Authors: Tim Gautreaux
FOUR DAYS AFTER he’d entered the hospital, he woke with a spinning head and saw his wife, Linda, sitting in a white enamel chair stitching a large canvas of needlepoint. He watched her a moment before he spoke to make sure she was real and not one of the dreams that had been haunting him. He blinked. It was stolid Linda, red hair, milk white complexion, her fingers working needlepoint chair bottoms she sold to a furniture store uptown.
When he spoke her name, she lifted her head and said, “Do you remember what happened?”
It was like her to check to see if something, in this case his memory, might be broken. He wondered if she’d throw him away if he couldn’t think anymore. But after a moment, he decided he could, and told her, “I’m all right. I remember.”
She leaned in close and studied his eyes, kissing his forehead as she would a feverish child. “I’ll call for the doc to look at you in a minute.” She helped him sit up, and his head began to clear. He then told her about that day in the store, carefully working in all the details, placing them for her like delicate items on a shelf.
“Well,” she said, brushing his hair back. “That’s pretty much the way Mr. Krine told it to me when he came by to fire you.”
He looked down at his arms, as though he still expected to be wearing his floorwalker’s suit. “What for?”
Her eyebrows arched, and she looked at him as if he’d just asked what the sun was. “Why, for losing that little girl.”
He thought about this. For Mr. Krine there was no substitute for performance. If something went wrong, it was the employee’s fault. Always. “How did they get away with her?”
“They left you out cold in the dressing room, came downstairs with the child dressed as a sleeping boy and walked right through the doors before the staff got the order from Mr. Krine himself to lock them.” She leaned around and inspected the back of his head. “Nobody found you for half an hour. When they saw all the stuff in the dressing room, they figured out what happened. The parents were really upset, Lucky. They said they should’ve got more help from the store. They’ve been by here every day with a policeman wanting to ask you questions. Mr. Krine’s afraid they’ll try to sue.”
“What else could I have done?” But even as he said this, he knew the answer. He’d ignored Mr. Krine’s rule: If a child was missing in-store for more than fifteen minutes, the floorwalker on duty was responsible for making sure all the doors were locked.
His wife walked back to her chair. “Whatever needed to be done, you didn’t do it.”
“I tried my best.” He turned his face to the wall, wondering if this was true.
“That’s what the mezzanine attendant and the candy girl said.” She glanced up at him, then returned to her needlework. “You sure have a lot of lady friends.”
“Linda, three-quarters of the staff’s ladies.”
She drew her work close. “The city cops said you should’ve called them first off.”
He groaned and slid down in the sheets. “City cops wouldn’t come for a kid lost in a store.”
“I realize that. But because things turned out bad, you know, after the fact, they’re all down on you.”
“They want Krine to hire one of their patrolmen on his off-hours.”
She squinted and drew a stitch. “They do carry guns.”
“I’ve got a little gun in the store safe,” he said weakly, knowing he would never have used it. After his experience in the war, he wanted nothing further to do with guns.
Linda shrugged.
He watched her push her needle up and through the pattern, one he recognized from other chair seats, of an eighteenth-century dandy bowing before his reluctant lady. Her work was beautiful and earned decent money, and he was glad of it.
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER he went to the store, and Mr. Krine gave him a week’s pay along with a lecture. Sam was hoping for a little mercy, but it was a faint hope at best; he’d seen several employees walk out of Krine’s flashy doors holding their final pay envelopes because of lesser mistakes.
He stood in front of the mahogany desk in the owner’s office. “How can I come back? I like the job.”
Mr. Krine was looking up a phone number, already finished with him. “If you find that little girl you can have your job back.”
Sam glanced at the family photograph on Mr. Krine’s desk showing his well-dressed offspring, all of them working in the store. “You have any idea how I might do that?”
Mr. Krine kept his eyes on the phone as he drew it toward him. “You could use all the free time you have.”
