The Given Day

  By the looks of the place, Arthur Smalley had at one time tried to have a go at farming. Off to his left, Luther could see a barn in need of painting and a field with a skinny horse and a pair of knobby-looking cows wandering in it. But nothing had been tilled or reaped out there in some time and the weeds stood tall in midautumn.

  Jessie went to ring the bell again and the door opened and they looked through the screen at a man about Luther’s size but near twice his age. He wore suspenders over an undershirt yellowed by old sweat, the mask over his face yellowed with it, too, and his eyes were red from exhaustion or grief or the flu.

  “Who you-all?” he said, and the words came out airless, as if whatever they answered wouldn’t make no difference to him.

  “You Arthur Smalley, sir?” Luther said.

  The man slid his thumbs under his suspenders. “What you think?”

  “I had to guess?” Luther said. “I’d say yeah.”

  “Then you’d guess right, boy.” He leaned into the screen. “What ya’ll want?”

  “The Deacon sent us,” Jessie said.

  “Did he now?”

  In the house behind him someone moaned, and Luther got a whiff of the other side of that door. Sharp and sour at the same time, as if someone had left the eggs, the milk, and the meat out of the icebox since July.

  Arthur Smalley saw that smell hit Luther in the eyes and he opened the screen door wide. “Ya’ll want to come in? Maybe set a spell?”

  “Nah, sir,” Jessie said. “What say you just bring us the Deacon’s money?”

  “The money, uh?” He patted his pockets. “Yeah, I got some, drew it fresh this morning from the money well. It’s still a little damp, but—”

  “We ain’t joking here, sir,” Jessie said and adjusted his hat back off his forehead.

  Arthur Smalley leaned over the threshold and they both leaned back. “I look like I been working of late?”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “No, I don’t,” Arthur Smalley said. “Know what I been doing?”

  He whispered the words and Luther took another half-step back from the whisper because something about the sound of it was obscene.

  “I buried my youngest in the yard night before last,” Arthur Smalley whispered, his neck extended. “Under an elm tree. She liked that tree, so…” He shrugged. “She was thirteen. My other daughter, she in bed with it. And my wife? She ain’t been awake in two days. Her head as hot as a kettle just come to boil. She gone die,” he said and nodded. “Tonight most likely. Else tomorrow. You sure you don’t want to come in?”

  Luther and Jessie shook their heads.

  “I got sheets covered in sweat and shit need washing. Sure could use a hand.”

  “The money, Mr. Smalley.” Luther wanted off this porch and away from this sickness and he hated Arthur Smalley for not washing that undershirt.

  “I don’t—”

  “The money,” Jessie said, and the .45 was in his hand, dangling beside his leg. “No more bullshit, old-timer. Get the fucking money.”

  Another moan from inside, this one low and long and huffing, and Arthur Smalley stared at them so long Luther started to think he’d fallen into some sort of trance.

  “Ya’ll got no decency at all?” he said and looked first at Jessie and then at Luther.

  And Luther told the truth. “None.”

  Arthur Smalley’s eyes widened. “My wife and child are—”

  “The Deacon don’t care about your domestic responsibilities,” Jessie said.

  “But you-all? What you care about?”

  Luther didn’t look at Jessie and he knew Jessie wasn’t looking at him. Luther pulled the .38 from his belt and pointed it at Arthur Smalley’s forehead.

  “Care about the money,” he said.

  Arthur Smalley looked into that barrel and then he looked in Luther’s eyes. “Boy, how does your mama walk the street knowing she birthed such a creature?”

  “The money,” Jessie said.

  “Or what?” Arthur said, which is exactly what Luther had been afraid he’d say. “You gone shoot me? Shit, I’m fine with that. You want to shoot my family? Do me the favor. Please. You ain’t gone do—”

  “I’ll make you dig her up,” Jessie said.

  “You what?”

  “You heard me.”

  Arthur Smalley sagged into the doorjamb. “You didn’t just say that.”

  “I damn well did, old man,” Jessie said. “I will make you dig your daughter out her grave. Else I’ll tie your ass up, make you watch me do it. Then I’ll fill it back in, while she lying beside it, so you’ll have to bury her twice.”

