Broken by Mary Ann Gouze Read Free Book Online

“I’ll go.”
    When the doctor and his mother were gone, George turned to Walter. “Go home, Lipinski. We don’t need you here.”
    Sarah placed her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “If there’s anything we can do . . .”
    “Go home!” said George. “That’s what you can do!”
     
    *     *     *
     
    Twenty minutes later, Walter dropped his wife off in front of their house. He turned the car around and coasted back down the hill.
    Except for the yellow glow of the furnaces, the sky was black and the chilly October air was heavy with the choking stench of sulfur. Company railroad cars rumbled and clanked northward along the embankment above Tavern Row. Except for the train and the usual din of the mill, the street was quiet. On the corner across from the mill’s main gate, the red neon Iron City Beer sign above Mickey’s Pub glowed eerily in the night.
    Walter opened the pub door to the familiar blend of smoke, sweat, and stale beer. At the thirty-foot bar, elbow to elbow mill workers sat in front of their drinks with their heads down. Along the wall, more laborers sat at small tables, some still wearing their mill-hunk jackets and hard-hats. A young man with pink cheeks and blond hair quickly slid off his barstool so Walter could sit down.
    The cigar-chewing bartender, in a thin T-shirt, put a double shot of Jim Beam on the bar in front of Walter. Then, with the skill of experience, he filled three mugs with perfectly foamed beer, sliding one to Walter and the others to the men on either side.
    Walter reached into his jacket for his lighter. Before he retrieved the lighter a hand reached from behind with a ready flame. Walter lit the cigarette, parked it in an ashtray, and tossed the jigger of whiskey down his throat. He then placed a five-dollar bill on the bar and picked up his beer. The young blond man, who had given Walter his seat, asked politely, “How is Mr. Siminoski?”
    “Alive,” said Walter.
    To the left of Walter a hard-hat foundry worker, his entire face covered with black dust, looked at Walter through eyes circled in white. “Ain’t that the way your old man got killed?” he asked. “By a tipped ladle?”
    “Nope,” Walter replied. “The bastard drank himself to death.”
    The hard-hat shrugged and turned back to his beer. At a nearby table, Mike, a lanky Irishman, stood up raising his beer mug. With foam spilling over his callused hand, he looked around the room. One by one the mill workers rose to their feet and lifted their glasses. “To our hero, Walter Lipinski.” A gray haired pensioner removed his baseball cap and bowed his head, adding “And may God help poor Dobie.” The workers murmured a solemn Amen and seated themselves.
    Walter tossed down another double. He pushed the five-dollar bill toward the bartender. The bartender pushed it back.
    From the far end of the bar someone called out, “Lipinski! Hey! Lipinski! You just come out from tha hospital?”
    Walter leaned forward to look down the bar to the brawny Italian, who, in order to keep a mass of jet-black curls off his forehead, wore his blue striped railroad cap backwards. Droplets of foam edged his full mustache and he wiped them away with the back of his hand. Walter took a long drink of cold beer and burped.
    “What’ a you go back to hospital for?” the Italian called out as railroad men at that end of the bar gathered around him.
    “Who wants to know?” Walter asked, although he already knew. What he didn’t know was what Salvador Tamero and his railroad friends were doing in Mickey’s Pub. Tamero, an engineer on a company train, very rarely went to any bar. Mostly he was known for being a family man. He was also Dobie Siminoski’s neighbor.
    “You blind?” yelled the Italian. “You know damn-a-well who wants to know! Why’d ya go back to St. Luke’s? What you hope to find there? A dead compadre?”
    Walter leaned back on his barstool and studied his own blurred image in the murky mirror,