The Missing Person Read online

  None of the Buttses smoked or drank, or much liked to read or even listen to the radio except for the baseball games. Now and then on a Saturday night they all went to the movies in Prairie City. But their pleasures were primarily muscular. They loved large meals, working outdoors, throwing footballs to each other or kicking them against the barn. They walked because they loved the feel of dirt roads and grassy paths under their feet, they talked to each other about the farm, the seasons, sports, they drove farm machinery with the pure pleasure that came to them from visible accomplishments and physical activity.

  They loved the rituals of Sunday, the early-morning baths, clean clothes, ties and shined shoes, then the wait on the veranda for Maw. The five men drank their coffee together there, standing up, looking out at their fields. There was the customary jostling for position when Emma came down looking like a bird shining after a rain, to go to church with them. On her narrow neck she usually wore oversized white plastic-ball beads. They made her look pathetic and proud.

  “Spiffy. You look right spiffy,” said the Reverend Butts to his wife.

  Three sons squeezed into the back seat and one sat over the hump in front to give Maw enough room. The church was only a few miles away, in the heart of Prairie City, and had a congregation of sixty-eight. Wendell Butts read the service and then delivered his sermon. It was full of down-to-earth sense, his “grass-roots approach to living and to God,” as he liked to call his sermons. His figures of speech were invariably athletic. He talked of his service to God as being “God’s waterboy.” Fighting against sin he described as “keeping the opposition, the Devil, off balance.” A happy family was an “all-star team.” To the farm families and the townspeople in the congregation these football references proved Butts’s acquaintance with the wider world. He made them feel cosmopolitan and knowledgeable. To the Buttses listening with admiration from their pew, his allusions combined in a cheerful, Sabbath way, their abiding interests: God, football, the farm, and their love for each other.

  The Buttses took great pride in good health, even Emma who had little of it herself but seemed to be sustained by the display of theirs. The oldest son, Dempsey, was small for a football player, with much of his mother’s gentleness about him. He was “wonderfully put together,” as she said. He could run very fast and for long distances without getting winded. His muscles lay smooth and flat on his bones; nothing bulged as he moved. Everything in his body operated with the greatest economy. Even his corn-silk hair lay flat against his narrow head. His brother, Tunney, younger by a year, was taller, darker, and much heavier, like their father, with unusually wide shoulders, long arms, and broad, capable hands. “A born pass receiver,” his father said when Tun had attained his full growth and had already decided he wanted to be a farmer.

  The young twins, Sully and Shark, loved football too, but their eyes were poor, the result of an overlong stay in incubation after their premature births. Good-naturedly, but without much hope, they ignored their handicap and practiced incessantly, throwing the football between them as they walked to high school or helped their mother in the truck garden, priding themselves at not hitting any tender shoots. “Old Four Eyes” they called each other: their names were Sharkey and Sullivan. In his youthful passion for the sport of boxing, Wendell Butts had bestowed the names of famous fighters on his sons, “as incentive,” he told them later, “to work hard and be good, really good, at something.”

  As was only fitting for the eldest, Dempsey was the first to obey. During his last year in high school he led his team to the state championship; the University in Iowa City sent a scout to see him play. He was offered a scholarship to the University of Iowa which had a coach known throughout the middle west for building winning teams.

  Demp was not much of a student and ignored attending a number of his more difficult college classes. Yet he squeaked through. In the spring he made the track team. His height and weight (by dint of forcing himself to eat starches he finally made one hundred and sixty-five pounds), the swiftness with which he moved, his accurate eye and arm, made him a natural quarterback. He played fast and hard, with perfect concentration on every play he called, every pass he threw.

  On Sundays he went to an Open Bible Church near the University. Usually he was invited back “to the house” to have dinner with the minister and his family. The minister had a daughter, Edna-Mae, who was Dempsey’s age. She was a healthy-looking, suntanned girl with hair exactly the color of Demp’s. She tried to interest him in herself. But he was too involved in football and in watching his weight and getting enough sleep. So he would leave the minister’s house almost as soon as dinner was over, and never seemed to notice Edna-Mae’s attentions.

