Tengu by John Donohue Read Free Book Online Page A

platform in Brooklyn, loaded down with excess rolls, meats, and other surprises. It was somewhat embarrassing. Connor Burke: scholar, martial artist, bagman.
    “Michael,” she called out the window into the backyard.
    “Wha!” a voice demanded.
    “Connor’s here,” Dee called with a heavy Long Island accent. When she said my name, it sounded like ‘Kahna.’ Her kids said it the same way. Dee jerked her head toward the backyard. “Go see him. I’m gonna get a vase for these.”
    The backyard was where the men and children hid from women, the controlling elements in their lives. Even in the cold, Micky was out there, hovering over a barbecue. He wasn’t alone. Our brother Tommy was huffing across the yard, clutching a football while three small children clung, screaming, to his legs. They were having the time of their lives, but Tommy, never in the best of shape, looked like he was going to die. Off in the far corner of the yard, some older Burke kids were murmuring to each other and pressing the toes of their sneakers against the thin sheet of ice that had formed on a shallow puddle. They looked like prisoners planning the Big Break.
    I came out the door and Micky glanced at me. “Finally,” he said. “Now we can eat.” Micky is whipcord thin with a patch of white in his dark reddish-brown hair. He has a military mustache that bristles with energy. As a homicide cop he’s seen lots of things, the kind most of us don’t want to know about. It tends to make him cranky. The two of us have always been different in many ways. But when you peel us down to the core, the surface differences fall away and are unimportant. We’d been together, smelling blood, and lived through it. So when we look at each other, the recognition of experiences shared is like a current arcing through space and making a connection.
    But we don’t talk much about that. Micky squinted at me, then bent down, opened the lid on a big orange cooler, and handed me a bottle of beer. He picked up his own bottle and clicked the neck against mine. “Confusion to our enemies,” he said and took a sip.
    “Why should we be alone?” I replied.
    Micky’s partner Art came through the sliding glass door that led to the den. He smiled at me. Art is bigger than my brother and his hair is a lighter, sandy sort of red. But he has the same cop mustache. And the same cop eyes.
    “Deirdre wants to know how much longer, Mick,” Art said.
    Micky poked the meat with a finger. “Gimme five minutes and we’re set.”
    Art nodded at that. He started to head back to the house, then turned. “You talk to Connor about that thing yet?”
    My sister Irene’s husband Nick came into the yard just then. Micky jerked his head in Nick’s direction. “Not now,” he told Art.
    “There’s a thing?” I asked.
    “Oh yeah,” Art said. “Right up your alley.”
    “Art . . . ” Micky warned him. Then he looked at me. “After dinner. We’ll talk about the thing.”
    “And what a thing it is,” Art said over his shoulder as he headed back into the house.
    “I love it when you guys get technical,” I said to my brother.
    Nick rooted around in the cooler and pulled out a beer, too. He looked at us with bright, expectant eyes, waiting to be let in on things. We changed the subject.
    We had eaten and the light outside was fading. I always feel a bit overstuffed and sluggish after a family feed like this. But the kids hadn’t slowed down at all. They had gobbled down their meals and bolted for the yard, leaving paper plates piled haphazardly in the trash and a trail of potato chip crumbs that stretched from one end of the house to another. Twilight deepened and in the strengthening invisibility of night, they hooted like animals from far off jungles.
    The den is Micky’s lair. It’s littered with old furniture and bad decorations. My brother paneled it himself, and in spots the wooden sheets of fake walnut are coming away from the furring strips. There’s a neat