Mick (2 page)

He was just looking, anyway. Giving it a test run, the way anybody does when they’re thinking of joining a club. They should have just left him alone; he would have gone home and told his friends about the place, then they would have told
him
about the place, and everything could be put back normal. But they couldn’t let it lie. First to move was Baba. He got up off the weight bench and made a gracious sweeping gesture with his hand to offer it to the guy. The black guy nodded. He didn’t smile or anything, but his face lifted somewhat. He took it as an invitation, and lay right down on the bench, with all the weight on it that Baba was lifting even though this guy weighed probably forty pounds less than Baba.

I knew what Baba was thinking. Not that it’s cold fusion to figure out what Baba’s thinking. But he figured that guy couldn’t lift the weight. Baba himself even acted as spotter for the guy, and I knew then that something good wasn’t going to happen.

What Baba hadn’t planned on, though, was that the guy pressed the weight. Pressed it right up. Not like it wasn’t hard or anything, but slow and steady and perfectly balanced. Great form, he wasn’t no rookie. Then he brought it down to his chest to do it again.

Baba and the muscle boys stood with their mouths hanging open, which, again, is not that unusual. But it meant something for a change. Almost without moving, a bunch of them pulled in tighter around the guy. And he noticed. They weren’t coming to study his form. He got edgy, broke the concentration that made it possible to lift impossible weight. His right arm started going up a little ahead of his left, and there he was cooked. The weight shifted, his right foot came off the floor as he struggled to balance the load, but the whole thing began to sink back down on him.

The music got louder. Somebody was hitting the button. Hitting it, hitting it, juicing it until the walls were ringing with metal, the sound blasting out like the cap off a hot radiator.

“Spot me,” the guy called, signaling Baba to help him.

Baba folded his arms, looked straight down on him, and smiled. “Sorry, man, can’t hear you with the music.”

The man now knew where he was. He didn’t ask again. He closed his eyes, took three deep breaths, and when he opened up again, the resolve, the control, the focus was there again. Slowly, and remarkably, the bar began rising off his chest. Three inches up, five. A short pause as he struggled to push it through the halfway point, then he broke it, the weight was up.

But not. Just as the man’s elbows were about to lock, Baba reached out his hand and began to push. Down. The man fought back, sweat bubbling all over his face. But it was no use. Baba applied more pressure, and more, as needed and then some, until the man was pinned and gasping, the weight bar lying heavy with the help of several hands now, across his collarbones.

Baba dropped to his knees and breathed right into the guy’s face while the others held him down. “Maybe you don’t know, but maybe you oughtnotta come here. You understand me, muthuh?”

The man did not respond. The weightlifters leaned harder, until the load included all the weight plus nearly all the poundage of two huge guys. Still, the man did not respond, other than to drop his hands from the bar. His eyes fluttered shut like he was passing out.

Laughing, they removed the weight from him. Slapping his face, happily, Baba and one of the others half revived him and helped him to the door. Once there, they gave him a shove and sent him staggering across the parking lot. He didn’t know where he was, just like when he arrived.

Baba strutted back to the deafening roar of whoops and screams. High fives and forearm smashes all around. He stopped short, raised his arms, and sang a screechy chorus of “God Bless America” joined by everybody in the place.

Even Sully. Even, after a glare from Baba, me. I wasn’t sure if I loved
this
America so much right about then, but I was sure I loved it better than I loved a punch in the head.

Then they all went back to pumping iron. Harder, faster, meaner than before. Nobody talked to anybody else, but everybody laughed, a lot, at nothing. They were like a scary race of muscle-bound ’droids pumping and laughing, barking and spitting, out of control.

Sully didn’t laugh, and neither did I. We never seemed to be able to muster up the same kind of
spirit
those guys had.

“COMIN’, MICK?
”

It wasn’t really a question. My brother doesn’t usually
ask
me anything. Thought I might answer anyway, though.

“No, I’m not coming.”

“Put your damn jacket on. You’re comin’.”

So I put my damn jacket on. Blue dungaree, like always. If it’s seventy out, I wear the blue dungaree. If it snows, the blue dungaree.

“Where’s your green? Where’s your goddamn green? And your hat?”

“I don’t like to wear hats, Terry. They make me feel like I need a shower and I have to keep scratching my head.”

“Don’t gimme no lip. Go back in there and put on the green and white striper. We gotta get goin’.”

