“This getting thick with ugly,” Old Byron said.
“Yeah, it is.” Luther thought of turning around, since most of the crowd seemed to be moving toward Court Square and then Scollay Square beyond, but when he looked behind him, he couldn’t see any space. All he could see were shoulders and heads, a pack of drunk sailors in the mix now, red-eyed and pimple-faced. A moving wall, pushing them forward. Luther felt bad for leading Old Byron into this, for suspecting him, if only for a moment, of being anything but an old man who was losing his brother. He craned his neck above the crowd to see if he could find a way out for them, and just ahead, at the corner of City Hall Avenue, a group of men hurled rocks into the window of Big Chief’s Cigar Store, the sound of it like a half dozen rifle reports. The plate glass broke into fins that hung in place for a moment, creaking in the moist breeze, and then they dropped.
A piece of glass ricocheted into a small guy’s eye and he had time to reach for it before the crowd swarmed over him and into the cigar store. Those who couldn’t make it inside broke the window next door, this one to a bakery, and loaves of bread and cupcakes sailed overhead and fell into the midst of the mob.
Old Byron looked frightened, his eyes wide, and Luther put an arm around him and tried to calm the old man’s fear with idle talk. “What’s your brother’s name?”
Old Byron cocked his head like he didn’t understand the question.
“I said what’s—?”
“Carnell,” Old Byron said. “Yeah.” He gave Luther a shaky smile and nodded. “His name’s Carnell.”
Luther smiled back. He hoped it was a comforting smile, and he kept his arm around Old Byron, even though he feared the blade or the pistol he now knew the man had on his person somewhere.
It was the “Yeah” that got him. The way Old Byron said it like he was confirming it to himself, answering a question on a test he’d over-prepared for.
Another window exploded, this time on their right. And then another. A fat white man pushed them hard to the left as he made his charge for Peter Rabbit Hats. The windows kept dropping—Sal Myer’s Gents’ Furnishings, Lewis Shoes, the Princeton Clothing Company, Drake’s Dry Goods. Sharp, dry explosions. Glass glittering against the walls, crunching underfoot, spitting through the air. A few feet ahead of them, a soldier swung a chair leg into the head of a sailor, the wood already dark with blood.
Carnell. Yeah. His name’s Carnell.
Luther removed his arm from Old Byron’s shoulders.
“What’s Cornell do for work?” Luther said as a sailor with arms slashed to bits by a window pushed through them, bleeding all over everything he touched.
“Luther, we got to get out of here.”
“What’s Cornell do?” Luther said.
“He a meat packer,” Old Byron said.
“Cornell’s a meat packer.”
“Yeah,” Old Byron shouted. “Luther, we got to get free of this.”
“Thought you said his name was Carnell,” Luther said.
Old Byron’s mouth opened but he didn’t say anything. He gave Luther a helpless, hopeless look, his lips moving slightly as he tried to find the words.
Luther shook his head slowly. “Old Byron,” he said. “Old Byron.”
“I can explain.” Old Byron worked a sad smile onto his face.
Luther nodded, as if ready to listen, and then shoved him into the nearest group to his right and quick-pivoted between two men who looked whiter than white and scareder than scared. He slid between two more men with their backs to each other. Someone broke another window, and then a few someones began firing guns in the air. One of the bullets came back down and hit the arm of a guy beside Luther and the blood spouted and the guy yelped. Luther reached the opposite sidewalk and slipped on some glass pebbles. He almost went down, but he righted himself at the last second and risked a look back across the street. He spotted Old Byron, his back pressed to a brick wall, eyes darting, as a man wrestled the carcass of a sow over a butcher’s window frame, the sow’s belly dragging across the broken glass. The man wrenched it to the sidewalk where he took several punches to the head from three men who kept swinging until they’d knocked him back through the open window. They availed themselves of his bloodied sow and carried it over their heads down Tremont.
Carnell, my ass.
Luther walked gingerly through the glass and tried to keep to the edge of the crowd, but within minutes he’d been forced toward the center again. It was no longer a group of people, it was a living, thinking hive that commanded the bees within, made sure they were all anxious and jangly and hungry. Luther pulled his hat down tighter and kept his head down.
