Danny’s father raised an eyebrow. It was a slow gesture, meant to suggest he admired Danny. But Danny knew that while Thomas Coughlin had a dizzying array of character traits, admiration wasn’t one of them.
“Is this the test by which you’d choose to define your life?” His father eventually leaned forward, and his face was lit with what many people could mistake for pleasure. “Or would you prefer to save that for another day?”
Danny said nothing.
His father looked around the room again. Eventually he shrugged and met his son’s eyes.
“Deal.”
By the time Danny left the study, his mother and Joe had gone to bed and the house was dark. He went out on the front landing because he could feel the house digging into his shoulders and scratching at his head, and he sat on the stoop and tried to decide what to do next. Along K Street, the windows were dark and the neighborhood was so quiet he could hear the hushed lapping of the bay a few blocks away.
“And what dirty job did they ask of you this time?” Nora stood with her back to the door.
He turned to look at her. It hurt, but he kept doing it. “Wasn’t too dirty.”
“Ah, wasn’t too clean, either.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point?” She sighed. “You’ve not looked happy in a donkey’s age.”
“What’s happy?” he said.
She hugged herself against the cooling night. “The opposite of you.”
It had been more than five years since that Christmas Eve when Danny’s father had brought Nora O’Shea through the front door, carrying her in his arms like firewood. Though his face was pink from the cold, her flesh was gray, her chattering teeth loose from malnutrition. Thomas Coughlin told the family he’d found her on the Northern Avenue docks, beset by ruffians she was when he and Uncle Eddie waded in with their nightsticks as if they were still first-year patrolmen. Sure now, just look at the poor, starving waif with nary an ounce of meat on her bones! And when Uncle Eddie had reminded him that it was Christmas Eve and the poor girl managed to croak out a feeble “Thank ye, sir. Thank ye,” her voice the spitting image of his own, dear departed Ma, God rest her, well wasn’t it a sign from Christ Himself on the eve of His own birthday?
Even Joe, only six at the time and still in thrall to his father’s grandiloquent charms, didn’t buy the story, but it put the family in an extravagantly Christian mood, and Connor went to fill the tub while Danny’s mother gave the gray girl with the wide, sunken eyes a cup of tea. She watched the Coughlins from behind the cup with her bare, dirty shoulders peeking out from under the greatcoat like damp stones.
Then her eyes found Danny’s, and before they passed from his face, a small light appeared in them that seemed uncomfortably familiar. In that moment, one he would turn over in his head dozens of times in the ensuing years, he was sure he’d seen his own cloaked heart looking back at him through a starving girl’s eyes.
Bullshit, he told himself. Bullshit.
He would learn very quickly how fast those eyes could change—how that light that had seemed a mirror of his own thoughts could go dull and alien or falsely gay in an instant. But still, knowing the light was there, waiting to appear again, he became addicted to the highly unlikely possibility of unlocking it at will.
Now she stared at him carefully on the porch and said nothing.
“Where’s Connor?” he said.
“Off to the bar,” she said. “Said he’d be at Henry’s if you were to come looking.”
Her hair was the color of sand and strung in curls that hugged her scalp and ended just below her ears. She wasn’t tall, wasn’t short, and something seemed to move beneath her flesh at all times, as if she were missing a layer and if you looked close enough you’d see her bloodstream.
“You two are courting, I hear.”
“Stop.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“Connor’s a boy.”
“He’s twenty-six. Older’n you.”
She shrugged. “Still a boy.”
“Are you courting?” Danny flicked his cigarette into the street and looked at her.
“I don’t know what we’re doing, Danny.” She sounded weary. Not so much of the day, but of him. It made him feel like a child, petulant and easily bruised. “Would you like me to say that I don’t feel some allegiance to this family, some weight for what I could never repay your father? That I know for sure I won’t marry your brother?”
“Yes,” Danny said, “that’s what I’d like to hear.”
“Well, I can’t say that.”
“You’d marry out of gratitude?”
