Authors: Tim Gautreaux
She looked up at him with her pained eyes and said that a live person was more frightening than a dead one. It was a live person who blew up her house.
He looked again at the burning thatch roof. “C’était un accident,” he said. “La guerre est finie.”
“Non,” she said. The girl told him that it was not over for her, and she began weeping again, thrusting her bloody bandage up at him.
He sat down next to her on the stone wall and pulled her head against his chest. She smelled unwashed, and a louse came up between his fingers, but he held her close, repeating “It’s over, it’s over,” as she shook her head, and keened, “Jamais, jamais pour moi.”
* * *
HE SPENT the rest of the day preparing the house, boarding up a blown-out window, remounting the front door, and as he worked he told her about his childhood, and where he lived now. He showed her how to make fires, though she assured him that she was wise to the chore, and he explained how to clean and rebandage her wound. When the daylight began to fade he told her he was sorry for what happened to the other house, and she gave him a worried look and asked if he was going to shoot his cannon again. He said no, that they’d made an experiment that had failed.
“Bon. Si la fusillade a enfin arrêté, peut-être mes voisins seront de retour.”
He set a plate on the rough kitchen table in front of her, and began rummaging for something to put on it, wondering how she would manage until someone showed up to help. She had lost everyone. He asked her if she knew how to read.
“J’étais la première dans ma classe,” she said, throwing her head up.
In a cabinet in another room he had found a small library, and he brought a few books out for her, setting them next to her plate. She brushed her dark hair back and picked one of them up. There was a translation of Dickens and another of Twain, and editions of Flaubert and Stendhal, names he didn’t recognize. “Peut-être ceux-ci peuvent t’aider à passer le temps.”
She opened the book with her bloody hand. “Monsieur Chanceux, ma mère m’a dit que le temps passe sans notre aide.”
* * *
THAT EVENING he rode the bay back to his unit, arriving well after dark and reporting what he’d discovered, that he’d left a child with candles and eight shriveled potatoes and some rations from the horse’s saddlebags. The men were glad the stray shell hadn’t done even more damage, but Sam saw nothing to be happy about. His uncle had taught him that what he did in life, good or bad, could seldom be undone.
The lieutenant pulled from his tunic a packet delivered a half hour earlier by motorcycle courier, then bent next to the truck out of the wind and tried to read a message by matchlight. “We were so busy waiting for you and sharing the excellent brandy with the poor motorcyclist that I forgot to read this.” After a moment, his head snapped up. “Well, it’s over.”
“What we got to blow up now?” Sam asked, holding his cup out to Robicheaux’s jug.
“Nothing.” The lieutenant threw the packet into the ruined truck and smiled all around. “Most teams have been ordered back to Paris. All cleanup has been ordered stopped, and for some reason our little group’s being sent to the south of France. Makes me wonder why they exiled us out here in the first place.”
“They had this fancy idea in their heads,” Sam said, feeling the brandy burn in his throat.
“What? An illusion, you mean?”
“Is that what they call it? I meant some general who’s never been out here had a fancy idea we could sweep up this place with a whisk broom and a dustpan. When you think about a problem for thirty seconds instead of a week like you should, you come up with one of those illusions you’re talking about.”
“Oh, sit down and have a drink,” the lieutenant told him.
Sam held out an open hand toward the battlefield. “Do you think I can come back and check on the little girl?”
“No, absolutely not. We have our orders.”
“What about later? On my leave?”
“We’re going a long ways away, and I’d bet straight home after that.”
“I have to see about her.”
The lieutenant took a swallow from a tin cup. “You’re not exactly a tourist over here. And you can’t pop some French kid into your knapsack for the trip home.” The brandy was making the lieutenant talkative and bold. He drained the cup. “I’m sorry, but she’ll have to take her chances like the rest of us.”
Sam leaned back against the truck and ran his hand along the enormous hole in the hood. The piece of shrapnel could just as well have crashed through him. “The little French girl called me Lucky. Like a name.”
“Why’s that?”
“For getting here the day the Armistice was signed. For missing everything.”
“There’s worse nicknames,” the lieutenant said, walking over to where the other men were huddled in blankets, passing the huge jug.
Sam stared at the moonstruck wreckage around him that extended from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and beyond, understanding that Amélie’s lot was but one particle of the overall catastrophe, that mothers from Nebraska to Mesopotamia were setting tables for diminished families, and countless children were waiting for the sound of a door opening and the claiming voices of their blood. He wanted in the worst way to help the girl, but he was as carried along by the war’s events as she was and would be a hundred miles away by the next evening.
Robicheaux called out from his blanket spread along a fallen tree. “Simoneaux, viens ici, petit boogalee.”
