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?”

“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.