Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

Number 6 labored on, now and then hanging up between saplings. In a tight spot it raised a hoof, put it through a fork in a trunk, then pulled it back and wedged around the tree, lowering its head and rooting through the trash woods like a hog. Four miles into the maze, a ropey wisteria vine caught the toe of Sam’s shoe and flipped him off like a playing card. Number 6 didn’t even look around and cantered west. Fighting the brush, Sam ran after it for a hundred yards in the smothering heat, finally leaping for the saddle horn and pulling himself up. The horse stopped then and looked back at him.

“You ugly son of a bitch,” Sam rasped. “You thirdhand hook rug pulled from a privy.” Here the horse bucked once, and Sam came down on its neck. After gaining his breath, he slid down and led the animal to a deep puddle of clear water and let it drink. “All right,” he said, pulling out his compass. “Eat some of that grass there and we’ll move on.” The horse rolled its ears away.

Soon they entered a low-water cypress swamp, the treetops closing off the sky. The red-bark trunks were the size of factory chimneys, and everywhere their roots rose from the soppy mud like stalagmites. He checked his compass and headed across the weedless, canopied land. Everywhere he looked he saw the stout windings of water moccasins, and he felt the horse go rigid with fear. Sam put heels to its flanks, keeping its mind on movement, not on the flint-scaled multitudes boiling in the dim mud.

He was four hours beyond the bayou when he saw bright light between a mossy picket of trees, and he rode through a tussle of brambles into the open air. Reaching into the saddlebag, he pulled out a Mason jar of water and a cheese sandwich and sat, eating and staring at the Mississippi, sensing what de Soto must have felt when he stumbled out of the brush to wonder at this wide arm of water.

He rode down under the bank until he saw sun-lavendered bottles on the mudflats and then turned the horse up a washout that led past a roofless cabin. He turned right into a trash woods that forty years before was a pasture and followed a leaning barbwire fence beyond a weather-flattened barn and into a sudden green rush of old magnolias, sycamores, and ground-hugging live oaks. He glimpsed a chimney top through the greenery and stopped the horse, stepping down and tying it to a low oak limb. After ten steps he was standing in the rear of a three-story house with two encircling galleries and tall stuccoed pillars on four sides. It was invisible to the world, warped and paintless, its windows smudged or broken out, daylight pouring through holes in the upstairs gallery floors. The brick porch was strewn with rags, broken chairs, desiccated watermelon rinds, and a cow skull. He knew better than to present himself at the wide front entrance, and what could he say when someone opened the door in his face holding no better greeting than a cocked pistol? He stood and thought and then went back to the horse, leading it slowly away, but in a circuit so that soon he was going along the riverbank as though traveling through to somewhere else. There was no road, just an area too sandy to support more than weeds and thistle. When he got opposite the woodsy patch where he thought the house was hiding, he talked to the horse in a big, good-natured voice. Number 6 wouldn’t look at him and turned his head away, engaged in patient urination. Sam picked up its rear hoof and caught it between his legs, pretending to examine the frog for an injury, but after ten minutes, no one came out to ask what he was about. Finally, he said loudly, “Well, let’s us just go in and ask for what we want, like the dunderheads we are.”

He spied above the branches a paneless belvedere, walked toward it, and was soon through the woods at the front of the mansion, where he tied the horse and walked up the flagstones. He took a breath, then knocked on the weather-scoured door.

From around the corner of the house stepped a man of at least fifty years, wearing a misshapen straw cowboy hat and dressed in denim shirt and pants that had been worn sky blue. “What you need?”

“I’m looking for Ninga Skadlock.”

The man walked up, followed closely by an all-black German shepherd that slowly and almost reverently gathered a mouthful of Sam’s pants leg in its mouth and held fast. “Excuse Satan here. He just wants to hold you still.”

Sam looked down into the monstrous dog’s amber eyes whose depths radiated primal obedience. “All right.”

“What you want of Mom?”

He swallowed twice. “I want to hire her to go get a dog for me in Baton Rouge. I heard she was good at it.”

The man touched the shepherd and it slowly drew back. Sam felt its saliva cooling against his calf and looked down again into eyes trained to see things differently than he did. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said.

“Just let me see her.”

The man slowly rubbed his knuckles on the animal’s head. “She’s in the kitchen.”

Sam felt light-headed among the soaring pillars. “This is your big place?”

“It was here when we come along,” he growled.

They walked through a leaf-sodden yard to a small gray-wood clapboard building separate from the main house. Stepping up inside, he saw the walls first, for they were freshly whitewashed. A thick-shouldered, clean-shaven man was seated at table writing in a ledger, and an old woman was working at a kerosene stove, frying onions and bell peppers in a stamped iron skillet.

“Man wants to see you.”

She looked up and he knew at once it was her. The man at the table closed his ledger and watched Sam passively. He was about forty-five, dressed all in khaki, even to his baseball cap.

The old woman wore glasses and didn’t have to squint to size Sam up. “You come in a boat?”

“No, ma’am. I have a horse.”

Glancing at his town shoes, she said, “You sure didn’t walk here in those.” She banged a spoon on the edge of the skillet and dropped chunks of cut-up rabbit into the vegetables. Then she smiled and he saw the gap in her teeth. “Excuse my manners while I keep working. We don’t exactly get much company out here. What can I do for you?”

He looked at the two men, the first still standing in the doorway behind him. Sam was a fair teller of unimportant lies and thought he might fool people like this. Then he looked down at the dog, who watched him as if he were game. “I have a nice house down in Baton Rouge, on Florida Avenue,” he began unsteadily, “where I live with my wife and two young kids. A man next door owns a chow. The dog’s attacked my kids twice, and all night he keeps my family up with his yowling. I’ve tried to deal with the owner for a couple years, but he won’t get rid of the dog.” He paused for effect here, scratching his ear, glancing across the room. A door was opened halfway, revealing a large indoor still under a metal cowl that vented through the ceiling. “He seems to get pleasure out of the trouble he’s caused me.”

“I never knew a chow to bark much.” The woman lay the spoon down on a dishcloth and motioned to him. “Sit down, mister?”

“Sam Simoneaux.”

“Well, a coonass.”

His face remained fixed; he couldn’t afford anger here. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And you live on Florida Avenue down in Baton Rouge?”

“Yes.”

“What block?”

“Ma’am?”

“What’s your house address?”

A brief surge of panic ran up his backbone. “The 1900 block.”

“All right.” She pulled a chair out from the table and sat down, then introduced him to her son Billsy, who had crossed his arms over the ledger and was leaning forward, regarding him with distant amusement. “And that other one’s Ralph. Anyway, how can we help you with this dog?”