Joe Collins, Mary’s overwhelmed husband, met us at the door. He was an addled-looking gentleman, fidgety and skeletally thin, and immediately I thought of Jack Spratt and his wife, and wondered if there was a small bit of truth in all fairy tales. He smiled and blessed us for coming. He pointed the way to the kitchen and then went past us to greet someone else with a distracted look on his face. I realize now that long association with the sisters probably explained the distracted facial expression, but Tom insisted that Joe’s feeble wit was also a factor. I heard him tell Uncle Mike that Joe had “retired from the police force after forty years as a patrolman and still signed his name with an X. Came here not knowing how to read and write and he still can’t.”
A while later, Mary sent Joe out for more liquor and, as soon as he was gone, she scurried over to a hall closet and produced a quart bottle of Jim Beam, then waddled around “freshening” people’s drinks, whether or not they had been drinking bourbon. She paused at my glass and was moments from adding bourbon to it till Uncle Tom said, “Cream soda, Aunt Mary.”
She frowned at me and Tom said, “Aunt Mary, he’s eight,” and then she nodded. She returned to her big red stuffed armchair, where she “freshened” her own drink till it was the color of a chocolate phosphate and sipped at it, making little noises of contentment. By the time her husband returned, she was singing Irish songs along with a John McCormack record, in a flat croaking voice like a bullfrog calling for its mate.
The adults chattered away as though it was Christmas come early and I ate my way through the dessert table. Then someone put John McCormack away and turned on more lively music, and Aunt Mary’s house rocked with fiddles and flutes, tin whistles, bagpipes, and the thump of the bhodran, and the party went tribal. It was a warm afternoon and everywhere I looked I saw sweating, flushed faces, some of them literally inside blue wreaths of cigarette smoke—they put me in mind of little mountains climbing up into the clouds. Now people were singing and clapping. My grandfather, his quiet soul taken by the music and a couple of whiskeys, lurched out into the middle of the living room and began to dance.
“Oh, Dad’s got his party hat on,” I heard Uncle Mike say, and Tom looked delighted, but the look on Grandma’s face was exactly the one I’d seen when she found ants on the kitchen table.
Everybody clapped and whooped and tried to sing, and then my grandfather was pulling me out on the floor with him, whereupon we produced our unique version of the jig, though in truth I knew no more of the Irish jig than I did of brain surgery, but an Irishman is a tolerant audience for his dancers, and most of the attendees were willing to suspend their disbelief and pretend they were seeing the genuine article. They clapped and exclaimed and said I was cute, and my grandfather made them play the record again, and we danced till my grandfather and I fell over each other.
“Easy, Dad,” I heard Tom say. “Remember Jake Cooley.”
Grandpa waved him off and said, “For God’s sake he was getting on to be eighty-five, and I’m not sixty-two yet.”
I asked Uncle Tom about Jake Cooley.
“Ah, he was an old guy, like your Grandpa says, and he got a little too energetic on the dance floor and had a heart attack. Not that that’s a bad way for a guy to go, dancing in front of his friends with a smile on his face. Most people don’t get to die at a party, kiddo.”
He patted me on the head and watched his father with a look of good-humored tolerance. I looked around and even Grandma was smiling. A few moments later someone put on another old record, a fox trot, and Grandpa had Grandma out there with him. She was laughing like a young girl. In a few moments the floor was crammed with old people dancing to Mary McReady’s record player and I thought I had never seen anything so funny in my life.
Later, Grandpa and I danced again, but he tired quickly this time out, and he went out into the kitchen. I followed him out to get another pop and found him sitting at the table, coughing into his handkerchief.
Tough Guys
It was a plain fact of life that if you walked through a pack of boys who weren’t your friends, anything could happen and probably would. Stranger-kids might call you names, ask for money, trip you as you went by, chase you down the street and, on the worst occasions, get close enough to throw punches. A boy was well-advised to keep his head up, cross the street to avoid certain corners, and be aware of who was walking behind him at all times. Like most boys, I had to learn these things.
There were older boys at Hamlin Park who frequently tormented us, largely from boredom. One afternoon after swimming in the crowded Hamlin Park pool, I was coming out of the candy store with my friend Jamie and we encountered a group of older boys, including Lenny, the terror who during the school year seemed to live under the viaduct like a dark-haired troll. They stared at us as we came down the concrete steps. Lenny was sitting on the bottom step, and when I reached it, he tripped me. I landed on my elbow and my knee, bloodying both of them.
“What’re you, clumsy?” Lenny said.
I got up angrily and without thinking swung at him and grabbed the front of his T-shirt. He laughed and slapped me in the face, then walked on, staring at me over his shoulder and daring me to retaliate. My friend Jamie watched in fear and whispered that Lenny’d cream me if I did anything more.
At home, my new injuries were noticed, but I told everyone I’d fallen while running along the concrete edge of the pool. Predictably, my grandmother told me I could have broken my neck. I told myself I’d simply try to avoid Lenny in the future.
The next time I went to the library I found Rusty there, rooting around in the adult section for books on explosives. He set a couple of books down on a table and beckoned me to sit down. He made a pretense of paging through one of the books and then looked up suddenly.
