The Missing (11 page)

Elsie seemed alarmed. “Did it work?”

“Dried me right up.” He gave her a smile. “Now quit worrying about everything.”

SOME OF THE MOOSE LODGE MEN had come on board already drunk and eager to fight with members of their fellow lodge from across the river. Sam shoved four men apart for twenty minutes and spent another half hour wrestling two of them into the brig. By the end of the run he was tired and his shoulder was sprung, but the captain told him to play for the two o’clock trip. He barely had time to sew his vest buttons back on before climbing the bandstand and catching the downbeat from the drummer. The first tune was “Japanese Sandman,” jacked up in tempo, and he felt he was an eighth beat behind everyone else, playing uphill into the alto sax and clarinet duel in the middle. Several young Vicksburg couples began dancing badly, tripping, kicking shins on their turns, and Sam hung on. The next tune was a waltz, and then he got on top of the following fox-trot and stayed there. As the dance deck heated up, sweat began to sting his eyes; then the boat pulled out and the breeze came through, fluttering the bleached tablecloths. Between tunes he watched the floor, looked at faces, tried to read minds, studied the men lurking against the white-enameled stanchions, hoping to see Ted, maybe a Skadlock, or just someone whose face showed inexplicable guilt or longing. He imagined that by now the little girl could be anywhere on the boat’s downbound route, because that was the one connection he understood, that someone saw her and had to have her, someone near the river’s fogs, within reach of the big boat’s whistle and the pull of the blasting calliope.

At the break, Elsie Weller came up next to the keyboard and told him that Ted hadn’t been on the train. Her eyes were red and she was twisting one of the boat’s cloth napkins into a rope.

“Aw, he’s probably coming up to Greenville. We’ll be there tomorrow.”

“He would’ve sent a telegram, Lucky.”

The drummer gave a rim tap and he turned to a new piece on the piano’s music rack. “Maybe the office was closed. There’s all sorts of reasons he might be late or didn’t send a wire.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

He began an intro to “I Used to Love You but It’s All Over Now,” sorry that this was in the rotation. It was a new song, and he hoped she didn’t know the title. She adjusted her little waitress crown and walked bravely out a starboard door with her back straight, and he remembered that she was a better musician than he was and deserved more than a kitchen job, that she was missing two pieces of her life, and he was missing one. His fingers struggled up a knoll of unfamiliar notes and behind him the cornetist frowned. Sam began to think of the day his son died, how Linda was inconsolable, and no matter how much he comforted her, she continued to shake with the loss. He sometimes forgot that she had as big a hole in her life as he did, and suddenly he missed her very much. A strange thing began to happen under his fingertips: he was paying less attention to his music, and his timing improved. He began to feel the notes instead of just reading them off the page. Tilting his head, he listened to himself get better as he went on, feeling sad enough to cry while making the dancers step and spin, and smile.

FOR THE MOONLIGHT trip he counted the gate at the stage plank, earnestly checking faces, watching up the bluff for Ted to get out of a cab. After loading everybody, he patrolled the dance floor. The Vicksburg people were pretty well behaved, though suspicious of the black orchestra, but a group from the big sawmill in Yokena had brought in an intolerable number of half-pints of 150-proof moonshine, and in midriver several rattling fistfights broke out. There was something wrong with their liquor, and toward the end of the excursion people were vomiting over the deck rails and under tables on the dance floor. One balding man wearing overalls went berserk, and it took a waiter, Charlie Duggs, and two busboys to restrain him from jumping into the paddlewheel. By the time the boat returned to the dock, Sam, Duggs, and Aaron Swaneli had to turn their uniforms over to a maid to be sewn back together for the next day’s run in Greenville.

That night while the boat was under way August helped load coal for three hours, pushing a wheelbarrow up and down a narrow plank to a dark coal flat tied to the side of the boat. He was ankle deep in black dust and shoveling in the light of a guttering kerosene lantern, humming a new piece the black orchestra had played twice in a row because the dancers wouldn’t quit hollering for it. When the bunkers were full, he threw a few shovelfuls into the firebox and saw that the coal was terrible stuff, half dirt, and he and the other firemen could raise barely enough steam to operate the engines. He fought the fires all night, trying to break up clinkers and get enough air through the coal so it would burn hot, and by the time they landed, before dawn, when his mother came down to tell him where the railroad station was in Greenville, he was too tired to stand, able only to lean on his shovel handle and listen, his eyes the only bright spots on him.

