Danny laughed too. “Sure did. And boots.”
“Spurs?”
Danny narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Man’s gotta draw the line somewhere.”
Joe was still chuckling when he asked, “So what happened? We heard something about a riot?”
The light blew out inside Danny. “They burned it to the ground.”
“Tulsa?”
“Black Tulsa, yeah. Section Luther lived in called Greenwood. One night at the jail, whites came to lynch a colored because he grabbed a white girl’s pussy in an elevator? Truth was, though, she’d been dating the boy on the sly for months. The boy broke up with her, she didn’t like it, so she filed her bullshit claim, and we had to arrest him. We were just about to turn him loose on lack of evidence when all the good white men of Tulsa showed up with their ropes. Then a bunch of coloreds, including Luther, they showed up too. The coloreds, well, they were armed. No one expected that. And that backed off the lynch mob. For the night.” Danny stubbed his cigarette out under his heel. “Next morning, the whites crossed the tracks, showed the colored boys what happens when you raise a gun to one of them.”
“So that was the riot.”
Danny shook his head. “Wasn’t no riot. It was a massacre. They gunned down or lit on fire every colored they saw—kids, women, old men, didn’t make a difference. These were the pillars of the community doing the shooting, mind you, the churchgoers and the Rotarians. In the end, the fuckers flew overhead in crop dusters, dropping grenades and homemade firebombs onto the buildings. The colored folk would run out of the burning buildings and the whites had machine gun nests set up. Just mowed ’em down in the fucking street. Hundreds of people killed. Hundreds, just lying in the streets. Looked like nothing more than piles of clothes gone red in the wash.” Danny laced his hands together behind his head and blew air through his lips. “I walked around afterward, you know, loading the bodies onto flatbeds? I kept thinking, Where’s my country? Where’d it go?”
Neither spoke for a long time until Joe said, “Luther?”
Danny held up one hand. “He survived. Last I saw him, him and his wife and kid were heading for Chicago.” He said, “Thing about that kind of . . . event, Joe? You survive it and it’s like you’ve got this shame. I can’t even explain it. Just this shame, big as your whole body. And everyone else who survived? They have it too. And you can’t look each other in the eye. You’re all wearing the stink of it and trying to figure out how to live the rest of your life with the odor. So you sure as hell don’t want anyone else who smells the same as you getting close enough to stink you up even more.”
Joe said, “Nora?”
Danny nodded. “We’re still together.”
“Kids?”
Danny shook his head. “You think you’d be walking around an uncle without me telling you?”
“I haven’t seen you but once in eight years, Dan. I don’t know what you’d do.”
Danny nodded, and Joe saw what until now he’d only suspected—something in his brother, something at the core, was broken.
But just as he thought it, a piece of the old Danny returned with a sly grin. “Me and Nora have been in New York the last few years.”
“Doing what?”
“Making shows.”
“Shows?”
“Movies. That’s what they call them there—shows. I mean, it’s a little confusing because a lotta people call plays shows too. But anyway, yeah, movies, Joe. Flickers. Shows.”
“You work in movies?”
Danny nodded, animated now. “Nora started it. She got a job with this company, Silver Frame? Jews, but good guys. She was handling all their bookkeeping and then they asked her to do some side work with publicity and even costumes. It was that kinda outfit back then, just everyone pitching in, the directors making coffee, the camera guys walking the lead actress’s dog.”
“Movies?” Joe said.
Danny laughed. “So, wait, it gets better. Her bosses meet me and one of them, Herm Silver, great guy, lot on the ball, he asks me—you ready?—he asks me if I ever did stunts.”
“Fuck are stunts?” Joe lit a cigarette.
“You see an actor fall off a horse? It ain’t him. It’s a stuntman. A professional. Actor slips on a banana peel, trips over a curb, hell, runs down a street? Look close at the screen next time because it ain’t him. It’s me or someone like me.”
“Wait,” Joe said, “how many movies have you been in?”
Danny thought about it for a minute. “I’m guessing seventy-five?”
“Seventy-five?” Joe took the cigarette from his mouth.
“I mean, a lot of them were shorts. That’s when—”
“Jesus, I know what shorts are.”
“You didn’t know what stunts were, though, did you?”
Joe raised his middle finger.
“So, yeah, I’ve been in a bunch. Even wrote a few of the shorts.”
Joe’s mouth opened wide. “You wrote . . . ?”
Danny nodded. “Little things. Kids on the Lower East Side try to wash a dog for a rich lady, they lose the dog, the rich lady calls the cops, high jinks ensue, that sort of thing.”
Joe dropped his cigarette to the floor before it could burn his fingers. “How many have you written?”
“Five so far, but Herm thinks I got a knack for it, wants me to try for a full-length feature soon, become a scenarist.”
“What’s a scenarist?”
“Guy who writes movies, genius,” Danny said and flipped his own middle finger back at Joe.
“So, wait, where’s Nora in all this?”
“California.”
“I thought you were in New York.”
