Danny can’t argue with that. The Irish who could got out to the suburbs—Cranston, Warwick, down to South County—when the Blacks started moving in.
“So you’re going to offer them what, the rest?” John asks.
“I’m not going to offer them anything that belongs to us,” Danny says. “I’m going to offer them what belongs to the Morettis.”
“I don’t know,” John says. “Getting in bed with the Blacks . . .”
“Times change,” Bernie says. “We have to change with them. If we don’t, we’re dinosaurs.”
Liam asks, “What’s wrong with dinosaurs?”
“Do you see any around, Liam?” Bernie asks.
Danny gets the okay to approach Marvin.
The Top Hat Club is mostly empty about two in the afternoon, except for Marvin and his guys sitting in a booth in the back. Danny is pretty aware that he’s about the only white guy ever to walk in there, if you don’t count the cops coming to get their monthly envelopes, and one of Marvin’s guys gets right into his face. “What do you want?”
“I want to talk to Marvin.”
“Who are you?”
“Danny Ryan.”
“Wait here.”
Danny watches him walk back and talk into Marvin’s ear. Then Marvin slides out of the booth and walks up to Danny. Tall motherfucker, Marvin Jones, solidly built, looking good—gray suit, red shirt, red tie. Marvin’s done all right for himself, Danny thinks.
Better than me.
“Danny Ryan,” Marvin says. “I heard about you.”
“We played ball against each other,” Danny says.
“Is that right?” Marvin answers. “I don’t remember.”
“No reason you should,” Danny says.
“You here to play ball now?” Marvin asks.
“Sort of.”
Danny lays it out. At the end of the day, they both want the same thing—the guineas out of South Providence. Marvin has been competing with the Morettis for years for who gets to sell heroin to his people. Marvin is of the strong opinion that it should be him. John Murphy, Danny says, is ready to share that opinion.
“Is that a fact?” Marvin asks.
“Could be,” Danny says. “John wants a sit-down.”
Marvin smiles. Then he says, “All right, on one condition.”
“What?”
Marvin says, “Murphy has to invite us for dinner. At the Gloc.”
Danny tries to remember the last time a Black ever came into the Gloc and can’t. Probably because no Black has ever stepped into the Gloc, not for long, anyway. No, there was that Black woman Liam brought in one time, just to stick it in everyone’s eye, but she was a model who’d been in Vogue so she got a pass.
Danny smiles back. “Okay.”
He goes and tells John, who thinks about it for a minute, then asks, “The Blacks, what do they eat?”
“I dunno,” Danny says. “Food.”
“I know ‘food,’ but what? Soul food?”
This amuses Danny, because John has probably just taught himself to say “Blacks” and now he’s catching up on “soul food”？
“I dunno what soul food is,” Danny answers. “Pork chops? Collard greens?”
“What are collard greens?”
“I don’t know. I just heard that.”
John settles on steaks and baked potatoes, which is good, because that’s about as much as the cooks at the Gloc can manage. Now it’s all set out at a long table—steaks, potatoes wrapped in tinfoil, green beans, a salad. Some bottles of wine, beer in buckets of ice, bottles of whiskey.
“You think I should have gotten grape soda?” John asks when Danny comes in.
“What?”
“I heard the Blacks like grape soda.”
“Who told you that?”
“Kennedy that runs the movie theater,” John answers. “He says when he has a movie the Blacks like, he stocks up on grape soda.”
“Black kids, maybe,” Danny says. He don’t know that they even make grape soda anymore. Hasn’t had a grape soda since he drank one in a single gulp in a bet with Jimmy and it came up out his nose.
A few minutes later Bobby Bangs sticks his head in and says, “They’re here.”
“Let them in,” John says.
Pigs flying all around, Danny thinks.
Three guys come with Marvin, each of them playing the angry Black man role, scowling, each of them with a bulge under his jacket. Marvin takes one look at the spread, hands a hundred bucks in cash to one of his underlings, and says, “KFC.”