The Given Day (46 page)

"What?" Joe said, his voice thick. "Why's everyone yelling?" "Go to bed," Connor said.

Ellen Coughlin held out a hand for Joe, but he ignored it. He looked to Nora. "Why's everyone yelling?"

"Come now, woman," Quentin Finn said.

Nora said to Thomas, "Don't do this."

"I said close that mouth."

"Dad," Joe said, "why's everyone yelling?"

Danny said, "Look--"

Quentin Finn crossed to Nora's chair and pulled her out of it by her hair.

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Joe let out a wail and Ellen Coughlin screamed and Thomas said, "Everyone just calm down."

"She's my wife." Quentin dragged her along the floor.

Joe took a run at him, but Connor scooped him up in his arms and Joe batted his fists against Connor's chest and shoulders. Danny's mother fell back into her chair and wept loudly and prayed to the Holy Mother.

Quentin pulled Nora tight to him so that her cheek was pressed against his and said, "If someone would gather her effects, yah?"

Danny's father held out his hand and shouted, "No!" because Danny's arm was already cocked as he came around the table and smashed his scotch glass into the back of Quentin Finn's head.

Someone else screamed, "Danny!"--maybe his mother, maybe Nora, could have even been Joe--but by that point he'd hooked his fingers into the socket-bones above Quentin Finn's eyes and used them to ram the back of his head into the dining room doorway. A hand grabbed at his back but fell away as he spun Quentin Finn into the hallway and ran him down the length of it. Joe must have left the front door unlatched because Quentin's head popped the door wide as he went through it and out into the night. When his chest hit the stairs, it pushed through a fresh inch of snow and he landed on the sidewalk where the flakes fell fast and fat. He bounced on the cement and Danny was surprised to see him stumble to his feet for a few steps, his arms pinwheeling, before he slipped in the snow and fell with his left leg folded under him against the curb.

Danny came down the steps gingerly because the stoop was built of iron and the snow was soft and slick. The sidewalk had some slush in the places Quentin had slid through and Danny caught his eye as Quentin made it to his feet.

"Make it fun," Danny said. "Run."

His father grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him halfway around, and Danny saw something in his father's eyes he'd never seen before--uncertainty, maybe even fear.

"Leave him be," his father said.

THE GIVEN DAYHis mother reached the doorway just as Danny lifted his father by his shirt lapels and carried him back to a tree.

"Jesus, Danny!" This from Connor, on top of the stoop now as Danny heard Quentin Finn's shoes slap through the slush in the middle of K Street.

Danny looked into his father's face, pressed his back gently against the tree. "You let her pack," he said.

"Aiden, you need to calm yourself."

"Let her take what ever she needs. This is not a negotiation, sir. We firm on that?"

His father stared back into his eyes for a long time and then eventually gave him a flick of his eyelids that Danny took for assent.

He placed his father back on the ground. Nora appeared in the doorway, her temple scraped from Quentin Finn's nails. She met his eyes and he turned away.

He let out a laugh that surprised even him and took off running up K Street. Quentin had a two-block head start, but Danny cut off through the backyards of K Street and then I Street and then J, vaulting fences like he was still altar-boy age, knowing that Quentin's only possible destination was the streetcar stop. He came barreling out of an alley between J and H and hit Quentin Finn up at the shoulders and brought him sliding down into the snow in the middle of East Fifth Street.

Christmas lights had been strung up in garlands above the street, and candles lit the windows of half the homes along the block as Quentin tried to box with Danny before Danny ended a series of light jabs to both sides of his face with a torrent of body blows that finished with the one-two snap of a right and left rib. Quentin tried to run again, but Danny caught him by his coat and swung him around in the snow a few times before releasing him into a streetlamp pole. Then he climbed on top of him and broke bones in his face and broke his nose and snapped a few more ribs.

Quentin wept. Quentin begged. Quentin said, "No more, no more."

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With each syllable he spat another fine spray of blood up into the air and back down onto his face.

When Danny felt the ache bite into his hands, he stopped. He sat back on Quentin's midsection and then wiped his knuckles off on the man's coat. He rubbed snow into the man's face until his eyes snapped open.