  His classmates found him likable but very strange. He had none of their extracurricular interest in beer, women, jazz, and cars, an odd guy for a football player. Behind his back they called him “the Lady,” but he was too sensitive, too tough-spirited, and too damned nice for them to allow him to hear the epithet. In his senior year he was able to throw accurate lateral passes and had compiled a record, for his league, as a ground gainer. The coach boasted to the professional scouts who began to attend the Iowa games on Saturday afternoons that Demp was calling the plays without help from the sidelines.

  As president of his graduating class Demp gave a short speech after the valedictory had been delivered at commencement. He charmed the audience with his gentle, boyish smile, his deep-blue, sincere-looking eyes, and his genuine team-effort sentiments. A week later, so eager was he to play professional football, that he signed on with a new team on the West Coast, the Mavericks. Then he took a job on a road-building project near Des Moines to earn some of his expenses and to toughen up for the team.

  In mid-July he was due at training camp. Demp went home to Prairie City for his last weekend before he had to leave for the Coast. On that occasion there was very little gaiety among the Buttses. It is often true that, for an unhappy family, an unaccustomed gay note is sounded when a member departs, as though a break in the pattern of the usual communal misery raises the hopes of everyone in something better to come. But when the Buttses knew that Demp was leaving for the West they gathered Saturday night at the dinner table in a funereal mood. When he was a college student, Demp had been only forty miles away; he had come home often. Now the threatened long distance made the break between them and their first son, their brother, very real.

  At dinner, Emma Butts’s pallor frightened them all. She appeared to have lost some of her life force or to have presented it to Demp, like a fond parent who gives up a favorite possession to a departing child. Tun, torn between the pleasurable feeling at his ascendancy as the oldest son at home and a deep sense of loss, covered his confusion by talking constantly and too loudly. Full of pride at Demp’s success, the twins were silent.

  Reverend Butts alone sensed what was happening to his wife. He knew that Emma existed, in a vital sense, for him and for her sons. He understood that Demp’s departure would seriously diminish her and, to a lesser extent, all of them. But he was luckier. Sustained by his strong sense of God’s will in all things, and by the hard, physical work he had to do, he would survive. He was not so sure about Emma. Tunney was moving fast into Demp’s place in the family, if only in his own eyes which, after all, the Reverend Butts thought, was the important way. To the twins, Demp’s leaving was not so vital. They had each other and many friends; people were always attracted to them by their composed and happy duality.

  But for Emma: it was more serious. Her pretense at contentment, her determination to make these last hours at home happy for Demp, cost her so much that in the evening, after she had washed up the dishes, set out the fruit for later, and the family were settled into their usual places on the veranda, she had “a little sinking spell,” as she called it. She had to be helped up the stairs to her bedroom, her husband’s arm about her waist, the four young men trailing helplessly behind “to see Maw upstairs.” They all felt they wanted to donate to t
heir almost spectral mother some of their sturdy bodily tissue and energetic blood.

  Demp was terrified. He blamed himself for his mother’s weakness, reproached himself for his selfishness in wanting to be a football player more than a son and a farmer. If she sickened he alone would be responsible, he told himself. For the first time in his life he felt the burdensome misery of being so cherished, and helpless in the presence of maternal love.

  The next morning Emma was recovered, enough, she said, to go to church with her family. At once the air cleared. Demp’s guilt melted, the Reverend Butts relaxed in his pulpit at the sight of Emma there among her four boys, his beloved wife and friend in the chipper straw hat and flowered silk dress she had bought in Younkers in Des Moines. On the ride back to the farm they all joked with each other. Dinner was eaten in an atmosphere of high spirits and teasing born of their intense relief. When it was time for Demp to leave for the train at three, there was no visible break in the determined familial cheerfulness.

  “Kill ’em, boy. Don’t worry. You’ll survive.”

