The Given Day

  He wore a broad smile and a white suit over a white shirt and a red tie the same color as his velvet hat. He sat at a round table at the back of the club near the stage and he waved them over through the dim light as Smoke snapped the lock on the door behind them. Luther felt that snap vibrate in his Adam’s apple. He’d never been in the club when it wasn’t open for business, and its tan leather booths and red walls and cherrywood banquettes felt less sinful but more threatening at noon.

  The Deacon kept waving his arm until Luther took the chair on the left and Jessie the one on the right, and the Deacon poured them each a tall glass of bonded, prewar Canadian whiskey and slid the glasses across the table and said, “My boys. Yes, indeed. How ya’ll doing now?”

  Jessie said, “Right fine, sir.”

  Luther managed, “Very good, sir, thanks for asking.”

  The Deacon wasn’t wearing his mask, though Smoke and Dandy were, and his smile was big and white. “Aw, that’s music to my ears, I do swear.” He reached across the table and managed to clap both of them on a shoulder. “Ya’ll making the money, right? Heh heh heh. Yeah. You liking that, right? Making them greenbacks?”

  Jessie said, “We trying, sir.”

  “Trying, hell. Doing is what I see. Ya’ll the best runners I got.”

  “Thank you, sir. Things been a little tight of late because a that flu. So many people sick, sir, they ain’t got no heart for the numbers right now.”

  The Deacon waved that away. “People get sick. What you gone do? Am I right? They sick and their loved ones be dying? Bless us, Heavenly Father, it tries the heart to see so much suffering. Everyone walking the streets with masks on and the undertakers running out of coffins? Lord. Times like these, you puts the bidness aside. You just puts it up on a shelf and pray for the misery to end. And when it do? When it do, then you go right back to bidness. Damn sure you do. But not”—he pointed his finger at them—“until then. Can I get an ‘amen’ on that, my brothers?”

  “Amen,” Jessie said, then lifted his mask and ducked his glass under there and slammed back his whiskey.

  “Amen,” Luther said and took a small drink from his glass.

  “Shit, child,” the Deacon said. “You supposed to drink that not romance it.”

  Jessie laughed and crossed his legs, getting comfy.

  Luther said, “Yes, sir,” and threw the whole thing back and the Deacon refilled their glasses and Luther realized that Dandy and Smoke now stood behind them, no more than a step away, though Luther couldn’t have said when it was they’d arrived in that spot.

  The Deacon took a long slow drink from his own glass and said, “Ahhh,” and licked his lips. He folded his hands and leaned into the table. “Jessie.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Clarence Jessup Tell,” Deacon Broscious said, turning those words into song.

  “In the flesh, sir.”

  The Deacon’s smile returned, brighter than ever. “Jessie, let me ask you something. What’s the most memorable moment of your life?”

  “Sir?”

  The Deacon raised his eyebrows. “You ain’t got one?”

  “I’m not sure I understand, sir.”

  “The most memorable moment of your life,” the Deacon repeated.

  Luther felt sweat bathe his thighs.

  “Everyone’s got one,” the Deacon said. “Could be a happy experience, could be sad. Could be a night with a girl. Am I right? Am I right?” He laughed, his face folding all over his nose with the effort. “Could be a night with a boy. You like boys, Jessie? In my profession, we don’t cast aspersions on what I like to call specified taste.”

  “No, sir.”

  “No sir what?”

  “No, sir, I don’t like boys,” Jessie said. “No, sir.”

  The Deacon showed them his palms in apology. “A girl, then, yeah? Young, though, am I right? You never forget ’em when you were young and they were, too. Nice piece of chocolate with a ass you could pound all night and it still don’t lose its shape?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No sir you don’t like a fine young woman’s ass?”

  “No, sir, that’s not my memorable moment.” Jessie coughed and took another slug of whiskey.

  “Then what is, boy? Shit.”

  Jessie looked away from the table, and Luther could feel him composing himself. “My most memorable moment, sir?”

  The Deacon clapped the table. “Most memorable,” he thundered and then winked at Luther, as if, whatever this con was, Luther was somehow in on it with him.

