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, wondering 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.”
