The Given Day

Chapter forty

Luther arrived back in Tulsa in late September during a dogged heat wave and a humid breeze that kicked the dust up and caked the city tan. He’d spent some time in East St. Louis with his Uncle Hollis, enough time in which to grow a beard. He stopped grooming his hair as well and traded his bowler for a broke-down cavalryman’s hat with a sloopy brim and a crown that the moths had gotten to. He even allowed Uncle Hollis to overfeed him so that for the first time in his life he had a little belly on him and some extra flesh beneath his jaw. By the time he got off the freight car in Tulsa, he looked like a tramp. Which was the point. A tramp with a duffel bag.

Most times he looked at the bag, he’d start laughing. Couldn’t help it. Bundled-up stacks of money sat at the bottom, product of another man’s greed, another man’s graft. Years of corruption all stacked and tied up and smelling now of someone else’s future.

He took the bag to a field of weeds north of the tracks and buried it with a spade he’d brought along from East St. Louis. Then he crossed back over the Santa Fe tracks into Greenwood and went down to Admiral, where the rough trade spent their time. It was four hours before he spotted Smoke coming out of a billiards parlor that hadn’t been there when Luther left last year. Place was called Poulson’s and it took Luther a moment to remember that this was Smoke’s given surname. If he’d thought of that before, maybe he wouldn’t have lost four hours wandering up and down Admiral.

Smoke had three men with him, and they surrounded him until they reached a cherry red Maxwell. One of them opened the back door and Smoke hopped in and they drove off. Luther went back to the field of weeds, dug the bag back up, took what he needed, and buried it again. He walked back into Greenwood and kept going till he’d reached the outskirts and found the place he’d been looking for — Deval’s Junkyard, run by an old fella, Latimer Deval, who’d occasionally done side work for Uncle James. Luther had never met old Deval in the flesh, but he’d passed his place enough back when he’d lived here to know Deval always kept a few heaps for sale on his front lawn.

He bought a 1910 Franklin Tourer off Deval for three hundred, the two barely exchanging words, just the cash and the key. Luther drove back to Admiral and parked a block down from Poulson’s.

He followed them for the next week. He never went out to his house on Elwood, though it pained him more than anything to be this close after so much time away. But he knew if he saw Lila or his son, he would lose all strength and have to run to them, have to hold them and smell them and wet them with his tears. And then he’d surely be a dead man. So he drove the Franklin out to unincorporated scrub land every night and slept there, and the next morning he was back on the job, learning Smoke’s routine.

Smoke took his lunch every day at the same diner but mixed it up for dinner — some nights at Torchy’s, others at Alma’s Chop House, another night at Riley’s, a jazz club that had replaced the Club Almighty. Luther wondered just what Smoke thought about as he chewed his dinner in view of the stage where he’d almost bled to death. Whatever else you could say about the man, he definitely had a strong constitution.

After a week, Luther felt reasonably confident he had the man’s routine down cold because Smoke was a man of routine. He might have eaten at a different place every night, but he always arrived at six sharp. Tuesdays and Thursdays, he went to his woman’s place out in the sticks, an old sharecropper’s shack, and his men would wait in the yard while he went about his business and came out two hours later, tucking in his shirt. He lived above his own billiards parlor, and his three bodyguards would all accompany him into the building and then come back and get into their car and return the next morning at five-thirty on the nose.

Once Luther got the afternoon routine figured — lunch at twelve-thirty, collections and package re-ups from one-thirty to three, back to Poulson’s at three-oh-five — he decided he’d found his window. He went to a hardware store and bought a doorknob, lock assembly, and keyhole plate that matched the one on the door leading up to Smoke’s apartment. He spent afternoons in the car, learning how to thread a paper clip through the keyhole, and once he could open the lock ten out of ten times in under twenty seconds, he started practicing at night, parked beside the dark scrub, not even the light of the moon to guide him, until he could pick that lock blind.

Of a Thursday night, when Luther knew Smoke and his men were at his woman’s shack, he crossed Admiral in the looming dusk and was through the door faster than he’d ever stolen a base. He faced a set of stairs that smelled of oil soap and he climbed them to find a second door, also locked. It was a different lock cylinder, so it took him about two minutes to get the hang of it. Then the door popped open and he was inside. He turned and squatted in the doorway until he spied a single black hair lying on the threshold. He lifted it and placed it back against the lock and closed the door over it.

