The Missing (35 page)

MORRIS HIGHTOWER AGENT GREENVILLE MISSISSIPPI AM IN MEMPHIS STATION TYING UP LOOSE ENDS FOR CHILD IN TROUBLE. CAN YOU TELL LOCATION OF OUTLAW FAMILY IN SE ARK NAME OF CLOAT. APPRECIATE HELP. SAM SIMONEAUX.

He told the clerk he would wait for a response.

“I know this old boy,” the man told him. “He might not be on shift.”

“I’ll wait.” Sam knew that every nail, sweet pea, mantel clock, hot-water bottle, and woodstove came through the hands of a town’s railroad agent, and all news and secrets as well. If Hightower couldn’t tell him anything, he probably could put him in touch with someone who could.

He sat with Charlie until his train steamed in, and he boarded him like a relative, waving as the engine chuffed off southward toward Mississippi, its long-bell whistle hurling blue notes at the sky.

He dozed a while, and shortly after five, the clerk walked over and handed him a telegram. “Here you go, feller.”

He tore the envelope and held the message in the light of the western windows.

TELEGRAPHED MY MAN IN ARKANSAS. GO TO TOWN OF RATIO. ASK CONSTABLE SONER YOUR QUESTIONS. BRING BIG WEAPON. MH

A LOCAL FREIGHT clattered into Greenville, Mississippi, and the conductor came in with the bills of lading. Morris Hightower began to invoice everything on the train while sacks of feed, crated Victrolas, bedsteads, harness and kegs were unloaded onto the freight dock. A local fellow, toothless and skinny, an assistant bartender out of work since the Volstead Act was passed, was coming up the street headed in the direction of the hardware store. He veered into the station and stood at the barred window, calling out to Morris Hightower to give him change for a twenty. “Them hardware clerks don’t like breaking a big bill for a quarter’s worth of box nails.”

“I’m low on change myself,” the agent said, running a handkerchief over his ponderous neck.

The skinny man blinked and seemed to think about this. “Look, I ain’t askin’ for no loan. Just break this bill into two fives, nine ones, and some quarters and dimes.”

The agent moved one bill of lading over to a tall stack. “Lot of people buyin’ tickets this morning. I need what change I got.”

The man at the window cocked his head. “Damn your hide. Hightower, you ain’t never lifted a finger in your whole damn life to hep somebody out.”

“Them that deserves help sometimes gets it.”

He began waving the twenty in the window as though it were on fire. “Come over here you rock-hearted old bastard and give me my change.”

Hightower turned only halfway around. The bulb hanging from the ceiling imparted a white-hot luminescence to his bald head. After a moment of concentrating on the wall above his typewriter, he said, “If I have to come to that window, I’ll hit you so hard you’ll piss nickels. Then you’ll have all the change you want.” When he heard footsteps trailing off toward the door, he turned back to his work. After a while he thought about the girl that had been found. His brother in New Orleans had mentioned that he’d seen her playing on Sam’s porch, singing like a bird.

* * *

SAM LEFT the pawnshop wearing a new soft brown cap, a set of high leather boots, and a big Colt automatic pistol in a shoulder holster under his coat. He left Memphis at sundown aboard the Kate Adams, bound downriver for Helena. In the tiny stateroom he washed up, then went out to join five old men sitting near the open windows in the forward part of the cabin. They were discussing which stocks to buy on the New York exchange. One of them was a silver-haired farmer who declared he’d as soon bury his money in the privy as trust it to a New York broker. This engendered a half hour of carping that Sam patiently waited out. When the conversation changed to river traffic, Sam got in and told them what he did, which they all considered exotic and some sign of the new age to come.

“I hear some of them young gals shimmy to that jazz music till their drawers fall off,” the farmer said.

“I wouldn’t know. I’m too busy playing.”

They laughed at that, and one of them asked if he were a Levert from south Louisiana and he said no, that he lived in New Orleans, and then everybody told what they thought of New Orleans, and within an hour he had them explaining to him where to rent an automobile in Helena. He asked how the road was down to Ratio, but none of them could remember if there was any kind of a road.

* * *

THE KATE ADAMS stopped all night at plantations and dirt landings, scratching for pennies in freight. Right after sunrise it ran out its stage plank and dropped him and a large, well-made wooden crate on the wharfboat’s freight platform. He caught a ride into Helena and found the man who rented cars, giving him the names of the gentlemen who’d recommended him on the Kate Adams, and the man handed him the key of a two-year-old black Ford roadster and didn’t ask for a signature.

