The Missing

“Have you had any run-ins with them?”

“Yes.” The word came after a long pause, freighted with meaning.

Sam took a long drink. “Not as bad as my family’s, I hope.”

There was another pause. “In 1901, Aubrey Bledsoe bought a quart of whiskey off the Cloats on Saturday morning and was dead by four o’clock. The Bledsoe men, good people who used to live south of here, rode up and asked me if I could locate the still. I was a good tracker in those days, and if I could find it, I could do the busting up. I saddled a horse for Island Sixty-five, which is co

“Designs?”

“Like caveman pictures, but nasty. I don’t want to tell you about it. I had a fire ax in my saddle holster and gave the still a good chopping, then turned it over and put a hundred blows into the bottom of it. The next day I told the Bledsoes the story, and good people that they were, they were satisfied that somehow justice had been done.”

“Was that the end of it?” He imagined the sorrow of the Cloats at losing three of their own.

Soner squirmed in his rocker, and Sam guessed he was crossing his legs. “The next morning I woke up and every hog, chicken, and cow I owned had its throat cut. My wife was bawling, and my son, who was six then, just stood in the yard and stared. They left me one horse, so I saddled up and rode over to the Bledsoes. All their animals were down, even the beeves in the big field, one man dead in the yard and the women howling like a hurricane. Mrs. Bledsoe, the grandmother, asked me who I left with my missus, and like a flash I understood how stupid I was, how much I could still underestimate inborn cruelty.” Here Soner stopped, and they listened to the deep throbbing of a steamboat whistle ten miles away.

“Were they safe?” Sam prayed they had been.

“Son, I’ll not inflict more of this story on you than you need to know. But you require a certain amount of preparation for your meeting tomorrow. Let’s just say that two Cloats, Batch and Slug, were standing in my backyard wearing muddy dusters when I rode up, flies in their beards around their toothless smiles. They made my wife and boy watch as they tied me to a pecan tree, arms and legs, me sitting on the ground hugging that trunk. They owned a big stinking dog, a rottweiler with a diseased face, and they turned him loose on me.” Soner stopped here and cleared his throat. “That devil tore at my neck and ate the flesh off my back until the bones came to the surface, and right before I died they pulled him off me and rode away. I imagine they figured it was better vengeance to leave me alive than to put me out of my suffering. It was my boy who cut me free and helped me crawl into the house. My wife had lost her mind. Absolutely. This is the short version, let me tell you. The very shortest.”

But even this abbreviated telling seemed to last a full hour, and after hearing it Sam felt sure he would leave for Helena in the morning.

But Soner had more to tell. “A year later, when I could get around, she left me. She couldn’t hardly step into the yard without every nerve in her body winding up like a clock spring. The boy stayed two years more, then left to join her. He writes me every month, and he’s married now with kids of his own and lives west of Chicago.”

“You wouldn’t go with her?”

“I would’ve in a heartbeat, but she said she couldn’t have me. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. She said every time she looked at me she saw those men and that dog.”

“You didn’t go after them? Or tell the county sheriff?”

“Ha. I’ve got a lot of guns, but I’ll admit I’m afraid. Not a match for them. All these years, I figured to leave bad enough alone. I didn’t have the evil imagination to do to them what they’d have done to me.” He took another swallow from his glass. “If I’d called the sheriff, he wouldn’t have gone against them. If they’d heard I’d brought other law in, I’d have paid for it again. Call me chickenhearted, but I still enjoy watching the sun come up every morning. I still draw my pay, help the locals. The only thing that hurts is that I’m incomplete. My family’s gone, but still out there.”

Sam saw a firefly combust in the yard. Only one. “I think I would’ve done something. They’re only men.” In the dark, he thought he could feel the anger Soner must have felt.

The constable drained his glass and began to move in the rocker. “Come here, son, I want you to know something.”

“What?”

“The work of men.”

Sam stepped over to where he guessed by a shadowy motion that Soner was taking off his shirt.

When he finished, he rolled his shoulders forward and put down his head. “Run your hands over my back.”

“I don’t think-”

“Don’t be scared. You’ll learn something.”

“I can’t see a thing.”

“You don’t need to.”

Sam reached out with both hands the way he would search for something in a dark house at night. Placing them on Soner’s right shoulder, he let his palms ride carefully over to his backbone. “Aw, God almighty,” Sam gasped. He moved his hands over to the far shoulder, whispering something in French. Down toward the middle back, his fingers found a ski

Soner’s voice came dry and small. “That should be a good lesson to you. But I’ve lived long enough to know it won’t be. Not good enough to keep you away from them. Nobody understands what a snake is until he’s been bitten.” Soner stood up and pulled open the screen door. “I’ll see you right after dawn.”

“Yes, sir.”

THAT NIGHT Sam rubbed his fingertips against the sheets again and again, as if to cleanse off memory itself. He woke at false dawn and lay on his back, watching the room develop around him in its gray plai

At breakfast, he noticed that Soner turned his whole body when reaching for something at his side. “Thanks for all your hospitality.”

“I don’t get many civil visitors. I hope to see you again sometime.” He stopped buttering his bread and looked up. “I hope anyone sees you again.”

He was still thinking about riding on and forgetting. “How many of them are back in there?”

Soner looked off to his left and squinted. “At one time there were twenty Cloats, plus their Indian women. They liked Indian women. There were children from time to time, but most didn’t last.”

“Didn’t last?”

“Sometimes the women would run off with them. Or, when they got to be nine or ten, sometimes the kids would take off by themselves. Girl child or no, the Cloats would rut on them all.”

Sam stopped eating. “What’s wrong with those people?”

Soner’s eyes were clear and bright. “Why, nothing. They’re exactly like you and I. They’ve just fallen a few more rungs down the moral ladder than most. It’s because they live in their chosen isolation so that nothing good can touch them. And they insist on seeing themselves as normal, abetting each other’s notions. The worst thing that ever happened to them is each other.”

“The men who did that to you, are they back in there?”

“Batch and Slug? They’re somewhere else. They acquired some hashish, I hear, and smoked it and smoked it until they decided to play tandem double Russian roulette with their pistols. Instead of one bullet, they installed five in each revolver and both crossed over on the first try.”