Mick Read Free Page B

black beers. Stout. It was a liquid rainbow arcing around us as Terry’s buddies finished their meals and gathered with their pints, always the big pint vases, pints of rusty Bass or Sam Adams, gold Foster’s or Ballantine or, of course, old opaque Guinness. The common thread, of course, was the green shirt of whoever hovering behind each glass. I had drunk my Harp and my stout and had choked down my little bits of onion and bacon polluted by contact with the rest of the foul boiled mess, and I was teetering. Terry, trooper that he was, pounded down the drinks, licked his plate so clean that there was nothing left on it but his ever-sweet breath, and slyly polished off most of my meal without giving away our family shame. And feeling mighty proud of himself through it all.
    “Any balls in the room?” Terry bleated, rubbing his full belly. “Who wants a game?” He pointed toward the tabletop hockey game with the big Plexiglas bubble over it, against the wall under the TV. Terry strutted over to the game, and six guys followed. When he took up his spot at the controls and looked up to see that I was still across the room, glued stupid to my stool, Terry came back and retrieved me, towing me by the shirt.
    Terry played the first game and won, beating the fatter of the big fat Cormac brothers 6-0. That meant Fatter Cormac had to buy him a beer. It also meant, according to Terry’s rules of order, Fatter had to buy me a beer. “No way, that ain’t the rule,” Fatter said. “Really, I don’t need it,” I said. Terry glowered. Fatter bought. I drank.
    Danny stepped up and promptly beat the pants off Terry. “I quit,” said Terry, which I don’t even know what that was supposed to mean, quitting after the game was already over. I guess it meant he was quitting the loser-buys-the-beer part, since he didn’t buy. Instead he slinked over to the little TV, the one with the Nintendo on it.
    “You goin’ to the parade tomorrow?” Augie asked from over Terry’s shoulder.
    Terry hit the pause button on the Nintendo basketball game, making the electronic musical tweedle-dee-ooo noise for pause. Terry turned around and threw Augie a disgusted look. “What kind of a ignorant question is that?” he said, then turned back to his game. Tweedle-dee-ooo.
    It was sort of a dumb question because the thought of a St. Patrick’s Day parade without Terry was like the thought of no parade at all—unthinkable. Augie knew that; he was just looking for fire.
    “You goin?” Augie asked me.
    I shrugged. I shrugged because I hadn’t thought much about whether or not I was going to the parade. I shrugged because I didn’t much go in for any old parade crap anyhow. I shrugged because at that point, four pints full, I would have shrugged if Augie’d asked me what my name was. Anyhow, it wasn’t a true question, with several possible answers. Not in this place it wasn’t.
    “Whatdya mean, ya don’t know? Ya don’t know if you’re goin’ to the parade? Where’s ya goddamn pride, man? Y’know, this is the day, our day, every year when they bring the damn TV cameras down and we get to look into ’em and say yo and we get to see ourselves later on the news sayin’ ya, that’s right, we’re still here, and this is who we are and the rest a ya can just chomp on my inky dinky pink thing. It’s a important muthuh of a day.”
    “I guess so,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t care about what Augie said. Augie, with his thick curly hair like black scrambled eggs falling over his low forehead, his acne-torn face, and his medication that kept him under control and that sometimes he didn’t take, Augie was kind of frightening even though he was no bigger than me. So I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t care about what he was saying, it was just that, well, I didn’t care about what he was saying.
    “You guess so?” he snapped. “You guess ? You know, you young dudes just don’t know, do you? Youse guys got