He’d bathed this morning in the river, his teeth clacking from the cold as he covered every inch of his stinky self with brown soap. Then he pulled the fresh clothes he’d purchased in East St. Louis from the bag on the front seat of the car and put them on. He commended himself on that now, as he’d guessed correctly that Smoke’s apartment would be as orderly as his dress. Place was spotless. Bare, too. Nothing on the walls, only one throw rug in the living room. Bare coffee table, Victrola without a wisp of dust or even the tiniest smudge.

Luther found the hall closet, noted that several of the coats he’d seen Smoke wearing in the last week were hung precisely on wooden hangers. The hanger that was empty awaited the blue duster with the leather collar Smoke had worn today. Luther slipped in among the clothes, closed the door, and waited.

Took about an hour, though it felt like five. He heard footsteps on the stairs, four sets of them, and pulled his watch, but it was too dark to see, so he put it back in his vest and noticed he was holding his breath. He let out a slow exhale as the key turned in the lock. The door opened and one man said, “You good, Mr. Poulson?”

“I am, Red. See you in the morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

The door shut and Luther raised his pistol, and for one horrible moment he was seized by overwhelming terror, a desire to close his eyes and wish this moment away, to push past Smoke when he opened that door and run for his life.

But it was too late, because Smoke went to the closet straightaway and the door opened and Luther had no choice but to place the muzzle of the pistol against the tip of Smoke’s nose.

“You make a sound, I’ll kill you where you stand.”

Smoke raised his arms, still wearing the duster.

“Take a few steps back. Keep those arms high.” Luther came out into the hallway.

Smoke’s eyes narrowed. “Country?”

Luther nodded.

“You changed some. Never would recognize you on the street with that beard.”

“You didn’t.”

Smoke gave that a small upward tilt of his eyebrows.

“Kitchen,” Luther said. “You first. Lace your hands on top of your head.”

Smoke complied and walked down the hallway and entered the kitchen. There was a small table there with a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth and two wooden chairs. Luther gestured Smoke into one of the chairs and took the one across from him.

“You can take your hands off your head. Just put them on the table.”

Smoke unlaced his fingers and placed his palms down on the table.

“Old Byron get back to you?”

Smoke nodded. “Said you threw him through a window.”

“He tell you I was coming for you?”

“He mentioned it, yeah.”

“That what the three bodyguards are for?”

“That,” Smoke said, “and some rival business associates too quick to the anger.”

Luther reached into his coat pocket and came out with a brown paper bag that he placed on the table. He watched Smoke stare at it, let him wonder what it was.

“What’d you think about Chicago?” Luther said.

Smoke cocked his head. “The riots?”

Luther nodded.

“Thought it was a damn shame we only killed fifteen whites.”

“Washington?”

“Where you going with this?”

“Humor me, Mr. Poulson.”

Smoke raised another eyebrow at that. “Washington? Same thing. Wished them niggers had fought back, though. Chicago ones had some spirit.”

“I passed through East St. Louis on my travels. Twice.”

“Yeah? What it look like?”

“Ash,” Luther said.

Smoke tapped his fingers lightly on the tabletop. “You didn’t come here to kill me, did you?”

“Nope.” Luther tipped the bag and a sheaf of money fell out, wrapped tightly in a red rubber band. “That’s a thousand dollars. That’s half what I feel I owe you.”

“For not killing me?”

Luther shook his head. He lowered the gun, placed it on the table, and slid it across the tablecloth. He took his hand off it. He sat back in his chair. “For you not killing me.”

Smoke didn’t lift the pistol right away. He cocked his head at it, then tilted it the other way to consider Luther.

“I’m done with our kind killing our kind,” Luther said. “White folk do enough of it. I won’t be a party to any more of it. You want to still be part of it, then you kill me and you’ll get that thousand. You don’t, you’ll get two thousand. You want me dead, I’m sitting across from you saying pull the fucking trigger.”

Smoke had the gun in his hand. Luther had never seen him so much as flinch, but there was the gun pointed directly at Luther’s right eye. Smoke thumbed back the hammer.

“You might be confusing me with somebody has a soul,” he said.

“I might.”

“And you might not think I’m the kind of man would shoot you right through that eye of yours and then go up the road and fuck your woman up the ass, cut her throat when I come, and then cook me a soup out of your baby boy.”

Luther said nothing.