He got directions to Ratio, and two miles south of town the road dwindled into bumper-high grass running along the levee. He gave the car some gas and spun his way up to the top of the embankment and followed a wagon track, steering around lakes of rainwater and swales of mud, making about five miles an hour. After a time, he passed a large cotton plantation and could see dozens of workers in the fields, many mules hitched up to cultivators and spray wagons, but not a single internal-combustion machine. The trail ran down the levee at this point, and he stood on the brakes and let the Ford slide down it to flat land. The car sputtered along to a company store, a tall and broad wooden building, its shutters hanging off like oversized ears. Past this, the trail went into the woods and he drove at a crawl, the wheels tumbling over roots and stumps. This was virgin forest, and the trail wound back in time, away from civilization toward some druidlike occupancy back in the hardwood-haunted dimness.

For two hours the little car shook like a dog shedding water, and then he rolled up to the edge of a flat, fallow field that had been plowed the year before but left in unplanted rows. He got the wheels to match two furrows and proceeded until he was funneled by a fence line into the backyard of a large, paintless house where a white man sat on the back porch cradling a crock jug in his lap. He placidly watched Sam stop in the yard, scattering chickens, as though this happened every five minutes. His arm came up and briskly motioned around the side of the house, and Sam set the car forward and saw a lane under wild magnolia branches, and soon he was at a gate in front, which he opened and closed, now facing a pasture full of rickety brown cattle. This he drove across for two miles, dodging manure cakes and listing, bony animals, coming to another gate that led to a levee ramp. On top, he expected to see the Mississippi, but it had meandered off many years before and there was only willow-haunted flatland that seemed to go east for miles. He guessed that this had been a landing a hundred years before, for remnants of a cypress dock remained, pilings marching out to nowhere, to history. He tried to picture the grand steamers that stopped here fifty years before with their mural-covered paddle boxes and stained-glass clearstories, millionaire planters gesturing from the upper decks toward the worlds they owned, a time that seemed as inconsequential as smoke in light of the nothing that remained. It was only money, he thought, and that never lasts.

A trail plunged east into the willow brake, but it wasn’t mentioned in the uninspiring directions he’d been given in Helena, so he again turned south on the levee, passing a cotton gin with a shake roof and a rust-perforated smokestack coming up through the middle of it. Across a field he saw a respectable-looking redbrick house, a painted wooden porch across its front. He cut the Ford’s wheels and stood on the brakes, the tires locking and plowing sod down the steep slope. He drove along a cow path to a paintless barn and then through a gate into a fenced area of sawdust and dried manure, spooking three mules and five horses that ran from the machine and bunched against the mossy pickets. Leaving the Ford to steam among the animals, he climbed over the corral fence and advanced on the house.

The front door opened as he stepped up. Framed in the doorway was a barefoot man wearing a white shirt and vest, pearl-colored pants, and black cloth suspenders. Pinned to the right strap was a shield badge worn to brass. His hair was iron gray, carefully cut, and he was clean-shaven as well. There was something slightly off about his posture. “Sir,” he began, “is there some way I can help you?”

His civility was disarming. Sam regarded him carefully, as though there was something he didn’t understand but should. “Are you Constable Soner?”

“Indeed I am.”

“My name’s Sam Simoneaux. A man I know, a telegrapher for the railroad, told me you might be able to help me find a family back in these parts.”

“Is it Sam Kivens?”

“No, sir.”

“Oh, of course. It’s old Bob McFadden.”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“What railroad?”

“Y&MV.”

Soner narrowed his eyes. “Doug Friar? Mac Divitts? Hazel Tugovich? Barry Ofel?”

“His name’s Morris Hightower.”

Soner seemed surprised. “I don’t know him, son. But I imagine that he knows one of the others I named and obtained my location from them.” He looked Sam over carefully for hints of who he was, and then turned stiffly, like a man with back trouble. “Come on in and have a seat.”

As soon as he closed the door, the front room went dark as a tunnel, and when his eyes adjusted he could see that all the windows were boarded across except for the top foot or so, where the upper sash was pulled down for air. Soner gestured to an armchair in front of an oak desk and then walked rigidly around it and sat in a wheeled office chair that needed oiling badly. In the gloom Sam saw that the wall behind the lawman was hung with guns, more of them materializing in an umber collage as his pupils relaxed. The rear wall was covered with Winchester lever actions, brass-framed carbines and rifles turning green under dust, Model 1873s, impossibly large Model 1876 big-game guns, sleeker ’86s, modern-looking ’95s, and semiautomatics in bear-killing .401 caliber. The walls were ten feet high, and on the one to his left were dusty military rifles, while to his right a hundred pistols hung on nails, hog legs from the Mexican War, break-action Smiths come in off the western prairie, single-action Colts by the dozen, their finish burned off according to how much misery they’d dispensed. He was afraid to turn around.

