Vanished by Wil S. Hylton Read Free Book Online Page B

familiar sight. Born in the 1920s, they had come of age in an endless depression, and many had never left home before or had any idea where they were going. Their uniforms would be their first suits; their barracks, their first homes with lights and plumbing.
    At twenty-five, Jimmie Doyle was one of the oldest men in his crew. He came from the flatlands of West Texas, raised by a single dad who’d left his mom and four siblings in Arkansas years earlier, heading across the High Plains with only Jimmie at his side. Growing up in the heart of the Dust Bowl, Jimmie had gone to work with his father—helping to laystone walls and build fences on the Llano Estacado caprock. They spent one summer pouring a road base for Route 180 between the towns of Lamesa and Snyder, staking the shoulder with wooden rails and pouring in stone and crushed lime, then hitching up horses to drag a chain across the top. At night, they bedded down with the animals, cooking over a campfire with the other men.
    Jimmie’s hands were calloused and strong but he still had the lanky physique of a teen. His blond hair was perpetually tossed over a boyish face of freckles. One day at gunnery school in Laredo, he was struggling with a heavy pack, the blisters bleeding on his feet, when his wiry frame gave out. He felt a surge under his arms as another private hoisted him up, carrying him down the field until his strength returned. After that, Jimmie and Johnny Moore were rarely apart. They bunked together, ate together, and stayed up late talking. Jimmie told Johnny about life on the plains, the shade of the elm trees he longed for, and the little boy, Tommy, he’d left behind with Myrle, the only woman he’d ever loved. Johnny told Jimmie about the sultry woods of Arkansas, a place that Jimmie no longer remembered, but where his mom and siblings still lived.
    Johnny was five years younger than Jimmie, but he was a head taller and laced with muscle. His dark brown hair scooped into a swirl, and he beamed the easy sideways smile of a lifelong country boy. Growing up on the Des Arc Bayou, he was the youngest of nine kids and the second son, but he was named for his father. Most folks in Des Arc called him John Junior. His dad and sister called him Bud. In the service, he was Johnny.
    Life in Des Arc hadn’t changed much in a century or two. Johnny’s dad woke early each morning for a bowl of corn mush and a mug of hot water, then headed out to fish the hidden corners of the White River, bagging catfish and buffalo fish as big as fifty pounds. In the evening, he dragged them home to put on ice and ship to Saint Louis. When Johnny was little, he stayed home with his mom, Addie, a husky, whistling figure who tended the chickens and milked the cow and raised fields of cotton and corn beside the jumble of beans and peas and potatoes in thehousehold garden. The older kids sometimes helped Addie do laundry in the outdoor washtub, or hang the clothes to dry on a line between trees. When things got busy, Johnny hung by his sister Melba, who was six years older. “ He was my pet ,” Melba said. “He was my baby. He was my doll.”
    In place of toys, Johnny had cousins and nephews to race and chase through woodland acres. Two of his sisters were so much older that one had a son, Doyle, who was just ten months younger than Johnny, and another had a boy named Charles born just two years after that—the year the White River climbed so high in Des Arc that it breached the pages of the
New York Times . By the time the three boys were old enough to walk, they were running. They’d skinny-dip in the river behind the cemetery and climb up high in the persimmon trees to ride the branches to the ground. When school began, they made the two-mile walk along railroad tracks by the river, tossing rocks into the water to see who could make the biggest splash. The year Johnny turned thirteen, the river surged over the banks again, sweeping through the first floor of the house.