“I’m happy for you,” Joe said, still shaking his head at the absurdity of it. Danny’s life—boxer, cop, union organizer, businessman, sheriff’s deputy, stuntman, budding writer—was an American life, if ever there was one.
“Come,” his brother said.
“What?”
“When you get out of here. Come join us. I’m serious. Fall off a horse for money and pretend to get shot and fall through sugar windows made up to look like glass. Lie in the sun the rest of the time, meet a starlet by the pool.”
For a moment, Joe could see it—another life, a dream of blue water, honey-skinned women, palm trees.
“Only a brisk, two-week train ride away, little brother.”
Joe laughed some more, picturing it.
“It’s good work,” Danny said. “You ever want to come out and join me, I could train you.”
Joe, still smiling, shook his head.
“It’s honest work,” Danny said.
“I know,” Joe said.
“You could stop living a life where you look over your shoulder all the time.”
“It’s not about that.”
“What’s it about?” Danny seemed authentically curious.
“The night. It’s got its own set of rules.”
“Day’s got rules too.”
“Oh, I know,” Joe said, “but I don’t like them.”
They stared through the mesh at each other for a long time.
“I don’t understand,” Danny said softly.
“I know you don’t,” Joe said. “You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy’s leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there’s a difference, like the banker’s just doing his job but the loan shark’s a criminal. I like the loan shark because he doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be sitting where I’m sitting right now. I’m not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men’s club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid’s grades. Die at my desk, and they’ll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt’s hit the coffin.”
“But that’s life,” Danny said.
“That’s a life. You want to play by their rules? Go ahead. But I say their rules are bullshit. I say there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself.”
Again, they considered each other through the mesh. His whole childhood, Danny had been Joe’s hero. Hell, his god. And now god was just a man who fell off horses for a living, pretended to be shot for a living.
“Wow,” Danny said softly, “did you ever grow up.”
“Yeah,” Joe said.
Danny placed his cigarettes in his pocket and put his hat on.
“Pity,” he said.
Within the prison, the White-Pescatore War was partially won the night three White soldiers were shot on the roof while “trying to escape.”
Skirmishes continued to occur, however, and bad blood festered. Over the next six months, Joe learned that wars don’t really end. Even as he and Maso and the rest of the Pescatore prison crew consolidated their power, it was impossible to tell if this guard or that guard had been paid to move against them or if this or that convict could be trusted.
Micky Baer was shanked in the yard by a guy who, it turned out, was married to the late Dom Pokaski’s sister. Micky survived, but he’d have problems pissing for the rest of his life. They heard from the outside that Guard Colvin was laying off bets with Syd Mayo, a White associate. And Colvin was losing.
Then Holly Peletos, a White button man, rotated in to do five years for involuntary manslaughter and started running his mouth in the mess hall about regime change. So they had to throw him off the tier.
Some weeks Joe went two or three nights without sleep because of the fear, or because he was trying to figure out all the angles, or because his heart wouldn’t stop banging inside his chest like it was trying to break free.
You told yourself it wouldn’t get to you.
You told yourself this place wouldn’t eat your soul.
But what you told yourself above all else was, I will live.
I will walk out of here.
Whatever the cost.
Maso was released on a spring morning in 1928.
“Next time you see me,” he said to Joe, “will be Visitors’ Day. I’ll be on the other side of that mesh.”
Joe shook his hand. “Be safe.”
“I got my mouthpiece working on your case. You’ll be out soon. Stay alert, kid, stay alive.”
Joe tried to take comfort in the words, but he knew that if that’s all they were—words—then he was in for a sentence that would feel twice as long because he’d allowed hope in. As soon as Maso left this place behind, he could very easily leave Joe behind.
Or he could give him just enough of the carrot to keep Joe running his operation behind these walls for him with no intention of hiring him once he reached the outside.
Either way, Joe was powerless to do anything but sit and wait to see how things shook out.
When Maso hit the street, it was hard not to notice. What had been simmering on the inside got splashed with gasoline on the outside. Murderous May, as the rags dubbed it, left Boston looking for the first time like Detroit or Chicago. Maso’s soldiers hit Albert White’s bookies, distillers, trucks, and soldiers like it was open season. And it was. Within one month, Maso chased Albert White out of Boston, his few remaining soldiers scurrying after him.
In prison, it was as if harmony had been injected into the water supply. The stabbings stopped. For the rest of ’28, no one got thrown off a tier or shanked in the chow line. Joe knew that peace had truly come to Charlestown Penitentiary when he was able to forge a deal with two of Albert White’s best incarcerated distillers to ply their trade behind the walls. Soon, the guards were smuggling gin out of Charlestown Penitentiary, the shit so good it even picked up a street name, Penal Code.
Joe slept soundly for the first time since he’d walked through the front gates in the summer of ’27. It also gave him time to mourn his father and mourn Emma, a process he’d held at bay when it would have pulled his thoughts to places they shouldn’t have gone while others plotted against him.
The cruelest trick God played on him through the second half of ’28 was sending Emma to visit him while he slept. He’d feel her leg snake between his, smell the single drops of perfume she placed behind each ear, open his eyes to see hers an inch away, feel her breath on his lips. He’d raise his arms off the mattress so he could run his palms down her bare back. And his eyes would open for real.
No one.
Just the dark.
And he’d pray. He’d ask God to let her be alive, even if he never saw her again. Please let her be alive.
But, God, alive or dead, could you please, please stop sending her to my dreams? I can’t lose her again and again. It’s too much. It’s too cruel. Lord, Joe asked, have mercy.