The Given Day (19 page)

And he walked to it and turned the knob and the door opened. Luther said, "Don't mean shit, Jessie. Don't mean nothing but someone forgot to lock the door."

"You say," Jessie said. "You say. Let me ask you-- You think I'd a forced that man to dig up his girl's grave?"

Luther said, " 'Course not. We were hot. That's all. Hot and scared. Got crazy."

Jessie said, "Let go of them straps, brother. We ain't lifting nothing right now."

Luther stepped away from the car. He said, "Jessie."

Jessie reached out so fast his hand could have slapped Luther's head off his neck but instead it landed soft on Luther's ear, barely touching. "You good kin, Country."

And Jessie went into the Club Almighty and Luther followed and they walked through a foul back hallway that stank of piss and came out near the stage through a black velvet curtain. The Deacon Broscious sat just where they'd left him at the table at the base of the stage. He sipped milky white tea from a clear glass, and he gave them the kind of smile told Luther there was more than milk in the tea.

"Stroke of twelve," the Deacon said and waved at the darkness all around him. "Ya'll done come at the stroke of twelve itself. Should I put my mask on?"

"Nah, sir," Jessie said. "Ya'll don't need to worry."

The Deacon reached beside himself, as if he was looking for his mask anyway. His movements were thick and jumbled and then he waved his hands at the whole idea and beamed at them with the sweat beading on his face thick as hail.

"Haw," he said. "You niggers look tired."

"Feel tired," Jessie said.

"Well, come on over here and sit, then. Tell the Deacon about your travails."

Dandy came out of the shadows on the Deacon's left, carrying a teapot on a tray and his mask flapping from the overhead fan, and he took one look at them and said, "What ya'll doing coming through the back door?"

Jessie said, "Just where our feets took us, Mr. Dandy," and cleared the .45 from his belt and shot Dandy in his mask and Dandy's face disappeared in a puff of red.

Luther crouched and said, "Wait!" and the Deacon held up his hands and said, "Now--" but Jessie fired and the fingers of the Deacon's left hand came free and hit the wall behind him and the Deacon shouted something Luther couldn't understand and then the Deacon said, "Hold it, okay?" Jessie fired again and the Deacon didn't seem to have any reaction for a moment and Luther fi gured the shot had hit the wall until he noticed the Deacon's red tie widening. The blood bloomed across his white shirt and the Deacon got a look at it for himself and a single wet breath popped out of his mouth.

Jessie turned to Luther and gave him that big Jessie- smile of his and said, "Shit. Kinda fun, ain't it?"

Luther saw something he barely knew he saw, something move from the stage, and he started to say "Jessie," but the word never left his mouth before Smoke stepped out between the drums and the base stand with his arm extended. Jessie was only half turned toward him when the air popped white and the air popped yellow-and-red and Smoke fired two bullets into Jessie's head and one into his throat and Jessie went all bouncy.

He toppled into Luther's shoulder, and Luther reached for him and got his gun instead and Smoke kept shooting, and Luther raised an arm across his face, as if it could stop the bullets, and he fi red Jessie's .45 and felt the gun jumping in his hand and saw all the dead and blackened and blue from today and heard his own voice yelling, "No please no please," and pictured a bullet hitting each of his eyes and then he heard a scream--high-pitched and shocked--and he stopped firing and lowered his arm from his face.

He squinted and saw Smoke curled on the stage. His arms were wrapped around his stomach and his mouth was open wide. He gurgled. His left foot twitched.

Luther stood in the middle of the four bodies and checked himself for wounds. He had blood all over his shoulder, but once he unbuttoned his shirt and felt around in there, he knew that the blood was Jessie's. He had a cut under his eye, but it was shallow and he fi gured that whatever had ricocheted off his cheek hadn't been a bullet. His body, though, did not feel like his own. It felt borrowed, as if he shouldn't be in it, and whoever it might belong to sure shouldn't have walked it into the back of the Club Almighty.

He looked down at Jessie and felt a part of him that just wanted to cry but another part that felt nothing at all, not even relief at being alive. The back of Jessie's head looked as if an animal had taken bites from it, and the hole in his throat still pumped blood. Luther knelt on a spot of floor the blood hadn't reached yet and cocked his head to look into his friend's eyes. They looked a little surprised, as if Old Byron had just told him the night's tip pool had turned out bigger than expected.

