The Missing (19 page)

He looked at the gun. “I know the rule.” And then he stood up, wondering about every rule in the world. “Three of ’em. Man, we were lucky.” He raised his eyes. “You guys up there all right?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Almeda called. “I think Aren peed his pants, though.”

Aren hung his ghost of a face over the rail. “Did we hit anybody?”

“Well, somebody winged Mr. Halloran over there.” Sam pointed to the gentleman seated in the plant, now being tended to by the assistant manager, who was packing the wound with a handkerchief.

* * *

AT THE END of the day, he rode home on the rocking streetcar wondering what his wife would do if one day he were killed. He knew what emptiness his child would face if he were never in its life. And there are times when robbers don’t get away, when a lucky shot knocks out their brains on the bank steps, and then what void does that death cause, what unopened front door, what cold side of the bed, what raised and empty arms of a child uncrossed by shadow? Do people ever think of such things if they’ve never been forced to greet the phantom waiting in every room, to long for the ghost in the kitchen chair? He closed his eyes and wondered what his father had looked like. He could picture his uncle’s features, and taking these for a pattern, he tried all the way home to imagine a face to fit the loss.

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, Acy and Willa, he in a brocade smoking jacket and she in a fur-lined housecoat, opened the door to the girl’s bedroom and watched her sleep, the scene bearing a likeness to any number of sentimental illustrations found in Willa’s magazines. Acy walked over and picked her up out of the covers but she straightened her legs against him, and he let her slide down.

“I have to pee-pee,” she said.

Willa reached down and gave her a little shake. “Don’t say that. It sounds nasty. I’ve told you to ask to go to the bathroom.”

“I have to,” she said, rubbing her arm.

Downstairs the girl came into the presence of the tree, a tall, aromatic spruce loaded with etched glass balls ordered from Chicago and strings of bubbling electric lights. “Go ahead, Madeline,” Willa coaxed. “Open your presents.” She led her to a box wrapped in shining red paper embossed with silver bells. The child stood stock-still, then looked up at the two adults, then past them, surveying the room for something. “Go ahead, dear. Aren’t you curious?”

The girl slowly tore the paper away and opened the box, revealing a doll with blond hair and blue eyes, dressed in green lederhosen with red piping and wearing a felt hat topped by a cocked feather. “Hey,” she said, smiling and sitting down on the rug. She pulled the doll free of its wrapping and examined its joints and clothes, moved it into sitting position, and fingered its eyeballs open and closed.

“Do you like it?” Acy asked. “It’s the best money could buy.”

“I like it,” the child said.

Willa leaned over her, and the girl frowned at the shadow. “What do you say?”

“What?” She looked up into the cumulus of Willa’s hair.

“Thank you?”

“Thank you, Santa Claus,” the girl murmured, pressing her thumbs gently against the doll’s eyes.

Acy lit a cigarette. “Don’t you think your doll deserves a name?”

“Like what?”

“Whatever you want. She’s yours.”

“I’ll call her Lily.”

Willa shot her husband a look. “Why not Mary, isn’t that a pretty name?”

“Or Sue. How about Sweet Sue?”

“She’s Lily,” the child repeated, embracing the doll as though she’d just recognized it. “Ein alter Freund.”

“Look at your other presents,” Acy said quickly, wedging a sparkling box between her and the doll.

She unwrapped a painting set, a tin mechanical jumping dog, a little Limoges tea set, a new frock, a bright yellow child’s umbrella, a musical top embedded with red and green stones. She looked at each gift calmly, smiled at the jumping dog, though she was not strong enough to wind it up. The last of the gifts was a tin piano with two connected minstrel figures. When Acy wound the key, a tin woman jittered before the piano and a tin man in blackface wiggled as though playing his banjo, while the music box inside played “Camptown Races.” Acy sat on the floor. “You like this, Madeline? See, the little niggers move in time to the music.”

The child looked at him appraisingly. “They’re not playing, silly. It’s a trick.”

Acy scowled. “Well, I think it’s damned funny.”

The girl began singing the lyrics, all of them.

Acy stood up and handed Willa a box, which she quickly opened. Inside was a ring bearing a rectangular-cut diamond. She smiled and slipped the ring on next to last year’s gift. “I love it, Ace. The shape is so different. I bet it’s the only one in town.”

She gave him a watch, an expensive Hamilton pocket model, and he set it and slid it into his jacket pocket.

