“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 Isleno 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 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. “
At once, his uncle said, “
Again he pictured his uncle, pinning the receiver between cheek and shoulder and striking his palms together in sliding, glancing blows.
“Not Sam Simoneaux’s trouble. Who they are is trouble enough for
“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,
“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.”
