The Given Day

  “Don’t make it bad.”

  Jessie smiled that smile of his got him women and a free drink more often than not. “Sure it do, Country. Sure it do.”

  Oh, the women loved him. Dogs rolled over at the sight of him and peed all over their bellies, and children followed him when he walked Greenwood Avenue, as if gold-plated jumping jacks would spring from his trouser cuffs.

  Because there was something unbroken in the man. And people followed him, maybe, just to see it break.

  Luther sank the six and then the five, and when he looked up again, Jessie had gone into a nod, a bit of drool hanging from the corner of his mouth, his arms and legs wrapped around that pool stick like he’d decided it would make him a right fine wife.

  They’d look after him here. Maybe set him up in the back room if the place got busy. Else, just leave him where he sat. So Luther put his stick back in the rack and took his hat from the wall and walked out into the Greenwood dusk. He thought of finding himself a game, just sit in for a few hands. There was one going on right now upstairs in the back room of Po’s Gas Station, and just picturing it put an itch in his head. But he’d played in a few too many games already during his short time in Greenwood and it was all he could do hustling for tips at the hotel and running for the Deacon to keep Lila from getting any idea how much he’d lost.

  Lila. He’d promised her he’d come home tonight before sunset and it was well past that now, the sky a deep dark blue and the Arkansas River gone silver and black, and while it was just about the last thing he wanted to do, what with the night filling up around him with music and loud, happy catcalls and such, Luther took a deep breath and headed home to be a husband.

  Lila didn’t care much for Jessie, no surprise, and she didn’t care much for any of Luther’s friends or his nights on the town or his moonlighting for Deacon Broscious, so the small house on Elwood Avenue had been getting smaller every day since.

  A week ago when Luther had said, “Where the money going to come from then?” Lila said she’d get a job, too. Luther laughed, knowing that no white folk was going to want a pregnant colored scrubbing their pots and cleaning their floors because white women wouldn’t want their husbands thinking about how that baby got in there and white men wouldn’t like thinking about it either. Might have to explain to the children how come they’d never seen a black stork.

  After supper tonight, she said, “You a man now, Luther. A husband. You got responsibilities.”

  “And I’m keeping ’em up, ain’t I?” Luther said. “Ain’t I?”

  “Well, you are, I’ll grant you.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “But still, baby, you can spend some nights at home. You can get to fixing those things you said.”

  “What things?”

  She cleared the table and Luther stood, went to the coat he’d placed on the hook when he’d come in, fished for his cigarettes.

  “Things,” Lila said. “You said you’d build a crib for the baby and fix the sag in the steps and—”

  “And, and, and,” Luther said. “Shit, woman, I work hard all day.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?” It came out a lot harder than he’d intended.

  Lila said, “Why you so cross all the time?”

  Luther hated these conversations. Seemed like it was the only kind they had anymore. He lit a cigarette. “I ain’t cross,” he said, even though he was.

  “You cross all the time.” She rubbed her belly where it had already begun to show.

  “Well why the fuck not?” Luther said. He hadn’t meant to cuss in front of her, but he could feel the liquor in him, liquor he barely noticed drinking when he was around Jessie because Jessie and his heroin made a little whiskey seem as dangerous as lemonade. “Two months ago, I wasn’t a father-to-be.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” Lila placed the dishes in the sink and came back into the small living room.

  “Shit mean what I said,” Luther said. “A month ago—”

  “What?” She stared at him, waiting.

  “A month ago I wasn’t in Tulsa and I wasn’t shotgun-wed and I wasn’t living in some shit little house on some shit little avenue in some shit little town, Lila. Now was I?”

  “This ain’t no shit town.” Lila’s voice went up with her back. “And you weren’t shotgun-wed.”

  “May as well.”

  She got up into him, staring with stoked-coal eyes and curled fists. “You don’t want me? You don’t want your child?”

  “I wanted a fucking choice,” Luther said.

  “You have your choice and you take it every night out on the streets. You ain’t ever come home like a man should, and when you do, you drunk or high or both.”