Where we had to get going to was Terry’s bar. Not that he actually
owned
the bar, not quite, anyway. It was just the place where he spent most of his time and all his money. Saw him one time walk in there with his paycheck, sign it, and hand the whole thing right over to the laughing bartender. The bar, a place called Bloody Sundays, has a reputation around the city as sort of the Hard Rock Cafe of Irishness, which means that on St. Patrick’s Day, which was tomorrow, the place is rotten with politicians and priests scarfing up the free boiled dinner, telling total crap stories about themselves and spending ten times the cost of the meal on gassy draft beers.

So what they do, to show their appreciation for the regulars like Terry, who eat their other three hundred and sixty-four suppers there every year, is they put out the free corned beef the night before St. Pat’s. That way they can say thanks to their slushy, loyal clientele. That way they can protect their roots rep as a down and dirty neighborhood bar. That way they can get the heavyweights started drinking like maniacs twenty-four hours early. St. Patrick’s Eve.

But why does he need me? Because I don’t know why, I don’t know, I don’t, but for some reason St. Patrick’s Day makes the people around here, even the not so warm and fuzzy ones like my brother, it makes them all gooey and clannish.

“Gotta have me boon ’round me,” he said as he swept through the door after work. Which meant he was already drinking, on the job.

“How sweet,” my mother said, about the boon business. She’d been drinking on the job that day too, cleaning the house. Now she and my old man were headed out to the Knights of Columbus, which is a Catholic club kind of like the Elks, only you drink your eyeballs out under a picture of the Sacred Heart instead of under a picture of the
PT-109
. They were going to tip back a couple of jars before heading to the night jobs—she the waitress, he the bartender at the O’Asis, which makes the Bloody look like the Ritz Bar. Then they’ll have a couple more during and after work. Get the picture? So Ma finds this brotherly love stuff just lovely, and Dad thinks... well, to be honest, nobody in the world knows what Dad thinks. About anything.

“Piss off,” Terry spat as they went out.

“Come home at a reasonable hour,” Ma chirped.

“I won’t bail you out,” Dad said.

After Terry sent me to Irish up, I came back out wearing the rugby shirt with the four-inch-wide kelly green-and-white horizontal stripes, deeply wrinkled from life at the bottom of my closet.

“
There
ya go,” he said as he jammed the hat low over my brow. Without even rolling my eyes toward it I knew what was up there on my head. It was a knit tam-o’-shanter, bright green like the underbelly of a baby tree frog, small brim with the cloth shamrock stuck on, and a baseball-sized white pompom on top. Supposed to symbolize, can you believe it,
pride
? I felt like a dink. Terry beamed at me from under an identical cap.

“Terry, you know, I’m really not much of a hat guy...”

He didn’t even consider it. Threw his arm around me and squeezed so hard my shoulder blades touched. “Whatsa matter, you don’t wanna look like me?” He laughed like he thought that was such an outrageous idea. “This is beautiful. Ain’t this nice, Mick? You look like goddamn
me
. We could be goddamn twins, we could. They’re gonna eat us up at the goddamn Bloody, boy.”

He thinks we look exactly alike, but I don’t quite see it. His hair is orange, and mine is, well, it’s red.

But he was right, we lit the joint up when we walked in the bar. “Hey, he brought the Mick. Yo, boys, Terry brought the Mick along.”

“’Course he did. Wouldn’t be no St. Paddy’s without no Micks.”

They all smelled like cabbage already, Terry’s buddies. The bartender drew a tall one for Terry before he even asked, and one for me too even though I’m exactly fifteen years old and look exactly fifteen years old. Terry tipped back and drank his beer halfway down, slammed the glass on the bar, then slapped me on the forehead because I wasn’t drinking mine yet when for chrissake we’d been in the place for a minute and a half already. I drank, not as much as Terry drank in one gulp, because I don’t have a blowhole in the top of my head, but I did okay. The taste was high and tinny, with a strong bitter finish, so I knew it was Harp.

The bartender slid two plates of steaming pink food across the bar. Terry growled at it like a ravenous happy dog. I covered my mouth and nose with my hands as the bitter, sulfuric odor of the cabbage climbed over me.

“Get it away, Terry,” I said through my hands.

“What are you, crazy? This is some fine shit.”

