The Missing (18 page)

He walked to the station and paid his fare south, purchasing his way over various railroads, different trains, boarding the first with a streamer of tickets in hand that would take him away from defeat and toward the rest of his life. And later, the locomotive breathing hard upon the long Kentucky hills under endless spoolings of steam, he dozed against a window, dreaming of nothing at all until the image of the girl’s bright face drifted back to him, but diminished now, muted like the glow of a jellyfish dying in silty water.

LINDA FOUND HIM skinny and pale. “Were they starving you on that boat? Not only don’t they pay anything, they can’t fry you a nice pork chop once in a while?”

“Steamboat food. Flour and grease.” They were looking out the back window at the rain, and he patted her behind. “But you’ll fatten me up.”

“After you get a good job I will.” She enjoyed teasing him, and he was drinking in her attention like a cold glass of water on an August afternoon.

He closed his arms around her. “You know, chère, you look good pregnant. Like peaches and cream.”

“Oh yeah? Want a bite?”

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING he entered the office of Crescent Security Division, a company that provided bank guards for the Gulf Coast region. Franco Crapinsano, the manager, was a first cousin of Sergeant Muscarella.

“Ay, Frenchie, I’m glad to see you come down here for the interview. Nice suit.”

“Thanks. Where will you send me to train?”

Franco laughed and put up his feet. “Lucky, you don’t need no trainin’. I can tell you what you need to know in fifteen minutes, tops.”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been a boss before.”

“Look, I been talking to the folks at Krine’s. You got brains. You big enough to be, how you say, formidable.” Franco smiled broadly, proud of this word.

“What exactly do I do?”

“You in charge of the twelve-man crews at the Louisiana Bank. You do the schedules, you figure the hours. Nobody’s gonna give you no crap because the guards are all over sixty, just making enough to pay their rent and buy enough pork and beans to keep ’em fartin’. I’ll tell you in a minute how to handle the Wells Fargo pickups and deliveries, how to proceed when they close the vault. It’s a snap.”

“I was wondering if you could tell me the salary.”

“It’s four dollars twenty-five cents a day.”

He sat back in the oak chair. “I made five seventy-five at Krine’s and was about to get a raise.”

Franco turned over a hand, palm up. “You had a good job there at Krine’s. We give you the uniforms and a pistol. You can work overtime for the restaurants.”

“I have to carry?”

“Yeah. You’ll be out on the floor with the geezers. The gun’s chambered for .38 New Police, the short cartridge. Real hard to kill anybody with it. You know, we had troubles a couple years ago about robberies.” Franco gave out a hearty laugh. “Shot three customers and no robbers.”

“I heard. You had trouble before, too.”

“Whatever. Just remember rule number one. If a robbery happens, everybody shoots. The bank got to feel we’re protectin’ their money. If they don’t, they gonna hire another agency.”

Sam looked at his left shoe. “The lobby at Louisiana Bank is all marble, as I remember.”

“So?”

“Ricochets.”

“Lucky, these guns is so weak a ricochet won’t hurt nobody too much. When we wing a customer, it’s just part of the business.”

“I see.”

“If you have a robbery, look at everybody’s gun after it’s over. If they ain’t at least one empty shell in a gun, you fire that man.”

He wanted to walk out, but he wondered what else he could do to make a living. He thought only of drinking smoke all night in a whorehouse lounge or watching his fingers disappear in the midnight clash of railroad couplers down in the freight yards. “All right,” he said quietly.

“Now, here’s what you do when the Wells Fargo wagon pulls up. The pump shotguns are stacked in the vault…”

The next day was Sunday and he and Linda went to early Mass. They sat sixteen rows back, and the priest began an incomprehensible sermon about the meaning of the Trinity. Sam started to wonder if he would have to go to confession if he shot someone at work. It then occurred to him that he could be shot himself, and with a better gun than he carried. Would it be immoral to expose himself to this danger? Then he thought of old New Orleans bank guards in general and couldn’t name one that had been killed.

* * *

AFTER TWO WEEKS in the lobby of the Louisiana Bank, he began to get the hang of things. He walked down to Baronne Street to do the paperwork on that branch’s crew, then walked back to the main office. The crew he worked with was composed of Mr. Almeda, a soft-voiced seventy-year-old Isleño from down in St. Bernard Parish; Aren, a fifty-eight-year-old albino gentleman; and sixty-five-year-old twins, Charlie and Jerry Boudreaux. The bank had been held up three times that year, and all of the men had fired their weapons, though only a relief teller had been wounded. Two gilded chandeliers bore bullet holes; there were graze marks along the marble counter facings; and several holes had been puttied up around the mahogany entrance to the lobby. There seemed to be more thugs in town every month, from Chicago or New Jersey, and they needed money to operate, so each year the number of bank robberies in the city had increased.

