kidnap her myself if it comes to that.”

  “Your mom’s a tough lady. She’ll pull through.”

  “God, I hope so.” He slumped forward and closed his eyes.

  Sam tried to remember if he had ever been that worried. When he thought of the sickness that took his first child, the baby’s trembling eyelids, his blue lips, he knew that he had.

  “You go on and take a walk. Get your mind on something else.”

  August stood up. “Can you watch her?”

  “Well, I guess so.”

  He walked forward toward the main stairs and Lily saw him go, then turned to Sam, a crayon bearing down on a page. “I’m hungry.”

  The piano key cover snapped down like a fact. “Let’s get you a sandwich in the café.”

  “It smells bad.” She pinched her nose.

  “That smell is medicine to get rid of the sickness.”

  “It always smells bad.”

  He took her by the hand, which was sticky and soot-smudged. “We’ll wash our hands and go get a sandwich.”

  “I don’t want to wash my hands.”

  “Come on and let me show you how it’s done.”

  ***

  BEFORE SUPPER, they left Lily with Gladys and walked to the hospital, and at the main desk, when they asked to see Elsie, the receptionist called someone on the phone. When they saw a tall nurse walk down the hall toward them, a woman with iron-gray hair and a solemn stride, when they looked at her eyes and the way she held her hands, one over another in front, when they saw her face, a face good at telling the worst, they knew Elsie was dead.

  August collapsed in a chair and covered his face with his hands. Sam spoke with the nurse for a few moments, then stood staring down the long hall after her retreating steps. He remembered visiting Elsie sick in bed, and that was hard enough. He didn’t want to see her now. When he asked August if he wanted to, the boy trembled and shook his head.

  “I’m scared.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, I don’t want to.”

  For himself, he chose to remember her in a close-fitting gown the color of pearl, bouncing the notes of “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine” as the hundreds on the dance floor quick-stepped and the river breeze streamed through the windows and the shoreline moved past like the dreary real thing it was, the thing made of smokestacks and shabby houses and overworked souls, all gilded by Elsie’s gliding voice, her flash of blond hair, the spark of hard work showing in her song, in her eyes. He wanted to dwell in the remembering, but he was obliged instead to turn to August and pull him out of the chair. “I’m sorry, Gussie. Cry all you want.” And the boy did, against Sam’s cheap second-mate coat. After a while he walked him down the echoing hallway, trying hard to think of something to say, and in the entry, he pulled him aside and told him, “Never forget that you had her
for fifteen years. A lot of kids never had anything like those fifteen years.”

  Captain Stewart paid the expenses for the body to be shipped to Cincinnati. Sam went up with August and Lily, who had cried a little without understanding why. After the burial Mass, there was a family meeting, some shouting on August’s part, bitter accusations and dismissals from Ted’s brothers, quiet resignation from Elsie’s aged parents, and the result was that when Lucky got off the train days later, broke and hungry in St. Louis’s grand station, August stepped off behind him, Lily asleep in his arms.

  ***

  IN MID-JUNE the boat was far north of Hannibal playing an isolated town, a place of machine shops and foundries stretching up the mountainside. The afternoon crowds were mostly families of running and screaming children, and Sam had to keep an eye on Lily to make sure she wasn’t knocked down a stairway. He played piano for the two o’clock and convinced her to sit beside him on the bench and turn pages, though he knew the music, and it didn’t matter if she turned two pages at once. Sometimes she wandered away in the middle of a song, and he’d have to play looking over his shoulder, and one time when she’d wandered out among the dancers and gotten bumped to the floor, he had to stop playing and charge out to drag her back up onto the bandstand as she bawled and rubbed her calf.

  For the night trip, the boat filled up with local men and their women. Sam worked the stage plank asking for weapons and surveying the crowd. The men were all muscle from working ten-hour shifts wrestling cylinder heads and piston rods, but only two surrendered anything, a jackknife and a dollar pistol. The ones who strutted onto the dance deck either took seats at tables or leaned against the bulkheads, all of them staring grimly at the band. When Sam came up and looked around, the hair rose on his neck. The crowd stared as if they’d never seen Negroes holding anything other than a shovel or a wrench. He guessed they hadn’t heard much jazz and distrusted any music that didn’t sound like the conventional tunes played on their Victrolas. The orchestra was playing a grinding rendition of “Sud Bustin’ Blues,” and no one was dancing. It wasn’t clear that anyone knew how.

