The Missing (15 page)

* * *

SAM COULDN’T SEE a proper street, but down the cinder-strewn trails streamed men and women drawn by the squalling calliope. The black orchestra was on the foredeck playing a jacked-up version of “Ain’t We Got Fun” as Mrs. Benton eased the Ambassador against the landing and the deckhands lassoed two cypress stumps. The captain mounted the little flying bridge on the hurricane deck and through a large megaphone announced the schedule for the next two nights. Sam scanned the crowd, the mismatched boots, patched overalls, chemical-slathered aprons, and flour-sack dresses that made Stovepipe Bend seem more beyond the news than Bung City. It looked to be a town where there would be child thieves or any other kind of criminal in abundance. He noted the square yellow flyers stapled by the advance man to every fence and porch post and imagined they were tacked up in the poor neighborhood above the factories as well, and even out along the mud road coming into town that threaded through the hookworm-haunted farms of the region. He hoped the milling workers would go home and wash before the first evening trip, which cast off at seven. Hundreds of men stood around with their thumbs under their overalls straps staring at the only white thing in their smudged hamlet. The women were dressed mostly in old shirtwaists and long full skirts, though some wore washed-out housedresses and no shoes. One woman came out of the back door of an abattoir wearing a blood-soaked jacket, stopped dead, and stared at the Ambassador, her open mouth a toothless hole.

* * *

BY SIX Sam and Charlie were standing by the gangplank, pistols in belt, asking each patron if he or she carried any weapons, and for a while only pocket knives dropped into the baskets. But then gaggles of younger couples began to show up, some men in reblued overalls or their fathers’ patched suit coats, and then straight razors and dollar pistols began to weigh down the long table. Skiffs from the hamlet of Yunt, a cluster of crooked smokestacks across the river, started to land and tie up, each boat bearing four or five contrary, hollering folks dressed in gay, cheap clothes.

The first of these that Sam stopped pulled back his arm when asked if he had any weapons. “Yeah, what’s it to you?” He was drunk and sweating and his straw boater was cracked in two places already.

“You can’t board with a weapon. Hand it over, whatever you got, and we’ll give it back after the trip.”

“Hell, they’s five or six on that boat want to kill me. I need my little six-gun.”

Sam grabbed his lapel. “We’ve taken everybody’s weapons, sport. You’ll be safe as in church.”

The man frowned. “If I went in a church the place would prob’ly ketch on far.”

Charlie Duggs slipped up behind and slid a hand into the man’s pants pocket, fishing out a Colt with the barrel hacksawed off. He tossed it to Sam. “Here you go.”

“Hey!” The man lurched for his gun.

“Aw, go on and have a good time.” Charlie gave him a shove up the stage. “When you get off we’ll let you kill as many jugheads as you want.”

The man continued to holler, but the crowd pushed up against him and he floated toward the ticket window. “My name’s Buxton, and I better get the same gun when I come back,” he called.

The second engineer was helping them look for weapons, but they could only do a patchy job of it, checking the customers with coats or lumpy pockets. The people were wrinkled, sunburned, generally thin, coal stained, thick voiced, and bent, a hard-used population with limps, eye patches, bad breath, casts in the eye, crooked teeth or none, missing fingers. Sam looked at the smokestacks of the town, now just giving off mild waves of residual stench, and knew that most of the workers had some money but nowhere at all to waste it, until now. He turned and spotted the captain surveying the crowd from high up on the Texas roof. He was smiling.

Several other skiffs landed ahead of the Ambassador and tied off to anything that would hold them. One carried a single man wearing a dark coat and an old-fashioned shirt without a collar. He mixed in with the crowd and gravitated toward the stage like a dark spirit, seemingly carried not by his legs but by the motion of others. Sam didn’t study him, but at some point while counting, touching, and questioning the crowd, he felt a lull, an absence of light, something that connected him to the worst possible world. He took a blackjack from a man and turned to receive, without having asked for it, an antique throwing dagger with an ebony handle and a carbon-steel blade, a knife invisible in the dark. Its owner was the lone skiffman, and when Sam looked at his face he felt each bone in his spine line straight up.

It was Ralph Skadlock, who said, “I come to talk to you, Simoneaux,” and then looked behind him. The crowd, which had been pressing up toward the stage, stopped for a moment under his gaze. “You load these chickens and I’ll find you aboard.”

Sam was stunned and could think of nothing to say. He watched the man’s dark back as he drifted through the crowd and onto the boat.

