Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

“We’re a union, men. That means we come together as one body with one purpose and we take it to them where they live. And we demand our rights as men. Any of you want to sit this out? Then fucking sit. The rest of you — show me what we are.”

They rose as one — a thousand men, some with blood on their faces, some with tears of rage bubbling in their eyes. And Danny rose, too, a Judas no longer.

He met his father as his father was leaving the Oh-Six in South Boston.

“I’m out.”

His father paused on the station house steps. “You’re out of what?”

“The union-rat job, the radicals, the whole thing.”

His father came down the stairs and stepped in close. “Those radicals could make you a captain by forty, son.”

“Don’t care.”

“You don’t care?” His father gave him a withered smile. “You turn this chance down, you’ll not get another shot at that gold shield for five years. If ever.”

Fear at that prospect filled Danny’s chest, but he jammed his hands deeper in his pockets and shook his head. “I won’t rat on my own men.”

“They’re subversives, Aiden. Subversives within our own department.”

“They’re cops, Dad. And by the way, what kind of father are you to send me into that kinda job? You couldn’t find someone else?”

His father’s face grew gray. “It’s the price of the ticket.”

“What ticket?”

“For the train that never runs out of track.” He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Your grandchildren would have ridden it.”

Danny waved it off. “I’m going home, Dad.”

“Your home’s here, Aiden.”

Danny looked up at the white limestone building with its Grecian columns. He shook his head. “Your home is.”

That night he went to Tessa’s door. He knocked softly, looking up and down the hall, but she didn’t answer. So he turned and walked toward his room, feeling like a kid carrying stolen food under his coat. Just as he reached his door, he heard hers unlatch.

He turned in the corridor and she was coming down the hallway toward him with a coat thrown over her shift, barefoot, her expression one of alarm and curiosity. When she reached him, he tried to think of something to say.

“I still felt like talking,” he said.

She looked back at him, her eyes large and dark. “More stories of the Old Country?”

He thought of her on the floor of Primo Alieveri’s great hall, the way her flesh would have looked against the marble as the light of the fire played on her dark hair. A shameful image, really, in which to find lust.

“No,” he said. “Not those stories.”

“New ones, then?”

Danny opened his door. It was a reflexive gesture, but then he looked in Tessa’s eyes and saw that the effect had been anything but casual.

“You want to come in and talk?” he said.

She stood there in her coat and the threadbare white shift underneath, looking at him for a long time. He could see her body underneath the shift. A light sheen of perspiration dotted the brown flesh below the hollow of her throat.

“I want to come in,” she said.

The first time Lila ever laid eyes on Luther was at a picnic on the outskirts of Minerva Park in a green field along the banks of the Big Walnut River. It was supposed to be a gathering of just the folks who worked for the Buchanan family at the mansion in Columbus, while the Buchanans themselves were on vacation in Saginaw Bay. But someone had mentioned it to someone and that someone mentioned it to someone else and by the time Lila arrived in the late morning of that hot August day there were at least sixty people going full-out for high times down along the water. It was a month after the massacre of coloreds in East St. Louis, and that month had passed slow and winter-bleak among the workers at the Buchanan house, pieces of gossip trickling in here and there that contradicted the newspaper accounts and, of course, the conversation among the white folk around the Buchanan dinner table. To hear the stories — of white women stabbing colored women with kitchen knives while white men burned the neighborhood down and strung their ropes and shot the colored men — was plenty reason to have a dark cloud drift down into the heads of everyone Lila knew, but four weeks later, it seemed folks had decided to retire that cloud for a day, to have fun while there was fun to be had.

Some men had cut an oil drum in half and covered the halves in cattle wire and started barbecuing and folks had brought tables and chairs and the tables were covered with plates of fried catfish and creamy potato salad and deep brown drumsticks and fat purple grapes and heaps and heaps of greens. Children ran and folks danced and some men played baseball in the wilting grass. Two men had brought their guitars and were cutting heads against each other like they were standing on a street corner in Helena, and the sounds of those guitars was as sharp as the sky.

Lila sat with her girlfriends, housemaids all — ’Ginia and CC and Darla Blue — and they drank sweet tea and watched the men and the children play and it wasn’t no trick at all to figure out which men were single because they acted more childish than the children, prancing and bowing up and getting loud. They reminded Lila of ponies before a race, pawing the dirt, rearing their heads.

Darla Blue, who had all the sense of a barn door, said, “I like that one there.”

They all looked. They all shrieked.

“The snaggle-toothed one with the big ol’ bush for a head?”

“He cute.”

“For a dog.”

“No, he—”

“Look at that big spilly belly on him,” ’Ginia said. “Go all the way to his knees. And that butt look like a hundred pounds of warm taffy.”

“I like a little roundness in a man.”

“Well, that be your true love, then, ’cause he all round all the time. Round as a harvest moon. Ain’t nothing hard in that man. Ain’t nothing going to get hard neither.”

They shrieked some more and clapped their thighs and CC said, “What about you, Miss Lila Waters? You see your Mr. Right?”

Lila shook her head, but the girls were having none of it.

Yet no matter how much shrieking and jawing they did to get it out of her, she kept her lips sealed and her eyes from wandering because she’d seen him, she’d seen him just fine, could see him now out of the corner of her eye as he moved across the grass like the breeze itself and snatched a ball from the air with a flick of his glove so effortless it was almost cruel. A slim man. Looked like he had cat in his blood the way he moved, as if where other men had joints, he had springs. And they were oiled to a shine. Even when he threw the ball, you didn’t notice his arm, the piece of him that had done it, so much as you saw every square inch of him moving as a whole.

Music, Lila decided. The man’s body was nothing less than music.

She’d heard the other men call his name — Luther. When he came running in to take his turn at bat, a small boy ran alongside him in the grass and tripped as they reached the dirt. The child landed on his chin and opened his mouth to wail, but Luther scooped him up without breaking stride and said, “Hear now, boy, ain’t no crying on Saturday .”

The child’s mouth hung open and Luther smiled wide at him. The child let loose a yelp and then laughed like he might never stop.

Luther swung the boy in the air and then looked straight at Lila, taking her breath on a ride down to her knees with how fast his eyes locked on hers. “Yours, ma’am?”

Lila tuned her eyes in to his and didn’t blink. “I don’t have no children.”

“Yet,” CC said and laughed loud.