Mick Read Free

America” joined by everybody in the place.
    Even Sully. Even, after a glare from Baba, me. I wasn’t sure if I loved this America so much right about then, but I was sure I loved it better than I loved a punch in the head.
    Then they all went back to pumping iron. Harder, faster, meaner than before. Nobody talked to anybody else, but everybody laughed, a lot, at nothing. They were like a scary race of muscle-bound ’droids pumping and laughing, barking and spitting, out of control.
    Sully didn’t laugh, and neither did I. We never seemed to be able to muster up the same kind of spirit those guys had.

Who Are You?
    “COMIN’, MICK? ”
    It wasn’t really a question. My brother doesn’t usually ask me anything. Thought I might answer anyway, though.
    “No, I’m not coming.”
    “Put your damn jacket on. You’re comin’.”
    So I put my damn jacket on. Blue dungaree, like always. If it’s seventy out, I wear the blue dungaree. If it snows, the blue dungaree.
    “Where’s your green? Where’s your goddamn green? And your hat?”
    “I don’t like to wear hats, Terry. They make me feel like I need a shower and I have to keep scratching my head.”
    “Don’t gimme no lip. Go back in there and put on the green and white striper. We gotta get goin’.”
    Where we had to get going to was Terry’s bar. Not that he actually owned the bar, not quite, anyway. It was just the place where he spent most of his time and all his money. Saw him one time walk in there with his paycheck, sign it, and hand the whole thing right over to the laughing bartender. The bar, a place called Bloody Sundays, has a reputation around the city as sort of the Hard Rock Cafe of Irishness, which means that on St. Patrick’s Day, which was tomorrow, the place is rotten with politicians and priests scarfing up the free boiled dinner, telling total crap stories about themselves and spending ten times the cost of the meal on gassy draft beers.
    So what they do, to show their appreciation for the regulars like Terry, who eat their other three hundred and sixty-four suppers there every year, is they put out the free corned beef the night before St. Pat’s. That way they can say thanks to their slushy, loyal clientele. That way they can protect their roots rep as a down and dirty neighborhood bar. That way they can get the heavyweights started drinking like maniacs twenty-four hours early. St. Patrick’s Eve.
    But why does he need me? Because I don’t know why, I don’t know, I don’t, but for some reason St. Patrick’s Day makes the people around here, even the not so warm and fuzzy ones like my brother, it makes them all gooey and clannish.
    “Gotta have me boon ’round me,” he said as he swept through the door after work. Which meant he was already drinking, on the job.
    “How sweet,” my mother said, about the boon business. She’d been drinking on the job that day too, cleaning the house. Now she and my old man were headed out to the Knights of Columbus, which is a Catholic club kind of like the Elks, only you drink your eyeballs out under a picture of the Sacred Heart instead of under a picture of the PT-109 . They were going to tip back a couple of jars before heading to the night jobs—she the waitress, he the bartender at the O’Asis, which makes the Bloody look like the Ritz Bar. Then they’ll have a couple more during and after work. Get the picture? So Ma finds this brotherly love stuff just lovely, and Dad thinks... well, to be honest, nobody in the world knows what Dad thinks. About anything.
    “Piss off,” Terry spat as they went out.
    “Come home at a reasonable hour,” Ma chirped.
    “I won’t bail you out,” Dad said.
    After Terry sent me to Irish up, I came back out wearing the rugby shirt with the four-inch-wide kelly green-and-white horizontal stripes, deeply wrinkled from life at the bottom of my closet.
    “ There ya go,” he said as he jammed the hat low over my brow. Without even rolling my eyes