At that moment, Charlie and the second engineer began struggling with a large Indian who’d showed up in the heat wearing a long canvas duster under which he’d concealed a sawed-off eight-gauge hammer gun. “Good God,” Charlie began to shout, “give us a hand, Lucky—this fellow’s stark raving!” They all boarded him like terriers on a mastiff, knocked him down in the mud, threw his gun pinwheeling into the river, and handed him over to a local constable, who broke his nightstick atop the Indian’s huge head before he agreed to go along. And when Sam leaned on the table, caught his breath, and scanned the boat, Skadlock was nowhere to be seen.

They cast off fifteen minutes late, the boat wallowing low in the water with over two thousand excursionists walking her decks like so many fire ants inspecting a slice of wedding cake dropped on their mound. A good deal of moonshine was brought on board, and the waiters and busboys were running to keep up with demands for ice and setups. Before the boat hit midriver, a platoon of Yunt men began a bite-and-stomp fight with rivals from Stovepipe Bend that took both slapjacks and pistols to quell.

The captain walked up to the skylight deck to see how the contest ended and called Sam over. “Lucky, you’re bleeding already. Can you handle them? Tell me if you can’t, and I’ll give the order to head to the bank.”

He thumbed blood from his nose. “I guess so. Good thing you asked us to pick the iron off ’em.”

“Hang on. Just hang on. They’re spending money like water at a whorehouse fire. On the main deck they’re fighting over the slot machines already, and I don’t think most of these people have ever seen popcorn.”

IT WAS A WARM NIGHT and Mr. Brandywine decided to run on a full bell upstream to keep everyone cool. Sam took the exterior staircase down to the first deck to do a walkaround. He passed women whose lips bulged with snuff, but the men were smoking hand-rolled, and he reminded every waiter he saw to step on the dropped butts. Then he climbed to the dance deck.

Up there, the floor was dark and the band was heaving itself into “Avalon,” Fred Marble leading the way with the big piano. Sam walked up to Charlie Duggs and yelled over the horns, “You got a feel for the room yet?”

“It was dicey for a couple tunes. It was a good thing the old man had them out playing in the open when we pulled in so nobody was surprised.”

“Good music is good music.”

“That’s the ticket. None of these goobers have ever seen a Negro in a suit before, and they were bristling about that, but once the band set everybody’s toes a-tappin’ all they want to do is dance.”

Sam pointed his chin toward the crowd. “I guess you could call that dancing.”

“Looks like five hundred couples having a thousand fits.”

“Have you seen a big fellow in a dark coat and white shirt? Sort of a flat-brim cowboy hat?”

“As you sometimes say, ‘Been busy.’”

When the band landed on the last note, half the couples returned to their tables and the rest stood in the windows to dry themselves off. Sam turned his head as a spotlight fired a circle on the bandstand and Elsie stepped into the powdery glow. He remembered Ted’s warning about not watching her sing, and in a second he knew why, because now she was neither a worried mother nor a waitress but a smiling blonde in a richly beaded burgundy silk crepe de chine dress, and from her oval collar lined with glistening rosettes to her matching satin high heels, she was the real thing, an expert singer swaying her hips to the intro of the new song she’d taught the band. She leaned into “Am I Blue?” and the band followed her, leaving out nearly all the wandering jazzy notes and lining up behind her voice, playing to the motion of her swaying dress. The dance floor crowded up for the slow song, but Sam noticed many rough men propped on the window jambs, smoking slowly and just imagining what it would feel like to hold a woman like that. He was surprised at the power she projected into the room, and by how much larger she now was than her real self.

Charlie gave him a nudge. “She’s got it.”

Sam touched his chin. “She sure does.”

When she finished the song, drawing the first applause of the night, Sam went out to check the upper deck, and as he passed through the door a pair of bearlike hands jerked him into a pocket of darkness next to the port smokestack.

“Where’s that damn Dutchman?”

Sam could smell the river on him, and something else: liquor and a scent of angry dog. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That piano player.”

“Ted Weller? You should know. You about killed him.”

Skadlock leaned into a shaft of light, and his face looked like something made out of fieldstone. “I aim to set him back a bit more. He owes me money.”

“What?”

“He shot my black dog. I thought he’d get better but he got the infection and died on me.”

Sam pulled free and stood away. “The way I understand it, your dog was trying to eat his hand off at the time.”

Skadlock pulled a glossy automatic pistol out of his jacket and pressed it against Sam’s temple. “You think this is funny? Some kind of joke? Tell me where that man is.”

Sam looked at what he could see of the gun, then back at Skadlock. “You hurt him so bad they sent him on the train to Cincinnati. He’s got to have about five operations to straighten him up.”