Danny took a few gulps of air. "I haven't lost my temper since I was eighteen years old. You believe that? True. Eight years. Almost nine . . ." He sighed and looked out at the street, the snow, the lights.

"I won't . . . be a . . . bother to ya," Quentin said.

Danny laughed. "You don't say?"

"I . . . just want . . . me . . . w-wife."

Danny took Quentin's ears in his hands and softly banged his head off the cobblestone for a bit.

"As soon as you're released from the charity ward, you get on a boat and leave my country," Danny said. "Or you stay and I call this assault on a police officer. See all these windows? Half of them belong to cops. You want to pick a fight with the Boston Police Department, Quentin? Spend ten years in an American prison?"

Quentin's eyes rolled to the left.

"Look at me."

Quentin's eyes fixed in place and then he vomited on the collar of his coat.

Danny waved at the fumes. "Yes or no? Do you want the assault charge?"

Quentin said, "No."

"Are you going home as soon as you get out of a hospital?" "Yah, yah."

"Good lad." Danny stood. "Because if you don't, God is my witness, Quentin?" He looked down at him. "I'll send you back to the Old Sod a fucking cripple."

Thomas was out on the stoop when Danny returned. The taillights of his father's car glowed red as his driver, Marty Kenneally, braked at an intersection two blocks up.

THE GIVEN DAY"So Marty's driving her someplace?"

His father nodded. "I told him I don't want to know where." Danny looked at the windows of their home. "What's it like in there?"

His father appraised the blood on Danny's shirt, his torn knuckles. "You leave anything for the ambulance driver?"

Danny rested his hip against the black iron railing. "Plenty. I already called it in from the call box on J."

"Put the fear of God into him, I'm sure."

"Worse than God." He fished in his pockets and found his Murads and shook one out of the pack. He offered one to his father and his father took it and Danny lit both with his lighter and leaned back against the railing.

"Haven't seen you get like that, boy, since I had you locked up in your teens."

Danny blew a stream of smoke into the cold air, feeling the sweat beginning to dry on his upper chest and neck. "Yeah, it's been a while."

"Would you have honestly hit me?" his father said. "When you had me against the tree?"

Danny shrugged. "Might have. We'll never know."

"Your own father."

Danny chuckled. "You had no problem hitting me when I was a kid."

"That was discipline."

"So was this." Danny looked over at his father.

Thomas shook his head softly and exhaled a blue stream of smoke into the night.

"I didn't know she left a child behind back there, Dad. Had no idea."

His father nodded.

"But you did," Danny said.

His father looked over, the smoke sliding out of the corner of his mouth.

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"You brought Quentin here. Left a trail of bread crumbs and he found our door."

Thomas Coughlin said, "You give me too much credit."

Danny rolled his dice and told the lie. "He told me you did, Dad." His father sucked the night air through his nostrils and looked up at the sky. "You'd have never stopped loving her. Connor either." "What about Joe? What about what he just saw in there?" "Everyone has to grow up sometime." His father shrugged. "It's not Joe's maturing I worry about, you infant. It's yours."

Danny nodded and flicked his cigarette into the street.

"You can stop worrying," he said. chapter twenty-three Late Christmas afternoon, before the Coughlins had sat for dinner, Luther took the streetcar back to the South End. The day had started with a bright sky and clear air, but by the time Luther boarded the streetcar, the air had turned indistinct and the sky had folded back and fallen into the ground. Somehow the streets, so gray and quiet, were pretty, a sense that the city had gone privately festive. Soon the snow began to fall, the flakes small and listing like kites at first, riding the sudden wind, but then as the streetcar bucked its way over the hump of the Broadway Bridge, the flakes grew thick as flower heads and shot past the windows in the black wind. Luther, the only person sitting in the colored section, accidentally caught the eye of a white man sitting with his girlfriend two rows up. The man looked weary in a satisfied way, and his cheap wool flat cap was tilted down just so over his right eye, giving a little bit of nothing a little bit of style. He nodded, as if he and Luther shared the same thought, his girlfriend curled against his chest with her eyes closed.

"Looks like Christmas should, don't it?" The man slid his chin over his girl's head and his nostrils widened as he smelled her hair.

