Tim Gautreaux - The Missing

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.

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.”

Willa shot her husband a look. “Why not Mary, isn’t that a pretty name?”

“Or Sue. How about Sweet Sue?”

“She’s Lily,” the child repeated, embracing the doll as though she’d just recognized it. “ Ein alter Freund. ”

“Look at your other presents,” Acy said quickly, wedging a sparkling box between her and the doll.

She unwrapped a painting set, a tin mechanical jumping dog, a little Limoges tea set, a new frock, a bright yellow child’s umbrella, a musical top embedded with red and green stones. She looked at each gift calmly, smiled at the jumping dog, though she was not strong enough to wind it up. The last of the gifts was a tin piano with two connected minstrel figures. When Acy wound the key, a tin woman jittered before the piano and a tin man in blackface wiggled as though playing his banjo, while the music box inside played “Camptown Races.” Acy sat on the floor. “You like this, Madeline? See, the little niggers move in time to the music.”

The child looked at him appraisingly. “They’re not playing, silly. It’s a trick.”

Acy scowled. “Well, I think it’s damned funny.”

The girl began singing the lyrics, all of them.

Acy stood up and handed Willa a box, which she quickly opened. Inside was a ring bearing a rectangular-cut diamond. She smiled and slipped the ring on next to last year’s gift. “I love it, Ace. The shape is so different. I bet it’s the only one in town.”

She gave him a watch, an expensive Hamilton pocket model, and he set it and slid it into his jacket pocket.

Down next to the tree, the girl was singing, almost under her breath, “Gwine to run all night, gwine to run all day…”

THROUGHOUT JANUARY, Sam worked at the bank with the empty shell corroding in his gun’s cylinder. If there was another gunfight, he’d show the spent casing and be done with it. He told Linda that he didn’t know if he could kill a criminal. He wasn’t sure why not, though he thought about it a great deal. The robbery returned to him in dreams, and upon waking, he would imagine all the bad things that could have happened. He became nervous on the job once he understood that any day, another group of pistol-wielding men could appear in the bank’s broad doorway.

On an icy day in early February, Mr. Almeda was on one side of the entrance and the ghostly Aren on the other when Nestor Cabrio walked in. Every policeman and security guard knew him as a thug’s thug who specialized in robbing jewelry stores and didn’t worry about who he had to shoot down to escape. He’d do a job, then disappear for a year. But a few months after his picture appeared in the Picayune and in the post office, people would begin to forget. He’d been robbing stores and banks in New Orleans all his life, more or less once a year.