The Blade Itself

5

Danny hadn’t really been in the mood for a drink, and at first he’d told McCloskey he had to get home; then, seeing what it had cost the foreman to invite a manager out for a beer, he’d said what the hell, there was time for one or two. They’d ended up at Lee’s, a workingman’s bar on Division with press-paneled walls and a faded newspaper cutout of an American flag pinned above the bourbon. A shovel-faced bartender poured their shots while he yelled at his granddaughter to change the damn music before it attracted yuppies. The girl, a petite thing with Kool-Aid hair, smilingly ignored him, nodding to the mellow electronic textures she’d put on the boom box.

They’d been there half an hour, chatting about nothing in particular, before McCloskey got serious. “Listen, Dan – Danny, sorry – about this afternoon. I want to thank you again.”

“Don’t worry about it. Really.” As McCloskey extricated a toothpick from his vest pocket, Danny took the opportunity to change the subject. “What’s with those, anyway?”

“The picks?” McCloskey grimaced. “Smoked two packs a day for twenty years. Quit a couple back. My youngest daughter. Chew one of these instead of lighting a straight.”

“It help?”

“Some. But anything you do that long, you never get all the way over it.”

Danny nodded, sipped his whiskey, enjoying the bite. “How many kids you have?”

“Nine. You believe it?”

Danny laughed. “I’m Irish.”

“So cheers, then.” They clinked glasses and threw down the whiskey. McCloskey gestured to the girl, and she came over with the bottle. Up close Danny saw a diamond stud in one side of her nose. She smiled as she poured copper into the heavy-bottomed glasses.

Danny said to her, “Can I ask you something?” She narrowed her eyes, but nodded. “This music.”

“Bugging you? I can put on that shit-kicker stuff we usually play.”

“Nah, it’s fine. Just curious what it is.”

“It’s trip-hop,” she said. “With dub influences.”

Danny smiled over at McCloskey. “Used to be it only took one word.”

“Tell me,” the foreman said. “You should hear the stuff my kids listen to.”

“So now can I ask you something?” The girl set the bottle down, looking at Danny.

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“You guys aren’t planning any trouble, are you? Because if you are, you ought to know we keep a pistol under the bar.”

He squinted at her, surprised. “No, no trouble. Just here for a couple of drinks.” A tingle ran up the backs of his hands. “Why?”

“Because that big guy’s been eye-fucking you since he came in.”

Tension locked his neck muscles. Over the stereo, a woman’s voice whispered something about black flowers blossoming. Slowly, Danny spun on his stool.

He loomed near the back wall, feet apart like a boxer. His gaze smashed through the cigarette smoke and gruff laughter to hit Danny with physical force, and Danny’s fingers slipped a little on the glass, splashing some of the whiskey on his shirt. They stared at each other for a long moment, and then with measured steps, Evan started over.

“Someone you know?” McCloskey spoke with the quiet of a man who could handle himself.

Danny’s mind raced. What the hell was Evan doing here? And what was he supposed to do now? Introduce the foreman like they were all buddies? Spin the stool away and pretend Evan didn’t exist? Who was this guy walking toward him, and what did he mean to Danny Carter, regular civilian?

“It’s okay,” he said, not sure it was.

And then Evan was there. Prison had boiled him down, hardening the angles of his face and neck. Whip-cord muscles bulged against his sweater. His curly hair was neatly kept, the sides slicked back.

His dark eyes betrayed nothing at all.

“Long time.” Danny struggled to keep his game face, his heart thumping.

Evan flicked his gaze over to McCloskey, then back again. Danny turned. “Jim, would you give us a minute? Evan’s an old friend.”

The foreman drew himself up on the stool. “You sure?”

“Yes.”

The man hesitated, then stood. “You know, I should probably get gone anyway. The wife’ll be expecting me.”

Danny nodded. “Thanks for the drinks.” He kept his eyes locked on Evan’s as the foreman stood, paused, and then walked toward the door. For a moment, Danny felt an urge to call the guy back, but instinct kicked in, and instinct had only one rule. So he played it cool. “Buy you a beer?”

