Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

HE AND BILLSY were looking the gun over the next day in the big kitchen house, debating where they could sell it, when they heard a spatula hit the floor. Their mother, cooking breakfast, had slumped down on the floor planks with a wheeze, and they went and stood over her, nudging her arms with their brogans and then kneeling down and trying to talk her upright. Ninga would have none of it. One eye rolled toward the window and the other toward the door, signals that everything in her had suddenly quit, muscles turned loose, breaths escaped, thought gone out like a wick. After ten minutes of staring and cajoling, the men understood that she was dead, but could not imagine what might happen now. A vast emptiness grew up around them, and Billsy stood to turn off the aromatic stove, not sure which way to twist the valve handle.

They laid her out straight on the floor, so she would cool in a decent posture, and stood around outside the kitchen eating slices of white bread, wondering what to do next. Neither of them had been to a family funeral, and they couldn’t remember what had been done to their father after his still had exploded when they were four and five years old. They weren’t sure where any relatives lived over in Arkansas, as the clan tended to move around.

There was a magnolia-haunted graveyard a hundred yards to the rear of the mansion bearing several humpbacked markers and a stone cross crenellated with lichen. The men scratched out a vacant space at the rear of the highborn dead and dug her hole. Wrapping her in her own quilts, they set her in the ground and covered her up, then stood looking down at the soppy mound. Ralph felt a thickness in his throat he thought might be some words coming up, but he didn’t say anything. No one in the family had ever read a Bible or stepped foot in a church one time, and both men were too primitively formed to deal even in the clichés of Christianity, having no more notion of a hereafter or its price of admission than lizards stunned asleep in the noon sun.

Billsy looked around at the other weed-wracked headstones bearing inscriptions in French. “She needs her a marker.”

Ralph looked up. “Like what?”

“Just a second.” He turned back to the kitchen house. Ralph walked the dirt down around the edge of the grave until his brother returned holding a stamped skillet with a long handle. “This here’s the ticket.”

Ralph took it from him, turned it front and back several times as if he were inspecting it for purchase, then stuck the handle in the earth at the head of the grave. “That there about says it, all right.”

THEY ATE potted meat and sardines, then rode several miles toward a ferry landing upriver. Turning onto a road leading to the water, they rode against automobiles coming off the boat. Near the bank they reached a roughboard roadhouse fronting three mildewed tourist cabins strung out along a raw red ditch. Upstairs, the dark, low-ceilinged bar served skin-peeling moonshine in jelly glasses, and after an hour of it they both were ready for whores.

Ralph leaned over the counter and put a hand on the ample arm of the barmaid. “Is Suzy servin’ tonight?”

She fixed a lead ball eye on him. “Ruttin’ season, is it?”

“Is she still three dollars?”

“Ralph, a good-lookin’ man like you, I’m surprised you ain’t married.”

“Costs more than three dollars. Is she seein’ fellers?”

The barmaid put a finger in an ear and scratched. “In cabin two, at the back.” She slid her gaze past Ralph’s dark bulk to round-shouldered Billsy, who’d been here dozens of times but was still shy about it. “You want a good pokin’?”

“I reckon so.”

“Who you want?”

Billsy thought for a moment. “This time I want a gal with teeth.”

THE DOOR to cabin two swung open to reveal Suzy Kathell, long-waisted and long-faced, fifty years old with orange hair. Swaying in a lime green negligee, she held a drink and a cigarette in one hand and tugged him into the light with the other. “Hello, opportunity,” she said, and laughed like a horse. “How the hell you doin’?”

Ralph stared at her bodice. “All right.”

“How’s your bashful brother?”

“He’s all right, I reckon.”

“Is your mother still kickin’?”

“Naw. She died.”

“She did? When was that?”

“This morning.”

She turned her head at an angle. “Well, damn it to hell, you need some cheerin’ up,” she said, shucking her negligee.

Ralph was near senseless from the moonshine, and it took a while for the woman to get finished with him. After it was over, he said, “Would you come live with me on salary?”

She gave his face a playful slap. “Hell, that almost sounds like a proposal. Or will I have to do Billsy too?” She guffawed at this, blowing smoke in his face.

“Do us or not, we need a woman out at the place.”

Suzy Kathell took a sizzling drag on her Picayune. “Lambchops, I don’t think you can afford help like me. Plus I done tried domestic bliss before and it didn’t work out. I like my fancy drawers and my automobile I can drive anywhere I want. You got a automobile out at your place?”

Ralph admitted that he didn’t even have a road.

She gave his stubbly cheek an enormous pinch. “Sweetie, you straight in the back, you got all your teeth, and you got that scary look that drives dumb women off their nut. You look around good and you’ll have that old cookstove hot in no time. Now if you’ll put your clothes on and excuse me, I got to call my next case.”

THE BROTHERS SAT in the bar and drank from the same jar of shine. “I think my eyeballs is switched sockets,” Billsy said.

Ralph reached over and jerked a button off his brother’s shirt pocket and threw it at him. “Wake up and listen.”

Billsy looked stricken. “Who’s gonna sew that son of a bitch back on?”

“How much is that racehorse worth you took over in Carencro?”

“I got no idea. I think they said a thousand dollars.”

“That LeGrange man paid you to take it?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you grab it back?”

“Hell no, that black devil bit me six times. It was like dancing with a wolverine evertime I fooled with him.”

“But you could just steal it back, and he wouldn’t say nothin’ because it’s stole by him in the first place.”

“Then what, sell it?”

“Yeah. Back to him.”

“That’s crazy. Who’d buy something that was his in the first place?”

“That’s the beauty of it. It never was his.”

Billsy took a sip, hoping the drink would clear his head. “Why not just blackmail the son of a bitch?”

“There’s something about havin’ that physical thing in your own hands. Something you want that somebody else could wind up with. That’s what drives ’em up a wall.”

“Well, I ain’t going after that horse. I couldn’t sleep for a month after that job. Thought I had rabies.”

“Come on.” Ralph batted him on the shoulder, knocking off his fedora.

Billsy bent down to pick it up. “You want to resteal something, you ought to think about that kid.”

The chair under Ralph cracked its knuckles. “I done thought about it. Just don’t know how to make that deal work.”

“That job was good money.”

Ralph bent over the table and took another drink. He spread his arms out onto its surface as though it were a giant wheel he was trying to stop from turning. “That job cost me my dog.”

Billsy straightened up and composed himself, as if he knew he had to be careful. “That was some dog.”

“I took a step, that dog took a step. We’d sit out in the woods, he’d come up and bite the flies out the air if they was buzzin’ too close to my head. He’d eat bees before they got a chance to sting me.”