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.