Skadlock seemed to realize something all at once and his expression took on a blue heat as he pressed him against the stack. “You the dumb shit what tole him where we was.” He began to curse and ramble, and Sam wondered what he’d been drinking and for how many days.

“I was just trying to find his little girl,” Sam told him, yelling into his face, but Skadlock didn’t seem to care.

“You led him to us. I ought to kill you. I wish they hadn’t left you alive down in that shithole town so you could come back to haunt us.”

The statement was like a jolt of electricity. “What did you say?”

Skadlock strengthened his grip on the pistol and raised his elbow high. Sam closed his eyes and for an instant started praying, but then there was a bony pop, the kind of noise the blunt side of an ax makes when it kills a steer, and Skadlock hit the deck, slack all at once. Sam looked and saw Charlie pocketing his slapjack.

“Friend of yours?”

He straightened his coat. “Pick up his pistol and let’s get this bastard in the brig before he wakes up.”

“Better hurry. Trouble’s a-brewin’ below.”

They dragged Skadlock down the stairs, his riding boots banging every step and the people from Stovepipe Bend cheering them on. They’d just clapped him into the engine-room brig when August came back from the firing galley.

“Who’s that?”

“Nobody you need to know.” Sam pushed him along roughly and he and Charlie headed to the main-deck lounge, where they found a scuffle between smelter workers and sawmillers from Yunt. When they got among the tables they noticed ten different poker games were going on, and at one of them five men were standing and hollering back and forth.

Charlie spread his coat, showing his pistol. “What’s the beef here?”

A cross-eyed man wearing patched suspenders pulled his cigar. “This feller checked a bet and I raised and he raised me back.”

“So?”

“That’s sandbaggin’. We don’t play like that in Stovepipe.”

The man from Yunt put his finger in the first man’s face. “That’s how you play the game, chickenshit. That’s poker.”

“That’s ambushin’, you mean, and it would take somebody with sawdust for brains to play like that.”

The other man straightened his back and strutted two steps sideways like a rooster. “If they hadn’t of took my Smith I’d see what was in your fool head. Prob’ly lead sinkers.”

“Aw, sit down and just call dealer’s choice if you want to sandbag,” Duggs told him.

“Or what?” the man from Stovepipe Bend demanded, drawing a pearl-handled straight razor from his coat pocket.

Everyone at the table turned toward the sound of a pistol being cocked. Sam had pressed the muzzle of his revolver behind the man’s ear. “Or you’ll get a hot pitchfork in your ass in about half a second.”

Charlie took a step away from the table. “Easy, Sam.”

“Let’s have the razor,” Sam said, and the man handed it over his shoulder, his arm the only thing moving at the table. “We gonna have any more trouble out of you?”

“No,” the man said, but even from the one syllable Sam knew that for the rest of his life he’d better never find himself in Stovepipe Bend past dark.

* * *

IN TEN MINUTES the area was again filled with hollering and the stink of homegrown tobacco. Sam and Charlie leaned against the capstan, looking back into the lighted area of gamblers and drinkers.

“You scared me for a minute back there.”

“I kind of scared myself. I should’ve hauled his ass down to the engine room.”

“Well, maybe it was that other fellow got you excited. We all tend to go downhill when someone sticks a pistol in our face. Who the hell was that?”

“One of those Skadlocks I told you about.”

“Half man, half weasel.”

“The weasel part might be right.”

* * *

FOR THE NEXT HOUR they kept in motion on the dance floor, showing their pistols and palming slapjacks. Elsie appeared again and sang “Leave Me with a Smile,” her sweet alto taming down the room and calming Sam as well. Her voice was a drink of cool water.

Toward the staggering, glass-breaking end of the trip he went back to the engine room and saw Ralph standing above two passed-out drunks, holding on to the bars, staring at all the heaving machinery.

“We’ll get to the bank in about ten minutes, and I’ll escort you off.”

“Where’s my pistol?”

“Part of my salary for a hard night.”

Skadlock’s eyes showed several worlds of pain. “You gonna law me?”

Sam put his hand on one of the bars, tempted to say he wasn’t worth the trouble, but that would only make things worse. His uncle had taught him that for some people, hard words were the same as bullets. Finally he shook his head. Then he asked, “What do you know about the trouble down in Troumal?”

“I was livin’ in Arkansas them days.”

“Do you know who did it?”

Skadlock looked away, feeling the lump on the back of his skull. “Coulda been anybody.”

“You know.”

“Why would I tell you? You couldn’t touch ’em, even nowadays.” The big backing gong went off like a detonation above his head, but he didn’t flinch.

“How did you know somebody survived?”

“I didn’t till you hauled up in our kitchen.”

