Some people tried to pull him down, some people tried to calm him, but he jumped off the seat backs and did a jig in the aisle and he grabbed some more hats and he flung some and punched holes in a few more and people were clapping, people were cheering and whistling. He slapped his hands together like a wop's monkey and he scratched his ass and went "hoo hoo hoo," and they loved it, they loved it.
Then he ran out of hats. He looked back down the aisle. They covered the floor. They hung from the luggage racks. Pieces of straw stuck to a few windows. Ruth could feel the litter of them in his spine, right at the base of his brain. He felt addled and elated and ready to take on the ties. The suits. The luggage.
Ebby Wilson put his hand on his chest. Ruth wasn't even sure where he'd come from. He saw Stuffy standing up in his seat, raising a glass of something to him, shouting and smiling, and Ruth waved.
Ebby Wilson said, "Make me a new one."
Ruth looked down at him. "What?"
Ebby spread his hands, reasonable. "Make me a new hat. You broke 'em up, now make me another one."
Someone whistled.
Ruth smoothed the shoulders of Wilson's suit jacket. "I'll buy you a drink."
"Don't want a drink. I want my hat."
Ruth was about to say "Fuck your hat," when Ebby Wilson pushed him. It wasn't much of a push, but the train went into a turn at the same time, and Ruth felt it buckle, and he smiled at Wilson, and then decided to punch him instead of insult him. He threw the punch, saw it coming in Ebby Wilson's eyes, Wilson not so smug anymore, not so concerned with his hat, but the train buckled again, and the train shimmied and Ruth felt the punch go wide, felt his whole body lurch to the right, felt a voice in his heart say, "This is not you, Gidge. This is not you."
His fist hit the window instead. He felt it in his elbow, felt it in his shoulder and the side of his neck and the hollow just below his ear. He felt the sway of his belly as a public spectacle and he felt fat and orphaned again. He dropped into the empty seat and sucked air through his teeth and cradled his hand.
Luther Laurence and Sticky Joe and Aeneus James were probably sitting on a porch somewhere now, feeling the night heat, passing a jar. Maybe they were talking about him, about the look on his face when he saw Luther walking away from that ball as it fell through the air. Maybe they were laughing, replaying a hit, a pitch, a run.
And he was out here, in the world.
I slept through New York, Babe thought as they brought a bucket of ice and placed his hand in it. And then he remembered this train didn't run past Manhattan, only Albany, but he still felt a loss. He'd seen it a hundred times, but he loved to look at it, the lights, the dark rivers that circled it like carpet, the limestone spires so white against the night.
He pulled his hand from the ice and looked at it. His pitching hand. It was red and swelling up and he couldn't make a fist.
"Gidge," someone called from the back of the car, "what you got against hats?"
Babe didn't answer. He looked out the window, at the fl at scrub of Springfield, Massachusetts. He placed his forehead against the window to cool it and saw his reflection and the reflection of the land, the two of them intertwined.
He raised his swollen hand to the glass and the land moved through it, too, and he imagined it healing the aching knuckles and he hoped he hadn't broken it. Over something as silly as hats.
He imagined finding Luther on some dusty street in some dusty town and buying him a drink and apologizing and Luther would say, Don't you worry about it none, Mr. Ruth, suh, and tell him another tale about Ohio cacti.
But then Ruth pictured those eyes of Luther's, giving nothing away but a sense that he could see inside you and he didn't approve of what was there, and Ruth thought, Fuck you, boy, and your approval. I don't need it. Hear me?
I don't need it.
He was just getting started. He was ready to bust wide open. He could feel it. Big things. Big things were coming. From him. From everywhere. That was the feeling he got lately, as if the whole world had been held in a stable, him included. But soon, soon it was going to bust out all over the place.
He kept his head against the window and closed his eyes, and he felt the countryside moving through his face even as he began to snore.
The MILK RUN chapter one On a wet summer night, Danny Coughlin, a Boston police officer, fought a four-round bout against another cop, Johnny Green, at Mechanics Hall just outside Copley Square.
Coughlin-Green was the fi nal fight on a fifteen-bout, all-police card that included flyweights, welterweights, cruiserweights, and heavyweights. Danny Coughlin, at six two, 220, was a heavyweight. A suspect left hook and foot speed that was a few steps shy of blazing kept him from fighting professionally, but his butcher-knife left jab combined with the airmail-your-jaw-to-Georgia explosion of his right cross dwarfed the abilities of just about any other semipro on the East Coast.
The all-day pugilism display was titled Boxing & Badges: Haymakers for Hope. Proceeds were split fi fty-fifty between the St. Thomas Asylum for Crippled Orphans and the policemen's own fraternal organi zation, the Boston Social Club, which used the donations to bolster a health fund for injured coppers and to defray costs for uniforms and equipment, costs the department refused to pay. While flyers advertising the event were pasted to poles and hung from storefronts in good neighborhoods and thereby elicited donations from people who never intended to actually attend the event, the flyers also saturated the worst of the Boston slums, where one was most likely to fi nd the core of the criminal element--the plug- uglies, the bullyboys, the knuckle- dusters, and, of course, the Gusties, the city's most powerful and fuck- out-oftheir-minds street gang, who headquartered in South Boston but spread their tentacles throughout the city at large.
The logic was simple:
The only thing criminals loved almost as much as beating the shit out of coppers was watching coppers beat the shit out of each other.
Coppers beat the shit out of each other at Mechanics Hall during Boxing & Badges: Haymakers for Hope.
Ergo: criminals would gather at Mechanics Hall to watch them do so.
Danny Coughlin's godfather, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna, had decided to exploit this theory to the fullest for benefit of the BPD in general and the Special Squads Division he lorded over in particu lar. The men in Eddie McKenna's squad had spent the day mingling with the crowd, closing outstanding warrant after outstanding warrant with a surprisingly bloodless efficiency. They waited for a target to leave the main hall, usually to relieve himself, before they hit him over the head with a pocket billy and hauled him off to one of the paddy wagons that waited in the alley. By the time Danny stepped into the ring, most of the mugs with outstanding warrants had been scooped up or had slipped out the back, but a few--hopeless and dumb to the last--still milled about in the smoke-laden room on a floor sticky with spilt beer.