The Missing (17 page)

But when he returned to the boat, the advance man, a vest-wearing glad-hander named Jules, buttonholed him on the stage and handed him a telegram. “Here you go, bud.”

“Where’s it from?”

“Can’t you read?” The advance man jumped off the stage to the mud and headed for his idling Model T.

It was from Greenville, Mississippi, and the very paper felt crisp with possibility. He tore it open. THIS A GOOD LEAD. ACY WHITE AND WIFE. GRAYSONER KENTUCKY. LET ME KNOW. MORRIS.

He ran across the forecastle and asked a deckhand if he knew where Graysoner was.

“Don’t know, Cap. The chief steward upstairs, maybe he knows.”

He raced up the big staircase and walked back to the restrooms, where he saw the man talking to a janitor. “Can you tell me where Graysoner is?”

The chief steward looked at his face and winced. “Rough time last night. Graysoner the new man what replaced that old Jenkins boy with the broke leg?”

“No, it’s a town in Kentucky.”

“It’s a town.”

“That’s right.”

“Go see Mr. Check in the kitchen. He’s from Kentucky.”

Mr. Check, the head cook, was scraping down a stove top with a firebrick. “Naw, I ain’t from Kentucky. I was raised in St. Marys, West Virginia. The steward’s thinking of that Meldon feller who cooked for us two years gone. Go ask the captain. Maybe ten minutes ago I saw him kicking cinders off the skylight roof.”

He walked forward, but the captain was nowhere to be seen, so he took the stairs up to the Texas deck and found the first mate in his cabin. Swaneli was propped in his bunk reading a week-old newspaper from Chicago. “Lucky, what’s up?”

“I need to know where Graysoner, Kentucky, is.”

“It’s up ahead somewheres.”

“On the river?”

“Or close to it. Ask someone in the pilothouse, if anybody’s up there.”

He ducked into the companionway and went up the steps to the Texas roof and saw Mr. Brandywine’s cap moving about. He tapped on the narrow door and the old man waved him in with one crooked finger. He was leaning down over a river chart.

“Mr. Brandywine, can you tell me where Graysoner, Kentucky, is?”

“We’ll play there in a few days if I can get this boat in among the rocks.”

Sam leaned back against the door and caught his breath. “Is it another pigpen?”

“Well, it’s not a big town, but there’s five little burgs right around it, and all in all it’s a decent place to play. The people there know how to behave themselves.”

“Nice place to live?”

Brandywine leaned down over his channel map and pursed his lips, slowly placing a finger on a blue line passing between islands. “Paved streets. Electric lights. Good stores. Right now you can go down and get me a mug of hot coffee.”

“You heard about Ted Weller.”

“Of course. The captain gave his wife an extra fifty dollars when he paid her off. Told her she could come back and work the end of the season if she wanted. But you know she can’t.”

Sam reached over and gathered up two empty mugs. “Her life’s pretty much wrecked.”

“That’s a good way to put it, all right. She’ll be starting from scratch, I imagine.” Mr. Brandywine looked at him sharply. “Were you sweet on her?”

“I’m a married man.”

“I hope you plan to stay that way.”

He motioned at him with the mugs. “I’m very happy with my wife.”

“Don’t take offense. I’ve seen you sitting with Mrs. Weller at table with her son.”

“And?”

Mr. Brandywine’s eyes narrowed at some problem on the map. “And would you please get me my coffee?”

THE EVANSVILLE WHARF boat had an excellent telephone connection in a little private room used by freight brokers. Here Sam sat in a chair and called his wife, collect, and after three operators made the links, she picked up the receiver on their candlestick phone in New Orleans.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Oh, Sam, I’m glad to hear from you. How are you?”

“I’m fine. I’m in Evansville.”

“Where is that?”

“Illinois, right above Kentucky. How are you? Your last letter said you were kind of sick.”

“I’ve been feeling so bad I had to go to the doctor. It got so I couldn’t work for a week.”

He moved closer to the phone and felt a rill of fear run up his arms and across his chest. “The doctor? Is something wrong? What kind of doctor?”