Dozens of people, all cut up from the glass, keened and moaned. The sight and sound of them incited the hive even more. Anyone wearing a straw hat had it wrenched from his head and men beat the shit out of one another over stolen shoes and bread loaves and suit jackets, most times destroying the very thing they tried to possess. The packs of sailors and the soldiers were roving enemy squads, bursting out of the herd in sudden explosions to pummel their rivals. Luther saw a woman pushed into a doorway, saw several men press around her. He heard her scream but he couldn’t get anywhere near her, the walls of shoulders and heads and torsos moving alongside of him like freight cars in the stockyards. He heard the woman scream again and the men laugh and hoot, and he looked out at this hideous sea of white faces stripped of their everyday masks and wanted to burn them all in a great fire.
By the time they reached Scollay Square, there had to be four thousand of them. Tremont widened here and Luther finally broke from the center again, made his way to the sidewalk, heard someone say, “Nigger got his own hat,” and kept moving until he ran into another wall of men pouring out of a shattered liquor store, draining the bottles and smashing them to the sidewalk and then opening replacements. Some inbred-looking short sons of bitches kicked down the doors of Waldron’s Casino, and Luther heard the burlesque show in there screech to an end. Several of the men came right back out pushing a piano in front of them, the piano player lying belly-down on top, one of the short sons of bitches sitting on his ass and riding him like a horse.
He turned to his right and Old Byron Jackson stabbed him in the bicep. Luther fell back against the wall of Waldron’s Casino. Old Byron swung with that knife again, the old man’s face a feral, terrified thing. Luther kicked out at him, then came off the wall as Old Byron lunged and missed, the knife sending a spark off the brick. Luther cuffed him in the ear but good, bounced the other side of his head off the wall.
“The fuck you doing this for?” he said.
“Got debts,” Old Byron said and came at him in a low rush.
Luther banged into someone’s back as he dodged the thrust. The man he’d bumped grabbed his shirt and spun him to face him. Luther jerked out of the man’s grasp and kicked behind him, heard the kick connect with some part of Old Byron Jackson, the old man letting out an “oof” of air. The white man punched him in the cheek, but Luther had expected that and he rolled with it right into the crowd still dancing out in front of the liquor store. He broke through them and leapt up onto the piano keys, heard a smattering of cheers break out as he vaulted off the keys and over the piano player and the man riding him. He landed on the other side and kept his footing and got a quick glimpse of a guy’s shock at this nigger dropping out of the sky and then he pushed into the crowd.
The mob moved on. They poured through Faneuil Hall, and some cows were set loose from their pens, and someone overturned a produce cart and lit it on fire in front of its owner, who dropped to his knees and pulled his hair out of his bleeding scalp by the roots. Up ahead, a sudden burst of gunfire, several pistols fired above the crowd, and then a desperate shout: “We are plainclothes police officers! Cease and desist at once.”
More warning shots and then the crowd started shouting back.
“Kill the cops! Kill the cops!”
“Kill the scabs!”
“Kill the cops!”
<
br /> “Kill the scabs!”
“Kill the cops!”
“Back off or we will shoot to kill! Back off!”
They must have meant it because Luther felt the surge change direction and he was spun in place and the swarm moved back the way it had come. More shots fired. Another cart lit afire, the yellow and red reflecting off the bronze cobblestone and the red brick, Luther catching his own shadow moving through the colors along with all the other shadows. Shrieking that filled the sky. A crack of bone, a sharp scream, a thunderclap of plate glass, fire alarms ringing so consistently that Luther barely heard them anymore.
And then the rain came, a fat pouring of it, clattering and hissing, steaming off bare heads. At first Luther held out hope it would thin the crowd, but if anything it brought more of them. Luther was buffeted along within the hive as it destroyed ten more storefronts, three restaurants, rushed through a boxing match at Beech Hall and beat the fighters senseless. Beat the audience, too.
