Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

So his father’s funeral had brought a thousand men to a graveyard along the banks of the Neponset. And someday, possibly, cadets would study in the Thomas X. Coughlin Building at the Boston Police Academy or commuters would rattle over the Coughlin Bridge on their way to work in the morning.

Wonderful.

And yet dead was dead. Gone was gone. No edifice, no legacy, no bridge named after you could change that.

You were only guaranteed one life, so you’d better live it.

He placed the paper beside him on the bed. It was a new mattress and it had been waiting for him in the cell after work detail yesterday with a small side table, a chair, and a kerosene table lamp. He found the matches in the drawer of the side table beside a new comb.

He blew out the lamp now and sat in the dark, smoking. He listened to the sounds of the factories and the barges out on the river signaling one another in the narrow lanes. He flicked open the cover of his father’s watch, then snapped it closed, then opened it again. Open-close, open-close, open-close as the chemical smell from the factories climbed over his high window.

His father was gone. He was no longer a son.

He was a man without history or expectation. A blank slate, beholden to none.

He felt like a pilgrim who’d pushed off from the shore of a homeland he’d never see again, crossed a black sea under a black sky, and landed in the new world, which waited, unformed, as if it had always been waiting.

For him.

To give the country a name, to remake it in his image so it could espouse his values and export them across the globe.

He closed the watch and closed his hand over it and closed his eyes until he saw the shore of his new country, saw the black sky above give way to a far-flung scatter of white stars that shone down on him and the small stretch of water left between them.

I will miss you. I will mourn you. But I am now newly born. And truly free.

Two days after the funeral, Danny made his last visit.

He leaned into the mesh and asked, “How you doing, little brother?”

“Finding my way,” Joe said. “You?”

“You know,” Danny said.

“No,” Joe said, “I don’t. I don’t know anything. You went to Tulsa with Nora and Luther eight years ago and I haven’t heard anything but rumors since.”

Danny acknowledged that with a nod. He fished for his cigarettes, lit one, and took his time before he spoke. “Me and Luther started a business together out there. Construction. We built houses in the colored section. We were doing all right. Weren’t booming, but okay. I was a sheriff’s deputy too. You believe that?”

Joe smiled. “You wear a cowboy hat?”

“Son,” Danny said with a twang, “I wore six-guns. One on each hip.”

Joe laughed. “String tie?”

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.”