Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

“Yep,” she said ruefully. “Miss. Or maybe ‘missed.’”

HE LAY ON his single bed that night and looked at the ceiling, sipping from a pint of his own white-hot stock and thinking where he might run into her again. He was hungry and tired of the food he’d brought from home, bread he could drive tacks with and cheese that smelled like feet. Longing suddenly for his mother’s skillet-fried marsh hen with garlic, he was stunned by the thought that she would never cook for him and Billsy again. “Well, damn,” he said to the ceiling. Ralph never felt sentimental about one thing in his life, but at the present moment he felt heart pangs when he remembered the old woman pushing around a cut-up bird in a smoking skillet. He wondered long why she did it.

The next afternoon he met Vessy at the head of Ditch Street and spoke with her for another ten minutes. He noticed powder stuck to the sweat on her face and thought he detected the smell of violets or Sen-Sen. Later that night he showed up at her place, where they sat on her teetering porch in dry-rotted wicker chairs. They talked for an hour or so before he offered her a pour out of his flask. She sniffed at the inch of liquid in her cloudy water glass, then took it all down in a slug. “All fire and no ash,” she said approvingly. “Sure ain’t no singlings.”

“I figured a east Kentucky gal would know a good sip.”

She looked at him. “What exactly you do for a livin’ there, Ralph?”

“Oh, people hire me out to do things. Find things. Make things.”

“I bet some of them things flow in a bottle.”

“Could be.” He poured her another sip, and with this, she took her time, staring at him over the glass.

THE THIRD DAY was Saturday. That night he took her to a café and they each ate a plate of chops and vegetables. Walking back to her place, he asked about the child and she told him what she knew. They drank a pint between them sitting at the rough wood table next to her bed, and he leaned over and gave her a lasting kiss that she took as though it were a long-awaited letter from the mailman. Then she said, “Well, Mr. Ralph, that’s all right, but just to get things straight, you can kiss on me all you want, but I ain’t spreadin’ my legs for no man. I seen too many left with a big belly watchin’ a feller’s back walkin’ away.”

He lit a cigarette and looked past her at the bed, then he kissed her again as if he liked the taste of it. He straightened up in his chair and gave her his cigarette and watched her take a drag. “All right. You tell me how you think they got that little girl.”

“It’s somebody else’s, I know that much. Probably hired somebody to steal her away from her parents.” Her eyes narrowed. “You a detective or something?”

“No,” he said. “I’m the man got paid a thousand bucks to steal her.”

Vessy gave him back the cigarette and reached for the bottle. “Well, ain’t you a jack-in-the-box.” Her mouth formed a straight line. “What you want now?”

“I aim to steal her back.”

She stopped before taking a drink. “Excuse me, but that don’t seem too bright. The sheriff’s in Acy’s poker club.”

He pointed a finger up the hill to Lilac Street. “They can’t report me, not without admittin’ to a crime themselves. And I’ll sell that kid right back to them again, but this time for a cool two thousand.” He got up and put the cigarette in the trash burner, then turned to look at her. “Could you use five hundred of it?”

She glanced rapidly around her shack, every surface jaundiced in the kerosene light, as if she might never see it again. “What I got to do?”

“Can you ride a horse?”

She made a face. “What you think? I was raised ridin’ a mule to school, all five grades, then I come home to plow till dark.”

“I need you to help with the girl down to my place in Louisiana.”

She stuck a tongue in her jaw and thought about this. “And then what?”

He was not used to smiling, but smiled now and straightened his back the way a gambler with the winning hand does before he lays down his cards. “Sweetness, then you can do whatever the hell you want.”

HE STAYED at her place talking with her long after the streets were empty. The next day he laid low at the hotel. The following night, he walked over to Ditch Street, ignoring the aromatic fog rising from the steaming runnels flowing downhill from the tannery. She let him in and told him at once that Tuesday Acy would be away from the house early for sure, and that Mrs. White was leaving on the morning boat headed upriver to Louisville to shop. Neither would get home until five-thirty at the earliest.

He wedged back in the spindle chair and its joints popped like caps in a toy pistol. “You got pants you can wear under a dress?”

She nodded, sitting across from him at her table. “You got horses?”

“I got two set up to buy.”

“Neither one of ’em bite?”

“The ones I’m lookin’ at might not have teeth.”

She grinned, and a trace of a blush formed above her cheekbones.

He smiled back, his expression mysterious, the way some mean men smile at people, with the suggestion that he might bring her as far as he needed her, then leave her in the woods somewhere with a knot on her head. If Vessy read these notions on his face, she gave no hint of it. Taking his flask, she poured herself a small drink, hoping the taste would burn the tannery stench out of her nostrils. She smiled delicately into the glass.

ON TUESDAY at a quarter to six Acy walked home from the bank. His fine burgundy Oldsmobile stayed in the carriage house on the alley because he liked the exercise the uphill route gave him, even when he was tired, as he was today. When he opened his front door, the quiet was palpable, and at once he knew that something was different. No cooking smells. He looked at the floor, wondering if he had forgotten some event, perhaps a recital or music class for Madeline. Nothing came to mind. He went into the kitchen and put a hand on the stove, which was cold. Upstairs, everything seemed in order and the beds were made, which meant that Vessy, who did the housework when the maid was ill, as well as the cooking, had been in.

He decided to take the car down the hill and eat at the Wilson Hotel. At the restaurant, while waiting for his food, he studied his ironstone plate. Had Vessy taken ill? His wife, he knew, had caught the Galeno upriver to shop, and there were all sorts of reasons the old boat might be late getting back in. Perhaps Madeline had gone along, and Vessy as well, to help with the packages. Two young lawyers came over to join him, and soon he was talking of tax laws and thinking about the night’s steaks. He would have enjoyed a glass of wine, as in the old days before the war when drinking was legal. But the steaks arrived plump and running with hot fat, so he was happy.

THE GALENO had indeed developed boiler trouble and was limping downstream two hours behind schedule. Willa liked riding a boat upriver, imagining against fact that the dowdy, short-trade packets still running were grand floating palaces, but after dark she always wished she’d taken the train. She was tired, and the ladies’ lounge at the rear of the main salon had lost its gilt and gloss, the chair seats threadbare and smelling of coal oil. Two dour spinsters were returning from a doctor’s visit, and all they wanted to talk about were the limitless female problems they’d suffered. She passed the time by going through her two large bundles of purchases, one of which held even more shifts and pinafores for the girl. She was anxious to return and show her Madeline the new things, though the girl seldom reacted much to gifts of clothes. That would change as she got older and learned more about style and fashion. Willa had taught her many things already, although the girl still refused to call her Mother, or to wave at people properly, or to refrain from certain unruly expressions. The times she tried to feel close to Madeline, when the girl was in her lap and she was brushing her hair, the child would turn suddenly, staring at her as though Willa were a complete stranger. Then she would feel hurt and denied, but she was always able to cheer herself with the knowledge that at last, at long last, she possessed a child.