Luther whispered, "Oh, Jessie," and used his thumb to close his eyes, and then he placed his hand to Jessie's cheek. The flesh had begun to cool, and Luther asked the Lord to please forgive his friend for his actions earlier today because he'd been desperate, he'd been compromised, but he was, Lord, a good man at heart who'd never before caused anyone but himself any pain.

"You can . . . make this . . . right."

Luther turned at the sound of the voice.

"Sm-smart boy like . . . like you." The Deacon sucked at the air. "Smart boy . . ."

He rose from Jessie's body with the gun in his hand and walked over to the table, coming around to stand on the Deacon's right so the fat fool had to roll that big head of his in order to see him.

"You go get that doctor you . . . you . . . saw this afternoon." The Deacon took another breath and his chest whistled. "Go get him." "And you'll just forgive and forget, uh?" Luther said.

"As . . . as God is my witness."

Luther removed his mask and coughed in the Deacon's face three times. "How about I fucking cough on you till we see if I got me the plague today?"

The Deacon used his good hand to reach for Luther's arm, but Luther pulled it away.

"Don't you touch me, demon."

"Please . . ."

"Please what?"

The Deacon wheezed and his chest whistled again and he licked his lips.

"Please," he said again.

"Please what?"

"Make . . . this right."

"Okay," Luther said and put the gun into the folds under the Deacon's chin and pulled the trigger with the man looking in his eyes.

"That fucking do?" Luther shouted and watched the man tip to his left and slide down the back of the booth. "Kill my friend?" Luther said and shot him again, though he knew he was dead.

"Fuck!" Luther screamed at the ceiling, and he grabbed his own head with the gun clutched against it and screamed it again. Then he noticed Smoke trying to pull himself across the stage in his own blood and Luther kicked a chair out of his way and crossed to the stage with his arm extended and Smoke turned his head and lay there, looking up at Luther with no more life in his eyes than Jessie's.

For what felt like an hour--and Luther would never know how long he stood there exactly--they stared at each other.

Then Luther felt a new version of himself he wasn't even sure he liked say, "If you live, you'll have to come kill me, sure as sin."

Smoke blinked his eyelids once, real slow, in the affi rmative.

Luther stared down the gun at him. He saw all those bullets he'd scored in Columbus, saw his Uncle Cornelius's black satchel, saw the rain that had fallen, warm and soft as sleep, the afternoon he'd sat on his porch, willing his father to come home when his father was already four years five hundred miles away and not coming back. He lowered the gun.

He watched the surprise flash across Smoke's pupils. Smoke's eyes rolled and he burped a thimbleful of blood down his chin and onto his shirt. He fell back to the stage and the blood flowed from his stomach.

Luther raised the gun again. It should have been easier, the man's eyes no longer on him, the man probably slipping across the river right at this moment, climbing the dark shore into another world. All it would take was one more pull of the trigger to be sure. He'd had no hesitation with the Deacon. So why now?

The gun shook in his hand and he lowered it again.

Wouldn't take the people the Deacon associated with long to put all this together, to put him in this room. Whether Smoke lived or died, Luther and Lila's time in Tulsa was done.

Still . . .

He raised the gun again, gripped his forearm to stop the shakes and stared down the barrel at Smoke. He stood there a good minute before he finally faced the fact that he could stand there for an hour and he'd still never pull that trigger.

"Ain't you," he said.

Luther looked at the blood still leaking out of the man. He took one last look behind him at Jessie. He sighed. He stepped over Dandy's corpse.

"You simple sons of bitches," Luther said as he headed for the door. "You brought this on yourselves." chapter eight After the flu had passed on, Danny returned to walking the beat by day and studying to impersonate a radical at night. In terms of the latter duty, Eddie McKenna left packages at his door at least once a week. He'd unwrap them to find stacks of the latest socialist and Communist propaganda rags, as well as copies of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, speeches given by Jack Reed, Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Jim Larkin, Joe Hill, and Pancho Villa. He read thickets of propaganda so dense with rhetoric it may as well have been a structural engineering manual for all it spoke to any common man Danny could imagine. He came across certain words so often--tyranny, imperialism, capitalist oppression, brotherhood, insurrection--that he suspected a knee-jerk vocabulary had become necessary to ensure a dependable shorthand among the workers of the world. But as the words lost individuality, so they lost their power and gradually their meaning. Once the meaning was gone, Danny wondered, how would these noodle heads--and among the Bolshie and anarchist literature, he had yet to find someone who wasn't a noodle head--as one unifi ed body, successfully cross a street, never mind overthrow a country?

