The Missing (20 page)

* * *

THAT WAS A TUESDAY, and he mailed the letter about noon. As soon as it whispered into the brass slot at the post office, he began worrying about the response, when it would come and in what form. He dreaded it until Saturday, when his phone rang with a collect call from Cincinnati, Ohio.

“Mr. Sam Simoneaux?” The voice was Elsie’s, sounding as flat as a skillet against the head.

“It’s me, Elsie,” he muttered.

After a pause, she said something that sounded much rehearsed. “I read your letter several times with all your reasons, and I’ve got a question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“You told me once you had a child.”

“Yes. I’ve got a new one now. A new baby boy.”

There was no congratulation in what she said next. “And of course you’re rich as can be and can give him everything in the world?”

It was as though she’d read his insides from across the country, knew him better than he knew himself. “No.”

“And you’ve got this big job, making maybe five hundred dollars a month?”

“I don’t have any job right now.”

“So, you must have this grand inheritance, and with it you’re going to send this boy to Harvard and Paris, or at least a private school somewhere.”

“Elsie, all I can say is I’m sorry.”

“You are. You really are. If you’d just done your floorwalker job like you were supposed to, none of this would’ve ever happened.” She began to cry now, and accusation began to pile on accusation until he took the candlestick phone off the table and sat on the floor, his legs drawn up, his back against the wall. Linda came out of the bedroom holding the baby and looked at him with no particular expression. Elsie ended her long recital with “And if it weren’t for you, Ted wouldn’t have died.”

“How’s August?” he ventured, his mind reeling with shame.

“How do you think?” she cried. “He’s not the same person. He never will be.”

“What do you want me to do?”

The response was quick. “I’ll tell you. I have no idea how to handle this, so I want you to figure out how we can get to that hick town and take my baby back from those people. You’ve got to come with me. All my relatives work for a living.”

“I can’t even afford the train ticket. I’m making a few dollars at odd jobs, but I can’t leave my family without any money in the bank.” He looked up at his wife. “It might take two weeks to straighten things out.”

The voice came back thin as a needle. “I don’t want to hear it. This will never be straightened out. Me and August have been eating potato soup and shivering for months. At least down where you are the river doesn’t freeze over.”

He closed his eyes and reached deep inside himself for the words. “Well, maybe we can try this.”

The phone call lasted ten more minutes. Later that afternoon, she called back. The Ambassador was coming out of winter quarters above Cincinnati and would run down to New Orleans light, making no stops, to get dry-docked, stocked, and take on crew and musicians before starting her initial upriver excursion schedule. Captain Stewart said she and August could deadhead free down to Graysoner and stay at the Wilson Hotel on the boat’s account if they promised to work the season. She would be there in seven days, waiting for him.

Sam hung up the phone and walked to his piano, a glossy red-mahogany Packard, a stolid instrument with bell-like upper notes and a booming bass. He opened the sheet music for “When My Baby Smiles at Me” and played it as written, but when he was finished he played it again, adding ragged filigree to the plain arrangement, then jazzed it up on a third run-through. He played ten other pieces in a row, feeling the ivory slide under his fingertips, and afterward he sat a long time staring at the fine wood until he saw his face reflected in the French polish. He got up and called a furniture store on Dryades Street, and in an hour the dealer arrived and bought his piano for seventy-nine dollars.

SOME TIME IN MARCH, Ralph Skadlock had been hired by a Louisiana state legislator to steal a specially engraved and gold-inlaid Parker shotgun from the home of a plantation owner in Braithwaite. The day after he stole it, he pulled the double out of its gun bag and looked it over while sitting in his mildewed front parlor. The sidelocks showed bird dogs jumping a covey of quail, and he ran a sooty fingertip over the razor-sharp checkering on the swirling walnut stocks. He noted how it snapped shut, as though barrels and receiver suddenly became one piece of metal through the cold welding of expert craftsmanship. Still, to him, the piece was ridiculous. A gun was a wrench or a hammer. It did a job.

The next day he rode horseback to the depot and took the southbound to the Baton Rouge station, where he handed a smudged cardboard box to a corpulent, florid man dressed in a tailored suit.

