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 flat 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 final 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 fifty-fifty between the St. Thomas Asylum for Crippled Orphans and the policemen’s own fraternal organization, 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 find 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-of-their-minds street gang, who headquartered in South Boston but spread their tentacles throughout the city at large.