The Given Day

by Dennis Lehane

  The metal shot from between her hands and into his body. It bit his flesh and then hit bone and chiseled through that and his hip caught fire and the bolt of pain shot down through his thigh and reached his knee.

  He pushed her back and she stumbled and looked at him with her hair in her face and her lips wet with spittle.

  Danny glanced at the knife sticking out of his hip and then his leg gave way and he dropped to his ass in the alley and watched the blood sluice down his outer thigh. He raised his .45 and pointed it at her.

  The pain came in bolts that shook his entire body. It was worse than anything he’d experienced when he’d been shot in the chest.

  “I’m carrying a child,” she said and took a step backward.

  Danny took a bite from the air and sucked it through his teeth.

  Tessa held out her hands and he shot her once in the chin and once between her breasts and she fell down in the alley and flopped like a fish. Her heels kicked the cobblestones, and then she tried to sit up, taking a loud gulp of the air as the blood spilled down her coat. Danny watched her eyes roll back in her head and then her head hit the alley and she was still. Lights came on in the windows.

  He went to lay back and something punched him in the thigh. He heard the pistol report a half a second before the next bullet hit him high on the right side of his chest. He tried to lift his own pistol. He raised his head and saw a man standing on the fire escape. His pistol flashed and the bullet chunked into the cobblestones. Danny kept trying to raise his own pistol but his arm wouldn’t follow commands, and the next shot hit his left hand. The whole time, he couldn’t help thinking: Now who the fuck is this guy?

  He rested on his elbows and let the gun fall from his right hand. He wished he could have died on any other day but this. This one had carried too much defeat with it, too much despair, and he would have liked to leave the world believing in something.

  The man on the fire escape rested his elbows on the rail and took aim.

  Danny closed his eyes.

  He heard a scream, a bellow really, and wondered if it was his own. A clank of metal, a higher pitched scream. He opened his eyes and saw the man fall through the air, and his head made a loud pop against the cobblestones and his body folded in half.

  Luther heard the first shot after he’d already passed the alley. He stood still on the sidewalk and heard nothing for almost a minute and was about to walk away when he heard the second one—a sharp pop followed immediately by another one. He jogged back to the alley. Some lights had come on and he could see two figures lying in the middle of the alley, one of them trying to raise a gun off the stone. Danny.

  A man stood up on the fire escape. He wore a black bowler and pointed a gun down at Danny. Luther saw the brick lying by a trash can, thought it might be a rat at first even as he reached for it, but the rat didn’t move, and he closed his hand over it and came up with, yup, a brick.

  When Danny lay back on his elbows, Luther saw that execution coming, could feel it in his chest, and he let loose the loudest yell he was capable of, a nonsensical “Aaaahhhh” that seemed to empty his heart and soul of its blood.

  The man on the fire escape looked up and Luther already had his arm cocked. He could feel grass underfoot, the smell of a field in late August, the scent of leather and dirt and sweat, see the runner trying to take home, take home against his arm, trying to show him up like that? Luther’s feet left the alley, and his arm turned into a catapult. He saw a catcher’s mitt waiting, and the air sizzled when he unleashed the brick into it. That brick got up there in a goddamned hurry, too, like it had been pulled from the fire of its maker but for no other purpose. That brick had ambition.

  Hit that son of a bitch right in the side of his silly hat. Crushed the hat and half his head. The guy lurched. The guy canted. He fell over the fire escape and tried to grab it, tried kicking at it, but there wasn’t no hope in that. He just fell. Fell straight down, screaming like a girl, and landed on his head.

  Danny smiled. Blood pumping out of him like it was heading to put out a fire, and he fucking smiles!

  “Twice you saved my life.”

  “Sssh.”

  Nora came running up the alley, her shoes clicking on the stones. She dropped to her knees over her husband.

  “Compress, honey,” Danny said. “Your scarf. Forget the leg. The chest, the chest, the chest.”

