The Missing

“How about the tack?”

“Now that’s worth money. That stuff’ll listen to you. I want it all back, and you leave me a ten-dollar deposit.”

“What’s his name?”

“Gasser. That’s what was wrote on the bill of sale I got. Came from over the river in Pointe Coupee Parish.”

They shook on it, and Sam rode the animal back to the store for a sack of food, a canteen, matches, oil of citronella, and a straw hat with a curled brim. He also bought a box of Quaker Oats. Starting out toward the south, he noticed Gasser’s gait was rough when he hurried him along. He slowed him to a walk, and the mule grew soft footed. Then he bumped him up with his heels, and the hard gait returned. “Damned if you don’t trot like you’re runnin’ on crutches.” In ten minutes they entered the trees at a fast walk.

The country south of the Skadlocks’ was a mix of dry and submerged cypress swamp, but this higher northern route showed hardwoods mixed with longleaf pine, the terrain choppy and bent as a run-over washboard. He was two miles south of Zeneau when the forest closed in completely, and the mule stalled against a wall of tallow trees and briars, refusing to budge. He turned the animal around and found a hogback ridge which he followed for a quarter-mile until it came to a point at a gulch full of fallen timber. He sat the animal and looked down into the tangle. Turning the mule again, he backtracked and crossed to the next ridge and rode along it until it also petered out, so he reversed tracks again, sidling west until he found a ridge that sloped down gradually into a mudbottom gorge. He tapped Gasser’s flanks to go down, but he just stood there looking from side to side. “Git up.” After half a minute the animal sidestepped to the bottom and walked south in a narrow ditch full of mudballs washed out of the ridges. Sam dodged vines as big as a man’s arm, and after a mile of riding in what felt like a long grave, he tried to urge the mule up a slope onto high land, but he just stopped and drank the opaque water.

“Aw, get up!” The mule continued to drink. He popped him with the reins and found himself carried along the ravine, still in its bottom. Reining to the side made the mule jam to a stop, sideways, his nose in the moss on one side, his rump imbedded in dirt on the other. He cursed the animal for a full minute and then straightened him out and waited in the slow moving current. He kicked his ribs and called out every command he knew, every curse and animal insult, finally resorting to the French of his childhood, calling him a maudit fils de putain, at which the mule rolled his ears back all the way, though he didn’t budge. Sam noticed the ears and thought a moment, sucking a tooth. “En avant!” he yelled, and the mule picked up his head and walked forward. Sam raised his hands and let them drop. “Eh bien, un mulet qui parle francais!” The animal picked up speed, as if what he’d heard made him comfortable with the work at hand. Sam decided to give the mule his head and let him figure the woods out for himself. The light began to fade and he played with the name “Gasser,” trying to understand where that might have come from. Finally, he called out “Garde ca!” and the animal gave a jump and picked up his step, bobbing his head. “Garde ca!” Sam said again, remembering that every village had a garde ca, an old rascal who sat in front of a store begging tobacco and telling dirty jokes. “Regardez ca!” the women would exclaim, shaking their heads. “Look at that.”

***

GARDE CA dug up a slope and got on top of a wooded promontory, where he stopped. Neither French nor English would get him going, so finally Sam dismounted and pulled on the bridle. The animal refused to take a step and bent to taste a weed. It was then he saw it, a wink of tin next to his brogan, and he looked out at the woods, knowing what it was before he picked it up: the can with the image of the red devil on its side. He called the boy’s name, his voice broken by the matrix of vines and trees. Putting his head down, he listened but heard only the mule’s rotary crunching.

He mounted and rode through a clattering brake of wild magnolias, then into a cloud of honeysuckle, and after a mile the mule again stopped dead for a long time, where the ridge started to descend. A good rein-whipping had no effect. He looked over the animal’s ears trying to imagine what he saw in the mat of pigweed woven with generations of wisteria and poison oak. He began to suspect a snake and got down to study the woods floor, then looked up to scan the trees for signs of a wildcat. He hoped they weren’t near a bear’s den, and the thought of a flying comb of claws made him tug on the mule’s bridle. “Allons!”

The mule closed his eyes and grew as still as a statue. Sam stepped back to give the bridle a jerk-to tear it off the sticker-matted head, if need be-and then he put his foot on something that was not solid ground. He looked behind him and jounced a bit, as if testing a gangplank for soundness, and the whole surface for fifty feet around moved up and down like a taut waxed tarpaulin. He dropped the reins, took another step, and his leg went through into nothing. Scrambling back to the mule’s hooves, he understood that a section of the ridge had washed out, leaving the forest floor of vines and leaves suspended over a chasm underneath. Both of them could have been killed had they tried to cross. Turning Garde Ca around, he opened a burlap pack and took out a round box of oats, feeding half of them to the mule in tribute.

Backtracking, he turned south down a trail of sorts. Near dark, Garde Ca stopped and looked off to his left. Sam listened to a hot breeze stir the tops of a line of sycamores, and in the distance saw a watchman crow give three caws and flit off a pine top like ink slung from a pen. Under him, the mule seemed to be holding his breath. Then he heard two metallic clicks and turned his head, knowing that hammers had been drawn back and fingers were tightening on the triggers. A dart of orange fire blasted out of the brush and the mule stood on his hind legs, braying. Sam slid behind the saddle and hung on until the forelegs slammed back down, then Garde Ca bucked and he arced over the long ears, impacting the trail like a mortar round. He lay there, his lungs flattened, his mouth open as if to ask why all the air had been sucked out of the world.

August stepped out of the brush while reloading a mottled double-barrel shotgun. “I want you to catch your animal and get back out of here.”

He tried to say something for a long time. His shoulder felt knocked out of its socket, and pinwheels of white fire spun through his vision. He wanted to say “Bastard!” but knew that wasn’t right, and that “Son of a bitch!” was even less true, so when he got a bit of wind he said, “I’m tryin’ to help, you fool.”

August stood over him, expressionless. “You can’t even help yourself.”

“Put up that gun. I didn’t come out here to hurt you.”

“I wasn’t sure who you were, exactly.” He brushed his hair out of his mosquito-stung face.

“Come on and pull this arm. It’s just out of its socket a little.”

August propped the shotgun against a sapling and grabbed Sam’s left hand. “You want me to yank on it?”

“Just turn it right when I tell you.” He took one breath, then another.

“Now?”

He nodded and cried out when the shoulder popped back in. “Damn it to hell!”

The boy took up his gun and stood in the trail. “Now you can ride.” He pointed down the trail to the mule, who stood sideways to the track, eating bright-green leaves of marsh alder.

“What you expect to do, boy?”

August’s face was still a child’s, but his eyes were fixed like a hawk’s. “I’m going to kill Mr. Ralph Skadlock, at the very least.”

Sam sawed his left arm gingerly, looking up at the boy, trying to figure how to reason with him. “I think you’ve heard this before, yeah, but if you do that, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

“I’ve got plenty to regret already, don’t you think?” He helped Sam to his feet.

“I’m not going anywhere. You mother told me to get you back safe.”

“Nobody’s stopping me.”

“One of the Skadlocks will put the brakes on you.”

August turned his back and walked off into the brush, and Sam tried to remember what he’d felt like at fifteen, when he’d already made up his mind to leave his uncle’s farm. Nothing would have changed his mind from the one thing it had focused on. He suspected such single-mindedness was both the best and the worst thing about youth.

Sam retrieved the mule and followed the boy to where he’d been building a campfire.