After the Philadelphia arrest in May 1929, the work book lost my name faster than it lost its greasy fingerprints. The public news concerned a concealed weapon, a conviction, and a year’s sentence. For me the immediate question was whether I could keep my car. I had never reached the private audience I meant to request. Now the men who distributed assignments said there was nothing regular available. I took a day hauling flour and returned home white from collar to cuffs, paid for something anybody could name.
Lawful hauling gave me sore shoulders and no passenger to wait upon. I leased my car to another driver on days I worked beside the freight wagons, keeping enough of the receipts for repairs. Through that summer and into winter, I measured expenses in loads lifted. Rose would accept payment for laundry but no contribution I could not afford. When I carried her coal upstairs from the cellar, she paid me with supper. We could sit together again without my looking toward the door.
The truck had not vanished during those years. Leo told me Frank kept changing the repair demand and Bruno kept refusing it. Men visited, argued, and left; I was not present for most of it. Then, one cold afternoon late in the year, Leo came running beside a wagon I was unloading. He caught the tailboard, breathing through his mouth. “He’s taking it apart.” I set down the flour sack. Leo pulled a length of broken strap from his pocket, as if that could explain the rest.
At Frank’s yard, a man was loading a detached wheel into a small commercial van. Beyond him stood the disputed truck, stripped unevenly, its hood raised over an empty space I did not remember. Leo ducked past the van and ran at Frank with the strap wrapped around his fist. I reached him before he reached the office. Catching his coat dragged us both sideways into a pile of worn tires. He fought to get up. I pinned his forearm against rubber and told him to look at me.
Frank came out carrying a heavy wrench. “Take him off my property.” Leo strained beneath me. I had to choose whether to hold him for Frank or get him away. I stood, hauling Leo upright, and put myself between them. “Set that down.” Frank did not. Behind us, the van driver slid his door shut. I asked what had been sold. Frank told me repairs and storage did not pay themselves. I could see missing pieces; I could not calculate ownership or a lawful bill by looking.
I got Leo as far as the gate with one belt loop torn clean off in my fist. Danny Ives was waiting on the pavement. I had called him to carry us home, the first time I'd asked him to drive me since the day of the laundry wagon. He had the passenger door open and a hand up. From the van behind us came Walt Sayer's voice. "Let them see who gets him." It took me a second to understand that the wheel going out in that van was bait. The man they had come to collect was Danny.
I went under the raised arm of a man in the gateway and reached the car. Walt fired across the open door. Danny's raised hand hit the car roof and slid off it. Leo pulled me down behind the front wheel. I could have stayed there and watched the van go. Instead I climbed onto the running board while it was moving. I got my fingers into Walt's collar and saw, on the seat beside him, the patched brown glove I'd paid to have mended for Paul. Walt caught my wrist in the door. When Leo got to me I was sitting in the gutter trying to straighten two fingers. Danny died before either of us could get his door shut. The family let me pay for replacing the door glass but wouldn't have me at the service. I had brought the fight to his car.
At Bruno's shed that evening I told him who had fired. I didn't tell him about the glove. A man can lend a glove. He can also keep silent about one because he wants to share a front seat with its owner again. Bruno wanted a driver from Frank in return for the one who'd died. Leo said, "Which driver? The first one you can lay hold of?" I stood beside Leo and promised to bring the two outfits together, in person, to put my account to Walt's face. Until then Bruno agreed to keep his people off the drivers. I was the one who asked Leo to stand beside me at that meeting. I had just seen what standing beside me cost.
Early in 1930 I found Paul outside a garage, polishing a windshield on a car I used to drive. He had steady assignments now, including calls that had once come to me. I asked whether there was room for another driver. He wiped the glass directly before my face, making me step back from the spray. “You’ve got your freight work.” “I can do both.” He folded the cloth and opened the driver’s door, leaving me outside its sweep. “Not beside me.” Then he settled into my former place and waited until I moved away.