Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

“I wasn’t exactly in a position to put any pressure on them. As far as the law is concerned, these people own their own country.”

Ted grabbed him by the arm and wedged him against a bulkhead. “You tell me how to get back in there and they’ll tell me something.”

Sam read his eyes and found them a mix of rage and fear. “Ted, I think they’ll kill you.”

His eyes flew wide and Elsie turned her face away. “They didn’t kill you !” Ted hollered. “You think I’m just big soft Ted the dumb German who all he can do is pound a piano. Let me tell you, I’m plenty tough. I grew up in a saloon.”

Sam pointed downriver. “Back in there where I went ain’t Cincinnati. There’s no law at all.”

“I don’t need law when my baby’s missing.”

Sam looked south along the bank understanding that Ted was going to do something stupid, and the sad part of it was that he agreed with his feelings. “You don’t know how to get back in there,” he said softly.

“I got a mouth to ask.”

Elsie put a hand on his shoulder. Sam imagined she was going to try to calm him, but instead she said, “I’ll get you money from the boat and you can ask directions at the station.”

“This is a bad idea.”

Ted glowered at him, his mustache blooming under his red nose. “You tell me where this place is. Right now.”

“No. I won’t be responsible.”

Ted slammed him against the bulkhead, hard. “Tell me or I’ll break you open like a dollar fiddle, damn you.”

Sam stared him in the eye. Ted was hoping for at least a chance of finding his family’s future, of gathering in his blood, but Sam remained silent, to keep him from getting hurt. He himself had been called Lucky so many times that he was beginning to believe the name fit, but Ted might not share his good fortune. Then he remembered the child’s face, floating in the folds of his brain like an ivory pendant. A child alive. Out there somewhere. His thoughts changed course, and he decided that luck couldn’t manifest itself unless a man took a chance. Feeling sad to the bone, he raised his open palms above his waist. “Well, to start with, there’s this murderous dog.”

TED WALKED to the Y &MV station, bought a ticket, and boarded a mixed train going out at four to St. Frank. It was a bone-rattling ride in a wooden coach through cut-over land and weed-wracked farms. Two hours later the train jammed on its brakes at a dusty board-and-batten station and he stepped off into the still air and asked the agent for directions to the livery.

The little agent sized him up. “This here’s the last train tonight, so if you wait a bit I’ll give you a lift in my flivver.” He waited under the station overhang until the agent came out in the slanting light and turned the oily crank on his Ford. At the livery Ted got the owner up from supper and asked to rent a horse.

“Well,” the liveryman said, “I like your looks so I’ll let you have my wife’s mare, Sooky.”

Ted shook his head. “No thanks. I want the one called Number six.”

The liveryman fished a set of spectacles from his pocket, put them on, and looked at Ted more closely. “That’s not a good horse for a big fellow like yourself.”

“A man who rented it before says it’s what I need.”

“You can suit yourself, but that horse will try to gallop through a parked locomotive, it’s that stupid.” The man stalked off toward his sun-bleached barn.

Ted rode across the stream before full dark, then sat the horse on the far bank, reading a compass by the light of a match. The liveryman had explained where to go and to wait for the moon to come up, and after half an hour it began to rise above the line of cypresses, shining like a communion wafer. Ted put the horse forward, keeping the moon between the animal’s ears. He carried his pistol in one pocket, his big folding knife in the other, and his little girl in his thoughts. In the swamp he lost sight of the sky and became lost. He spilled his matches into the mud and couldn’t read his compass, but he kept moving, hoping he would blunder his way to the river, deciding that nothing could stop him. Number 6 brushed against a locust tree and Ted felt the thorns rake his calf, but he didn’t so much as turn his head at the pain.

THE NEXT DAY Sam was rushing through his lunch before the loading of the two o’clock crowd when Captain Stewart walked up to the table and asked, “Have you seen Mr. Weller?”

“I thought he’d asked you for the day off.”

The captain’s white eyebrows seemed to double in size as he leaned down. “He sent me a note to that effect but evidently did not wait for a reply. Who’s supposed to play for the two o’clock trip?”

Sam swallowed slowly, looking at his fingers. “Aw, I’ll cover it for him. It’s a church group, isn’t it? How much dancing are they going to do?”

“No offense, son, but I’ve heard you play. You’ve got to practice to get the stiffness out of your wrists.” He went upright, his back straight as a broom handle. “But go down and get ready while Fred Marble plays everybody on board with the calliope. And I’ll keep an ear on you.”

After a minute Elsie came over and refilled his coffee cup. “Is he awful mad?”

“He ain’t happy. When’s Ted coming back?”

“He told us he’d return on this afternoon’s train.”

“I hope he finds out more than I did.”

“Who’s going to cover for him, the colored pianist?”

“Yours truly.”

“Oh.”

He smiled at her. “Don’t worry. I’ll play like it counts.” Up on the roof Fred began to run scales of weeping notes, the whistles rising in pitch as they warmed in the blasting steam.

About one-thirty he got down to the hot dance floor and put up the lid on the piano, a six-foot-eight George Steck, a tough, loud instrument tolerant of the river’s dampness. As the first ticket holders began to roam the big boat he warmed up, playing “Nola” at a moderate tempo and nodding to the five other band members as they walked up: Zack Stimson, the banjo player; Mike Gauge, the clarinetist; Freddie Peat, drummer; Felton Bicks, cornetist; and tuba player Jackie van Pelt. The men fell into the song one at a time and swapped the lead around for fifteen minutes, letting Sam have the fancy ending to himself.

The band checked their instruments, getting ready for the long haul. Zack leaned over and asked politely, “Where’s Ted?”

“He’s laying out today. Going for some information on his little girl.”

Zack shook his head and bent down to tune his banjo. “We could use her right about now.”

Sam frowned at the remark. “Well, how’m I doing?”

“Doin’ okay, but I can tell you mostly play by yourself. No offense. Ted and us, we’re used to each other.”

The big whistle hollered up the Natchez bluff, and four young couples walked up, looking expectantly at the band, so Zack started strumming “Nobody but You” and the others landed on the melody like bees on a daisy. Captain Stewart skirted the edge of the dance floor, listened to three measures, and kept walking. When Sam had to fake a section, he heard Freddie Peat laugh out loud. He remembered the melody and what was coming up and relaxed, glancing now and then through an open door at shoreline willows flowing past along with the smokestacks of tugboats and ferries. When Mrs. Benton blew the whistle again and turned out for the main channel, the breeze began to pour in through the dance floor’s many windows and this, too, was what the customers were here for, escape from the soul-melting heat onshore. Twelve couples danced right in front, and a steward walked by sprinkling dance wax at their feet. Soon more dancers came out, the shy ones and the young ones, their steps melding with the music and the scenery passing by in the windows as if it were all part of the same song. He watched the back of a woman who’d begun two-stepping by herself, but when she turned Sam spotted the three-year-old she was holding, his arm high in his mother’s hand. He dropped a beat when he saw that and heard Zack call out, “Steady.” It’s what parents did, teach their kids to dance. He shouldn’t have been surprised. But for much of the song his timing was imperfect as he kept his attention on her, an ordinary-looking woman made distinctive by her eyes as she watched the boy feel her movements and learn that music and motion belonged together. He wondered if his own son would have learned to dance or sing, and he guessed probably so. His wife would’ve taught him, and at the thought of Linda he was filled with longing for the feel of her in his arms on a big dance floor. This pained him but the music moved him on, his fingers climbing an arpeggio so hard to execute it hurt him out of remembering and drew him back into the song. He turned his head, and Zack nodded.