* * *
SIX BLOCKS FROM THE STORE was the precinct station on Chartres, and he dawdled through the steamy morning, breathing a nimbus of horse droppings and cigarette butts sopping in the gutters and sewer gas crawling out of the storm drains. He kept back from the curb as the Model T’s and fruit wagons splashed down toward the market.
Coming into the station house’s lobby, a large open space with wedding-cake plaster on its ceiling, he saw Sergeant Muscarella writing in a ledger, the white dome of his bald head bobbing away under a shivering lightbulb. Last year he was on foot patrol in Sam’s neighborhood, but then he had donated a month’s pay to the new mayor’s campaign fund.
“Mr. M.”
Muscarella raised his gray face from the ledger. “Eh, Lucky, you got out the hospital.” The sergeant’s eyes, watching him with detachment, were olives left too long in the jar.
“Yeah. I still got the headache real bad.” He touched his forehead. “You heard anything about that little girl?”
The sergeant laid his pen in the crack of the ledger. “You know, somebody steals a coat, he’ll sell it or wear it. We can kind of guess where to look. But when somebody steals a kid, what do you do?”
“You sent people to the stations?”
“Yeah, sure. But nowadays they coulda used a car.” He shrugged. “They coulda left on a ship. They could even still be in town, you know.”
“If you hear anything, I’m in the book.”
Muscarella’s face twitched unpleasantly. “Lucky, why you worried about this? You not a cop.”
He looked at the quarter-sawn oak wall panels behind the sergeant’s bench, carved sections that rose up around the policeman like a little throne. He decided not to tell him about the pale cameo floating nightly behind his eyelids, the injured girl he left behind in France, his dead son, or his stolen family. He looked down at his shoes, understanding that the policeman didn’t need the complicated truth. He needed a reason. “Sal, I got fired because of this mess. Krine said he might hire me back if I found the kid.”
The sergeant shrugged. “Lucky, floorwalker’s not much of a job for somebody like you.”
“I like it. The pay’s not bad and I can move up some, maybe manage a department.”
“Well, if you that hard up, I can get you on as a bank guard.”
He looked up and shook his head.
The sergeant picked up his pen. “I guess you’re not the shootin’ kind.”
“Even my wife says I’m responsible for the little girl.”
Muscarella ranged his dark eyes over him. “What you say?”
He put his hands in his pockets. “I say I wish it’d been my day off.”
The sound of an argument rolled up the steps outside and the double doors burst open with two small cops fighting a two-hundred-pound whore, her red face rising angry as a boil out of a white feather boa.
* * *
HE SPENT THE DAY looking for work at the other big stores downtown. At suppertime he stepped off the streetcar and walked under the live oaks and over the root-buckled sidewalks to his shotgun on Camp Street. Looking forward to playing into the evening on his piano, he stopped half a block away and pushed back his straw boater when he saw a man and a woman sitting on the porch with his wife. He put his head down and walked up.
His wife’s voice carried a forced lightness. “Lucky, these are the Wellers, Ted and Elsie.”
“I know. How are you?” He noticed the mother’s lips were determined today, pressed tight. Ted, a thick, balding fellow with a short mustache, held out his hand for Sam’s and clasped it with surprisingly long fingers. After Sam sat down in a straight-back chair, the couple told him they’d been to every precinct house in town and explained they were musicians working on a Stewart Line excursion steamer come down from Cincinnati.
Sam nodded. “One of the big dance boats.”
“The Excelsior,” Ted said. “Elsie and me were in town shopping, you know, getting some fresh duds for a new act. That’s what we were doing when our girl got taken.” He looked away, his eyes reddening.
Elsie leaned into the conversation. “The boat’s getting laid up for a couple months for new boilers and hull work. The company’s going to put us on another boat they just bought from the St. Paul Line. It’s tied up south of town, but until it leaves we’re spending every spare minute looking for her.”
Sam closed his eyes for a second and saw the little girl. “Her name’s Lily, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Elsie put a hand to her mouth.
He looked uncomfortably from one to the other, not knowing what to say or ask in a situation like this. Finally, he said, “She is your blood child, right? There’s no ex-spouses involved, is there?”