“Dr. Duplessis, the one you go to.”

He felt a pain rise in the pit of his stomach. There was so much bad luck going around, he wondered if he was in for his share. “Did he give you some medicine? What did he say?”

Her voice was thin but musical, even over the wire. “He said we’re going to have a baby. I feel so stupid because here I thought I was sick all summer and it turns out I’m over three months along. Are you happy?”

“Yes!” He made a punching swing with his left hand. “I’m more than happy! Do you need me home?”

There was static on the line, and then her voice came back. “I know you want to look for that little girl and I want you to keep on. I don’t want to make you mad, but I’ve got to tell you that the money you’ve been sending home isn’t quite enough, honey.”

“It isn’t?”

“We’ll have to get set up here and pay the doctor, you know. The furniture people haven’t ordered much of my needlepoint this month.”

“Maybe I can figure something on this end to make a few extra bucks.”

“Sergeant Muscarella called and said the bank on Baronne needs a superintendent of its bank guards there. I think it pays what you’re making now, but with no expenses.” There was a brief pause in her voice. “And you’d be home.”

He told her they could discuss that soon. He wanted to talk for a long time, just to hear her voice, but she reminded him the call was expensive. When he came out of the room he realized he hadn’t even told her about the Wellers. He saw Charlie Duggs, and they climbed the hill into town to celebrate with a beer. In the back room of a speakeasy they got into a poker game and Sam lost over three dollars, and later, walking back down into the coal smoke of the dock area, he cursed the jack of hearts that did him in. “I can’t figure what I did wrong,” he complained.

Charlie spat next to the Ambassador’s stage as they went up. “I think it’s called playin’ poker. Lucky in cards you ain’t.”

“Three dollars. Linda could’ve paid the light bill with that.”

Charlie stopped to set his watch under a deck light. “Or you could’ve bought a little Cloat-killing pistol with it.”

* * *

IN LATE SUMMER the Ohio River is a hazy green, and Sam watched it slide under the bow of the steamer like an endless watery lawn. After six hard days of day trips for veterans’ conventions, Elks lodges, and high schools, night trips for mostly easy crowds intent on practicing their new steps or proposing romance on the dark upper deck, the boat pulled in one morning to the landing at Graysoner. Sam leaned on the Texas deck railing, his bruises driven inside where they banded together and roamed his burning shoulders and lower back. He stared hard at the town, watching it develop out of a fog as Nellie Benton drifted the boat in, and after the docking he hiked up to the main business section, several blocks of well-maintained and amply stocked brick stores fronted by paved streets with curbs and electric streetlights. Water oaks had been planted twenty years before, and the lanes above the business district were shady and lush. Upriver he saw the masonry smokestack bearing the name of a furniture factory, and judging from even the modest houses, everyone here made more money than he did. He was out of the Deep South and could smell the money and comfort.

He left his uniform behind in his cabin and wore his best shirt, which needed ironing and mending at the cuffs. Going into a drugstore, a place with marble counters and waxed-oak display cases, he asked to see a phone book. Sure enough, he found an Acy White at 653 Lilac Street. He grinned in spite of himself.

The woman behind the counter took the book back, and he asked where Lilac Street was.

“Why, it’s up the hill three blocks and to the right.” She smiled at him and became a template for the rest of the population, people with something to smile about.

He left the store and began walking through a neighborhood of big, well-kept houses, some of them made of stone inset with transoms of stained glass. It occurred to him that he’d never imagined who had the girl—that is, what kind of people. If he’d had to guess he would’ve said outlaws, or sick-minded people who wanted a lightning rod for their electrical meanness, or just someone who wanted a kid to train up as a serving girl. As he walked deeper into the fine neighborhood, he realized that Morris Hightower’s lead was another fool’s errand, that there were no child thieves living in houses like these. People who hired thugs to steal little girls didn’t live in fine mansions with copper trim and beveled-glass entries, with sunrooms and carriageways, wrought-iron fences and belvederes.

