Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

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.