Smoke ran the muzzle over Luther’s cheek. He turned the pistol to his right and drew the target sight down the side of Luther’s face, opening the flesh.

“You,” he said, “will not associate with any gamblers, any drinkers, any dope fiends. You will stay out of the Greenwood nightlife. All the way out. You will never enter a place where I could run into you. And if you ever leave that son of yours because the simple life is too fucking simple for you? I will take you apart, piece by piece, in a grain silo for a week before I let your ass die. Is there any part of this deal you have issue with, Mr. Laurence?”

“None,” Luther said.

“Drop my other two thousand at the pool hall tomorrow afternoon. Give it to a man named Rodney. He’ll be the one handing out balls to the customers. No later than two o’clock. Clear?”

“It ain’t two thousand. It’s one.”

Smoke stared back at him, his eyelids drooping.

Luther said, “Two thousand, it is.”

Smoke thumbed down the hammer and handed the gun to Luther. Luther took it and put it in his coat.

“The fuck out of my house now, Luther.”

Luther stood.

As he reached the kitchen doorway, Smoke said, “You realize, your whole life, you’ll never get this lucky again?”

“I do.”

Smoke lit himself a cigarette. “Then sin no more, asshole.”

Luther walked up the steps to the house on Elwood. He noticed that the railings needed repainting and decided that would be his first order of business tomorrow.

Today, though …

There wasn’t a word for it, he thought, as he opened the screen door and found the front door unlocked. No word at all. Ten months since that horrible night he’d left. Ten months riding rails and hiding out and trying to be another person in a strange city up north. Ten months of living without the one thing in his life he’d ever done right.

The house was empty. He stood in the small parlor and looked through the kitchen at the back door. It was open, and he could hear the creak of a clothesline being pulled, decided that’s something else he’d need to tend to, give that wheel a little oil. He walked through the parlor and into the kitchen and could smell baby here, could smell milk, could smell something still forming itself.

He walked out the back steps and she bent to reach into her basket and lift another wet piece of clothing from it, but then she raised her head and stared. She wore a dark blue blouse over a faded yellow house skirt she favored. Desmond sat by her feet, sucking on a spoon and staring at the grass.

She whispered his name. She whispered, “Luther.”

All the old pain entered her eyes, all the grief and hurt at what he’d done to her, all the fear and worry. Could she open her heart again? Could she put her faith in him?

Luther willed her to go the other way, sent a look across the grass freighted with all his love, all his resolve, all his heart.

She smiled.

Good Lord, it was gorgeous.

She held out her hand.

He crossed the grass. He dropped to his knees and took her hand and kissed it. He wrapped his arms around her waist and wept into her shirt. She lowered herself to her knees and kissed him, weeping, too, laughing, too, the two of them a sight, crying and giggling and holding each other and kissing and tasting each other’s tears.

Desmond started to cry. Wail actually, the sound so sharp it was like a nail in Luther’s ear.

Lila leaned back from him. “Well?”

“Well?”

“Make him stop,” she said.

Luther looked at this little creature sitting in the grass and wailing, his eyes red, his nose running. He reached down and lifted him to his shoulder. He was warm. Warm as a kettle wrapped in a towel. Luther had never known a body could give off such heat.

“He okay?” he asked Lila. “He feels hot.”

“He’s fine,” she said. “He’s a baby been setting in the sun.”

Luther held him out in front of him. He saw some Lila in the eyes and some Luther in the nose. Saw his own mother in the jaw, his father in the ears. He kissed his head. He kissed his nose. The child continued to wail.

“Desmond,” he said and kissed his son on the lips. “Desmond, it’s your daddy.”

Desmond wasn’t having any of it. He wailed and shrieked and wept like the world was ending. Luther brought him back to his shoulder and held him tight. He rubbed his back. He cooed in his ear. He kissed him so many times he lost count.

Lila ran a hand over Luther’s head and leaned in for a kiss of her own.

And Luther finally found the word for this day …

Whole.

He could stop running. He could stop looking for anything else. Wasn’t anything else he wanted. This right here was the full measure of every hope he’d harbored since birth.

Desmond’s wails stopped, just snuffed out like a match in the wind. Luther looked at the basket at his feet, still half full with damp clothing.

“Let’s get those clothes hung,” he said.

Lila lifted a shirt off the pile. “Oh, you gonna help, uh?”

“You give me a couple of those clothespins, I will.”

