The Missing

“Duggs tells me you were in the war,” the pilot said, with sudden animation.

Sam stopped with his hand on the knob. It was late, the fog was beginning to lift, and he wondered if Mr. Brandywine just wasn’t ready to be left alone.

The boat finished crossing the river and straightened, or at least Sam felt it did. “Just missed the fighting. I saw what was left over, though.”

“I wish my oldest boy had missed it.” He reached up and pulled one glass-rattling note from the whistle. Sam peered out of the window to the left and after much concentration could barely make out a running light a half- mile off, dim as a cigarette in a dark hallway. From across the river came the vessel’s hoarse salute. “The Nellie Speck,” Brandywine said to the night.

“How can you tell?”

He could just make out Brandywine’s shape, slowly turning to him. “A steamboat’s whistle is its name. That other pilot knows what boat we are. Everybody’s whistle is made to sound different, my boy.”

“You must have some ears.”

“Why, can’t you tell a family member’s voice even when you can’t see them? Your good friend’s? Your wife’s?”

He didn’t answer for a long time. “I guess so.”

“That’s right.”

“What outfit was your oldest boy in?”

“He volunteered in Missouri.”

Sam didn’t want to ask the next question, and Brandywine perhaps knew this, that there would be several questions leading to a black answer, so he went ahead and gave it.

“He got his eyes burned out,” the old man said. “And what a loss that was to him. When he rode cub pilot with me, he could see a green running light a mile and a half away, and now he’s at home making brooms.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sometimes, late at night when I’m tired and waiting for first light, I feel like he’s standing right here to the side of me. I’ll turn to him and there’s nothing there, just this hole in the darkness.” He gave the wheel a nudge to starboard. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Yes,” Sam said. “It is.”

***

ON THE WAY DOWNSTAIRS Sam watched a fog patch crossing the river. Two or three stars spun overhead, and a navigation light burned yellow above the western batture. A steam towboat came breathing heavily down on the starboard side, escape pipes woofing, running lights no more than sooty fireflies above the velvety stream, its sudden-rising whistle an organ note driven like a nail into the delta night, audible for ten miles where a farmboy hearing its hum might decide to drop from his bedroom window and join a world of wanderers. Sam imagined such a boy and wondered what would happen to him, if he’d wind up shoveling coal all night or sleeping above Charlie Duggs’s torturous snoring, a dull life going in a straight line. No wonder so many songs were about going back home.

Passing by the cafe, he saw Elsie cleaning up, her long waist bent over a checkered oilcloth. Everything would go on in a straight line tomorrow, all right, unless Ted returned with world-changing news. Or unless he didn’t return at all.

***

TED SQUATTED in the dark guessing when dawn would come, lost in a timeless ocean of blackness where ten minutes seemed an hour. It had taken two days to find the Skadlocks, and now, in a tangle of reeds behind the big house, he crouched and waited for movement or sound. The moon was long gone, and a barge of cloud had moored in the sky. A wind came up and rattled the stalks around him and he thought of his daughter, gone now too many weeks. He saw himself as a shrinking spark in her mind and knew that time was the enemy, an old cliche as true as anything else he might think. Each day cost him more of his little girl’s voice, her sense of perfect pitch, her baby teeth shining above her laughter, the touch of her hands on his big ears as he hoisted her up to sing in his arms. All he could do during this dangerous wait for the sun was think of her, and he feared it would distract him from the task at hand. He shook his head, hoping again for light since he could see nothing at all. He had scouted the house and its outbuildings before the moon lay down in the trees, but now there was nothing before him except his dark imagination of a house, a brush-swamped, gigantic thing of nibbled chimney tops and grass-spiked roof gutters. Looking off to the right, he saw nothing. Turning left, he thought he saw-what, distant fireflies? Two amber lights from a far-off boat? As he stared, the color came up in intensity and the glowing rounds grew larger-closing in from a mile away? With a shock he realized they weren’t far at all, but floating in midair right beside him, fixed in the warm, silent breath of an animal.

The blood drained from his chest, and though he knew he should remain as frozen and quiet as a stump, he understood that an animal’s nose couldn’t be fooled. Against his will he rose and his left hand floated up in defense just as a dark fury of indeterminate size struck it like a hungry fish, pain streaking up his arm at once. His hand was crushed and shredded by a huge invisible animal and he drew his pistol and pumped one detonation toward the dark pull, guessing at what had hold of him since he could see only phantom movement in the crashing reeds. The growling power on his hand turned him loose, and he tried to lurch away and find his stride but was seized in the back of the neck by a set of steel-trap fangs that shook him like a rabbit, trying to snap his brain stem. He raised the pistol again and fired once over his shoulder and then something metal banged his skull and a shower of sparks rained down in his eyes. A gruff cry that might have been for the dog’s benefit rose behind him. Ted was down on his knees when he felt a second blow and then the crush of wet, sulphurous swamp grass against his cheek.

***

MRS. BENTON was in the wheelhouse when the Ambassador drifted up against the foot of the bluff in Vicksburg, and she laid the boat against the pilings as gently as she’d once put her baby in a crib. Down in the boiler room, August cleaned his fires. Getting off duty, he washed up, combed his brassy hair, and hiked the steep redbrick street to check the train schedule at the Y &MV station. The agent told him that passengers coming up from St. Frank would arrive in two hours on the eleven o’clock train from Harriston. The boy went out on the platform and sat on a bench under the overhang, just out of the sunshine, looking down the track. A switch engine chuffed by, pulling two flats of lumber, and he watched it hiss and smoke off toward the upriver end of town. Half an hour later a passenger train of three wooden coaches creaked up to the station, thirty or so people getting off. One portly man in a straw boater kissed his wife and two daughters who had come to the station to meet him. August watched their shiny Ford chatter up the hill. His father had told him that they’d buy a car as soon as they finished up the season and went back to Cincinnati, that they’d have a better place for the winter, a flat with hot water and more than two rooms, a ground-floor place that would support a substantial piano and have room for them to play music and sing. He began to pass the time going over arrangements in his head, fox-trots he’d picked up on the way downriver. When he got stuck figuring which way to go with a note, he pictured his father’s fingers on the keyboard, rolling up, skipping down, showing the way to the melody. Those same fingers had stung his legs as a child, pulled back at his thick hair when he disobeyed. His father was pretty much all business, and his business was music. So no matter what, they were the same in that.

At ten he heard Mrs. Benton pull the whistle ring for the Moose lodge trip as he was meditating on “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” the way the white band played the melody, then how the colored orchestra played around the melody, going in and out of it, and he came to the revelation that there were more notes around a song than in it. He closed his eyes and began to hum and pat his feet on the cindery brickwork.

At 10:58, August lifted his chin toward the whistle of a passenger train, three blended notes rising toward A- sharp, D, and F-sharp. A well-maintained ten-wheeler pulled a train of six coaches into the station, and two conductors lowered step stools to the apron the moment the wheels stopped turning, getting off in their sharp