Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

The man was mumbling, sitting where a front porch had been, the old frowning roof held up over him by one two-by-four. Sam stopped in plain sight. The man looked over at him and his mouth fell open a bit. “It don’t mean,” he said.

Sam looked around at the other houses, then turned back. “I came here to ask a few questions. Are you named Cloat?”

The man’s hands were in his lap, swollen and furry. The crotch of his overalls had split open and spilled him out onto the caned seat. His graying beard was braided and ran down onto his left thigh like a greasy snake. One overalls strap was missing and he wore no shirt, his skin botched and sun cratered, his eyes running like sores. The ground around the chair was littered with a mat of small bones as though he’d sat there for years eating chicken and squirrel. “Six mile,” the man growled.

Sam could smell him over the rot of his garbage, a fecal putrescence that caused him to step back.

A woman who seemed half-Indian, half-Negro lurched out of the doorway and stared at him in amazement. “Who the fuck you?”

He scanned her hands for a weapon. “I’m looking for anybody named Cloat.”

She nodded the words into her head one at a time as if translating them into Cherokee or whatever language she was born under. “He Cloat. No speak right. What you talk?”

He gestured behind him. “This bunch rode down into Louisiana in 1895 and shot up a family.”

“What that?”

“What’s what?”

“Eighteen ninety-five. That wagon?”

He tried to imagine how she thought, and after a while he said, “It was twenty-seven winters ago. Killed my family.”

She pointed to the ground. “Make winter mark.”

He bent down and with a stick made twenty-seven scratches in a bare stretch of dirt. “This long ago.” He looked up.

The woman added ten marks with a dark forefinger and clawed a line under them. “He this many. No kill no one yet ten winter.”

“But he is a Cloat?”

“Babe. Babe Cloat. You go see Box.” A hand rose out of the folds of her dust-caked skirt and she pointed to a mildew-blackened dwelling across two hundred feet of weeds.

“How many men live back in here?”

“Ask Box.”

“I’m asking you.”

Her eyes were on him, annoyed, uncomprehending. She held up three fingers.

“That’s all?”

“Babe, Box, Box daddy.”

He surveyed the houses, the weather-crippled sheds out back. “What happened to everybody?”

The woman mashed a nostril with a thumb and blew out a slug of snot. “What?”

He waved an arm. “Where are all the Cloats?”

She nodded. “Die, rot. Some rot, then die.”

He watched her go up to Babe Cloat and hand him a potato, which he drew to his face and gnawed as would a squirrel.

A headache rose up in the back of his skull as he walked across the compound. He was hot, angry, and wanted out of the sun but stopped when he saw a long rifle barrel slide over a front windowsill. “Are you Box Cloat?” he called.

A wheezy voice came from the window. “Before I kill you, tell me what the hell you think you doin’ back in here.”

The rusty octagon barrel swung slightly in the window. He hoped the shot, if and when it came, would only wound him. “If you’re Box Cloat come out and talk to me, damn it. I might not do a thing to you.”

He heard the hammer drop on the rifle, snap, and a raspy string of cursing and knew at once the man had pulled the trigger on an empty chamber and was fumbling with the action to throw a live round under the firing pin, so he pulled his.45 and put two blasts through the front wall above the window. He ran at the door, throwing himself against it, and it flew apart like a chickenyard gate as he fell into the room five feet from a tall man with enormous eyebrows trying to lever a jammed rifle. Sam aimed and hollered for him to drop the gun, and it hit the floor.

His heart was squeezing blood like a fist, and he stood up quickly, holding the pistol out at the other man’s head. “Are you a Cloat?”

The man was frozen, staring walleyed in Sam’s direction and trying hard to focus. “You a Lobdell, ain’t you. You not lookin’ for me, you want Clamp and he died three year ago.”

“Are you Box Cloat?”

“Yeah. You a Bledsoe?”

“No.”

Box tilted his head to the left. “Then you a Clemmons or Terra-nova? Maybe Walting, or a Mills? Say, you ain’t no Levers, are you?…A Smollet?” He continued down a staccato list of twenty names, his hands rising higher above his brushy head before Sam stopped him.

“Shut up. You got a lot of people mad with you, don’t you?”

Box gasped. “You not a Kathell, is you? God lands, not no Kathell,” he whined, looking away. “Listen, them little girls was a accident. We thought they was somebody else’s.”

Sam raised the pistol thinking of how he could kill him and people would care more for the corpse of a mole rotting in its burrow. His eyes narrowed for a moment, along with his conscience. Living in the present is so easy. You just do a thing and not think about what could happen the next day, or how you might view your own actions in ten years. At last, he said, “Sit on the floor. How old are you?”

Box squatted in the floury dust of his room. “Forty-some-odd.”

“What do you know of Jimmy Cloat?”

“Uncle Jimmy? He been dead and gone a long time, feller.”

“Who killed him?”

Box closed one eye. “One of them Frenchies down south.”

“Did you pay ’em back for it?”

Box went through another spasm of focusing, trying to see who was holding the big pistol at his head. “I don’t know nothing about it.”

Sam knelt down, moved the long black beard out of his way and placed the pistol’s muzzle under the man’s chin, leaning close through the smell of him. “Can you see me?”

“Some.”

“My name’s Sam Simoneaux. Don’t you even blink. You people came down to Louisiana and murdered my whole family, didn’t you?” In his mouth he could taste the words like a metallic poison.

Box’s milky eyes widened. “I ain’t did nothin’. I was just a kid.”

“Look, I didn’t come down here to kill anybody. Understand that. I just want the truth.”

“You sure enough sound like them Frenchies.”

“Who did it?”

“What part Louisiana?”

“Down south. Sugarcane country.”

He squirmed against the pistol. “Yeah. All they let me do was to hold the horses. Said they wouldn’t trust my eyes with no gun.”

“Right. So who did it?”

“I ain’t telling you shit.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to tie you up and go talk to your daddy.”

“He’s sick as a dog. Rotten sick. He ain’t got no breath to tell you nothin’.”

“Where’s your rope?”

“Bring me along, you got me covered. I can talk to him yit.”

Sam glanced around the room. The floor sagged, and the splayed wallboards showed the daylight beyond. There was only a shuck mattress killed flat and greasy and a poplar-wood washstand leaning away from a wall, a handful of corroded rifle shells spread over its alligatored top. “All right. If you get me the answers I want, I’ll leave you alone. But if I think you’re lying to me I’ll paint the wall with your brains. You understand?”

Box nodded and struggled to his feet. “You ain’t the first what said such.”

“Who else lives back here?”

“Just who you seen.”

“You have a woman?”

“The last up and died on me.”

He thought a moment. “Do you miss her?”

Box’s face screwed up at him. “What?”

“Come on.” He put the Colt against his back. “Let’s go see Daddy.”