“Who did it?”

Skadlock stared at the port engine as though he envied its un-touchable heat.

Sam cocked his head, imagining what he could say to make Skadlock talk. Finally, he said, “Maybe I could pay them a visit like I did you.”

At that, Ralph Skadlock’s eyes rolled sideways into jaundiced thought. After a long time he said, “It was Cloats what did it.”

The name went through him like a chill. “How do I find them?”

“Everbody around Bung City has a opinion.”

“You’re just a fountain of information.”

“Go to hell. If I was you I’d grow some eyes in the back of my head.”

Sam heard the engine bells jangle for the landing. “Who’d you sell that little girl to?”

“The devil.”

“When I find her, I’ll do my best to send the law after you. Maybe some federal law.”

“I ain’t got her. They can’t arrest me for havin’ thin air.”

“But I got a feeling you’re worse than the ones that do.”

Skadlock looked away as if offended. “I don’t know about that. I ain’t the start of your troubles. And I sure as hell didn’t deserve no dead dog.”

When the landing whistle began roaring, Sam unlocked the brig and walked him to the stage.

Skadlock pushed out the dent in his hat and settled it back on his head. “I ain’t forgot about that Dutchman.”

“That’s your trouble. You don’t forget much of anything.”

“Keep a lookout, coonass.” He started down the plank with the rest of the tipsy crowd.

Sam faked a friendly wave. “Manges la merde, Skadlock.”

* * *

THE SECOND MOONLIGHT TRIP was worse. Among the eighteen hundred people dawdling at the landing, two hundred or so had been drinking while they waited. After they frisked the crowd and the boat slid off into the river, the generator failed again. The band kept playing, but after a few minutes a blind volcanic brawl broke out that took half an hour to stop. The mates and several waiters and even the cooks had to wade in to separate the fighters as best they could, and the captain showed up with a megaphone and shouted that there would be no more music if the crowd didn’t calm down. The crew brought up the coal-oil lanterns and hung them, and under the smoky yellow aura the band continued playing for the reeling dancers. Sam was still breathing hard when someone called out “Fire,” and he and the first mate ran to quench a smashed lamp in the men’s toilets at the rear of the boat, beating it down with sacks until an oiler coaxed the fire hose alive.

Sam sat down on a stool by a sink, his mouth open, and watched the muddy water knock down the flames. “Son of a bitch. If that had got away from us this tub would’ve gone up like a haystack in July.”

“Get up, bud,” Swaneli told him. “I just heard a gunshot.”

On the first deck several men had started shooting at the ceiling-fan blades, and one had his arm broken by a ricochet. The three mates fought them and then hustled the banged-up men to the brig, stacking them in with five others already there.

The café ran out of food halfway back to the landing, and the cooks began to fill any pot that had a lid with oil and made tubs of popcorn they salted and sold cheaply to staunch the angry hunger of the drunks. The café register was so full of money it wouldn’t close, the people wild to buy anything, even extra salt. When Sam stepped through the door he was hit across the chest with a chair, and before he could get up a woman began screaming into his face that her friend was being raped up on the Texas roof. He took the stairs two at a time to a dark open area where passengers were not allowed and saw men in overalls hoist a yowling, half-naked man over their heads and throw him off the boat. Sam looked down and saw a white scissoring motion in the water, headed aft.

A middle-aged woman was sitting on the roof tarpaper adjusting her long skirt. He looked at the skinny man next to him, whose hair was longer than the woman’s, and tried to make out his features in the dark. “If he was raping that woman, you should’ve held him for the sheriff.”

The man bent over laughing. “Her? We don’t give a shit about her. She’s just a old whore he hired to ride with him tonight.”

Sam looked at the other men, trying to understand. “Why’d you pitch him overboard, then?”

“Hell, we’uns just wanted to see could he fly.”

The men standing at the rail started laughing, coughing up popcorn, punching each other, cursing the whore and the six other men they said they’d thrown off the boat that night.

* * *

WHEN THEY GAVE BACK weapons at the end of the trip, two pistols and five knives were left over. He considered the weapons in the glow of the deck lights, and then lobbed everything into the river.

The general cleanup was unending, the boat filthy in every way. During the hour that the restrooms were closed, several people had gone up on the rear promenade and squatted in the dark. Three hours before sunrise, Charlie and Sam climbed shaking into their bunks, and neither could fall asleep.

“I saw you waltz Skadlock off the boat. What was you talking about?”

“He showed up to bother Ted Weller and then got real focused on me. I told you about his dog, didn’t I?”

“Yeah. That boy’s been in the woods too long.”

“He was drunk.”