Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

“You can’t call the local authorities on them?” Mrs. Benton asked.

“No, ma’am. There ain’t a lot of law where they’re at.”

“You could try.”

“Well, maybe. You might be right about checking them out, anyway.”

The Ambassador paddled up to a wooded point and Mr. Brandywine was swinging the levers farther to port to get to the deep water in midriver when a loud whistle sounded twice around the bend. “Try your ears on that one, Mrs. Benton.” He grinned meanly, as though he’d finally trumped her skill.

She put her head down and adjusted her hemline. “It’s the MacDougall blowing her three-bell chime.”

He wagged his head. “Golly, Ned, I thought I had you.” He rang a stop bell and blew one glass-rattling blast for a port-to-port passing. “I wonder how they knew we were up here. Must’ve seen my smoke.”

“More likely they’re runnin’ with all the windows open and heard your exhausts.”

Coming up around the point was a one-stack steam pushboat behind two oil barges, MacDougall painted on its bow. It crossed over to the east side and Mr. Brandywine yanked a bell cord for full speed, the old boat beginning to bob with each piston stroke. Pulling the plug out of the speaking tube, he blew into it, and when Bit’s pipe-strangled voice hollered up, Mr. Brandywine called through the funnel, “Quit dragging your feet down there. Throw the cutoff lever all the way in the corner.” Shortly the escape pipes began to bark, the smokestacks dumped out twin black tornados, and the sliding windows shuddered in their frames.

Mrs. Benton rolled her eyes at Sam. “Rafe, you must think you’re coming down from Cincinnati and delivering the governor on the big old City of Louisville. ”

Mr. Brandywine arched his back. “Ha. One time they docked my pay for shaking china off the tables down in the main cabin on that boat. Yes, ma’am, coming downstream on a full bell over nine foot of water, that City of Louisville was one rattling load of lumber.”

THE NEXT DAY, after morning practice Sam got up from the piano and walked over to where August was sorting his music into an accordion file. The boy didn’t look up and kept thumbing through a sheaf of papers. Sam saw that some of them were maps. “You doing all right?”

The boy still didn’t look up. “Mr. Simoneaux, I’ve just about got everything under control.”

Elsie walked over and stood between them, her arms folded. “Sam?”

“Listen, I’ve been thinking about those Skadlocks. They might have something to do with Lily’s disappearance.”

“That’s pretty foolish thinking,” she said.

“When we get into New Orleans, I can take a train up there and maybe find out. Maybe give the local law a try.” He knew he sounded desperate.

She turned her face away. “Lucky, that Vessy person has her.”

“What state is the local law in?” August looked at him for the first time that day.

“What do you mean?”

“If the Skadlocks live where you say, they’re on the Mississippi-Louisiana line. Does anybody really know where that line is back in the woods?”

“You’ve been reading too many maps. It’s in Louisiana, and I’d bet money on it.” But he was less sure of this as he spoke.

The boy got up and stepped off the bandstand. “Maybe you ought to do some map reading of your own.”

“He’s not too happy, is he?”

Elsie watched after him as he passed through a door to the open deck. “It’s been rough on us both.”

“But it’s given him a hard edge.”

Elsie sat on a maple folding chair, and her voice came out dreamy and tired. “One day he had a father who could teach him anything, and the next day he didn’t.” She looked up at him. “We’ve both lost a lot, but you know that. Sit down and play that last song again. I’ve got to sing it sometime on a night trip.”

He opened up his music and began to play a lively tune. “Make it bounce more,” she called, and on the next breath she was singing. Her voice was good, but there was something missing in it. She was merely singing the notes, and last summer she’d tackled the song and thrown it to the ground.

SOUTH OF MEMPHIS the Ambassador lay up, blinded by fog, tied to willows for twelve hours. The next day Mrs. Benton put the boat through the strangulated loops of river switchbacking down toward Helena and Greenville, deep into the land of dampness and heat. The river slowed and widened below Vicksburg, and the river birds that showed up were long-legged and moved like ghosts. Sam propped open his cabin door and watched the misty air below Natchez bear clouds of mosquitoes chased by buckshot patterns of cycling martins. The boat landed briefly at Zeneau, a hamlet that seemed to be falling house by house into the river that undercut the sandy bluff on which it festered. Here a fireman and an oiler who’d worked the previous two seasons got on with their sacks of clothes, and Mrs. Benton backed the boat out and aimed its bow toward Fort Adams light. The night settled down like wet velvet, and Sam went to the empty dance deck to practice. He was bumping up the intro of “Grandpa’s Spells” when a door opened and Elsie walked in. He kept playing, thinking she was just taking a shortcut over to the port side, but she came up and stood by his treble hand and spoke over his music. “I’m looking for August.”

He thought for a moment that her voice was part of the song, but looking at her eyes, he stopped. “Haven’t seen him. You try the café?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe he went down to the engine room.”

“I’ve checked. Will you look?”

He nodded into her worried face, understanding what was unsaid. There were places she might have passed over, like the big room where the musicians stayed, the firing galley’s grit and hiss, the deckhands’ tool room where men played cards and spat. He got up and walked the boat, hoping the boy was talking music with the night-orchestra pianist. Fred Marble was nattily dressed as usual when Sam spotted him at the rail. He was deadheading back to New Orleans to join up with the new group the captain had just hired. But Fred hadn’t seen August.

“Naw. That boy came around yesterday and we talked about his saxophone.” Fred flicked a cigarette over the rail into the river. “He’s getting good. That little Dutchman can make that thing talk like a parrot.”

“Yeah, but he’s not so little anymore.”

“I hear that. He’s getting his growth for sure. Big as his daddy was.”

Sam looked past him into the tiny room, its floor littered with arrangements. “He talk much about his daddy?”

“Yeah. That man trained him from a baby. And that boy’s mad deep inside, like only a boy can be. He can’t think about it. Not old enough to think. He can just be mad.”

“Any idea where he is?”

“Check the banjo man. They was talking yesterday.”

But Zack Stimson hadn’t seen him either, nor had the captain, whom he found running deckhands out of the tool room, nor had the pilot on watch. He went into the café and saw Elsie sitting at a table, a forefinger lifeless in the handle of a coffee cup. She was staring out a night-blackened window.

“I couldn’t find him.”

“I know.”

“What’s that mean?” He sat down next to her.

“Mr. Brandywine was coming through and stopped in for some pie. He told me he saw August get off the boat at Zeneau and thought he’d been sent to a deckhand’s shack to roust him out. I asked him how he was dressed, and he was wearing his fireman’s overalls and boots.” She began to tear up. “Lucky, he’s going after that man.”

Sam sat back, his mouth open. “Why, he can’t get to him. He’s just a kid.”