The Given Day (61 page)

"Buy you a frankfurter, brother?"

Danny had never called him "brother" before. It had always been "little brother." It changed everything, made Joe feel a foot taller, and yet part of him immediately wished they could go back to how it had been.

"Sure."

They walked up West Broadway to Sol's Dining Car at the corner of C Street. Sol had just recently added the frankfurter to his menu. He'd refused to do so during the war because the meat sounded too German and he had, like most restaurants during the war, taken great pains to change the name of frankfurters to "Liberty Sausages" on his menu board. But now the Germans were beaten, and there were no hard feelings about it in South Boston, and most of the diners in the city were trying hard to catch up with this new fad that Joe & Nemo's had helped popularize in the city, even if, at the time, it had called their patriotism into question.

Danny bought two for each of them and they sat atop the stone picnic bench out in front of the diner and ate them with bottles of root beer as cars navigated horses and horses navigated cars out on West Broadway and the air smelled of the coming summer.

"You heard," Danny said.

Joe nodded. "You married Nora."

"Sure did." He bit into his frankfurter and raised his eyebrows and laughed suddenly before he chewed. "Wish you could have been there."

"Yeah?"

508DENNIS LEHANE

"We both did."

"Yeah."

"But the folks would never have allowed it."

"I know."

"You do?"

Joe shrugged. "They'll get over it."

Danny shook his head. "No they won't, brother. No they won't." Joe felt like crying, but he smiled instead and swallowed some meat and took a sip of root beer. "They will. You'll see."

Danny placed his hand softly to the side of Joe's face. Joe didn't know what to do, because this had never happened. You slugged each other on the shoulder. You jabbed each other in the ribs. You didn't do this. Danny looked down at him with soft eyes.

"You're on your own in that house for a while, brother."

"Can I come visit?" Joe heard his own voice crack, and he looked down at his frankfurter and was pleased to see no tears fell on it. "You and Nora?"

"Of course. But that'll put you in the doghouse with the folks if you get caught."

"Been in the doghouse before," Joe said. "Plenty. Might start barking soon."

Danny laughed at that, a bark unto itself. "You're a great kid, Joe."

Joe nodded and felt the heat in his face. "How come you're leaving me, then?"

Danny tipped his chin up with his finger. "I'm not leaving you. What'd I say? You can come by anytime."

"Sure."

"Joe, Joe, I'm fucking serious. You're my brother. I didn't leave the family. The family left me. Because of Nora."

"Dad and Con' said you're a Bolshevik."

"What? To you?"

Joe shook his head. "I heard them talking one night." He smiled. "I hear everything in there. It's an old house. They said you went native.

THE GIVEN DAYThey said you were a wop-lover and a nigger-lover and you lost your way. They were really drunk."

"How could you tell?"

"They started singing near the end."

"No shit? 'Danny Boy'?"

Joe nodded. "And 'Kilgary Mountain' and 'She Moved Through the Fair.' "

"You don't hear that one a lot."

"Only when Dad's really snockered."

Danny laughed and put his arm around him and Joe rocked against it.

"You go native, Dan?"

Danny kissed his forehead. Actually kissed it. Joe wondered if he was drunk.

Danny said, "Yeah, I guess so, brother."

"You love Italians?"

Danny shrugged. "I got nothing against 'em. You?"

"I like them. I like the North End. Just like you do."

Danny bounced a fist lightly off his knee. "Well, good then." "Con' hates 'em, though."

"Yeah, well, Con's got a lot of hate in him."

Joe ate the rest of his second frankfurter. "Why?"

Danny shrugged. "Maybe because when he sees something that confuses him, he feels like he needs an answer right then. And if the answer ain't right in front of him, he grabs onto whatever is and makes it the answer." He shrugged again. "I honestly don't know, though. Con's had something eating him up since the day he was born."