She passed a handful of them to him and he hoisted Desmond onto his hip and helped his wife hang laundry. The moist air hummed with cicadas. The sky was low and flat and bright. Luther chuckled.

“What you laughing at?” Lila asked.

“Everything,” he said.

Danny’s first night in the hospital, he spent nine hours on the operating table. The knife in his leg had nicked the femoral artery. The bullet in his chest had hit bone, and some of the bone chips had sprayed his right lung. The bullet in his left hand had entered through the palm and the fingers were, for the time being anyway, useless. He’d had less than two pints of blood in his body by the time they got him out of the ambulance.

He woke from a coma on the sixth day and was awake half an hour when he felt the left side of his brain catch fire. He lost the vision in his left eye and tried to tell the doctor something was happening to him, something odd, like maybe his hair was on fire, and his body began to shake. It was quite beyond his control, this violent shaking. He vomited. The orderlies held him down and shoved something leather into his mouth, and the bandages on his chest tore and blood leaked from him all over again. By this time, the fire had raged all the way across his skull. He vomited again, and they pulled the leather out of his mouth and rolled him onto his side before he choked.

When he woke a few days later, he couldn’t speak properly and the whole left side of his body was numb.

“You’ve had a stroke,” the doctor said.

“I’m twenty-seven years old,” Danny said, though it came out, “I’b wenty-vesen airs awl.”

The doctor nodded, as if he’d spoken clearly. “Most twenty-seven-year-olds don’t get stabbed and then shot three times for good measure. If you were much older, I doubt you would have survived. In truth, I don’t know how you did.”

“Nora.”

“She’s outside. Do you really want her to see you in your current state?”

“She I mife.”

The doctor nodded.

When he left the room, Danny heard the words as they had left his mouth. He could form them in his head right now—she’s my wife—but what had come out—she I mife—was hideous, humiliating. Tears left his eyes, hot ones of fear and shame, and he wiped at them with his right hand, his good hand.

Nora entered the room. She looked so pale, so frightened. She sat in the chair by his bed and took his right hand in hers and lifted it to her face, pressed her cheek to his palm.

“I love you.”

Danny gritted his teeth, concentrated through a pounding headache, concentrated, willing the words to leave his tongue correctly. “Love you.”

Not bad. Love ooh, really. But close enough.

“The doctor said you’ll have trouble speaking for a while. You may have trouble walking, yeah? But you’re young and fierce-strong, and I’ll be with you. I’ll be with you. ’Twill all be fine, Danny.”

She’s trying so hard not to cry, he thought.

“Love ooh,” he said again.

She laughed. A wet laugh. She wiped her eyes. She lowered her head to his shoulder. He could feel the warmth of her against his face.

If there was a positive outcome to Danny’s injuries, it was that he didn’t see a newspaper for three weeks. If he had, he would have learned that the day after the shoot-out in the alley, Commissioner Curtis proclaimed all positions of the striking police officers to be officially vacant. Governor Coolidge supported him. President Wilson weighed in to call the actions of the policemen who left their posts “a crime against civilization.”

Ads seeking the new police force contained within them new standards and rate of pay, all in keeping with the strikers’ original demands. Base salary would now start at fourteen hundred dollars a year. Uniforms, badges, and service revolvers would be provided free of charge. Within two weeks of the riots, city cleanup crews, licensed plumbers, electricians, and carpenters began arriving at each of the station houses to clean and remodel them until they met safety and sanitation codes at a state level.

Governor Coolidge composed a telegram to Samuel Gompers of the AFL. Before he sent the telegram to Gompers, he released it to the press where it was published on the front page of every daily the following morning. The telegram was also released to the wire services and would run in over seventy newspapers across the country in the following two days. Governor Coolidge proclaimed the following: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime.”

Within a week, those words had turned Governor Coolidge into a national hero and some suggested he should consider a run for the presidency the following year.

Andrew Peters faded from public view. His ineffectuality was deemed, if not quite criminal, then certainly unconscionable. His failure to call out the State Guard on the first night of the strike represented an unforgivable dereliction of his duties, and popular opinion held that it was only the quick thinking and steely resolve of Governor Coolidge and the unfairly maligned Commissioner Curtis that had saved the city from itself.