She sighed and closed her eyes. “I don’t know what I’d do.”
Danny’s throat felt tight, like it might collapse in on itself. “And when Connor finds out you left a husband behind in—”
“He’s dead,” she hissed.
“To you. Not the same as dead, though, is it?”
Her eyes were fire now. “What’s your point, boy?”
“How do you think he’s going to take that news?”
“All I can hope,” she said, her voice weary again, “is that he takes it a fair sight better than you did.”
Danny said nothing for a bit and they both stared over the short distance between them, his eyes, he hoped, as merciless as hers.
“He won’t,” he said and walked down the stairs into the quiet and the dark.
CHAPTER five
A week after Luther became a husband, he and Lila found a house off Archer Street, on Elwood, little one-bedroom with indoor plumbing, and Luther talked to some boys at the Gold Goose Billiard Parlor on Greenwood Avenue who told him the place to go for a job was the Hotel Tulsa, across the Santa Fe tracks in white Tulsa. Money be falling off trees over there, Country. Luther didn’t mind them calling him Country for the time being, long as they didn’t get too used to it, and he went over to the hotel and talked to the man they’d told him to see, fella by the name of Old Byron Jackon. Old Byron (everyone called him “Old Byron,” even his elders) was the head of the bellmen’s union. He said he’d start Luther as an elevator operator and see where things went from there.
So Luther started in the elevators, and even that was a gold mine, people giving him two bits practically every time he turned the crank or opened the cage. Oh, Tulsa was swimming in oil money! People drove the biggest motorcars and wore the biggest hats and the finest clothes and the men smoked cigars thick as pool cues and the women smelled of perfume and powder. People walked fast in Tulsa. They ate fast from large plates and drank fast from tall glasses. The men clapped one another on the back a lot and leaned in and whispered in each other’s ears and then roared with laughter.
And after work the bellmen and the elevator operators and the doormen all crossed back into Greenwood with plenty of adrenaline still ripping through their veins and they hit the pool halls and the saloons down near First and Admiral and there was some drinking and some dancing and some fighting. Some got themselves drunk on Choctaw and rye; others got higher than kites on opium or, more and more lately, heroin.
Luther was only hanging with them boys two weeks when someone asked if he’d like to make a little something extra on the side, man as fast as he was. And no sooner was the question asked than he was running numbers for the Deacon Skinner Broscious, the man so called because he was known to carefully watch over his flock and call down the wrath of the Almighty if one of them strayed. The Deacon Broscious had once been a Louisiana gambler, the story went, won himself a big pot on the same night he killed a man, the two incidents not necessarily unrelated, and he’d come to Greenwood with a fat pocket and a few girls he’d immediately put up for rent. When those original girls got themselves in a partnership frame of mind he cut them in for a slice each and then sent them out for a whole new string of younger, fresher girls with no partnership frame of mind whatsoever and then the Deacon Broscious branched out into the saloon business and the numbers business and the Cho
ctaw and heroin and opium business and any man who fucked, fixed, boozed, or bet in Greenwood got right familiar with either the Deacon or someone who worked for him.
The Deacon Broscious weighed north of four hundred pounds. With plenty change. More often than not, if he took the night air down around Admiral and First, he did so in a big old wooden rocker that somebody’d strapped wheels to. The Deacon had him two high-boned, high-yellow, knob-jointed, thin-as-death sons of bitches working for him, name of Dandy and Smoke, and they pushed him around town at all hours of the night in that chair, and plenty nights he’d take to singing. He had a beautiful voice, high and sweet and strong, and he’d sing spirituals and chain gang songs and even did a version of “I’m a Twelve O’Clock Fella in a Nine O’Clock Town” that was a hell of a lot better than the white version you heard Byron Harlan singing on the disc record. So there he’d be, rolling up and down First Street, singing with a voice so beautiful some said God had kept it from his favorite angels so as not to encourage covetousness in their ranks entire, and Deacon Broscious would clap his hands, and his face would bead with sweat and his smile would become the size and shine of a trout, and folks would forget for a moment who he was, until one of them remembered because he owed the Deacon something, and that one, he’d get to see behind the sweat and smile and the singing and what he saw there left an imprint on children he hadn’t even sired yet.