“Lenny beat you up?”
“Who told you?”
“Jamie.”
“He knocked me down and slapped me in the face. I’m gonna get him, I’ll hit him with a brick,” I said, though I had no intention of ever getting close enough to hit Lenny with anything.
“No, I’ll take care of him, that shit, him and those big tough guys with him.” He gave me a serious look. “You’re my friend.”
“What’re you gonna do?” I asked.
“You’ll see tomorrow. He always comes to the park on Saturdays. I’ll find ’im.”
The next morning Aunt Anne wanted to take me to a movie, but I told her I was meeting my friends at the park. She made me call up Jamie so that I wouldn’t be roaming the streets alone.
When we arrived, there were already dozens of kids there, some chasing one another, some heading to the tiny gym for basketball, some making their way to the cramped library in the fieldhouse. The center of the park was a great round depression, as though an alien spaceship had landed there, burned a hole into the ground and left four baseball diamonds in its wake. Several dozen boys were already occupying the diamonds, armed with tattered baseball gloves, cracked bats, and well-taped league balls, and Lenny was on one of the smaller softball diamonds.
Jamie and I took a seat on one of the benches and watched the players.
“Rusty’s not here,” Jamie pointed out.
“I know.” A cold fluttery feeling began to grow in my stomach. Already one of the boys with Lenny had chanced to look my way, and when he noticed us, he’d said something to Lenny. Lenny gave me a look of menace and went back to his game.
I was preparing to retreat to the library when Rusty finally arrived. His red hair, impervious to the comb, it seemed, blew in the wind. He had high points of color in his pale cheeks, he was breathing fast, and there was a distant look in his eyes that I was to see a number of times in years to come. He was carrying a bag.
“Hi, you guys. Is he here?”
Jamie and I pointed as though a single string controlled both of us, and Rusty looked down at the ballfield and nodded.
&nb
sp; He hefted the bag and said, “I got something for Lenny.”
It was a shabby, much-used paper bag, the type you’d put a kid’s lunch in, and it was wrinkled and folded in a hundred places because his mother, living on poverty’s near edge, had told him to fold it and bring it home after using it. And today Mrs. Kilgallen’s only son had filled it with something that was clearly not lunch, for at that moment as he raised the bag, it moved.
Jamie and I gasped together, and Jamie said, “What’s in there?”
“He’s got a snake!” I said.
“Nah, my snake died. But I got good stuff anyway.”
“What?”
“Small stuff,” Rusty said, and gave me his grin.
As we were talking, Lenny and several of his friends had moved closer and begun making remarks intended for the three of us. One of the boys held that we were a bunch of sissies who sat around on benches while other boys played ball, and then Lenny, who I see now as a boy without basic good sense, noted the lunch bag and asked if the three of us were having a picnic.
Rusty wheeled around as if just noticing them. He looked from them to his little bag and back to them, smiling.
“Yeah, that’s right, we’re havin’ a picnic. You want some? You want some, you guys?”
And with that, he was striding down the sloping side of the ballfield, bag in hand, a skinny, pale-skinned child whose pants were two inches too short, unaware that he was, for better or worse, painting a childhood legend in broad strokes.
He was still six or seven feet from Lenny when he reached into the bag and said, “Here, Lenny,” and threw what appeared to be a small gray ball of fur at Lenny.
Lenny screamed, one of the other boys said, “Shit!” and all of them jumped back. Lenny caught the gray thing on his chest, screamed again and made a batting motion with his hand. The gray thing bounced off him and landed on the ground, then scuttered away quickly.
“Is it off me?” he asked his friends.
Rusty laughed and put his hands on his hips. “Big tough guy, afraid of a little field mouse. Bet your friends think you’re real tough, Lenny. A little mouse, for cryin’ out loud.”
A dark look came into the other boy’s eyes and I told myself Rusty had overplayed a scant hand. Lenny took two steps in Rusty’s direction and said something I couldn’t hear. His fists were clenched, he’d survived the mouse, and Rusty was finished. One of the other boys said, “Punch ’im in the mouth, Len,” and a third boy moved just behind Rusty, cutting off that avenue of escape. Lenny and Rusty were almost nose to nose and I was about to yell some warning to Rusty when he froze them all by reaching into the bag once more.
To his credit, he’d never moved an inch when Lenny came at him, and now I understood that along with his other gifts he had patience.
He pulled a small white bundle from the bag, something in a common kitchen napkin, held it up to Lenny’s face and watched the bigger boy’s eyes go wide. Then he unwrapped it and flung its contents in Lenny’s face.
Lenny made a harsh squawking sound, flailed with both hands at his face and hair and began running. Rusty spun and tossed the napkin in the face of the kid behind him, and this second boy ran across the diamond wailing like a lost soul.
Rusty faced the others and they shrank back. Rusty shook his head theatrically.
“Bunch of tough guys and they’re afraid of a couple centipedes.”
He took a step toward them and they moved back, and then he launched what can only be described as a battlefield oration.
