The Missing (24 page)

VESSY WOKE THE GIRL and told her they were going on a long horse ride and having a picnic in the woods.

The girl clapped her hands and sang out, “I can wear pants.”

“Yep, you can wear those little overalls things.” They were the smallest pair Vessy had ever seen, and she thought Mrs. White liked them because they mocked working people. “Here now, lets us get dressed and hurry up.”

They left by the back door and walked to the alley. Vessy lugged a cardboard valise with her left hand and a two-handled picnic basket under her right arm. “Would you like to meet Vessy’s friend?”

The girl pulled at her hair, which had grown out the color of polished brass. “Yes.”

“Yonder he is.”

Ralph Skadlock stood by the carriage house wearing a new pair of jeans, a black preacher’s shirt, and a big Stetson.

The child saw him and walked boldly up, studying his face a moment before looking past him. “Horsies!”

“Hey there, missy,” Skadlock said, as though addressing a miniature barmaid, for he had little notion of how to treat a child. “Would you like to take a ride on this here animal?”

The horse he motioned to was a big five-dollar horse, swaybacked and standing on splayed hooves. The smaller one picked one back leg up as if the ground were too hot to stand on and wagged his fiddle-shaped head. His saddle was cracked to dissolution and the one on the large horse was painted with brown enamel. They were disposable horses, good for a day’s work, if that.

Vessy mounted the small horse and pulled the child out of Skadlock’s hands and set her in front. He tied her suitcase on the animal’s rump and bound the picnic basket alongside his mount. They started up the hill away from town, rode into an empty field and out the back of it into a graveled lane, crossed the drain flute on the hill side of the lane and took a path up into a section of red oaks, the forest floor crackling with last fall’s leaves. Soon they were on a trail through the hardwoods, climbing. Within two miles they came out of the woods into someone’s backyard, passing behind the woodpiles, then slipped among the trunks again, going higher, Vessy pointing out things for the child to look at all the while.

The girl was a good traveler but got tired around eleven o’clock and started to fret, wanting to stop. Vessy called to Skadlock and he pulled up and looked back. “What’s the matter with her?”

“She’s just tired and a little hungry.”

“Can’t you get her to stay quiet? There’s farms all over these woods.” He slouched back on the swayback horse, which was blowing hard as a bellows.

The girl began to cry, and Vessy got down. “Give me that basket.”

Skadlock stayed on his mount. “We’re on a schedule here.”

She just stared at him, and after a moment or two he sighed and passed down the basket, then got off.

The girl sat on a rock, and Vessy gave her a cup of milk and two cookies. The child ate as if she expected the service. After a while, Vessy said, “You want to get up on the horsie again?”

“Is this our picnic?” She looked around, still chewing. The trees were big boled and full headed, so there was little underbrush.

Skadlock led the horse up and slapped the end of the reins in his hands. “We’re havin’ fun,” he said in the tone he might use to announce a death in the family. The child looked up at him and squinted, hard. Fearing for a moment that she recognized him, he turned quickly and walked off.

They mounted up and went on, across a wide clearing and back into woods, a pine belt this time, and the ground grew rocky. After an hour of this, stopping three times to let the poor horses blow lest one of them drop stone dead on the grade, the girl began to cry out with boredom. The little lame horse rolled back his ears and craned his neck to look at her.

Skadlock rode back to where they sat the horse, a minor urge to slap the girl flying through him like a bat through a chimney hole. “Shut her up, will you?”

Vessy gave him an evaluating glance. “Haven’t you been so upset you just wanted to holler out?”

“We’re comin’ up on a farm. I can near see the house. Keep her quiet!”

“I can’t.”

He reined the horse around sharply and plodded ahead into a small open area of pine stumps. When the child wailed out, “I want to go back, go baaack,” Skadlock stopped and wondered how hard he would have to thump her in the back of the head to knock her out. Her skull was about the size of a raccoon’s, and he figured for a full minute, thinking of animals he’d stunned and what they were like when they revived. He dismounted and walked back to them, taking the halter of Vessy’s horse as it stumbled up. “Get down a minute and let me see her.”

