“I could build you a new cover, move you to a new cell. There’s one in—”
“Stop. Please. I’m done. I don’t even know what the fuck we were doing. I don’t know why—”
“Ours is not to reason why.”
“Mine is not to reason why. This is your baby.”
McKenna shrugged.
“What did I do here?” Danny’s gaze fell on his open palms. “What was accomplished? Outside of making lists of union guys and harmless Bolsheviki—”
“There are no harmless Reds.”
“—what the fuck was the point?”
Eddie McKenna drank from his brown bucket of beer and then relit his cigar, one eye squinting through the smoke. “We’ve lost you.”
“What?” Danny said.
“We have, we have,” Eddie said softly.
“I don’t know what you’re on about. It’s me. Danny.”
McKenna looked up at the ceiling tiles. “When I was a boy, I stayed with an uncle for a time. Can’t remember if he was on me mother’s side or me da’s, but he was gray Irish trash just the same. No music to him a’tall, no love, no light. But he had a dog, yeah? Mangy mutt, he was, and dumb as peat, but he had love, he had light. Sure he’d dance in place when he saw me coming up the hill, his tail awagging, dance for the sheer joy of knowing I’d pet him, I’d run with him, I’d rub his patchy belly.” Eddie drew on his cigar and exhaled slowly. “Became sick, he did. Worms. Started sneezing blood. Time comes, me uncle tells me to take him to the ocean. Cuffs me when I refuse. Cuffs me worse when I cry. So I carry the cur to the ocean. I carry him out to a point just above me chin and I let him go. I’m supposed to hold him down for a count of sixty, but there’s little point. He’s weak and feeble and sad and he sinks without a noise. I walk back into shore, and me uncle cuffs me again. ‘For what?’ I shout. He points. And there he is, that feeble brick-headed mutt, swimming back in. Swimming toward me. Eventually, he makes it to shore. He’s shivering, he’s heaving, he’s sopping wet. A marvel, this dog, a romantic, a hero. And he looks at me just in time for me uncle to bring the axe down on his spine and cut him in half.”
He sat back. He lifted his cigar from the ashtray. A barmaid removed half a dozen mugs from the next table over. She walked back to the bar, and the room was quiet.
“Fuck you tell a story like that for?” Danny said. “Fuck’s wrong with you?”
“It’s what’s wrong with you, boy. You’ve got ‘fair’ in your head now. Don’t deny it. You think it’s attainable. You do. I can see it.”
Danny leaned in, his beer sloshing down the side of his bucket as he lowered it from his mouth. “I’m supposed to fucking learn something from the dog story? What — that life is hard? That the game is rigged? You think this is news? You think I believe the unions or the Bolshies or the BSC stand a spit of a chance of getting their due?”
“Then why are you doing it? Your father, your brother, me — we’re worried, Dan. Worried sick. You blew your cover with Fraina because some part of you wanted to blow it.”
“No.”
“And yet you sit there and tell me you know that no reasonable or sensible government — local, state, or federal — will ever allow the Sovietizing of this country. Not ever. But you continue to get deeper and deeper into the BSC muck and further and further from those who hold you dear. Why? You’re me godson, Dan? Why?”
“Change hurts.”
“That’s your answer?”
Danny stood. “Change hurts, Eddie, but believe me, it’s coming.”
“It isn’t.”
“It’s got to.”
Eddie shook his head. “There are fights, m’ boy, and there is folly. And I fear you’ll soon learn the difference.”
Chapter nineteen
In the kitchen with Nora late of a Tuesday afternoon, Nora just back from her job at the shoe factory, Luther chopping vegetables for the soup, Nora peeling potatoes, when Nora said, “You’ve a girl?”
“Hmm?”
She gave him those pale eyes of hers, the sparkle of them like a flickering match. “You heard what I said. Have you a girl somewhere?”
Luther shook his head. “No, ma’am.”
She laughed.
“What?”
“Sure, you’re lying.”
“Uh? What makes you say that?”
“I can hear it in your voice, I can.”
“Hear what?”
She gave him a throaty laugh. “Love.”
“Just ’cause I love someone don’t mean she’s mine.”
“Now that’s the truest thing you’ve said all week. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean …” She trailed off and went back to humming softly as she peeled the potatoes, the humming a habit of hers Luther was fairly certain she was unaware of.
Luther used the flat of the knife to push the chopped celery off the cutting board and into the pot. He sidestepped Nora to pull some carrots from the colander in the sink and took them back down the counter with him, chopped off their tops before lining them up and slicing them four at a time.
“She pretty?” Nora asked.
“She’s pretty,” Luther said.
“Tall? Short?”
“She kinda small,” Luther said. “Like you.”
“I’m small, am I?” She gave Luther a look over her shoulder, one hand holding the peeler, and Luther, as he had before, got the sense of the volcanic from her in the most innocent of moments. He didn’t know too many other white women and no Irishwomen, but he’d long had the feeling that Nora was a woman worth treading very carefully around.
“You ain’t big,” he said.
She looked over at him for a long time. “We’ve been acquainted for months, Mr. Laurence, and it occurred to me at the factory today that I know next to nothing, I do, about you.”
Luther chuckled. “Pot calling the kettle black if ever I did hear it.”
“You’ve some meaning you’re keeping to yourself over there?”
“Me?” Luther shook his head. “I know you’re from Ireland but not where exactly.”
“Do you know Ireland?”
“Not a whit.”
“Then what difference would it make?”
“I know you came here five years ago. I know you are courting Mr. Connor but don’t seem to think about it much. I—”
“Excuse me, boy?”
Luther had discovered that when the Irish said “boy” to a colored man it didn’t mean what it meant when a white American said it. He chuckled again. “Hit a nerve there, I did, lass?”
Nora laughed. She held the back of her wet hand to her lips, the peeler sticking out. “Do that again.”
“What?”
“The brogue, the brogue.”
“Ah, sure, I don’t know what you’re on about.”
She leaned against the side of the sink and stared at him. “That is Eddie McKenna’s voice, right down to the timbre itself, it ’tis.”
Luther shrugged. “Not bad, uh?”
Nora’s face sobered. “Don’t ever let him hear you do that.”
“You think I’m out my mind?”
She placed the peeler on the counter. “You miss her. I can see it in your eyes.”
“I miss her.”
“What’s her name?”
Luther shook his head. “I’d just as soon hold on to that for the moment, Miss O’Shea.”
Nora wiped her hands on her apron. “What’re you running from, Luther?”
“What’re you?”
She smiled and her eyes sparkled again but this time from the wet in them. “Danny.”
He nodded. “I seen that. Something else, though, too. Something further back.”
She turned back to the sink, lifted out the pot filled with water and potatoes. She carried it to the sink. “Ah, we’re an interesting pair, Mr. Laurence. Are we not? All our intuition used for others, never ourselves.”