Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

August was quiet for a long time. “What if those people talk the sheriff out of it? Didn’t you say this Mr. White was a banker and his wife a proper lady? You think the sheriff will believe us over them?”

“Oh, maybe she was bred in old Kentucky, but she’s only a crumb down here.”

August laughed aloud, and it was the first time he’d laughed since before his father died. “I wish you could play piano as good as you tell jokes.”

“I’m getting better.”

He talked to the boy a long time, easing him off to sleep. And then the image came to him of armed men waiting in the small depot for the likes of Ralph and Billsy Skadlock, and he thought of the possibility that something could go wrong, a gunfight and pursuit, slugs the size of bumblebees slamming through the flimsy pine walls, with a little girl in the middle of the fracas. Bullets didn’t seek out guilt or innocence; they were flying accidents of fate. He eventually fell asleep and began to dream of Lily in Ralph Skadlock’s arms, both of them turning to face a boy pointing a monstrous shotgun at them, and when that vision faded, he was in a hospital in France, and his wife was working on a needlepoint chair bottom, at one point holding it up to him and showing an image of a bombed-out house, a girl standing before the smoke and fire raising both hands, each finger made of khaki thread, nine in all, and a stitch of red for the bloody socket.

WHEN RALPH SKADLOCK got out of bed, Billsy was standing in the doorway scratching and yawning into the new day.

“You smell that?” Billsy asked.

Ralph had begun sleeping upstairs again now that the ceiling no longer leaked and Vessy had dried and turned the mattress. He pulled on his pants with a grunt, and they went down and out into the kitchen.

Vessy had fired the big stove, robbed eggs from the hens that were left, and cut up onions and cheese, making the men an omelette and floating it on a pad of grits and butter. The little girl was at the table penciling mustaches on photographs in an old newspaper. The men sat down and began to eat, their heads low over the plates, staring at the food as it disappeared. The girl dropped her pencil and bent under the table to reach for it, but banged her head when she came up and started crying. The men glowered at her and Billsy said, “Hey, shut that stuff up.”

Vessy picked up the pencil, gave it to the child, and brushed back her hair, kissing her forehead. She rubbed her back and found her a fresh page on which to draw. The child stopped wailing and began marking dark eyebrows on the image of a Baton Rouge debutante.

The men stopped eating and watched all of it, as if the notion of calming a child with anything other than a peppery slap or a whack with a piece of kindling had never occurred to them. Billsy put an elbow in his brother’s ribs and asked, “You remember the time I sassed the old woman while she was ironin’ and she threw that flat-iron down on my foot?”

Ralph made a face and took another bite. “What made you think of something like that?”

“You remember that?”

“Sure I do. I’m the one tended to your foot. Took off your shoe and had to shake it to make your little toe fall out.”

“Took all winter for my foot to heal up,” Billsy mumbled, watching the girl drawing.

Vessy came to the table with her plate and sat down. “I don’t guess you heathen ever say grace.”

Ralph looked at her, chewing slowly. “Grace who?”

AFTER BREAKFAST the brothers took a horse that was favoring a rear leg from the little wire trap of a paddock and checked its hooves.

The girl came out and pulled at Ralph’s pants.

“Can I ride?”

“Go buy your own horse.” He walked backwards toward the woods, leading the mare and watching its rear legs. Thirty feet into the long grass, he stopped and looked at the ground. The girl walked up and put a white hand on the horse’s knee. “Billsy!” Ralph hollered.

His brother came out and looked at the footprints in the mud. “Looks like two of ’em.”

“Town shoes. What the hell?”

“Can I ride?” the girl asked again.

Ralph circled her waist with his hands and lifted her onto the animal’s bare back. “Grab hold of her mane,” he told her, planting her hands in the coarse hair. “Come on.”

The three of them moved off into the brush, where they found animal prints and, off toward the river, the flattened weeds of a resting place.

“You reckon it’s somebody after the still or our reserves?” Billsy asked, pushing back his straw hat.

“Naw. None of them rascals wears shoes like that. Shallow heels and broad soles flat as a spinster’s backside.”

“Somebody’s been watchin’.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Giddyap!” the girl yelled.

Billsy spat. “We best change our plans a little.”

“One thing for sure. I ain’t ridin’ into Woodgulch in broad daylight with the kid.”

They turned back toward the house, the girl singing in her sweet voice the first two stanzas of “The Horse That Outran the Train.”

Billsy looked up at her admiringly. “Do you know ‘The Girl in the Window Above Alfred’s Saloon’?”

His brother reached over and knocked off his hat. “Damn it, Billsy!”

“Hey,” he hollered, swinging down for his hat, “everbody knows that one.”

Vessy was waiting for them in the rear of the great house, wearing a housedress she’d found and washed and ironed. “I figured you boys gone berry pickin’.”

Ralph told her what they’d found, and her eyes raked the woods. “We still turnin’ her over Friday, right?”

“I’ll have to do some figurin’, but you get her ready.”

“When can I get my part of the money?”

Suddenly, he looked down at the ground. “I have it and I’ll give it you.” He looked up and he was blushing.

Billsy rolled his eyes and walked past into the house, saying “I’ll be damned” under his breath.

“What’s that about?” She put her hands on her hips.

“Nothin’. I told him you could buy into the still if you wanted.”

She drew her lips together, vertical lines forming around her mouth as though she were figuring some great sum. “How much of a cut would that get me?”

“One part out of six.”

She looked at the house and back at him. “You don’t own none of this, do you?”

“We sort of found it.”

“What you really want is a house gal and now and then a free ride on me. Well, I’ve known women who traded for less.” She looked around again. “But I ain’t one of ’em.”

He looked at her walnut hair, then into her gray eyes. “What’s wrong with that deal?”

“It ain’t a deal.” She turned away. When she turned back, her face was composed, the corners of her mouth in their habitual downturn. “I got used to livin’ with electricity and a store down the road where I can walk and buy a pork chop. What you got here’s no better than that mountain shack I was raised in. I can’t live on saltmeat and sardines ever day.”

“My line of work kind of needs some distance between me and a town.”

“Where at you live before?”

“Arkansas.”

“And the feds busted you out, right?”

He took a step back. “How’d you guess that?”

“And before?”

“Around Longview.”

“Who got you there?”

He shook his head. “The Babtist fire department came down on my cooker with their axes. After they finished, you could’ve drained spaghetti with the thing.”

“How long you reckon before some dollar-a-day feds come through them weeds and chops you out of business? And you want me to invest in that? Include me out.”