When he wasn't reading speeches, he read missives from what was commonly referred to as the "front line of the workers' revolution." He read about striking coal miners burned in their homes alongside their families, IWW workers tarred and feathered, labor organizers assassinated on the dark streets of small towns, unions broken, unions outlawed, workingmen jailed, beaten, and deported. And always it was they who were painted as the enemies of the great American Way.

To his surprise, Danny felt occasional stirrings of empathy. Not for everyone, of course--he'd always thought anarchists were morons, offering the world nothing but steel-eyed bloodlust, and little in his reading changed his opinion. Communists, too, struck him as hopelessly naive, pursuing a utopia that failed to take into consideration the most elemental characteristic of the human animal: covetousness. The Bolshies believed it could be cured like an illness, but Danny knew that greed was an organ, like the heart, and to remove it would kill the host. The socialists were the smartest--they acknowledged greed--but their message was constantly entwined with the Communists' and it was impossible, at least in this country, for it to be heard above the red din.

But for the life of him Danny couldn't understand why most of the outlawed or targeted unions deserved their fate. Time and again what was renounced as treasonous rhetoric was merely a man standing before a crowd and demanding he be treated as a man.

He mentioned this to McKenna over coffee in the South End one night and McKenna wagged a finger at him. "It's not those men you need to concern yourself with, young protege. Ask yourself instead, 'Who's funding those men? And to what end?' "

Danny yawned, tired all the time now, unable to remember the last time he'd had a true night's sleep. "Let me guess--Bolsheviks."

"You're goddamned right. From Mother Rus sia herself." He widened his eyes at Danny. "You think this is mildly amusing, yeah? Lenin himself said that the people of Russia will not rest until all the peoples of the world join their revolution. That's not idle talk, boyo. That's a clear fucking threat against these shores." He thumped his index finger off the table. "My shores."

Danny suppressed another yawn with his fist. "How's my cover coming?"

"Almost there," McKenna said. "You join that thing they call a policemen's union yet?"

"Going to a meeting Tuesday."

"What took so long?"

"If Danny Coughlin, son of Captain Coughlin and no stranger himself to the selfi sh, politically motivated act, were to suddenly ask to join the Boston Social Club, people might be a bit suspicious."

"You've a point. Fair enough."

"My old partner, Steve Coyle?"

"The one who caught the grippe, yeah. A shame."

"He was a vocal supporter of the union. I'm letting some time pass so it'll seem I passed a few long dark nights of the soul over him getting sick. Finally my conscience caught up, so I had to check out a meeting. Let them think I have a soft heart."

McKenna lit the blackened stub of a cigar. "You've always had a soft heart, son. You just hide it better than most."

Danny shrugged. "Starting to hide it from myself, then, I guess."

"Always the danger, that." McKenna nodded, as if he were intimate with the dilemma. "Then one day, sure, you can't remember where you left all those pieces you tried so hard to hold on to. Or why you worked so hard at the holding."

Danny joined Tessa and her father for dinner on a night when the
cool air smelled of burning leaves. Their apartment was larger than his. His came with a hot plate atop an icebox, but the Abruzzes' had a small kitchen with a Raven stove. Tessa cooked, her long dark hair tied back, limp and shiny from the heat. Federico uncorked the wine Danny had brought and set it on a windowsill to breathe while he and Danny sat at the small dining table in the parlor and sipped anisette.

Federico said, "I have not seen you around the building lately." Danny said, "I work a lot."

"Even now that the grippe has passed on?"

Danny nodded. It was just one more of the beefs cops had with the department. The Boston police officer got one day off for every twenty. And on that day off, he wasn't allowed to leave city limits in case an emergency arose. So most of the single guys lived near their stations in rooming houses because what was the point in getting settled when you had to be at work in a few hours anyway? In addition, three nights a week, you were required to sleep at the station house, in the fetid beds on the top floor, which were lice- or bug-ridden and had just been slept in by the poor slob who would take your place on the next patrol.