The Given Day

  Danny made sure to call his parents most every night and managed to make one trip home during the pandemic. He sat with his family and Nora in the parlor on K Street and they drank tea, slipping the cups under the masks Ellen Coughlin demanded the family wear everywhere but in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Nora served the tea. Normally Avery Wallace would have performed that duty, but Avery hadn’t shown up for work in three days. Had it bad, he’d told Danny’s father over the phone, had it deep. Danny had known Avery since he and Connor were boys, and it only now occurred to him that he’d never visited the man’s home or met his family. Because he was colored?

  There it was.

  Because he was colored.

  He looked up from his teacup at the rest of the family and the sight of them all—uncommonly silent and stiff in their gestures as they lifted their masks to sip their tea—struck him and Connor as absurd at the same time. It was as if they were still altar boys serving mass at Gate of Heaven and one look from either brother could cause the other to laugh at the least appropriate moment. No matter how many whacks on the ass they took from the old man, they just couldn’t help it. It got so bad the decision was made to separate them, and after sixth grade, they never served mass together again.

  The same feeling gripped them now and the laugh burst through Danny’s lips first and Connor was a half step behind. Then they were both possessed by it, placing their teacups on the floor and giving in.

  “What?” their father said. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing,” Connor managed, and it came out muffled through the mask, which only made Danny laugh harder.

  Their mother, sounding cross and confused, said, “What? What?”

  “Jeeze, Dan,” Connor said, “get a load of himself.”

  Danny knew he was talking about Joe. He tried not to look, he did, but then he looked over and saw the little kid sitting in a chair so big his shoes barely reached the edge of the cushion. Joe, sitting there with his big wide eyes and the ridiculous mask and the teacup resting on the lap of his plaid knickerbockers, looking at his brothers like they’d provide an answer to him. But there wasn’t any answer. It was all so silly and ridiculous and Danny noticed his little brother’s argyle socks and his eyes watered as his laughter boomed even harder.

  Joe decided to join in and Nora followed, both of them uncertain at first but gathering in strength because Danny’s laughter had always been so infectious and neither could remember the last time they’d seen Connor laugh so freely or helplessly and then Connor sneezed and everyone stopped laughing.

  A fine spray of red dots peppered the inside of his mask and bled through to the outside.

  Their mother said, “Holy Mary Mother of Jesus,” and blessed herself.

  “What?” Connor said. “It was a sneeze.”

  “Connor,” Nora said. “Oh God, dear Connor.”

  “What?”

  “Con’,” Danny said and came out of his chair, “take off your mask.”

  “Oh no oh no oh no,” their mother whispered.

  Connor took off the mask, and when he got a good look at it, he gave it a small nod and took a breath.

  Danny said, “Let’s me and you have a look in the bathroom.”

  No one else moved at first, and Danny got Connor into the bathroom and locked the door as they heard the whole family find their legs and assemble out in the hall.

  “Tilt your head,” Danny said.

  Connor tilted his head. “Dan.”

  “Shut up. Let me look.”

  Someone turned the knob from the outside and his father said, “Open up.”

  “Give us a second, will ya?”

  “Dan,” Connor said, and his voice was still tremulous with laughter.

  “Will you keep your head back? It’s not funny.”

  “Well, you’re looking up my nose.”

  “I know I am. Shut up.”

  “You see any boogers?”

  “A few.” Danny felt a smile trying to push through the muscles in his face. Leave it to Connor—serious as the grave on a normal day and now, possibly facing that grave, he couldn’t keep serious.

  Someone rattled the door again and knocked.

  “I picked it,” Connor said.

  “What?”

  “Just before Ma brought out the tea. I was in here. Had half my hand up there, Dan. Had one of those sharp rocks in there, you know the ones?”

  Danny stopped looking in his brother’s nose. “You what?”

  “Picked it,” Connor said. “I guess I need to cut my nails.”