The job went smoothly. Two men, usually Charlie and Jerry, patrolled the lobby; two others walked the varnished wooden rails of the upper gallery, where the safety deposit boxes were; and Sam sat behind the main counter watching the teller gates and reading. Lately he’d been checking out westerns from the library, staying lost in illusions of gunfights. In the background he heard the chatter of customers, the echoing of high heels as the women stepped across the marble. He had an oak chair and desk almost as tiny as a phone table, and for hours he sat there, shoehorned in beside a water cooler, reading or writing down the arrival of armored-car deliveries and departures or the guards’ hours and schedules.

That winter in New Orleans was its usual mild self, but his house was drafty, and during the evenings he worked in the baby’s room, painting or tightening up the seal of the windows. He would read to Linda, and she would recount gossip from her side of the family gleaned from telephone calls. Once every two weeks his uncle Claude phoned from west Louisiana and spoke with him for half an hour, mostly in French. Sam pictured him standing next to a crank telephone in Letillier’s general store, in the back by the bins filled with dusty mule harnesses and kegs of horseshoes. The old man usually went through the catalog of cousins, telling what was happening with each of them. Sam would ask about people on the surrounding farms, nodding at the answers.

During one of their calls his uncle said, “Some time ago, you told me about a little girl you was looking for. You find her?”

He had never lied to his uncle before, and words began to stack up in his throat. “She’s all right.”

“Ah, good. You found her. I bet her parents were some happy.”

“She’s all right,” he repeated, with a slightly different inflection.

“Good. Most times, blood belongs with blood. Don’t forget that.”

To change the subject, he told him about the Cloats.

There was an astonished silence on the other end of the line. When the old man spoke, he sounded breathless. “For true? You know where they are?”

“I think I can find out.”

“It been twenty-six years they been suffering.”

“What? I didn’t understand what you said.” He thought some wires had crossed somewhere in the connection, that maybe he’d heard a fragment of another conversation on the line.

“It’s what the priest says, Sam. Sin is its own punishment. They got to live with what they did.”

He snorted. “You think they even worry about that?”

“Baby, what they did is who they are. It makes them cripples. Half-people.”

He thought for a long moment. “Nonc, do you think I should do something about them?”

At once, his uncle said, “Mais oui. Dust you hands together comme ça—pop pop, and forget about those people.”

Again he pictured his uncle, pinning the receiver between cheek and shoulder and striking his palms together in sliding, glancing blows. Pop pop. “Not worth the trouble?”

“Not Sam Simoneaux’s trouble. Who they are is trouble enough for them.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I ought to try to bring them a little extra grief.”

“Oho! So now you the grief man, eh? Look, stick to getting rid of a little grief, like you did for that child in France you told me about. Like that little girl you found for her parents.”

He looked at the floor and put a hand on the top of his head. “Yes.”

“That’s a great thing you did. You can look back all you life and say that. What can you look back and say about a killing? Especially one you didn’t have to do?”

He looked over at his wife, who was raising the flame in the gas heater. “I don’t know, nonc.”

“Yeah. You’ll be glad you don’t know.”

* * *

IT WAS A FEW DAYS before Christmas. The bank closed for lunch that day, and Sam and the other guards were at an oyster bar down the street. Mr. Almeda removed his cap and put it on the table and ran his fingers through his white hair. “Lucky, I need tomorrow off. My wife, she needs me to help with the holidays. It’s a big deal at my house.”

Sam put a dot of hot sauce on a small oyster and sucked it up off the shell. “Okay, I’ll call up Rosenbaum.”

Mr. Almeda nodded his gratitude. “All my kids come over with their kids. You got some kids, right, Lucky?”

“One on the way.”

“Somebody told me you had a little boy.”

He was reaching for another oyster, but his hand paused and then drew back. “He got a bad fever and died.”

Mr. Almeda made a face and pulled his head to the side. “I didn’t know. There’s nothing like losin’ a kid.”

“I’ll call Rosenbaum when we get back.”

Charlie Boudreaux put down his sandwich. “My brother got drownded swimming off Algiers Point maybe thirty-five years ago, and my old man never got over it. He didn’t live two years.”

