AFTER THE MOONLIGHT cruise the boat steamed all night to Bayou Sadie, little more than a mud landing and a few plank stores connected by a thread of road to the nearby towns. At seven the next morning the purser gave Sam an advance against his salary and told him to get back for the eight-thirty cruise or he’d be docked two dollars. He walked all the way into St. Frank and found the livery on the north side of the main street. The owner, a fat man wearing a cut-down pair of overalls held up by green suspenders, didn’t know him, so he took all the money he had as a deposit on the worst horse in the pen, a small, nervous-looking animal the color of a stained mattress. Then he tried to explain where Gasket Landing might be. “You have to go down this here lane and then ford the bayou, but it’s pretty shallow this time of year and it’s got a hard bottom. Then you head west into the stickers for a while and you’ll get into a big swamp that’s dry right now and pretty clear of brush. Those big trees cut back on the undergrowth. Keep the horse moving through there, don’t let him stop and look around too much. If you keep an animal busy he won’t get spooked.”
“What’s to spook him?”
The fat man looked up thoughtfully as Sam swung into the saddle. “Best not tell you. Just keep going a few miles till you hit the riverbank, then you’ll ride up to some ruint houses. That’s where the Skadlocks stay. You related?”
“No.”
“I figured that. You don’t have the look.”
Sam motioned toward the woods with his chin. “You know if Ninga Skadlock lives in there?”
“She couldn’t live nowheres else.”
“How many miles am I lookin’ at?”
“I don’t know.”
“No idea at all?”
“Somewhere between ten and fifty. It’s crazy country back in there.”
“What’s his name?”
“Who?”
“The horse.”
The livery owner scratched the yellow hair on his chest where it boiled up out of his undershirt. “Number 6.”
HE GOT the animal out into the road, and when a lumber truck went by, Number 6 whinnied, reared, and clambered down into a twelve-foot ditch. He sat the horse in water up to his stirrups, petted it, and coaxed it up the bank and back into the lane, where it commenced a pelvis-hammering trot, weaving from side to side. Sam stopped it, rode it several times in a circle to the right and then to the left, as his uncle Claude had taught him, and when he set the horse forward it seemed to remember that it was supposed to travel in a straight line, and its gait evened out. After a few miles they arrived at a place where the road sloped down into a broad bayou. The horse would have none of it. As soon as the water went over his pasterns, he kept turning upstream. Sam got off, stripped down to his drawers, and walked in ahead, tugging the reins. The water was only up to his waist, but the bottom rose in stinking clouds as he pulled across. He sat on the bank in the heat to dry off, then pulled on his khakis, debating whether he should just give up and cross back into town. He closed his eyes a moment to see if the girl child was still caught behind his lids, and her image came up glowing, but beside it was another face, that of his son losing consciousness, slipping away in a fever. He was the type of man who didn’t want the bad things that happened to him to happen to anyone else; maybe somebody told him things when he was three or four years old that landed like seeds in the furrows of his character. However he was formed, his tendencies were costly ones. He mounted up with a yodel and kicked Number 6 in the flanks, the horse barging into a hummock of blackberries, scattering dust and dead stalks, wasps flying behind its hooves like red sparks.
Number 6 labored on, now and then hanging up between saplings. In a tight spot it raised a hoof, put it through a fork in a trunk, then pulled it back and wedged around the tree, lowering its head and rooting through the trash woods like a hog. Four miles into the maze, a ropey wisteria vine caught the toe of Sam’s shoe and flipped him off like a playing card. Number 6 didn’t even look around and cantered west. Fighting the brush, Sam ran after it for a hundred yards in the smothering heat, finally leaping for the saddle horn and pulling himself up. The horse stopped then and looked back at him.
“You ugly son of a bitch,” Sam rasped. “You thirdhand hook rug pulled from a privy.” Here the horse bucked once, and Sam came down on its neck. After gaining his breath, he slid down and led the animal to a deep puddle of clear water and let it drink. “All right,” he said, pulling out his compass. “Eat some of that grass there and we’ll move on.” The horse rolled its ears away.
Soon they entered a low-water cypress swamp, the treetops closing off the sky. The red-bark trunks were the size of factory chimneys, and everywhere their roots rose from the soppy mud like stalagmites. He checked his compass and headed across the weedless, canopied land. Everywhere he looked he saw the stout windings of water moccasins, and he felt the horse go rigid with fear. Sam put heels to its flanks, keeping its mind on movement, not on the flint-scaled multitudes boiling in the dim mud.
