Jessie Tell told Luther that the last time a man had seriously fucked with the Deacon Broscious—“I mean lack-of-all-respect type of fucking?” Jessie said—Deacon up and sat on the son of a bitch. Squirmed in place until he couldn’t hear the screams no more, looked down and saw that the dumb nigger’d given up the ghost, just lay in the dirt looking at nothing, mouth wide open, one arm stretched and reaching.

“Mighta told me this before I took a job from the man,” Luther said.

“You running numbers, Country. You think you do that sort of thing for a nice man?”

Luther said, “Told you not to call me Country no more.”

They were in the Gold Goose, getting loose after a long day smiling for white folk across the tracks, and Luther could feel the liquor reaching that level in his blood where everything slowed down right nice and his eyesight sharpened and he felt nothing was impossible.

Luther would soon have ample time to consider how he’d fallen into running numbers for the Deacon, and it would take him a while to realize that it had nothing to do with money—hell, with the tips he made at the Hotel Tulsa he was making nearly twice what he’d made at the munitions factory. And it wasn’t like he hoped to have any future in the rackets. He’d seen enough men back in Columbus who’d thought they could climb that ladder; usually when they fell from it, they fell screaming. So why? It was that house on Elwood, he guessed, the way it crowded him until he felt the eaves dig into his shoulders. And it was Lila, much as he loved her—and he was surprised to realize how much he did sometimes, how much the sight of her blinking awake with one side of her face pressed to the pillow could fire a bolt through his heart. But before he could even get his head around that love, maybe enjoy it a little bit, here she was carrying a child, she only twenty and Luther just twenty-three. A child. A rest-of-your-life responsibility. A thing that grew up while you grew old. Didn’t care if you were tired, didn’t care if you were trying to concentrate on something else, didn’t care if you wanted to make love. A child just was, thrust right into the center of your life and screaming its head off. And Luther, who’d never really known his father, was damn sure certain he’d live up to his responsibility, like it or not, but until then he wanted to live this here life at full tilt, with a little danger thrown in to spice it up, something to remember when he sat on his rocker and played with his grandkids. They’d be looking at an old man smiling like a fool, while he’d be remembering the young buck who’d run through the Tulsa night with Jessie and danced just enough on the other side of the law to say it didn’t own him.