Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

The light snapped off.

Something soft hit him in the face and then fell to his shoulder. He blinked into the darkness—a small towel.

“Wipe your face,” Maso said. “It’s a mess.”

When he finished, his eyes had adjusted enough to be able to make out Maso standing a few feet away, smoking one of his French cigarettes.

“You think I was going to kill you?”

“Crossed my mind.”

Maso shook his head. “I’m a low-rent wop from Endicott Street. I go to a fancy joint, I still don’t know what fork to use. So I might not have class or education, but I never double-cross. I come right at you. Just like you came at me.”

Joe nodded, looked at the three corpses at his feet. “What about these guys? I’d say we double-crossed them pretty good.”

“Fuck them,” Maso said. “They had it coming.” Stepping over Pokaski’s corpse, he crossed to Joe. “You’ll be getting out of here sooner than you think. You ready to make some money when you do?”

“Sure.”

“Your duty will always be to the Pescatore Family first and yourself second. Can you abide that?”

Joe looked into the old man’s eyes and was certain that they’d make a lot of money together and that he could never trust him.

“I can abide that.”

Maso extended his hand. “Okay, then.”

Joe wiped the blood off his hand and shook Maso’s. “Okay.”

“Mr. Pescatore,” someone called from below.

“Coming.” Maso walked to the trapdoor and Joe followed. “Come, Joseph.”

“Call me Joe. Only my father called me Joseph.”

“Fair enough.” As he descended the spiral staircase in the dark, Maso said, “Funny thing about fathers and sons—you can go forth and build an empire. Become king. Emperor of the United States. God. But you’ll always do it in his shadow. And you can’t escape it.”

Joe followed him down the dark staircase. “Don’t much want to.”

After a morning funeral at Gate of Heaven in South Boston, Thomas Coughlin was laid to rest at Cedar Grove Cemetery in Dorchester. Joe was not allowed to attend the funeral but read about it in a copy of the Traveler that one of the guards on Maso’s payroll brought to him that evening.

Two former mayors, Honey Fitz and Andrew Peters, attended, as well as the current one, James Michael Curley. So did two ex-governors, five former district attorneys, and two attorney generals.

The cops came from all over—city cops and state police, retired and active, from as far south as Delaware and as far north as Bangor, Maine. Every rank, every specialty. In the photo accompanying the article, the Neponset River snaked along the far edge of the cemetery, but Joe could barely see it because the blue hats and blue uniforms consumed the view.

This was power, he thought. This was a legacy.

And in nearly the same breath—So what?

So his father’s funeral had brought a thousand men to a graveyard along the banks of the Neponset. And someday, possibly, cadets would study in the Thomas X. Coughlin Building at the Boston Police Academy or commuters would rattle over the Coughlin Bridge on their way to work in the morning.

Wonderful.

And yet dead was dead. Gone was gone. No edifice, no legacy, no bridge named after you could change that.

You were only guaranteed one life, so you’d better live it.

He placed the paper beside him on the bed. It was a new mattress and it had been waiting for him in the cell after work detail yesterday with a small side table, a chair, and a kerosene table lamp. He found the matches in the drawer of the side table beside a new comb.

He blew out the lamp now and sat in the dark, smoking. He listened to the sounds of the factories and the barges out on the river signaling one another in the narrow lanes. He flicked open the cover of his father’s watch, then snapped it closed, then opened it again. Open-close, open-close, open-close as the chemical smell from the factories climbed over his high window.

His father was gone. He was no longer a son.

He was a man without history or expectation. A blank slate, beholden to none.

He felt like a pilgrim who’d pushed off from the shore of a homeland he’d never see again, crossed a black sea under a black sky, and landed in the new world, which waited, unformed, as if it had always been waiting.

For him.

To give the country a name, to remake it in his image so it could espouse his values and export them across the globe.

He closed the watch and closed his hand over it and closed his eyes until he saw the shore of his new country, saw the black sky above give way to a far-flung scatter of white stars that shone down on him and the small stretch of water left between them.

I will miss you. I will mourn you. But I am now newly born. And truly free.

Two days after the funeral, Danny made his last visit.

He leaned into the mesh and asked, “How you doing, little brother?”

“Finding my way,” Joe said. “You?”

“You know,” Danny said.

“No,” Joe said, “I don’t. I don’t know anything. You went to Tulsa with Nora and Luther eight years ago and I haven’t heard anything but rumors since.”

Danny acknowledged that with a nod. He fished for his cigarettes, lit one, and took his time before he spoke. “Me and Luther started a business together out there. Construction. We built houses in the colored section. We were doing all right. Weren’t booming, but okay. I was a sheriff’s deputy too. You believe that?”

Joe smiled. “You wear a cowboy hat?”

“Son,” Danny said with a twang, “I wore six-guns. One on each hip.”

Joe laughed. “String tie?”

Danny laughed too. “Sure did. And boots.”

“Spurs?”

Danny narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Man’s gotta draw the line somewhere.”

Joe was still chuckling when he asked, “So what happened? We heard something about a riot?”

The light blew out inside Danny. “They burned it to the ground.”

“Tulsa?”

“Black Tulsa, yeah. Section Luther lived in called Greenwood. One night at the jail, whites came to lynch a colored because he grabbed a white girl’s pussy in an elevator? Truth was, though, she’d been dating the boy on the sly for months. The boy broke up with her, she didn’t like it, so she filed her bullshit claim, and we had to arrest him. We were just about to turn him loose on lack of evidence when all the good white men of Tulsa showed up with their ropes. Then a bunch of coloreds, including Luther, they showed up too. The coloreds, well, they were armed. No one expected that. And that backed off the lynch mob. For the night.” Danny stubbed his cigarette out under his heel. “Next morning, the whites crossed the tracks, showed the colored boys what happens when you raise a gun to one of them.”

“So that was the riot.”

Danny shook his head. “Wasn’t no riot . It was a massacre. They gunned down or lit on fire every colored they saw—kids, women, old men, didn’t make a difference. These were the pillars of the community doing the shooting, mind you, the churchgoers and the Rotarians. In the end, the fuckers flew overhead in crop dusters, dropping grenades and homemade firebombs onto the buildings. The colored folk would run out of the burning buildings and the whites had machine gun nests set up. Just mowed ’em down in the fucking street. Hundreds of people killed. Hundreds, just lying in the streets. Looked like nothing more than piles of clothes gone red in the wash.” Danny laced his hands together behind his head and blew air through his lips. “I walked around afterward, you know, loading the bodies onto flatbeds? I kept thinking, Where’s my country? Where’d it go?”