Vessy misunderstood and tilted her off the saddle toward him. He put up his hands and the girl jumped, throwing both arms around his neck to keep from falling. Her soft bottom found his forearm and next thing he knew, he was holding a soap-smelling child who was looking him straight in the eye. He turned around to scan the woods, then looked at her closely. “You…uh…can you be quiet now?”

“Let’s have a picnic.”

“You just ate.”

“You play games on a picnic.”

He stepped back from the horse and almost fell over a broad, flat-topped stump. He examined the dry surface and put the girl down on it, then bent and brushed away the pine straw. Pulling himself up straight, he focused on her small, perfect features, her smart eyes. “You know your numbers?”

“I can count to fifteen.”

“Which is bigger, six or seven?”

“Seven, silly.”

He walked over and dug into the rotten pair of saddlebags the horse’s owner had thrown in, the leather split, the copper rivets green with verdigris. The saddle maker’s name was pressed into the decorative tooling, proclaiming his location in Saginaw, and for an instant Skadlock thought of the old boy who rode horseback through the snow all the way from Michigan. It toughened him up to consider this. Then he dredged out a deck of cards.

He sat the girl on the picnic basket on one side of the stump, and he dragged over a bucked-off pine top and sat across from her. He dealt out the whole deck. “Leave ’em facedown,” he said.

“Is this a game? This is a game!” she said, clapping her white hands.

“It’s called battle.” He turned up one of his cards—a four. “Now you flip a card.”

She pushed a sprig of hair from her eyes with the back of a hand and rolled her top card with the other. “Nine.” She looked at him.

“Which is bigger?”

“The nine.”

“You done won my card.”

“Good.” She clapped once, reached over, and picked up his four.

His next card was a queen, and the girl turned a six. “Which is bigger?” he asked.

She shrugged. “The lady card?”

Vessy, standing behind her, snorted.

“This gal might have a head for cards,” he said. “That’s right. That’s a queen and it’s higher than your six, so I take your card.” After a few plays the jack and king came out, and he explained the hierarchy. Then she tried to claim a queen with her jack, and he stopped her. “Say, ‘Jack, queen, king, three in a ring.’” The child repeated this twice.

“Where’d you hear that?” Vessy said.

“Mamma taught me.” All at once he remembered the old pack he’d learned on as a child, a deck of forty-six cards so old they had only the spots on them and no numbers. They lived in a thinboard shack in Arkansas so cold that they played cards to keep the blood from freezing in their fingers. He’d sat in his mother’s lap and learned his numbers that way. As he grew, she taught him every type of poker there was and, once he got his growth, what kind of knife to carry to the games.

The girl turned her cards faster and faster, and soon the game was over. Skadlock then made a show of counting the piles. “You got thirty and I got twenty-two. Who done won?”

“Me!” She threw up her hands.

He gathered the cards, shuffled, and handed them to her. “Now you deal. Give me one and then you one till they’re all gone.” He watched her bright little fingers struggle with the cards, and finally reached over and formed her hands in his. “Look, damn it, you deal like Billsy. Hold the deck in one hand like this and lick your thumb to push the top card off on the table.” She did as he said and dealt the deck onto the rings of the stump. He reached into his pants and drew out a coin and placed it on the wood.

“What’s that for?” she said.

“You don’t play cards for nothin’. You got to bet. I bet a dime, so what’ll you bet?”

“I don’t know.”

“You got money?”

She shook her head and turned her first card, a seven.

“Well, then we got to stop playin’.”

“Aw, no!” She balled a fist and put it up next to an eye.

“Can’t play without no bet.”

“Oh, please!”

He rubbed his two-day beard. “Tell you what. See that big open hayfield?” He pointed ahead to a mile-wide opening, and she turned and looked. “If you promise not to go cryin’ when we ride over it, well, I’ll take that as your bet.”

She spun back to him, smiling as if he were joking, but when she saw his eyes she knew he was not. The child glanced at Vessy, who was standing patiently off by the horses, holding the reins. “I’ll be quiet,” she whispered.

“It might could take us a good fifteen minutes to ride through. Promise you won’t cry?”

“Your card, mister.” She began bouncing on the basket.

His eyebrows went up, and he flipped an ace.

The girl stared at the card. “High or low?” she said.

