The Given Day by Dennis Lehane Read Free Book Online

how childlike his expression had become, as if he'd just been hatched.
    Then his eyes narrowed. His shoulders clenched. His hands rose. The doctor would later tell Danny (when he'd been stupid enough to ask) that a body under extreme duress often acts out of refl ex. Had Danny known that at the time, maybe it would have made a difference, though he was hard-pressed to see how. A hand rising in a boxing ring rarely meant anything but what one naturally assumed. Green's left fist entered the space between their bodies, Danny's shoulder twitched, and his right cross blew up into the side of Johnny Green's head.
    Instinct. Purely that.
    There wasn't much left of Johnny to count out. He lay on the canvas kicking his heels, spitting white foam, and then gouts of pink. His head swayed left to right, left to right. His mouth kissed the air the way fish kissed the air.
    Three fights in the same day? Danny thought. You fucking kidding?
    Johnny lived. Johnny was fine. Never to fight again, of course, but after a month he could speak clearly. After two, he'd lost the limp and the left side of his mouth had thawed from its stricture.
    Danny was another issue. It wasn't that he felt responsible--yes, sometimes he did, but most times he understood the stroke had already found Johnny Green before Danny threw his counterpunch. No the issue was one of balance--Danny, in two short years, had gone from the Salutation Street bombing to losing the only woman he'd ever loved, Nora O'Shea, an Irishwoman who worked for his parents as a domestic. Their affair had felt doomed from the start, and it had been Danny who had ended it, but since she'd left his life, he couldn't think of one good reason to live it. Now he'd almost killed Johnny Green in the ring at Mechanics Hall. All of this in twenty- one months. Twenty-one months that would have led anyone to question whether God held a grudge.
    His woman took off," Steve told Danny two months later. It was early September, and Danny and Steve walked the beat in the North End of Boston. The North End was predominantly Italian and poor, a place where rats grew to the size of butchers' forearms and infants often died before their fi rst steps. English was rarely spoken; automobile sightings unlikely. Danny and Steve, however, were so fond of the neighborhood that they lived in the heart of it, on different floors of a Salem Street rooming house just blocks from the Oh-One Station House on Hanover.
    "Whose woman?"
    "Now don't blame yourself," Steve said. "Johnny Green's." "Why'd she leave him?"
    "Fall's coming. They got evicted."
    "But he's back on the job," Danny said. "A desk, yeah, but back on the job."
    Steve nodded. "Don't make up for the two months he was out, though."
    Danny stopped, looked at his partner. "They didn't pay him? He was fighting in a department-sponsored smoker."
    "You really want to know?"
    "Yeah."
    "Because the last couple months? A man brings up Johnny Green's name around you and you shut him down surer than a chastity belt."
    "I want to know," Danny said.
    Steve shrugged. "It was a Boston Social Club-sponsored smoker. So technically, he got hurt off the job. Thus . . ." He shrugged again. "No sick pay."
    Danny said nothing. He tried to find solace in his surroundings. The North End had been his home until he was seven years old, before the Irish who'd laid its streets and the Jews who'd come after them had been displaced by Italians who populated it so densely that if a picture were taken of Napoli and another of Hanover Street, most would be hard-pressed to identify which had been taken in the United States. Danny had moved back when he was twenty, and planned never to leave.
    Danny and Steve walked their beat in sharp air that smelled of chimney smoke and cooked lard. Old women waddled into the streets. Carts and horses made their way along the cobblestone. Coughs rattled from open windows. Babies squawked at so high a pitch Danny could imagine the red of their faces. In most