“I think you’ll be happy with this here item,” Ralph told him.

The legislator gave him a look, paid him, and turned away without a word. Ralph held on to the envelope and watched him walk out into the sunlight, knowing for a fact that this fool couldn’t hit a quail exploding out of a dewberry bush to save his soul and probably not even a dove sitting on a branch outside his bedroom window. But he could show off the gun to men gathered in his parlor for drinks, the weapon suggesting how much better he was than they.

Skadlock went home and brooded about their meeting, how the man’s little sharp eyes looked at him, how he’d refused to give him a single word. He remembered the envelope coming over with a nasty flick of the wrist. Men had gotten killed for such manners.

A week later he crossed a long, apple-green lawn and climbed through the window of a many-columned house northeast of Baton Rouge. He stood under a high ceiling and smelled the furniture oil, the floor wax, the fresh paint of the place. The gun was conspicuously displayed in a leaded-glass case, and he took it, fading back out into the night, knowing that when the theft was discovered, the legislator wouldn’t report it, wouldn’t send any lawman against Ralph Skadlock, who might tell who had paid him to take the gun in the first place, along with a few other items he’d been hired to steal in the past. He walked two miles to a highway and crossed it into a stand of sycamores where his horse was tied. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of this double thieving before. On the long ride back, he made a mental list of all the haughty, weak men he could revisit, taking back animals, clocks, jewelry. It was then that Acy White came to mind.

* * *

HE AND BILLSY were looking the gun over the next day in the big kitchen house, debating where they could sell it, when they heard a spatula hit the floor. Their mother, cooking breakfast, had slumped down on the floor planks with a wheeze, and they went and stood over her, nudging her arms with their brogans and then kneeling down and trying to talk her upright. Ninga would have none of it. One eye rolled toward the window and the other toward the door, signals that everything in her had suddenly quit, muscles turned loose, breaths escaped, thought gone out like a wick. After ten minutes of staring and cajoling, the men understood that she was dead, but could not imagine what might happen now. A vast emptiness grew up around them, and Billsy stood to turn off the aromatic stove, not sure which way to twist the valve handle.

They laid her out straight on the floor, so she would cool in a decent posture, and stood around outside the kitchen eating slices of white bread, wondering what to do next. Neither of them had been to a family funeral, and they couldn’t remember what had been done to their father after his still had exploded when they were four and five years old. They weren’t sure where any relatives lived over in Arkansas, as the clan tended to move around.

There was a magnolia-haunted graveyard a hundred yards to the rear of the mansion bearing several humpbacked markers and a stone cross crenellated with lichen. The men scratched out a vacant space at the rear of the highborn dead and dug her hole. Wrapping her in her own quilts, they set her in the ground and covered her up, then stood looking down at the soppy mound. Ralph felt a thickness in his throat he thought might be some words coming up, but he didn’t say anything. No one in the family had ever read a Bible or stepped foot in a church one time, and both men were too primitively formed to deal even in the clichés of Christianity, having no more notion of a hereafter or its price of admission than lizards stunned asleep in the noon sun.

Billsy looked around at the other weed-wracked headstones bearing inscriptions in French. “She needs her a marker.”

Ralph looked up. “Like what?”

“Just a second.” He turned back to the kitchen house. Ralph walked the dirt down around the edge of the grave until his brother returned holding a stamped skillet with a long handle. “This here’s the ticket.”

Ralph took it from him, turned it front and back several times as if he were inspecting it for purchase, then stuck the handle in the earth at the head of the grave. “That there about says it, all right.”

* * *

THEY ATE potted meat and sardines, then rode several miles toward a ferry landing upriver. Turning onto a road leading to the water, they rode against automobiles coming off the boat. Near the bank they reached a roughboard roadhouse fronting three mildewed tourist cabins strung out along a raw red ditch. Upstairs, the dark, low-ceilinged bar served skin-peeling moonshine in jelly glasses, and after an hour of it they both were ready for whores.

Ralph leaned over the counter and put a hand on the ample arm of the barmaid. “Is Suzy servin’ tonight?”