  We’re going to hell, Luther thought. Head of the line.

  “What you think about that, old man?” Jessie put his .45 behind his back again.

  Arthur Smalley’s eyes filled with tears and Luther prayed they wouldn’t fall. Please don’t fall. Please.

  Arthur said, “I ain’t got no money,” and Luther knew the fight was gone from him.

  “What you got then?” Jessie said.

  Jessie followed in his Model T as Luther drove Arthur Smalley’s Hudson out from behind the barn and crossed in front of the house as the man stood on his porch and watched. Luther shifted into second gear and put some juice into it as he passed the small fence at the edge of the dirt yard, and he told himself he didn’t see the freshly turned dirt under the elm. He didn’t see the shovel that stuck upright from the dark brown mound. Or the cross made from thin planks of pine and painted a pale white.

  By the time they’d finished with the men on the list, they had several pieces of jewelry, fourteen hundred dollars in cash, and a mahogany hope chest strapped to the back of what had once been Arthur Smalley’s car.

  They’d seen a child gone blue as twilight and a woman no older than Lila who lay on a cot on a front porch with her bones and her teeth and her eyes lunging toward heaven. Saw a dead man sitting against a barn, blacker than black could ever get, as if he’d been struck by lightning through his skull, his flesh all bumpy with welts.

  Judgment Day, Luther knew. It was coming for all of them. And he and Jessie were going to go up and stand before the Lord and have to account for what they’d done this day. And there was no possible accounting for that. Not in ten lives.

  “Let’s give it back,” he said after the third house.

  “What?”

  “Give it back and run.”

  “And spend the rest of our short fucking lives looking over our shoulders for Dandy or Smoke or some other broke-down nigger with a gun and nothing left to lose? Where you think we’d hide, Country? Two colored bucks on the run?”

  Luther knew he was right, but he also knew it was eating Jessie up as awful as it was eating him.

  “We worry about that later. We—”

  Jessie laughed, and it was the ugliest laugh Luther’d ever heard from him. “We do this or we dead, Country.” He gave him an open-armed, wide-shouldered shrug. “And you know that. Less you want to kill that whale, sign you and your wife’s death warrant in the process.”

  Luther got in the car.

  The last one, Owen Tice, paid them in cash, said he wouldn’t be around to spend it no way anyhow. Soon as his Bess passed, he was going to get his shotgun and ride that river with her. He’d had him a raw throat since noon and it was starting to burn and without Bess there wasn’t no fucking point to it anyway. He wished them well. He said, sure he understood. He did. Man had to make a living. Wasn’t no shame in that.

  Said, My whole fucking family, you believe that shit? A week ago we all in the pink, eating dinner ’round the table—my son and daughter-in-law, my daughter and son-in-law, three grandchildren, and Bess. Just sitting and eating and jawing. And then, then, it was like God Hisself reached through the roof and into their house and closed his hand ’round the whole family and squeezed.

  Like we was flies on the table, he said. Like that.

  They drove up an empty Greenwood Avenue at midnight a
nd Luther counted twenty-four windows marked by Xs and they parked the cars in the alley behind the Club Almighty. There was no light coming from any of the buildings along the alley and the fire escapes hung above them and Luther wondered if there was anything left of the world or if it had all gone black and blue and seized up with the grippe.

  Jessie put his foot on the running board of his Model T and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in a stream toward the back door of the Club Almighty, nodding his head every now and then, as if he heard music Luther couldn’t and then he looked over at Luther and said, “I walk.”

  “You walk?”

  “I do,” Jessie said. “I walk and the road is long and the Lord ain’t with me. Ain’t with you neither, Luther.”

  In the time they’d known each other, Jessie had never, not once, called Luther by his Christian name.

  “Let’s unload this shit,” Luther said. “Yeah, Jessie?” He reached for the straps that held Tug and Ervina Irvine’s hope chest to the back of Arthur Smalley’s car. “Come on now. Let’s get this shit done.”

