The Missing

“And thank you for not latherin’ the boys up,” she said, bending to unhook the chains.

“You can let me do that.”

“No, get on home, son. As dark as it is, I can tell you’re sunburned and coated with paint chips.”

“How’s this wagon go

“I’ll take it out tomorrow afternoon.” She was a big woman and no stranger to horses. In a moment she was leading the animals to a pair of roofed stalls against the back fence. “I guess we’ll get rid of these fellas after this season. We’re the last in the neighborhood to keep any.”

“Do you work on the boat?”

She gave him a quick look. “Yes. Those engineers are my nephews, and the bunch of us have been on the river all our lives. My late husband was a pilot and two of my sons are pilots on the upper Ohio. I’m Nellie Benton.” She reached out like a man and he looked at her hand for just a heartbeat before taking it. She shook like she meant to hurt his fingers. And she did.

THE STREETS on his way home were fogbound, and the live oaks sucked the light out of the streetlamps. He walked through the gloom nearly asleep and found himself standing on a corner half a block past his door before he understood where he was.

In a few minutes he was in the bathtub, the water cold because the gas had been turned off.

Linda padded in to use the commode, and glanced at his eyes. “You look like an Indian, honeybunch.”

He covered his face with a hand. “Can I have your straw hat?”

“Sure. I’ll take the sash off so it’ll look like a man’s.” She stood and looked at him again. “You see the Wellers any?”

“Yeah. They were scrubbing down the dance floor. I believe they’re tireder than I am.”

She put a hand in his hair. “You don’t have to do this.”

“It’s sixty bucks a month, plus you don’t have to feed me.”

“You know what I mean.”

He pulled his palm away from his face. “I don’t know. I just can’t understand it.”

She reached into the tub and rubbed his neck as though claiming him. “I believe I can.”

BY THE SECOND DAY the bilge was pumped dry, and he and Charlie were sent belowdecks with carbide lamps to check the hull. There wasn’t much down there other than a potable water tank, some steering and capstan works, and a few steam lines. After his eyes adjusted, he crawled along under the bracing, holding his lamp so Charlie could examine warped areas and test for punky boards with an ice pick. They had been out of daylight for an hour when Sam shone the lamp ahead and then back toward the dim shaft of light falling down the hatch they’d entered.

“You looking for frogs?”

“Everything’s wood,” Sam said. “No watertight compartments.”

“That’s a fact.” Charlie took a string of oakum from his shoulder, then set it into a seeping joint with the pick.

“How’d this thing stay afloat all these years?”

“Two eyeballs in the wheelhouse. Shine that light here.”

He was in awe of all the soggy wood. “One bump on a rock and this tub’ll go down like a woodstove.”

Charlie sniffed. “Kind of makes ’em careful where they steer it, don’t it? One thing about a steamboat, it’s all wood, and not the best wood or heaviest at that. It’s just kind of a glorified chicken coop. If you smack a bridge pier with a wood steamboat, folks downstream will have all the toothpicks they want.”

THE NEXT DAY, fifty people showed up to paint. The stacks were washed down with stove black; the outside of cabin doors, the rails, the first-deck planking, and the boat’s name-in four-foot letters on the engine-room bulkhead-were dressed with burgundy gloss enamel. The paddlewheel was painted bright red and everything else, from the circus molding branching out from the deck posts to the balusters and fire buckets, a sun-tossing white. Inside, when everything was scrubbed and enameled white, the spaces loomed larger, the huge dance floor now cavernous, the whole interior glowing like a snow cave. After he used turpentine to get the sticky oil paint from his hands and forearms, Sam jumped on shore and walked way back from the boat to look her over: in the early evening light she was a three-hundred-foot wedding cake. The ru

Charlie followed over to where he stood by a coal pile. “Sam, my man. What you think?”

He raised a hand, then let it fall. “I can’t understand it. A few days ago it was a stinking washtub. Now I want to buy a ticket for the moonlight cruise.”

Chapter Six

ACY WHITE owned the only bank in the riverside town of Graysoner, Kentucky. He was a thin, sallow man, a Presbyterian-for-show, the grandson of a plantation owner who had owned many slaves in Mississippi. He held risky mortgages on dozens of little farms and owned personal loans made to hundreds of the county’s lesser inhabitants, in this respect continuing his grand-father’s slaver persona. Though he loaned money to most businesses in the area, nobody knew him well. He was not a gregarious and sweating banker, the usual tobacco-soaked, seersucker-wearing steak eater one finds in small Southern towns. He was neither a skinflint nor an easy touch, though now and then a wiry mea

Willa Stanton White, forty-year-old daughter of a wealthy lumber family from Gipson County, spent much of her time reading and rereading a leatherbound and gilt collection of Sir Walter Scott novels her husband had bought her and practicing Franz von Suppé transcriptions on the piano. Willa was an only child who had been spoiled beyond all measure and who’d allowed herself to be chosen by a man bent on honoring that tradition. For a small-town woman she owned brave sexual appetites and was an encouraging partner for Acy, though at times he seemed too tired to meet her demands. She had few close friends in town, though she knew many citizens at a hand-waving distance. Favoring expensive clothes designed to seem modest, she was not a stupid woman, but isolated and logic-deprived, raised on illusions and no work whatsoever.

At noon Acy left the bank in his new Oldsmobile, jittering over the redbrick street up the hill to his house, a three-story Greek revival with a windowed cupola on top from which one could just barely see the river two miles away. He went in and washed his hands in the downstairs bathroom under the stairs and sat in the dining room to wait for his lunch. Vessy, a thin serving girl from out of the eastern Kentucky mountains, hipped open the swinging kitchen door and in one motion set down a plate of beef stew and noodles and a glass of iced tea.

“Are they home?” He raised his chin to her.

She brushed her straight, near-colorless hair out of her gray eyes. “They’ll get down directly.”

“I thought they might have gone out in the other car.”

“Naw. The missus stickin’ close to the house.” Vessy pulled the silver condiment rack closer to Acy and left the room.

He’d finished half his meal when his wife and the little girl came in. Willa had her hand on the child’s back, guiding her to a chair next to Acy.