Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

“Can’t see you.” Steve cleared his throat.

Danny said, “I can see you, pal.”

“Pull it back, would ya?”

Danny didn’t move right away.

“You scared? I don’t blame ya. Forget it.”

Danny leaned forward a few times. He hitched his pants at the knees. He leaned forward again. He pulled back the curtain.

His friend sat upright, the pillow dark from his head. His face was swollen and skeletal at the same time, like dozens of the infected, living and dead, that he and Danny had run across this month. His eyes bulged from their sockets, as if trying to escape, and ran with a milky film that pooled in the corners. But he wasn’t purple. Or black. He wasn’t hacking his lungs up through his mouth or defecating where he lay. So, all in all, not as sick as one feared. Not yet anyway.

He gave Danny an arched eyebrow, an exhausted grin.

“Remember those girls I courted this summer?”

Danny nodded. “Did more than court some of them.”

He coughed. A small one, into his fist. “I wrote a song. In my head. ‘Summer Girls.’”

Danny could suddenly feel the heat coming off him. If he leaned within a foot of him, the waves found his face.

“‘Summer Girls,’ eh?”

“‘Summer Girls.’” Steve’s eyes closed. “Sing it for you someday.”

Danny found a bucket of water on the bedside table. He reached in and pulled out a cloth and squeezed it. He placed the cloth on Steve’s forehead. Steve’s eyes snapped up to him, wild and grateful. Danny moved down his forehead and wiped his cheeks. He dropped the hot cloth back into the cooler water and squeezed again. He wiped his partner’s ears, the sides of his neck, his throat and chin.

“Dan.”

“Yeah?”

Steve grimaced. “Like a horse is sitting on my chest.”

Danny kept his eyes clear. He didn’t remove them from Steve’s face when he dropped the cloth back in the bucket. “Sharp?”

“Yeah. Sharp.”

“Can you breathe?”

“Not too good.”

“Probably I should get a doctor, then.”

Steve flicked his eyes at the suggestion.

Danny patted his hand and called for the doctor.

“Stay here,” Steve said. His lips were white.

Danny smiled and nodded. He swiveled on the small stool they’d wheeled over to the bed when he arrived. Called for a doctor again.

Avery Wallace, seventeen years the houseman for the Coughlin family, succumbed to the grippe and was buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery in a plot Thomas Coughlin had bought for him a decade ago. Only Thomas, Danny, and Nora attended the short funeral. No one else.

Thomas said, “His wife died twenty years ago. Children scattered, most to Chicago, one to Canada. They never wrote. He lost track. He was a good man. Hard to know, but a good man, nonetheless.”

Danny was surprised to hear a soft, subdued grief in his father’s voice.

His father picked up a handful of dirt as Avery Wallace’s coffin was lowered into the grave. He tossed the dirt on the wood. “Lord have mercy on your soul.”

Nora kept her head down, but the tears fell from her chin. Danny was stunned. How was it that he’d known this man most of his life and yet somehow had never really seen him?

He tossed his own handful of dirt on the coffin.

Because he was colored. That’s why.

Steve walked out of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital ten days after he’d walked in. Like thousands of others infected in the city, he’d survived, even as the grippe made its steady way across the rest of the country, crossing into California and New Mexico the same weekend he walked with Danny to a taxi.

He walked with a cane. Always would, the doctors promised. The influenza had weakened his heart, damaged his brain. The headaches would never leave him. Simple speech would sometimes be a problem, strenuous activity of any kind would probably kill him. A week ago he’d joked about that, but today he was quiet.

It was a short walk to the taxi stand but it took a long time.

“Not even a desk job,” he said as they reached the front taxicab in the line.

“I know,” Danny said. “I’m sorry.”

“‘Too strenuous,’ they said.”

Steve worked his way into the cab and Danny handed him his cane. He came around the other side and got in.

“Where to?” the cabdriver asked.

Steve looked at Danny. Danny looked back, waiting.

“You guys deaf? Where to?”

“Keep your knickers cinched.” Steve gave him the address of the rooming house on Salem Street. As the driver pulled off the curb, Steve looked over at Danny. “You help me pack up my room?”

“You don’t have to leave.”

“I can’t afford it. No job.”

“The Widow Coyle?” Danny said.

Steve shrugged. “Ain’t seen her since I got it.”

“Where you going to go?”

Another shrug. “Got to be somebody looking to hire a heartsick cripple.”

Danny didn’t say anything for a minute. They bumped along Huntington.

“There’s got to be some way to—”

Steve put a hand on his arm. “Coughlin, I love ya, but there’s not always ‘some way.’ Most people fall? No net. None. We just go off.”

“Where?”

Steve was quiet for a bit. He looked out the window. He pursed his lips. “Where the people with no nets end up. That place.”

Luther was shooting pool alone in the Gold Goose when Jessie came around to tell him the Deacon wanted to see them. It was empty in the Goose because it was empty all over Greenwood, all over Tulsa, the flu having come in like a dust storm until at least one member of most families had gotten it and half of those had died. It was against the law right now to go outside without a mask, and most businesses in the sinners’ end of Greenwood had closed up shop, though old Calvin, who ran the Goose, said he’d stay open no matter what, said if the Lord wanted his tired old ass, He could just come get it for all the good it would do Him. So Luther came by and practiced his pool, loving how crisp the balls snapped in all that quiet.

The Hotel Tulsa was closed until people stopped turning blue, and nobody was betting numbers, so there wasn’t no money to be made right now. Luther forbade Lila to go out, said they couldn’t risk it for her or the baby, but this had meant he’d been expected to stay home with her. He had, and it was mostly better than he would have imagined. They fixed up the place a bit and gave every room a fresh coat of paint and hung the curtains Aunt Marta had given them as a wedding present. They found time to make love most every afternoon, slower than ever before, gentler, soft smiles and chuckles replacing the hungry grunts and groans of summer. He remembered in those weeks how deeply he loved this woman and that loving her and having her love him back made him a worthy man. They built dreams of their future and their baby’s future, and Luther, for the first time, could picture a life in Greenwood, had formed a loose ten-year plan in which he’d work as hard as a man could and keep socking away the money until he could start his own business, maybe as a carpenter, maybe as the owner/operator of a repair shop for all the different gadgets that seemed to sprout out from the heart of this country damn near every day. Luther knew if you built something mechanical, sooner or later it broke, and when it did most wouldn’t know how to fix it, but a man with Luther’s gifts could have it back in your house and good as new by nightfall.

Yeah, for a couple weeks there, he could see it, but then the house started closing in on him again and those dreams went dark when he pictured growing old in some house on Detroit Avenue, surrounded by people like Aunt Marta and her ilk, going to church, laying off the liquor and the billiards and the fun until one day he woke up and his hair was speckled white and his speed was gone and he’d never done nothing with his life but chase someone else’s version of it.