Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

“August had a little money saved up, and when I checked his bunk just now, it was gone.”

“Where’s the next stop?”

She shook her head. “You say he’s just a kid. He used to be a kid.”

“He’s graduated all the way to fool.”

Her head jerked up, her mouth a hard straight line. “I heard Charlie say your whole family was murdered and nobody was ever arrested. He said you weren’t even interested in finding those people.” She focused on him, her jaw rigid.

“It happened before I was…” He couldn’t find the words to finish the sentence. Maybe there were no words for not being vengeful. Would vengeance matter to an infant so glad to get out of a stove and into his uncle’s arms? It occurred to him that maybe he should have learned along the way that something like vengeance did matter. But of what use was it? Setting old scores right? Paying back a son of a bitch? He wasn’t trained to think that way. His uncle had told him many times that revenge didn’t help anybody and that the punishment for being a son of a bitch was being one.

VESSY WOKE THE GIRL and told her they were going on a long horse ride and having a picnic in the woods.

The girl clapped her hands and sang out, “I can wear pants.”

“Yep, you can wear those little overalls things.” They were the smallest pair Vessy had ever seen, and she thought Mrs. White liked them because they mocked working people. “Here now, lets us get dressed and hurry up.”

They left by the back door and walked to the alley. Vessy lugged a cardboard valise with her left hand and a two-handled picnic basket under her right arm. “Would you like to meet Vessy’s friend?”

The girl pulled at her hair, which had grown out the color of polished brass. “Yes.”

“Yonder he is.”

Ralph Skadlock stood by the carriage house wearing a new pair of jeans, a black preacher’s shirt, and a big Stetson.

The child saw him and walked boldly up, studying his face a moment before looking past him. “Horsies!”

“Hey there, missy,” Skadlock said, as though addressing a miniature barmaid, for he had little notion of how to treat a child. “Would you like to take a ride on this here animal?”

The horse he motioned to was a big five-dollar horse, swaybacked and standing on splayed hooves. The smaller one picked one back leg up as if the ground were too hot to stand on and wagged his fiddle-shaped head. His saddle was cracked to dissolution and the one on the large horse was painted with brown enamel. They were disposable horses, good for a day’s work, if that.

Vessy mounted the small horse and pulled the child out of Skadlock’s hands and set her in front. He tied her suitcase on the animal’s rump and bound the picnic basket alongside his mount. They started up the hill away from town, rode into an empty field and out the back of it into a graveled lane, crossed the drain flute on the hill side of the lane and took a path up into a section of red oaks, the forest floor crackling with last fall’s leaves. Soon they were on a trail through the hardwoods, climbing. Within two miles they came out of the woods into someone’s backyard, passing behind the woodpiles, then slipped among the trunks again, going higher, Vessy pointing out things for the child to look at all the while.

The girl was a good traveler but got tired around eleven o’clock and started to fret, wanting to stop. Vessy called to Skadlock and he pulled up and looked back. “What’s the matter with her?”

“She’s just tired and a little hungry.”

“Can’t you get her to stay quiet? There’s farms all over these woods.” He slouched back on the swayback horse, which was blowing hard as a bellows.

The girl began to cry, and Vessy got down. “Give me that basket.”

Skadlock stayed on his mount. “We’re on a schedule here.”

She just stared at him, and after a moment or two he sighed and passed down the basket, then got off.

The girl sat on a rock, and Vessy gave her a cup of milk and two cookies. The child ate as if she expected the service. After a while, Vessy said, “You want to get up on the horsie again?”

“Is this our picnic?” She looked around, still chewing. The trees were big boled and full headed, so there was little underbrush.

Skadlock led the horse up and slapped the end of the reins in his hands. “We’re havin’ fun,” he said in the tone he might use to announce a death in the family. The child looked up at him and squinted, hard. Fearing for a moment that she recognized him, he turned quickly and walked off.

They mounted up and went on, across a wide clearing and back into woods, a pine belt this time, and the ground grew rocky. After an hour of this, stopping three times to let the poor horses blow lest one of them drop stone dead on the grade, the girl began to cry out with boredom. The little lame horse rolled back his ears and craned his neck to look at her.

Skadlock rode back to where they sat the horse, a minor urge to slap the girl flying through him like a bat through a chimney hole. “Shut her up, will you?”

Vessy gave him an evaluating glance. “Haven’t you been so upset you just wanted to holler out?”

“We’re comin’ up on a farm. I can near see the house. Keep her quiet!”

“I can’t.”

He reined the horse around sharply and plodded ahead into a small open area of pine stumps. When the child wailed out, “I want to go back, go baaack,” Skadlock stopped and wondered how hard he would have to thump her in the back of the head to knock her out. Her skull was about the size of a raccoon’s, and he figured for a full minute, thinking of animals he’d stunned and what they were like when they revived. He dismounted and walked back to them, taking the halter of Vessy’s horse as it stumbled up. “Get down a minute and let me see her.”

Vessy misunderstood and tilted her off the saddle toward him. He put up his hands and the girl jumped, throwing both arms around his neck to keep from falling. Her soft bottom found his forearm and next thing he knew, he was holding a soap-smelling child who was looking him straight in the eye. He turned around to scan the woods, then looked at her closely. “You…uh…can you be quiet now?”

“Let’s have a picnic.”

“You just ate.”

“You play games on a picnic.”

He stepped back from the horse and almost fell over a broad, flat-topped stump. He examined the dry surface and put the girl down on it, then bent and brushed away the pine straw. Pulling himself up straight, he focused on her small, perfect features, her smart eyes. “You know your numbers?”

“I can count to fifteen.”

“Which is bigger, six or seven?”

“Seven, silly.”

He walked over and dug into the rotten pair of saddlebags the horse’s owner had thrown in, the leather split, the copper rivets green with verdigris. The saddle maker’s name was pressed into the decorative tooling, proclaiming his location in Saginaw, and for an instant Skadlock thought of the old boy who rode horseback through the snow all the way from Michigan. It toughened him up to consider this. Then he dredged out a deck of cards.

He sat the girl on the picnic basket on one side of the stump, and he dragged over a bucked-off pine top and sat across from her. He dealt out the whole deck. “Leave ’em facedown,” he said.

“Is this a game? This is a game!” she said, clapping her white hands.

“It’s called battle.” He turned up one of his cards-a four. “Now you flip a card.”

She pushed a sprig of hair from her eyes with the back of a hand and rolled her top card with the other. “Nine.” She looked at him.