  “Got to be,” Luther said.

  Her lips were trembling when she said, “And why’s that?”

  “’Cause it’s the only way I can put up with—” He stopped himself, but it was too late.

  “With what, Luther? With me?”

  “I’m going out.”

  She grabbed his arm. “With me, Luther? That it?”

  “Go on over to your auntie’s now,” Luther said. “Ya’ll can talk about what an un-Christian man I am. Tell yourselves how you gonna God me up.”

  “With me?” she said a third time, and her voice was small and soul sick.

  Luther left before he could get the mind to bust something.

  They spent Sundays at Aunt Marta and Uncle James’s grand house on Detroit Avenue in what Luther’d come to think of as the Second Greenwood.

  No one else wanted to think of it that way, but Luther knew there were two Greenwoods, just like there were two Tulsas. Which one you found yourself in depended on whether you were north or south of the Frisco depot. He was sure white Tulsa was several different Tulsas when you got under the surface, but he wasn’t privy to any of that, since his interactions with it never got much past “Which floor, ma’am?”

  But in Greenwood, the division had become a whole lot clearer. You had “bad” Greenwood, which was the alleys off Greenwood Avenue, well north of the intersection with Archer, and you had the several blocks down around First and Admiral, where guns were fired on Friday nights and passersby could still catch a whiff of opium smoke in the Sunday-morning streets.

  But “good” Greenwood, folks liked to believe, made up the other 99 percent of the community. It was Standpipe Hill and Detroit Avenue and the central business district of Greenwood Avenue. It was the First Baptist Church and the Bell & Little Restaurant and the Dreamland Theater where the Little Tramp or America’s Sweetheart ambled across the screen for a fifteen-cent ticket. It was the Tulsa Star and a black deputy sheriff walking the streets with a polished badge. It was Dr. Lewis T. Weldon and Lionel A. Garrity, Esquire, and John and Loula Williams who owned the Williams Confectionery and the Williams One-Stop Garage and the Dreamland itself. It was O. W. Gurley, who owned the grocery store, the mercantile store, and the Gurley Hotel to boot. It was Sunday-morning services and these Sunday-after-noon dinners with the fine china and the whitest linen and something classical and delicate tinkling from the Victrola, like the sounds from a past none of them could point to.

  That’s where the other Greenwood got to Luther most—in that music. You only had to hear but a few bars to know it was white. Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms. Luther could just picture them sitting at their pianos, tapping away in some big room with polished floors and high windows while the servants tiptoed around outside. This was music by and for men who whipped their stable boys and fucked their maids and went on weekend hunts to kill small animals they’d never eat. Men who loved the sound of baying hounds and sudden flight. They’d come back home, weary from lack of work, and compose or listen to music just like this, stare up at paintings of ancestors as hopeless and empty as they were, and preach to their children about right and wrong.

  Uncle Cornelius had spent his life working for men l
ike those before he’d gone blind, and Luther had met more than a few himself in his day, and he was content to step out of their path and leave them to themselves. But he couldn’t stand the idea that here, in James and Marta Hollaway’s dining room on Detroit Avenue, the dark faces assembled seemed determined to drink, eat, and money themselves white.

  He’d much rather be down around First and Admiral right now with the bell boys and the liverymen and the men who toted shine boxes and toolboxes. Men who worked and played with equal effort. Men who wanted nothing more, as the saying went, than a little whiskey, a little dice, a little pussy to make things nice.

  Not that they’d know a saying like that up here on Detroit Avenue. Hell no. Their sayings fell more along the lines of “The Lord hates a…” and “The Lord don’t…” and “The Lord won’t…” and “The Lord shall not abide a…” Making God sound like one irritable master, quick with the whip.

  He and Lila sat at the large table and Luther listened to them talk about the white man as if he and his would soon be sitting here on Sundays alongside them.

  “Mr. Paul Stewart himself,” James was saying, “come into my garage the other day with his Daimler, says, ‘James, sir, I don’t trust no one on the other side of them tracks the way I trust you with this here car.’”