  Danny stared at him and Connor laughed. Danny slapped the side of his head and Connor rabbit-punched him. By the time they opened the door to the rest of the family, standing pale and angry in the hall, they were laughing again like bad altar boys.

  “He’s fine.”

  “I’m fine. Just a nosebleed. Look, Ma, it stopped.”

  “Get a fresh mask from the kitchen,” their father said and walked back into the parlor with a wave of disgust.

  Danny caught Joe looking at them with something akin to wonder.

  “A nosebleed,” he said to Joe, drawing the word out.

  “It’s not funny,” their mother said, and her voice was brittle.

  “I know, Ma,” Connor said, “I know.”

  “I do, too,” Danny said, catching a look from Nora now that nearly matched their mother’s, and then remembering her calling his brother “dear” Connor.

  When did that start?

  “No, you don’t,” their mother said. “You don’t at all. The two of you never did.” And she went into her bedroom and closed the door.

  By the time Danny heard, Steve Coyle had been sick for five hours. He’d woken that morning, thighs turned to plaster, ankles swollen, calves twitching, head throbbing. He didn’t waste time pretending it was something else. He slipped out of the bedroom he’d shared last night with the Widow Coyle and grabbed his clothes and went out the door. Never paused, not even with his legs the way they were, dragging under the rest of him like they might just decide to stay put even if his torso kept going. After a few blocks, he told Danny, fucking legs screamed so much it was like they belonged to someone else. Fucking wailed, every step. He’d tried walking to the streetcar stop then realized he could infect the whole car. Then he remembered the streetcars had stopped running anyway. So a walk, then. Eleven blocks from the Widow Coyle’s cold-water flat at the top of Mission Hill all the way down to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Damn near crawling by the time he reached it, folded over like a broken match, cramps ballooning up through his stomach, his chest, his throat for Christ’s sake. And his head, Jesus. By the time he reached the admitting desk, it was like someone hammered pipe through his eyes.

  He told all this to Danny from behind a pair of muslin curtains in the infectious disease ward of the intensive care unit at the Peter Bent. There was no one else in the ward the afternoon Danny came to see him, just the lumpen shape of a body beneath a sheet across the aisle. The rest of the beds were empty, the curtains pulled back. Somehow that was worse.

  They’d given Danny a mask and gloves; the gloves were in his coat pocket; the mask hung at his throat. And yet he kept the muslin between him and Steve. Catching it didn’t scare him. These past few weeks? If you hadn’t made peace with your maker, then you didn’t believe you’d been made. But watching it drain Steve to the ground powder of himself—that would be something else. Something Danny would pass the cup on if Steve allowed him. Not the dying, just the witnessing.

  Steve spoke like he was trying to gargle at the same time. The words pushed up through phlegm and the ends of sentences often drowned. “No Widow. Believe that?”

  Danny said nothing. He’d only met the Widow Coyle once, and his sole impression was one of fussiness and anxious self-regard.

  “Can’t see you.” Steve cleared his throat.

  Danny said, “I can see you, pal.”

  “Pull it back, would ya?”


  Danny didn’t move right away.

  “You scared? I don’t blame ya. Forget it.”

  Danny leaned forward a few times. He hitched his pants at the knees. He leaned forward again. He pulled back the curtain.

  His friend sat upright, the pillow dark from his head. His face was swollen and skeletal at the same time, like dozens of the infected, living and dead, that he and Danny had run across this month. His eyes bulged from their sockets, as if trying to escape, and ran with a milky film that pooled in the corners. But he wasn’t purple. Or black. He wasn’t hacking his lungs up through his mouth or defecating where he lay. So, all in all, not as sick as one feared. Not yet anyway.

  He gave Danny an arched eyebrow, an exhausted grin.

  “Remember those girls I courted this summer?”

  Danny nodded. “Did more than court some of them.”

  He coughed. A small one, into his fist. “I wrote a song. In my head. ‘Summer Girls.’”

  Danny could suddenly feel the heat coming off him. If he leaned within a foot of him, the waves found his face.