He walked toward the voice. “Let me have a pull on that jug if you haven’t dirtied it with your spit.”
“This brandy has a lot of fire,” Comeaux said. “You could disinfect a urinal with it.”
Sam drank until his eyes watered. “Maudit fils d’putain!” he exclaimed.
“I thought you give up speakin’ French,” Robicheaux said.
“This stuff’ll make you speak Chinese.” But he took another swallow, and after a few minutes, another, for a breeze had come up and the wind was ice. Comeaux told a joke, but no one laughed, and the lieutenant tried to explain what life was like in Indiana, but no one listened to him. After a long period of quiet someone said out of the dark, “I can’t believe they expected us to do any good.”
“Yes,” the lieutenant began, raising an arm toward the north, “think of all the millions of tons of stuff lying out there that didn’t explode.”
Sam’s gaze followed the gesture, and saddened by the day’s events, he said, “But think of every bit that did.”
1921
SAM RETURNED from Europe with the notion that the surface appearance of things was not to be trusted, that the world was a more dangerous place than he’d thought. Like most of his fellow soldiers, he didn’t completely understand what he’d been through. Some of his friends came back shell-shocked, depressed, suspicious, and disoriented. Most got jobs and tried to work their way out of the war, and, in time, succeeded—artillerymen selling cars, machine gunners baking bread. Sam was thankful he hadn’t killed anybody, because the men he knew who had were having a rough time just walking down Canal Street, where a car might backfire and send them to the pavement.
For the past two years Sam had been the head floorwalker in Krine’s department store, four high-ceilinged floors of clothes for all genders and ages and budgets; shoes ranging from hand-sewn wingtips with waxy oxblood complexions to smelly rubber footgear that would come apart if the wearer stood on a heat register; a like spectrum of furniture, notions, and phonograph records; a lunch counter with both steak and thin soup. On an open mezzanine above the first floor was a lady’s parlor of no particular commercial purpose where a pipe organ was manned between ten and five by Maurice, the fourth and most musical son of Isaac Krine, the owner. Sam told his fellow employees to call him Lucky and repeated the Armistice story to everybody because it made them happy. He was glad to be in New Orleans and not on the farm, glad to be getting rid of his bayou accent, his sun-roasted skin, his army clothes, the explosions, and the horse droppings.
Krine’s was on Canal Street, not far from neighborhoods fallen on hard times, including the French Quarter, home, in Sam’s mind, to people of decayed wealth and logic. The store suffered the slings and arrows of shoplifting, a biannual armed robbery, usually at the jewelry counter, arson, and the occasional fistfight between whores in the foundations department.
Sam stepped out of the office, rolled his shoulders in his freshly pressed summer-wool suit, and checked the wide aisles. Each morning he slipped a fresh flower into his buttonhole, checked his nut-brown hair and square jaw in the jewelry-counter mirror, and began a constant route through the cavernous store, examining both the behavior of customers and the physical plant, including the many-bulbed light fixtures hanging twenty feet above the floor from huge plaster medallions. If Mr. Krine spotted a dead bulb before Sam did, his pay would be docked a nickel. On this particular Monday in late June he rolled down the aisle through women’s dresses wearing his rubber-heeled lace-ups and stepping easily so no one could hear his approach. He was uncomfortable about wearing such deceptively quiet shoes, but his job required them. The previous week he’d come upon a man wadding silk scarves into his pants pocket. Sam drifted up behind him like a cloud, inserting four fingers into his collar before the thief knew what was happening. He struggled and tried to run, but Sam pulled him down in the purse section, with a knee in his lower back, just as he’d learned in the army and in childhood scuffles with his cousins.
It was eleven o’clock and Maurice began playing “Down Among the Sugar Cane” with only the ocarina stop pulled out, a signal to the restaurant crew to gear up for lunch. The store was flush with customers, a hundred or more on the main floor, browsing and listening, from time to time glancing up at the pastel-painted organ pipes and Maurice’s animated backside bouncing on the bench. People were shopping with music in their feet, and the overall motion in the store was that of a dance floor as lips mouthed the song’s words, hands reached out for ties, and fingers tapped shirtfronts in the rhythm of selection. Everyone was convinced by the chandeliers, decorative plaster, and music that they were happy to spend their money.
Sam enjoyed his clean, snappy clothes and light duties. His wife, a seamstress, worked for a fine upholstery shop uptown, where they rented a cypress shotgun house and comfortably waited for another child to come along. He’d bought himself a decent secondhand Packard piano, and his wife purchased a Singer sewing machine that she could run like a small locomotive when rushed to complete a job. Their lives had found a happy, productive pattern. He now looked up at a store fixture and checked all the bulbs, keeping everything in control, all the nickels in his paycheck. Glancing around the morning-cool store at the pretty counter girls, he tapped a shiny shoe to the fluting pipe organ. He could work this job, he felt, for the rest of his life.