Jessie Tell told Luther that the last time a man had seriously fucked with the Deacon Broscious—“I mean lack-of-all-respect type of fucking?” Jessie said—Deacon up and sat on the son of a bitch. Squirmed in place until he couldn’t hear the screams no more, looked down and saw that the dumb nigger’d given up the ghost, just lay in the dirt looking at nothing, mouth wide open, one arm stretched and reaching.
“Mighta told me this before I took a job from the man,” Luther said.
“You running numbers, Country. You think you do that sort of thing for a nice man?”
Luther said, “Told you not to call me Country no more.”
They were in the Gold Goose, getting loose after a long day smiling for white folk across the tracks, and Luther could feel the liquor reaching that level in his blood where everything slowed down right nice and his eyesight sharpened and he felt nothing was impossible.
Luther would soon have ample time to consider how he’d fallen into running numbers for the Deacon, and it would take him a while to realize that it had nothing to do with money—hell, with the tips he made at the Hotel Tulsa he was making nearly twice what he’d made at the munitions factory. And it wasn’t like he hoped to have any future in the rackets. He’d seen enough men back in Columbus who’d thought they could climb that ladder; usually when they fell from it, they fell screaming. So why? It was that house on Elwood, he guessed, the way it crowded him until he felt the eaves dig into his shoulders. And it was Lila, much as he loved her—and he was surprised to realize how much he did sometimes, how much the sight of her blinking awake with one side of her face pressed to the pillow could fire a bolt through his heart. But before he could even get his head around that love, maybe enjoy it a little bit, here she was carrying a child, she only twenty and Luther just twenty-three. A child. A rest-of-your-life responsibility. A thing that grew up while you grew old. Didn’t care if you were tired, didn’t care if you were trying to concentrate on something else, didn’t care if you wanted to make love. A child just was, thrust right into the center of your life and screaming its head off. And Luther, who’d never really known his father, was damn sure certain he’d live up to his responsibility, like it or not, but until then he wanted to live this here life at full tilt, with a little danger thrown in to spice it up, something to remember when he sat on his rocker and played with his grandkids. They’d be looking at an old man smiling like a fool, while he’d be remembering the young buck who’d run through the Tulsa night with Jessie and danced just enough on the other side of the law to say it didn’t own him.
Jessie was the first and best friend Luther had made in Greenwood, and this would soon become the problem. His given name was Clarence, but his middle name was Jessup, so everyone called him Jessie when they weren’t calling him Jessie Tell, and he had a way about him that drew men to him as much as women. He was a bellhop and fill-in elevator operator at the Hotel Tulsa, and he had a gift for keeping everyone’s spirits up on his own high level and that could sure make a day fly. Much as Jessie’d been given a couple nicknames himself, it was only fair, since he’d done the same to everyone he met (it was Jessie who, at the Gold Goose, had first called Luther “Country”), and those names left his tongue with so much speed and certainty that usually a man started going by Jessie’s nickname no matter how long he’d been called by any other on this earth. Jessie would move through the lobby of the Hotel Tulsa pushing a brass cart or lugging some bags and calling out, “Happening, Slim?” and “You know it’s the truth, Typhoon,” and following that with a soft “heh heh right,” and before suppertime people were calling Bobby Slim and Gerald Typhoon and most felt better for the trade-off.
