Live by Night

Danny nodded, animated now. “Nora started it. She got a job with this company, Silver Frame? Jews, but good guys. She was handling all their bookkeeping and then they asked her to do some side work with publicity and even costumes. It was that kinda outfit back then, just everyone pitching in, the directors making coffee, the camera guys walking the lead actress’s dog.”

“Movies?” Joe said.

Danny laughed. “So, wait, it gets better. Her bosses meet me and one of them, Herm Silver, great guy, lot on the ball, he asks me — you ready? — he asks me if I ever did stunts.”

“Fuck are stunts?” Joe lit a cigarette.

“You see an actor fall off a horse? It ain’t him. It’s a stuntman. A professional. Actor slips on a banana peel, trips over a curb, hell, runs down a street? Look close at the screen next time because it ain’t him. It’s me or someone like me.”

“Wait,” Joe said, “how many movies have you been in?”

Danny thought about it for a minute. “I’m guessing seventy-five?”

“Seventy-five?” Joe took the cigarette from his mouth.

“I mean, a lot of them were shorts. That’s when—”

“Jesus, I know what shorts are.”

“You didn’t know what stunts were, though, did you?”

Joe raised his middle finger.

“So, yeah, I’ve been in a bunch. Even wrote a few of the shorts.”

Joe’s mouth opened wide. “You wrote…?”

Danny nodded. “Little things. Kids on the Lower East Side try to wash a dog for a rich lady, they lose the dog, the rich lady calls the cops, high jinks ensue, that sort of thing.”

Joe dropped his cigarette to the floor before it could burn his fingers. “How many have you written?”

“Five so far, but Herm thinks I got a knack for it, wants me to try for a full-length feature soon, become a scenarist.”

“What’s a scenarist?”

“Guy who writes movies, genius,” Danny said and flipped his own middle finger back at Joe.

“So, wait, where’s Nora in all this?”

“California.”

“I thought you were in New York.”

“We were. But Silver Frame made a couple of movies real cheap lately that turned out to be hits. Meanwhile, Edison’s fucking suing everyone in New York over camera patents, but those patents don’t mean shit in California. Plus the weather there is nice three hundred sixty days out of three sixty-five, so everyone’s heading out there. The Silver brothers? They just figured now’s the time. Nora headed out a week ago because she’s become head of production — I mean, just flying up their ladder — and they’ve got me scheduled for stunts on a show called The Lawmen of the Pecos in three weeks. I just came back to tell Dad I was heading west again, tell him to come visit maybe, once he retired. I didn’t know when I’d ever see him again. Hell, see you again.”

“I’m happy for you,” Joe said, still shaking his head at the absurdity of it. Danny’s life — boxer, cop, union organizer, businessman, sheriff’s deputy, stuntman, budding writer — was an American life, if ever there was one.

“Come,” his brother said.

“What?”

“When you get out of here. Come join us. I’m serious. Fall off a horse for money and pretend to get shot and fall through sugar windows made up to look like glass. Lie in the sun the rest of the time, meet a starlet by the pool.”

For a moment, Joe could see it — another life, a dream of blue water, honey-skinned women, palm trees.

“Only a brisk, two-week train ride away, little brother.”

Joe laughed some more, picturing it.

“It’s good work,” Danny said. “You ever want to come out and join me, I could train you.”

Joe, still smiling, shook his head.

“It’s honest work,” Danny said.

“I know,” Joe said.

“You could stop living a life where you look over your shoulder all the time.”

“It’s not about that.”

“What’s it about?” Danny seemed authentically curious.

“The night. It’s got its own set of rules.”

“Day’s got rules too.”

“Oh, I know,” Joe said, “but I don’t like them.”

They stared through the mesh at each other for a long time.

“I don’t understand,” Danny said softly.

“I know you don’t,” Joe said. “You, you buy into all this stuff about good guys and bad guys in the world. A loan shark breaks a guy’s leg for not paying his debt, a banker throws a guy out of his home for the same reason, and you think there’s a difference, like the banker’s just doing his job but the loan shark’s a criminal. I like the loan shark because he doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and I think the banker should be sitting where I’m sitting right now. I’m not going to live some life where I pay my fucking taxes and fetch the boss a lemonade at the company picnic and buy life insurance. Get older, get fatter, so I can join a men’s club in Back Bay, smoke cigars with a bunch of assholes in a back room somewhere, talk about my squash game and my kid’s grades. Die at my desk, and they’ll already have scraped my name off the office door before the dirt’s hit the coffin.”

“But that’s life,” Danny said.

“That’s a life. You want to play by their rules? Go ahead. But I say their rules are bullshit. I say there are no rules but the ones a man makes for himself.”