  “Ain’t with me,” Jessie said. “Ain’t with you. Ain’t in this alley. I think He done left this world. Found Hisself another one to be more concerned with.” He chuckled and took a long drag on his cigarette. “How old you think that blue child was?”

  “Two,” Luther said.

  “’Bout what I guessed, too,” Jessie said. “Took his mama’s jewelry, though, didn’t we? Got her wedding ring right here in my pocket.” He patted his chest and smiled and said, “Heh heh yeah.”

  “Why don’t we just—”

  “I tell you what,” Jessie said and tugged his jacket, then shot his cuffs. “Tell you what,” he said and pointed at the back door of the club, “if that door be unlocked, you can forget what I said. That door open, though? God be in this alley. Yes indeed.”

  And he walked to it and turned the knob and the door opened.

  Luther said, “Don’t mean shit, Jessie. Don’t mean nothing but someone forgot to lock the door.”

  “You say,” Jessie said. “You say. Let me ask you—You think I’d a forced that man to dig up his girl’s grave?”

  Luther said, “’Course not. We were hot. That’s all. Hot and scared. Got crazy.”

  Jessie said, “Let go of them straps, brother. We ain’t lifting nothing right now.”

  Luther stepped away from the car. He said, “Jessie.”

  Jessie reached out so fast his hand could have slapped Luther’s head off his neck but instead it landed soft on Luther’s ear, barely touching. “You good kin, Country.”

  And Jessie went into the Club Almighty and Luther followed and they walked through a foul back hallway that stank of piss and came out near the stage through a black velvet curtain. The Deacon Broscious sat just where they’d left him at the table at the base of the stage. He sipped milky white tea from a clear glass, and he gave them the kind of smile told Luther there was more than milk in the tea.

  “Stroke of twelve,” the Deacon said and waved at the darkness all around him. “Ya’ll done come at the stroke of twelve itself. Should I put my mask on?”

  “Nah, sir,” Jessie said. “Ya’ll don’t need to worry.”

  The Deacon reached beside himself, as if he was looking for his mask anyway. His movements were thick and jumbled and then he waved his hands at the whole idea and beamed at them with the sweat beading on his face thick as hail.

  “Haw,” he said. “You niggers look tired.”

  “Feel tired,” Jessie said.

  “Well, come on over here and sit, then. Tell the Deacon about your travails.”

  Dandy came out of the shadows on the Deacon’s left, carrying a teapot on a tray and his mask flapping from the overhead fan, and he took one look at them and said, “What ya’ll doing coming through the back door?”

  Jessie said, “Just where our feets took us, Mr. Dandy,” and cleared the .45 from his belt and shot Dandy in his mask and Dandy’s face disappeared in a puff of red.

  Luther crouched and said, “Wait!” and the Deacon held up his hands and said, “Now—” but Jessie fired and the fingers of the Deacon’s left hand came free and hit the wall behind him and the Deacon shouted something Luther couldn’t understand and then the Deacon said, “Hold it, okay?” Jessie fired again and the Deacon didn’t seem to have any reaction for a moment and Luther figured the shot had hit the wall until he noticed the Deacon’s red tie widening. The blood bloomed across his white shirt and the Deacon got a look at it for himself and a single wet breath popped out of his mouth.

  Jessie turned to Luther and gave him that big Jessie-smile of his and said, “Shit. Kinda fun, ain’t it?”

  Luther saw something he barely knew he saw, something move from the stage, and he started to say “Jessie,” but the word never left his mouth before Smoke stepped out between the drums and the base stand with his arm extended. Jessie was only half turned toward him when the air popped white and the air popped yellow-and-red and Smoke fired two bullets into Jessie’s head and one into his throat and Jessie went all bouncy.

  He toppled into Luther’s shoulder, and Luther reached for him and got his gun instead and Smoke kept shooting, and Luther raised an arm across his face, as if it could stop the bullets, and he fired Jessie’s .45 and felt the gun jumping in his hand and saw all the dead and blackened and blue from today and heard his own voice yelling, “No please no please,” and pictured a bullet hitting each of his eyes and then he heard a scream—high-pitched and shocked—and he stopped firing and lowered his arm from his face.