  Lionel Garrity, Esquire, piped up a little later with, “It’s all just a matter of time ’fore folks understand what our boys did in the war and say, It’s time. Time to put all this silliness behind us. We all people. Bleed the same, think the same.”

  And Luther watched Lila smile and nod at that and he wanted to rip that disc record off the Victrola and break it over his knee.

  Because what Luther hated most was that behind all this—all this finery, all this newfound nobility, all the wing collars and preaching and handsome furniture and new-mown lawns and fancy cars—lay fear. Terror.

  If I play ball, they asked, will you let me be?

  Luther thought of Babe Ruth and those boys from Boston and Chicago this summer and he wanted to say, No. They won’t let you be. Comes the time they want something, they will take whatever they fucking please just to teach you.

  And he imagined Marta and James and Dr. Weldon and Lionel A. Garrity, Esquire, looking back at him, gape jawed and hands out in pleading:

  Teach us what?

  Your place.

  CHAPTER six

  Danny met Tessa Abruzze the same week people started to get sick. At first the newspapers said it was confined to soldiers at Camp Devens, but then two civilians dropped dead on the same day in the streets of Quincy, and across the city people began to stay inside.

  Danny arrived on his floor with an armful of parcels he’d carried up the tight stairwell. They contained his clothes, freshly laundered, wrapped in brown paper, and tied off with a ribbon by a laundress from Prince Street, a widow who did a dozen loads a day in the tub in her kitchen. He tried maneuvering the key into the door with the parcels still in his arms, but after a couple of failed attempts, he stepped back and placed them on the floor, and a young woman came out of her room at the other end of the hall and let out a yelp.

  She said, “Signore, signore,” and it came out tentatively, as if she weren’t sure she was worth the trouble. She leaned one hand against the wall and pink water ran down her legs and dripped off her ankles.

  Danny wondered why he’d never seen her before. Then he wondered if she had the grippe. Then he noticed she was pregnant. His lock disengaged and the door popped open, and he kicked his parcels inside because nothing left behind in a hallway in the North End would stay there long. He shut the door and came down the hall toward the woman and saw that the lower part of her dress was soaked through.

  She kept her hand on the wall and lowered her head and her dark hair fell over her mouth and her teeth were clenched into a grimace tighter than Danny had seen on some dead people. She said, “Dio aiutami. Dio aiutami.”

  Danny said, “Where’s your husband? Where’s the midwife?”

  He took her free hand in his and she squeezed so tight a bolt of pain ran up to his elbow. Her eyes rolled up at him and she babbled something in Italian so fast he didn’t catch any of it, and he realized she didn’t speak a word of English.

  “Mrs. DiMassi.” Danny’s holler echoed down the stairwell. “Mrs. DiMassi!”

  The woman squeezed his hand even harder and screamed through her teeth.

  “Dove e il vostro marito?” Danny said.

  The woman shook her head several times, though Danny had no idea if that meant she had no husband or if he just wasn’t here.

  “The…la…” Danny searched for the word for “midwife.” He caressed the back of her hand and said, “Ssssh. It’s okay.” He looked into her wide, wild eyes. “Look…look, you…the…la ostetrica!” Danny was so excited that he’d finally remembered the word he immediately reverted to English. “Yes? Where is…? Dove e? Dove e la ostetrica?”

  The woman pounded her fist against the wall. She dug her fingers into Danny’s palm and screamed so loudly that he yelled, “Mrs. DiMassi!” feeling a kind of panic he hadn’t felt since his first day as a policeman, when it had sunk in that he was all the answer the world saw fit to give to someone else’s problems.

  The woman shoved her face into his and said, “Faccia qualcosa, uomo insensato! Mi aiuti!” and Danny didn’t get all of it, but he picked up “foolish man” and “help” so he pulled her toward the stairs.