He was four hours beyond the bayou when he saw bright light between a mossy picket of trees, and he rode through a tussle of brambles into the open air. Reaching into the saddlebag, he pulled out a Mason jar of water and a cheese sandwich and sat, eating and staring at the Mississippi, sensing what de Soto must have felt when he stumbled out of the brush to wonder at this wide arm of water.
He rode down under the bank until he saw sun-lavendered bottles on the mudflats and then turned the horse up a washout that led past a roofless cabin. He turned right into a trash woods that forty years before was a pasture and followed a leaning barbwire fence beyond a weather-flattened barn and into a sudden green rush of old magnolias, sycamores, and ground-hugging live oaks. He glimpsed a chimney top through the greenery and stopped the horse, stepping down and tying it to a low oak limb. After ten steps he was standing in the rear of a three-story house with two encircling galleries and tall stuccoed pillars on four sides. It was invisible to the world, warped and paintless, its windows smudged or broken out, daylight pouring through holes in the upstairs gallery floors. The brick porch was strewn with rags, broken chairs, desiccated watermelon rinds, and a cow skull. He knew better than to present himself at the wide front entrance, and what could he say when someone opened the door in his face holding no better greeting than a cocked pistol? He stood and thought and then went back to the horse, leading it slowly away, but in a circuit so that soon he was going along the riverbank as though traveling through to somewhere else. There was no road, just an area too sandy to support more than weeds and thistle. When he got opposite the woodsy patch where he thought the house was hiding, he talked to the horse in a big, good-natured voice. Number 6 wouldn’t look at him and turned his head away, engaged in patient urination. Sam picked up its rear hoof and caught it between his legs, pretending to examine the frog for an injury, but after ten minutes, no one came out to ask what he was about. Finally, he said loudly, “Well, let’s us just go in and ask for what we want, like the dunderheads we are.”
He spied above the branches a paneless belvedere, walked toward it, and was soon through the woods at the front of the mansion, where he tied the horse and walked up the flagstones. He took a breath, then knocked on the weather-scoured door.
From around the corner of the house stepped a man of at least fifty years, wearing a misshapen straw cowboy hat and dressed in denim shirt and pants that had been worn sky blue. “What you need?”
“I’m looking for Ninga Skadlock.”
The man walked up, followed closely by an all-black German shepherd that slowly and almost reverently gathered a mouthful of Sam’s pants leg in its mouth and held fast. “Excuse Satan here. He just wants to hold you still.”
Sam looked down into the monstrous dog’s amber eyes whose depths radiated primal obedience. “All right.”
“What you want of Mom?”
He swallowed twice. “I want to hire her to go get a dog for me in Baton Rouge. I heard she was good at it.”
The man touched the shepherd and it slowly drew back. Sam felt its saliva cooling against his calf and looked down again into eyes trained to see things differently than he did. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man said.
“Just let me see her.”
The man slowly rubbed his knuckles on the animal’s head. “She’s in the kitchen.”
Sam felt light-headed among the soaring pillars. “This is your big place?”
“It was here when we come along,” he growled.
They walked through a leaf-sodden yard to a small gray-wood clapboard building separate from the main house. Stepping up inside, he saw the walls first, for they were freshly whitewashed. A thick-shouldered, clean-shaven man was seated at table writing in a ledger, and an old woman was working at a kerosene stove, frying onions and bell peppers in a stamped iron skillet.
“Man wants to see you.”
She looked up and he knew at once it was her. The man at the table closed his ledger and watched Sam passively. He was about forty-five, dressed all in khaki, even to his baseball cap.
The old woman wore glasses and didn’t have to squint to size Sam up. “You come in a boat?”
“No, ma’am. I have a horse.”
Glancing at his town shoes, she said, “You sure didn’t walk here in those.” She banged a spoon on the edge of the skillet and dropped chunks of cut-up rabbit into the vegetables. Then she smiled and he saw the gap in her teeth. “Excuse my manners while I keep working. We don’t exactly get much company out here. What can I do for you?”
