The Missing

Chapter Thirty-seven

A LOCAL FREIGHT clattered into Greenville, Mississippi, and the conductor came in with the bills of lading. Morris Hightower began to invoice everything on the train while sacks of feed, crated Victrolas, bedsteads, harness and kegs were unloaded onto the freight dock. A local fellow, toothless and ski

“I’m low on change myself,” the agent said, ru

The ski

The agent moved one bill of lading over to a tall stack. “Lot of people buyin’ tickets this morning. I need what change I got.”

The man at the window cocked his head. “Damn your hide. Hightower, you ain’t never lifted a finger in your whole damn life to hep somebody out.”

“Them that deserves help sometimes gets it.”

He began waving the twenty in the window as though it were on fire. “Come over here you rock-hearted old bastard and give me my change.”

Hightower turned only halfway around. The bulb hanging from the ceiling imparted a white-hot luminescence to his bald head. After a moment of concentrating on the wall above his typewriter, he said, “If I have to come to that window, I’ll hit you so hard you’ll piss nickels. Then you’ll have all the change you want.” When he heard footsteps trailing off toward the door, he turned back to his work. After a while he thought about the girl that had been found. His brother in New Orleans had mentioned that he’d seen her playing on Sam’s porch, singing like a bird.

SAM LEFT the pawnshop wearing a new soft brown cap, a set of high leather boots, and a big Colt automatic pistol in a shoulder holster under his coat. He left Memphis at sundown aboard the Kate Adams, bound downriver for Helena. In the tiny stateroom he washed up, then went out to join five old men sitting near the open windows in the forward part of the cabin. They were discussing which stocks to buy on the New York exchange. One of them was a silver-haired farmer who declared he’d as soon bury his money in the privy as trust it to a New York broker. This engendered a half hour of carping that Sam patiently waited out. When the conversation changed to river traffic, Sam got in and told them what he did, which they all considered exotic and some sign of the new age to come.

“I hear some of them young gals shimmy to that jazz music till their drawers fall off,” the farmer said.

“I wouldn’t know. I’m too busy playing.”

They laughed at that, and one of them asked if he were a Levert from south Louisiana and he said no, that he lived in New Orleans, and then everybody told what they thought of New Orleans, and within an hour he had them explaining to him where to rent an automobile in Helena. He asked how the road was down to Ratio, but none of them could remember if there was any kind of a road.

THE KATE ADAMS stopped all night at plantations and dirt landings, scratching for pe

He got directions to Ratio, and two miles south of town the road dwindled into bumper-high grass ru

For two hours the little car shook like a dog shedding water, and then he rolled up to the edge of a flat, fallow field that had been plowed the year before but left in unplanted rows. He got the wheels to match two furrows and proceeded until he was fu

A trail plunged east into the willow brake, but it wasn’t mentioned in the uninspiring directions he’d been given in Helena, so he again turned south on the levee, passing a cotton gin with a shake roof and a rust-perforated smokestack coming up through the middle of it. Across a field he saw a respectable-looking redbrick house, a painted wooden porch across its front. He cut the Ford’s wheels and stood on the brakes, the tires locking and plowing sod down the steep slope. He drove along a cow path to a paintless barn and then through a gate into a fenced area of sawdust and dried manure, spooking three mules and five horses that ran from the machine and bunched against the mossy pickets. Leaving the Ford to steam among the animals, he climbed over the corral fence and advanced on the house.

The front door opened as he stepped up. Framed in the doorway was a barefoot man wearing a white shirt and vest, pearl-colored pants, and black cloth suspenders. Pi

His civility was disarming. Sam regarded him carefully, as though there was something he didn’t understand but should. “Are you Constable Soner?”