Dennis Lehane: Live by Night

Growing up, Joe had adored his brother. Then he’d come to hate him. Now, he mostly didn’t think about him. When he did, he had to admit, he missed his laugh.

Down the other end of the car, Emma Gould said “Excuse me, excuse me” as she worked her way toward the doors. Joe looked out the window and saw that they were approaching City Square in Charlestown.

Charlestown. No wonder she hadn’t gotten rattled with a gun pointed at her. In Charlestown, they brought .38s to the dinner table, used the barrels to stir their coffee.

He followed her to a two-story house at the end of Union Street. Just before she reached the house, she took a right down a pathway that ran along the side, and by the time Joe got to the alley behind the house, she was gone. He looked up and down the alley—nothing but similar two-story houses, most of them saltbox shacks with rotting window frames and tar patches in the roof. She could’ve gone into any of them, but she’d chosen the last walkway on the block. He assumed hers was the blue-gray one he was facing with steel doors over a wooden bulkhead.

Just past the house was a wooden gate. It was locked, so he grabbed the top of it, hoisted himself up, and took a look at another alley, narrower than the one he was in. Aside from a few trash cans, it was empty. He let himself back down and searched his pocket for one of the hairpins he rarely left home without.

Half a minute later he stood on the other side of the gate and waited.

It didn’t take long. This time of day—quitting time—it never did. Two pairs of footsteps came up the alley, two men talking about the latest plane that had gone down trying to cross the Atlantic, no sign of the pilot, an Englishman, or the wreckage. One second it was in the air, the next it was gone for good. One of the men knocked on the bulkhead, and after a few seconds, Joe heard him say, “Blacksmith.”

One of the bulkhead doors was pulled back with a whine and then a few moments later, it was dropped back in place and locked.

Joe waited five minutes, clocking it, and then he exited the second alley and knocked on the bulkhead.

A muffled voice said, “What?”

“Blacksmith.”

There was a ratcheting sound as someone threw the bolt back and Joe lifted the bulkhead door. He climbed into the small stairwell and let himself down it, lowering the bulkhead door as he went. At the bottom of the stairwell, he faced a second door. It opened as he was reaching for it. An old baldy guy with a cauliflower nose and blown blood vessels splayed across his cheekbones waved him inside, a grim scowl on his face.

It was an unfinished basement with a wood bar in the center of the dirt floor. The tables were wooden barrels, the chairs made of the cheapest pine.

At the bar, Joe sat down at the end closest to the door, where a woman with fat that hung off her arms like pregnant bellies served him a bucket of warm beer that tasted a little of soap and a little of sawdust, but not a lot like beer or a lot like alcohol. He looked for Emma Gould in the basement gloom, saw only dockworkers, a couple of sailors, and a few working girls. A piano sat against the brick wall under the stairs, unused, a few keys broken. This was not the kind of speak that went in for entertainment much beyond the bar fight that would open up between the sailors and the dockworkers once they realized they were short two working girls.

She came out the door behind the bar, tying a kerchief off behind her head. She’d traded her blouse and skirt for an off-white fisherman’s sweater and brown tweed trousers. She walked the bar, emptying ashtrays and wiping spills, and the woman who’d served Joe his drink removed her apron and went back through the door behind the bar.

When she reached Joe, her eyes flicked on his near-empty bucket. “You want another?”

“Sure.”

She glanced at his face and didn’t seem fond of the result. “Who told you about the place?”

“Dinny Cooper.”

“Don’t know him,” she said.

That makes two of us, Joe thought, wondering where the fuck he’d come up with such a stupid name. Dinny? Why didn’t he call the guy “Lunch”?

“He’s from Everett.”

She wiped the bar in front of him, still not moving to get his drink. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. We worked the Chelsea side of the Mystic last week. Dredge work?”

She shook her head.

“Anyway, Dinny pointed across the river, told me about this place. Said you served good beer.”

“Now I know you’re lying.”

“Because someone said you serve good beer?”

She stared at him the way she had in the payroll office, like she could see the intestines curled inside him, the pink of his lungs, the thoughts that journeyed among the folds of his brain.

“The beer’s not that bad,” he said and raised his bucket. “I had some once in this place this one time? I swear to you it—”

“Butter doesn’t melt on your tongue, does it?” she said.

“Miss?”

“Does it?”

He decided to try resigned indignation. “I’m not lying, miss. But I can go. I can certainly go.” He stood. “What do I owe you for the first one?”

“Two dimes.”

She held out her hand and he placed the coins in them and she placed them in the pocket of her man’s trousers. “You won’t do it.”

“What?” he said.

“Leave. You want me to be so impressed that you said you’d leave that I’ll decide you’re a Clear-Talk Charlie and ask you to stay.”

“Nope.” He shrugged into his coat. “I’m really going.”

She leaned into the bar. “Come here.”

He cocked his head.

She crooked a finger at him. “Come here.”

He moved a couple of stools out of the way and leaned into the bar.

“You see those fellas in the corner, sitting by the table made out of the apple barrel?”

He didn’t need to turn his head. He’d seen them the moment he walked in—three of them. Dockworkers by the look of them, ship masts for shoulders, rocks for hands, eyes you didn’t want to catch.

“I see ’em.”

“They’re my cousins. You see a family resemblance, don’t you?”

“No.”

She shrugged. “You know what they do for work?”

Their lips were close enough that if they’d opened their mouths and unfurled their tongues, the tips would have met.

“I have no idea.”

“They find guys like you who lie about guys named Dinny and they beat them to death.” She inched her elbows forward and their faces grew even closer. “Then they throw them in the river.”

Joe’s scalp and the backs of his ears itched. “Quite the occupation.”

“Beats robbing poker games, though, doesn’t it?”

For a moment Joe forgot how to move his face.

“Say something clever,” Emma Gould said. “Maybe about that sock you put in my mouth. I want to hear something slick and clever.”

Joe said nothing.

“And while you’re thinking of things,” Emma Gould said, “think of this—they’re watching us right now. If I tug this earlobe? You won’t make the stairs.”

He looked at the earlobe she’d indicated with a flick of her pale eyes. The right one. It looked like a chickpea, but softer. He wondered what it would taste like first thing in the morning.

Joe glanced down at the bar. “And if I pull this trigger?”

She followed his gaze, saw the pistol he’d placed between them.

“You won’t reach your earlobe,” he said.

Her eyes left the pistol and rose up his forearm in such a way he could feel the hairs parting. She sculled across the center of his chest and then up his throat and over his chin. When she found his eyes, hers were fuller and sharper, lit with something that had entered the world centuries before civilized things.