  She used her scarf on the left hole in his chest and Luther took off his jacket and applied it to the bigger hole in his leg. They knelt over him pressing all their weight into his chest.

  “Danny, don’t leave me.”

  “Not leaving,” Danny said. “Strong. Love you.”

  Nora’s tears poured down into his face. “Yes, yes, you’re strong.”

  “Luther.”

  “Yeah?”

  A siren bleated in the night, followed by another.

  “Hell of a throw.”

  “Sssh.”

  “You should…”—Danny smiled and blood bubbled over his lips—“…be a baseball player or something.”

  The BABE GOES SOUTH

  CHAPTER forty

  Luther arrived back in Tulsa in late September during a dogged heat wave and a humid breeze that kicked the dust up and caked the city tan. He’d spent some time in East St. Louis with his Uncle Hollis, enough time in which to grow a beard. He stopped grooming his hair as well and traded his bowler for a broke-down cavalryman’s hat with a sloopy brim and a crown that the moths had gotten to. He even allowed Uncle Hollis to overfeed him so that for the first time in his life he had a little belly on him and some extra flesh beneath his jaw. By the time he got off the freight car in Tulsa, he looked like a tramp. Which was the point. A tramp with a duffel bag.

  Most times he looked at the bag, he’d start laughing. Couldn’t help it. Bundled-up stacks of money sat at the bottom, product of another man’s greed, another man’s graft. Years of corruption all stacked and tied up and smelling now of someone else’s future.

  He took the bag to a field of weeds north of the tracks and buried it with a spade he’d brought along from East St. Louis. Then he crossed back over the Santa Fe tracks into Greenwood and went down to Admiral, where the rough trade spent their time. It was four hours before he spotted Smoke coming out of a billiards parlor that hadn’t been there when Luther left last year. Place was called Poulson’s and it took Luther a moment to remember that this was Smoke’s given surname. If he’d thought of that before, maybe he wouldn’t have lost four hours wandering up and down Admiral.

  Smoke had three men with him, and they surrounded him until they reached a cherry red Maxwell. One of them opened the back door and Smoke hopped in and they drove off. Luther went back to the field of weeds, dug the bag back up, took what he needed, and buried it again. He walked back into Greenwood and kept going till he’d reached the outskirts and found the place he’d been looking for—Deval’s Junkyard, run by an old fella, Latimer Deval, who’d occasionally done side work for Uncle James. Luther had never met old Deval in the flesh, but he’d passed his place enough back when he’d lived here to know Deval always kept a few heaps for sale on his front lawn.

  He bought a 1910 Franklin Tourer off Deval for three hundred, the two barely exchanging words, just the cash and the key. Luther drove back to Admiral and parked a block down from Poulson’s.

  He followed them for the next week. He never went out to his house on Elwood, though it pained him more than anything to be this close after so much time away. But he knew if he saw Lila or his son, he would lose all strength and have to run to them, have to hold them and smell them and wet them with his tears. And then he’d surely be a dead man. So he drove the Franklin out to unincorporated scrub land every night and slept there, and the next morning he was back on the job, learning Smoke’s routine.

  Smoke took his lunch every day at the same diner but mixed it up for dinner—some nights at Torchy’s, others at Alma’s Chop House, another night at Riley’s, a jazz club tha
t had replaced the Club Almighty. Luther wondered just what Smoke thought about as he chewed his dinner in view of the stage where he’d almost bled to death. Whatever else you could say about the man, he definitely had a strong constitution.

  After a week, Luther felt reasonably confident he had the man’s routine down cold because Smoke was a man of routine. He might have eaten at a different place every night, but he always arrived at six sharp. Tuesdays and Thursdays, he went to his woman’s place out in the sticks, an old sharecropper’s shack, and his men would wait in the yard while he went about his business and came out two hours later, tucking in his shirt. He lived above his own billiards parlor, and his three bodyguards would all accompany him into the building and then come back and get into their car and return the next morning at five-thirty on the nose.

