grandmothers used to buy Saturday night hosiery and perfume in stores like F.W. Woolworth and Hearne’s. And on the sidewalks outside, people’s grandfathers sweated in Army dress clothes for the hope of walking those girls up the wooden steps of nameless hotels before they were taken off in the rail cars of the Southern Belle to New Orleans and loaded onto ships bound for the European Front; trading tossed-away nylons and perfumed breasts for cigarettes and laughter.
Cam wonders if he would’ve been a twenty-one-year-old man back then, instead of a twenty-one-year-old kid. Cam assesses his reflection as it slides across the empty storefront windows of Texas Street, blaming what he sees on sunless shopping malls and half-hearted wars, and wishing he could’ve gotten here a few generations earlier. He’d be wearing his own starched uniform, and cashing a check from Uncle Sam instead of aunt Sallie.
He leans the bike against a parking meter and stares at the cable lock coiled around the seatpost. He needs four numbers, so he tries Andrew’s birth year. He doesn’t know it by heart, only by counting back from his own. When that doesn’t work he tries Munna’s street address. “Eleven-Seventy” is both the address and the title of the Daltry homestead. Whenever they pulled into the driveway at Eleven-Seventy after church, Andrew was always the first one out of the car. And when they had to leave after Sunday dinner, Andrew would always hide somewhere upstairs to buy whatever extra time in the house it would take for their parents to find him. And it’s Eleven-Seventy that opens Andrew’s lock.
The main branch of Citizen’s National Bank is a showpiece of Southern Protestant art deco. Fancy enough to flaunt high caliber credit to the industry barons, but stripped of the excess flourishes that might intimidate the farmers. There’s a lobby with thirty-foot ceilings and seventeen stories tapering to a clock tower. In the mid-seventies, the original Roman numeral clock came down and a four-sided digital display went up, big enough and bright enough to give the time and temperature to two parishes.
Everything inside the old bank looks the same to Cam––the money-green marble pilasters between the windows, the Louisiana industry murals––cotton, lumber, oil, and sugarcane––lining the walls just below the ceiling, and the clean smell of un-licked envelope glue that is still the best way he’s ever been able to describe the smell of cash to himself.
When Cam was ten years old everyone knew him here, and they all wanted to be his favorite. He’d sit in front of his grandfather’s brass nameplate with his legs dangling over the edge of his desk. The men would come ask when he was going to take his Papaw’s job and the women would ask when he was going to marry them.
Cam waits in the Friday payday line with about ten other people, a paycheck-to-paycheck crowd made up mostly of dim-eyed desk workers from the Parish Courthouse and City Hall and sweaty public works men with hard-hat lines still showing on their foreheads.
When his turn comes, Cam walks up to the teller and smiles with familiarity. “Hey, how are you?”
The teller just nods in response. She’s in the 39th hour of her workweek and isn’t making any attempt to pretty her exhaustion. Her hands are swollen around a battered wedding band and her fingertips are dry and cracked from handling bills.
“I need to get a cashier’s check with half of this and cash the rest,” he says as he hands her his check and driver’s license, keeping his tone warm because the banker used to tell him you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.
“Account number?”
“I don’t… think I have one here anymore.”
“Then I can’t cash this for you.”
“I had one when I was a kid, but I don’t know if it’s still good.”
The teller types his name into the computer from his license.
“Cam Daltry,” he loudly confirms.
“Yeah, nothing’s coming up.”
“May I open one?”
“Our account specialist is already gone for the day. I can make you an appointment for Monday if you’d like.“
“I need to get a check postmarked by today for college. Can you… make a one-time exception for me? You know Sallie Mae’s good for it,” he grins.
“I’m afraid I can’t change bank policy for you.”
There’s a murmur over Cam’s shoulder that he senses concerns him. He glances behind him at two orange-vested D.O.T. crewmen making false starts at the front of the line and growling in a loud twang about how long he’s taking. The teller shakes her head for them in a show of shared frustration.
“I can help the next person in line,” she announces.
“Wait,” says Cam, waving off the road crewmen.
Cam looks down the long row of teller’s cages to the bank officers’ desks in the raised and railed-off back section of the room, where he used to score pocketfuls of hard candy and guided tours of the vault. After a few moments searching for familiar faces, he looks blankly back at the teller.
“I told you I can’t––“
“You see that portrait?” he interrupts, noticing the row of bank president portraits on the wall behind her.
“Portrait?”
“The very first president,” he points. “Read the name under it, if you don’t mind. It’s the same as the one my license.”
She turns around for a few seconds, then back to Cam with a shrug.
“It’s my grandfather. It was his bank, he started it.”
“I don’t know how to… verify that, but––“
Cam reads the brass plaque under the last picture in the row to put a name to its familiar face. “Is Mr. Ogilvie here, he knows me.”
The teller sighs and stamps her way over to a floor manager who couldn’t be more than thirty-five, too young to know Cam. As the teller snips at him, he looks at Cam and then picks up the receiver on the countertop phone at an empty teller cage. He adjusts the knot on his tie and clears his throat before cautiously dialing a three-digit extension. After a few words mouthed into the receiver, beginning with an apology and ending with Cam’s name, he speaks a few words to the teller that send her back to Cam with a forced smile.
She gives him a blameless apology and splits his $4000 check between a cashier’s check and two grand in cash, which Cam takes in hundreds. She’s out of cash envelopes, but he makes her go get one from another teller. It was the kind the banker always gave him and Andrew for birthdays––filled with twenties until their teens and fifties until he died.
The cash envelope goes into the front pocket of his khakis, taking the place of an envelope addressed to the Tech registrar’s office that he seals up with the cashier’s check.
“Cam,” a voice calls out behind him.
Cam turns around as Jerry Ogilvie steps out of an elevator. The last time Cam saw him he was as young and nervous as the man who just called him down. He’s only in his mid-forties now, but his hair has gone gray and his eyelids and back droop from the heavy impatience of board members, foreclosures and defaults. He doesn’t carry
