Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

THE NEXT MORNING there was a rude rapping at the front door, and on the porch he found a ruddy, birdlike man, vaguely familiar, a blunt stuck in the corner of his mouth. He wore a seersucker coat but no tie, and his straw boater was sliding off the side of his head in the sunny breeze. He made a motion with a stubby finger. “You the excursion-boat man?”

“I was.”

“My brother called me up and said you lived about four blocks away from me. Damned if you don’t.”

“Who’s your brother?”

“Station agent in Greenville. He sent you a telegram up to Evansville and wanted to know did you get it.”

The notion that someone else was concerned about his search made him take a step backwards in the door frame. “Yeah. I should’ve sent one back to thank him.”

The little man eyed him harshly. “Morris wants to know did the message help you any? He don’t burn much daylight helping folks out, you know. It’s not his nature.”

“Yes,” he said. “It helped a lot.”

“You find the little girl, did you?”

Sam looked at the brother, who seemed a bit concerned himself over a lost child he’d never seen or heard of before getting a phone call from the wilds of Mississippi. “Yeah, sure. Let him know she’s been found safe.”

The man removed his cigar and shook Sam’s hand. “All right, then. I’ll tell him that. Nice to meetcher.”

“Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t write him back.”

“That’s all right. He’s used to sorry.” He threw his cigar into the street and headed up the sidewalk at a brisk walk, his bright seersucker flapping in the breeze.

Sam went out to the end of his walk and watched Morris Hightower’s brother striding under the oaks, his jacket winking white in the sun. He decided it was a scary visit-that he’d somehow been called to accounts.

THAT WAS A TUESDAY, and he mailed the letter about noon. As soon as it whispered into the brass slot at the post office, he began worrying about the response, when it would come and in what form. He dreaded it until Saturday, when his phone rang with a collect call from Cincinnati, Ohio.

“Mr. Sam Simoneaux?” The voice was Elsie’s, sounding as flat as a skillet against the head.

“It’s me, Elsie,” he muttered.

After a pause, she said something that sounded much rehearsed. “I read your letter several times with all your reasons, and I’ve got a question for you.”

“What’s that?”

“You told me once you had a child.”

“Yes. I’ve got a new one now. A new baby boy.”

There was no congratulation in what she said next. “And of course you’re rich as can be and can give him everything in the world?”

It was as though she’d read his insides from across the country, knew him better than he knew himself. “No.”

“And you’ve got this big job, making maybe five hundred dollars a month?”

“I don’t have any job right now.”

“So, you must have this grand inheritance, and with it you’re going to send this boy to Harvard and Paris, or at least a private school somewhere.”

“Elsie, all I can say is I’m sorry.”

“You are. You really are. If you’d just done your floorwalker job like you were supposed to, none of this would’ve ever happened.” She began to cry now, and accusation began to pile on accusation until he took the candlestick phone off the table and sat on the floor, his legs drawn up, his back against the wall. Linda came out of the bedroom holding the baby and looked at him with no particular expression. Elsie ended her long recital with “And if it weren’t for you, Ted wouldn’t have died.”

“How’s August?” he ventured, his mind reeling with shame.

“How do you think?” she cried. “He’s not the same person. He never will be.”

“What do you want me to do?”

The response was quick. “I’ll tell you. I have no idea how to handle this, so I want you to figure out how we can get to that hick town and take my baby back from those people. You’ve got to come with me. All my relatives work for a living.”

“I can’t even afford the train ticket. I’m making a few dollars at odd jobs, but I can’t leave my family without any money in the bank.” He looked up at his wife. “It might take two weeks to straighten things out.”

The voice came back thin as a needle. “I don’t want to hear it. This will never be straightened out. Me and August have been eating potato soup and shivering for months. At least down where you are the river doesn’t freeze over.”

He closed his eyes and reached deep inside himself for the words. “Well, maybe we can try this.”

The phone call lasted ten more minutes. Later that afternoon, she called back. The Ambassador was coming out of winter quarters above Cincinnati and would run down to New Orleans light, making no stops, to get dry-docked, stocked, and take on crew and musicians before starting her initial upriver excursion schedule. Captain Stewart said she and August could deadhead free down to Graysoner and stay at the Wilson Hotel on the boat’s account if they promised to work the season. She would be there in seven days, waiting for him.

Sam hung up the phone and walked to his piano, a glossy red-mahogany Packard, a stolid instrument with bell-like upper notes and a booming bass. He opened the sheet music for “When My Baby Smiles at Me” and played it as written, but when he was finished he played it again, adding ragged filigree to the plain arrangement, then jazzed it up on a third run-through. He played ten other pieces in a row, feeling the ivory slide under his fingertips, and afterward he sat a long time staring at the fine wood until he saw his face reflected in the French polish. He got up and called a furniture store on Dryades Street, and in an hour the dealer arrived and bought his piano for seventy-nine dollars.

SOME TIME IN MARCH, Ralph Skadlock had been hired by a Louisiana state legislator to steal a specially engraved and gold-inlaid Parker shotgun from the home of a plantation owner in Braithwaite. The day after he stole it, he pulled the double out of its gun bag and looked it over while sitting in his mildewed front parlor. The sidelocks showed bird dogs jumping a covey of quail, and he ran a sooty fingertip over the razor-sharp checkering on the swirling walnut stocks. He noted how it snapped shut, as though barrels and receiver suddenly became one piece of metal through the cold welding of expert craftsmanship. Still, to him, the piece was ridiculous. A gun was a wrench or a hammer. It did a job.

The next day he rode horseback to the depot and took the southbound to the Baton Rouge station, where he handed a smudged cardboard box to a corpulent, florid man dressed in a tailored suit.

“I think you’ll be happy with this here item,” Ralph told him.

The legislator gave him a look, paid him, and turned away without a word. Ralph held on to the envelope and watched him walk out into the sunlight, knowing for a fact that this fool couldn’t hit a quail exploding out of a dewberry bush to save his soul and probably not even a dove sitting on a branch outside his bedroom window. But he could show off the gun to men gathered in his parlor for drinks, the weapon suggesting how much better he was than they.

Skadlock went home and brooded about their meeting, how the man’s little sharp eyes looked at him, how he’d refused to give him a single word. He remembered the envelope coming over with a nasty flick of the wrist. Men had gotten killed for such manners.

A week later he crossed a long, apple-green lawn and climbed through the window of a many-columned house northeast of Baton Rouge. He stood under a high ceiling and smelled the furniture oil, the floor wax, the fresh paint of the place. The gun was conspicuously displayed in a leaded-glass case, and he took it, fading back out into the night, knowing that when the theft was discovered, the legislator wouldn’t report it, wouldn’t send any lawman against Ralph Skadlock, who might tell who had paid him to take the gun in the first place, along with a few other items he’d been hired to steal in the past. He walked two miles to a highway and crossed it into a stand of sycamores where his horse was tied. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of this double thieving before. On the long ride back, he made a mental list of all the haughty, weak men he could revisit, taking back animals, clocks, jewelry. It was then that Acy White came to mind.