Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

The Deacon Broscious weighed north of four hundred pounds. With plenty change. More often than not, if he took the night air down around Admiral and First, he did so in a big old wooden rocker that somebody’d strapped wheels to. The Deacon had him two high-boned, high-yellow, knob-jointed, thin-as-death sons of bitches working for him, name of Dandy and Smoke, and they pushed him around town at all hours of the night in that chair, and plenty nights he’d take to singing. He had a beautiful voice, high and sweet and strong, and he’d sing spirituals and chain gang songs and even did a version of “I’m a Twelve O’Clock Fella in a Nine O’Clock Town” that was a hell of a lot better than the white version you heard Byron Harlan singing on the disc record. So there he’d be, rolling up and down First Street, singing with a voice so beautiful some said God had kept it from his favorite angels so as not to encourage covetousness in their ranks entire, and Deacon Broscious would clap his hands, and his face would bead with sweat and his smile would become the size and shine of a trout, and folks would forget for a moment who he was, until one of them remembered because he owed the Deacon something, and that one, he’d get to see behind the sweat and smile and the singing and what he saw there left an imprint on children he hadn’t even sired yet.

Jessie Tell told Luther that the last time a man had seriously fucked with the Deacon Broscious — “I mean lack-of- all -respect type of fucking?” Jessie said — Deacon up and sat on the son of a bitch. Squirmed in place until he couldn’t hear the screams no more, looked down and saw that the dumb nigger’d given up the ghost, just lay in the dirt looking at nothing, mouth wide open, one arm stretched and reaching.

“Mighta told me this before I took a job from the man,” Luther said.

“You running numbers, Country. You think you do that sort of thing for a nice man?”

Luther said, “Told you not to call me Country no more.”

They were in the Gold Goose, getting loose after a long day smiling for white folk across the tracks, and Luther could feel the liquor reaching that level in his blood where everything slowed down right nice and his eyesight sharpened and he felt nothing was impossible.

Luther would soon have ample time to consider how he’d fallen into running numbers for the Deacon, and it would take him a while to realize that it had nothing to do with money — hell, with the tips he made at the Hotel Tulsa he was making nearly twice what he’d made at the munitions factory. And it wasn’t like he hoped to have any future in the rackets. He’d seen enough men back in Columbus who’d thought they could climb that ladder; usually when they fell from it, they fell screaming. So why? It was that house on Elwood, he guessed, the way it crowded him until he felt the eaves dig into his shoulders. And it was Lila, much as he loved her — and he was surprised to realize how much he did sometimes, how much the sight of her blinking awake with one side of her face pressed to the pillow could fire a bolt through his heart. But before he could even get his head around that love, maybe enjoy it a little bit, here she was carrying a child, she only twenty and Luther just twenty-three. A child. A rest-of-your-life responsibility. A thing that grew up while you grew old. Didn’t care if you were tired, didn’t care if you were trying to concentrate on something else, didn’t care if you wanted to make love. A child just was, thrust right into the center of your life and screaming its head off. And Luther, who’d never really known his father, was damn sure certain he’d live up to his responsibility, like it or not, but until then he wanted to live this here life at full tilt, with a little danger thrown in to spice it up, something to remember when he sat on his rocker and played with his grandkids. They’d be looking at an old man smiling like a fool, while he’d be remembering the young buck who’d run through the Tulsa night with Jessie and danced just enough on the other side of the law to say it didn’t own him.

Jessie was the first and best friend Luther had made in Greenwood, and this would soon become the problem. His given name was Clarence, but his middle name was Jessup, so everyone called him Jessie when they weren’t calling him Jessie Tell, and he had a way about him that drew men to him as much as women. He was a bellhop and fill-in elevator operator at the Hotel Tulsa, and he had a gift for keeping everyone’s spirits up on his own high level and that could sure make a day fly. Much as Jessie’d been given a couple nicknames himself, it was only fair, since he’d done the same to everyone he met (it was Jessie who, at the Gold Goose, had first called Luther “Country”), and those names left his tongue with so much speed and certainty that usually a man started going by Jessie’s nickname no matter how long he’d been called by any other on this earth. Jessie would move through the lobby of the Hotel Tulsa pushing a brass cart or lugging some bags and calling out, “Happening, Slim?” and “You know it’s the truth, Typhoon,” and following that with a soft “heh heh right,” and before suppertime people were calling Bobby Slim and Gerald Typhoon and most felt better for the trade-off.

Luther and Jessie Tell had them some elevator races when times were slow and they bet on bag totals every day they worked the bell stand, hustled like mad with smile and shine for the white folk who called ’em both George even though they wore brass name tags clear as day, and after they’d crossed back over the Frisco tracks into Greenwood and retired to the saloons or the galleries down around Admiral, they kept their raps up, because they were both fast in the mouth and fast on their feet and Luther felt that between the two of them lay the kinship he’d been missing, the one he’d left behind in Columbus with Sticky Joe Beam and Aeneus James and some of the other men he’d played ball with and drank with and, in pre-Lila days, chased women with. Life— life —was lived here, in the Greenwood that sprung up at night with its snap of pool balls and its three-string guitars and saxophones and liquor and men unwinding after so many hours of being called George, called son, called boy, called whatever white folk felt a mind to call them. And a man could not only be forgiven, he could be expected to unwind with other men after days like they had, saying their “Yes, suhs” and their “How dos” and their “Sho ’nuffs.”

Fast as Jessie Tell was — and he and Luther both ran the same numbers territory and ran it fast — he was big too. Not near as big as Deacon Broscious but a man of girth, nonetheless, and he loved him his heroin. Loved him his chicken and his rye and his fat-bottomed women and his talk and his Choctaw and his song, but, man, his heroin he loved above all else.

“Shit,” he said, “nigger like me got to have something slow him down, else whitey’d shoot him ’fore he could take over the world. Say I’m right, Country. Say it. ’Cause it’s so and y’ know it.”

Problem was, a habit like Jessie had — and his habit was like the rest of him, large — got expensive, and even though he cleared more tips than any man at the Hotel Tulsa, it didn’t mean much because tips were pooled and then dealt out evenly to each man at the end of a shift. And even though he was running numbers for the Deacon and that was most definitely a paying proposition, the runners getting two cents on every dollar the customers lost and Greenwood customers lost about as much as they played and they played at a fearsome rate, Jessie still couldn’t keep up by playing straight.

So he skimmed.

The way running numbers worked in Deacon Broscious’s town was straight simple: ain’t no such thing as credit. You wanted to put a dime on the number, you paid the runner eleven cents before he left your house, the extra penny to cover the vig. You played for four bits, you paid fifty-five. And so on.