Finding the Women

FINDING THE WOMEN / Michael Alley THE LOWLANDS WERE SOUTH of Camisade. They stretched from Zoar's Sinkhole down to Red River Canyon, then east to Sunoco. Nothing good ever came from them; at least that's what Dula remembered his father always saying. His father would take Jerry Mays's old wife for example, a stub of a woman from Red River who married Mays some thirty years ago. She started working tables then in Betty's One Stop right next to Mays's service garage. She smelled like bacon, coffee grounds, and strawberry jam all mixed together. She was a woman sassy enough to mine fifty cent tips from under the newspapers of truckers who had only bought the two-egg special. An industrious woman, they all said, a woman willing to expend herself for her family. But one day she slipped into some trucker's open cab door, not fifty feet from an Olds Eighty-Eight that Mays was sweating under. And then she was gone, vanished, never heard from again; the last glimpses she must have had of Camisade were the oil stains burned into the cracked concrete around the garage's gas pumps, the shadow the town's blue and gold water tower cast upon Highway 57, the worn soles of her husband's work boots sticking out from under the Olds. Dula was now driving his truck south on 57 into the lowlands, and beside him with an elbow cocked out the passenger window Jerry Mays sat mumbling. Dula and Mays had been paired by the sheriff from Bristol City and asked to check out a white Chevrolet with a flat tire that had supposedly turned onto E.C. Clayton's ranch last night. Like the rest of Camisade, they were searching for Patricia Anne Flowers who while sunbathing yesterday afternoon in her backyard had just disappeared. Dula's father, if he were still alive, would have said that Patricia Anne's roots in the lowlands—Patricia Anne's mother was from Sunoco—probably explained what happened to her, that Patricia Anne had bad blood. Since leaving the sheriff's, Jerry Mays kept insisting the girl had just eloped, that this whole search was a farce, but then Mays predicting something probably meant it wasn't so. Mays had predicted there would be more rain by the middle of June and here it was the first of July. Three years ago Mays predicted the interstate would bend by his service garage and he bought hundreds of dollars worth of souvenirs. Just speculating, he told everyone. Now the cowboy hats and tomahawks were stacked in crates behind the tires. And since the day his wife left, every time the winds turned cool Jerry Mays hinted she might be returning soon, his eyes moist in their southward gaze down 57. Dula imagined that Patricia Anne Flowers had never left her The Missouri Review · 131 backyard, that the sun had just wanted to touch her, her dark olive skin so soft and smooth and wet with oil; Dula imagined every car bumper and piece of tin in Camisade had been struck at precisely the right angle so as to reflect one tremendous flash of heat onto her. And then she had evaporated, just like that. But Dula knew his father probably would have been right, that the lowlands had something to do with this disappearance. His father would have reminded him of Linda Louise Simpson and her boyfriend, the all-district tackle whose family had moved up from Sunoco, whose nose had never grown away from his face. When Linda Louise disappeared that June night three years ago, her car still parked at the Dairy Queen, her boyfriend had headed the search party that combed all the shanties on spie side. Her boyfriend continued questioning strangers at the One Stop long after the sheriff from Bristol City had given up the search. In mid-November after the first frost, her boyfriend stood crying before the whole church and dedicated the Red River football game to her, wherever she was. But the next July when all the creeks and buffalo lakes had again vanished into the cracked clay, when...