Ted frowned. “She’s our natural child. And we’ve thought about everybody we know and can’t come up with a soul who’d want to make off with her.”
Sam leaned back, listening to the chair creak underneath him. “Well, I’m not surprised.”
“Why do you say that?” Elsie asked, her hand still next to her mouth.
“The woman I saw didn’t look like anybody who’d wanted a pretty little girl. She was old and had seen a lot of hard times. I just caught a glimpse, but her hair was oily-looking and I think, let’s see now”—he closed his eyes again—“she was missing a front tooth.”
“Oh,” Elsie said, “she sounds awful.”
“Did you see the one who hit you?” her husband asked.
“No, but the bastard—excuse me—he sure knew where to pop me. If you think about it, considering the chloroform and all, it’s like somebody hired those people to steal her. They were just too good at it. They’d planned it all out.”
For a long moment everyone on the narrow wood porch seemed to be thinking about what he’d said. In the next block, the clipped yells of a neighborhood baseball game swelled up and died off. Sam was imagining the one bottle of beer at the bottom of the cooler, next to the block of ice.
Ted moved uneasily in his chair. “It doesn’t make sense for someone to hire a thief.”
“I don’t know. Tell me something about her.”
The Wellers exchanged looks.
“Well,” the husband began, “about two months ago we brought her into the act. She’s only three and a half, but she’s smarter than the two of us multiplied together. The child can remember at least a couple verses of a dozen different songs. When she sings, you can see the music in the way she moves.”
Elsie straightened her back. “She’s got this voice that’s very accurate for a child. Good volume, too.”
“I taught her how to dance a little while she sings,” Ted bragged. “We’re part of the big orchestra that the Stewart Line hires, but we only use Lily in two ensemble pieces per set, and the audiences go crazy for her.” He looked up and narrowed his eyes. “A lot of people have watched her perform since we left Cincinnati four weeks ago.”
“Three and a half and she can do all that?” Sam looked at his wife. “I’d steal her myself.”
The parents both looked glumly at the street.
During the next half hour he told the Wellers how sorry he was several times, but they didn’t make a move to get up. Finally, the street began to darken and he pulled out his watch. “You know, I’ve got to go in now.”
Ted also pulled a pocket watch from his vest but wound it without checking the time. “You’re the only one who saw the ones that took her. The cops at the Third District said you’re real smart. You can figure all the angles here.”
Sam felt sorry for them, but had no idea of how to help. His brief stay in France had instilled in him the understanding that the world presents unsolvable tragedies at every turn. “I don’t know what to do for you.”
Lightning bugs began to come out of the streetside privet, sparking on and off like flickering hopes.
At last, Elsie stood up. “We’re sorry you got fired.”
“Me too.”
“What will you do?”
He smiled up at her in spite of himself. “I guess I’ll think about some of those angles.”
* * *
LATER, after supper, Linda opened the beer and poured it into two glasses. Sam walked through the little parlor and picked up a small framed photograph of an infant dressed in baptismal clothes. They went back out onto the porch and sat in the night’s breath coming up from the river. He held the photograph in one hand and rubbed a thumb back and forth across the glass.
Linda touched his arm. “Are you thinking of how to help them?”
“I’m thinking, all right.” There were people missing in his life like big holes cut out of the night sky, and Sam felt powerless to do anything about it. He was only one person in a planet full of incomplete seekers, and now the Wellers had joined him.
IT HAD BEEN TWO WEEKS since they’d seen the Wellers. Right after a thunderstorm had tortured the neighborhood with sizzling bolts, Sam and his wife were looking through the window screen at the water standing in their small bricked yard. He felt like a piece of wreckage left behind by the wind. Between them on the table was a small loaf of French bread showing a flame of desiccated ham. No lettuce or tomato, no mayonnaise. They were out of everything and the rent was due. They owned only an old Dodge automobile and their clothes. Linda had spent her needlepoint money on the telephone bill, electricity, gasoline. Sam imagined she had a jar of quarters somewhere but never asked about it, for fear it didn’t exist. The dry sandwich lay between them like a signal.