They sat in silence for a bit, Joe swinging his legs off the edge of the stone table. A street vendor coming home from a day at Haymarket Square pulled over to the curb. He climbed off his cart, breathing wearily through his nostrils, and went to the front of his horse and lifted its left leg. The horse snuffled softly and twitched at the flies on its tail and the man shushed it as he pulled a pebble from its hoof and tossed it out onto West Broadway. He lowered the leg and caressed the horse's 510DENNIS LEHANE ear and whispered into it. The horse snuffled some more as the man climbed back up onto his cart, its eyes dark and sleepy. The vendor whistled softly and the horse clopped back into the street. When it dropped a clump of shit from between its flanks and cocked its head proudly at the creation, Joe felt a smile spread across his face he couldn't explain.

Danny, watching, too, said, "Damn. Size of a hat."

Joe said, "Size of a breadbasket."

"I believe you're right," Danny said, and they both laughed.

They sat as the light turned rusty behind the tenements along the Fort Point Channel and the air smelled of the tide and the clogging stench of the American Sugar Refi ning Company and the gases of the Boston Beer Company. Men crossed back over the Broadway Bridge in clusters and other groups wandered up from the Gillette Company and Boston Ice and the Cotton Waste Factory and most entered the saloons. Soon the boys who ran numbers for the neighborhood were dashing in and out of those same saloons, and from across the channel another whistle blew to signal the end of another working day. Joe wished he could stay here forever, even in his school clothes, with his brother, on a stone bench along West Broadway as the day faded around them.

Danny said, "You can have two families in this life, Joe, the one you're born to and the one you build."

"Two families," Joe said, eyeing him.

He nodded. "Your first family is your blood family and you always be true to that. That means something. But there's another family and that's the kind you go out and find. Maybe even by accident sometimes. And they're as much blood as your first family. Maybe more so, because they don't have to look out for you and they don't have to love you. They choose to."

"So you and Luther, you chose each other?"

Danny cocked his head. "I was thinking more of me and Nora, but now that you mention it, I guess me and Luther did, too."

"Two families," Joe said.

THE GIVEN DAY"If you're lucky."

Joe thought about that for a bit and the inside of his body felt splashy and ungrounded, as if he might float away.

"Which are we?" Joe said.

"The best kind." Danny smiled. "We're both, Joe."

At home, it got worse. Connor, when he talked, ranted about the anarchists, the Bolsheviks, the Galleanists, and the mud races who constituted their core. Jews financed them, he said, and Slavs and wops did their dirty work. They were riling up the niggers down South and poisoning the minds of the working whites back east. They'd tried to kill his boss, the attorney general of the United States of America, twice. They talked of unionization and rights for the workingman, but what they really wanted was violence on a national scale and despotism. Once turned onto the subject, he couldn't be turned off, and he'd just about combust when talk turned to the possibility of a police strike.

It was a rumor in the Coughlin home all summer, and even though Danny's name was never said, Joe knew that he was somehow involved. The Boston Social Club, his father told Connor, was talking to the AFL, to Samuel Gompers about an impending charter. They would be the first policemen in the country with national affiliation to a labor union. They could alter history, his father said and ran a hand over his eyes.

His father aged five years that summer. Ran down. Shadowed pockets grew below his eyes as dark as ink. His colorless hair turned gray.

Joe knew he'd been stripped of some of his power and that the culprit was Commissioner Curtis, a man whose name his father uttered with hopeless venom. He knew that his father seemed weary of fighting and that Danny's break from the family had hit him far harder than he let on.

The last day of school, Joe returned to the house to find his father and Connor in the kitchen. Connor, just back from Washington, was 512DENNIS LEHANE already well into his cups, the whiskey bottle on the table, the cork lying beside it.

"It's sedition if they do it."

"Oh, come on, boy, let's not be overly dramatic."

"They're officers of the law, Dad, the first line of national defense. If they even talk about walking off the job, that's treason. No different than a platoon that walks away from the field of battle."

"It's a little different." Joe's father sounded exhausted.

Connor looked up when Joe entered the room and this was usually where such conversation ended, but this time Connor kept going, his eyes loose and dark.

"They should all be arrested. Right now. Just go down to the next BSC meeting and throw a chain around the building."

"And what? Execute them?" His father's smile, so rare these days, returned for a moment, but it was thin.