  Jessie lifted his mask and took another swig. “Night my pops died, sir.”

  The Deacon’s face strained with the weight of compassion. He dabbed his face with a napkin. He sucked air through pursed lips and his eyes grew large. “I am so sorry, Jessie. How did the good man pass?”

  Jessie looked at the table, then back into the Deacon’s face. “Some white boys in Missouri, sir, where I was reared?”

  “Yes, son.”

  “They come and said he’d snuck onto their farm and killed their mule. Said he’d meant to cut it up for food but they’d caught him at it and run him off. These boys, sir? They showed up at our house next day and dragged my pops out the house and beat him something fierce, all in front of my mama and me and my two sisters.” Jessie drained the rest of his glass and then sucked back a great wet hunk of air. “Aw, shit.”

  “They lynch your pops?”

  “No, sir. They done left him there and he died in the house two days later from a busted-up skull. I was ten year old.”

  Jessie lowered his head.

  The Deacon Broscious reached across the table and patted his hand. “Sweet Jesus,” the Deacon whispered. “Sweet sweet sweet sweet Jesus.” He took the bottle and refilled Jessie’s glass and gave Luther a sad smile.

  “In my experience,” the Deacon Broscious said, “the most memorable thing in a man’s life is rarely pleasant. Pleasure doesn’t teach us anything but that pleasure is pleasurable. And what sort of lesson is that? Monkey jacking his own penis know that. Nah, nah,” he said. “The nature of learning, my brothers? Is pain. Ya’ll think on this—we hardly ever know how happy we are as children, for example, until our childhood is taken from us. We usually can’t recognize true love until it’s passed us by. And then, then we say, My that was the thing. That was the truth, ya’ll. But in the moment?” He shrugged his enormous shoulders and patted his forehead with his handkerchief. “What molds us,” he said, “is what maims us. A high price, I agree. But”—he spread his arms and gave them his most glorious smile—“what we learn from that is priceless.”

  Luther never saw Dandy and Smoke move, but when he turned at the sound of Jessie’s grunt, they’d already clamped his wrists to the table and Smoke had Jessie’s head held fast in his hands.

  Luther said, “Hey, ya’ll wait a—”

  The Deacon’s slap connected with Luther’s cheekbone and busted up through his teeth and his nose and eyes like shards of broken pipe. The Deacon’s hand didn’t leave his head, either. He clenched Luther’s hair and held his head in place as Dandy produced a knife and sliced it along Jessie’s jawbone from his chin up to the base of his ear.

  Jessie screamed long after the knife had left his flesh. The blood climbed out of the wound like it had been waiting its whole life to do so, and Jessie howled through his mask and Dandy and Smoke held his head in place as the blood poured onto the table and Deacon Broscious yanked on Luther’s hair and said, “You close your eyes, Country, I’ll take them home with me.”

  Luther blinked from the sweat, but he didn’t shut his eyes, and he saw the blood flow over the lip of the wound and off Jessie’s flesh and spill all over the table, and he could tell by a fleeting glimpse of Jessie’s eyes that his friend had exited the place where he was worried about the wound to his jaw and had realized these could be the first moments of a long, last day on earth.

  “Give that pussy a towel,” the Deacon said and pushed Luther’s he
ad away.

  Dandy dropped a towel on the table in front of Jessie, and then he and Smoke stepped back. Jessie grabbed the towel and pressed it to his chin and sucked through his teeth and wept softly and rocked in his chair, his mask gone red up the left side, and that went on for some time, no one saying anything and the Deacon looking bored, and when the towel was redder than the Deacon’s hat, Smoke handed Jessie another one to replace it and tossed the bloody one behind him to the floor.

  “Your thieving old man getting killed?” the Deacon said. “Nigger, that’s now the second most memorable moment of your life.”

  Jessie clenched his eyes shut and pressed the towel so hard against his jaw Luther could see his fingers turn white.

  “Can I get an ‘amen’ on that, brother?”

  Jessie opened his eyes and stared.

  The Deacon repeated his question.

  “Amen,” Jessie whispered.