  Her hand remained in his, her arm wrapped around his abdomen, the rest of her clenched against his back as they made their way down the staircase to the street. Mass General was too far to make on foot and he couldn’t see any taxis or even any trucks in the streets, just people, filling it on market day, Danny thinking if it was market day there should be some fucking trucks, shouldn’t there, but no, just throngs of people and fruit and vegetables and restless pigs snuffling in their straw along the cobblestone.

  “Haymarket Relief Station,” he said. “It’s closest. You understand?”

  She nodded quickly and he knew it was his tone she was responding to and they pushed their way through the crowds and people began to make way. Danny tried a few times, calling out, “Cerco un’ ostetrica! Un’ ostetrica! Cè qualcuno che conosce un’ ostetrica?” but all he got were sympathetic shakes of the head.

  When they broke out on the other side of the mob, the woman arched her back and her moan was small and sharp and Danny thought she was going to drop the child onto the street, two blocks from Haymarket Relief, but she fell back into him instead. He scooped her up in his arms and started walking and staggering, walking and staggering, the woman not terribly heavy, but squirming and clawing the air and slapping his chest.

  They walked several blocks, time enough for Danny to find her beautiful in her agony. In spite of or because of, he wasn’t sure, but beautiful nevertheless. The final block, she wrapped her arms around his neck, her wrists pressing against the muscle there, and whispered, “Dio, aiutami. Dio, aiutami,” over and over in his ear.

  At the relief station, Danny pushed them through the first door he saw and they ended up in a brown hallway of dark oak floors and dim yellow lights and a single bench. A doctor sat on the bench, his legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. He looked at them as they came up the corridor. “What are you doing here?”

  Danny, still holding the woman in his arms, said, “You serious?”

  “You came in the wrong door.” The doctor stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and stood. He got a good look at the woman. “How long’s she been in labor?”

  “Her water broke about ten minutes ago. That’s all I know.”

  The doctor placed one hand under the woman’s belly and another to her head. He gave Danny a look, calm and unreachable. “This woman’s going into labor.”

  “I know.”

  “In your arms,” the doctor said, and Danny almost dropped her.

  “Wait here,” the doctor said and went through some double doors halfway up the cor
ridor. Something banged around back there and then the doctor came back through the doors with an iron gurney, one of its wheels rusted and squeaking.

  Danny placed the woman on the gurney. Her eyes were closed now, her breath still puffing out through her lips in short bursts, and Danny looked down at the wetness he’d been feeling on his arms and waist, a wetness he’d thought was mostly water but now saw was blood, and he showed his arms to the doctor.

  The doctor nodded and said, “What’s her name?”

  Danny said, “I don’t know.”

  The doctor frowned at that and then he pushed the gurney past Danny and back through the double doors and Danny heard him calling for a nurse.

  Danny found a bathroom at the end of the hall. He washed his hands and arms with brown soap and watched the blood swirl pink in the basin. The woman’s face hung in his mind. Her nose was slightly crooked with a bump halfway down the bridge, and her upper lip was thicker than her lower, and she had a small mole on the underside of her jaw, barely noticeable because her skin was so dark, almost as dark as her hair. He could hear her voice in his chest and feel her thighs and lower back in his palms, see the arch of her neck as she’d ground her head into the gurney mattress.

  He found the waiting area at the far end of the hall. He entered from behind the admitting desk and came around to sit among the bandaged and the sniffling. One guy removed a black bowler from his head and vomited into it. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief. He peered into the bowler, and then he looked at the other people in the waiting room; he seemed embarrassed. He carefully placed the bowler under the wooden bench and wiped his mouth again with the handkerchief and sat back and closed his eyes. A few people had surgical masks over their faces, and when they coughed the coughs were wet. The admitting nurse wore a mask as well. No one spoke English except for a teamster whose foot had been run over by a horse-drawn cart. He told Danny the accident had happened right out front, else he’d have walked to a real hospital, the kind fit for Americans. Several times he glanced at the dried blood covering Danny’s belt and groin, but he didn’t ask how it had gotten there.