Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

“Moonlighting?”

“Got to do some damn something to squeeze a nickel out of the old man.” Ted Weller’s eyes were red, and Sam wondered if he’d been drinking.

“Hey, I’m on your side.”

“The more I work, the less I have. First my little girl, and now they’re trying to starve me out.”

Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Your little girl? That’s what I’m here for. When we get upriver, I’ll start asking around onshore.”

Ted wrote something on his pad and glanced up. “She would kiss me at bedtime and say ‘ Gute Nacht. ’ I was teaching her German.”

“Yeah?”

He leaned close and Sam could smell the whiskey. “You don’t know what it’s like, not to be able to take your kid in your arms anymore.” He turned at once and banged through a swinging door.

Sam wanted to follow him through and remind him that he wasn’t the only man in the world to lose a child, but he held back, watching the door swing in and out with waiters and busboys, giving a sliced-up view of Ted Weller arguing with a sweating cook.

AROUND TEN O’CLOCK, the boat swung into a dreamy turn at the Violet locks and was steaming upstream at three-quarters speed. The band broke into an uptempo version of “Everybody Step” and emptied the tables. When Sam came down the stairs Charlie Duggs was dragging a big young fellow by the collar out toward the forward rail. He broke loose and swung, punching Duggs in the jaw. Charlie’s face rebounded wearing a grin, and he slapped the man openhanded, the percussion cracking above the thundering band, the customer plunging sideways under a table. Sam went over to help but the second mate waved him off.

“I can handle this one. He just wants to dance a new step is all. A waiter came up a minute ago and said things were getting testy downstairs.” He grabbed the man by the ankles and hauled him back out into the music.

On the main deck Sam spotted two old men arguing, their faces crimson, one holding a cane by its bottom, the curved handle rising toward a big Emerson ceiling fan, which jerked it away, and carried it three turns before flinging it across the lounge, onto a table, where it knocked drinks in the laps of an overdressed and tipsy foursome. Sam at once understood several things about a dance steamer: people felt safe getting drunk since there was no proper law on board, nearly everyone was drinking, and any cruise was liable to turn more unstable as the trip wore on.

He stepped in front of two men advancing from their dripping table. “Easy,” he said, holding up his hands. “It was an accident.”

“Oh yeah?” One of them raised a fist, a short fellow with an ice cube rising out of his vest pocket. “Where have you been? These old bastards have been carping back and forth for the past half hour. This was supposed to be an enjoyable ride.”

“We want our money back for the drinks,” the other man said, swaying and then taking an extra step to the side.

“I’ll see that the waiter brings out another bucket of ice and some glasses.”

“What about an apology?” the little man said.

The larger of the two old men came over. His eyes were small and his nose was a huge overripe strawberry. “I’ll take my cane, thank you.”

“Don’t you have anything to say?” the little man snarled.

The old gentleman pursed his mouth, and Sam knew by looking at his face that he was going to say something that would result in the breaking up of a quarter of the wicker furniture in the lounge. “I see,” the old man began, “that you would like for me to make you feel better. You want me to apologize for the actions of an electrical contrivance.”

Here the little man’s friend stepped up. “You don’t have to get smart with us.” He gave the old man a halfhearted shove in the vest.

A tiny, well-dressed, middle-aged gentleman stood up across the room and steadied himself against a plant stand. “You just watch who you’re shoving around,” he chirped. “That’s my father-in-law.”

Two women were flapping ice off their dresses, and one of them picked up the cane and tossed it at the old man, hitting him on the forehead and knocking his glasses off. “You trashy people,” he roared, “ought to be thrown overboard!”

Sam looked around at sixty or so passengers and saw that they were nice people, well dressed and mature, not some unimportant kids he could bully into behaving. He tried to get between everybody at once and found himself in the middle of a jabbering cloud of alcoholic breath. The polite air was turning sour when the son-in-law, who was four tables over, tried to get to the argument by stepping on a wicker-bottom chair, but his foot went through it and he danced three hops and fell onto another couple’s table, his hand getting stuck in a small metal water pitcher. At this point everyone started to laugh, except the son-in-law and the old man, who slowly bent over and felt the floor for his cane and spectacles. Sam called over a waiter to dry the tables and chairs and get everybody reseated and supplied with fresh glasses and ice. The steam whistle blew a warning, followed by a rising, shrill signal from the starboard side as a ferryboat cut its engines only twenty-five feet away, its yellow running lights shining angrily, its boiler’s fire door a blinding orange star traveling sideways in the night. The passengers calmed down, distracted by the fact that the ferry had come out from its landing without waiting for or even seeing the Ambassador at all. Sam watched the ferry slide astern, hoping that everyone would realize that a couple of spilled drinks or a rude remark was nothing compared to a midnight collision spilling hundreds of folks in deep river, but then the son-in-law began throwing punches and it took him ten minutes of pulling and pushing to break up the fight.

UPSTAIRS, the band members were running with sweat, thumping out a shimmy number as five hundred dancers stepped and turned in a massive wink of patent leather and sequins, silk ties and hair oil, good New Orleans dancers who knew what to do with a downbeat making the old deck jump. The waiters were skating around the edge of the action, sliding their shoes on the dance wax, delivering sandwiches and mixers to the people at the double layer of tables lining the walls. The expressions of most of the dancers seemed overly happy, and Sam scanned the faces of the band members, who were too busy selling the tune to exhibit any worry, and indeed no one showed a negative thought, caught up in some kind of capsule of delight, at least while the music kept everything in motion. And then he saw a still silhouette sitting at the stern end of the dance deck, and he walked over because her presence contradicted the motion-drunk room. It was Elsie, sitting alone at the last table, her hair wound in pigtails above her ears, wearing a plain dark dress.

“Hi. You on break?”

“In case you don’t know, the staff can’t join in the fun. We’ll be at the dock in ten minutes and as soon as the lights come up, I’m to start stripping the tables.”

She looked tired, and he wanted to say something to cheer her up, but all he said was, “Work you to death, don’t they?”

“Well, let’s just say I need to keep busy.”

“Ted still waiting on ’em upstairs?”

She nodded. “I was waitressing with him but they cut me loose a few minutes ago. It’ll only take a half hour to clear everybody off. This is a pretty mild crowd.”

The whistle moaned out a landing signal and the band began to play “Home, Sweet Home.” Sam felt a tug on his arm and he turned to face a thickset man also wearing a mate’s cap. He introduced himself as Aaron Swaneli, the first mate.

“How’d I miss meeting you?”