And then the young couple approached him, their faces worried, confused. “Excuse us,” the man said, “but we can’t find our little girl.” Sam looked at their clothes. The woman showed a nice sense of style that she’d put together on a budget. The man’s suit was sharp, but shiny with wear.
Sam remembered learning at his internship in Krine’s St. Louis store that it was common for a child to wander away from one parent engaged in the art of buying things, but when two lost track of a young one, something was wrong. Maybe the child had run off, or had fallen asleep in some under-counter bin, or was exploring the elevator machinery in the basement. Or worse.
He smiled easily at them, but it was a store-bought smile, and he immediately scanned the nearest doors leading to the street. “Where was she the last time you saw her?”
“It was over in men’s suits,” the man said.
Sam noticed that he was wearing a carefully ironed shirt, and the thought came to him that the man’s wife loved him.
She now pointed across the store. “We’ve looked for her for five minutes all over that side. We’ve been in the store a half hour, and honest, she was right around us all that time. She’s only three years old. A little blonde in a blue pinafore. Her name’s Lily.”
“Has she wandered off before? Does she like to play hide-and-seek?”
The mother, a blonde herself, her hair in a medium bob, shook her head.
Sam smiled at her. “Don’t worry. You two cross over to the south side of the store and look there. I’ll recheck men’s suits.” While the parents began to filter through the maze of counters, he walked over toward Lillian Clarksby in cosmetics and asked her to close her register and check the front of the store, especially the window displays on the street. Sometimes he’d found young children wandering among the mannequins as if comparing their frozen gestures and shallow eyes with those of the adults they knew.
He toured suits, then mounted the stairs to the mezzanine and stood with his back to the women’s parlor to scan the aisles, but saw no children.
Mary Lou Landry, the mezzanine attendant, came up behind him. “Lucky, what you looking for, darling?”
He caught a whiff of an expensive scent and stared at her, then remembered that she spritzed herself at the perfume counter every morning. “A little blond girl, a toddler.”
“She got herself lost? Well, stop looking and start listening. She’ll be bawling for sure if she’s still in the store.”
He watched customers wandering over the chicken-wire tile entranced by the illusion Krine’s lavished on them. Sam sometimes felt it himself, a shrinelike ambience like that of a courthouse or a church. “Do me a favor, Mary. Lillian’s checking the front doors, so will you please slip around to the Granier Street entrance and stay there for about ten minutes? She was wearing a little blue pinafore, they told me.”
“Oh, she wouldn’t wander that far.” Mary wasn’t about to take orders from a floorwalker.
He leaned into her. “Not without help.”
“Oh.” Mary clopped down the mezzanine steps briskly, her hands turned up on her wrists as if she were displaying her nails.
Sam walked down the line of elevators and put his head in each that was open, asking the same question of the operators, then stepped into the last one and told old Melvin Stine to bring him up to two.
“You checkin’ the tills, Lucky?”
“I’m looking for a three-year-old girl in a pinafore.”
“She didn’t come up in this car.” He gave Sam a look. “Lucky, how long you been lookin’?”
He glanced at his watch. “Nine minutes.”
“Don’t forget the stairwells. And Mr. Krine’s rule.”
He got out and walked through children’s clothes, then into toys, telling clerks what to look for as he went. After checking the dressing rooms he unlocked a door with his key and walked through the janitor’s area and two large, hot storerooms. Outside again, catching Melvin’s car going up, he traveled to the third floor, then the fourth, which was the discount floor, a sweltering place with tall, wide-open windows and many ceiling fans whirring overhead—a repository of returned suits, remaindered shoes, garish suspenders, celluloid collars, and what was referred to derisively as the Country Corner, a few shelves of overalls, blue jeans, straw hats, brogans, red neckerchiefs. This was the province of Hulgana Ditchovich, a blocky woman stuffed into a vertically striped dress made of what seemed to be mattress ticking.
“Mrs. Ditchovich, have you seen a little blond girl in a pinafore up here? Her parents lost sight of her downstairs.”
“Lucky, Lucky, when will the cool-air vents come to the fourth floor?”
He imagined Hulgana as a stolid child, holding a wooden bucket and feeding cows in the snow outside of St. Petersburg. “Maybe next season. About that child?”
“No children up here this morning except for some farmer boys come in for shoes.” She focused on him for the first time. “Such a big man like you can’t find a child?”
