Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

“I take plenty to heart, you little shit. I was six months old when it happened. I never even knew anybody I lost.”

“That’s pretty heartless.”

Sam looked away from the fire, from the disturbing eyes. “My uncle told me it was in other hands.”

August tossed a stick onto the fire. “Other hands? You know, the Bible teaches justice along with everything else. Sam Simoneaux, you’re just a coward with all sorts of excuses, and your uncle’s next to worthless for not setting things right for your father. All he taught you is excuses.”

Sam stared at his feet, then turned his head sideways. “Maybe.”

“Tell me. You remember your father’s hands on you?”

He settled back against a fallen loblolly and looked up at the fire-coppered limbs. “I told you, I was a baby.”

“When I was old enough to make a chord on a piano, my father started teaching me. He’d sit behind me and tap my shoulders with his fingers, sort of playing the notes on me while I played them on the piano. I knew if I was lazy and delaying a note, or if I was rushing a run out of time. His fingers guided me in the rhythm, see. When I started the sax, he did the same thing, tapping out an improvised beat, hearing where I was going with the melody and telling me where I should go, where not. It was like he was passing himself into me through those fingers.” He looked up, and his eyes were yellow mirrors. “You can’t know what it’s like never to have that again.”

“Your old man made a good musician out of you. He wouldn’t want you to waste it.”

“I’m not wasting a damn thing.”

“You’re about to. When one of those Skadlocks knocks you down with a rifle bullet tomorrow, where will all that music learning be then? Dead as your smart-ass little carcass.”

“Skadlock’s just a hillbilly rummy. I can sneak up on him like I waylaid you.”

“Good lord, August. I’m a department-store floorwalker. These people live waiting to get waylaid. They’re not three miles from here, I’d bet, and probably can smell the smoke from the pine knots you built the fire with. Maybe even see the smoke. I wouldn’t be surprised if they step out into the light right now and do us in.”

August gazed to his left into the dark and smiled. “I don’t think they’re as sharp as you think.”

“Listen. If you believe you know more about hurting people than they do, go back to town and talk to some of the locals.”

“I’ll do what I need to.”

“Boy, this doesn’t have a thing to do with your father. You just want to think of yourself as important. A show-off is all you are.”

The boy stood up and grabbed the old shotgun by the barrels. “Take that back.”

“That’s what revenge is, kid. You’d like to think you’re going to help your mamma or provide justice for the world, but you really just want to kill somebody to make yourself feel big.”

“That Ralph Skadlock might kill someone else.”

“I got news for you. I don’t know for a fact that he’s ever killed anybody. He didn’t kill your father, either. Ted got an infection in a Cincinnati hospital and died of blood poisoning.”

August’s face convulsed. “He wouldn’t have been there if it hadn’t been for Skadlock,” he yelled, his eyes welling with tears.

“If Skadlock wanted him dead he’d of killed him out here and thrown him in the river with a sack of bricks tied to his neck. You’re not thinking straight.”

“It’s not right,” he cried. “If people don’t get what they deserve for killing somebody, it’s just not right.”

“I agree with you. But trying to shoot ’em up with a six-dollar shotgun ain’t the way to do it.”

“It feels right to me.”

“Feeling’s got nothing to do with it. But what’s true does have something to do with it. The truth is, your daddy never taught you to go out and gun anybody down. He taught you to make music for the rest of your life.”

August sat in the dirt next to the fire and let his hand slide down the shotgun. “Just shut up.”

“After you sprinkle Skadlock with that Parker, what’ll you do about his brother?”

“He has a brother?”

“And a mother, who I’m pretty sure is never more than three feet from a pocket pistol. They run a still back in there, and I’ve never seen moonshiners who didn’t have more guns than a hardware store.”

He looked over when he heard a sniff and saw the tears shining down August’s face. “Lucky, for a second I thought I believed you, but just as soon as I did I could feel my father’s hands on my shoulder. I’ve got to make it right.”

Sam nodded once. The matter was past arguing that night. When someone is struck, the first mindless impulse is to strike back. After reflection, sometimes that impulse fades. He knew the boy needed time to calm the notion of revenge. Or an alternative. “August,” he began, “once those people see you armed on their place, they’re going to protect themselves. They’ll hurt you real bad, maybe even kill you, because you’ve made them believe they have to. I’m not going to bring that news to your mother. No way in hell. If you’ll just listen to me, maybe there’s a way we can capture Skadlock and bring him to the law in Zeneau.”

The boy lay the shotgun down on a blanket before the fire and stretched out next to it, his hand on the walnut wrist. “I already talked to the deputy.”

This surprised him. “The hell you say.”

“Yeah. He’s Ralph Skadlock’s second cousin.”

That night he lay on a mound of leaves listening to spiders grinding away in the weeds. His arm and shoulder seemed to glow with dull pain. Sometime in the night he fingered citronella into his ears to scent out the keening mosquitoes. He dozed when the fire burned down, but soon woke up imagining how the boy would blunder onto the homesite full of confidence and catch lead like an animal drawn to a baited field. Nobody should let this happen to a child, even one big enough to be a man and already smarter than most. August still lived in the one-dimensional world where he couldn’t understand how the irreversible can happen, drawing your final breath or watching someone else do it. In the morning he’d do what needed to be done, even if it meant the boy would need stitches or to have a bone set. First thing, he’d break the shotgun to pieces.

AT DAWN the temperature came up and the trees began to tick with dew, a glossy magnolia leaf dripping into his face and waking him. The boy was gone. He sat up and whirled around but saw only the hobbled mule, staring at him knowingly. He brushed off his shirt, stretched out his arm, which hurt worse than the night before, and saddled Garde Ça, reining him out onto the narrow ridge. The lead-colored sky revealed nothing of the time, and he stared up as he rode, trying to figure out how long past daylight he’d slept and wondering if the boy was dead yet. The mule shambled along, shaking his head as though Sam had started the whole series of sad events that would end with Elsie’s losing the only child she had left.

Inexplicably, he came to a straight, one-lane gravel road running east-west. He sat the mule in the middle trying to comprehend this connection to the known world. Then he crossed over and continued south through the woods. In less than an hour the trail ran parallel to the mile-wide river, and he knew he was close when the mule’s hoof clanked down on the lip of an inverted sugar vat, a huge cast-iron kettle shaped like his wartime helmet. In a collapsed shed he saw a litter of dove-colored shingles covering two other kettles, remnants of a batterie where slaves boiled sugarcane juice down to blackstrap. He reined into the marsh alder and cattails here, knowing the house was perhaps a mile or less away. When they reached the tree line the going was easier, and he turned south and stopped, keeping the animal’s head up so he wouldn’t pull and grind grass. Garde Ça’s breathing calmed, and he listened. To the southwest a steam towboat was making a racket, fighting upstream in the high river, and the covering noise allowed him to move through the brush up to the house. He tied the mule off and went on foot until he could see the dark planks of the belvedere rise above the willow saplings. Passing through the graveyard, he crept along until he spotted the fawn cloth of August’s vest. The boy slowly turned his face as if expecting him, and Sam dropped down on his knees, water seeping through to his skin. Sixty yards or so in front of them was the board walkway that ran between the kitchen and the big house, and a woman stepped out of a door, gathered a small bundle of shingles, and walked back in.