The woman behind the counter took the book back, and he asked where Lilac Street was.
“Why, it’s up the hill three blocks and to the right.” She smiled at him and became a template for the rest of the population, people with something to smile about.
He left the store and began walking through a neighborhood of big, well-kept houses, some of them made of stone inset with transoms of stained glass. It occurred to him that he’d never imagined who had the girl-that is, what kind of people. If he’d had to guess he would’ve said outlaws, or sick-minded people who wanted a lightning rod for their electrical meanness, or just someone who wanted a kid to train up as a serving girl. As he walked deeper into the fine neighborhood, he realized that Morris Hightower’s lead was another fool’s errand, that there were no child thieves living in houses like these. People who hired thugs to steal little girls didn’t live in fine mansions with copper trim and beveled-glass entries, with sunrooms and carriageways, wrought-iron fences and belvederes.
He reached 653 Lilac Street and stood at the fence, his head cocked up at the three-story Victorian soaring into the Kentucky sky. Seventy-five feet of billiard-table lawn stretched to the marble front steps that led up to the leaded glass door. Another dead end. He would walk back into the business district and find the railroad station and leave his usual plea with the agent. Suddenly a woman who seemed to be in her late twenties opened the front door and put a milk bottle out with a note in it. She was thin and ordinary-looking, but under her brown bangs were a set of intense eyes, and she fixed them on him for a long moment before turning inside. She actually looked at him. Noticed him. And there was connection in that look, as though she might somehow be on the same page as he was. He could have turned and walked back to the boat, but after standing there for a full minute he decided instead to walk to the far corner, and when he arrived there, he saw that an alley ran through the middle of the block, parallel with Lilac Street. He entered it and walked along the rear of the great homes, casually inspecting their garages and wash houses and flower gardens. Behind 653 he stopped alongside a low iron fence and saw a young girl in the yard with short golden hair sticking up at all angles, idly nudging a rubber ball through the grass. Seated on a bench next to a marble birdbath was the woman he’d seen out front. He waved at her and smiled, trying to control himself. He glanced at the girl to see if her face matched the cameo burned into his brain.
“Hi,” he said. “This your little girl?”
She looked at him as though she suspected he were dim-witted. “Naw. I just take care of her sometimes. I work for her folks.”
“She looks like a happy little thing.” He wondered what he could say that would keep the conversation going. “I’ve got a niece at home looks exactly the same.” Then the child turned toward him, and with a thrill he knew it was her. “Is she happy, too? Cheerful, I mean.” He fought to steady his voice.
Vessy took out a handkerchief and blew her nose, looking at him with suspicion. “You not from around here, are you?”
He gave her a laugh. “No, I’m visiting an army buddy who lives up the hill a bit. I left a prescription at Baumer’s and decided to take a walk while they filled it.”
Vessy nodded. “That druggist is the slowest old man. Rolls them pills one at a time.”
“What’s the little girl’s name?”
“Madeline. They tell me she’s a orphan and as far as her being cheerful is concerned, I don’t know. I sure would be if the man who calls himself my daddy was the richest man in town and I had somebody waitin’ on me hand and foot, plus a free-spendin’ momma and music teachers and all.”
He looked up and down the street and could smell the wealth of the neighborhood. Even the dirt under his thin soles seemed rich.
“She’s young to be taking music, isn’t she?”
“She can sing like a Victrola, that one. She’s liable to perform in a opera house somewheres when she grows up.”
“Nice people, the ones who adopted her, I bet.”
“Sometimes they ain’t too nice to me, but that one there, they spend like a princess on her.”
He looked at the girl’s yellow dress, at the silk bands running through the hem. Her shoes looked to be new strap-on flats and her barrettes were banded with garnets. Parents who bought her such things would send her to the finest schools and provide for her in a manner he could never imagine. He caught the girl’s eye, but her expression was unreadable. To her he was only a stranger in wrinkled clothes. “She looks like a princess in the making, anyway,” he said at last.
Vessy stood up and grabbed the child’s hands, raising her arms straight up and wiggling them. “Are you a princess yet, sweet thing?” she crooned.
The child looked at him boldly, as if to ask, “By what authority do you want to change any of this?”
“I better get down to Baumer’s,” he said, moving on.
Vessy began to swing the child in a slow circle, chanting “Sweet thing’s a princess,” and the girl giggled brightly. He listened to their playing voices as he walked down the alley.