She fixed a lead ball eye on him. “Ruttin’ season, is it?”

“Is she still three dollars?”

“Ralph, a good-lookin’ man like you, I’m surprised you ain’t married.”

“Costs more than three dollars. Is she seein’ fellers?”

The barmaid put a finger in an ear and scratched. “In cabin two, at the back.” She slid her gaze past Ralph’s dark bulk to round-shouldered Billsy, who’d been here dozens of times but was still shy about it. “You want a good pokin’?”

“I reckon so.”

“Who you want?”

Billsy thought for a moment. “This time I want a gal with teeth.”

THE DOOR to cabin two swung open to reveal Suzy Kathell, long-waisted and long-faced, fifty years old with orange hair. Swaying in a lime green negligee, she held a drink and a cigarette in one hand and tugged him into the light with the other. “Hello, opportunity,” she said, and laughed like a horse. “How the hell you doin’?”

Ralph stared at her bodice. “All right.”

“How’s your bashful brother?”

“He’s all right, I reckon.”

“Is your mother still kickin’?”

“Naw. She died.”

“She did? When was that?”

“This morning.”

She turned her head at an angle. “Well, damn it to hell, you need some cheerin’ up,” she said, shucking her negligee.

Ralph was near senseless from the moonshine, and it took a while for the woman to get finished with him. After it was over, he said, “Would you come live with me on salary?”

She gave his face a playful slap. “Hell, that almost sounds like a proposal. Or will I have to do Billsy too?” She guffawed at this, blowing smoke in his face.

“Do us or not, we need a woman out at the place.”

Suzy Kathell took a sizzling drag on her Picayune. “Lambchops, I don’t think you can afford help like me. Plus I done tried domestic bliss before and it didn’t work out. I like my fancy drawers and my automobile I can drive anywhere I want. You got a automobile out at your place?”

Ralph admitted that he didn’t even have a road.

She gave his stubbly cheek an enormous pinch. “Sweetie, you straight in the back, you got all your teeth, and you got that scary look that drives dumb women off their nut. You look around good and you’ll have that old cookstove hot in no time. Now if you’ll put your clothes on and excuse me, I got to call my next case.”

* * *

THE BROTHERS SAT in the bar and drank from the same jar of shine. “I think my eyeballs is switched sockets,” Billsy said.

Ralph reached over and jerked a button off his brother’s shirt pocket and threw it at him. “Wake up and listen.”

Billsy looked stricken. “Who’s gonna sew that son of a bitch back on?”

“How much is that racehorse worth you took over in Carencro?”

“I got no idea. I think they said a thousand dollars.”

“That LeGrange man paid you to take it?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you grab it back?”

“Hell no, that black devil bit me six times. It was like dancing with a wolverine evertime I fooled with him.”

“But you could just steal it back, and he wouldn’t say nothin’ because it’s stole by him in the first place.”

“Then what, sell it?”

“Yeah. Back to him.”

“That’s crazy. Who’d buy something that was his in the first place?”

“That’s the beauty of it. It never was his.”

Billsy took a sip, hoping the drink would clear his head. “Why not just blackmail the son of a bitch?”

“There’s something about havin’ that physical thing in your own hands. Something you want that somebody else could wind up with. That’s what drives ’em up a wall.”

“Well, I ain’t going after that horse. I couldn’t sleep for a month after that job. Thought I had rabies.”

“Come on.” Ralph batted him on the shoulder, knocking off his fedora.

Billsy bent down to pick it up. “You want to resteal something, you ought to think about that kid.”

The chair under Ralph cracked its knuckles. “I done thought about it. Just don’t know how to make that deal work.”

“That job was good money.”

Ralph bent over the table and took another drink. He spread his arms out onto its surface as though it were a giant wheel he was trying to stop from turning. “That job cost me my dog.”

Billsy straightened up and composed himself, as if he knew he had to be careful. “That was some dog.”

“I took a step, that dog took a step. We’d sit out in the woods, he’d come up and bite the flies out the air if they was buzzin’ too close to my head. He’d eat bees before they got a chance to sting me.”

“He was the only pureblood in the family.”

