The Missing

Sam looked at his wall and dropped another flurry of soap flakes into his pail. “But he offered you good money.”

“Two bucks a song.”

“Man. So you’re singing?”

“Practicing all day. Haven’t you heard?”

“Been busy.”

“You know, the next big city’s Cairo. I’ve got a feeling about the place. Lily sang in two shows there with lots of women crowding the bandstand.”

“You told me some time ago.” He looked at her. She was a nice woman, pretty and talented, but he could tell by her eyes that she was incomplete. She was lonely. “You taking good care of yourself?”

“Sure. But when I sing at Stovepipe Bend, I don’t know what’ll happen. Might be a riot.”

“Show business!”

She laughed at that and picked up her pail, walking past him into the engine room.

***

THE NEXT DAY he watched the cabin boys and cooks roll out bunting left over from a July Fourth trip and drape it over the rails. The captain told him to pull out all the slot machines and space them around the lower deck. Ten miles out from Stovepipe Bend, the leader of the black orchestra, Fred Marble, came onto the roof, pulled on kid gloves, opened the steam valve wide, and warmed up the calliope with “I Found a Rose in the Devil’s Garden,” the notes screaming out to five miles around. At two o’clock Sam buttoned up his uniform and did a walkaround, spitting on hot cinders on the upper decks. They were to play two moonlight trips, nothing during the day, because this was a fairly new and hard-nosed factory town with no clubs, church groups, or schools that might take a day trip. When Nellie Benton pulled a short rasp from the whistle, Sam headed up.

She was leaning on a steering lever ringing a slow bell when he tapped on the door, and she waved him in. “Lucky, go down and tell Bit not to let idlers hang around in the engine room tonight. I understand this is a squirrelly bunch we’ll have on board.”

“I been warned.”

“Watch yourself, son. You’re a good fellow, and the Wellers need you.”

“Well, I survived Bung City.”

“Stovepipe Bend might be more of a challenge.” Suddenly a little tugboat slid out past the point of an island right ahead and stopped in the channel as if its pilot were unsure which side of the Ambassador to pass, and Mrs. Benton pulled the whistle valve wide open, the big glass panes of the wheelhouse vibrating like harmonica reeds.

***

LATE IN THE DAY the boat slid around a muddy bend, and there on the west bank rose a long series of iron smokestacks like spines on a poisonous caterpillar, little coal-burning factories spewing smoke and unworldly smells into the damp afternoon. The riverbank was without vegetation except for balding willows dying behind the mudflats. A gravel slope two hundred feet long served as the landing. Sam watched a smelter spew orange smoke; at the river’s edge, discharge pipes from a creosote plant pushed out gouts of ebony foam. A cottonseed- oil mill, a broom factory, and the Gettum Rat Poison plant huddled behind the levee. Painted on the water tower above the last factory was a giant rodent writhing on its back. Tiers of company shacks, each like the other, sweltered up the naked hill toward where somewhat better houses with broad sagging porches were skylighted on the ridge.

***

SAM COULDN’T SEE a proper street, but down the cinder-strewn trails streamed men and women drawn by the squalling calliope. The black orchestra was on the foredeck playing a jacked-up version of “Ain’t We Got Fun” as Mrs. Benton eased the Ambassador against the landing and the deckhands lassoed two cypress stumps. The captain mounted the little flying bridge on the hurricane deck and through a large megaphone announced the schedule for the next two nights. Sam scanned the crowd, the mismatched boots, patched overalls, chemical-slathered aprons, and flour-sack dresses that made Stovepipe Bend seem more beyond the news than Bung City. It looked to be a town where there would be child thieves or any other kind of criminal in abundance. He noted the square yellow flyers stapled by the advance man to every fence and porch post and imagined they were tacked up in the poor neighborhood above the factories as well, and even out along the mud road coming into town that threaded through the hookworm-haunted farms of the region. He hoped the milling workers would go home and wash before the first evening trip, which cast off at seven. Hundreds of men stood around with their thumbs under their overalls straps staring at the only white thing in their smudged hamlet. The women were dressed mostly in old shirtwaists and long full skirts, though some wore washed-out housedresses and no shoes. One woman came out of the back door of an abattoir wearing a blood-soaked jacket, stopped dead, and stared at the Ambassador, her open mouth a toothless hole.

***

BY SIX Sam and Charlie were standing by the gangplank, pistols in belt, asking each patron if he or she carried any weapons, and for a while only pocket knives dropped into the baskets. But then gaggles of younger couples began to show up, some men in reblued overalls or their fathers’ patched suit coats, and then straight razors and dollar pistols began to weigh down the long table. Skiffs from the hamlet of Yunt, a cluster of crooked smokestacks across the river, started to land and tie up, each boat bearing four or five contrary, hollering folks dressed in gay, cheap clothes.

The first of these that Sam stopped pulled back his arm when asked if he had any weapons. “Yeah, what’s it to you?” He was drunk and sweating and his straw boater was cracked in two places already.

“You can’t board with a weapon. Hand it over, whatever you got, and we’ll give it back after the trip.”

“Hell, they’s five or six on that boat want to kill me. I need my little six-gun.”

Sam grabbed his lapel. “We’ve taken everybody’s weapons, sport. You’ll be safe as in church.”

The man frowned. “If I went in a church the place would prob’ly ketch on far.”

Charlie Duggs slipped up behind and slid a hand into the man’s pants pocket, fishing out a Colt with the barrel hacksawed off. He tossed it to Sam. “Here you go.”

“Hey!” The man lurched for his gun.

“Aw, go on and have a good time.” Charlie gave him a shove up the stage. “When you get off we’ll let you kill as many jugheads as you want.”

The man continued to holler, but the crowd pushed up against him and he floated toward the ticket window. “My name’s Buxton, and I better get the same gun when I come back,” he called.

The second engineer was helping them look for weapons, but they could only do a patchy job of it, checking the customers with coats or lumpy pockets. The people were wrinkled, sunburned, generally thin, coal stained, thick voiced, and bent, a hard-used population with limps, eye patches, bad breath, casts in the eye, crooked teeth or none, missing fingers. Sam looked at the smokestacks of the town, now just giving off mild waves of residual stench, and knew that most of the workers had some money but nowhere at all to waste it, until now. He turned and spotted the captain surveying the crowd from high up on the Texas roof. He was smiling.

Several other skiffs landed ahead of the Ambassador and tied off to anything that would hold them. One carried a single man wearing a dark coat and an old-fashioned shirt without a collar. He mixed in with the crowd and gravitated toward the stage like a dark spirit, seemingly carried not by his legs but by the motion of others. Sam didn’t study him, but at some point while counting, touching, and questioning the crowd, he felt a lull, an absence of light, something that connected him to the worst possible world. He took a blackjack from a man and turned to receive, without having asked for it, an antique throwing dagger with an ebony handle and a carbon-steel blade, a knife invisible in the dark. Its owner was the lone skiffman, and when Sam looked at