“We were. But Silver Frame made a couple of movies real cheap lately that turned out to be hits. Meanwhile, Edison’s fucking suing everyone in New York over camera patents, but those patents don’t mean shit in California. Plus the weather there is nice three hundred sixty days out of three sixty-five, so everyone’s heading out there. The Silver brothers? They just figured now’s the time. Nora headed out a week ago because she’s become head of production—I mean, just flying up their ladder—and they’ve got me scheduled for stunts on a show called The Lawmen of the Pecos in three weeks. I just came back to tell Dad I was heading west again, tell him to come visit maybe, once he retired. I didn’t know when I’d ever see him again. Hell, see you again.”
“I’m happy for you,” Joe said, still shaking his head at the absurdity of it. Danny’s life—boxer, cop, union organizer, businessman, sheriff’s deputy, stuntman, budding writer—was an American life, if ever there was one.
“Come,” his brother said.
“What?”
“When you get out of here. Come join us. I’m serious. Fall off a horse for money and pretend to get shot and fall through sugar windows made up to look like glass. Lie in the sun the rest of the time, meet a starlet by the pool.”
For a moment, Joe could see it—another life, a dream of blue water, honey-skinned women, palm trees.
“Only a brisk, two-week train ride away, little brother.”
Joe laughed some more, picturing it.
“It’s good work,” Danny said. “You ever want to come out and join me, I could train you.”
Joe, still smiling, shook his head.
“It’s honest work,” Danny said.
“I know,” Joe said.
“You could stop living a life where you look over your shoulder all the time.”
“It’s not about that.”
“What’s it about?” Danny seemed authentically curious.
“The night. It’s got its own set of rules.”
“Day’s got rules too.”
“Oh, I know,” Joe said, “but I don’t like them.”
They stared through the mesh at
each other for a long time.
“I don’t understand,” Danny said softly.
“I know you don’t,” Joe said. “You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy’s leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there’s a difference, like the banker’s just doing his job but the loan shark’s a criminal. I like the loan shark because he doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be sitting where I’m sitting right now. I’m not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men’s club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid’s grades. Die at my desk, and they’ll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt’s hit the coffin.”
“But that’s life,” Danny said.
“That’s a life. You want to play by their rules? Go ahead. But I say their rules are bullshit. I say there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself.”
Again, they considered each other through the mesh. His whole childhood, Danny had been Joe’s hero. Hell, his god. And now god was just a man who fell off horses for a living, pretended to be shot for a living.
“Wow,” Danny said softly, “did you ever grow up.”
“Yeah,” Joe said.
Danny placed his cigarettes in his pocket and put his hat on.
“Pity,” he said.
Within the prison, the White-Pescatore War was partially won the night three White soldiers were shot on the roof while “trying to escape.”
Skirmishes continued to occur, however, and bad blood festered. Over the next six months, Joe learned that wars don’t really end. Even as he and Maso and the rest of the Pescatore prison crew consolidated their power, it was impossible to tell if this guard or that guard had been paid to move against them or if this or that convict could be trusted.
Micky Baer was shanked in the yard by a guy who, it turned out, was married to the late Dom Pokaski’s sister. Micky survived, but he’d have problems pissing for the rest of his life. They heard from the outside that Guard Colvin was laying off bets with Syd Mayo, a White associate. And Colvin was losing.
Then Holly Peletos, a White button man, rotated in to do five years for involuntary manslaughter and started running his mouth in the mess hall about regime change. So they had to throw him off the tier.
Some weeks Joe went two or three nights without sleep because of the fear, or because he was trying to figure out all the angles, or because his heart wouldn’t stop banging inside his chest like it was trying to break free.
You told yourself it wouldn’t get to you.
You told yourself this place wouldn’t eat your soul.
But what you told yourself above all else was, I will live.
I will walk out of here.
Whatever the cost.
Maso was released on a spring morning in 1928.
“Next time you see me,” he said to Joe, “will be Visitors’ Day. I’ll be on the other side of that mesh.”
Joe shook his hand. “Be safe.”
“I got my mouthpiece working on your case. You’ll be out soon. Stay alert, kid, stay alive.”
Joe tried to take comfort in the words, but he knew that if that’s all they were—words—then he was in for a sentence that would feel twice as long because he’d allowed hope in. As soon as Maso left this place behind, he could very easily leave Joe behind.
Or he could give him just enough of the carrot to keep Joe running his operation behind these walls for him with no intention of hiring him once he reached the outside.
Either way, Joe was powerless to do anything but sit and wait to see how things shook out.
When Maso hit the street, it was hard not to notice. What had been simmering on the inside got splashed with gasoline on the outside. Murderous May, as the rags dubbed it, left Boston looking for the first time like Detroit or Chicago. Maso’s soldiers hit Albert White’s bookies, distillers, trucks, and soldiers like it was open season. And it was. Within one month, Maso chased Albert White out of Boston, his few remaining soldiers scurrying after him.