Evan smiled thinly. “Same old Danny. Slick as shit.” He pulled the stool out of his way and leaned on the bar. He looked awesomely fit, his movements spare but powerful, like inside he was all coiled springs.

“So.”

“So.”

“Bad?”

Evan shrugged.

The granddaughter came over with beer and whiskey, her eyes framing questions Danny ignored. It was like that nightmare he had: One minute, he’d been in the life he knew, then without warning, here he was sitting beside his childhood friend and former partner. He didn’t know what to feel. He wasn’t scared exactly, but he had that knife’s edge thinness he used to get on the job, the sense that things could go either way. There’d been moments standing in some stranger’s living room, flashlight in hand, when it’d come on him, this sense that fate wasn’t a guide written in a celestial book, but rather a tightrope, a narrow and shaking line above the abyss. One wrong breath could overbalance you.

“How about you, Danny? How you been keeping yourself?”

“I’m good. Better than ever.”

“Yeah?” Evan glanced over with a smile. “You a millionaire, gonna remember your friends?”

Danny grinned, surprised. The conversation came easier than he’d expected. It was almost fun, trading snaps and sparring. “Sure. I’ll buy you a house next to the mayor.”

“Daley don’t live in Bridgeport these days. Left ’bout the same time I did. Different places, of course.”

“I left, too,” Danny said. “I’m on the North Side now.”

“No shit.”

“No shit.”

“And you’re not in the game anymore.”

“No.”

“Too bad.” Evan took a long pull of beer.

It wasn’t, but Danny didn’t see any point in saying that. So he reached for the whiskey, held it up to Evan. “Cheers. To being out.”

They clinked glasses. Danny had always felt you could go too far trying to read someone’s soul in his eyes, but still, something he saw in Evan’s reminded him that they weren’t exactly buddies anymore. After all, the guy hadn’t turned up by accident. Danny thought about asking what he was doing here, decided he didn’t want to haul the answer out in the open, where they would have to deal with it directly. Sometimes a mutual lie was easier for everybody.

“You still seeing that same woman, the one you were getting serious about?”

“Karen,” Danny said. “Yeah.”

“Long time. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

“You know, I thought maybe I saw her.” Evan took out a pack of Winstons, tapped one free, lit it with a shiny silver Zippo. “At the trial.”

Danny’s heart went to his throat.

“I’d only met her the once, but I’m pretty sure it was Karen. Yeah?”

Danny had wanted to sneak in himself, one last gesture of solidarity, but couldn’t have imagined a more boneheaded play. So he’d cooked dinner, opened wine, and asked Karen for the biggest favor of their relationship. Her older brothers had been rough guys that had landed in County more than once, so it wasn’t a totally alien world. Still, he’d expected a refusal. Instead she’d just stared at the candles and asked, in voice so soft it was nearly a whisper, if he had quit for good.

Until that moment, he hadn’t been sure. Not in his marrow. But when she’d asked him, this half-Italian bartendress with ambitions to manage the place, this woman who knew his past but still trusted in their future, that was it.

He’d promised, and she’d gone to the trial. Watched the pawnshop owner testify from a wheelchair. Looked at photographs of the woman’s face, one eye swollen shut, nose broken, as the police described how they arrived just in time. And when it was all over, her cheeks white and a little tremble in her voice, Karen had made the only ultimatum of their relationship. If he ever slipped, she’d walk without a backward glance.

Now, seven years later, the man she’d gone to watch stared at him with an expression Danny couldn’t read, and spoke her name.

“Yeah, it was her.” He paused. “I asked her to go.”

“You had other plans.”

“They would have made me. The owner of the store, the woman, they would have made me.”

Evan blew a plume of gray smoke. “So why send her?”

“I felt like I owed it to you.” Picking his words carefully. “To have someone there.”

“Seeing as I was taking a solo fall, you mean.” Evan’s eyes hard again. “I thought maybe you just wanted to see if I’d drop your name.”

“I knew you wouldn’t.” And he had, too, known that Evan would do the time cold, even though Danny had walked out, even though a word might have saved him years.

