Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

Danny put his arm around the guy beside him, a chimney sweep with a bad hip, and the chimney sweep raised his own glass. Nathan Bishop worked his way out from behind his table, making sure to scoop up both his whiskey bottle and his whiskey glass, and joined them at the bar as two merchant marines jumped in, loud as hell and way off key, but who cared as they all swung their elbows and their drinks from side to side:

The last line came out in shouts and torn laughs, and then the bartender rang the bell behind the bar and promised a free round.

“We’re singing for our supper, boys!” one of the merchant marines cried out.

“You’re getting the free drink to stop singing!” the bartender shouted over the laughter. “Them’s the terms and none other.”

They were all drunk enough to cheer to that and then they bellied up for their free drinks and shook hands all around — Daniel Sante meet Abe Rowley, Abe Rowley meet Terrance Bonn and Gus Sweet, Terrance Bonn and Gus Sweet meet Nathan Bishop, Nathan Bishop meet Daniel Sante.

“Hell of a voice there, Nathan.”

“Thank you. Good on yours as well, Daniel.”

“Habit of yours, is it, to just start singing out in a bar?”

“Across the pond, where I’m from, it’s quite common. It was getting fairly gloomy in here until I took up the cause, wouldn’t you say?”

“I wouldn’t argue.”

“Well, then, cheers.”

“Cheers.”

They met their glasses, then threw back their shots.

Seven drinks and four songs later they ate the stew that the bartender kept cooking in the fireplace all day. It was horrid; the meat was brown and unidentifiable and the potatoes were gray and chewy. If Danny had to guess, he’d bet the grit it left on his teeth came from sawdust. But it filled them. After, they sat and drank and Danny told his Daniel Sante lies about western Pennsylvania and Thomson Lead.

“That’s just it, isn’t it?” Nathan said, rolling his cigarette from a pouch on his lap. “You ask for anything in this world and the answer is always ‘No.’ Then you’re forced to take from those who themselves took before you — and in much bigger slices, I might add — and they dare call you a thief. It’s fairly absurd.” He offered Danny the cigarette he’d just rolled.

Danny held up a hand. “Thanks, no. I buy ’em in the packs.” He pulled his Murads from his shirt pocket and placed them on the table.

Nathan lit his. “How’d you get that scar?”

“This?” Danny pointed to his neck. “Methane explosion.”

“In the mines?”

Danny nodded.

“My father was a miner,” Nathan said. “Not here.”

“Across the pond?”

“Just so.” He smiled. “Just outside of Manchester in the North. It’s where I grew up.”

“Tough country I’ve always heard.”

“Yes, it is. Sinfully dreary, as well. A palette of grays and the occasional brown. My father died there. In a mine. Can you imagine?”

“Dying in a mine?” Danny said. “Yes.”

“He was strong, my father. That’s the most unfortunate aspect of the whole sordid mess. You see?”

Danny shook his head.

“Well, take me for instance. I’m no physical specimen. Uncoordinated, terrible at sports, nearsighted, bowlegged, and asthmatic.”

Danny laughed. “You leave anything out?”

Nathan laughed and held up a hand. “Several things. But that’s it, you see? I’m physically weak. If a tunnel collapsed and I had several hundred pounds of dirt on me, maybe a half-ton wood beam in the mix, a terribly limited supply of oxygen, well, I’d just succumb. I’d die like a good Englishman, quietly and without complaint.”

“Your father, though,” Danny said.

“Crawled,” Nathan said. “They found his shoes where the walls had collapsed on him. It was three hundred feet from where they found his corpse. He crawled. With a broken back, through hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds of dirt and rock while the mining company waited two days to begin excavation. They were worried that rescue attempts could put the walls of the main tunnel at risk. Had my father known that, I wonder if it would have stopped his crawling sooner or pushed him on another fifty feet.”

They sat in silence for a time, the fire spitting and hissing its way along some logs that still held a bit of dampness. Nathan Bishop poured himself another drink and then tilted the bottle over Danny’s glass, poured just as generously.

“It’s wrong,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“What men of means demand of men without them. And then they expect the poor to be grateful for the scraps. They have the cheek to act offended — morally offended — if the poor don’t play along. They should all be burned at the stake.”

Danny could feel the liquor in him turning sludgy. “Who?”

“The rich.” He gave Danny a lazy smile. “Burn them all.”

Danny found himself at Fay Hall again for another meeting of the BSC. On tonight’s agenda, the department’s continued refusal to treat influenza-related sickness among the men as work related. Steve Coyle, a little drunker than one would have hoped, spoke of his ongoing fight to get some kind of disability payments from the department he’d served twelve years.

After the flu discussion was exhausted, they moved on to a preliminary proposal for the department to assume part of the expense of replacing damaged or severely worn uniforms.

“It’s the most innocuous salvo we can fire,” Mark Denton said. “If they reject it, then we can point to it later to show their refusal to grant us any concessions at all.”

“Point for who?” Adrian Melkins asked.

“The press,” Mark Denton said. “Sooner or later, this fight will be fought in the papers. I want them on our side.”

After the meeting, as the men milled by the coffee urns or passed their flasks, Danny found himself thinking of his father and then of Nathan Bishop’s.

“Nice beard,” Mark Denton said. “You grow cats in that thing?”

“Undercover work,” Danny said. He pictured Bishop’s father crawling through a collapsed mine. Pictured his son still trying to drink it away. “What do you need?”

“Huh?”

“From me,” Danny said.

Mark took a step back, appraised him. “I’ve been trying to figure out since the first time you showed up here whether you’re a plant or not.”

“Who’d plant me?”

Denton laughed. “That’s rich. Eddie McKenna’s godson, Tommy Coughlin’s son. Who’d plant you? Hilarious.”

“If I was a plant, why’d you ask for my help?”

“To see how fast you jumped at the offer. I’ll admit, you not jumping right away gave me pause. Now here you are, though, asking me how you can help out.”

“That’s right.”

“I guess it’s my turn to say I’ll think about it,” Denton said.

Eddie McKenna sometimes conducted business meetings on his roof. He lived in a Queen Anne atop Telegraph Hill in South Boston. His view — of Thomas Park, Dorchester Heights, the downtown skyline, the Fort Point Channel, and Boston Harbor — was, much like his persona, expansive. The roof was tarred and flat as sheet metal; Eddie kept a small table and two chairs out there, along with a metal shed where he stored his tools and those his wife, Mary Pat, used in the tiny garden behind their house. He was fond of saying that he had the view and he had the roof and he had the love of a good woman so he couldn’t begrudge the good Lord for forsaking him a yard.

It was, like most of the things Eddie McKenna said, as full of the truth as it was full of shit. Yes, Thomas Coughlin, had once told Danny, Eddie’s cellar was barely able to hold its fill of coal, and yes, his yard could support a tomato plant, a basil plant, and possibly a small rosebush but certainly none of the tools needed to tend them. This was of little import, however, because tools weren’t all Eddie McKenna kept in the shed.