Along Washington Street, the major department stores—Filene’s, White’s, Chandler’s, and Jordan Marsh—had loaded up for bear. The guys guarding Jordan Marsh saw them coming from two blocks away and stepped off the sidewalk with pistols and shotguns. They didn’t even wait for a debate. They set themselves in the middle of Washington Street, fifteen of them at least, and fired. The hive went into a crouch and then took another couple of steps forward, but the Jordan Marsh men charged them, guns booming and chucking, and the surge reversed again. Luther heard terror screams and the Jordan Marsh men kept firing and the hive ran all the way back to Scollay Square.
Which was an uncaged zoo by now. Everyone drunk and howling up at the raindrops. Dazed burlesque girls stripped of their tassels wandering around with bare chests. Overturned touring cars and bonfires along the sidewalk. Headstones ripped from the Old Granary Burying Ground and propped up against walls and fences. Two people fucking on top of an overturned Model T. Two men in a bare-knuckle boxing match in the middle of Tremont Street while the bettors formed a ring around them and the blood and rain-streaked glass crunched under their feet. Four soldiers dragged an unconscious sailor to the bumper of one of the flipped cars and pissed on him as the crowd cheered. A woman appeared in an upper window and screamed for help. The crowd cheered her, too, before a hand clamped over her face and wrenched her back from the window. The crowd cheered some more.
Luther noticed the dark bloodstain on his upper sleeve and took a look at the wound long enough to realize it wasn’t deep. He noticed a guy passed out against the curb with a bottle of whiskey between his legs and he reached down and took the bottle. He poured some over his arm and then drank some and watched another window explode and heard more screams and wails but all of them eventually drowned out by the leering cheers of this triumphant hive.
This? he wanted to scream. This is what I kowtowed to? You people? You made me feel like less because I wasn’t you? I’ve been saying “yes, suh” to you? “No suh”? To you? To you fucking…animals?
He took another drink and the sweep of his gaze landed on Old Byron Jackson across the street, standing in front of a whitewashed storefront, what had once been a bookstore, several years abandoned. Maybe the last window left in Scollay Square. Old Byron looked down Tremont in the wrong direction, and Luther tilted his head and drained the bottle and dropped it to his feet and started across the street.
Glazed, white, maskless faces loomed all around him, drunk from liquor, drunk on power and anarchy, but drunk on something else, too, something nameless until now, something they’d always known was there but pretended they didn’t.
Oblivion.
That’s all it was. They did things in their everyday life and gave it other names, nice names—idealism, civic duty, honor, purpose. But the truth was right in front of them now. No one did anything for any other reason but that they wanted to. They wanted to rage and they wanted to rape and they wanted to destroy as many things as they could destroy simply because those things could be destroyed.
Fuck you, Luther thought, and fuck this. He reached Old Byron Jackson and sank one hand into his crotch and the other into his hair.
I’m going home.
He lifted Old Byron off the ground and swung him back in the air as the old man howled and when he got to the top of the pendulum, Luther swung it all the way back and threw Old Byron Jackson through the plate glass window.
“Nigger fight,” someone called.
Old Byron landed on the bare floor and the glass shards popped all over him and all around him and he tried to cover up with his arms but the glass hit him anyway, one shard taking off a cheek, another carving a steak off his outer thigh.
“You going to kill him, boy?”
Luther turned and looked at three white men to his left. They were swimming in booze.
“Might could,” he said.
He climbed through the window and into the store and the broken glass and Old Byron Jackson.
“What kinda debts?”
Old Byron huffed his breath and then hissed it and grabbed his thigh in his hands and let out a low moan.
“I asked you a question.”
Behind him one of the white men chuckled. “You hear? He axed him a question.”
“What kinda debts?”
“What kind you think?” Old Byron ground his head back into the glass and arched his back.
“You using, I take it.”
“Used my whole life. Opium, not heroin,” Old Byron said. “Who you think supplied Jessie Tell, fool?”
Luther stepped on Old Byron’s ankle and the old man gritted his teeth.
“Don’t say his name,” Luther said. “He was my friend. You ain’t.”