Down next to the tree, the girl was singing, almost under her breath, “Gwine to run all night, gwine to run all day…”

* * *

THROUGHOUT JANUARY, Sam worked at the bank with the empty shell corroding in his gun’s cylinder. If there was another gunfight, he’d show the spent casing and be done with it. He told Linda that he didn’t know if he could kill a criminal. He wasn’t sure why not, though he thought about it a great deal. The robbery returned to him in dreams, and upon waking, he would imagine all the bad things that could have happened. He became nervous on the job once he understood that any day, another group of pistol-wielding men could appear in the bank’s broad doorway.

On an icy day in early February, Mr. Almeda was on one side of the entrance and the ghostly Aren on the other when Nestor Cabrio walked in. Every policeman and security guard knew him as a thug’s thug who specialized in robbing jewelry stores and didn’t worry about who he had to shoot down to escape. He’d do a job, then disappear for a year. But a few months after his picture appeared in the Picayune and in the post office, people would begin to forget. He’d been robbing stores and banks in New Orleans all his life, more or less once a year.

As soon as he walked in, Cabrio drew a big break-action Smith & Wesson revolver from his pocket and turned toward Mr. Almeda, who was chatting with a customer. Aren knew who he was at once, stepped out from behind the door, and shot him in the back before Cabrio’s gun arm could straighten out. He twisted and fell, yelling with pain and ripping off shots at random. Aren stood over him and shot him in both shoulders, the left side of his stomach, and twice in the gun arm, placing the shots carefully as though Cabrio were a skiff and he was trying to sink it.

Sam was filling out his duty log for the week when the first shot went off. He stood up and watched the old albino looming over a man and firing at point-blank range. When Aren ran out of bullets, Mr. Almeda crab-walked closer, stepped on Cabrio’s bloody arm, and took the pistol away. Sam ran over to a phone and called the closest precinct, then the nearest hospital. The robber was hollering something in a foreign language, arching his back and rolling in his own blood. Sam didn’t want to study the gory mess at the door, so he drew his gun and sidled past the scene to check the street for an accomplice. Outside, the air was crisp and breezy, the sky blue. It was a nice day, and he decided to stay out in it forever. Somebody had to do this job, he decided, but not him. It took forty minutes for the mud-spattered ambulance to arrive, and when the attendants got to him, Nestor Cabrio began to curse them in Spanish with great gusto and creativity while Mr. Almeda translated for the other three guards, who laughed and put up their weapons.

* * *

WHEN HE SAW Linda waiting right inside the door of their house, he blurted out, “I quit the job.”

“That’s nice.” She pushed him backwards onto the porch.

“I’m sorry.”

“Right. That’s nice.” She pushed him again toward the steps, harder.

“Linda, I’m real, real sorry.” His voice began to rise in pitch, and for a moment he thought she wanted to push him across the street and out of her life altogether.

“Yeah. Let’s go now.”

“Go?”

“My water’s broke.”

For a moment he glanced at the house, wondering if she meant a pipe had burst. Then he knew. He put her in the ratty Dodge, noting that she’d loaded her bag in already. It took five minutes to start the engine, but eventually they got to the hospital. At eleven o’clock that night she delivered a boy, and by twelve they were in a ward curtained off from other women in the room. They named the child Christopher, and Sam took him, looked at his features, and saw a chin that was his, eyes that were Linda’s, and a nose he didn’t recognize. The nose would probably change over time, but it was prominent for a newborn’s, almost like his uncle Claude’s. With a thrill he understood that part of this baby would be his father and mother. For much of the child’s life, he would wonder where his ears, cheekbones, feet, angers, inclinations, and talents originated, whether from the killed folks in Troumal or from hundreds of years back in Nova Scotia. The baby writhed in his arms, a wailing package of history.

* * *

THOUGH HER MOTHER and aunts were clopping around the house all day, and everybody related to her plus the neighbors came by to see this new Christopher, Sam stayed home in the chaos and helped Linda with the baby. In the nights, after feeding him, she would hand the boy over and go back to bed. Rocking the snorting infant against his belly in the dark, he would feel how warm he was, like a soft little engine slowly burning up the milk.

One night, very late, at the beginning of April, Sam got up with Linda, and while she fed, went to stand on the back steps. He looked up at a rare clear sky graveled with stars and thought about going to work on the railroad, about buying paint for the hallway, about discovering that Christopher was another part of his own body. He couldn’t imagine being without him. He wasn’t feeling mushy-hearted; it was just a fact that if anyone took him away, it would be like losing a part of himself. As improbable as it seemed, he now missed his first boy even more. He closed his eyes and saw the ghosting of galaxies on his retinas, and a frightening patch of paleness drifting in his imagination among the real lights. He knew what the cloudy image was—though amorphous and faded, he knew. Going into the house, he took his son to rock and tried to forget what he’d just remembered. But that night he couldn’t sleep.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING at the breakfast table, taking his time, haltingly, he told his wife the truth. She was furious.