He reached 653 Lilac Street and stood at the fence, his head cocked up at the three-story Victorian soaring into the Kentucky sky. Seventy-five feet of billiard-table lawn stretched to the marble front steps that led up to the leaded glass door. Another dead end. He would walk back into the business district and find the railroad station and leave his usual plea with the agent. Suddenly a woman who seemed to be in her late twenties opened the front door and put a milk bottle out with a note in it. She was thin and ordinary-looking, but under her brown bangs were a set of intense eyes, and she fixed them on him for a long moment before turning inside. She actually looked at him. Noticed him. And there was connection in that look, as though she might somehow be on the same page as he was. He could have turned and walked back to the boat, but after standing there for a full minute he decided instead to walk to the far corner, and when he arrived there, he saw that an alley ran through the middle of the block, parallel with Lilac Street. He entered it and walked along the rear of the great homes, casually inspecting their garages and wash houses and flower gardens. Behind 653 he stopped alongside a low iron fence and saw a young girl in the yard with short golden hair sticking up at all angles, idly nudging a rubber ball through the grass. Seated on a bench next to a marble birdbath was the woman he’d seen out front. He waved at her and smiled, trying to control himself. He glanced at the girl to see if her face matched the cameo burned into his brain.

“Hi,” he said. “This your little girl?”

She looked at him as though she suspected he were dim-witted. “Naw. I just take care of her sometimes. I work for her folks.”

“She looks like a happy little thing.” He wondered what he could say that would keep the conversation going. “I’ve got a niece at home looks exactly the same.” Then the child turned toward him, and with a thrill he knew it was her. “Is she happy, too? Cheerful, I mean.” He fought to steady his voice.

Vessy took out a handkerchief and blew her nose, looking at him with suspicion. “You not from around here, are you?”

He gave her a laugh. “No, I’m visiting an army buddy who lives up the hill a bit. I left a prescription at Baumer’s and decided to take a walk while they filled it.”

Vessy nodded. “That druggist is the slowest old man. Rolls them pills one at a time.”

“What’s the little girl’s name?”

“Madeline. They tell me she’s a orphan and as far as her being cheerful is concerned, I don’t know. I sure would be if the man who calls himself my daddy was the richest man in town and I had somebody waitin’ on me hand and foot, plus a free-spendin’ momma and music teachers and all.”

He looked up and down the street and could smell the wealth of the neighborhood. Even the dirt under his thin soles seemed rich.

“She’s young to be taking music, isn’t she?”

“She can sing like a Victrola, that one. She’s liable to perform in a opera house somewheres when she grows up.”

“Nice people, the ones who adopted her, I bet.”

“Sometimes they ain’t too nice to me, but that one there, they spend like a princess on her.”

He looked at the girl’s yellow dress, at the silk bands running through the hem. Her shoes looked to be new strap-on flats and her barrettes were banded with garnets. Parents who bought her such things would send her to the finest schools and provide for her in a manner he could never imagine. He caught the girl’s eye, but her expression was unreadable. To her he was only a stranger in wrinkled clothes. “She looks like a princess in the making, anyway,” he said at last.

Vessy stood up and grabbed the child’s hands, raising her arms straight up and wiggling them. “Are you a princess yet, sweet thing?” she crooned.

The child looked at him boldly, as if to ask, “By what authority do you want to change any of this?”

“I better get down to Baumer’s,” he said, moving on.

Vessy began to swing the child in a slow circle, chanting “Sweet thing’s a princess,” and the girl giggled brightly. He listened to their playing voices as he walked down the alley.

* * *

SAM ATE lunch by himself in the café and sleepwalked through the two o’clock trip. That afternoon he lay in his bunk and drank from Charlie Duggs’s bottle, wondering what to do, whether or not to rob the girl of a good life and cause her to live in a freezing flat in Cincinnati while her mother scrambled to buy what poor food she could, what cheap clothes, what cheap life. The fact that he had survived well enough without natural parents settled on him. Had they not died, he might have been living barefoot in a muddy cane field in south Louisiana. But he couldn’t miss what he never possessed, and he knew that the girl had a better memory of her folks. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to decide what to do, and in the course of the afternoon he changed his mind a dozen times.