  Once Luther got the afternoon routine figured—lunch at twelve-thirty, collections and package re-ups from one-thirty to three, back to Poulson’s at three-oh-five—he decided he’d found his window. He went to a hardware store and bought a doorknob, lock assembly, and keyhole plate that matched the one on the door leading up to Smoke’s apartment. He spent afternoons in the car, learning how to thread a paper clip through the keyhole, and once he could open the lock ten out of ten times in under twenty seconds, he started practicing at night, parked beside the dark scrub, not even the light of the moon to guide him, until he could pick that lock blind.

  Of a Thursday night, when Luther knew Smoke and his men were at his woman’s shack, he crossed Admiral in the looming dusk and was through the door faster than he’d ever stolen a base. He faced a set of stairs that smelled of oil soap and he climbed them to find a second door, also locked. It was a different lock cylinder, so it took him about two minutes to get the hang of it. Then the door popped open and he was inside. He turned and squatted in the doorway until he spied a single black hair lying on the threshold. He lifted it and placed it back against the lock and closed the door over it.

  He’d bathed this morning in the river, his teeth clacking from the cold as he covered every inch of his stinky self with brown soap. Then he pulled the fresh clothes he’d purchased in East St. Louis from the bag on the front seat of the car and put them on. He commended himself on that now, as he’d guessed correctly that Smoke’s apartment would be as orderly as his dress. Place was spotless. Bare, too. Nothing on the walls, only one throw rug in the living room. Bare coffee table, Victrola without a wisp of dust or even the tiniest smudge.

  Luther found the hall closet, noted that several of the coats he’d seen Smoke wearing in the last week were hung precisely on wooden hangers. The hanger that was empty awaited the blue duster with the leather collar Smoke had worn today. Luther slipped in among the clothes, closed the door, and waited.

  Took about an hour, though it felt like five. He heard footsteps on the stairs, four sets of them, and pulled his watch, but it was too dark to see, so he put it back in his vest and noticed he was holding his breath. He let out a slow exhale as the key turned in the lock. The door opened and one man said, “You good, Mr. Poulson?”

  “I am, Red. See you in the morning.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The door shut and Luther raised his pistol, and for one horrible moment he was seized by overwhelming terror, a desire to close his eyes and wish this moment away, to push past Smoke when he opened that door and run for his life.

  But it was too late, because Smoke went to the closet straightaway and the door opened and Luther had no choice but to place the muzzle of the pistol against the tip of Smoke’s nose.

  “You make a sound, I’ll kill you where you stand.”

  Smoke raised his arms, still wearing the duster.

  “Take a few steps back. Keep those arms high.” Luther came out into the hallway.

  Smoke’s eyes narrowed. “Country?”

  Luther nodded.

  “You changed some. Never would recognize you on the street with that beard.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Smoke gave that a small upward tilt of his eyebrows.

  “Kitchen,” Luther said. “You first. Lace your hands on top of your head.”

  Smoke complied and walked down the hallway and entered the kitchen. There was a small table there with a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth and two wooden chairs. Luther gestured Smoke into one of the chairs and took the one across from him.

  “You can take your hands off your head. Just put them on the table.”

  Smoke unlaced his fingers and placed his palms down on the table.

  “Old Byron get back to you?”

  Smoke nodded. “Said you threw him through a window.”

  “He tell you I was coming for you?”

  “He mentioned it, yeah.”

  “That what the three bodyguards are for?”

  “That,” Smoke said, “and some rival business associates too quick to the anger.”

  Luther reached into his coat pocket and came out with a brown paper bag that he placed on the table. He watched Smoke stare at it, let him wonder what it was.

  “What’d you think about Chicago?” Luther said.

  Smoke cocked his head. “The riots?”

  Luther nodded.

  “Thought it was a damn shame we only killed fifteen whites.”

  “Washington?”

  “Where you going with this?”

  “Humor me, Mr. Poulson.”

  Smoke raised another eyebrow at that. “Washington? Same thing. Wished them niggers had fought back, though. Chicago ones had some spirit.”