  “Show ’em how Iowa boys can play.”

  “Don’t eat too much, Demp. If you get too fat you’ll be a better target for the smear.”

  “Real desire, boy, real effort,” said the Reverend heartily.

  “Remember now, the playbook is the Bible,” said Tun. The Reverend frowned at this irreverence.

  Demp nodded, said yes to everything, and groaned as if in pain at the sentences intended to spur him on.

  “Write when you get there, son,” said his mother softly.

  Demp told her he would. Clowning with his brothers and his father, he gave a handoff to Sully and then faked a run between the twins and through the dining room archway. It was hard for anyone to be serious in the presence of his resolute tomfoolery.

  His mother kissed him and patted the sleek blond back of his head which she loved. Then she sat down on the veranda to watch Reverend Butts bring the car around. Demp waved from the car, his heart full of gratitude at the way they all clearly loved him. His mother seemed to have recovered from her look of loss. In his last sight of her she had turned away and was chatting with Sully, one hand on Sharkey’s shoulder. Relieved and high-hearted, Demp talked to his father during the drive to Des Moines, about getting a hired man to help with the harvest, about his own future if he was lucky, and his intention, once his salary started, to help out by paying for his lost labor. They were back on safe grounds of ordinary masculine subject matter. The Reverend Butts found it easy to respond to his son.

  The trip to San Francisco was very long and hot. Demp spent it sitting up in a coach in a happy state of anticipation, dozing occasionally, waking to think of his press notices in the Daily Iowan, of the stadium he would play in which he had seen only in photographs. He pictured himself in the blue and gold uniform of the Mavericks: Goll-ee, the Mavericks. Think of it, me with the Mavericks.

  Demp arrived, hot, tired but exalted by his hours of daydreaming on the Union Pacific coach. At the dormitory of the college outside of San Francisco where the team was training, he found a telegram for him saying his mother had died in her sleep Sunday night, eight hours after he had left Prairie City.

  Two years later, in early July, Dempsey Butts, now first-string quarterback of the Mavericks, went south with a carload of fellow players to see the sights in Hollywood. They had five days off to relax in. Two of them they spent walking aimlessly up and down the streets near Hollywood and Vine in the vain hope of seeing a Star. On the third night they gave up and went to a Mexican bar on the outskirts of Beverly Hills. They all ordered tequila, which none of them had drunk before. After the first drink, they decided they liked the place and stayed on, enjoying the darkness, the unabashed seediness, and what they took to be the authenticity of El Chico, following all the synthetic glitter and white plastic of the Hollywood tourist places. After two tequilas even the name of the place seemed very funny and therefore good to them.

  “No Ciro’s this, eh, Demp,” shouted Amos Settle, pounding the table. Settle was a fullback, an enormous, rawboned, red-faced Kentuckian with a fondness for what he called “living.”

  “This is it, eh? This is living.”

  “Olé, said Demp. He felt fine, light-headed and happy, for the first time in three days. The sort of banging-around they had been doing, from bar to bar, poor restaurants to pretentious hotel lobbies (where they sat mornings to read the green sports pages and write postcards) was not for him. He liked plain home-cooking, a regular schedule of workouts every day in the week, and a well-washed comforter on his bed at night. He was willing to put up with hand-to-mouth hotel existence for the sake of the game he loved, but he felt that in his free time he ought to return to the clean, settled, familiar world of a place like Prairie City.

  No longer listening to the talk around him and fiddling with his tequila glass, he sat, watching a girl come into the bar. She went past their table toward a seat in the far corner of the dark, tunnellike room. Wearing heavy, unlaced boots, she clumped as she walked. But he could not miss her legs. Scratched and streaked with dirt, even in those boots he could see they were fine legs. Demp watched her drop heavily into a chair at a corner table. She ordered something, he could not hear what, and then the waiter brought her a beer. He watched her sip it. It was hard to see her face under the brim of her canvas cap and behind the wide green sunglasses she wore. He wondered: Why does she need them in here? She must be bats or something.