  He walked over to the trumpeter when the piece was over. “Hey, we got a boatload of rubes tonight,” he said, his back to the floor. “Can you do your hotel stuff?”

  The man nodded, wiped his face with a voluminous white handkerchief, and scanned the crowd. “They don’t look like no dance club, do they?”

  “Nope.”

  “We can’t play no polka music.”

  “Just dumb it down.”

  “Play like the day band?” The trumpeter’s smile was wide and bright.

  “Give me a break.”

  He walked over to the main staircase and down to start his rounds on the main deck. The boat was barely a hundred feet from shore when an argument broke out in the forward lounge and he got sandwiched between two men dressed in heavy denim shirts who were trying to tear them off each other. Closing his eyes, he pushed into the muffled flailing of their fists, but two enormous hands grabbed him from behind and tossed him against a bulkhead, the concussion a star-flashing impact that sent him sliding to the floor. He tried to get up but found a large soggy boot pressing on his chest. “Let ’em at it,” a voice above him said, cramped by a wad of tobacco. Someone else put a brogan on his ankle, and he lay down and gave up. After a while he felt a sticky sensation on the back of his head and realized he was bleeding. A whole wicker table arced in the air above him, and somewhere glass was breaking and rattling on the deck like gravel. Someone’s thumb must have found a windpipe or eyesocket because an ungodly squalling ensued and the room began to reshuffle, but he suddenly wasn’t there.

  ***

  HE WOKE UP on the deck outside his cabin door, a wadded bedsheet under his head. Down below he could hear hundreds of shouts and the orchestra playing a waltz. Above him were stars in one eye, nothing in the other, and in the next instant he was in his upper bunk, Charlie’s hand drifting above him holding a rag soaked in alcohol. A streak of fire running around the back of his skull from ear to ear roused him.

  “Damn it to hell, that hurts!”

  “I’ll bet it does. Glad to see you’re coming around.”

  He put a hand over his eyes. “What happened?”

  “Well, it’s over now. You been out four hours.”

  He blinked and rolled his head. “Where’s Lily?”

  “She’s in with a maid and the maid ain’t too happy about it.”

  “I can’t…Big fight?”

  “You could say that. There’ll be some carpenter work to do tomorrow and a hell of a lot of mop work.”

  Charlie opened the door and looked out at the paintless buildings of the town. “You dizzy?”

  “I don’t think so.” He touched the bandage Charlie had put on him. “You’re not going back out?”

  “Still gotta work. You can’t handle this.”

  “Handle what?”

  “Coming back from Talbot Island a motorboat pulled alongside with running lights and all and paced us about three feet out. The guy driving it was drunk, I guess, and was cussing at some jugheads on the top deck. Well, they went in the café and picked up a slot machine and threw it over the rail at him. Went straight through the bottom of his nice boat, and he sank like a woodstove.”

  Sam lay back, deciding to stay in bed. “You meeting with the law?”

  Charlie stepped through the door into the night. “It’s a mess, all right. A real mess.”

  He lay there listening to the rasp of brooms overhead, the rattling of bucket bails, the crash of mop water and slops in the river. His head pulsed, and an iron taste rose up the back of his throat. He heard distant sawing and nailing in the night as the carpenters propped up the boat’s power of illusion, and finally, he slept.

  At daybreak he heard his cabin door open and close, and he thought Charlie had come in.

  “I’m hungry.” It was Lily standing under his bunk in a wrinkled baby dress, barefoot, her face dirty.

  “Sweetie, I’m sick.”

  Lily looked at him a long time and said again, her voice absolute, “I’m hungry.”

  He slowly sat up and waited for the cramped room to stop drifting off to his left. He pulled on his pants and looked into the mirror at a black eye, then began to wash up and shave.