  “Amen,” the Deacon said and clapped his hands. “Way I figure it, you been skimming ten dollars a week from me for two years now. What that add up to, Smoke?”

  “One thousand forty dollar, Deacon, sir.”

  “A thousand forty.” The Deacon turned his gaze on Luther. “And you, Country, you either in on it or known about it and didn’t tell me, which make it your debt, too.”

  Luther didn’t know what else to do so he nodded.

  “You don’t need to nod like you confirming something. You ain’t confirming shit to me. I say something is, and it very much is.” He took a sip of whiskey. “Now, Jessie Tell, can you pay me my money or it all done got shot up your arm?”

  Jessie hissed, “I can get it, sir, I can get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “Your thousand forty dollars, sir.”

  The Deacon widened his eyes at Smoke and Dandy and all three of them chuckled at the same time and stopped chuckling just as fast.

  “You don’t understand, dope ho’, do you? The only reason you alive is because, in my beneficence, I kindly decided to call what you took a loan. I loaned you the thousand forty. You didn’t steal it. If I was to have decided you stole it, that knife be in your throat right now and your dick be in your mouth. So say it.”

  “Say what, sir?”

  “Say it was a loan.”

  “It was a loan, sir.”

  “Indeed,” the Deacon said. “So, as to the terms of that loan, let me enlighten you. Smoke, what we charge a week for vig?”

  Luther felt his head spin and he swallowed hard to keep his vomit down.

  “Five percent,” Smoke said.

  “Five percent,” the Deacon told Jessie. “Compounded weekly.”

  Jessie’s eyes, which had gone hooded with the pain, snapped open.

  “What’s the weekly vig on a thousand forty?” the Deacon said.

  Smoke said, “I believe it work out to fifty-two dollars, Deacon, sir.”

  “Fifty-two dollars,” the Deacon said slowly. “Don’t sound like much.”

  “No, Deacon, sir, it don’t.”

  The Deacon stroked his chin. “But shit, wait, what’s that per month?”

  “Two hundred eight, sir,” Dandy chimed in.

  The Deacon showed his real smile, a tiny one, having himself a time now. “Per year?”

  “Two thousand four hundred ninety-six,” Smoke said.

  “And doubled?”

  “Ah,” Dandy said, sounding desperate to win the game, “that be, um, that be—”

  “Four thousand nine hundred ninety-two,” Luther said, not even sure he was speaking or why until the words left his mouth.

  Dandy slapped the back of his head. “I had it, nigger.”

  The Deacon turned his full gaze on Luther and Luther saw his grave in there, could hear the shovels in the dirt.

  “You ain’t dumb at all, Country. I knew that first time I saw you. Knew the only way you’d get dumb is hanging around fools like this one bleeding all over my table. It was my mistake to allow your fraternization with said Negro, and that’s to my everlasting regret.” He sighed and stretched his great bulk in his chair. “But it’s all spilt milk now. So that four thousand nine hundred ninety-two added to the original loan come out to…?” He held up a hand to stop anyone else from answering and pointed at Luther.

  “Six thousand thirty-two.”

  The Deacon slapped the table. “It do. Dang. And before ya’ll think I’m a merciless man, ya’ll need to understand that even in this, I was more than kind because ya’ll need to consider what you’d owe if, like Dandy and Smoke suggested, I’d added the vig into the principal every week as I did my computations. You see?”

  No one said anything.

  “I said,” the Deacon said, “do you see?”

  “Yes, sir,” Luther said.

  “Yes, sir,” Jessie said.

  The Deacon nodded. “Now how you gone pay back six thousand thirty-two dollars of my money?”

  Jessie said, “Somehow we’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” The Deacon laughed. “You stick up a bank?”

  Jessie said nothing.

  “You go over to White Town maybe, rob every third man you see all day and all night?”

  Jessie said nothing. Luther said nothing.

  “You can’t,” the Deacon said softly, his hands spread out on the table. “You just can’t. Dream all you want, but some things ain’t in the realm of possibility. No, boys, there’s no way you can come up with my—oh, shit, it’s a new week, I almost forgot—my six thousand eighty-four dollars.”

