Mick by Chris Lynch Read Free Book Online Page A

a silly truck painted like a Jersey cow for his father until he inherits the little empire himself. “I deliver to some a them people, y’know, Terry, and, well,” he shook his head grimly, disgustedly, “well, you know what I’m talking about.”
    Terry nodded, nodded, soaked it up, winked, and let the Milkman kiss his ring before clearing out. The band started warming up. My god, the band . Please, not the band. Had it been a year already? This is the thing people wind up talking about most when the gas clears from another March 17. The band is a three-piece outfit made up of a drummer with only a snare drum; his wife, a versatile instrumentalist who alternates between tin whistle and accordion; and on vocals, every pipefitter and bookkeeper with inhibitions quelled enough and strength raised enough to grip a microphone. The three stand on a makeshift stage in the front window that takes up the space of two round cocktail tables, making for big fun every year when three or four soloists end their sets by plunging accidentally into the crowd.
    The first singer, a priest new to the parish, tore right into “My Wild Irish Rose.” The earnestness. That’s what I could kill them for. The earnestness. The senator was up on the TV screen screeching the same song at the same time as if it was some kind of bozo celebrity lip synch contest. Same heartfelt squints, same sour notes.
    “Brendan, man, you got a couple of Advil for me?”
    Brendan slid me another beer.
    “No, no, no, I don’t want another beer, I want something for my head .”
    Brendan slid me a shot of Jameson. And the copy of Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy that was always on display right beside it.
    I didn’t try to talk to Brendan anymore. Talk got harder anyway as the caterwaul grew louder all around us.
    “Semper friggin’ fi!” Borderline Bob screamed in Terry’s face. They called him that because he was, even by local standards, psychotic. He was pointing at the inscription tattooed on his large, heavily veined biceps. “Semper friggin’ fidelis,” which is exactly how it read. “Always friggin’ faithful. That’s me, Terry, man. That’s my motto. It was the motto when I was in the corps, and it’s even on my family’s goddamn coat of arms, if you can believe that.” Which I couldn’t, because old Bob’s not exactly semper fi with the truth. “But today, man, it’s you, Terry. You’re the faithful one. You are the true one. Y’know, I wish I could tear this sucker right off myself, and I would, I’d rip it right off and I’d stick it right onto you ’cause you’re the guy that deserves it.” And with that, Borderline Bob began what appeared to be a sincere effort to claw the tattoo right off his own arm.
    “Hey, I appreciate the thought, Bob, but could you maybe do that over there,” Terry said, motioning toward the corner by the one brick wall in the place.
    “Sure. A-course,” Bob said as he headed off in that direction, scratching, scratching, picking, as if he were just trying to lift a postage stamp off an envelope. “I love you, Terry, man. I love you,” he muttered, then, as he passed me, “Hi, Mickey.”
    “Hi, Bob.”
    “I ain’t no racist,” Marion said as he shook Terry’s hand. Marion, with his mother behind him, nodding. Marion lived with his mother and not with his father, who went out for a quick cold one twenty years ago and never came back. Marion Junior was named after his father and not after his mother, who was named Marian by some freak of luck that they just made worse by dumping the name on the kid and giving him probably the full set of nervous acne he still has at age twenty-five. “I ain’t no racist, Terry,” Marion Junior said.
    “He ain’t,” Marian said, and the two passed along to me, shaking my hand in what had become a sort of receiving line.
    “I’m workin’ for the Edison now, y’know,” Marion said. “Anything you need, you just let me know.”
    “They had it coming