Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

“Which is bigger?”

“The nine.”

“You done won my card.”

“Good.” She clapped once, reached over, and picked up his four.

His next card was a queen, and the girl turned a six. “Which is bigger?” he asked.

She shrugged. “The lady card?”

Vessy, standing behind her, snorted.

“This gal might have a head for cards,” he said. “That’s right. That’s a queen and it’s higher than your six, so I take your card.” After a few plays the jack and king came out, and he explained the hierarchy. Then she tried to claim a queen with her jack, and he stopped her. “Say, ‘Jack, queen, king, three in a ring.’” The child repeated this twice.

“Where’d you hear that?” Vessy said.

“Mamma taught me.” All at once he remembered the old pack he’d learned on as a child, a deck of forty-six cards so old they had only the spots on them and no numbers. They lived in a thinboard shack in Arkansas so cold that they played cards to keep the blood from freezing in their fingers. He’d sat in his mother’s lap and learned his numbers that way. As he grew, she taught him every type of poker there was and, once he got his growth, what kind of knife to carry to the games.

The girl turned her cards faster and faster, and soon the game was over. Skadlock then made a show of counting the piles. “You got thirty and I got twenty-two. Who done won?”

“Me!” She threw up her hands.

He gathered the cards, shuffled, and handed them to her. “Now you deal. Give me one and then you one till they’re all gone.” He watched her bright little fingers struggle with the cards, and finally reached over and formed her hands in his. “Look, damn it, you deal like Billsy. Hold the deck in one hand like this and lick your thumb to push the top card off on the table.” She did as he said and dealt the deck onto the rings of the stump. He reached into his pants and drew out a coin and placed it on the wood.

“What’s that for?” she said.

“You don’t play cards for nothin’. You got to bet. I bet a dime, so what’ll you bet?”

“I don’t know.”

“You got money?”

She shook her head and turned her first card, a seven.

“Well, then we got to stop playin’.”

“Aw, no!” She balled a fist and put it up next to an eye.

“Can’t play without no bet.”

“Oh, please!”

He rubbed his two-day beard. “Tell you what. See that big open hayfield?” He pointed ahead to a mile-wide opening, and she turned and looked. “If you promise not to go cryin’ when we ride over it, well, I’ll take that as your bet.”

She spun back to him, smiling as if he were joking, but when she saw his eyes she knew he was not. The child glanced at Vessy, who was standing patiently off by the horses, holding the reins. “I’ll be quiet,” she whispered.

“It might could take us a good fifteen minutes to ride through. Promise you won’t cry?”

“Your card, mister.” She began bouncing on the basket.

His eyebrows went up, and he flipped an ace.

The girl stared at the card. “High or low?” she said.

“In this game it’s forever high,” he said, raking the trick.

HE WON by two cards, picked up the dime and her promise, and they mounted up and went on quietly, passing through the big farm and on into another band of timber, and then higher, where the animals scrambled for purchase on the mossy rocks. The three of them topped the ridge at last and stopped to let the horses wheeze and shudder under them, the bigger animal leaning against a fat pine for twenty minutes.

The child complained that she was hungry, but Skadlock started his horse.

“Can’t we’uns eat now?” Vessy called ahead to him. He didn’t respond, though he pulled his watch. In a few minutes they started down the other side of the ridge.

In a clear, level spot he stopped the horse and checked his watch again. “Schedule says we got fifteen minutes.”

Vessy dismounted, spread a cloth on the ground, and they sat around it. “Here,” she said, taking a block of cheese from his stubby fingers. “I’ll fix things.” She gave the child milk in a cup and poured water into two others. Opening a box of crackers, she sliced cheese onto several squares and spread potted meat over that. They ate in silence until Vessy, looking around the bald, said, “This here dirt looks pretty good.”

He followed her gaze, chewing. “I seen better.”

“Was you a gardenin’ man or did your mamma do the growin’?”

He became still. “She just passed, and this is the first I thought of it.”

“What did she grow?”

He squinted. “Tomatoes, some sweet potatoes, and turnips. The usual.” He was lying on his side but sat up Indian-style. “Tomatoes was the best. Ain’t nothing better than a big one sliced with salt and a little vinegar.”

“That’s the truth,” she said, popping a cracker into her mouth. “Looks like you’re gonna have to get friendly with your mamma’s hoe.”

He looked at her and at the child, who was licking potted meat off her fingers. “You grow stuff up in the mountains where you’re from?”

“Aw, no. We just sent all them sarvants we had down to the lowlands to shop for us and haul it back up to our place on their backs.”

He gave her a startled look. “Ain’t you saucy.”

Her expression didn’t change. “I like the garden. One thing I hate about livin’ in town’s there ain’t no place for the vegetables to come up in.”

IN AN HOUR they noticed smoke rising up above the trees, and though they could see no houses, he knew they were coming to a town called Cletchy, three dozen houses in a narrow valley threaded through by a railroad. They rode slowly into a cornfield, then came out on a tractor road where the fields changed to cotton. Before long they began making their way past a string of tenant houses. In the first yard, black women were boiling wash, and in the second children were feeding dominique chickens, and on the porches of the third and fourth and fifth old men sat smoking pipes and watching them pass like some dream drifting before them, perhaps the only strange white people they’d ever seen, too rare even to believe much less call out to with a good word.

They found the rail embankment and rode down it to the small gingerbread station. He walked in and woke up the drowsing agent and bought tickets to a connecting station further south, not buying through fares so he would not leave a trail. He also bought northbound tickets for thirty miles up the line toward Indiana. The agent asked where the people were who would use the extra set, and he said that relatives were coming at this very moment to take the southbound.

Outside, he scanned the long ridges they’d crossed. He would buy new tickets in the first connection and the second as well, northbound and southbound at each, figuring the expense was worth it to make it that much harder for anybody to trail them, if trail them they would.

While Vessy and the girl sat on the long bench on the track side of the station, he walked around to where he’d tethered the horses to a sapling, the old hitching rail too rotten and wobbly to trust. Two Fords passed in the gravel road, and he stood in the sun with his boots gathering street dust until a white man passed on foot. He looked him over and decided he looked wary, and a wary white man would ask questions when somebody tried to give him two horses, even two sorry broken-down nags. Next came a black man wearing a creased and shiny face and riding a mule with no saddle on it, a very old man who wouldn’t question anyone’s motives, not in this town.

“Hold on!” Skadlock called.

The man pulled up his little mule, which seemed mostly donkey. “Cap’n?”