“Well, I guess I better go see Muscarella and sign up with the bank militia.”
She looked at him. “My brother can get you on at the railroad.”
“Switchman?”
“Yes.”
“Your brother with three fingers missing? Or your brother with a thumb cut off?”
She sliced the sandwich in half and pushed the larger portion toward him. “You’re more careful.”
“Linda, there’s not a man in your family that can play the piano.”
She bit at her part of the sandwich, twisting on it. “Well, go on downtown, then. And please find something.”
* * *
THAT DAY and the following, he walked the twenty blocks downtown to look for work in the stores. He went on foot to loosen up his legs, he told himself, but in fact he wanted to save the seven cents’ street-car fare. On the second day, halfway to Canal Street, he didn’t know why, some little spark of curiosity or sense of purpose overtook him at Lee Circle and he changed direction toward the river, wondering what he was doing as he walked into the smell of burning coal and roasting coffee. From the foot of Canal he could see a big Stewart Line excursion boat riding high in a dry dock across the river, its paddle wheel dismantled, its rusty stacks laid out on the deck. He caught the Algiers ferry, which cost him seven cents, and from the landing walked down a dirt lane to the shipyard. A watchman told him that most of the boat’s crew and performers had been put up in the Gardenia Hotel. He counted out five Indian-head pennies and two Lincolns, took the next boat across, and walked through the French Quarter to the hotel, a place he knew was frequented by vaudevillians and traveling salesmen. He arrived tired and thirsty, the bottoms of his feet burning in his shiny floorwalker’s shoes, and he paused on the sidewalk across from the Gardenia, examining the pressed-tin roof frieze that pretended to be stone, the copper-sheeted bay windows that hung over the street like ingots, showing a thinly deceptive elegance.
The desk clerk rang the Wellers’ room, and the wife said her husband was out but she would come right down, so Sam waited in the illusory lobby with its puddled curtains and genteel walnut settees and side tables. He knew what the rooms were like, small and hot and plain as toast. He heard Elsie on the stairs before he saw her, and her steps were slow. She joined him on a green plush sofa, sitting down quickly, perhaps pretending not to notice a polite scattering of dust rising from the cushions.
“Do you have any news?” she asked. She was composed and did not smile at him.
He shook his head, once. “I’ve been going around town trying to find a job that won’t maim me or drive me crazy or get me arrested.” He watched her face, but she seemed unconcerned about what he’d said. He knew what she wanted to hear. “While I was out and about, I did what I could. Checked with the porters at the stations. Visited some hotels and the one criminal I know.”
She still did not smile. Out in the street the vegetable man’s wagon passed by, his falsetto rising about the glories of tomatoes and plums, “Ahh gotta da bannannnn…,” but her gaze didn’t stray toward the window. “We’ve paid a private policeman to investigate Lily’s disappearance, but he’s turned up nothing. I don’t think he really cares about her, just our money.” She didn’t say this in a bitter voice, and he was glad of it. His uncle had taught him that bitterness solved nothing. “I don’t suppose you have children,” she continued. “I didn’t see any sign of them at your house.”
He looked over at the bald desk clerk, who was watching them. “I had a son. But we lost him to a fever.”
“How old?”
“Nearly two. I know a little of what you’re feeling.”
“A little,” she said. “At least you know where your son is.”
He reddened at her presumption, bordering on meanness, and had opened his mouth to say something, he wasn’t sure what, when a big hand came down on his shoulder. He looked up and saw a large, white-haired gentleman dressed in a bluewater uniform, a soft cap pulled down at an angle with the legend “Captain” in gold braid above the patent-leather bill.
“Pardon me,” he said, “but I’ve got to put a quick question to this lady.” He was about sixty-five years old, the type of blustery fellow used to taking over anyone’s conversation. “Elsie, I need you and Ted to come down to the Industrial Canal out by the cracker works. We’ve just closed on the Ambassador and we’ve got to get her in shape fast.”