SAM WAS IN HIS CABIN matching Charlie Duggs snore for snore when he was awakened by a knock. He found Elsie outside, teary eyed and begging him to go up to the station and check the schedules because August was dead on his feet and needed an hour’s washing besides. She was already late for the kitchen, and receiving his nod, ran down the steps. His shoulder was aching and he was so exhausted he swayed like a drunk. Pulling on mismatched pants and shirt, he stepped out on the wet deck. The boat itself was snoring steam into the gray dawn as he crossed the levee into town.

The night agent was at the end of his shift, and his eyes were bloodshot under his visor. He glanced at Sam’s clothes and made him wait at the ticket window a long time before coming over and telling him that the connecting up from St. Frank was due in at one-thirty.

Sam made a face and looked over the agent’s shoulder at the regulator clock.

“Something else?” The man had a nasty sneer.

Sam took a breath. “You hear of anybody in town bringing a three-year-old girl into their family?”

“You from down in French country?”

“I might still sound like I am but I live in New Orleans. Off Magazine Street.”

“One of my brothers lives in New Orleans, but he don’t like it. What kind of little girl you mean, like a orphan or something?” The fat agent snorted. “Like people around here need another mouth to feed.”

Sam blinked himself more awake. He had to think straight. “I bet everybody in town goes through this station. We had a baby girl stolen from a musical act on the excursion boat on the trip downriver. I was hoping something might have caught your eye.”

The agent cocked his big bald head in the little barred window. “Everybody’s got some big tragedy to deal with sooner or later. Are you not old enough yet to know that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not.”

“And why are you even interested in these other folks’ kid? You owe them something?”

“Mister, it’s a long story, but I’m sort of responsible she got stole.”

The agent looked him over carefully. “You just trying to get rid of a little guilty feeling, maybe?”

Sam didn’t know what to say to this. He already suspected that most human action was self-serving but now wondered if there wasn’t something beyond the selfishness, a possibility that interested him. “That and maybe something more.”

The agent stared at a wad of waybills in his hand, but he was not reading them. “I’d like to wipe my ass with these things.” He took a long breath and let it out, sounding like a man who’d come to a hard decision. “You say it’s a little girl?”

“About three years old. They cut her hair short to disguise her, but some weeks have gone by.”

“So she’d look like a boy, maybe.”

“I guess so.”

The agent met his gaze and looked away. “All I can do is keep my eyes and ears open.”

“I’m a mate on the excursion boat, the Ambassador. If you find something, anything, send me a wire and I’ll pay for it.”

From under the window, the agent picked up a hook stuck full with waybills. “In the unlikely event that I do, it’ll be from Morris Hightower. That’s me. But nobody I know would steal somebody’s kid.” He wet his lips with his tongue. “Now, if it was a boy, some mud farmer might be after making him a hand. But who’d want a girl?”

Sam bent at the knees to look under the man’s visor. “She was pretty and could sing like a bird.”

Morris Hightower frowned and pulled the paper bills apart angrily. He was tired, sedentary, probably wouldn’t be alive in five years and knew it. “Partner, there never was a bird that made a nickel off a song.”

* * *

THE TEN O’CLOCK TRIP was a field day for several grammar schools, and no music was required, so he haunted the railings, keeping the children from falling into the river and away from the hot smokestacks on the upper deck. After lunch, the boat landed and he walked back to the station to wait for Ted, who wasn’t on that day’s train either. He sat down on the long bench and stared south along the tracks. The Skadlocks were dishonest in all ways and coldhearted as well, but he didn’t know if they were killers. Throughout his life people had accused him of never suspecting the worst of people, but he didn’t see any need to without reason. The Skadlocks had let him leave safely. But then, he hadn’t threatened them, had tried to deal with them on their own level. And he wasn’t the desperate father of a child they’d stolen away. Down at the landing a donkey engine’s whistle went off like a woman’s scream, bouncing away from the buildings in town and spreading west over the Arkansas wilderness. He hoped more than anything that Ted hadn’t done something stupid.