  He squinted and saw Smoke curled on the stage. His arms were wrapped around his stomach and his mouth was open wide. He gurgled. His left foot twitched.

  Luther stood in the middle of the four bodies and checked himself for wounds. He had blood all over his shoulder, but once he unbuttoned his shirt and felt around in there, he knew that the blood was Jessie’s. He had a cut under his eye, but it was shallow and he figured that whatever had ricocheted off his cheek hadn’t been a bullet. His body, though, did not feel like his own. It felt borrowed, as if he shouldn’t be in it, and whoever it might belong to sure shouldn’t have walked it into the back of the Club Almighty.

  He looked down at Jessie and felt a part of him that just wanted to cry but another part that felt nothing at all, not even relief at being alive. The back of Jessie’s head looked as if an animal had taken bites from it, and the hole in his throat still pumped blood. Luther knelt on a spot of floor the blood hadn’t reached yet and cocked his head to look into his friend’s eyes. They looked a little surprised, as if Old Byron had just told him the night’s tip pool had turned out bigger than expected.

  Luther whispered, “Oh, Jessie,” and used his thumb to close his eyes, and then he placed his hand to Jessie’s cheek. The flesh had begun to cool, and Luther asked the Lord to please forgive his friend for his actions earlier today because he’d been desperate, he’d been compromised, but he was, Lord, a good man at heart who’d never before caused anyone but himself any pain.

  “You can…make this…right.”

  Luther turned at the sound of the voice.

  “Sm-smart boy like…like you.” The Deacon sucked at the air. “Smart boy…”

  He rose from Jessie’s body with the gun in his hand and walked over to the table, coming around to stand on the Deacon’s right so the fat fool had to roll that big head of his in order to see him.

  “You go get that doctor you…you…saw this afternoon.” The Deacon took another breath and his chest whistled. “Go get him.”

  “And you’ll just forgive and forget, uh?” Luther said.

  “As…as God is my witness.”

  Luther removed his mask and coughed in the Deacon’s face three times. “How about I fucking cough on you till we see if I got me the plague today?”

  The Deacon used his good hand to reach for Luther’s arm, but Luther pulled it away.

  “Don’t you touch me, demon.”

  ?
??Please…”

  “Please what?”

  The Deacon wheezed and his chest whistled again and he licked his lips.

  “Please,” he said again.

  “Please what?”

  “Make…this right.”

  “Okay,” Luther said and put the gun into the folds under the Deacon’s chin and pulled the trigger with the man looking in his eyes.

  “That fucking do?” Luther shouted and watched the man tip to his left and slide down the back of the booth. “Kill my friend?” Luther said and shot him again, though he knew he was dead.

  “Fuck!” Luther screamed at the ceiling, and he grabbed his own head with the gun clutched against it and screamed it again. Then he noticed Smoke trying to pull himself across the stage in his own blood and Luther kicked a chair out of his way and crossed to the stage with his arm extended and Smoke turned his head and lay there, looking up at Luther with no more life in his eyes than Jessie’s.

  For what felt like an hour—and Luther would never know how long he stood there exactly—they stared at each other.

  Then Luther felt a new version of himself he wasn’t even sure he liked say, “If you live, you’ll have to come kill me, sure as sin.”

  Smoke blinked his eyelids once, real slow, in the affirmative.

  Luther stared down the gun at him. He saw all those bullets he’d scored in Columbus, saw his Uncle Cornelius’s black satchel, saw the rain that had fallen, warm and soft as sleep, the afternoon he’d sat on his porch, willing his father to come home when his father was already four years five hundred miles away and not coming back. He lowered the gun.

  He watched the surprise flash across Smoke’s pupils. Smoke’s eyes rolled and he burped a thimbleful of blood down his chin and onto his shirt. He fell back to the stage and the blood flowed from his stomach.

  Luther raised the gun again. It should have been easier, the man’s eyes no longer on him, the man probably slipping across the river right at this moment, climbing the dark shore into another world. All it would take was one more pull of the trigger to be sure. He’d had no hesitation with the Deacon. So why now?