  “‘Summer Girls,’ eh?”

  “‘Summer Girls.’” Steve’s eyes closed. “Sing it for you someday.”

  Danny found a bucket of water on the bedside table. He reached in and pulled out a cloth and squeezed it. He placed the cloth on Steve’s forehead. Steve’s eyes snapped up to him, wild and grateful. Danny moved down his forehead and wiped his cheeks. He dropped the hot cloth back into the cooler water and squeezed again. He wiped his partner’s ears, the sides of his neck, his throat and chin.

  “Dan.”

  “Yeah?”

  Steve grimaced. “Like a horse is sitting on my chest.”

  Danny kept his eyes clear. He didn’t remove them from Steve’s face when he dropped the cloth back in the bucket. “Sharp?”

  “Yeah. Sharp.”

  “Can you breathe?”

  “Not too good.”

  “Probably I should get a doctor, then.”

  Steve flicked his eyes at the suggestion.

  Danny patted his hand and called for the doctor.

  “Stay here,” Steve said. His lips were white.

  Danny smiled and nodded. He swiveled on the small stool they’d wheeled over to the bed when he arrived. Called for a doctor again.

  A very Wallace, seventeen years the houseman for the Coughlin family, succumbed to the grippe and was buried at Cedar Grove Cemetery in a plot Thomas Coughlin had bought for him a decade ago. Only Thomas, Danny, and Nora attended the short funeral. No one else.

  Thomas said, “His wife died twenty years ago. Children scattered, most to Chicago, one to Canada. They never wrote. He lost track. He was a good man. Hard to know, but a good man, nonetheless.”

  Danny was surprised to hear a soft, subdued grief in his father’s voice.

  His father picked up a handful of dirt as Avery Wallace’s coffin was lowered into the grave. He tossed the dirt on the wood. “Lord have mercy on your soul.”

  Nora kept her head down, but the tears fell from her chin. Danny was stunned. How was it that he’d known this man most of his life and yet somehow had never really seen him?

  He tossed his own handful of dirt on the coffin.

  Because he was colored. That’s why.

  Steve walked out of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital ten days after he’d walked in. Like thousands of others infected in the city, he’d survived, even as the grippe made its steady way across the rest of the country, crossing into California and New Mexico the same weekend he walked with Danny to a taxi.

  He walked with a cane. Always would, the doctors promised. The influenza had weakened his heart, damaged his brain. The headaches would never leave him. Simple speech would sometimes be a problem, strenuous activity of any kind would probably kill him. A week ago he’d joked about that, but today he was quiet.

  It was a short walk to the taxi stand but it took a long time.

  “Not even a desk job,” he said as they reached the front taxicab in the line.

  “I know,” Danny said. “I’m sorry.”

  “‘Too strenuous,’ they said.”

  Steve worked his way into the cab and Danny handed him his cane. He came around the other side and got in.

  “Where to?” the cabdriver asked.

  Steve looked at Danny. Danny looked back, waiting.

  “You guys deaf? Where to?”

  “Keep your knickers cinched.” Steve gave him the address of the rooming house on Salem Street. As the driver pulled off the curb, Steve looked over at Danny. “You help me pack up my room?”

  “You don’t have to leave.”

  “I can’t afford it. No job.”

  “The Widow Coyle?” Danny said.

  Steve shrugged. “Ain’t seen her since I got it.”

  “Where you going to go?”

  Another shrug. “Got to be somebody looking to hire a heartsick cripple.”

  Danny didn’t say anything for a minute. They bumped along Huntington.

  “There’s got to be some way to—”

  Steve put a hand on his arm. “Coughlin, I love ya, but there’s not always ‘some way.’ Most people fall? No net. None. We just go off.”

  “Where?”

  Steve was quiet for a bit. He looked out the window. He pursed his lips. “Where the people with no nets end up. That place.”

