Mick by Chris Lynch Read Free Book Online

in nearly drove me to the floor.
    Which would have been fine, actually. I would have just lain there the way smart people do when there’s a fire, letting the smoke and noxious fumes float over them, the flames lap away everybody else. I would keep my nose pressed against the dusty floor, my arms covering my head, and then in a while I’d get up and walk calmly out, stepping over all the dead bodies. No such luck though. They wouldn’t let me go down.
    “Here, here, c’mere, boy, here, have this.” Some old duffer I recognized but didn’t know was jamming a slab of corned beef between a couple of slices of Wonder bread that had some meat-juice stains around the crust. “Here ya go. They’re all outta the free dinners, a-course, but here, you take this.” The meat kept wiggling out of the bread, and the old guy kept wedging it back in with his cracked, brown-speckled, sclerotic hands, then waving it all in my face again.
    “No, really,” I said, turning my head ninety degrees and closing one stung eye. “I want you to keep it.”
    He didn’t hear me, or wouldn’t accept it, because once again, the sandwich was in my face. “Here, son, have this, you earned it.”
    “I don’t want it,” I screamed, drawing some looks, making the old man stare down into his plate and mumble. “Sorry,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. He brightened, tried to talk to me. I walked away. A spot opened up at the bar and I snatched it. As soon as I took up my spot on the stool, Terry was there.
    “You could give up that seat,” Terry said to the man next to me, one of the part-time, green beer, St. Patrick’s Day rent-a-micks. The man hopped right off the stool.
    “So, whadja think? Fun, or what?” Terry said to me as Brendan slammed two cold ones down in front of us. I pushed mine away.
    “Get this out of here, man,” I said.
    Brendan pushed it back. “Get outta town. You’re a hero. Drink the beer.”
    People are always trying to force me to swallow things. “I’m not a damn hero,” I said, and before I could slide the beer away again, Terry grabbed it.
    “He’s right, he ain’t a damn hero,” he said. “He’s just an apprentice. I’m a hero.”
    “That you are, boy,” said Tommy Coughlin, an off-duty firefighter who draped both big hands over Terry’s shoulders. “You’re the man, Terry, preserver of the faith, keeper of the flame, righter of all things—”
    “Shut up, Tommy,” Brendan laughed. “Go home to the wife.”
    “Don’t stop him now,” Terry said. “I think he’s soundin’ pretty good. Just a little full a the old blarney today, that’s all he is.”
    “Full a the old barley , ya mean,” Tommy said, laughing, exchanging fist smashes with Terry. “But no shit, man, y’know, I ain’t no prejudiced, you know that, but what you guys done today, that was right, it was the right thing.”
    “Preserved the purity of the day, is what ya done,” said Mrs. Doherty, a sixty-year-old semi-widow with her husband, Jim, slumped at a table across the room. “Now I ain’t no bigot, mind ya, but them people had no business in our parade. You fellas did the decent thing.” She slapped me hard on the back, nearly sending me into the cheap bottom-shelf booze. The admiring crowd gathered in a semicircle around us. Terry loved it, swinging all the way around to survey his flock from the pulpit, leaning back with his elbows on the bar. I held my face in my hands, looking into the yellow mirror with the fake marbled squiggle all through it behind the bar.
    Up on the big TV, cable access was playing the annual St. Patrick’s political breakfast, where the dwarfy needlenose president of the state legislature sings lame sappy Irish ballads and ridicules everybody who has a real job. It’s like a TV Mass around here, but this time Terry had the senator beat for attention.
    The Milkman came over to solemnly shake Terry’s hand. They call him the Milkman because he is, actually a milkman. Drives