After a quick tour of the steaming storage area on her floor, he came back out and used the store phone under Hulgana’s register to call the candy counter.
“Penny Nickens, candy.”
“Penny, this is Sam.”
“Lucky!” she shouted into the receiver. He liked Penny well enough but found her too exuberant, always likely to spout like a shaken bottle of pop.
“You have a good view of the office. Is anything going on?”
After a pause she said, “There’s a worried-looking couple talking to Mr. Krine. Oh, the lady looks so sad.”
“Thin woman in a blue dress. Pretty.”
“Yes. Look, I’ve got some of those new raspberry slices you like.”
“You can’t win me with candy.”
“Oh!” she shrieked. “And you a married man!”
He imagined all the heads turning toward the candy counter, and hung up.
It had been half an hour since the little girl disappeared. Walking to the elevator, he remembered Melvin’s comment about the stairwell and changed direction. No one used the stairs, and they gave off a nose-burning essence of dusty concrete. He started down, and on the third flight something on a gray tread caught his eye, a little piece of yellow hard rubber, some junk missed by the janitor. He stepped past it and continued all the way to the bottom of the stairs, trying not to scuff his mirrory shoes. He was annoyed that he would have to deal with the parents again. By now, the girl had probably turned up.
He put his hand on the knob of the stairwell door and stopped, overcome by the feeling that he’d made some kind of mistake. The whole store’s design ghosted through his mind as he tried to think of what he might’ve missed. He looked back up the stairway and pursed his lips, letting go of the knob and rising several flights to pick up the little piece of yellow tucked against the wall in the corner of a step: a child’s barrette, a yellow bar and nickel-plated clasp with a small blue butterfly set on the topside. Suddenly, he was frightened.
Down on the first floor he met the couple, the Wellers, and when he showed them the barrette, the mother clapped her hands over her mouth.
Mr. Krine touched him on the shoulder as if he were adjusting a table lamp. “Mr. Simoneaux, if you found this, why can’t you find the child? I was sure you’d come in here leading her by the hand.”
“Now that I know the hair clip was hers, maybe I can.” He looked at Mrs. Weller. “She probably just found the stairs. Kids love stairs.”
Mr. Krine raised a marble-hard face to Sam, as though to say, “Look at me and see how serious this is.” “Search again,” he said. “And this time find her.”
The mother cried, “Why would someone try to take Lily?” and the sound of her voice made him understand that today might not be like every other day, that something terrible could be happening. Some long-dormant fear woke up in him, the mysterious taste of ash welling up on the back of his tongue.
He ran through the milling customers to the first open elevator and told the operator to take him straight to the fourth floor. A middle-aged woman in the back of the car said, “I have to get off at three,” and he considered saying something sharp, but even now he understood that most people didn’t have all the facts. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am,” he said. As soon as the doors opened he bounded into the discount section and in a moment was in the Country Corner. Mrs. Ditchovich was dozing behind the register, and he rushed past her back to the only dressing room in the store he hadn’t checked, one that was seldom used because people buying bulky triple-stitch denim clothes rarely studied how they looked in a mirror. Behind the showroom partition he entered a dim hall filled with a peculiar smell that stopped him cold. Suddenly the hospitals in France came back to him, with the memory of men returned from surgery reeking of chloroform, which was what Sam was smelling now as he stood frozen, trying to imagine what that odor was doing here. When he understood, he lunged for the door to the dressing room.
The first thing he noticed was a golden blur on the floor, and a surprised older woman sitting on the bench holding a large pair of blued scissors over the head of a child, a very young, short-haired boy—his eyes rolled up in his head, his mouth gaping open—dressed in new trousers and a checkered shirt. Sam thought he had accidentally stumbled upon something horrible yet unrelated to his search, but in the next instant he saw a small blue pinafore lying next to a scattering of fine blond hair and knew he had found the girl, though as he reached out to her, for an instant enjoying the touch of rescue before it actually happened, she disappeared into darkness, all light instantly knocked out of his head by a soundless blow from behind.
For a long time he lay stunned, listening to a scuffling, and then, as from a great distance in the dark, a fleshy pale image like a blurred cameo drifted toward him, out of focus, sliding away from resolution, but finally he willed his brain to fix the vision and it was the bright face of a strangely wise-looking baby girl with soft cheeks and long lashes, and he felt himself running through the dark faster and faster, breathing through his mouth and moaning out loud until he woke up coughing on vomit, a doctor rolling him onto his side and his face plunging into boiled hospital sheets, a nurse coming toward him with a porcelain pan while a bright window beyond her absorbed the dissolving jewel of the child’s face.