He looked at the two men, the first still standing in the doorway behind him. Sam was a fair teller of unimportant lies and thought he might fool people like this. Then he looked down at the dog, who watched him as if he were game. “I have a nice house down in Baton Rouge, on Florida Avenue,” he began unsteadily, “where I live with my wife and two young kids. A man next door owns a chow. The dog’s attacked my kids twice, and all night he keeps my family up with his yowling. I’ve tried to deal with the owner for a couple years, but he won’t get rid of the dog.” He paused for effect here, scratching his ear, glancing across the room. A door was opened halfway, revealing a large indoor still under a metal cowl that vented through the ceiling. “He seems to get pleasure out of the trouble he’s caused me.”
“I never knew a chow to bark much.” The woman lay the spoon down on a dishcloth and motioned to him. “Sit down, mister?”
“Sam Simoneaux.”
“Well, a coonass.”
His face remained fixed; he couldn’t afford anger here. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And you live on Florida Avenue down in Baton Rouge?”
“Yes.”
“What block?”
“Ma’am?”
“What’s your house address?”
A brief surge of panic ran up his backbone. “The 1900 block.”
“All right.” She pulled a chair out from the table and sat down, then introduced him to her son Billsy, who had crossed his arms over the ledger and was leaning forward, regarding him with distant amusement. “And that other one’s Ralph. Anyway, how can we help you with this dog?”
“I hear you’re pretty good at gathering them up.”
“And where did you hear this?”
“I have a friend on the police force.”
Here the man at the table laughed, stood up, and poured himself a cup of coffee out of a porcelain pot sitting in a warming pan on the stove.
The woman tilted her head and looked at Sam directly. “Everybody’s got friends on that police force.” She raised a hand and let it drop. “Some even have relatives in the sheriff’s office.”
Sam looked around the room. “I don’t guess you see much law back in here.”
“Son, if we needed the law I’d have to write a letter, but then somebody would have to build a post office for me to mail it in.” Her voice was fine-grained. Close up, her skin seemed smooth and light. “What color is this dog’s tongue?”
He looked toward the door, where the shepherd sat, its mouth closed, its big ears up. “I don’t know.”
“Hot days, a chow’s tongue is always out,” Ralph said, leaning against the door frame.
“Simoneaux, do you have a telephone in your house?” Ninga asked.
“Yes.” This, he sensed immediately, was a mistake.
She got up and went to a high beaded-board cabinet and swung open its door. Inside he could see lines of books and her quick hands flashing through a stack of what looked like magazines. She found the one she wanted and thumbed through it with her back to him. Then she came back and sat at the table, spreading her hands out on the oak.
“We don’t have a phone, but it’s good to have a phone book anyway. Funny thing is, you don’t seem to be listed in the latest directory.” She raised her head and looked him in the eye. “Now, you can tell us what you really want.”
“I want a dog picked up, that’s all. Now if it’s a matter of price-”
“As I remember, the 1900 block of Florida is completely occupied on both sides by a cemetery.” Her gray eyes were as constant as facts, and he knew his lie had failed.
He looked over at the men, who were smiling smugly in admiration of their mother. The dog let out its tongue and panted, as if thirsty for the truth. “All right. I’m from New Orleans and-”
“And somewhere south of there before that,” she added. “We could hear New Orleans in your talk. But you still say those funny a’s the way those dummy Frenchies do. Where were you born?”
“A place you never heard of, over by the Texas line.”
“ Lake Charles?”
“Troumal.”
Ralph snorted, then walked up to the table. “I know where it is.”
Sam gave him a quick look. “You been there? Nobody’s been there much. It’s just our families.”
“Your family-it’s still there, is it?” he asked.
Sam studied his face, then its hard features. “My family was killed off by outlaws.”
A brief flash flew through the man’s eyes. “I think I heard about it, long time ago.”
The woman suddenly tapped him on the shoulder with her spatula, and her face began to darken. “Are you some kind of law? At least tell that much of the truth.”
“No.”
She looked up at the denim-clad son. “Ralph, do you recognize him?”
“I didn’t at first, but now I do.”
Sam turned around. “How is it you know me?”
“We never been innerduced from the front,” Ralph said, showing a rack of yellow teeth.
A phantom pain rose in the back of Sam’s head, and he stood up. “You about killed me.”
“If I’d wanted you dead you’d of been that way.”
The woman moved a hand as if she were shooing a fly. “Look, sit down, Simoneaux, or whoever you are. Ralph, you and your brother do a walkaround, make sure he’s alone.”
