The Railroad by Neil Douglas Newton Read Free Book Online Page B

name. “Sounds French.”
    “It’s Laphroaig, like boy. ”
    Colm poured my drink and I raised my glass. “To New York,” was all I could think of at first. “Liver ho!” I added, to Dennis in particular.
    “Yeah,” said a man down the bar who I’d never seen before. “To the ones who died”. A few other glasses were raised and the toast completed.
    “Oh god!” Dennis screamed, holding up his glass and studying it. “This is awful.”
    “What’s liver ho mean?” someone asked.
    Colm snorted. “It’s their own language. No one knows what it means. They won’t say.”
    Dennis drained the water that Colm had placed in front of him. “Okay,” he said, fixing me with his best glare. “What’s been with you lately? You don’t say anything when I call you, you don’t come out.”
    I wished he hadn’t asked me anything; the feeling in my gut was back. “You ever get into a car accident?” I asked him.
    “You’re going to tell me about the subway.”
    “I can’t tell you about the subway. There’s no way to tell you.”
    “Come on, Mike! This is me. This is Dennis."
    I had to laugh. He was drunk and he was saying the deep things that drunken people say. “Maybe I should talk about this later. All I can tell you is that it was something so different than what I’ve experienced as Mike the systems analyst that it can’t really be put into perspective in the Emerald Isle.”
    Dennis looked crestfallen; I couldn’t blame him; I was essentially shutting my best friend out of a part of my life. But he couldn’t have been part of it. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Dennis. I’m going to come out of this. That’s why I mentioned the car accident. I remember a friend of mine who spun out of control when he was getting on the Long Island Expressway. He spun a couple of times and missed another car by a few feet. For a couple of days everything was different for him and he couldn’t really make anyone understand.”
    “So you’ve had your couple of days,” Dennis countered. “It’s time to come out of it.”
    “It’s different when the car accident is all around you.”
    He stared at me. Then he ordered another Laphroaig. I guess it was as close to expressing solidarity as he could get at the moment.
    The drink came and we both sipped. I watched Dennis make nasty faces as he tasted the whiskey. Then a man walked out of the back room. He was of medium height and he walked like a bantam cock, all full of anger and bullshit. I’d seen him somewhere before.
    “Oh shit!” whispered Colm.
    I looked over. “That’s Sean, the owner’s son, fresh from the army,” Dennis told me. “He’s feeling his oats I guess.”
    “He wasn’t a lot of fun before and now he’s worse,” Colm added.
    Sean pulled his drink from the bar and stood, legs spread wide, staring up at the TV. I had attempted to ignore the talking heads on the screen, though most of the people at the bar were transfixed. A commentator was discussing the deployment of the Al-Qaeda terrorists and how the entire attack on the Trade Center had been planned over years. Every once in a while Sean would scowl at the screen and scream some obscenity, making an already nervous crowd jump in their seats.
    Colm sighed. “He’s been this way since he was a lad. Now it’s worse.”
    “Why doesn’t his father take care of his patrons and tell his son to shut up?” Dennis asked.
    “Declan is up in the Bronx tending to his other bar. Believe me; if he was here he’d kick the boy’s ass. Tonight, he’s in charge.”
    We watched as one of Sean’s friends tried to calm him, gesturing toward a chair. “I’ll buy you a drink,” I heard his friend say.
    Sean rounded on him like he was a terrorist himself and screamed, “Shut up! I’ve got my bayonet at home and I know what I’m going to do with it!”
    His friend raised his hands to calm him further but Sean ignored him, turning his attention back to the TV. Colm raised his eyes to the