“In this game it’s forever high,” he said, raking the trick.

* * *

HE WON by two cards, picked up the dime and her promise, and they mounted up and went on quietly, passing through the big farm and on into another band of timber, and then higher, where the animals scrambled for purchase on the mossy rocks. The three of them topped the ridge at last and stopped to let the horses wheeze and shudder under them, the bigger animal leaning against a fat pine for twenty minutes.

The child complained that she was hungry, but Skadlock started his horse.

“Can’t we’uns eat now?” Vessy called ahead to him. He didn’t respond, though he pulled his watch. In a few minutes they started down the other side of the ridge.

In a clear, level spot he stopped the horse and checked his watch again. “Schedule says we got fifteen minutes.”

Vessy dismounted, spread a cloth on the ground, and they sat around it. “Here,” she said, taking a block of cheese from his stubby fingers. “I’ll fix things.” She gave the child milk in a cup and poured water into two others. Opening a box of crackers, she sliced cheese onto several squares and spread potted meat over that. They ate in silence until Vessy, looking around the bald, said, “This here dirt looks pretty good.”

He followed her gaze, chewing. “I seen better.”

“Was you a gardenin’ man or did your mamma do the growin’?”

He became still. “She just passed, and this is the first I thought of it.”

“What did she grow?”

He squinted. “Tomatoes, some sweet potatoes, and turnips. The usual.” He was lying on his side but sat up Indian-style. “Tomatoes was the best. Ain’t nothing better than a big one sliced with salt and a little vinegar.”

“That’s the truth,” she said, popping a cracker into her mouth. “Looks like you’re gonna have to get friendly with your mamma’s hoe.”

He looked at her and at the child, who was licking potted meat off her fingers. “You grow stuff up in the mountains where you’re from?”

“Aw, no. We just sent all them sarvants we had down to the lowlands to shop for us and haul it back up to our place on their backs.”

He gave her a startled look. “Ain’t you saucy.”

Her expression didn’t change. “I like the garden. One thing I hate about livin’ in town’s there ain’t no place for the vegetables to come up in.”

* * *

IN AN HOUR they noticed smoke rising up above the trees, and though they could see no houses, he knew they were coming to a town called Cletchy, three dozen houses in a narrow valley threaded through by a railroad. They rode slowly into a cornfield, then came out on a tractor road where the fields changed to cotton. Before long they began making their way past a string of tenant houses. In the first yard, black women were boiling wash, and in the second children were feeding dominique chickens, and on the porches of the third and fourth and fifth old men sat smoking pipes and watching them pass like some dream drifting before them, perhaps the only strange white people they’d ever seen, too rare even to believe much less call out to with a good word.

They found the rail embankment and rode down it to the small gingerbread station. He walked in and woke up the drowsing agent and bought tickets to a connecting station further south, not buying through fares so he would not leave a trail. He also bought northbound tickets for thirty miles up the line toward Indiana. The agent asked where the people were who would use the extra set, and he said that relatives were coming at this very moment to take the southbound.

Outside, he scanned the long ridges they’d crossed. He would buy new tickets in the first connection and the second as well, northbound and southbound at each, figuring the expense was worth it to make it that much harder for anybody to trail them, if trail them they would.

While Vessy and the girl sat on the long bench on the track side of the station, he walked around to where he’d tethered the horses to a sapling, the old hitching rail too rotten and wobbly to trust. Two Fords passed in the gravel road, and he stood in the sun with his boots gathering street dust until a white man passed on foot. He looked him over and decided he looked wary, and a wary white man would ask questions when somebody tried to give him two horses, even two sorry broken-down nags. Next came a black man wearing a creased and shiny face and riding a mule with no saddle on it, a very old man who wouldn’t question anyone’s motives, not in this town.

“Hold on!” Skadlock called.

The man pulled up his little mule, which seemed mostly donkey. “Cap’n?”

“You look like a man what needs a horse or two.”

The black man’s eyes were cloudy, and he got down and took off his hat, leaning in to try and recognize who’d flagged him down. “I wanted this’n to pull my buggy, but he won’t get between the shafts, no he won’t. My woman can’t come to town no more, so she send me everywhere she want.”