Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

“All right.” The rail was unmaintained and the joints hammered his back when a wheel passed over them.

“I hate to see you down among the cinders and husks there,” the baggage clerk said. He had pulled up a deck chair and was sitting near his head. “I hear you run into some bad folks.”

“The Skadlocks.” His head cleared for a moment and he looked up at the man, who was somehow motionless in the swaying coach. “They kidnapped my little girl and won’t tell me where she is.”

The clerk stood up. “They got your kid back in there?”

“No. I don’t know where she is. They were paid to do it.”

“If you’d caught ’em with her, then you’d have something.”

“To show the law?”

The clerk ran a finger crossways through his waterfall of a mustache. “Well…”

“What would you do?”

The clerk looked blankly through a window. “If they did run off with one of my brood, I’d round up ever Salser with a trigger finger and ride out.”

Ted closed his eyes. “I don’t have folks like that.”

The big clerk’s voice grew low and mean. “We’d chase ’em in that big house and set fire to it. When they run out smokin’ we’d knock ’em down like deer before dogs.” He kept scanning the dull woods, and Ted knew he saw no longleaf pine, no honeysuckle, no swamp iris, just visions of killing, legends of hate passed down from poor, shot-up, unread forebears.

Two hours later, the undersized locomotive poked out of the woods at Harriston. The baggage clerk opened the door on the other side of the car and his counterpart from the northbound was there to help with the stretcher. They loaded him onto a larger baggage coach and set him down on a well-swept floor between a safe and an upright piano. The new baggage clerk was used to handling the poor sick as freight and gave him a shallow pan in which to urinate, then bent to check the tag on his ankle. “We telegraphed ahead for an ambulance at Memphis.” He was a slight man with wrinkles running across his forehead like threads on a pipe. “I got some aspirin. They don’t let us carry liquor no more, else I’d offer you a shot.”

The thought of aspirin made Ted smile. “You have four of them?”

The baggage man got an enamel dipper of water scooped out of a canvas bucket and handed over the pills. “You get in a real good poker game?”

“Can you check the back of my neck? It feels like hamburger.”

He got down on his knees and adjusted his glasses. “Well, I haven’t seen a bandage job like that since I fought in Cuba.” He gently examined the wound, and Ted wondered if he might have become a doctor had he been born in a more civilized part of the country. “You got a knot and a cut on top of that, but nothing they can’t fix at the hospital.”

“Thank you.”

“That hand’s busted up pretty good. Want me to look at it?”

“No. It hurts just to think about touching it.”

“When you get hurt?”

“Yesterday. Some time ago. I don’t know.” The train was taking the well-tamped high iron at seventy, and the car’s springs imparted a jouncing thrust to the world around him.

“We don’t carry many emergency cases, but there’s been times when somebody fell out a tree and waited a week to get to the hospital and have bones set.”

“That makes me feel better,” Ted told him.

The baggage clerk looked surprised. “Well, I’ll let you get some shut-eye. Can I bring you anything right now?”

Ted swallowed slowly. “I have a question.” It was hard to get the words up the elevator of his throat.

“What say?” The man bent at the waist and leaned a hairy ear close.

“You think I should go back after the man who did this to me?”

The clerk scanned him theatrically, head to toe. “Sure enough,” he said. “If you want him to finish the job.”

The train began to rock him to sleep, and ahead he heard the engine’s whistle singing up and down the scale a frantic and operatic warning. Ted imagined that some dunderhead was trying to get his loaded wagon across the tracks half a mile away, a farmer willing his mules to beat a speeding locomotive, as if his pitiful will alone were enough to accomplish anything.

THE PILOTS FOUGHT the tricky channels around Greenville and after the day’s last trip told the captain they were too tired for a night trip toward Memphis, so the boat laid over. The rest of the crew was worn down as well, and it was late morning before the Ambassador turned out from the landing.

The captain came in and found the three mates at the same table and completed the foursome. He put his cap next to the salt shaker and wagged his head. “You gentlemen get the news?”

Aaron Swaneli stopped buttering his toast. “What kind of news?”

“The advance man sent me a wire. There’s money to be made this trip between here and Memphis.”

Charlie put down his coffee cup. “Not Bung City.”

The captain put up his hands. “I know, I know. It’s sawmillers and creosote workers, but that’s a spending town.”

“It’s a gravestone-and-crutch kind of town,” Aaron said. “I don’t think it has electricity.”

“We’ll put Sam at the stage plank with the three baskets.”

“Three baskets?” Sam cocked an eye at the captain. Every day brought surprises.

“One for pistols, one for knives, one for blackjacks and things like that. All the dance boats do it at rough towns.” The captain replaced his hat. “Charlie and Aaron, check with me later today. I’ve got some new pocket slapjacks that can knock down a horse.”

Sam laid his napkin on his empty plate. “I never heard of Bung City.”

Charlie looked out at a steamboat passing on the starboard side. “Shit. How’re those hillbillies going to take to a colored band?”

“They won’t see ’em,” the captain said.

“How’s that?”

“I told them to stay in their bunk room down on the main deck. The white band can play such junk as the Bung City folks want to hear. ‘Turkey in the Straw,’ ‘The Letter Edged in Black.’”

“How’m I going to watch the plank and play piano both?”

The captain stood and began walking backwards to the door. “Fred Marble is kind of light, so we’ll unscrew the bulb over the piano and he’ll wear a little ladies’ face powder.”

Sam shook his head gravely. “What’s he think about this?”

“Hell, he thought it up. It’s costing me an extra fiver for his trouble.”

“I could play that junk.”

“Son, he can play it better.”

THE BOAT MADE SLOW time up to Bung City. The poor coal made a floury smoke, and flaky cinders rained from the stacks like infernal sleet. The cabin boys swept the decks and wiped down the chairs every thirty minutes, beginning at the forward rail, walking toward the stern, and then starting over. The dance trip was scheduled for eight-thirty and the Ambassador approached the bank at half past seven, the calliope blasting “Dixie” to announce to the stragglers in the hills that the boat’s advance man and his thousand nailed-up flimsies had not lied. Sam came out of his cabin when he heard the landing whistle and saw a big sawmill rack yard and a water-tank factory. In between the businesses, a single unpaved street led down to the river and was jammed with people, their faces lit by kerosene streetlamps. A few men by the waterside were carrying torches, their shadows writhing on the yellow mud, the smoky glow held above their heads reminders of the first flaming knots thrust aloft by cave dwellers living hard by a lightning strike. Mrs. Benton nosed the bow up against the bank, the Ambassador ’s old broad hull sliding over a mudflat, and Sam started down.