In prison, it was as if harmony had been injected into the water supply. The stabbings stopped. For the rest of ’28, no one got thrown off a tier or shanked in the chow line. Joe knew that peace had truly come to Charlestown Penitentiary when he was able to forge a deal with two of Albert White’s best incarcerated distillers to ply their trade behind the walls. Soon, the guards were smuggling gin out of Charlestown Penitentiary, the shit so good it even picked up a street name, Penal Code.
Joe slept soundly for the first time since he’d walked through the front gates in the summer of ’27. It also gave him time to mourn his father and mourn Emma, a process he’d held at bay when it would have pulled his thoughts to places they shouldn’t have gone while others plotted against him.
The cruelest trick God played on him through the second half of ’28 was sending Emma to visit him while he slept. He’d feel her leg snake between his, smell the single drops of perfume she placed behind each ear, open his eyes to see hers an inch away, feel her breath on his lips. He’d raise his arms off the mattress so he could run his palms down her bare back. And his eyes would open for real.
No one.
Just the dark.
And he’d pray. He’d ask God to let her be alive, even if he never saw her again. Please let her be alive.
But, God, alive or dead, could you please, please stop sending her to my dreams? I can’t lose her again and again. It’s too much. It’s too cruel. Lord, Joe asked, have mercy.
But he didn’t.
The visitations continued—and would continue—for the rest of Joe’s incarceration at Charlestown Penitentiary.
His father never visited. But Joe felt him in a way he never had while the man was alive. Sometimes he sat on his bunk, flicking the watch cover open and closed, open and closed, and he imagined conversations they might have had if all the stale sins and withered expectations hadn’t stood in the way.
Tell me about Mom.
What do you want to know?
Who was she?
A frightened girl. A very frightened girl, Joseph.
What was she afraid of?
Out there.
What’s out there?
Everything she didn’t understand.
Did she love me?
In her own way.
That’s not love.
For her it was. Don’t look at it as if she left you.
How am I supposed to look at it?
That she hung on because of you. Otherwise, she would have left us all years ago.
I don’t miss her.
Funny. I do.
Joe looked into the dark. I miss you.
You’ll see me soon enough.
Once Joe had streamlined the prison’s distillery and smuggling operations as well as its protection rackets, he had plenty of time to read. He read just about everything in the prison library, which was no small feat, thanks to Lancelot Hudson III.
Lancelot Hudson III had been the only rich man anyone could ever remember who’d been sentenced to hard time in Charlestown Pen’. But Lancelot’s crime had been so outrageous and so public—he’d thrown his unfaithful wife, Catherine, from the roof of their four-story Beacon Street town house into the Independence Day Parade of 1919 as it flowed down Beacon Hill—that even the Brahmins had put down their bone china long enough to decide that if there was ever a time to feed one of their own to the natives, this was it. Lancelot Hudson III served seven years at Charlestown for involuntary manslaughter. If it wasn’t exactly hard labor, it was hard time, mitigated only by the books he’d had shipped
into the prison, a deal dependent on his leaving them behind when he left. Joe read at least a hundred books of the Hudson collection. You knew they were his because, in the top right corner of the title page, he’d written in tiny, cramped penmanship, “Originally the Property of Lancelot Hudson III. Fuck you.” Joe read Dumas and Dickens and Twain. He read Malthus, Adam Smith, Marx and Engels, Machiavelli, The Federalist Papers, and Bastiat’s Economic Sophisms. When he’d burned through the Hudson collection, he read whatever else was on hand—dime novels and Westerns mostly—as well as every magazine and newspaper they allowed in. He became something of an expert at figuring out what words or whole sentences they’d censored.
Browsing an issue of the Boston Traveler, he came across a story about a fire at the East Coast Bus Line Terminal on St. James. A frayed electrical cord had sent sparks into the terminal Christmas tree. In short order, the building caught fire. The breath in Joe’s body went small and trapped as he studied the photographs of the damage. The locker where he’d stashed his life’s savings, including the $62,000 from the Pittsfield job, was in the corner of one shot. It lay on its side under a ceiling beam, the metal as black as soil.
Joe couldn’t decide which felt worse—the sensation that he’d never breathe again or the feeling that he was about to vomit fire through his windpipe.
The article claimed the building was a total loss. Nothing salvaged. Joe doubted that. Someday, when he had the time, he was going to track down which employee of the East Coast Bus Line had retired young and was rumored to be living abroad and in style.
Until then, he was going to need a job.
Maso offered it to him late that winter, the same day he told Joe his appeal was proceeding apace.
“You’ll be out of here soon,” Maso told him through the mesh.
“All due respect,” Joe said, “how soon?”
“By the summer.”
Joe smiled. “Really?”
Maso nodded. “Judges don’t come cheap, though. You’re going to have to work that off.”
“Why don’t we call us even for me not killing you?”
Maso narrowed his eyes, a natty figure now in his cashmere topcoat and a wool suit complete with a white carnation in his lapel that matched his silk hatband. “Sounds like a deal. Our friend, Mr. White, is making a lot of noise in Tampa, by the way.”