  He was used to the farm women in Prairie City who dressed in men’s work clothes, but for some reason she seemed different. Under the drab jacket and pants, he sensed a girl, not a woman. He wondered at the bulky clothes. Watching her steadily, he was the first on his feet when he saw her head go down on the tabletop.

  Bill Eddy had risen too. “That guy back there is drunk already. Pretty early in the day.” He looked, then laughed, and sat down.

  Demp moved as fast as if he were avoiding a red-dogging. He was halfway to the back of the room before the others noticed he had gone. He slid into the chair beside the girl. Her head coming down had pushed over her glass. He could smell the spilled beer. Her hat had fallen from her head onto the table; he saw her hair, silk, yellow hair. I knew it, he thought. She’s just a kid.

  “Are you all right?” His voice was hoarse with concern. He pushed her hair out of the beer, but she did not move. Then he heard high, wet sounds. She was crying. His heart beat so fast he thought he would pass out, feeling the terror he always had when a woman cried in his presence.

  “Hey. Hey. Stop that.” He tried to lift her head from the table, but she shook it away from his hands. He sat still, waiting. Suddenly she twisted and lifted her face. Her sunglasses, askew, fell into the beer, and he saw her face. At once he knew who she was—the purity of those eyes, bright and childlike from fresh tears, the unmistakable glow of that face on which the dirt was streaked, the caked pieces of black on her eyelids, that cleft in her left cheek, the sharp, lovely peak of her hairline. He recognized, of course, and at the same time (he was to remember this as long as he lived) he knew, beyond any doubt, that he loved her.

  “Franny Fuller,” he said aloud to himself and then, too late, realized his mistake. She heard him, pushed back from the table, and stood up, pulled a bill from a jacket pocket and put it down in the beer. He stood up as she brushed past him. He could smell her—sour, unwashed, female. He gestured to the boys at the table, a low, hip-level wave with his right hand as though warning them off. Behind him he heard someone snicker. But so intent was he not to lose sight of her that he did not respond and, for that matter, never saw those men again on that trip.

  A few doors beyond El Chico’s he caught up to her.

  “Whoa there a minute. Wait up.”

  She stopped and whispered, “Leave me alone, Please.”

  “I can’t,” he said, feeling his heart turn over with pity. “Let me help you. Please.”

  “You can’t help me. Go away.”

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sp; Demp walked beside her and said nothing. Her shoulders shook, she shuffled along in the thick boots, her blond hair pouring out of the cap she had jammed down over it.

  “Where are you staying?” he asked.

  “Where am I staying,” she said.

  “A hotel? What hotel? A house?”

  She hesitated a long time. Then she said: “The Y.”

  “Oh, come on. Someone like you at the Y?”

  “Someone like me,” she said. There seemed to be some obscure comment in her flat repetition of what he said to her, but he could not understand what she meant by it.

  “A movie star, like you.”

  They arrived in front of a building that looked to Demp like a Y. He waited for her to stop but she shuffled on, as though she had not noticed where she was. Or maybe, he thought, she made that up about the Y.

  “Why do you wear all those clothes in this heat?” he asked. She was now walking faster, breathing in small gulps, and sweating profusely. He could smell her warmth mixed with the must of coarse khaki.

  She made no reply, but she walked more slowly. Once she stopped so abruptly that he fell against her. He thought he would not be able to stand up under the furious beating of his heart. Then she turned and he followed her into a dark-brown, curtain-fronted bar. Without seeming to look at anything she headed for a table at the rear.

  Demp sat beside her and ordered two beers. He could read the name of the place, scrolled backward, on the front window: it was Castellano’s. The walls were decorated with faded, unframed pictures of the Bay of Naples and Lake Como, crepe-paper streamers, and religious banners left over, he imagined, from the celebration of some Italian festival.

  The waiter brought the beers, nodded to Franny Fuller without recognition or interest, picked up the coins Demp had put down, and wiped the table around the bases of the two glasses. Then he went away.