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"Sure does," Luther said, surprised it didn't come out "Sure do" in an all-white car.

"Heading home?"

"Yeah."

"To family?" The white guy lowered his cigarette to his girl's lips and she opened her mouth to take a drag.

"Wife and child," Luther said.

The man closed his eyes for a second and nodded. "That's good." "Yes, sir, it is." Luther swallowed against the wave of solitude that tried to rise in him.

"Merry Christmas," the man said and took his cigarette from his girl's lips and put it between his own.

"Same to you, sir."

In the Giddreauxs' foyer, he removed his coat and scarf and hung them, wet and steaming, on the radiator. He could hear voices coming from the dining room and he smoothed the snow into his hair with his palms and then wiped his palms on his coat.

When he opened the door into the main house, he heard the overlapping laughter and overlapping chatter of several conversations. Silverware and glasses clinked and he smelled roast turkey and maybe a deep-fried one as well and some kind of cinnamon scent that might have come from hot cider. Four children came running down the stairs toward him, three colored, one white, and they laughed maniacally in his face when they reached the fi rst floor and then ran full-out down the hall toward the kitchen.

He opened the pocket doors to the dining room and the guests turned to look at him, women mostly, a few older men and two about Luther's age whom he took to be the sons of Mrs. Grouse, the Giddreauxs' housekeeper. Just over a dozen people, all told, and half of them white, and Luther recognized the females who helped out at the NAACP and assumed the males were their husbands.

THE GIVEN DAY"Franklin Grouse," a younger colored man said and shook Luther's hand. He extended a glass of eggnog. "You must be Luther. My mother told me about you."

"Nice to meet you, Franklin. Merry Christmas." Luther raised his glass of eggnog and took a drink.

It was a wonderful dinner. Isaiah had returned from Washington the night before and promised he wouldn't talk politics until after dessert, so they ate and drank and chided the children when they got a little too boisterous and the talk jumped from the latest picture shows to pop u lar books and songs and then to the rumor that war radios would become a consumer item that would broadcast news and voices and plays and songs from all over the world, and Luther tried to picture how a play could be performed through a box, but Isaiah said it was to be expected. Between phone lines and telegraphs and Sopwith Camels, the future of the world was air. Air travel, air communication, air ideas. Soil was played out, ocean, too; but air was like a train track that never met the sea. Soon we'd be speaking Spanish and they'd be speaking English.

"That a good thing, Mr. Giddreaux?" Franklin Grouse said.

Isaiah tilted his hand from left-to-right, left-to-right. "It's what man makes of it."

"White man or black man?" Luther asked, and the table broke out laughing.

The happier and more comfortable he became, the sadder he felt. This could be his life--should be his life--with Lila, right now, not as a guest at the table but as the head of it and maybe some of those children would have been his, too. He caught Mrs. Giddreaux smiling at him, and when he met her smile with his own, she gave him a wink, and he could see her soul again, the supple grace of it, and it was lit with blue light.

At the end of the evening, after most of the guests had left and Isaiah and Yvette were taking their brandy with the Parthans, two old friends since his days at Morehouse and hers at Atlanta 388DENNIS LEHANE

Baptist, Luther excused himself and went up to the roof with his own glass of brandy and let himself out onto the widow's walk. The snow had stopped falling, but all the roofs were thick with it. Horns bayed from the harbor and the lights of the city spread a yellow band across the lowest reaches of the sky. He closed his eyes and sucked in the smell of the night and the snow and cold, the smoke and soot and brick dust. He felt as if he were snorting the sky right off the outermost curve of the earth. He kept his eyes shut tight and blocked out the death of Jessie and the stone-ache in his heart that had only one name: Lila. He asked only for this moment, this air that he held in his lungs, that filled his body and swelled in his head.

But it didn't work --Jessie came crashing through, turning to Luther to say, "Kinda fun, huh?" and less than a second later pieces of his head went popping off and he fell to the floor. The Deacon, too, the Deacon of all people, surfaced in the wave that followed Jessie, and Luther saw him clutching at him, heard him saying, "Make this right," and his eyes bulged with the universal plea not to be extinguished, not today, as Luther shoved the gun under his chin, and those bulging eyes said I'm not ready to go. Wait.