Patch stood in line at the First Union Bank.
The place was grand and tired. Marble pillars flocked with dark veins held up a ceiling of flaked paint and sat on gray carpet so thin it rucked up like waves crested beneath. A line of areca palms, the plastic leaves browned with dust.
Behind him a woman and her daughter stood; in front an old man clutched a checkbook and a couple of twenties. Through large glass windows heat swirled over distant Rockies, capped by snow and fogged by a city’s breath like smoke waiting to be exhaled. He wondered if it was the painting, if Sammy had seared his brain into exchanging what was plainly beautiful for something more.
His ’72 Celica was parked three streets away.
He’d packed what little he owned and left Monta Clare an hour before sunrise, opened the window and heard the faint quake of an airplane as he drove out of the only town he had ever lived in.
He had not met traffic until Des Moines, noted the passing time by changing light, the ambers waving from Kansas. His mind on Misty as he traded the interstate for two-laners, concrete for Flint Hills and tallgrass prairies so lush. He parked up at Cottonwood Falls and strolled with ranchers and their families toward the red-bricked downtown where he looked in windows of cloistered galleries.
A couple of miles on he’d stopped by the Chase State Fishing Lake and walked its shoreline toward the mudflats where fishermen pulled saugeye and bluegill. He met with a husband and wife named Drew and Sally and they held hands and sat on a bench by the north shore and showed him photographs of their daughter Anna May who had wandered from her life near eight years prior. It could not be Grace.
He’d left them with a promise, and in turn they left him a photograph of their daughter, so precious a commodity Sally gripped it for a moment longer as she handed it to him.
Thirty miles up the byway he found a spot and unfolded his easel and canvas and painted Anna May backdropped by land unchanged in a thousand years, the spirit of the Kaw and the Osage steeped in the dirt as he slowly chased north light.
He spoke with Drew and Sally, who instead of asking for the painting wondered if he might display it somewhere. Where it could be seen. Where their daughter would not be forgotten.
A month later he pulled from the Sacred Heart Trail and in a small post office carefully packaged his canvas and scrawled Anna May and the date she was last seen on the back. He sent the photograph back to her parents, along with a note telling them that the painting would sit in Monta Clare Fine Art, where Sammy would do what he could to highlight her.
He’d stuck to Interstate 35, immune to the lights of Oklahoma City. Slept in the car, opened the window to a Texan night sky, the stars his blanket. He ate grits in roadside diners, one meal each day because what little he had was spent on gas. He washed in their bathrooms and filled his flask with water from their faucets.
A week in the sweep of Texas, endless as he crawled mile on mile only stopping to meet with two families he had tracked through newspaper archives. In Corpus Christi he saw the ocean for the first time in his life and spent a day watching its folds and breathing salt air so dry and perfect he placed a call to Sammy and told him exactly how the water had felt when he found a deserted stretch, stripped from his clothes, and waded out deep.
“Stop calling me,” Sammy had said, though it was only the first call.
For eight weeks on that very beach he painted Lucy Williams and Ellen Hernandez. Cars backed up almost to the road as trucks opened their beds and families built canopies and spent the day in such unassumed luxury.
Patch brought the missing back with practiced strokes of his brush, heading into town when he was done, the canvases scrolled.
“Are you a pirate?” a small boy asked, as Patch headed past him into the post office to mail his work to Sammy.
“I was,” Patch said, his smile reaching his words.
That evening he walked through the bustling port as the sun dipped and cannoned color across the ocean. And then he saw the boats.
Patch lost that whole night to the gleaming decks, bowriders and catamarans and cabin cruisers. The walkways fed small islands, and Patch hopped a barrier as skippers guided their vessels toward the marina, his hands in his pockets, a wide smile on his face.
The heavy chug of engines, the glass-fronted watchtower a mirror of wonder. His eye locked on the twin hulls of a pontoon that glided with such elegance he thought of Misty. He slowly walked toward and watched it moor as a boy no older than him hopped from it barefoot onto the wooden deck to rope it off.
Patch studied him intently, certain he just might be the luckiest kid he’d ever seen.
As the sun drowned, the marina chorused with people sitting on their decks, drinks in hand. He was not sure if it was the water, or maybe the gentle sway, but as he noticed a woman with the right shade of hair, hosing down the hull of a towering sailboat, he felt that low ache, not quite pain, just a feeling that he would chase her until the day he died, and that he would always feel less without knowing she was okay.
For ten months he pinballed from state to state, chasing down the weakest links, the slightest hint he was tracking something live, and he moved. He lived from a single bag, bought only what he deemed essential. He ran when he could and ground out a couple of hundred push-ups each morning.
He read newspapers in bus seatbacks, saw color photos of troops too young being sent to a place they could not pick out on a world map, fought under a sun entirely foreign, against an enemy they would train hard not to understand. Deaths were victories. Patch knew those kids, like his father, history not so much doomed to repeat itself as just plain doomed.
He met a dozen families looking for a dozen lost girls, and sometimes they were hostile because they had already mourned and did not wish to again, and other times he sat with empty mothers who clutched their photos and trinkets, and both hoped and dreaded that his Grace was theirs.
In a Kansas hamlet he spent a week at a small farm with a father. Patch knew within a few hours that they were not searching for the same lost soul, but the man leaned heavy on him because those closest were not strong enough to speak of the girl. Over bourbon they sat on a porch swing and watched the twilight prairie. Sometimes there was just enough beauty to temper the pain.
He worked on a farm for a month in Louisiana, the end of the season, the clouds so low and heavy he could almost touch them. And on Sundays he skirted Lake Martin because in the archives he found a picture of a girl that might have been Grace who’d gone missing when her father was fishing. The man was long dead, but Patch thought maybe he’d feel something as he headed through swampland, cut the trails, and watched the egrets and the bullfrogs and the ibis.
A month later he hugged the Texan coast, met a man on the Galveston Strand and walked the seawall, and as the man showed him a photo, in the shade of Moody Gardens, Patch contemplated his own sanity. Searching for a girl he could not place, from a time so distant he was met by only the most desperate.
And then he ran low on funds, called Sammy who bitched about the bite of recession, cursed out stagflation, and slurred through a story of a couple who wanted to buy a missing girl and made an offer so derisory he’d had to chase them from the gallery with a cane just to cauterize the insult. Nix had come, threatened to arrest him, and he’d responded with an invitation to duel.
And so, in that Tucson bank, Patch waited for the old guy to pass before he strolled up to the mahogany counter, pulled a gun from the band of his belt, and aimed it squarely at the teller.
It took a moment to register, for the smile to drop and the fear to kick in. Heavy fans spun thickened air as sweat broke out and dripped from the man’s nose.
“Fill the bag,” Patch said. He wore jeans and a dark T-shirt and dark glasses, and on his head a bandana tied back his hair.
The man glanced around to catch the eye of a sleeping security guard but decided his life was not worth the trouble.
The mama with her little girl stood just far enough back, and as Patch turned he caught the girl’s eye and smiled. Her mother returned it with one of her own.
“I’m sorry this happened,” he said to the teller.
The man wiped at his sweat. He wore short sleeves and a navy tie with a gold clip and a digital watch. “I’ve got a wife and two children.”
“This gun isn’t loaded.”
Patch took the bag and walked out into the street, climbed into his car and drove.
Behind him there was no alarm or chase.
The next day in The Post the teller would claim Patch had threatened his life and the lives of his wife and two children. By then Patch would be under the open skies of Utah where he would see about a girl, knowing deep in his heart it would not be her. On his way he would donate all but a couple of hundred bucks to the Destiny Missing Persons charity.