“Is there a piano on board?” She seemed confused.
The big man cocked his head. “Now, Elsie?”
“Oh, I see. You want us to clean and paint,” she said, frowning.
“The Ambassador’s a big old boat and she’s been laid up a while down here in all this dampness. You know the routine. So you’ll come out tomorrow? Bring your work duds?”
Elsie nodded vaguely, and the captain straightened up and put his hands behind his back. “I’ve got to get on and find some men who won’t milk me dry for salary.”
Suddenly, her face seemed busy with several ideas at once. “This man here’s looking for work.”
The captain leaned back and examined Sam as though he were a deck chair he might or might not buy. The leather in his shoes creaked in the quiet lobby. “You’re a pretty nice-looking fellow. Ever worked a dance boat before, son?”
“No, but I’ve gone dancing on a few.”
She stood and put a hand on his shoulder. “Last night Ted said that if you worked on the boat, you’d be able to go ashore and help us look. Maybe you could watch the crowds while we worked.”
“Watch the crowds for what?”
“The woman you saw. We figured that somebody who caught Lily’s act paid that woman to take her.”
Sam stood up, looked through the glass-paneled entry door, and took a step toward it. “That old lady’s not going to show up on your boat.”
“She’s on the bank somewhere along our route.”
He stopped, then, admitting to himself that this was probably true.
“You a musician?” the captain asked.
“I’m a pretty bad pianist.”
“And were you in the war?”
“The army.”
The captain’s white eyebrows collapsed together, and he lowered his voice. “Can you break up a fight and keep your hand out of a till?”
Elsie began to shake him. “Sam, this new boat will work the same landings we did on the way down. You might could spot that old woman in one of the towns.”
He watched the desperation rising in her face, then turned to the captain. “What kind of work do you have?”
“I need a third mate. One of the main duties is to walk around the dance floor and show some authority. You have any experience walking around and looking like you know what you’re doing?”
Elsie sat down on the settee, smoothed her dress, then ran a forefinger along one eyebrow. “He’s the floorwalker I told you about.”
The captain’s expression darkened. “You’re the one who couldn’t stop those people.”
Sam looked back through the door where three smiling couples were strolling along the street. “That’s me, all right.” Suddenly he seemed to have a new identity: the man to blame.
The captain glanced down at Elsie. “Well, I’ll hire you anyway. Long hours, free room and board.”
“I’m Sam Simoneaux. My friends call me Lucky.”
The other man took his hand soberly. “My name’s Adam Stewart, and you can call me Captain.”
* * *
HIS WIFE was not happy about this job that would keep him away from home, and seemed suspicious of his motives. It took him until late that night to explain to her why he felt obliged to go on the river, but as he fell asleep he realized that he wasn’t sure of his motives himself, though the idea of wearing a snappy uniform and being around musicians had its appeal. He could explore each town on the boat’s route, asking questions about the stolen girl, but beyond that he wasn’t sure what he might accomplish for the Wellers.
The next morning he kissed Linda goodbye and caught a streetcar down to the Canal line and made the first of several transfers, walking the last leg down the east side of the new Industrial Canal. He could see the boat from a distance as it was nearly three hundred feet long, and he could tell by the kinks in the deck railings that it had seen too much river. He judged it to be at least forty years old, a sternwheeler four decks high that must have started life as a packet, hauling passengers and cotton, and then was made over into an excursion boat after the trade played out. The wooden hull was sprung, planks out of line and seams gorged with oakum. The main stage ramp was hung up over the bow in a tangle of rusted pillow blocks limed with bird droppings. A long two-by-twelve led from the wharf to the first deck. Beyond the boat the wide canal shifted, oily and slow, the new sun caught in it like a yolk. He bounced down the plank onto a deck made of broad cupped planks shedding enamel like red snow. He glanced up a broad central staircase and walked beyond it and then aft along the outside rail, past the boiler room, stepping through a door and walking among the main engines and pumps, expecting to find someone going over the machinery. He stopped in the dark and smelled cold oil, a ferrous mist of rust, and from below deck the sour ghost of a dark, side-rolling bilge. The old noncondensing steam engines looked like dead museum pieces that would never move again, asbestos-stuffed mammoths hulking in the gloom.
