there. But maybe not.”
“You go on home,” Morrow said. He stood and took the mop into his own hands. “I’ve got it.”
That night he paced near the big window, watching for the man, keeping his bird gun near. Whenever headlights passed the store, he opened the door for a clear view. He paced and kept a lookout for the man, but was thinking of the girl, the girl he’d seen long ago and the girl he’d seen in the dust. Somehow they became the same girl; there was a blending of then and now, her and her, and a combination of fresh excitement and release kept Morrow awake until at dawn he leaned the shotgun against the tree his robe hung from, and dove into the river to swim upstream.
Florianne
If they ever catch who took my daughter, I’ll probably know him. Maybe I’ve known him all my life; maybe he’s only a familiar face and name. I might have given him credit at the store, let his tab ride till next Friday or the one after, carried groceries to the car for his wife, cut two pounds from a chub of bologna and shaved it paper-thin the way he likes. Maybe he leans on the counter and repeats his favorite jokes, and I laugh at the right parts while recalling the sound of his mitt snapping shut when he shagged fly balls long ago.
I suspect everybody around here and nobody special.
At the opening of each deer season I hope this time she’ll be found. Eleven hunts have come and gone now, and others have been stumbled across in culverts, under old plywood, wrapped carefully in white sheets, and piled over with leaves, but not my girl. This is rough country, though, steep hills, rocky bottoms, hard ground to walk on, gloomy from the trees, and she could be ten feet away as three hunters pass and they’d all miss her. She might lie somewhere else, I guess, under a barn or the freshest patch of concrete in a bachelor’s basement, but that’s not how it comes to me. I can hear wind in the trees and limbs tapping limbs and feel rain.
She disappeared only a quarter mile down our road, taken out of the churchyard where she was mowing the grass, putting a few bucks in her pocket for Saturday night. There are exactly three homes between ours and the church and no strangers in any of them. The lawn mower was still running, blatting and fuming untended beside the tall stone church, until the nearest neighbor noticed the annoying noise no longer moved to and fro and looked from a window. She’d’ve turned seventeen in a month. There’s never been another sign of her.
Sometimes I’ll be at the cash register and catch somebody looking at me in a sort of funny way, at such a slant as to appear sneaky, or with lips curled too high on one end, and think, Is that him? Is he watching me sack groceries and gloating? Does that shifty glance say I fucked your daughter, Henry, from every which angle that felt good to me, then choked the light from her pretty eyes and put her…Should I grab him now while he’s handy and beat on him till he tells me where I can rake her bones together?
At some point every old friend sensed my suspicion aim their way and several couldn’t get over that moment of recognition, even after my suspicion rotated to the next ol’ buddy, or slightly creepy cousin, that mailman with the pencil mustache. There was no blood, no hair strands snatched loose in a fight or torn bits of her blouse, and she was a strong girl, so he had a gun to her head or she trusted him enough to go sit in his truck a minute, hang out, sip a soda. That brings everybody I know into the picture.
Her mother ran west when the girl was five. I was too steady for her taste, too regular, too much the same one day to another. She wanted fizzy drinks and jukeboxes, different arms to hold her every week or two. She remembered her daughter’s birthday for a few years, sent a gift at Christmas, then she just didn’t anymore. She’d turned that page, lit a fresh cigarette, poured a cold one, found new lips to kiss.
I went to all the trouble and tracked her to Reno once our girl was gone, and she said, “Everything with you is a downer, Henry. I just can’t stand your blah-blah-blah negative attitude. You’re so selfish that way. She’ll turn up.”
“She didn’t leave—she was taken.”
“What’s your proof? You got any?”
“You don’t even know her.”
The phone went click, and that was it. She has yet to call with another question.
I always wondered if her mom’s leaving was why the girl ran to fat for so long, had a roly-poly figure until the year before she went gone. She took up swimming, jogging, some flowery-sounding yoga class at the Civic Center, ate salads and more salads and rice cakes. She made herself into a size she hadn’t believed she could ever be. That meant so much to her, to finally have a figure clothes looked good on, to feel a little admired when lolling around the pool in town, wear shorts to the ballpark on summer nights.
I’ve often thought about that: If she’d stayed chunky would she be here now?
Such questions popping up keep the hurt fresh.
And sometimes I think, Were there two of them? Three?
How much of our world is in on this?
Black Step
The cow trembled in the sideways tree, the broken left foreleg canted in a separate direction from the other legs, snapped sharply to the right and dangling. There’d been moans since the storm in the night pushed on and away and the wind calmed. The cow heard my feet rustle pebbles on the cliff, and its tired neck raised the head to look up at me. The cow had wide screaming eyes that were saying things that living things say to me in that language better than words. That language that travels. I’ve seen it everywhere.
The sideways tree was a lonely old sycamore halfway down the cliff that grew straight out from the face for about ten feet, then curled upward for another thirty. Far below, the river flowed clean and dense in the morning shadow cast by the bluff, the rocks in its bed singing of centuries spent singing in the rushing, the things that wash by, bump going past, leave marks or bones. And the cow repeated everything again with those shrill eyes pointed my way, pleading as it had since the forest started rattling and lightning shanks stomped down yellow from the sky and the wind huffed ’til bad instincts took charge and the cow plunged through the barbed wire, seeking a way out of the suddenly terrifying pasture but found only a way down, and the sideways tree snagged it so it had a long hurt night held aloft to hear the rocks far, far below, and know horror.
I felt responsible for the cows.
I turned and walked across the broad sopping pasture toward Ma’s house, tall supple grass flicking droplets to my knees. The sky had been washed baby blue and blank, and the other cows were munching away at the greenery, rubbing their hides on small trees. Ma’s house is a square two-story built plain long ago and still sturdy. It’s painted an invented shade of white about halfway around the house to where the paint ran out, just past the south corner and beyond sight from the road, some certain mix of various whites you have to fetch from town. The rest of the house has been colored with the paler paints left over in the shed, so it’s one color house seen driving by, several others standing in the yard, colors that don’t rhyme in the eye, but the old wood is well coated. A ladder yet leans there, and a couple of brushes on the bottom rung have stiffened atop a paint can lid.
She’s asleep, Ma, snoring in her room, letting the creep of cancer slip her mind a spell, and I go tiptoe through the kitchen to the gun cupboard in the hall. The rifle I want is standing in the back now, behind a cracked oil lantern and a pile of yesteryear phone books, not handy like I kept it. It’s an old bruiser, a bolt-action aught-six that has been whipped on by wintry thickets slapping and raw sporting weather since two grandpas ago, yet it still has a glow to it, a veteran allure. I trust this one most.
The cow screams at me again with those eyes. Screams what you think it would. The sideways tree is too far down the cliff for me to clamber there, even if I was willing. In the valley and downriver a short ways there’s a twist of smoke coming from a new house I keep forgetting is there now. A strange but handsome riverside
