The Vanished Man

expecting an important call today he’d hurried—to the extent he ever hurried—to Elma’s Diner right after Bible school.
    Hobbs Wentworth was a bear-sized man with a thin red beard around his face and a fringe of curly hair, lighter than his beard. The word “career” was one that nobody in Canton Falls, New York, had ever associated with Hobbs, which wasn’t to say that he didn’t work like an ox. He’d give a man his money’s worth, as long as the job was out of doors, didn’t require too much calculating and his employer was a white Christian.
    Hobbs was married to a quiet, dusty woman named Cindy, who spent most of her time homeschooling, cooking, sewing and visiting with women friends who did the same. Hobbs himself spent most of his time working and hunting and spending evenings with men friends, drinking and arguing (though most of these “arguments” should be called “agreements” sincehe and his buddies were all extremely like-minded).
    A lifelong resident of Canton Falls, he liked it here. There was plenty of good hunting land, virtually none of it posted. People were solid and good-natured and knew their heads from their rumps (“like-minded” applied to almost everyone in Canton Falls). Hobbs had lots of opportunities to do the things he enjoyed. Like teaching Sunday school, of all things. An eighth-grade graduate with a stolen mortarboard but no learning to show for it, Hobbs had never in the Lord’s universe thought anybody’d want him to teach.
    But he had a flair for kids’ Sunday school, it turned out. He didn’t do prayer sessions or counseling or any Jesus-Loves-Me-This-I-Know singing. . . . Nope, all he did was tell Bible stories to the youngsters. But he was an instant hit—thanks largely to his refusal to stick to the party line. For instance, in his account, instead of Jesus’ feeding the crowds with two fish and five loaves, Hobbs reported how the Son of God went bow hunting and killed a deer from a hundred yards away and gutted and dressed it in the town square himself and he fed the people that way. (To illustrate the story Hobbs brought his compound Clearwater MX Flex to the classroom and, chunk, sent a tempered-tip arrow three inches into a cinder-block wall, to the delight of the kids.)
    Having finished one of those classes now, he walked inside Elma’s. The waitress walked up to him. “Hey, Hobbs. Pie?”
    “Naw, make it a Vernors and a cheese omelette. Extra Kraft. Hey, d’I get a phone—”
    Before he could finish she handed him a slip of paper. On it were the words: Call me—JB.
    She asked, “That Jeddy? Sounded like him. Since the police’ve been ’round, those troopers, I mean, I ain’t see him ’t’all.”
    He ignored her question and said only, “Hold that order for a minute.” As he went to the pay phone, fishing hard for coins in his jeans, his mind went right back to a lunch he’d had two weeks ago at the Riverside Inn over in Bedford Junction. It’d been him and Frank Stemple and Jeddy Barnes from Canton Falls and a man named Erick Weir, who Barnes later took to calling Magic Man, because he was, of all things, a professional conjurer.
    Barnes had puffed up Hobbs’s day ten times by smiling and standing up when Hobbs arrived, saying to Weir, “Here, sir, meet the best shot we got in the county. Not to mention bow hunter. And a damn sharp operator too.”
    Hobbs had sat over the fancy food at the fancy restaurant, proud but nervous too (he’d never before even dreamed about eating at the Riverside), poking his fork into the daily special and listening as Barnes and Stemple told him how they’d met Weir. He was sort of like a mercenary soldier, which Hobbs knew all about, being a subscriber to Soldier of Fortune. Hobbs noticed the scars on the man’s neck and the deformed fingers, wondering what kind of fight he’d been in that’d cause that kind of damage. Napalm, maybe.
    Barnes had been reluctant to even meet with Weir at first, of course, thinking entrapment. But Magic Man had put him right at ease by telling them to watch the news on one particular day. The lead story was about the murder of a Mexican gardener—an illegal immigrant—working for a rich family in a townnearby. Weir brought Barnes the dead man’s wallet. A trophy, like a buck’s antlers.
    Weir had been right up front. He’d told them that he’d picked the Mexican because of Barnes’s views on immigrants but he personally didn’t believe in their