While the rest of the active police force found their jobs in jeopardy, Steve Coyle was given a full policeman’s funeral. Commissioner Curtis singled out former Patrolman Stephen Coyle as an exemplar of the “old guard” policeman, the one who put duty before all else. Curtis repeatedly failed to note that Coyle had been released from the employ of the BPD almost a full year before. He further promised to form a committee to look into posthumously reinstating Coyle’s medical benefits for any immediate family he happened to have.

In the first days after the death of Tessa Ficara, the papers trumpeted the irony of a striking police officer who, in less than a year, had brought about the demise of two of the most wanted terrorists in the land as well as a third, Bartolomeo Stellina, the man Luther had killed with the brick, who was reputed to be a devoted Galleanist. Even though the strikers were now viewed with the enmity once reserved for the Germans (to whom they were often compared), accounts of Officer Coughlin’s heroics turned public sympathy back toward the strikers. Maybe, it was felt, if they returned to their jobs right away, some of them, at least those with distinguished records akin to Officer Coughlin’s, could be reinstated.

The next day, however, the Post reported that Officer Coughlin might have had a prior acquaintanceship with the Ficaras, and the evening Transcript, citing unnamed sources in the Bureau of Investigation, reported that Officer Coughlin and the Ficaras had once lived on the same floor of the same building in the North End. The next morning, the Globe ran a story citing several tenants in the building who described the relationship between Officer Coughlin and the Ficaras as quite social, so social in fact that his relationship with Tessa Ficara may have crossed into unseemly areas; there was even some question as to whether he had paid for her favors. With that question in mind, his prior shooting of her husband suddenly looked as if it could have been colored by more than a sense of duty. Public opinion turned wholly against Officer Coughlin, the dirty cop, and all of his striking “comrades.” Any talk of the strikers ever returning to work ended.

National coverage of the two days of rioting entered the arena of myth. Several newspapers wrote of machine guns turned on innocent crowds, of a death toll estimated in the hundreds, property damage in the millions. The actual dead numbered nine and the property damage slightly less than one million dollars, but the public would hear none of it. The strikers were Bolsheviks, and the strike had unleashed civil war in Boston.

When Danny left the hospital in mid-October, he still dragged his left foot and had trouble lifting anything heavier than a teacup with his left hand. His speech, however, was fully restored. He would have left the hospital two weeks earlier, but one of his wounds had developed sepsis. He’d gone into shock, and for the second time that month a priest had delivered last rites.

After the stories that defamed him in the papers, Nora had been forced to leave their building on Salem Street and had moved their few belongings to a rooming house in the West End. It was there they returned when Danny was released from the hospital. She had chosen the West End because Danny’s rehabilitation would be taking place at Mass General, and the walk from there to the apartment took a matter of minutes. Danny climbed the stairs to the second floor, and he and Nora entered the dingy room with one gray window that looked out on an alley.

“It’s all we could afford,” Nora said.

“It’s fine.”

“I tried to get the grime off the outside of the window, but no matter how hard I scrubbed, it just—”

He put his good arm around her. “It’s fine, honey. We won’t be here long.”

One night in November, he lay in bed with his wife after they’d managed to make love for the first time since he’d been injured. “I’ll never be able to get a job here.”

“You could.”

He looked at her.

She smiled and rolled her eyes. She slapped his chest lightly. “That’s what you get, boy, for sleeping with a terrorist.”

He chuckled. It felt good to be able to joke about something so bleak.

His family had visited the hospital twice while he was still in a coma. His father had come once after the stroke to tell him they would always love him, of course, but could never again admit him to their home. Danny had nodded and shook his father’s hand and waited until he was five minutes gone before he wept.

“There’s nothing to keep us here after my rehabilitation,” he said.

“No.”

“Are you interested in an adventure?”

She slid her arm over his chest. “I’m interested in anything.”

Tessa had miscarried the day before her death. Or so the coroner told Danny. Danny would never know if the coroner lied to save him the guilt, but he chose to believe him because the alternative, he feared, could be the thing that finally broke him.

When he’d met Tessa, she’d been in labor. When he came across her again in May, she’d been pretending to be pregnant. And now, at her death, pregnant again. It was as if she’d had an overpowering need to remake her rage as flesh and blood, to be certain it would live on and pass down through the generations. This need (and Tessa, as a whole) was something he would never understand.

Sometimes, he woke from a sleep with the cold echo of her laughter ringing in his ears.

A package from Luther arrived. There was two thousand dollars in it — two years’ salary — and a formal portrait of Luther, Lila, and Desmond sitting before a fireplace. They were dressed in the latest fashions; Luther even wore a coat with tails over his winged collar.

