The Missing

by Tim Gautreaux

  “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?”

  He looked at the gun. “I know the rule.” And then he stood up, w
ondering 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.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  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.