Kyle Dorsey stood at the teller window with the smile still frozen on his face, and Eugene Platt walked up behind him as easily as a man crossing a church lawn. “Kyle Dorsey,” Eugene said again. “Loan officer at the Ozark Heritage Credit Union in Springfield, 2016 to 2019. Fired for moving the money of other people into a private account. Pleaded to a reduced charge. Paid back part of it, and the rest is still owing.” Kyle did not turn around for a long moment. The teller had stopped counting. In the lobby, the only sound was the soft hum of the air conditioner.
What Kyle did not know was that Eugene had walked into the office of the branch manager forty minutes before he arrived, shown his old badge from the state banking division, and explained the situation. The manager, a calm woman named Mrs. Whitaker, had already frozen the account that received my nine transfers. She had printed the records. She had called the Joplin police. Standing behind a glass partition in the hallway, I could see two officers in the lobby with their hands folded, waiting like deacons at an altar.
Kyle did the only thing he knew how to do, which was to run. He broke for the front doors with his shoulder down. Now, I spent forty years on the railroad, and I learned that trouble goes where you leave the door open. When I drove to the bank that morning, I had parked the old Buick across the narrow exit of the lot, with the keys in my pocket, as a favor to Eugene. Kyle burst through the doors and found himself facing two tons of Detroit steel and an old man in a feed cap.
A man who trusts the wrong person once can still find the right one, if he is willing to pick up the telephone.
The officers had him by the arms before he could try the fence. He did not fight. He leaned against my front fender, breathing hard, and he looked at me with an expression I will never forget. It was not hatred. It was more like surprise, as if he had never imagined the old man could be a person at all. “Walt,” he said, “I was going to put it back.” I told him the same thing I told my own brakemen when they lied. “Son, you were going to put back what you had not already spent.”
My daughter Amy came to the police station that afternoon, still in her work scrubs from the dentist office in Carthage. She had never heard of Springfield. She had never heard of the credit union. Kyle had told her he had been a manager at a car dealership in Tulsa. She sat in my truck in the parking lot and cried until her mascara ran, and I held her the way I did when she was six and the thunder came. “Daddy,” she kept saying, “I married a stranger.” I said, “Honey, you married a man who lied. That is not your fault.”
It turned out the account he used was one he had opened under the name of his mother, who had passed in 2011. Of the twenty three thousand dollars, nineteen thousand was still sitting there, frozen. The rest he had lost at a casino in Pittsburg, Kansas, over six weekends. Mrs. Whitaker, bless her, had the bank restore every cent to my savings within the week, and she threw in a certificate for a new checkbook. She told me she had been waiting twenty years for the chance to call a thief out in her own lobby.
Kyle pleaded guilty to theft and identity fraud. The judge in Jasper County gave him four years, with a long order of restitution. Before they took him away, he asked to speak to me, and I went. He sat behind the glass and told me he had been gambling since college, that he had hated himself every day since, and that he had chosen me because I seemed lonely. I told him that was the cruelest honest thing anyone ever said to me. Then I told him I hoped he got help. I meant it, and I was surprised to find that I did.
Amy and the two grandchildren moved in with me. The house on Maple Street, which had been so silent since Betty died, is now full of backpacks and cereal bowls and a very loud cartoon about a talking dog. My grandson Caleb, who is nine, wants to know everything about trains. I take him down to the old depot on Saturdays and show him how to read a signal. He says one day he is going to be a conductor, and I tell him to study his arithmetic.
Eugene came over every Wednesday for two months to teach me the banking app on my telephone. He is a patient man. He wrote the steps on index cards in large letters, and he made me do each one three times. By Thanksgiving I could check my balance, pay the electric bill, and turn on the alerts, which now buzz in my pocket like an angry bee whenever so much as a dollar moves. I told him he would have made a fine schoolteacher. He said he already had, thirty years in the examiner trade.
On a Saturday in April we drove out to the Spring River before sunrise, the two of us, with a thermos, two folding chairs, and a can of worms. Eugene caught a rainbow trout the size of a shoe. I caught a boot. We laughed so hard that a heron lifted off the far bank and flapped away down the stream. The sun came up pink over the water, and I thought about Betty, who always said that you can tell a good friend by who sits with you when the fish are not biting.