One of the white men called, “Hey! You going to kill him, shine, or what?”
Luther shook his head and heard the men groan and then scuttle off.
“Ain’t going to save you, though, Old Byron. You die, you die. Came all the way up here just to kill one of your own for that shit you put in you?” Luther spit on the glass pebbles.
Old Byron spit blood up at Luther, but all it did was land on his own shirt. “Never liked your ass, Luther. You think you special.”
Luther shrugged. “I am special. Any day aboveground that I ain’t you or I ain’t that?” He jerked his thumb behind him. “You’re goddamned fucking correct I’m special. Ain’t afraid of them anymore, ain’t afraid of you, ain’t afraid of this here color of my skin. Fuck all that forever.”
Old Byron rolled his eyes. “Like you even less.”
“Good.” Luther smiled. He crouched by Old Byron. “I ’spect you’ll live, old man. You get back on that train to Tulsa. Hear? And when you get off it, you go run your sad ass right to Smoke and tell him you missed me. Tell him it don’t matter none, though, because he ain’t going to have to look hard for me from now on.” Luther lowered his face until he was close enough to kiss Old Byron Jackson. “You tell Smoke I’m coming for him.” He slapped his good cheek once, hard. “I’m coming home, Old Byron. You tell Smoke that. You don’t?” Luther shrugged. “I’ll tell him myself.”
He stood and crossed the broken glass and stepped through the window. He never looked back at Old Byron. He worked his way through the feverish white folk and the screams and the rain and the storm of the hive and knew he was done with every lie he’d ever allowed himself to believe, every lie he’d ever lived, every lie.
Scollay Square. Court Square. The North End. Newspaper Row. Roxbury Crossing. Pope’s Hill. Codman and Eggleston Squares. The calls came in from all over the city, but nowhere more voluminously than in Thomas Coughlin’s precinct. South Boston was blowing up.
The mobs had emptied the stores along Broadway and thrown the goods to the street. Thomas couldn’t find even the strayest hair of logic in that—at least use what you looted. From the inner harbor to Andrew Square, from the Fort Point Channel to Farragut Road—not a single window in a single business stood intact. Hundreds of homes had suffered similar fates. East an
d West Broadway swelled with the worst of the populace, ten thousand strong and growing. Rapes—rapes, Thomas thought with clenched teeth—had occurred in public view, three on West Broadway, one on East Fourth, another at one of the piers along Northern Avenue.
And the calls kept coming in:
The manager of Mully’s Diner beaten unconscious when a roomful of patrons decided not to pay their bills. The poor sod at Haymarket Relief now with a broken nose, a shattered eardrum, and half a dozen missing teeth.
At Broadway and E, some fun-loving fellas drove a stolen buggy over the sidewalk and into the front window of O’Donnell’s Bakery. That wasn’t enough revelry, however—they had to set it afire. In the process, they torched the bakery and burned seventeen years of Declan O’Donnell’s dreams to soot.
Budnick Creamery—destroyed. Connor & O’Keefe’s—ash. Up and down Broadway, haberdashers, tailors, pawnshops, produce stores, even a bicycle shop—all gone. Either burned to the ground or smashed beyond salvage.
Boys and girls, most younger than Joe, hurled eggs and rocks from the roof of Mohican Market, and the scant few officers Thomas could afford to send reported they were helpless to fire back at children. Responding firemen complained of the same thing.
And the latest report—a streetcar forced to stop at the corner of Broadway and Dorchester Street because of all the goods piled in the intersection. The mob added boxes, barrels, and mattresses to the pile and then someone brought some gasoline and a box of matches. The occupants of the streetcar were forced to flee the car along with the driver and most were beaten while the crowd rushed onto the car, tore the seats from their metal clamps, and tossed them through the windows.
What was this addiction to broken glass? That’s what Thomas wanted to know. How was one to stop this madness? He had a mere twenty-two policemen under his command, most sergeants and lieutenants, most well into their forties, plus a contingent of useless frightened volunteers.
The Given Day Page 60