“This is some collection, all right. Where’d you get ’em all?”

Soner’s expression didn’t change. “There’s many of them to be had in this world.”

“You’re well protected, that’s for sure.”

“They’re all loaded.” Here he smiled. “Back here in the woods, I need options.”

“Yes, sir. I won’t take much of your time.” He made an effort to see if in Soner’s eyes there were any traces of madness.

“Take all the time you wish. Can I get you a glass of water? It’s pure, though warm.”

“That’d be nice.”

When Soner returned from the back room, walking stiffly with the glass held out, he stopped behind him and held the tall glass to the left. When Sam reached out with his left hand, Soner’s right hand ghosted from behind and plucked the .45 from its shoulder holster. He held the big pistol high in the air with two fingers as he returned to his seat. “Just a precaution. I don’t know your character.”

Sam gulped the water. “Well…all right, then.”

“I’ve been the law back in here ever since I was a boy, more or less. You’d think it was just writing permits and solving little neighborly fights. Serving papers. Things like that.”

“I hadn’t thought about it much.”

“Even back in here there are what you might call earth-shaking matters.”

Sam looked at the top of the window to his right. The light was fading, and he wondered if he could stay around long enough to sleep in the barn. He might even get up in the morning and drive back to Helena. “You know everybody around here, then.”

“I know their animals, too.”

“I’m looking for a family named Cloat.”

The constable’s expression froze. In the dim room his eyes, deep set and dark, glimmered like two stars reflected in a narrow well. “I have the feeling you’ve got a story to tell me.”

“That’s right.” He took several swallows of water, which had no taste at all, and said what there was to say. He ended by explaining that each year he thought more about the missing pieces of his life, and that talking to the Cloats, maybe just seeing them, might help him fill in the blank areas. When he finished his story, the space in the window was lavender sky.

“You think that by looking at them you’ll figure them out?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you look at a mountain, can you tell what’s inside all that rock?”

“Sir?”

“I’m sorry.” Soner made a dismissive motion with his hand. “You going back there to kill some of them?”

“I hope not.”

“Why else would anyone look up a Cloat?”

“To find out things.”

Soner nodded. “Yes, of course. You’re on a quest for knowledge only. That makes you lucky.”

Sam blinked. “How’s that?”

“The Cloats go through life incurious about anything at all, whether history or music or the well-being of their own blood.”

“Maybe they’re the lucky ones.”

Soner shook his head. “No. They’re like animals, interested only in what’s in front of them at the moment. But there’s one thing that makes them different from animals.”

“And what’s that?”

“Revenge.” The constable was quiet for a long time. Then he reached out and lit a Rayo lamp with a match. “Come on,” he said, hoisting the lamp. “Let’s fix supper.”

They went into a long rear kitchen and lit more lamps. Sam got the kerosene stove hot and found a skillet while Soner brought in eggs and a smoked ham and snap beans from his garden. There was a pitcher of buttermilk under a cheesecloth and some hard bread. The little stove cooked slow, but within an hour they sat down to eat, and Soner said a blessing. He asked Sam to tell him about his work on the Ambassador and listened to the long story about why he hired out on the boat in the first place.

After the dishes were put away, the constable poured them some old sour mash in glasses of the good water and they went out and sat on the porch in rush-bottom rockers. The dark was so total the mosquitoes couldn’t find them.

“Mr. Simoneaux, you can spend the night in the upstairs bedroom. It should be cool enough for sleep in about an hour. But do not for any reason come down before daylight. There’s a chamber pot under the bed. Do you understand?”

Sam nodded. “What’s your bedside firearm?”

He heard Soner take a long draw from his glass and then a knocking sound as he set it on the floor. “An eight-gauge Greener double-barrel. I loaded the shells myself.”

“Good Lord. What’s in them, buckshot?”

Soner chuckled. “My father was a watchmaker in Memphis. He died when I was young, and I was left for years with boxes of used watch parts, little steel gears, balance wheels, winding stems, case-hardened screws. I loaded a whole box of eight-gauge shells with the stuff, jammed it in tight.”

“Damn. You ever fire one off?”

“No. I call it my time machine. You know, when somebody dies their soul travels one of two ways—back where they came from or forward toward what they deserve, and whoever comes against my Greener will make the journey.”