Screwed Read Free

and I’ll play it back later.”
    I’ve oversold it.
    “Screw you, Danny. Goddamn meetings, my ass. You had me going for a second, but I’ll take pity on you. Old Lady Madden went skiing, can you fucking believe that?”
    I presume this is a rhetorical question but Zeb waits for an answer.
    “No, I cannot believe that,” I say deliberately.
    “Well, believe it, Irish. This old lady strapped on her skis and struck out across the veld.”
    “Veld. Field. That’s not Hebrew is it?”
    “If you know what it ain’t, then why interrupt? It’s like you hate me.”
    If there is something more exhausting than a conversation with Dr. Zebulon Kronski then I will shoot myself in the face before attempting it.
    “Now it’s not downhill skiing, I’m not saying that, the woman was eighty-five for Christ’s sake, but she takes herself and her dog across the field to see her older sister.” Zeb giggles gleefully. “Older sister. You Irish people are made of volcanic material or some shit.”
    “Get on with it.”
    “There’s a storm brewing. Big smokestack clouds sitting on the hills, so Ma Madden decides to take a shortcut. A fateful decision, as it turns out.”
    I gotta sit through this performance. No choice.
    Fateful and smokestacks, fuck me.
    “She clambers over a stile, which it took me a while to find out what the hell a stile was, let me tell you. So the old gal is Forrest Gumping over this ditch with her ski pole up in the air when an honest-to-God bolt of lightning hits the pole and blows Ma Madden clear into the afterlife. A bolt of motherfucking lightning.”
    A bolt of motherfucking lightning. And there we have our weather reference, with apologies to Elmore.
    “You gotta be kidding me?” I ask, totally non-rhetorical. I really want to know if Zeb is shining me on. He does this kind of shit all the time and nothing is off-limits. Last year, in the middle of my own hair transplant procedure, he told me I had skull cancer. Kept it up for three solid hours.
    “I kid thee not, Dan. Boiled her eyeballs right in the sockets. One in a million.”
    This is bad news. The worst. Mike never struck me as a guy with shares in the forgive and forget business.
    “Maybe Mike is a bigger man than we think,” I say, totally grasping. “Maybe he realizes that the club is a good earner and he’s gonna let that thing we had slide.”
    Zeb chuckles. “Yeah? And maybe if my Uncle Mort had a pussy I’d snort cocaine off his ass and hump him. No way is Mike letting anything slide.”
    Uncle Mort and I have clinked glasses a couple of times, so now Zeb is responsible for yet another grotesque mental image that I will have to repress.
    I feel that sudden icy terror in my gut that you get when you’ve accidentally forwarded an e-mail about a grade-A asshole to the grade-A asshole.
    “Zeb, tell me bereaved Mike is not sitting opposite you listening to you blather on about his poor, recently deceased mother.”
    “’Course not,” says Zeb. “I ain’t a total moron.”
    “So how do you know he ain’t letting anything slide?”
    “I know this,” says Zeb, calm as you like, “because Mike sent one of his shamrock shmendriks over to pick me up. I’m in the backseat being chauffeured over to the Brass Ring right now.”
    “I better get over there,” I say, picking up my pace.
    “That’s what the shmendrik said,” says Zeb and hangs up.
    I am sincerely worried that my watchdog, Corporal Tommy Fletcher, has gone operational and wired this old lady up to a car battery. Violence never bothered him much even though his Facebook profile describes him as a loveable teddy bear. I would go so far as to say that some of Tommy’s more memorable wisecracks were inspired by moments of extreme violence. An example being one particular night in the Lebanon a few decades back when Tommy and I were Irish army peacekeepers trapped on a muddy rooftop with our colonel between a lookout tower and a bunker, listening to Hezbollah mortar