“She’s beautiful,” Nora said. “And that child, good Lord.”

Luther’s note was brief:

Danny opened the packet of bills and showed it to Nora.

“Sweet Jesus!” She let out a noise that was half laughing — half weeping. “Where did he get it?”

“I have some idea,” Danny said.

“And?”

“You don’t want to know,” he said. “Believe me.”

On the tenth of January, in a light snow, Thomas Coughlin left his station house. The new recruits were coming along faster than expected. They were mostly smart. And eager. The State Guard still patrolled the streets, but the units had begun to demobilize. Within the month, they’d be gone, and the restored Boston Police Department would rise in their place.

Thomas walked up the street toward home. At the corner, under a streetlamp, his son leaned against the pole.

“Believe the Sox traded Ruth?” Danny said.

Thomas shrugged. “I was never a fan of the game.”

“To New York,” Danny said.

“Your youngest brother is, of course, distraught over it. I haven’t seen him this beside himself since …”

His father didn’t have to finish the thought. It pierced Danny just the same.

“How’s Con’?”

His father tipped his hand from side to side. “He has good days and bad. He’s learning to read by his fingers. There’s a school in Back Bay that teaches it. If the bitterness doesn’t overwhelm him, he could be all right.”

“Does it overwhelm you?”

“Nothing overwhelms me, Aiden.” His father’s breath was white in the cold. “I’m a man.”

Danny said nothing.

His father said, “Well, then, you look back to trim. So I guess I’ll be going.”

“We’re leaving the city, Dad.”

“You’re …?”

Danny nodded. “Leaving the state actually. Heading west.”

His father looked stunned. “This is your home.”

Danny shook his head. “Not anymore.”

Maybe his father had thought that Danny would reside in exile but close by. That way Thomas Coughlin could live with the illusion that his family was still intact. But once Danny left, a hole would open that not even Thomas could have prepared for.

“You’re all packed then, I take it.”

“Yeah. We’re going to head to New York for a few days before Volstead kicks in. We never had a proper honeymoon.”

His father nodded. He kept his head lowered, the snow falling in his hair.

“Good-bye, Dad.”

Danny started to walk past him and his father grabbed his arm. “Write me.”

“Will you write back?”

“No. But I’d like to know—”

“Then I won’t write.”

His father’s face stiffened and he gave him a curt nod and dropped his arm.

Danny walked up the street, the snow thickening, the footprints his father had left already obscured.

“Aiden!”

He turned, could barely see the man in all the white swirling between them. The flakes caked his eyelashes and he blinked them away.

“I’ll write back,” his father called.

A sudden boom of wind rattled the cars along the street.

“All right, then,” Danny called.

“Take care of yourself, son.”

“You, too.”

His father raised a hand and Danny raised one in return and then they turned and walked in separate directions through the snow.

On the train to New York, everyone was drunk. Even the porters. Twelve in the afternoon and people were guzzling champagne and guzzling rye and a band played in the fourth car, and the band was drunk. No one sat in their seats. Everyone hugged and kissed and danced. Prohibition was now the law of the land. Enforcement would begin four days from now, on the sixteenth.

Babe Ruth had a private car on the train, and at first he tried to sit out the revelry. He read over a copy of the contract he’d officially sign at day’s end in the offices of the Colonels at the Polo Grounds. He was now a Yankee. The trade had been announced ten days ago, though Ruth had never seen it coming. Got drunk for two days to deal with the depression. Johnny Igoe found him, though, and sobered him up. Explained that Babe was now the highest-paid player in baseball history. He showed him New York paper after New York paper, all proclaiming their joy, their ecstasy about getting the most feared slugger in the game on their team.

“You already own the town, Babe, and you haven’t even arrived yet.”

That put a new perspective on things. Babe had feared that New York was too big, too loud, too wide. He’d get swallowed up in it. Now he realized the opposite was true — he was too big for Boston. Too loud. Too wide. It couldn’t hold him. It was too small, too provincial. New York was the only stage large enough for the Babe. New York and New York alone. It wasn’t going to swallow Babe. He was going to swallow it.

I am Babe Ruth. I am bigger and better and stronger and more popular than anyone. Anyone.

Some drunk woman bounced off his door and he heard her giggle, the sound alone giving him an erection.

What the hell was he doing back here alone when he could be out there with his public, jawing, signing autographs, giving them a story they’d tell their grandkids?