  “I passed through East St. Louis on my travels. Twice.”

  “Yeah? What it look like?”

  “Ash,” Luther said.

  Smoke tapped his fingers lightly on the tabletop. “You didn’t come here to kill me, did you?”

  “Nope.” Luther tipped the bag and a sheaf of money fell out, wrapped tightly in a red rubber band. “That’s a thousand dollars. That’s half what I feel I owe you.”

  “For not killing me?”

  Luther shook his head. He lowered the gun, placed it on the table, and slid it across the tablecloth. He took his hand off it. He sat back in his chair. “For you not killing me.”

  Smoke didn’t lift the pistol right away. He cocked his head at it, then tilted it the other way to consider Luther.

  “I’m done with our kind killing our kind,” Luther said. “White folk do enough of it. I won’t be a party to any more of it. You want to still be part of it, then you kill me and you’ll get that thousand. You don’t, you’ll get two thousand. You want me dead, I’m sitting across from you saying pull the fucking trigger.”

  Smoke had the gun in his hand. Luther had never seen him so much as flinch, but there was the gun pointed directly at Luther’s right eye. Smoke thumbed back the hammer.

  “You might be confusing me with somebody has a soul,” he said.

  “I might.”

  “And you might not think I’m the kind of man would shoot you right through that eye of yours and then go up the road and fuck your woman up the ass, cut her throat when I come, and then cook me a soup out of your baby boy.”

  Luther said nothing.

  Smoke ran the muzzle over Luther’s cheek. He turned the pistol to his right and drew the target sight down the side of Luther’s face, opening the flesh.

  “You,” he said, “will not associate with any gamblers, any drinkers, any dope fiends. You will stay out of the Greenwood nightlife. All the way out. You will never enter a place where I could run into you. And if you ever leave that son of yours because the simple life is too fucking simple for you? I will take you apart, piece by piece, in a grain silo for a week before I let your ass die. Is there any part of this deal you have issue with, Mr. Laurence?”

  “None,” Luther said.

  “Drop my other two thousand at the pool hall tomorrow afternoon. Give it to a man named Rodney. He’ll be the one handing out balls to the customers. No later than two o’clock. Clear?”

&nb
sp; “It ain’t two thousand. It’s one.”

  Smoke stared back at him, his eyelids drooping.

  Luther said, “Two thousand, it is.”

  Smoke thumbed down the hammer and handed the gun to Luther. Luther took it and put it in his coat.

  “The fuck out of my house now, Luther.”

  Luther stood.

  As he reached the kitchen doorway, Smoke said, “You realize, your whole life, you’ll never get this lucky again?”

  “I do.”

  Smoke lit himself a cigarette. “Then sin no more, asshole.”

  Luther walked up the steps to the house on Elwood. He noticed that the railings needed repainting and decided that would be his first order of business tomorrow.

  Today, though…

  There wasn’t a word for it, he thought, as he opened the screen door and found the front door unlocked. No word at all. Ten months since that horrible night he’d left. Ten months riding rails and hiding out and trying to be another person in a strange city up north. Ten months of living without the one thing in his life he’d ever done right.

  The house was empty. He stood in the small parlor and looked through the kitchen at the back door. It was open, and he could hear the creak of a clothesline being pulled, decided that’s something else he’d need to tend to, give that wheel a little oil. He walked through the parlor and into the kitchen and could smell baby here, could smell milk, could smell something still forming itself.

  He walked out the back steps and she bent to reach into her basket and lift another wet piece of clothing from it, but then she raised her head and stared. She wore a dark blue blouse over a faded yellow house skirt she favored. Desmond sat by her feet, sucking on a spoon and staring at the grass.

  She whispered his name. She whispered, “Luther.”

  All the old pain entered her eyes, all the grief and hurt at what he’d done to her, all the fear and worry. Could she open her heart again? Could she put her faith in him?

  Luther willed her to go the other way, sent a look across the grass freighted with all his love, all his resolve, all his heart.