“Sam, how the hell could you do that?” She sat back hard in her chair and banged her hands on the table.

“Like I said, these people were so well off—”

“Since when is being well off a license to steal children?”

He winced, her words going in like pins. “I’m going to let Elsie know right now.”

She folded her arms. “Sam, you of all people.”

He looked away, stung to the heart.

“You had to hold your own child before you could understand what the Wellers were missing? I guess I can grant you some understanding there. But only some. Honey, what were you thinking when you walked away from that girl?”

He rolled his head back and stared at the ceiling. “Again, I thought she’d be better off.”

Linda began to speak with her hands. “Maybe you’d do what you did if Elsie and her boy were murderers or some other kind of terrible people. But they’re like us, for God’s sake, just struggling to get by.”

He turned his face toward her. “So what do I do?”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to be you for all the chicory coffee in Orleans Parish.”

“I’ve got to come up with a good story.”

“Baby, you’re a fool if you think a lie will fix things between you and them.”

“I guess I’ll have to go up there and tell them face-to-face,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes. Her voice was low and matter-of-fact. “And how will you buy the train tickets, and how will you pay to feed yourself? And what about hotel bills? My family’s helped us out too much already.”

“Well, what can I do?”

“Write a letter.”

He tilted his head. “A letter.”

“A good one. If I was Mrs. Weller, I’d rather have it laid out in print than look at your bumbling face trying to gild the lily on this one.”

He pulled close to the table as she stood up and got a tablet and an envelope. “I know you’ve got her address.”

“Somewhere.”

She left the room, and he wrote one full page, then tore it up. He began another, and then a second page began to flow under a freshly filled fountain pen. He got up and drank a tumbler of water from the tap, sat down, and wrote three more pages.

The sunlight was slanting through the kitchen window when Linda returned holding the baby. “You have it all worked out?”

“I think so. I’ll need an extra stamp, though.”

* * *

THE NEXT DAY he started for the post office but stepped into a tavern on Magazine Street for a beer, sitting under the moth-eaten deer head at the end of the bar and watching the silver chains of bubbles rise in his mug like bad ideas. Though he wondered if he was condemning Lily to a hard, dumb life by sending his letter, he was ashamed to acknowledge the chief reason for his worry, that Elsie and August would hate him body and soul for not telling them at once when he’d located the girl. He had a second beer, then walked into the poker game in the back room, sat down, and won thirty dollars playing spit.

He never made it to the post office and hid the letter in his sock drawer. Another day to think things over might help. Maybe events had gone too far for a letter to do any good. In his little parlor he played piano for an hour, working on embellishments, on forgetting.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING there was a rude rapping at the front door, and on the porch he found a ruddy, birdlike man, vaguely familiar, a blunt stuck in the corner of his mouth. He wore a seersucker coat but no tie, and his straw boater was sliding off the side of his head in the sunny breeze. He made a motion with a stubby finger. “You the excursion-boat man?”

“I was.”

“My brother called me up and said you lived about four blocks away from me. Damned if you don’t.”

“Who’s your brother?”

“Station agent in Greenville. He sent you a telegram up to Evansville and wanted to know did you get it.”

The notion that someone else was concerned about his search made him take a step backwards in the door frame. “Yeah. I should’ve sent one back to thank him.”

The little man eyed him harshly. “Morris wants to know did the message help you any? He don’t burn much daylight helping folks out, you know. It’s not his nature.”

“Yes,” he said. “It helped a lot.”

“You find the little girl, did you?”

Sam looked at the brother, who seemed a bit concerned himself over a lost child he’d never seen or heard of before getting a phone call from the wilds of Mississippi. “Yeah, sure. Let him know she’s been found safe.”

The man removed his cigar and shook Sam’s hand. “All right, then. I’ll tell him that. Nice to meetcher.”

“Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t write him back.”

“That’s all right. He’s used to sorry.” He threw his cigar into the street and headed up the sidewalk at a brisk walk, his bright seersucker flapping in the breeze.

Sam went out to the end of his walk and watched Morris Hightower’s brother striding under the oaks, his jacket winking white in the sun. He decided it was a scary visit—that he’d somehow been called to accounts.