The Given Day (Coughlin 1)

Danny had never thought of it like that before. It suddenly embarrassed him that he'd moved through his entire life expecting it to work for him. And it usually had.

"It must be nice," Nathan said. "That's all."

"What do you do?" Danny asked.

"What do you do?"

"I'm looking for work. But you? Your hands aren't those of a laborer. Your clothes, either."

Nathan touched the lapel of his coat. "These aren't expensive clothes."

"They're not rags either. They match your shoes."

Nathan Bishop gave that a crooked smile. "Interesting observation. You a cop?"

"Yes," Danny said and lit a cigarette.

"I'm a doctor."

"A copper and a doctor. You can fix whoever I shoot."

"I'm serious."

"So am I."

"No really."

"Okay, I'm not a copper. You a doctor, though?"

"I was." Bishop stubbed his cigarette out. He took a slow pull of his drink.

"Can you quit being a doctor?"

"You can quit anything." Bishop took another drink and let out a long sigh. "I was a surgeon once. Most of the people I saved didn't deserve to be saved."

"They were rich?"

Danny saw an exasperation cross Bishop's face that he was becoming familiar with. It meant Bishop was heading for the place where his anger would dominate him, where he couldn't be calmed down until he'd exhausted himself.

"They were oblivious," he said, his tongue lathering the word with contempt. "If you said to them, 'People die every day. In the North End, in the West End, in South Boston, in Chelsea. And the thing that's killing them is one thing. Poverty. That's all. Simple as that.' " He rolled another cigarette and leaned over the table as he did, slurped his drink from the glass with his hands still in his lap. "You know what people say when you tell them that? They say, 'What can I do?' As if that's an answer. What can you do? You can very well fucking help.

That's what you can do, you bourgeois piece of shit. What can you do? What can't you do? Roll up your fucking sleeves, get off your fat fucking arse, and move your wife's fatter fucking arse off the same cushion, and go down to where your mates--your brother and sister fellow fucking human beings--are quite authentically starving to death. And do whatever you need to do to help them. That's what the bloody fuck you can bloody well fucking do."

Nathan Bishop slammed back the rest of his drink. He dropped the glass to the scarred wood table and looked around the bar, his eyes red and sharp.

In the heavy air that often followed one of Nathan's tirades, Danny said nothing. He could feel the men at the nearest table shift in awkwardness. One of them suddenly began talking about Ruth, about the newest trade rumors. Nathan breathed heavily through his nostrils while he reached for the bottle and placed his cigarette between his lips. He got a shaky hand on the bottle. He poured himself another drink. He leaned back in his chair and flicked his thumbnail over a match and lit his cigarette.

"That's what you can do," he whispered.

In the Sowbelly Saloon, Danny tried to see through the crowd of Roxbury Letts to the back table where Louis Fraina sat tonight in a dark brown suit and a slim black tie sipping from a small glass of amber liquor. It was only the blaze of his eyes behind a pair of small round spectacles that gave him away as something other than a college professor who'd entered the wrong bar. That, and the deference the others showed him, placing his drink carefully on the table in front of him, asking him questions with the jutting chins of anxious children, checking to see whether he was watching when they expounded on a point. It was said that Fraina, Italian by birth, spoke Rus sian as close to fluently as could be asked of one not raised in the Motherland, an assessment rumored to have been first delivered by Trotsky himself. Fraina kept a black moleskin notebook open on the table in front of him, and he'd occasionally jot notes in it with a pencil or fl ip through the pages. He rarely looked up, and when he did, it was only to acknowledge a speaker's point with a soft flick of his eyelids. Not once had he and Danny exchanged so much as a glance.

The other Letts, though, had finally stopped treating Danny with the amused politeness one reserved for children and the feeble-minded. He wouldn't say they trusted him yet, but they were getting used to having him around.

Even so, they spoke in accents so thick they'd soon tire of conversation with him and jump ship as soon as another Lett interrupted in the mother tongue. That night, they had a full docket of problems and solutions that had carried over from the meeting into the bar.

Problem: The United States had launched a covert war against the provisional Bolshevik government of the new Rus sia. Wilson had authorized the detachment of the 339th, who'd joined up with British forces and seized the Rus sian port of Archangel on the White Sea. Hoping to cut the supplies of Lenin and Trotsky and starve them out during a long winter, the American and British forces were instead facing an early winter freeze and were rumored to be at the mercy of their White Rus sian allies, a corrupt group of warlords and tribal gangsters. This embarrassing quagmire was just one more instance of Western Capitalism attempting to crush the will of the great people's movement.

Solution: Workers everywhere should unite and engage in civil unrest until the Americans and the British withdrew their troops.

Problem: The oppressed firemen and policemen of Montreal were being violently devalued by the state and stripped of their rights.

Solution: Until the Canadian government capitulated to the police and firemen and paid them a fair wage, workers everywhere should unite in civil unrest.

Problem: Revolution was in the air in Hungary and Bavaria and Greece and even France. In Germany, the Spartacists were moving on Berlin. In New York, the Harbor Workers Union had refused to report for duty, and across the country unions were warning of "No Beer, No Work" sit-downs if Prohibition became the law of the land.

Solution: In support of all these comrades, the workers of the world should unite in civil unrest.

Should.

Could.

Might.

No actual plans for revolution that Danny could hear. No specifi c plotting of the insurrectionary deed.

Just more drinking. More talk that turned into drunken shouts and shattered stools. And it wasn't just the men shattering stools and shouting that night but the women as well, although it was often hard to tell them apart. The workers revolution had no place for the sexist caste system of the United Capitalist States of America--but most women in the bar were hard-faced and industrial-gray, as sexless in their coarse clothes and coarse accents as the men they called comrades. They were without humor (a common affliction among the Letts) and, worse, politically opposed to it--humor was seen as a sentimental disease, a by-product of romanticism, and romantic notions were just one more opiate the ruling class used to keep its masses from seeing the truth.