Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

“All I need is for him to walk in front of a gun.”

“And you have a gun?”

Elsie leaned toward him. “No, he doesn’t. Haven’t you ever been fifteen years old?”

“You better not let him think like that.”

“He’s entitled,” she said, sitting back. He again saw how thin she was, how pale, strikingly older. He didn’t think being alone could take that much out of a person.

By late afternoon they were in Paducah and caught a cab down to the waterfront, where the Ambassador was raising steam, pillars of black smoke going straight up from the stacks. Captain Stewart was in the purser’s office on the main deck wearing a new uniform, the creases ironed in with so much starch the cloth gleamed like silk.

He looked up. “Lucky, I hope you’ve come to work this trip with the Wellers.”

Sam shook his head. “I can’t afford to work as third mate.”

The captain put a hand on his shoulder. “We lost Swaneli in Evansville. Fell down a flight of steps and broke his left leg in two places. What say we put you on at second mate and you can sit in with the day orchestra a bit. It’ll be seven dollars extra a week over your old wages.”

He thought of his new baby, his lost piano. “I guess I can phone my wife and see what she says.”

“That’s the ticket. You stay the whole season, there’ll be a bonus in your last pay envelope.”

“If I come on, I’ll take it a week at a time.”

“All right. You’ll bunk with Charlie, then? He’s the new first mate.”

“I guess so.”

The captain laughed. “So putting up with Charlie’s snoring is better than breaking in a new bunkmate.” He turned to the purser. “Put Lucky back on.”

The Wellers took their cabin assignment and left without a word.

He walked up three decks to the Texas and found Charlie reading his missal. “Hey, you must be dying, because you’re saying your prayers.”

“I just run out of reading material. I killed off Zane Grey and a half-dozen Review of Reviews. Figured I’d fish around in my prayer book for some Old Testament wisdom. You back on with us?”

“Looks like it.”

“You got any news on the Wellers’ little girl?”

He sat on a backless stool and told him what he knew. “We’re just hoping for a telegram at this point.”

“You say a cook stole the child?”

“I don’t know who stole what at this point.” He watched Charlie’s face sag into a suspicious frown and remembered he’d been a beat policeman.

“I’ll have to think on that one, yessir. Something’s not right.”

“Same crew as last year?”

“Yeah, but old Brandywine’s getting addled, so Mrs. Benton spends as much time with him as she can stand.”

“How addled?”

“Runnin’ fast, like in his mind he’s on the old City of Memphis on the mail schedule or something. We come through that bend north of Evansville and the river was all whitecaps for twenty minutes after we were finished with it. We must’ve turned over twenty rowboats in that stretch.”

“Bit can’t cramp his bells down in the engine room?”

“Won’t do it. Says when he gets a bell for full ahead he don’t know who’s ringing it, so he just delivers on the throttle. I keep Brandywine supplied with coffee every chance I get, and you can have that job. He cusses me down the steps once a day.”

“Well, if I ever go up on the roof, I’d better have a uniform on.”

“Go down to the laundry door and draw one, then.” Charlie lay back in his bunk and opened up a detective magazine.

THE BOAT RAN past Cairo, leaving the green Ohio for a dun Mississippi made of the flushed-out topsoil of half a million farms. Most of the day orchestra was on board, so he and August sat in with them, learning the season’s new tunes as the boat steamed past the empty lands above Tennessee and down into the intestinal bends approaching Caruthersville and beyond, the engineer working the engines hard and the boat pulsing ahead with each piston stroke. After one practice session Sam went up to the pilothouse with a cup of coffee for Mr. Brandywine, who was standing on a spoke, bringing the boat around the head of an island using the old steering wheel.

Sam froze and watched the coffee surge with the push of the big engines. “Still don’t like those new steering levers?”

“Hush, boy. This is a touchy spot. I’m tryin’ to feel what the river’s doing through my feet.” He reached over and rang a stop bell. The escape pipes ceased their intermittent rasp, and after a moment Sam felt the boat turn like a drunken head and yaw to starboard as the current steered her. When the tip of the island went past, Mr. Brandywine rang for half ahead and Bit Benton answered the bell, the boat regaining its southbound steps. “Now let’s have some coffee and a report on Elsie’s missing girl. I heard she was restole.” He reached back for the cup.

“Yes, sir.” Mr. Brandywine did not acknowledge the fact that Sam hadn’t been on the boat for months, as though it made no difference to him who showed up with his coffee.

“Who took her?”

“If I knew, I’d be trying to run them down.”

“I didn’t ask what you knew, but who took her.”

Sam stared at the back of the pilot’s head. “Oh. The sheriff says it was the housemaid.”

At this point Mrs. Benton came in and sat on the lazy bench. “Hi, boy.”

“Mrs. Benton. We were talking about Lily.”

She nodded and sat up and pulled at the shoulders of her customary black dress, which she wore to conceal the soot. “I heard you talking when I was coming in.”

The foot of the island went by on the left and the eastern light came up in the pilothouse. Mr. Brandywine looked at her. “Mrs. Benton, he says kitchen help stole the little girl. Now, I have no notion what goes on in a lady cook’s mind, so what do you think?”

“Well, how old was this cook?”

“I’d guess around thirty or less,” Sam told her.

“Where was she from?”

“I hear she was from eastern Kentucky.”

“Mountain girl?”

“I’d say so.”

Mr. Brandywine snorted. “Well, then that settles it. She’d be more likely to make off with a jug of coffin varnish than a singin’ baby girl.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” Mrs. Benton said. “My lady instincts tell me she won’t make off with a child and take on a world of bother that’s not hers to bear. A poor girl won’t do that, most cases.”

Sam placed a hand against the cold stove. “Well, who would?”

“A thief is what steals things,” she said. “Rafe, are you answering a hail?”

“No, by gosh.”

“Why’re you going to the bank, then?”

“There’s deep water here, I’ll thank you to know.”

Mrs. Benton looked at the bank sliding by. “I’d just as soon stay on top of it.”

“It’s all right.”

“Sure it’s all right. But I think your head must itch and you’re planning to stick it out the window and scratch it on those sycamores coming up.”

Mr. Brandywine stepped back from the wheel and turned the steering levers hard to port. “What were you sayin’ about a thief?”

“Wasn’t somebody hired to take this girl in the first place? To my way of thinking, that’s who you ought to look up.”

“The same people?” Sam shook his head.

“How many times does a person get stolen in her life? I’d bet the original thief has something to do with this. Look ’em up, I say.”

“They ain’t too fond of being looked up,” Sam told her, taking the empty cup from Mr. Brandywine’s back-stretched hand. One thing he knew about crooks is that they believe if they do the opposite of what people expect, they’re harder to catch. That’s why most shoplifters in Krine’s, the experienced ones, dressed in nice clothes and smiled at the clerks. They carefully stole in the middle of a crowd of shoppers, everybody else intent on their own purchases. He gazed out at the deserted riverbank, land not unlike that inhabited by the Skadlocks, a weed-infested, eroded clayscape showing scars of its annual submersion in the river’s spring ravage. Skadlock and his mother would figure how to blend into Graysoner, and, knowing them, they’d get out on horseback. But he doubted the old woman would travel so far, and he guessed Ralph would be helpless with a four-year-old girl. All at once, the missing cook made sense.