“Sometimes I’d wake up in the night and look around the bed. If the moon was in the window I’d see old Satan’s big eyes in the room lookin’ my way, kind of the color of pine sap, keeping watch on me.”

“I remember him killin’ that pit bull that come at you.”

“That Cincinnati son of a bitch,” Ralph mumbled into the table. “How many policemen you reckon they got in Cincinnati?”

Billsy squinted over at the barmaid, who was wiping glasses with her shirttail. “I’d bet a thousand. They got paved streets and automobiles. Telephones on ever street corner.”

“Damn telephones. If it wasn’t for them, a man could get away with most anything.”

The barmaid called over. “If he’s about to puke, haul his ass outside.”

Billsy looked around for the voice. “He ain’t sick. He’s my brother.”

She didn’t laugh. “Billsy, you drunker’n a rat ridin’ a ceilin’ fan. If he pops off, you got to clean it up.”

“Aw, he’s all right. Give us another drink.” He felt his shirt pockets. “And we out of cigarettes.”

“Don’t sell ’em.”

“Aw, sweet thing, you don’t want us to smoke in here? Scared it’ll make you smell worse than you do?”

The barmaid spat in a glass and rubbed it hard. “You’ll smoke enough after you’re dead,” she told him.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING they woke up and stumbled around in the sunshine outside the big house trying to detoxify, hungry as refugees, smelly and stunned with headache. Ralph fired a big heater in the house and warmed up water for a bath in the galvanized tub. After, he found some tins of sardines in the cupboard and a block of moldy cheese, and at table his head began to clear.

“Tell you what,” he said to Billsy, who was seated across from him in the kitchen with his shirt off, little horns of hair rising from his shoulders. “You stay here and tend the still and keep an eye on things. I’ll go up the country and check out that kid.”

“Leave me money for some eats.”

“All right. That bundle of shingles we fished out the river you could nail up on the roof. It leaks pretty bad.”

“You never complained before. Said it sounded like a waterfall in your sleep.”

“Well, we never found them shingles before, did we? Everything’s getting slimy with mold and the floor’s warped up.”

“I’ll take a look at it.” Billsy pinched up a sardine out of the tin and ate it, sucking his fingers.

“I’ll pack my glad rags. Them light wool pants we got from that laundry in Scotlandville. White shirts and a string tie.”

“Scrape the horse shit off your shoes.”

“I’ll use them new brown boots we got out that house in McComb.”

“Whoa. Nobody’ll know you.”

* * *

THEY RODE to the little station in Fault, and Billsy took both horses back. In two days, Ralph was walking the neighborhoods of Graysoner, Kentucky, his thumbs under his suspenders as if he owned the place. It was after nine a.m., when most men were at work, most women busy getting the day’s shopping done before the heat set in. He’d spent an hour down at the farrier’s, getting the information he needed from the old-timers hanging around the forge who told about the trails of ten or fifteen years before, when the automobile had been a thing unknown. He listened to what they said about the hatchet-back ridge south of town and the passes that threaded over it. The next day he walked down the alley behind Acy White’s house and saw what looked like a hired girl in poor clothes and the child rolling a ball in the short grass. When he passed the fence, he tipped his hat and smiled as best he could. The woman, robust-looking with a narrow back straight as a kitchen chair, smiled back at him, and he moved down the street. “Well, now,” he said to himself. “Gray eyes.”

Skadlock went down to a hotel where steamboat men stayed and washed up in the restroom at the end of the hall. He slicked his hair back with oil and put on a fresh shirt. He got a haircut in the shop in the lobby and passed small talk, gradually sliding the conversation around to the woman who worked in the middle of the block on Bonner Alley. He didn’t want to use Acy White’s name. Ralph understood that local barbers knew everything in a small town since chitchat was their stock-in-trade, more so than bartenders and whores. The barber snipped his scissors three times in the air and looked into the middle distance. “That gal lives somewhere down the hill in Ditch Street. I’ve seen her walking that way after seven when she’s finished up at Mr. White’s house. Damned if that ain’t a place for the rats. The tannery leaves its slops out in the canal, and they’re all over in there, up and down.”