Once they had left, he decided that he might as well ask her, and he did. “Why’d you take that little girl?”
She stood and tended the little stove, which smelled of kerosene. “What exactly are you doing out here? Somebody payin’ you?”
“I got my reasons.”
She adjusted the sickly flame under the skillet and stirred the contents slowly. “You don’t see a little girl around here, do you? Any sign of one?”
“I work with that child’s parents. They’re excursion-boat musicians, and they’re sick with worry about her.” He looked at the back of her head as if there might be a little window there that his thoughts could climb through. “You’re a mother. Can’t you think about how that lady must feel?”
“I’m seventy-some years old, too old to fall for crap like that.” She shook the skillet over the flame. “You know, sometimes people seem one way on the surface. But inside, they’re different.”
“What?”
“Musicians? Those fine parents might be musicians, all right, the drifter kind that think they’re better than everybody else just because they can read squiggles on a set of lines. You know what I’m talking about. Rummies in the vaudeville orchestra, whorehouse bands, saloon singers.”
“The Wellers aren’t like that.”
She turned her doubtful face on him. “You really know them?”
He blinked. “Well enough to know you been told wrong if you think they’re trash.”
“Still, where will they be in ten years? They’re music players. If they can’t keep up with the tunes, they’ll be as out of work as a broke talking machine.”
“Well.” He leaned back in the chair and looked through the screen into the weed-choked yard. “And where will your boys be in ten years?”
She bristled. “Ralph and Billsy’s already there, mister. And you don’t have to know exactly where, neither. We come over from Arkansas with nothing, and now we’re doin’ all right. That kid’s parents, if I had to guess, can’t give her a thing except how to grow up singin’ dirty songs to dancing drunks.”
“Look, I’m not the law.”
A half-smile formed over the sizzling skillet. “I was worried you might be one of those Chicago boys hired to make some law on the side, if you know what I mean. But you ain’t nothin’ but a coonass that learned all his words.”
Sam glared at her. “Just tell me what you did with the girl.”
“I don’t know what we’re talkin’ about.” She raised the lid on a pot that was chattering on another burner and stirred the rice. “There ain’t no little girl around here.”
The two men came back into the room and sat with him at the table, leaving Satan on the other side of the screen, his eyes like two hot coals caught in the mesh. “You got vittles yet?” Ralph asked.
“Watch this one off the property. He’s just leavin’,” the woman said.
Sam remained seated. “I might stay around to sample some of that rabbit.”
The one named Billsy ran a hand through his iron-colored hair and looked worriedly at the skillet. “What’s he want, anyways?”
The woman sighed. “Hush up.”
“If you won’t talk to me, I’ll go back to the excursion boat and saddle up the Wellers and bring them in for a little chat.”
“If you can sober them up, you mean.”
“They aren’t drunks. Somebody’s filled your head full of lies about those people. The same somebody that paid you to steal their girl.”
“If you send anybody back in here, after we deal with them, we’ll come after you.” The woman turned off the stove, and a kerosene stink began to fill the hot kitchen.
Sam folded his hands on the table. “If someone was hired to steal a child, I’d bet it was by strangers who rode up from nowhere with a good story.”
“Nobody came back in here.”
“It might be faraway strangers, too,” he continued.
“Why don’t you just get on, Frenchie,” Ralph said, arranging his knife and fork next to his plate.
“He talked better than you do,” Billsy said.
Quick as a snake his mother rapped him twice on the skull with her spatula. “You are a ringtailed dumbass if ever there was one.”
Billsy raised his forearms above his head. “I didn’t say nothing.”
Sam could see how scrambled his thoughts were by looking at his eyes. “What did this nice-talking man look like?”
Before his mother could hit him again, Billsy blurted out, “He just had a little mustache and talked about his wife a lot. Rode a horse in a suit.”
Sam made a face. “A horse in a suit?”
Ralph suddenly pulled a big sheath knife and banged it on the table boards. “You about ready to leave, ain’t ya?”
“What do you know about the killing in Troumal?”
“I’ll tell you about a killin’ right here in a minute. Now get out.”
Sam glanced at his eyes and stood up. “Can I get past that dog?”
“You can get past him goin’ out,” Ralph Skadlock told him. “But I wouldn’t try it comin’ back. He’ll eat you like a meat grinder.”