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.