He walked forward and pulled himself up the main staircase. The vast second deck opened before him all the way to the stern windows, a maplewood dance floor hundreds of feet long that popped like distant musketry as he walked across it. A bandstand stood amidships on his left, and a long raft of small tables ganged next to cloudy windows slid shut against rain and birds, everything dusted blue with mildew. The ceiling was cross-bracketed every eight feet with gingerbread arches layered with gunpowder mold bred by the water-bound air.
The third deck was a two-tier affair, an outer open promenade called a hurricane deck and, in the center, a raised deck some rivermen called the skylight roof, railed and balustered, topped with a thin plank ceiling, the front half open to the breeze and the rear half a café, walled and windowed, sheltering a jumble of cheap wooden tables and deck chairs stacked in a great logjam. He walked through the café and looked into the kitchen at the big rusted coal ranges and many-doored oak iceboxes that hung open with the bitter smell of rotting rubber gaskets. He shook his head, thinking that every square inch of the busy woodwork, stanchions, hogchains, window frames, braces, brackets, filigree, molding, steam pipes, valve bonnets, smokestacks, and gingerbread would have to be scrubbed and painted.
The fourth level housed most of the crew. Sam remembered it was called the Texas deck and this one held a double row of plain cabins whose doors opened to the outside. On top of the Texas was the pilothouse, trimmed above its wide windows with sooty knickknack millwork and a copper-shelled dome. Sam found an unlocked cabin door and looked inside: two stacked bunks, a small lavatory, a locker with thread spools for pulls, the mattresses no better than what he had seen in a jailhouse. He looked back over the rail and realized for the first time that these old boats were made mostly of thin wood, to keep the weight down—regular wood that wanted to rot and warp and crack and leak and twist, and woe to everybody on board if a fire ever got started. The Ambassador had seen its share of summer squalls and upriver ice jams, had banged lock walls, scraped boulders, wormed over sandbars, and every lurch and shock was recorded in her timbers. He looked aft and saw again the buckles in her guardrails, the swale in her roofline. The boat seemed a used-up, dead and musty thing as still as a gravestone, and he wondered who in his right mind would want to ride on it for fun.
* * *
ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK a bus rattled in on solid rubber tires and men dressed in denim began to pour off, most of them black. A little later four men hopped off a horse-drawn surrey, put on plug caps that identified them as the engine-room crew, then boarded and headed aft. In the next half hour a buggy, several Fords, and one horse showed up at the wharf, soon followed by a steaming stake-bed truck driven by the captain and piled high with cans of paint, brushes, turpentine, rags, and scrapers. The Wellers and other crew members were there, dressed in their worst clothes. Another, smaller truck pulled up carrying two zinc drums of bleach, and the captain climbed up in the bed and gave directions for its dilution and use. Sam was told to work with the second mate, a big hound of an ex-policeman named Charlie Duggs.
“Hey, I know you,” Duggs said. “You’re the head floorwalker at Krine’s.”
Sam stuffed a brush in his back pocket. “Not anymore.”
Duggs waited for a clarification, and after several seconds said, “We all used to be somebody else, I guess.”
Sam motioned to Duggs’s mate’s cap. “How’d you wind up in the steamboat business?”
He shrugged. “When I got back from France with everybody else I was a cop for a year. Muscarella fired me when the new mayor came in. You know Sergeant Muscarella?”
“Who doesn’t?”
They walked up carrying ladders and in a few minutes were scraping the gingerbread along the roofline of the Texas deck. Above them several men were making the chips fly on the pilothouse, and below a crew of seven was scratching away at the balusters on the guardrails, the whole boat vibrating as though gnawed by a million carpenter bees. As the day progressed, the dark water around the Ambassador was speckled by a soiled snow of paint flakes.