Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

The sergeant shrugged. “Lucky, floorwalker’s not much of a job for somebody like you.”

“I like it. The pay’s not bad and I can move up some, maybe manage a department.”

“Well, if you that hard up, I can get you on as a bank guard.”

He looked up and shook his head.

The sergeant picked up his pen. “I guess you’re not the shootin’ kind.”

“Even my wife says I’m responsible for the little girl.”

Muscarella ranged his dark eyes over him. “What you say?”

He put his hands in his pockets. “I say I wish it’d been my day off.”

The sound of an argument rolled up the steps outside and the double doors burst open with two small cops fighting a two-hundred-pound whore, her red face rising angry as a boil out of a white feather boa.

HE SPENT THE DAY looking for work at the other big stores downtown. At suppertime he stepped off the streetcar and walked under the live oaks and over the root-buckled sidewalks to his shotgun on Camp Street. Looking forward to playing into the evening on his piano, he stopped half a block away and pushed back his straw boater when he saw a man and a woman sitting on the porch with his wife. He put his head down and walked up.

His wife’s voice carried a forced lightness. “Lucky, these are the Wellers, Ted and Elsie.”

“I know. How are you?” He noticed the mother’s lips were determined today, pressed tight. Ted, a thick, balding fellow with a short mustache, held out his hand for Sam’s and clasped it with surprisingly long fingers. After Sam sat down in a straight-back chair, the couple told him they’d been to every precinct house in town and explained they were musicians working on a Stewart Line excursion steamer come down from Cincinnati.

Sam nodded. “One of the big dance boats.”

“The Excelsior, ” Ted said. “Elsie and me were in town shopping, you know, getting some fresh duds for a new act. That’s what we were doing when our girl got taken.” He looked away, his eyes reddening.

Elsie leaned into the conversation. “The boat’s getting laid up for a couple months for new boilers and hull work. The company’s going to put us on another boat they just bought from the St. Paul Line. It’s tied up south of town, but until it leaves we’re spending every spare minute looking for her.”

Sam closed his eyes for a second and saw the little girl. “Her name’s Lily, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Elsie put a hand to her mouth.

He looked uncomfortably from one to the other, not knowing what to say or ask in a situation like this. Finally, he said, “She is your blood child, right? There’s no ex-spouses involved, is there?”

Ted frowned. “She’s our natural child. And we’ve thought about everybody we know and can’t come up with a soul who’d want to make off with her.”

Sam leaned back, listening to the chair creak underneath him. “Well, I’m not surprised.”

“Why do you say that?” Elsie asked, her hand still next to her mouth.

“The woman I saw didn’t look like anybody who’d wanted a pretty little girl. She was old and had seen a lot of hard times. I just caught a glimpse, but her hair was oily-looking and I think, let’s see now”-he closed his eyes again-“she was missing a front tooth.”

“Oh,” Elsie said, “she sounds awful.”

“Did you see the one who hit you?” her husband asked.

“No, but the bastard-excuse me-he sure knew where to pop me. If you think about it, considering the chloroform and all, it’s like somebody hired those people to steal her. They were just too good at it. They’d planned it all out.”

For a long moment everyone on the narrow wood porch seemed to be thinking about what he’d said. In the next block, the clipped yells of a neighborhood baseball game swelled up and died off. Sam was imagining the one bottle of beer at the bottom of the cooler, next to the block of ice.

Ted moved uneasily in his chair. “It doesn’t make sense for someone to hire a thief.”

“I don’t know. Tell me something about her.”

The Wellers exchanged looks.

“Well,” the husband began, “about two months ago we brought her into the act. She’s only three and a half, but she’s smarter than the two of us multiplied together. The child can remember at least a couple verses of a dozen different songs. When she sings, you can see the music in the way she moves.”

Elsie straightened her back. “She’s got this voice that’s very accurate for a child. Good volume, too.”

“I taught her how to dance a little while she sings,” Ted bragged. “We’re part of the big orchestra that the Stewart Line hires, but we only use Lily in two ensemble pieces per set, and the audiences go crazy for her.” He looked up and narrowed his eyes. “A lot of people have watched her perform since we left Cincinnati four weeks ago.”

“Three and a half and she can do all that?” Sam looked at his wife. “I’d steal her myself.”

The parents both looked glumly at the street.

During the next half hour he told the Wellers how sorry he was several times, but they didn’t make a move to get up. Finally, the street began to darken and he pulled out his watch. “You know, I’ve got to go in now.”

Ted also pulled a pocket watch from his vest but wound it without checking the time. “You’re the only one who saw the ones that took her. The cops at the Third District said you’re real smart. You can figure all the angles here.”

Sam felt sorry for them, but had no idea of how to help. His brief stay in France had instilled in him the understanding that the world presents unsolvable tragedies at every turn. “I don’t know what to do for you.”

Lightning bugs began to come out of the streetside privet, sparking on and off like flickering hopes.

At last, Elsie stood up. “We’re sorry you got fired.”

“Me too.”

“What will you do?”

He smiled up at her in spite of himself. “I guess I’ll think about some of those angles.”

LATER, after supper, Linda opened the beer and poured it into two glasses. Sam walked through the little parlor and picked up a small framed photograph of an infant dressed in baptismal clothes. They went back out onto the porch and sat in the night’s breath coming up from the river. He held the photograph in one hand and rubbed a thumb back and forth across the glass.

Linda touched his arm. “Are you thinking of how to help them?”

“I’m thinking, all right.” There were people missing in his life like big holes cut out of the night sky, and Sam felt powerless to do anything about it. He was only one person in a planet full of incomplete seekers, and now the Wellers had joined him.

IT HAD BEEN TWO WEEKS since they’d seen the Wellers. Right after a thunderstorm had tortured the neighborhood with sizzling bolts, Sam and his wife were looking through the window screen at the water standing in their small bricked yard. He felt like a piece of wreckage left behind by the wind. Between them on the table was a small loaf of French bread showing a flame of desiccated ham. No lettuce or tomato, no mayonnaise. They were out of everything and the rent was due. They owned only an old Dodge automobile and their clothes. Linda had spent her needlepoint money on the telephone bill, electricity, gasoline. Sam imagined she had a jar of quarters somewhere but never asked about it, for fear it didn’t exist. The dry sandwich lay between them like a signal.

“Well, I guess I better go see Muscarella and sign up with the bank militia.”

She looked at him. “My brother can get you on at the railroad.”