After he walked back to the boat, he went to the kitchen and asked Elsie if Ted had brought any weapons with him. She told him about his knife and pistol, and he looked at the floor and shook his head.

“You didn’t expect him to go off without so much as a penknife, did you?” She picked up a crewman’s order and headed for the out door. Then she stopped and studied his expression. “You think he’s been hurt?”

“No. Not that. I bet he went ahead to Memphis. The train I met was packed full of Confederate veterans coming in for the two-thirty trip. He might’ve been forced to ride the main line all the way up. I wouldn’t worry until tomorrow, or whenever it is we get to Memphis.”

She set the plates down. “You checked for telegrams?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t suppose we could call the law down there and see if there’s been any trouble?”

The calliopist on the roof began to belt out “Camptown Races,” the whistles calling out over the county.

“The law down there isn’t real law,” he told her. “And the Skadlocks live where hawks couldn’t find ’em at noon.”

She closed her eyes. “I’m so scared.”

“I know. We’ll talk after I go down and play some Stephen Foster for the veterans.”

She shook her head, roused herself. “All right.”

“This time I’ll let the right hand know what the left hand’s doing.”

She didn’t smile. “Okay, Lucky.”

There was no one on the dance floor for the afternoon trip, the old soldiers staying as far away as possible from the music so they could retell their legends. Sam saw many one-legged fellows crowing about in long white beards. Some of them drew maps in the air with their crooked fingers to bring old battles back; in their brittle memories they rode horses dead so long their bones had gone to powder in the deep clay fields of northern Virginia.

The band knocked off, the musicians set free to wander with the customers, and as he walked along the starboard rail, Sam noted the missing arms, the eye patches, the nervous twitches. Most of the men were animated, wore their old uniforms or some version of those gray markings, but he wondered about the ones who’d stayed at home, who wanted nothing of the remembering, who’d gotten in the mail a two-cent postcard announcing the veterans’ excursion and thrown it in the stove and then maybe looked out the window, gladdened by the fact that people weren’t shooting each other down in the street. Charlie Duggs had been to France and had killed a few Germans, and twice Lucky had to drop down out of his bunk in darkness and shake him out of a nightmare. The first time, Duggs was calling out, “Not that, not that,” one leg thrashing out of his bunk, his body vibrating in the memory-stoked heat of despair. Sam had put a hand on his chest, feeling the spasms die off like the vibrations of a departing train.

“What?” Charlie had gasped.

“Bad dream, bud?”

He was quiet for a moment, gulping deep breaths of the stale air in the little cabin. “The worst,” he’d said.

* * *

THE MOONLIGHT carried eight hundred, and Sam studied faces at the stage plank, not sure what he was looking for, maybe nothing, maybe Ninga Skadlock stumping up the ramp. Later, on the dance floor, he saw a surly crowd stand well back from the bandstand and regard the black orchestra with bovine mistrust. No one from the scowling, slouching group danced for two numbers, and then the musicians seemed to size them up and began “Down Yonder,” played straight hotel-style but with a subtle African jounce that drew out first the young dancers and then, pair by pair, some of the others. The captain ordered the lights turned down, blackness receding into blackness, the mood of the deck graying out, rhythm, for a time, overcoming hate.

TED’S FLESH SHRANK back against his bones like cooked meat. He was lying in the half-light on what felt like a wood floor. An old woman was pressing a bandage on the top of his head and he smelled the cooking on her, the coal oil, and the sweat. It occurred to him that he might have been unconscious for days.

A man appeared above him. “He’s coming around,” the unshaved face said.

“Leave him be.”

“He can hear me.” Ralph Skadlock bent down. “Hey, son of a bitch. You shot my dog in the hip. I ought to tie a sash weight around your neck and throw your ass in the river.”

Ted was astounded by the pain in his head, back, and hands. He raised his left and found it to be a throbbing thing crusted in blood. Blinking, he tried to remember the reason for all this hurting. “Where’s my little girl?” His voice sounded as if it were coming from under the floor, and his vision began to fail again.

“Listen,” only a voice close to his ear said, “I’m going to bring you to the damn train. If we ever see you again, I’ll cut you like a October hog. You understand me?”

