Free The Last Tomorrow by Ryan David Jahn Page A

sweet, man. You should’ve been there.’
    Fingers drives down to 57th Street every Saturday night to play trumpet, the only speck of white in a six-piece Negro bebop band. Eugene’s gone out to see them several times now. He was
nervous, and got a few stares, the first time he showed up at the club where they play, but things loosened up once everyone realized he and Fingers were friends, and he ended up having a hell of a
good time. Now when he goes, rare as that is, the regulars know him by name. He even took a date once.
    ‘Next time.’
    ‘All right, I’m holding you to it. What’s your load like today?’
    When Fingers isn’t blowing his horn he’s usually got something else going on. He knows everybody and has his fingers in everything, which is how he got the nick. People come to him
with goods they need to shift – one day it’ll be a truckload of Canadian cigarettes, the next a duffel bag full of heroin – and he gets a percentage if he can find a buyer.
Doesn’t matter what it is, he always finds one.
    He’s asked Eugene to help him out once or twice, just need you to drive a truck to the corner of Slauson and Crenshaw, park it, and walk away, but Eugene doesn’t have the temperament
for criminal activity. Simply knowing he was driving stolen goods or illegal substances would make him sweat. One sideways glance from a cop and he’d crumble. The money’d be nice
– the only people who don’t seem to know the value of money are those who’ve always had it – but Eugene’s simply too square for that kind of work, and knows it. He
won’t even sell reefers off his truck, as some of the other milkmen do.
    He glances down at his clipboard, looks over the orders.
    ‘Pretty full. You know Sundays. Everybody loading up for the week.’ He hands Fingers a carbon copy of today’s haul, written in his neat block lettering.
    ‘Dave, Gary,’ Fingers says, ‘help Eugene out.’
    ‘I’ll get the ice,’ Gary says, and heads off.
    Divco manufactured a few hundred refrigerated trucks in 1940, but the Japanese ended production with Operation Z. After Pearl Harbor was bombed, Divco’s resources were instead diverted to
the war effort, and despite the war being over for seven years now, the company has yet to pick up where it left off, so they use ice to keep everything cold while en route. And occasionally Eugene
will chop off a small block for folks who don’t yet have refrigerators of their own. There are still a few people along his route who make do with their old ice boxes, setting their eggs and
milk on chicken-wire shelves so the cold can permeate.
    ‘What’s first on the list?’ Dave asks.
    ‘Two hundred and fourty-three quarts of milk.’
    Dave nods, then grabs the pallet truck and pulls it behind him, like an uncooperative dog, toward the walk-ins. As he approaches them, a stainless-steel door swings open and Gary emerges from a
freezer with two large blocks of ice in a wheelbarrow. In just under fifteen minutes Eugene’s truck is loaded.
    He thanks Dave and Gary, tells Fingers he’ll see him day after tomorrow, and gets into his truck. He starts the engine and rolls down the ramp, through the alley, and out to the street.
When he hits his route he’ll swivel the seat aside and drive standing up so he can hop on and off the truck more quickly, but for now he’ll take the cushion.
    He heads east toward Boyle Heights where he delivers, rolling past stacks of newspapers sitting on street corners, waiting for newsboys to arrive. In front of him the early morning light is
creating a halo around the jagged urban horizon, the day finally beginning. It will be, he’s certain, a day like any other day. And he’s right.
    Today will be a day to forget.
    He’ll finish his route and grab lunch at a diner. He’ll sip coffee, smoke a cigarette, and read from a paperback novel while his food digests. Lunch will be followed by several
drinks at the bar on the first floor of the Galt