Evan nodded. “Got that right.”

The music was repeating “I’ve got to get away from here,” and part of Danny knew just what the singer meant. But he was surprised to realize that another part of him was enjoying this.

Thing was, some nights, lying in bed in his safe neighborhood, he pictured a round metal door a foot thick, like a bank vault. Inside waited a dim room with racks like safe deposit boxes. He’d step in, close the door behind him, slide open one of the little boxes and remember the electric-dicked thrill of drag racing stolen cars down the Dan Ryan at four in the morning. Or the soft, almost sexual yielding of a lock to his picks. His fist in the air in St. Andrew’s, lungs raw with howling as Evan fought in the finals of the Golden Gloves.

It was his little secret, and it didn’t change anything. There was a reason he walled off those memories behind a foot of imaginary steel. But talking to Evan, the real guy, not the symbol from his dreams, it was like visiting that vault.

“So you got out early.”

Evan nodded. “They needed to clear some bunks. It was my first fall for a violent crime. And inside I kept myself to myself.” He shrugged.

“Simple as that.”

“If you say so.” Their eyes met again, feeling each other out. Danny sipped his beer, more aware of the taste than usual. He didn’t know what to say next, looked at Evan, looked back at his drink. A moment passed in silence.

Then Evan spoke. “You hear about Terry?”

Danny could picture him, stringy hair and bad breath. The last time he’d seen Terry was when he’d tipped them off to the pawnshop. A lifetime ago. “No.”

“I met one of his old dealers inside. Apparently Terry cleaned up, quit using. Managed to talk someone into letting him middleman product, God knows how, fucking track marks on his arm. He was doing well, selling to college kids wanna walk on the wild side. Then one day, he decides to take a little blast himself, for old times’ sake.”

Danny shook his head.

“Soon he’s cutting his stuff to skim for his own supply. Isn’t long before he’s selling milk sugar. Even the college kids can tell the difference.

He has to hit the street. Only now his habit is back, and shorting is the only way he can supply himself.”

Something about this story felt familiar. Not the specifics, but the structure. The course of it. The illicit thrill of the conversation began to evaporate as Danny guessed how the story would end.

“One day he sells a couple of weak grams to a Mexican kid. The guy turns out to be a baby banger, a Latin King trying to earn his stripes.” Evan took a sip of beer. “So Terry bled out in the basement of a tar house on South Corliss.”

A wave of rolling nausea washed through Danny. Of course the story had seemed familiar. He’d heard it before in a thousand variations. It was the story of what happened if you stuck with the life. Terry had been a junkie, but that wasn’t what killed him. It wasn’t even the gangbanger he’d cheated. What had killed him was the inexorable fact that there was only one ending to stories like his. He’d died because he was too weak to stop. To escape. Danny found himself remembering his earlier thought, the question of what Evan meant to him now. He realized he knew the answer.

Nothing.

It was time to go home.

“Listen, brother, it’s good to see you, but I’ve got to head out.”

Evan’s expression hardened, and he turned to the bar, one hand on his pint. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, you know, I’m a civilian now. I’ve got work.” He stood up, reached for his jacket. “Construction.”

“Just like your dad.”

“Sort of. I work in the office, though.” A voice inside him told him to shut up, not to go any further, but the words slipped out. “I’m a project manager.”

Evan nodded, still not looking at Danny. “Good for you. Beats shoveling shit.”

“Yeah. Hey, congratulations again.” He fumbled for his wallet, took out a couple of twenties.

“You don’t need to buy my beer.”

“Shit, it’s my pleasure. Least I can do.” What was he saying?

Evan sat silent.

The voice inside whispered that this was all wrong, that the tightrope was swaying and he was off balance and the darkness was hungry, but between the booze and the music and the thought of junkie Terry bleeding to death on dingy concrete, he pushed it away. All he wanted was to get out.

Evan kept staring straight ahead as Danny took a half step toward the door. Danny knew he should say something, but had no idea what. Finally, he put a hand on Evan’s shoulder, feeling the stone-carved muscles rigid beneath. “Good luck.”

Evan only nodded.