His sight brightened, and he looked at the beaded-board wall, at the cloudy windows. He could hear the rasp of wasps in the room. Next to him was some type of copper device and a burner, a still. Outlaws. He was among outlaws. “Where’s Lily?”

“Come back here again and I’ll fix you good.” Ralph Skadlock looked up at the old woman. “You know, they’d never find him back in here.”

“How many times I got to tell you, we got to send him out. Otherwise somebody might come lookin’ for him.”

Ted parted his lips to say something, then even his ears failed, and he passed out.

* * *

WHEN NEXT he opened his eyes, he was on the freight platform of a tiny board-and-batten railroad station out in the woods next to a single set of buckled tracks running through broom sedge. He turned his head to study the gray wood and found sitting next to him a man of about twenty wearing a straw hat and overalls.

The man folded up a piece of paper and stuffed it back into the opening of Ted’s shirt. “Hey, I come up a few minutes ago to catch the local and here you be with a note stuck in your shirt.”

Ted opened his mouth but nothing came out. On the second try he said, “I hurt.”

The man held up a forefinger and bobbed it. “Judging from the sight of you I reckon that’s a fact. This here note is to the Fault agent to put you on the baggage coach for the Memphis hospital. Says you got money in your wallet.”

“Fault agent.” Ted thought it a mystical phrase.

“He ain’t here yet. This station’s called Fault. His name’s Toliver and he don’t come to work but two hours a day, morning train and afternoon.”

“Which one is this?”

The man looked around as if to verify this for himself. “Afternoon.” He nodded. “What happened to you anyways, get stomped by a bull?”

“Some people named Skadlock—”

Suddenly, the young man stood up as though he realized he was near grave contagion. “Well, my granny used to say if you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas, but I believe you been lyin’ with the alligators.”

“Where am I?”

“Fault, Louisiana. Used to be called No Gun Switch, except they took out the switch five years ago.”

Raising his head a bit, Ted glimpsed only a poorly graveled lane crossing the tracks. “Can you get me some water?”

“I’m sorry, old son, ain’t none around here.” He pulled out a nickel silver watch, fobless, from his yellow pants. “Toliver’ll be here in a minute.”

Shortly, a Model T’s aspirate spitting sounded at the edge of Ted’s hearing. The station agent appeared in an open pasture adjacent to the one-room station. The middle-aged agent, bald, wearing thick glasses, got out and stepped up on the platform, standing over Ted and looking him over. “You get blowed up in the sawmill?”

The younger man leaned against the wall. “I think he’s about dried up. Can you fetch him a cup of water?”

“I brought a pail in the Ford, and there’s a dipper you can get him.” The agent pulled his switch key and removed an outsized brass padlock from the door. “You going to a hospital down the line, are you?”

“I feel terrible.” Ted wanted to say more, but felt as if a brood sow were lying across his chest.

The telegraph sounder began to clack in its box, and the agent went in to listen and to open his key and answer.

The younger man came up with a dipper of water and raised Ted’s head.

The agent came out. “Number forty-three’s on time and we’ll see engine smoke in a minute.” He bent down and tied a freight tag around Ted’s left ankle. “Sidney, what happened to him to black his eyes and mash his hand like that?”

“He tangled with some Skadlocks, he said.”

“He did? Who brought him out of their territory?”

“He was laid out when I got here.”

The agent read the note stuffed halfway in his shirt and pulled out Ted’s wallet, removing several small bills. “They want you sent north.” Half a mile away, the locomotive began blowing its out-of-tune whistle, and through the woods the men could hear the arrhythmic cough of a badly regulated engine. The agent got his flag, held it aloft, and the train pulled in, its two wooden coaches squalling to a stop on the flaking rails. An overweight clerk wearing a vest threw open the sliding door to the baggage coach, handed off six rocking chairs, two spools of barbed wire, ten sacks of feed, and a wooden box with the illustration of a clock on its side.

“You got a patient,” the agent said.

“Aw,” the clerk said, turning to pull down the coach’s stretcher, a stout wood-frame apparatus with short legs. The three men lifted Ted onto it and then into the baggage coach, laying him down in a clear area against a side wall.

The young man in the straw hat crouched next to him. “You need some more water, feller?”

Ted opened his eyes, glad to be inside anything, but said nothing.

