Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

Deacon Broscious didn’t believe in chasing down country niggers for their money after they’d lost, just couldn’t see the sense in that. He had real collectors for real debt, he couldn’t bother fucking up niggers’ limbs for pennies. Those pennies, though, you added it up and you could fill some mail bags with it, boy, could fill a barn come those special days when folks thought luck was in the air.

Since the runners carried that cash around with them, it stood to reason that Deacon Broscious had to pick boys he trusted, but the Deacon didn’t get to be the Deacon by trusting anybody, so Luther had always assumed he was being watched. Not every run, mind you, just every third or so. He’d never actually seen someone doing the watching, but it sure couldn’t hurt matters none to work from that assumption.

Jessie said, “You give Deacon too much credit, boy. Man can’t have eyes everywhere. ’Sides, even if he did, those eyes are human, too. They can’t tell if you went into the house and just Daddy played or if Mama and Grandpa and Uncle Jim all played, too. And you sure don’t pocket all four of them dollars. But if you pocket one? Who’s the wiser? God? Maybe if He’s looking. But the Deacon ain’t God.”

He surely wasn’t that. He was some other thing.

Jessie took a shot at the six ball and missed it clean. He gave Luther a lazy shrug. His buttery eyes told Luther he’d been hitting the spike again, probably in the alley while Luther’d used the bathroom a while back.

Luther sank the twelve.

Jessie gripped his stick to keep him up, then felt behind him for his chair. When he was sure he’d found it and centered it under his ass, he lowered himself into it and smacked his lips, tried to get some wet into that big tongue of his.

Luther couldn’t help himself. “Shit going to kill you, boy.”

Jessie smiled and wagged a finger at him. “Ain’t going to do nothing right now but make me feel right, so shush your mouth and shoot your pool.”

That was the problem with Jessie — much as the boy could talk at you, weren’t no one could talk to him. There was some part of him — the core, most likely — that got plumb irritated by reason. Common sense insulted Jessie.

“Just ’cause folks be doing a thing,” he said to Luther once, “don’t make that thing a good fucking idea all to itself, do it?”

“Don’t make it bad.”

Jessie smiled that smile of his got him women and a free drink more often than not. “Sure it do, Country. Sure it do.”

Oh, the women loved him. Dogs rolled over at the sight of him and peed all over their bellies, and children followed him when he walked Greenwood Avenue, as if gold-plated jumping jacks would spring from his trouser cuffs.

Because there was something unbroken in the man. And people followed him, maybe, just to see it break.

Luther sank the six and then the five, and when he looked up again, Jessie had gone into a nod, a bit of drool hanging from the corner of his mouth, his arms and legs wrapped around that pool stick like he’d decided it would make him a right fine wife.

They’d look after him here. Maybe set him up in the back room if the place got busy. Else, just leave him where he sat. So Luther put his stick back in the rack and took his hat from the wall and walked out into the Greenwood dusk. He thought of finding himself a game, just sit in for a few hands. There was one going on right now upstairs in the back room of Po’s Gas Station, and just picturing it put an itch in his head. But he’d played in a few too many games already during his short time in Greenwood and it was all he could do hustling for tips at the hotel and running for the Deacon to keep Lila from getting any idea how much he’d lost.

Lila. He’d promised her he’d come home tonight before sunset and it was well past that now, the sky a deep dark blue and the Arkansas River gone silver and black, and while it was just about the last thing he wanted to do, what with the night filling up around him with music and loud, happy catcalls and such, Luther took a deep breath and headed home to be a husband.

Lila didn’t care much for Jessie, no surprise, and she didn’t care much for any of Luther’s friends or his nights on the town or his moonlighting for Deacon Broscious, so the small house on Elwood Avenue had been getting smaller every day since.

A week ago when Luther had said, “Where the money going to come from then?” Lila said she’d get a job, too. Luther laughed, knowing that no white folk was going to want a pregnant colored scrubbing their pots and cleaning their floors because white women wouldn’t want their husbands thinking about how that baby got in there and white men wouldn’t like thinking about it either. Might have to explain to the children how come they’d never seen a black stork.

After supper tonight, she said, “You a man now, Luther. A husband. You got responsibilities.”

“And I’m keeping ’em up, ain’t I?” Luther said. “Ain’t I?”

“Well, you are, I’ll grant you.”

“Okay, then.”

“But still, baby, you can spend some nights at home. You can get to fixing those things you said.”

“What things?”

She cleared the table and Luther stood, went to the coat he’d placed on the hook when he’d come in, fished for his cigarettes.

“Things,” Lila said. “You said you’d build a crib for the baby and fix the sag in the steps and—”

“And, and, and,” Luther said. “Shit, woman, I work hard all day.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” It came out a lot harder than he’d intended.

Lila said, “Why you so cross all the time?”

Luther hated these conversations. Seemed like it was the only kind they had anymore. He lit a cigarette. “I ain’t cross,” he said, even though he was.

“You cross all the time.” She rubbed her belly where it had already begun to show.

“Well why the fuck not?” Luther said. He hadn’t meant to cuss in front of her, but he could feel the liquor in him, liquor he barely noticed drinking when he was around Jessie because Jessie and his heroin made a little whiskey seem as dangerous as lemonade. “Two months ago, I wasn’t a father-to-be.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Lila placed the dishes in the sink and came back into the small living room.

“Shit mean what I said,” Luther said. “A month ago—”

“What?” She stared at him, waiting.

“A month ago I wasn’t in Tulsa and I wasn’t shotgun-wed and I wasn’t living in some shit little house on some shit little avenue in some shit little town, Lila . Now was I?”

“This ain’t no shit town.” Lila’s voice went up with her back. “And you weren’t shotgun-wed.”

“May as well.”

She got up into him, staring with stoked-coal eyes and curled fists. “You don’t want me? You don’t want your child?”

“I wanted a fucking choice,” Luther said.

“You have your choice and you take it every night out on the streets. You ain’t ever come home like a man should, and when you do, you drunk or high or both.”

“Got to be,” Luther said.

Her lips were trembling when she said, “And why’s that?”

“’Cause it’s the only way I can put up with—” He stopped himself, but it was too late.

“With what, Luther? With me?”

“I’m going out.”

She grabbed his arm. “With me, Luther? That it?”

“Go on over to your auntie’s now,” Luther said. “Ya’ll can talk about what an un-Christian man I am. Tell yourselves how you gonna God me up.”

“With me?” she said a third time, and her voice was small and soul sick.

Luther left before he could get the mind to bust something.