  Jessie’s eyes slid to the side and then forced their way back to the center. “Sir, I need a doctor, I think.”

  “Need you a fucking mortician if’n we don’t figure your way out this mess, so shut the fuck up.”

  Luther said, “Sir, just tell us what you want us to do and we’ll sure do it.”

  It was Smoke who slapped him in the back of the head this time, but the Deacon held up a hand.

  “All right, Country. All right. You cut to the chase, boy, and I respect that. So I will respect you in kind.”

  He straightened the lapels of his white jacket and leaned into the table. “I got a few folks owe me large change. Some of them in the country, some of them right here downtown. Smoke, give me the list.”

  Smoke came around the table and handed the Deacon a sheet of paper and the Deacon looked at it and then placed it on the table so Luther and Jessie could see it.

  “There’s five names on that list. Each one is into me for at least five hundred a week. You boys gone go get it today. And I know what you’re thinking in your whiny-assed head-voices. You thinking, ‘But, Deacon, sir, we ain’t muscle. Smoke and Dandy supposed to handle the hard cases.’ You thinking that, Country?”

  Luther nodded.

  “Well, normally Smoke and Dandy or some other hardheaded, can’t-fucking-scare-’em sons a bitches would be handling this. But this ain’t normal times. Every name on that list has someone in their house with the grippe. And I ain’t losing no important niggers like Smoke or Dandy here to that plague.”

  Luther said, “But two unimportant niggers like us…”

  Deacon reared his head back. “This boy is finding his voice. I was right about you, Country—you got talent.” He chuckled and drank some more whiskey. “So, yeah, that’s the size of it. You gone go out and collect from these five. You don’t collect it all, you better be able to make up the difference. You bring it on back to me and keep going out and bringing it on back until this flu is over, I’ll wipe your debt back to the principal. Now,” he said, with that big broad smile of his, “what you think of that?”

  “Sir,” Jessie said, “that grippe be killing people in one day.”

  “That’s true,” the Deacon said. “So, if you catch it, you surely could be dead this time tomorrow. But if you don’t get my money? Nigger, you surely will be dead tonight.”

  The Deacon gave them the name of a doctor to see in the back room of a shooting gallery off Second and they went th
ere after they got sick in the alley behind the Deacon’s club. The doctor, a drunken old high-yellow with his hair dyed rust-colored, stitched Jessie’s jaw as Jessie sucked air and the tears ran quietly down his face.

  In the street, Jessie said, “I need something for the pain.”

  Luther said, “You even think about the spike, I’ll kill you myself.”

  “Fine,” Jessie said. “But I can’t think with this pain, so what you suggest?”

  They went up into the back of a drugstore on Second, and Luther got them a bag of cocaine. He cut two lines for himself to keep his nerve up and four for Jessie. Jessie snorted his lines one after the other and took a shot of whiskey.

  Luther said, “We going to need some guns.”

  “I got guns,” Jessie said. “Shit.”

  They went back to his apartment and he handed the long-barreled .38 to Luther and slid the .45 Colt behind his back and said, “You know how to use that?”

  Luther shook his head. “I know if some nigger try to beat me out his house I’ll point this in his face.”

  “What if that ain’t enough to stop him?”

  “I ain’t dying today,” Luther said.

  “Then let me hear it.”

  “Hear what?”

  “If it ain’t enough to stop him, you going to do what?”

  Luther put the .38 in his coat pocket. “I’m going to shoot the son of a bitch.”

  “Then shit, Negro,” Jessie said, still talking through gritted teeth, although now it was probably more from the cocaine than the pain, “let’s get working.”

  They were a scary sight. Luther would admit that much as he caught their reflection in the window of Arthur Smalley’s living room as they walked up the steps to his house—two wound-up colored men with masks that covered their noses and mouths, one of them with a row of black stitches sticking out of his jaw like a spiked fence. Time was, the look of them would have been enough to terror the money out of any God-fearing Greenwood man, but these days it didn’t mean much; most folks were scary sights. The high windows of the small house had white Xs painted on them, but Luther and Jessie had no choice but to walk right up on the old porch and ring the bell.