***
SAM ATE lunch by himself in the café and sleepwalked through the two o’clock trip. That afternoon he lay in his bunk and drank from Charlie Duggs’s bottle, wondering what to do, whether or not to rob the girl of a good life and cause her to live in a freezing flat in Cincinnati while her mother scrambled to buy what poor food she could, what cheap clothes, what cheap life. The fact that he had survived well enough without natural parents settled on him. Had they not died, he might have been living barefoot in a muddy cane field in south Louisiana. But he couldn’t miss what he never possessed, and he knew that the girl had a better memory of her folks. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to decide what to do, and in the course of the afternoon he changed his mind a dozen times.
The Ambassador cruised that night and Sam watched the people from Ohio and Kentucky behaving themselves, people who seemed to be cut from a different bolt of cloth than he was. He thought he might wire Elsie, even though she would be in the middle of suffering through the awful transition caused by Ted’s death. He doubted that the local sheriff would take his word that Lily was abducted, and knew that a stranger would never be believed in this town, not against a man living on Lilac Street. Mostly he worried about what he was taking from Lily. Isn’t that what parents wanted most for their children? A better chance at living a prosperous life? Especially a single parent with a teenager to feed and raise, an unemployed single parent who would never in her life have more than ten dollars in her pocketbook at one time.
When the band played “Home, Sweet Home” and the boat rubbed against the shore at midnight, Sam helped stack tables and started with the sweepdown and kept working, finishing up the Texas and mounting to the roof to go after pigeon droppings and cinders in the dark, sweeping the tarred surface by memory as the big bell banged and the whistle ripped through its departure song, the stars swinging above as the boat turned upriver, its escape pipes sending long breaths of steam up against the night sky. He walked to the stern and leaned on his broom, watching the lights of Graysoner slide backwards on the dark Ohio. Behind him he heard a pilothouse window slide open and Mr. Brandywine’s nasal question, “What’s wrong, son?”
That word, “son,” hit the back of his neck like a stone. Any man could be anyone’s father, was that it? He turned in the dark. “I’m just trying to wear out this broom.”
“You can’t fool me. I can read you like a book.” The old man was hollering over his shoulder now, stepping on the spokes of the great wheel.
Sam took a swipe at the dark deck and said, under his breath, “Turn the page, old man.”
***
AFTER THE LAST CRUISE at the little town of Aurora, he quit, telling the captain his wife needed him at home. He knew the boat would wind up in Cincinnati, and he couldn’t face seeing Elsie or August. After he was paid off, Charlie found him in the cabin, packing.
“Givin’ up?”
&
nbsp; “I guess so.”
“I know what you’ll do. Go after the Cloats.”
“That’s not it.”
“But you don’t want to say it, so you can tend to things on the sly.”
“You’re reading too many of those detective books.”
“Well, if you need a hand, I’m your man.”
He snapped his cardboard suitcase shut and turned away from the bed. “I appreciate it.” He would let him think what he wanted.
“What about the little girl?”
He shook his head. “Some things you can’t do anything about. Or maybe I’m not the man to do ’em.”
Charlie seemed to consider this. “Well, you gave it a good shot. Look me up after the season. I’m in the book, as they say.”
He walked out as the calliope began caterwauling up on the roof. He stopped and said goodbye to several people, waiters and mates who’d helped him civilize the crowds. On the first deck he walked back to the engine room to say goodbye to the engineers, who were working the condensate out of the engines, the big piston rods slowly paying in and out. Bit Benton came over and asked him to check on their house in New Orleans, and he told him he would.
Bit took off his gloves and reached out his hand. “Hate to see you go. You’re a good egg.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, so he shook hands soberly and walked out the gangway. On the riverbank he turned and watched the two o’clock excursion head out, the black band playing hot and heavy for the high schoolers and their parents, “I’m Just Wild About Harry” simmering and kicked ragged with a hard downbeat, Old Man Brandywine ringing bells for more speed and blowing the whistle, the Ambassador wearing the hymning plume of steam like a feather in its cap. The music pulsed out from under the gingerbread rooflines and sailed above all the scrubbed white paint, the fresh enamel cooking off the hot stacks, the black smoke rising like a sooty prosperity. For a moment he was tempted to join up again after Cincinnati for the few nickels the job paid, for the music and the friends. Then came the thought of Linda and what the next year was going to bring for them, and he became excited about having his own child again, being with Linda in New Orleans, eating good food, getting work that paid, a job where he didn’t have to war with drunks and dodge vomit.
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.
Chapter Twenty-two
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 ch
ecking 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.”
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