  Lily lay in Charlie’s bunk and watched him. “Why doesn’t somebody come up and bring us something to eat?”

  “Girlie, you been living in the wrong hotel.”

  “What?”

  He put on a shirt and looked at her. She was filthy and smelled sour. “Where are your clean clothes?”

  “In number fourteen.”

  “Where’s August?”

  “I tried to wake him.”

  They walked down to the cabin she shared with August, and he rummaged through her few things until he found a clean set of clothes. August lay like a stone and didn’t move. Sam gathered up four sooty little dresses and some underwear and brought her back to his cabin, where he gathered his dirty clothes. In the boat’s laundry they waited for a wringer machine to come free, and while their clothes were washing he got them breakfast in the café. On the starboard side, workmen were replacing a section of bulkhead that looked as if someone had blown it out with a cannon.

  Back in the laundry he sent their things through the wringer and hung everything to dry on the temporary lines strung on the aft deck between trips. Then he looked closely at the girl. “When’s the last time you washed yourself?”

  Lily shrugged.

  “Do you know how to wash yourself, or does August do it?”

  She rubbed her nose. “I can wash if you soap the cloth.”

  He led her back to her cabin, where August was snoring, drew a sink of water, put her on a stool, soaped up a washcloth, and told her to take everything off and scrub herself good all over, then rinse the rag clean and wipe off the soap and put on her clean clothes. He would wait for her out on deck.

  “I can’t put on my socks
when my feets are wet.”

  “Just come out dressed and I’ll put your socks on.”

  He sagged against the rail, something in his head spiking against his skullbones, a pain that should have been fatal.

  In half an hour she came out and the little dress was on backwards. One of the cooks was coming down the Texas rail. “Oh, for gosh sake,” she said, pulling the dress off and turning it around on her. She cast Sam a malevolent look and walked on, saying over her shoulder, “You got to watch that baby, now.”

  They went onto the dance floor, and he sat at the piano’s keyboard and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the pain at the back of his head. He felt her climb onto the bench, and he kept his eyes closed.

  “You sleeping, Mr. Lucky?”

  He began sorting through the books of music on the rack and found a simple waltz. “Do you want to sing?”

  He knew she wouldn’t. He had tried to coach her on a few songs that August said she knew, but when she sang, she dragged the notes and ignored the timing. Sometimes she just whined. Neither one of them knew what was wrong with her. “Look at that mark. It’s an F. Can you find F on the piano?”

  She pressed down middle F, the single note buzzing out over the hardwood.

  “When the mark is in the blank line above, it’s an A, and then a C.” He went on, and she touched the notes. He looked into her corn-flower eyes. “Is a sharp up or down?”

  “Up.”

  “How much did your father teach you?”

  “Those notes. F-A-C-E and E-G-B-D-F. He’s going to teach me to count.”

  He was sick to his stomach and dizzy, and the bandage on the back of his head felt hot, but when Lily said this, he spiraled down into a new dimension of pain-of darkness, even. “Who is?” he whispered, putting an arm around her.

  She looked at her shoes. “Nobody.”

  He felt in her posture some notion that had not occurred to her before, that people disappear in a manner she might never understand. She began to cry gently, but he knew she didn’t really comprehend why she was sad. Someone had told her that her father had gone to heaven, then someone told her that her mother had gone to the same place, and none of it made the least sense to her because she was in the eternal present tense of childhood where the motion of life keeps your mind busy, and the future and the past don’t even exist. He felt sick for her, but terrible for himself as well, for the thin shoulder he cupped in his right hand might have been his own sister’s or brother’s, and then he was crushed by a deeper understanding of what he had lost back before he knew what loss was. He didn’t know such a feeling could come so late, and to keep from crying in front of her, he grabbed a music book and started playing the first piece that opened up, a waltz called “Falling Waters,” and he began explaining the three-four rhythm. Lily’s head raised up and scanned the page. It was a simple piece with single bass notes, and she crossed behind him and stood on his left, poking out G and C more or less in time, watching his fingers complete the chords. He began to have the strange feeling that they were playing into the future, a place where there was no baggage to carry.