Luther and Jessie Tell had them some elevator races when times were slow and they bet on bag totals every day they worked the bell stand, hustled like mad with smile and shine for the white folk who called ’em both George even though they wore brass name tags clear as day, and after they’d crossed back over the Frisco tracks into Greenwood and retired to the saloons or the galleries down around Admiral, they kept their raps up, because they were both fast in the mouth and fast on their feet and Luther felt that between the two of them lay the kinship he’d been missing, the one he’d left behind in Columbus with Sticky Joe Beam and Aeneus James and some of the other men he’d played ball with and drank with and, in pre-Lila days, chased women with. Life—life—was lived here, in the Greenwood that sprung up at night with its snap of pool balls and its three-string guitars and saxophones and liquor and men unwinding after so many hours of being called George, called son, called boy, called whatever white folk felt a mind to call them. And a man could not only be forgiven, he could be expected to unwind with other men after days like they had, saying their “Yes, suhs” and their “How dos” and their “Sho ’nuffs.”
Fast as Jessie Tell was—and he and Luther both ran the same numbers territory and ran it fast—he was big too. Not near as big as Deacon Broscious but a man of girth, nonetheless, and he loved him his heroin. Loved him his chicken and his rye and his fat-bottomed women and his talk and his Choctaw and his song, but, man, his heroin he loved above all else.
“Shit,” he said, “nigger like me got to have something slow him down, else whitey’d shoot him ’fore he could take over the world. Say I’m right, Country. Say it. ’Cause it’s so and y’ know it.”
Problem was, a habit like Jessie had—and his habit was like the rest of him, large—got expensive, and even though he cleared more tips than any man at the Hotel Tulsa, it didn’t mean much because tips were pooled and then dealt out evenly to each man at the end of a shift. And even though he was running numbers for the Deacon and that was most definitely a paying proposition, the runners getting two cents on every dollar the customers lost and Greenwood customers lost about as much as they played and they played at a fearsome rate, Jessie still couldn’t keep up by playing straight.
So he skimmed.
The way running numbers worked in Deacon Broscious’s town was straight simple: ain’t no such thing as credit. You wanted to put a dime on the number, you paid the runner eleven cents before he left your house, the extra penny to cover the vig. You played for four bits, you paid fifty-five. And so on.
Deacon Broscious didn’t believe in chasing down country niggers for their money after they’d lost, just couldn’t see the sense in that. He had real collectors for real debt, he couldn’t bother fucking up niggers’ limbs for pennies. Those pennies, though, you added it up and you could fill some mail bags with it, boy, could fill a barn come those special days when folks thought luck was in the air.
Since the runners carried that cash around with them, it stood to reason that Deacon Broscious had to pick boys he trusted, but the Deacon didn’t get to be the Deacon by trusting anybody, so Luther had always assumed he was being watched. Not every run, mind you, just every third or so. He’d never actually seen someone doing the watching, but it sure couldn’t hurt matters none to work from that assumption.
Jessie said, “You give Deacon too much credit, boy. Man can’t have eyes everywhere. ’Sides, even if he did, those eyes are human, too. They can’t tell if you went into the house and just Daddy played or if Mama and Grandpa and Uncle Jim all played, too. And you sure don’t pocket all four of them dollars. But if you pocket one? Who’s the wiser? God? Maybe if He’s looking. But the Deacon ain’t God.”
He surely wasn’t that. He was some other thing.
Jessie took a shot at the six ball and missed it clean. He gave Luther a lazy shrug. His buttery eyes told Luther he’d been hitting the spike again, probably in the alley while Luther’d used the bathroom a while back.
Luther sank the twelve.
Jessie gripped his stick to keep him up, then felt behind him for his chair. When he was sure he’d found it and centered it under his ass, he lowered himself into it and smacked his lips, tried to get some wet into that big tongue of his.
Luther couldn’t help himself. “Shit going to kill you, boy.”
Jessie smiled and wagged a finger at him. “Ain’t going to do nothing right now but make me feel right, so shush your mouth and shoot your pool.”
That was the problem with Jessie—much as the boy could talk at you, weren’t no one could talk to him. There was some part of him—the core, most likely—that got plumb irritated by reason. Common sense insulted Jessie.
“Just ’cause folks be doing a thing,” he said to Luther once, “don’t make that thing a good fucking idea all to itself, do it?”