The Ambassador cruised that night and Sam watched the people from Ohio and Kentucky behaving themselves, people who seemed to be cut from a different bolt of cloth than he was. He thought he might wire Elsie, even though she would be in the middle of suffering through the awful transition caused by Ted’s death. He doubted that the local sheriff would take his word that Lily was abducted, and knew that a stranger would never be believed in this town, not against a man living on Lilac Street. Mostly he worried about what he was taking from Lily. Isn’t that what parents wanted most for their children? A better chance at living a prosperous life? Especially a single parent with a teenager to feed and raise, an unemployed single parent who would never in her life have more than ten dollars in her pocketbook at one time.

When the band played “Home, Sweet Home” and the boat rubbed against the shore at midnight, Sam helped stack tables and started with the sweepdown and kept working, finishing up the Texas and mounting to the roof to go after pigeon droppings and cinders in the dark, sweeping the tarred surface by memory as the big bell banged and the whistle ripped through its departure song, the stars swinging above as the boat turned upriver, its escape pipes sending long breaths of steam up against the night sky. He walked to the stern and leaned on his broom, watching the lights of Graysoner slide backwards on the dark Ohio. Behind him he heard a pilothouse window slide open and Mr. Brandywine’s nasal question, “What’s wrong, son?”

That word, “son,” hit the back of his neck like a stone. Any man could be anyone’s father, was that it? He turned in the dark. “I’m just trying to wear out this broom.”

“You can’t fool me. I can read you like a book.” The old man was hollering over his shoulder now, stepping on the spokes of the great wheel.

Sam took a swipe at the dark deck and said, under his breath, “Turn the page, old man.”

* * *

AFTER THE LAST CRUISE at the little town of Aurora, he quit, telling the captain his wife needed him at home. He knew the boat would wind up in Cincinnati, and he couldn’t face seeing Elsie or August. After he was paid off, Charlie found him in the cabin, packing.

“Givin’ up?”

“I guess so.”

“I know what you’ll do. Go after the Cloats.”

“That’s not it.”

“But you don’t want to say it, so you can tend to things on the sly.”

“You’re reading too many of those detective books.”

“Well, if you need a hand, I’m your man.”

He snapped his cardboard suitcase shut and turned away from the bed. “I appreciate it.” He would let him think what he wanted.

“What about the little girl?”

He shook his head. “Some things you can’t do anything about. Or maybe I’m not the man to do ’em.”

Charlie seemed to consider this. “Well, you gave it a good shot. Look me up after the season. I’m in the book, as they say.”

He walked out as the calliope began caterwauling up on the roof. He stopped and said goodbye to several people, waiters and mates who’d helped him civilize the crowds. On the first deck he walked back to the engine room to say goodbye to the engineers, who were working the condensate out of the engines, the big piston rods slowly paying in and out. Bit Benton came over and asked him to check on their house in New Orleans, and he told him he would.

Bit took off his gloves and reached out his hand. “Hate to see you go. You’re a good egg.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he shook hands soberly and walked out the gangway. On the riverbank he turned and watched the two o’clock excursion head out, the black band playing hot and heavy for the high schoolers and their parents, “I’m Just Wild About Harry” simmering and kicked ragged with a hard downbeat, Old Man Brandywine ringing bells for more speed and blowing the whistle, the Ambassador wearing the hymning plume of steam like a feather in its cap. The music pulsed out from under the gingerbread rooflines and sailed above all the scrubbed white paint, the fresh enamel cooking off the hot stacks, the black smoke rising like a sooty prosperity. For a moment he was tempted to join up again after Cincinnati for the few nickels the job paid, for the music and the friends. Then came the thought of Linda and what the next year was going to bring for them, and he became excited about having his own child again, being with Linda in New Orleans, eating good food, getting work that paid, a job where he didn’t have to war with drunks and dodge vomit.