The whistle hollered and the clerk slid the door closed. The train moved perhaps fifteen miles an hour, and he took pleasure in moving toward a better place where dogs didn’t crush and tear your fingers or men beat on you with the flat of a shovel as they would a snake. The train moved in a shuddering, unsteady motion with the sound of much loose metal in rattling distress. The baggage clerk got down on his knees and put his hand on Ted’s forehead, then gave him a drink of ice water, which went down like a blessing.

“Oh, thank you,” he rasped.

“You need something, you let me know.”

“All right.”

“Eventually we’ll get up to the main line at Harriston, where we meet the northbound train. You’ll get on their baggage car.”

“All right.” The rail was unmaintained and the joints hammered his back when a wheel passed over them.

“I hate to see you down among the cinders and husks there,” the baggage clerk said. He had pulled up a deck chair and was sitting near his head. “I hear you run into some bad folks.”

“The Skadlocks.” His head cleared for a moment and he looked up at the man, who was somehow motionless in the swaying coach. “They kidnapped my little girl and won’t tell me where she is.”

The clerk stood up. “They got your kid back in there?”

“No. I don’t know where she is. They were paid to do it.”

“If you’d caught ’em with her, then you’d have something.”

“To show the law?”

The clerk ran a finger crossways through his waterfall of a mustache. “Well…”

“What would you do?”

The clerk looked blankly through a window. “If they did run off with one of my brood, I’d round up ever Salser with a trigger finger and ride out.”

Ted closed his eyes. “I don’t have folks like that.”

The big clerk’s voice grew low and mean. “We’d chase ’em in that big house and set fire to it. When they run out smokin’ we’d knock ’em down like deer before dogs.” He kept scanning the dull woods, and Ted knew he saw no longleaf pine, no honeysuckle, no swamp iris, just visions of killing, legends of hate passed down from poor, shot-up, unread forebears.

Two hours later, the undersized locomotive poked out of the woods at Harriston. The baggage clerk opened the door on the other side of the car and his counterpart from the northbound was there to help with the stretcher. They loaded him onto a larger baggage coach and set him down on a well-swept floor between a safe and an upright piano. The new baggage clerk was used to handling the poor sick as freight and gave him a shallow pan in which to urinate, then bent to check the tag on his ankle. “We telegraphed ahead for an ambulance at Memphis.” He was a slight man with wrinkles running across his forehead like threads on a pipe. “I got some aspirin. They don’t let us carry liquor no more, else I’d offer you a shot.”

The thought of aspirin made Ted smile. “You have four of them?”

The baggage man got an enamel dipper of water scooped out of a canvas bucket and handed over the pills. “You get in a real good poker game?”

“Can you check the back of my neck? It feels like hamburger.”

He got down on his knees and adjusted his glasses. “Well, I haven’t seen a bandage job like that since I fought in Cuba.” He gently examined the wound, and Ted wondered if he might have become a doctor had he been born in a more civilized part of the country. “You got a knot and a cut on top of that, but nothing they can’t fix at the hospital.”

“Thank you.”

“That hand’s busted up pretty good. Want me to look at it?”

“No. It hurts just to think about touching it.”

“When you get hurt?”

“Yesterday. Some time ago. I don’t know.” The train was taking the well-tamped high iron at seventy, and the car’s springs imparted a jouncing thrust to the world around him.

“We don’t carry many emergency cases, but there’s been times when somebody fell out a tree and waited a week to get to the hospital and have bones set.”

“That makes me feel better,” Ted told him.

The baggage clerk looked surprised. “Well, I’ll let you get some shut-eye. Can I bring you anything right now?”

Ted swallowed slowly. “I have a question.” It was hard to get the words up the elevator of his throat.

“What say?” The man bent at the waist and leaned a hairy ear close.

“You think I should go back after the man who did this to me?”

The clerk scanned him theatrically, head to toe. “Sure enough,” he said. “If you want him to finish the job.”

The train began to rock him to sleep, and ahead he heard the engine’s whistle singing up and down the scale a frantic and operatic warning. Ted imagined that some dunderhead was trying to get his loaded wagon across the tracks half a mile away, a farmer willing his mules to beat a speeding locomotive, as if his pitiful will alone were enough to accomplish anything.