  CHAPTER seven

  Luther was shooting pool alone in the Gold Goose when Jessie came around to tell him the Deacon wanted to see them. It was empty in the Goose because it was empty all over Greenwood, all over Tulsa, the flu having come in like a dust storm until at least one member of most families had gotten it and half of those had died. It was against the law right now to go outside without a mask, and most businesses in the sinners’ end of Greenwood had closed up shop, though old Calvin, who ran the Goose, said he’d stay open no matter what, said if the Lord wanted his tired old ass, He could just come get it for all the good it would do Him. So Luther came by and practiced his pool, loving how crisp the balls snapped in all that quiet.

  The Hotel Tulsa was closed until people stopped turning blue, and nobody was betting numbers, so there wasn’t no money to be made right now. Luther forbade Lila to go out, said they couldn’t risk it for her or the baby, but this had meant he’d been expected to stay home with her. He had, and it was mostly better than he would have imagined. They fixed up the place a bit and gave every room a fresh coat of paint and hung the curtains Aunt Marta had given them as a wedding present. They found time to make love most every afternoon, slower than ever before, gentler, soft smiles and chuckles replacing the hungry grunts and groans of summer. He remembered in those weeks how deeply he loved this woman and that loving her and having her love him back made him a worthy man. They built dreams of their future and their baby’s future, and Luther, for the first time, could picture a life in Greenwood, had formed a loose ten-year plan in which he’d work as hard as a man could and keep socking away the money until he could start his own business, maybe as a carpenter, maybe as the owner/operator of a repair shop for all the different gadgets that seemed to sprout out from the heart of this country damn near every day. Luther knew if you built something mechanical, sooner or later it broke, and when it did most wouldn’t know how to fix it, but a man with Luther’s gifts could have it back in your house and good as new by nightfall.

  Yeah, for a couple weeks there, he could see it, but then the house started closing in on him again and those dreams went dark when he pictured growing old in some house on Detroit Avenue, surrounded by people like Aunt Marta and her ilk, going to church, laying off the liquor and the billiards and the fun until one day he woke up and his hair was speckled white and his speed was gone and he’d never done nothing with his life but chase someone else’s version of it.

  So he went down to the Goose to keep the itching in his head from coming out through his eyes and when Jessie came in, that itch spread into a warm smile in his head because, boy,
he’d missed their days together—just two weeks ago, but it felt like a couple years—when they’d all poured over the tracks from White Town and had them some play, had them some times.

  “I went by your house,” Jessie said, pulling off his mask.

  “Fuck you taking that thing off for?” Luther said.

  Jessie looked over at Calvin, then at Luther. “You both wearing yours, so what’s I got to worry about?”

  Luther just stared at him because for once Jessie made a bit of sense and it annoyed him that he hadn’t thought of it first.

  Jessie said, “Lila told me you might be here. I ’spect that woman don’t like me, Country.”

  “You keep your mask on?”

  “What?”

  “With my wife? You keep your mask on when you talked to her?”

  “Hell, yeah. ’Course, boy.”

  “All right then.”

  Jessie took a sip from his hip flask. “Deacon needs to see us.”

  “Us?”

  Jessie nodded.

  “What for?”

  Jessie shrugged.

  “When?”

  “’Bout half an hour ago.”

  “Shit,” Luther said. “Whyn’t you get here sooner?”

  “’Cause I went to your house first.”

  Luther placed his cue in the rack. “We in trouble?”

  “Nah, nah. Ain’t like that. He just want to see us.”

  “What for?”

  “I told you,” Jessie said, “I don’t know.”

  “Then how you know it ain’t bad?” Luther said as they walked out of the place.

  Jessie looked back at him as he tied the mask off behind his head. “Tighten your corset, woman. Show some grit.”

  “Put some grit up your ass.”

  “Talking it ain’t walking it, Negro,” Jessie said and shook his big ass at him as they ran up the empty street.

  Ya’ll take a seat over here by me now,” the Deacon Broscious said when they entered the Club Almighty. “Right over here now, boys. Come on.”