I couldn’t make out the first couple of lines, but then I caught up with him, following a respectful pace or two behind him as he stalked them all, one skinny maniacal little boy in his battle fury giving chase to six, and casting threats and maledictions on their heads like a hot rain.
“You want to pick on my friends, right? Go ahead, and then I’ll be looking for you. I can make gunpowder and I got cherry bombs. I can make shrapnel, I can make Greek fire, I can burn your houses down with you in ’em, and I got spiders and centipedes, Lenny, I got a tarantula, I got a snake that’s four feet long. You pick on my friends again and I’ll put things in your bed, and I’ll…I’ll put things in your ma’s bed.”
They had begun to slow down and now Rusty put on a burst of speed and they all tore off into the distance, and I could neither keep up nor listen to his steady litany of the vile things he would do to them all.
When he returned, he was grinning, and I gave him a roll of Lifesavers.
“You had centipedes?” I asked.
“Yeah. Three of ’em, one was real big. And a spider. The spider was dead but I knew they wouldn’t notice.” He sighed like a man after a large meal, crunched down on a lifesaver and beamed at us.
“What’s Greek fire?” I asked.
“It’s some kinda liquid the Greeks used to shoot at people to set fire to their ships.”
“And you can make it?” Jamie asked.
Rusty shrugged. “I dunno, but I got a chemistry set.”
“He’s got the real big one,” I told Jamie. “With like sixty bottles of stuff.”
“Wow.”
For much of that month, I feared that the other boys would not let their humiliation go unanswered, and I imagined them ambushing him in an alley and beating him bloody. But gradually I realized that their fear of finding a bedful of centipedes or black widows in their underwear drawer, or of a deadly rain of shrapnel and Greek fire descending on their homes and loved ones easily outweighed any need to get even. He was safe, we were all safe.
***
That second summer proved to be different from the first in several ways: not only was I seeing less of Matt, I saw less of Tom. The early days of that summer wore all the gaudy colors of a new vacation, and this time I had a life and a home that I thought of as my own. I had my local friends and playmates to keep me busy, eventually my sporadic encounters with Matt, and long, eventful sorties through the neighborhood with Rusty.
I understood that my uncle was now working two jobs, his regular one at the dairy and the new one at the bar. What started out as an occasional weeknight visit to pitch in behind the bar became a substantial drain on his time, partly from need—people couldn’t cover their shifts, somebody responsible had to watch the cash register—and partly from the novelty of being a bar owner, playing big shot on a minor scale and buying drinks for everybody the wind blew in. At our noisy dinner table I caught hints of problems at the bar but thought nothing of them: near as I could tell, there was no corner of the adult world, no matter how insignificant, that was not fraught with trouble, and I was constantly making mental notes to myself to avoid certain circumstances, certain jobs. Given half the chance, I would have avoided adulthood itself.
But there was trouble at the bar, and though the nature of these problems at times puzzled me, they were the classic worries of the saloonkeeper: the difficulties of dealing with liquor troubles among one’s friends and even relatives, the need to anticipate problems or break up the occasional barfight, the confrontations with patrons, especially belligerent strangers, and their troubles, troubles about money. When they talked of these things, my family let their voices drop, their references became masterpieces of circumlocution, they seemed to watch me as much as each other, and I feigned a native stupidity while soaking up as much as I could. There was money missing, there were conflicting ideas among the partners as to how they should deal with profit, there seemed to be an almost constant need to pay off one or another of the city inspectors, till I developed the notion that local government was a gaping maw into which one tossed money.
Other troubles were there as well, more serious ones: a partner or bartender with his hand in the till, and a partner who had lost control of his drinking: he’d begun to start fights, there had been angry scenes with this man’s wife. My uncle’s early exuberant moods during those first few weeks
as a bar owner, what he clearly saw as his first step toward giving himself a chance at independence, soon gave way to reality, and he became more subdued when he spoke of the tavern. It had become work, he had begun to see the dark side of running a tavern, of protecting what little one has, of doing business with friends. He stopped bringing the tavern up in conversation, responding when asked a direct question but little more.
One night over supper, I heard my grandfather ask, “How’s the saloon doing?”
“It’s a pain in the ass, Dad,” Tom said.
“Thomas,” my grandmother said, and they were all looking in my direction except Tom.
“Sorry, I’m just tired. Tired of the gin mill, too.”
“Ah, it’ll all work out for the best,” Grandma said. “There’s good money in a tavern,” doing her best to show her conversion. She didn’t sound as though she believed it.
“Well, four months into this one, I haven’t seen a dollar. And I’m good and tired of it.”
***
I was still losing my grandmother’s money when she sent me to the store, but not quite as often, so she gritted her teeth and handed me bills or coins and probably said a silent prayer, not only that I’d make it to the store with the money intact, but that I’d find the store: she’d sent me to a butcher’s on Belmont one day, and I’d turned the wrong way and walked for thirty minutes before it dawned on me that I had probably missed it. My one achievement was that I had never yet had trouble going to the bakery for bread: she always let me buy a cookie, and this seemed a benediction on my mission. I never seemed to lose her money when she sent me to the bakery.
In the Castle of the Flynns Page 23