“That’s exactly what it is, man. Get it away from me or I’m gonna lunch all over the bar.”

“You’re embarrassing me,” Terry said. “Tomorrow people’ll be steppin’ on each other’s faces to get this stuff. This is a damn honor, them gettin’ it out for us tonight.”

“
You
eat it, then.”

“I would, but that ain’t the point. You gotta eat it. Damn, this is CB&C, man, you ain’t got no choice but ta love it. This is who you are. You can’t not like it. Not in front of all my friends, anyway. Not tonight.”

I shook my head, which might not have looked like much but under the circumstances was a pretty ballsy move. I knew how strongly Terry felt about crap like this, and he’d beaten hell out of me for a whole lot less.

He leaned close. “If I gotta cram it down your throat with a broom handle...”

I was very much afraid of my brother. Not just at that moment, but in general. However, I was even more afraid of the corned beef and cabbage.

“Kill me,” I said.

He went all red,
redder
, that is, in the face. He looked over his shoulder at all his boys swallowing whole palm-sized slabs of meat. “Then just
pick
at it, for chrissake. I’ll try to help ya without nobody seein’. Christ...”

I had truly humiliated him. So I did what I could, spearing the tiny bits of bacon and onion that were cut up in the cabbage, making with the big chew like my mouth was full of a whole lot of bulk, washing down every bite with the Harp. Then I ordered Guinness.

“
That’s
the boy,” Terry said, ripping a sharp elbow into my ribs. “That
almost
redeems ya. Bartender, make it two.”

The bartender smirked as he stared down into the thick brown head rising under the tap. “Right, Terry, like I was only gonna bring
one
.”

No green beers on St. Patrick’s Eve. That was for the dabblers tomorrow. Tonight was for red beers, amber ales, and especially, black beers. Stout. It was a liquid rainbow arcing around us as Terry’s buddies finished their meals and gathered with their pints, always the big pint vases, pints of rusty Bass or Sam Adams, gold Foster’s or Ballantine or, of course, old opaque Guinness. The common thread, of course, was the green shirt of whoever hovering behind each glass. I had drunk my Harp and my stout and had choked down my little bits of onion and bacon polluted by contact with the rest of the foul boiled mess, and I was teetering. Terry, trooper that he was, pounded down the drinks,
licked
his plate so clean that there was nothing left on it but his ever-sweet breath, and slyly polished off most of my meal without giving away our family shame. And feeling mighty proud of himself through it all.

“Any balls in the room?” Terry bleated, rubbing his full belly. “Who wants a game?” He pointed toward the tabletop hockey game with the big Plexiglas bubble over it, against the wall under the TV. Terry strutted over to the game, and six guys followed. When he took up his spot at the controls and looked up to see that I was still across the room, glued stupid to my stool, Terry came back and retrieved me, towing me by the shirt.

Terry played the first game and won, beating the fatter of the big fat Cormac brothers 6-0. That meant Fatter Cormac had to buy him a beer. It also meant, according to Terry’s rules of order, Fatter had to buy me a beer. “No way, that ain’t the rule,” Fatter said. “Really, I don’t need it,” I said. Terry glowered. Fatter bought. I drank.

Danny stepped up and promptly beat the pants off Terry. “I quit,” said Terry, which I don’t even know what that was supposed to mean, quitting after the game was already over. I guess it meant he was quitting the loser-buys-the-beer part, since he didn’t buy. Instead he slinked over to the little TV, the one with the Nintendo on it.

“You goin’ to the parade tomorrow?” Augie asked from over Terry’s shoulder.

Terry hit the pause button on the Nintendo basketball game, making the electronic musical tweedle-dee-ooo noise for pause. Terry turned around and threw Augie a disgusted look. “What kind of a ignorant question is that?” he said, then turned back to his game. Tweedle-dee-ooo.

It was sort of a dumb question because the thought of a St. Patrick’s Day parade without Terry was like the thought of no parade at all—unthinkable. Augie knew that; he was just looking for fire.

“You goin?” Augie asked me.

I shrugged. I shrugged because I hadn’t thought much about whether or not I was going to the parade. I shrugged because I didn’t much go in for any old parade crap anyhow. I shrugged because at that point, four pints full, I would have shrugged if Augie’d asked me what my name was. Anyhow, it wasn’t a true question, with several possible answers. Not in this place it wasn’t.