He left the room. He walked straight to the bar car, worked his way through the dancing drunks, one bird up on a table kicking her legs like she was working burlesque. He sidled up the bar, ordered a double scotch.

“Why’d you leave us, Babe?”

He turned, looked at the drunk beside him, a short guy with a tall girlfriend, both of them three sheets to the wind.

“I didn’t leave,” Babe said. “Harry Frazee traded me. I had no say. I’m just a working stiff.”

“Then you’ll come back someday?” the guy said. “Play out your contract and come back to us?”

“Sure,” Babe lied. “That’s the idea, bub.”

The man patted him on the back. “Thanks, Mr. Ruth.”

“Thank you,” Ruth said with a wink for his girlfriend. He downed his drink and ordered another.

He ended up striking up a conversation with this big guy and his Irish wife. It turned out the big guy had been one of the striking coppers and was heading to New York for a little honeymoon before moving on out west to see a friend.

“What were you guys thinking?” Ruth asked him.

“Just trying to get a fair shake,” the ex-copper said.

“But it don’t work that way,” Babe said, eyeing that wife of his, a real dish, her accent sexy as all hell, too. “Look at me. I’m the biggest baseball player in the world and I got no say where they trade me. I got no power. Thems that write the checks write the rules.”

The ex-copper smiled. It was a rueful smile and distant. “Different sets of rules for different classes of people, Mr. Ruth.”

“Oh, sure. When wasn’t that so?”

They had a few more drinks and Ruth had to say he’d never seen a couple so in love. They barely touched, and it wasn’t like they got all gooey on each other, talked to each other in baby voices and called each other “dumpling” or anything. Even so, it was like a rope hung between them, invisible but electric, and that rope connected them more strongly than shared limbs. The rope was not only electric, it was serene. It glowed warm and peaceful. Honest.

Ruth grew sad. He’d never felt that kind of love, not even in his earliest days with Helen. He’d never felt that with another human being. Ever.

Peace. Honesty. Home.

God, was it even possible?

Apparently it was, because these two had it. At one point, the dame tapped a single finger on the ex-copper’s hand. Just one light tap. And he looked at her and she smiled, her upper teeth exposed as they ran over her lower lip. God, it broke Babe’s heart, that look. Had anyone ever looked at him like that?

No.

Would anyone?

No.

His spirits brightened only later as he walked out of the train station and waved good-bye to the couple as they went to stand in the taxi line. It looked to be a long wait on a cold day, but Babe didn’t have to worry. The Colonels had sent a car, a black Stuttgart with a driver who held up a hand to acknowledge Babe as he walked toward him.

“It’s Babe Ruth!” someone called, and several people pointed and called his name. Out on Fifth Avenue, half a dozen cars honked their horns.

He looked back at the couple in the taxi line. It sure was cold. For a moment he thought of calling to them, offering them a ride to their hotel. But they weren’t even looking his way. Manhattan was cheering him, honking horns, yelling “Hurrah,” but this couple heard none of it. They were turned into each other, the ex-copper’s coat wrapped around her to protect her from the wind. Babe felt forlorn again, abandoned. He feared he’d somehow missed out on the most elemental part of life. He feared that this thing he’d missed would never, ever, enter his world. He dropped his gaze from the couple and decided they could wait for a taxi. They’d be fine.

He climbed into the car and rolled down the window to wave at his new fans as the driver pulled away from the curb. Volstead was coming, but it wouldn’t affect him much. Word was the government hadn’t hired nearly the manpower needed to enforce it, and Babe and people like him would be allowed certain exemptions. As they always had. That was the way of things, after all.

Babe rolled the window back up as the car accelerated.

“Driver, what’s your name?”

“George, Mr. Ruth.”

“Ain’t that a kick? That’s my name, too. But you call me Babe. Okay, George?”

“You betcha, Babe. An honor to meet you, sir.”

“Ah, I’m just a ballplayer, George. Can’t even read good.”

“But you can hit, sir. You can hit for miles. I just want to be the first to say, ‘Welcome to New York, Babe.’”

“Well, thank you, George. Happy to be here. Gonna be a good year, I think.”

“A good decade,” George said.

“You can say that twice.”

A good decade. So it would be. Babe looked out the window, at New York in all its bustle and shine, all its lights and billboards and limestone towers. What a day. What a city. What a time to be alive.