Dennis Lehane - The Given Day

“Right now you hate me. I can see that. But today we’re going to settle accounts in this little burg of ours. Today, the Reds — all Reds, even colored Reds — are getting their eviction notices from this fair city.” He held out his arms and shrugged. “And by tomorrow, you’ll thank me, because we’ll have us a nice place to live again.”

He tapped the paper off his thigh again and gave Luther a solemn nod before walking toward his Hudson.

“You’re making a mistake,” Luther said.

McKenna looked back over his shoulder. “What’s that?”

“You’re making a mistake.”

McKenna walked back and punched Luther in the stomach. All the air left his body like it was never coming back. He dropped to his knees and opened his mouth but his throat had collapsed along with his lungs, and for a terrifying length of time he couldn’t get a breath in or out. He was sure he’d die like that, on his knees, his face gone blue like someone with the grippe.

When the air did come, it hurt, going down his windpipe like a spade. His first breath came out sounding like the screech of a train wheel, followed by another and then another, until they began to sound normal, if a little high-pitched.

McKenna stood over him, patient. “What was that?” he said softly.

“NAACP folks ain’t Red,” Luther said. “And if some are, they ain’t the kind going to blow shit up or fire off guns.”

McKenna slapped the side of his head. “I’m not sure I heard you.”

Luther could see twins of himself reflected in McKenna’s irises. “What you think? You think a bunch of coloreds are going to run in these here streets with weapons? Give you and all the other redneck assholes in this country an excuse to kill us all? You think we want to get massacred?” He stared up at the man, saw that his fist was clenched. “You got a bunch of foreign-born sons of bitches trying to stir up a revolution today, McKenna, so I say you go get them. Put ’em down like dogs. I got no love for those people. And neither do any other colored folk. This is our country, too.”

McKenna took a step back and considered him with a wry smile.

“What’d you say?”

Luther spit on the ground and took a breath. “Said this is our country, too.”

“’Tis not, son.” McKenna shook his large head. “Nor will it ever be.”

He left Luther there and climbed into his car and it pulled away from the curb. Luther rose from his knees and sucked a few breaths into his lungs until the nausea had almost passed. “Yes, it is,” he whispered, over and over, until he saw McKenna’s taillights take a right turn on Massachusetts Avenue.

“Yes, it is,” he said one more time and spit into the gutter.

That morning, the reports started coming out of Division 9 in Roxbury that a crowd was gathering in front of the Dudley Opera House. Each of the other station houses was asked to send men, and the Mounted Unit met at the BPD stables and warmed up their horses.

Men from all the city’s precincts were dropped at Division 9 under the command of Lieutenant McKenna. They assembled on the first floor in the wide lobby in front of the desk sergeant’s counter, and McKenna addressed them from the landing of the stairwell that curved up toward the second floor.

“We happy, happy few,” he said, taking them all in with a soft smile. “Gentlemen, the Letts are gathering in an illegal assembly in front of the Opera House. What do you think about that?”

No one knew if the question was rhetorical or not, so no one answered.

“Patrolman Watson?”

“Loo?”

“What do you think of this illegal assembly?”

Watson, whose family had changed their Polish name from something long and unpronounceable, straightened his shoulders. “I’d say they picked the wrong day for it, Loo.”

McKenna raised a hand above them all. “We are sworn to protect and serve Americans in general and Bostonians in particular. The Letts, well” — he chuckled — “the Letts are neither, gents. Heathens and subversives that they are, they have chosen to ignore the city’s strict orders not to march and plan to parade from the Opera House down Dudley Street to Upham’s Corner in Dorchester. From there they plan to turn right on Columbia Road and continue until they reach Franklin Park, where they will hold a rally in support of their comrades — yes, comrades — in Hungary, Bavaria, Greece, and, of course, Russia. Are there any Russians among us here today?”

Someone shouted, “Hell no!” and the other men repeated it in a cheer.

“Any Bolsheviki?”

“Hell no!”

“Any gutless, atheistic, subversive, hook-nosed, cock-smoking, anti-American dog fuckers?”

The men were laughing when they shouted, “Hell no!”

McKenna leaned on the railing and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “Three days ago, the mayor of Seattle received a bomb in the mail. Luckily for him, his housekeeper got to it before he did. Poor woman’s in the hospital with no hands. Last night, as I’m sure you all know, the U.S. postal service intercepted thirty-four bombs meant to kill the attorney general of this great nation as well as several learned judges and captains of industry. Today, radicals of every stripe — but mostly heathen Bolsheviki — have promised a national day of revolt to take place in key cities across this fine land. Gentlemen, I ask you — is this the kind of country we wish to live in?”

“Hell no!”

The men were moving around Danny, shifting from foot to foot.

“Would you like to walk out the back door right now and hand it over to a horde of subversives and ask them to please remember to shut the lights out at bedtime?”

“Hell no!” Shoulders jostled off one another and Danny could smell sweat and hangover breath and a strange burnt-hair odor, an acrid scent of fury and fear.

“Or,” McKenna shouted, “would you, instead, like to take this country back?”

The men were so used to saying “Hell no!” that several did so again.

McKenna cocked an eyebrow at them. “I said — Would you like to take this fucking country back?”

“Hell, yes!”

Dozens of the men attended BSC meetings alongside Danny, men who just the other night had been bemoaning the shoddy treatment they received at the hands of their department, men who’d expressed kinship for all the workers of the world in their struggle against Big Money. But all that, for the moment, was swept away by the tonic of unity and a shared purpose.

“We are going down to the Dudley Opera House,” McKenna shouted, “right now and we are going to order these subversives, these Communists and anarchists and bomb throwers, to stand the fuck down!”

The cheer that rose up was unintelligible, a collective roar of the blood.

“We are going to say, in the strictest terms, ‘Not on my watch!’” McKenna leaned over the rail, his neck extended, his jaw thrust forward. “Can you say it with me, gents?”

“Not on my watch!” the men shouted.

“Let me hear it again.”

“Not on my watch!”

“Are you with me?”

“Yes!”

“Are you frightened?”

“Hell no!”

“Are you Boston police?”

“Hell yes!”

“The finest, most respected police force in these forty-eight states?”

“Hell yes!”

McKenna stared at them, his head sweeping slowly from one side of the crowd to the other, and Danny saw no humor in his face, no ironic glint. Just certitude. McKenna let the silence build, the men shuffling from side to side, hands wiping sweat on the sides of pants and the handles of nightsticks.

“Then,” McKenna hissed, “let’s go earn our pay.”

The men turned in several directions at once. They shoved one another gleefully. They barked in one another’s faces, and then someone figured out where the exit was and they turned into the rear corridor and moved in a sea through the door. They poured out the back of the station house and up the alley, some already rapping their billy clubs off the walls and the tops of metal trash cans.