The Missing

He walked to the rail and saw that Mr. Brandywine had brought the Ambassador out into a skein of dead water and was letting the boat loaf with its bow upstream, more or less staying in the same pocket of river. The point of the trip, he realized, was not to go somewhere, but only to seem to go somewhere. It was a sad passenger who knew what was happening outside the vessel on a night cruise. The whole point was to stay in the breezy bubble of comfort and music and forget the dark and airless shore.

The cruise brought three fistfights and a bad screaming match between a woman and her boyfriend. One man refused to quit fighting, and Sam had to drag him down to the little brig in the engine room and lock him in. He banged the man’s head with the door when he slammed it shut because he was angry at his own exhaustion. There were still unpulled stickers in his legs, and the insides of his thighs ached from the saddle.

Passing through the main-deck lounge, he watched the bracing of the dance floor jounce over his head, as if an army were doing jumping jacks, and the captain, who was rushing through to the engine room, stopped and listened to the rumble. “Lucky, run up and tell the band to slow their tempo ten beats per minute on the fast numbers if they don’t want the damn boat to fold in half.”

At last came the race of unloading and policing the boat, and he worked asleep on his feet, moving people along, killing cigarettes, counting deck chairs to see how many had been thrown overboard from the dark upper deck. It wasn’t until he’d climbed into his bunk that he thought of the Wellers, and he let out a groan.

“I hear you,” Charlie Duggs said. “Tired as I am, I got the headache so bad I can’t go to sleep.”

“What’s up for tomorrow?”

“We’re pullin’ out in a bit, bud.”

“Where bound?”

“ Natchez. I expect old Brandywine will run on a full bell all night and have us there by eight o’clock.”

He put an arm over his eyes. “God, not a morning cruise.”

“It’s Sunday. First run is two-thirty. Captain Stewart lets anyone who wants to walk to church get sanctified. You a churchgoing man?”

“Catholic.”

“Well, then, I’ll walk up the hill with you.”

THE NEXT MORNING he washed up, brushed out his clothes, and they set off for ten o’clock Mass, walking in a group with a fireman, Captain Stewart, two white porters, Nellie Benton and her nephews, the engineers. At the top of the hill one group split off for the Methodist church while Sam and Charlie walked straight for a spire in the distance. He stopped on a street corner and looked back.

“What’s up?” Duggs asked.

“The Wellers ever go to church?”

“I don’t remember. Don’t start looking down your nose at folks for not goin’ to church. Both of them pulled double shifts yesterday and likely won’t knock off till midnight tonight.”

“That right? And all I did all yesterday was sit in a bubble bath ru

Duggs made a face. “Maybe they ain’t as tough as you French boys. Come on, we’ll be late.”

“For a war veteran, you got a soft heart,” Sam said.

Duggs stepped into the street. “Sure.”

“Did you shoot anyone?”

“None of your business,” Duggs said. “Are you really a Catholic?”

“So, you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Just answer my question.”

They both turned to go up the church steps. “Well, ‘Introibo ad altare Dei.’”

Duggs pulled open the arched oak door on incensed air, stood aside, and bowed. “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meum.”

They sat in the rear of the echoing church, and after the priest sang the Gloria, Sam heard the door open and turned to see Mr. Brandywine and two busboys come in, one on each side, watchful, as though they’d been propping him up all the way there. Sam prayed for the Wellers and their little girl, and for the old pilot’s judgment. He then questioned his own reasons for going out on the great river grasping at straws. What propelled him, he wanted to believe, was the awful diminished feeling he suffered whenever he thought of his dead child or of his taken family. If he could make another family whole, maybe that would help. Help whom, though? Then he remembered that if he found the girl, he’d get his job back and once more cruise along the gleaming floors of the finest department store in New Orleans. Was that the main reason he was doing this? Was he just along to retrieve his floorwalker’s salary? On the walk down the hill to the boat, he shared these thoughts with Charlie, whose only response was, “Lucky, self-interest is better than no interest.”

Chapter Eleven

VESSY CLEARED the dishes after the noon meal and then brought the bedsheets and covers upstairs in her wiry arms. She was a mountain girl and used to steep walking, so at the top of the stairs she wasn’t winded at all. Mrs. White, in her bedroom pulling on fine gloves and checking items in her purse, didn’t look up when the cook came through the door, just said, “Mrs. Hall won’t be able to tend Madeline today. You’ll watch her for us.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Vessy had wanted to go to her rented one-room house to boil her own laundry in the yard. Usually she was off between one-thirty and four, when she came in to start supper.

“Did you hear Madeline singing with the music teacher this morning?”

“I was out back stackin’ stovewood.”

Mrs. White’s gloved hands worked like mourning doves as she picked at a spray of pills on her dressing table and placed them one by one into a little nickel-plated box she kept in her purse. “Well, this morning Mr. Stover said she sings just like a little bird and has a natural sense of timing.”

Vessy pursed her lips and slid them to one side of her face. “That so? Like she already been taught.”

Mrs. White gave her an appraising look. “Well, I’m going into town to shop at Welford’s.”

“Yep.”

“Listen for her when she gets up from her nap. Don’t let her over-sleep because she’ll be hard to put down at eight.”

Vessy placed the sheets in the bedroom armoire and listened to Mrs. White’s slow tread on the stairs. When the car started up in the drive and backed toward the street, she bent to pick up a cream-colored pair of gloves discarded in the wastebasket and pulled them on. They were a short style that betrayed her freckled skin. Vessy was twenty-seven years old, had taken care of herself, and still had her teeth, except for a molar knocked out when her father punched her for leaving a saddled horse in the rain. She’d wanted to get married more than anything, but being a bit plain and more than a bit plain-spoken, it took her a long time to get someone to court her. She might have stayed in the eastern Kentucky mountains forever, but one Sunday her mother served an old, undercooked pork roast and killed the whole family with food poisoning, except for her, and she lay on the back porch and puked for two days before a neighbor found and rescued her. The man courting her stopped the relationship, believing she was a bad-luck woman, and that had hardened her outlook on life. Vessy admired her hands for a moment, then pulled off the gloves, dropping them back into the can. She might ask for them later but couldn’t bear Mrs. White thinking that she’d been stealing out of the trash. Then again, what need did she have of dress gloves? To handle stovewood? She spat into the can and went down to wash the dishes.

At two she walked into the child’s room and frowned at the ruffled bed, the expensive small furniture, the assembly of dolls lined up against the wall. Pulling a chair next to the bed, she studied the girl, narrowing her eyes at the flawless pink fingernails that showed no splits or coarse cuticles, no signs of roughness. She turned the sleeping child’s palm into a beam of sunlight and examined the skin. She woke up and pulled her hand back to rub her eyes.