Jerry, the other twin, never said anything unless asked a direct question and always agreed with what his brother said, perhaps thinking that to add anything would be redundant. But now, he said something. “The week after he drownded, Mother was ironin’ his clothes one afternoon, and when she realized what she was doing, she sat down and stared at the ironin’ board like she never seen it before. Then she put her head in her hands and cried for the first time. I remember her sayin’, ‘I used to have a boy in these clothes.’”

The waiter came and began banging down ironware cups of coffee on the table. “Hot stuff,” he called.

Charlie frowned and turned to his brother. “How come you never told me that?”

“I just now thought of it.”

Sam looked at the old guards. They were trying in their awkward way to tell him something about loss. Maybe they thought he was too young to know how serious it was to lose someone. Maybe they were right, for as time passed, he thought more of his son, how the baby felt when he held him twisting in his hands, twisting away even then. When it happened, he didn’t realize what it meant. His son was now more real to him than when he was alive, and this thought made his fingers shake as he lifted the coffee cup. He felt a hand on his back.

“Lucky.” It was Mr. Almeda, his gray eyes worried. “Let’s head back. This time of year. It’s bad in our line of work.”

“What?”

“Christmas. There’s almost always a robbery.”

“At our bank?” He put a hand on his badge.

“Somewhere in town. A branch bank in Gentilly went down yesterday, I heard. There’s usually a couple more. Just keep your eyes open.”

* * *

A HALF HOUR AFTER the bank opened, on a Friday, Sam was reading a novel about a lady piano player in a western saloon. He was in his little space to the rear of the water cooler, behind the tellers’ counter at the end. On his desk, a little red light ignited. It was a lens the size of a dime, sitting in a nickeled bezel, and he furrowed his brow, trying to remember what it was for. And then he did. The silent alarm had been tripped. Instead of poking his head out and around the cooler, he looked at a mirror positioned to show the counter. In the reflection he saw all three tellers bailing money from their drawers. Three men, each wearing the same type of soft cap, were bellied up to the cages, and on the counter in front of the nearest teller, an older woman named Irene, he could see a crumpled note. He put down the novel and tried to think, but only the hum of instinct was buzzing through his nerves. He wasn’t wearing his cap or uniform coat, so if he stood up with a bunch of papers in his hand they might just think he’s a clerk. And then what? Would he shoot someone? He undid his belt, slid his holster off, and rebuckled. The little Police Positive revolver he stuck in his waistband, in the small of his back. Gathering up the week’s duty logs, he stood and walked out of his cover, turning right, away from the tellers, as if to go out from behind the counter into the lobby. As he approached the gate leading to the open floor his mind was running like an express train toward a storm-weakened trestle. What would he do? Walk up to the three robbers, pull his gun, and threaten to kill them? Here was some type of chasm to be leaped, and it occurred to him that such an extreme act might not be his job. His mind shut down completely. As he stepped around the end of the counter, he suddenly visualized his piano and hoped he wouldn’t be shot in the fingers.

The man nearest him drew a pistol from his coat pocket and leveled it at him. “Guard, sit down.”

He couldn’t help saying, as he bent his knees, “How did you know I’m a guard?”

The gunman snickered. “Nice stripe on your pants leg, sheik.”

In the edge of his vision he saw Charlie and Jerry looking out from behind the open brass doors of the bank’s entrance. The robbers backed away from the counter together, holding their bulging canvas bags. From above came an echoing click, and then the pop of a revolver. Mr. Almeda was lying on his oyster belly on the upper gallery, firing from between two balusters. He missed. For the next six seconds gunshots rattled through the lobby like a pack of firecrackers as the robbers blasted away at Mr. Almeda and then at Aren, who drifted like a cloud at the opposite mezzanine rail, squeezing off shaky two-handed shots. Charlie and Jerry stuck only their hands from behind the heavy doors, firing blind, pumping a round every second into the center of the lobby, the tellers screaming, plaster dust and wood chips raining down and the robbers slipping on the glossy marble floor as they blindly emptied their revolvers and ran toward the doors. Sam sat on the floor, his arms crossed over his head, and when the shooting stopped he heard the hysterical tellers and the hollering of a middle-aged man in khaki shirt and pants sitting in a potted plant and holding his left shoulder. The robbers had run out into the sunlight, and he heard their shoe leather clapping sidewalk down toward Decatur Street. One of the twins, Jerry, walked over to him, and Sam thought he was going to lay a comforting hand on his head. Instead, he pulled Sam’s revolver from his waistband, walked out in front of the building to an enormous cast-iron planter, and fired the gun once into the dirt. Back inside, he handed Sam the Colt. “You know the rule, don’t you?”