Connor shrugged and poured more whiskey into his glass.

"You're half serious." His father noticed Joe now, too, as Joe placed his book sack up on the counter.

"We execute soldiers who walk away from the front," Connor said.

His father eyed the whiskey bottle but didn't reach for it. "While I may disagree with the men's plan of action, they have a legitimate beef. They're underpaid--"

"So let them go out and get another job."

"--the state of their quarters is unhygienic to say the least and they're dangerously overworked."

"You sympathize with them."

"I can see their point."

"They're not garment workers," Connor said. "They're emergency personnel."

"He's your brother."

"Not anymore. He's a Bolshevik and a traitor."

"Ah, Jaysus H," his father said. "You're talking crazy talk."

"If Danny is one of the ringleaders of this and they do strike? He deserves whatever's coming to him."

THE GIVEN DAYHe looked over at Joe when he said this and swirled the liquor in his glass and Joe saw contempt and fear and an embittered pride in his brother's face.

"You got something to say, little tough guy?" Connor took a swig from his glass.

Joe thought about it. He wanted to say something eloquent in defense of Danny. Something memorable. But the words wouldn't come, so he finally said the ones that did.

"You're a piece of shit."

No one moved. It was as if they'd all turned to porcelain, the whole kitchen, too.

Then Connor threw his glass in the sink and charged. Their father got a hand on his chest, but Connor got past him long enough to reach for Joe's hair and Joe twisted away but fell to the floor and Connor got one kick in before his father pushed him back.

"No," Connor said. "No! Did you hear what he called me?"

Joe, on the ground, could feel where his brother's fi ngers had touched his hair.

Connor pointed over his father's shoulder at him. "You little puke, he's got to go to work sometime, and you got to sleep here!"

Joe got up off the floor and stared at his brother's rage, stared it straight in the face and found himself unimpressed and unafraid.

"You think Danny should be executed?" he said.

His father pointed back at him. "Shut up, Joe."

"You really think that, Con'?"

"I said shut up!"

"Listen to your father, boy." Connor was starting to smile. "Fuck you," Joe said.

Joe had time to see Connor's eyes widen, but he never saw his father spin toward him, his father always a man of startling speed, faster than Danny, faster than Con', and a hell of a lot faster than Joe, because Joe didn't even have time to lean back before the back of his father's hand connected with Joe's mouth and Joe's feet left the fl oor. When he landed, his father was already on him, both hands on his 514DENNIS LEHANE shoulders. He hoisted him up from the floor and slammed his back into the wall so that they were face-to- face, Joe's shoes dangling a good two feet off the floor.

His father's eyes bulged in their sockets and Joe noticed how red they were. He gritted his teeth and exhaled through his nostrils and a lock of his newly gray hair fell to his forehead. His fingers dug into Joe's shoulders and he pressed his back into the wall as if he were trying to press him straight through it.

"You say that word in my house? In my house?"

Joe knew better than to answer.

"In my house?" his father repeated in a high whisper. "I feed you, I clothe you, I send you to a good school, and you talk like that in here? Like you're from trash?" He slammed his shoulders back into the wall. "Like you're common?" He loosened his grip just long enough for Joe's body to slacken and then slammed him into the wall again. "I should cut out your tongue."

"Dad," Connor said. "Dad."

"In your mother's house?"

"Dad," Connor said again.

His father cocked his head, eyeballing Joe with those red eyes. He removed one hand from Joe's shoulder and closed it around his throat.

"Jesus, Dad."

His father raised him higher, so that Joe had to look down into his red face.

"You're going to be sucking on brown soap for the rest of the day," his father said, "but before you do, let me make one thing clear, Joseph--I brought you into this world and I can damn sure take you out of it. Say 'Yes, sir.' "

It was hard with a hand around his throat, but Joe managed: "Yes, sir."

Connor reached toward his father's shoulder and then paused, his hand hovering in the air. Joe, looking in his father's eyes, could tell his father felt the hand in the air behind him and he willed Connor to THE GIVEN DAYplease step back. No telling what his father would do if that hand landed.