Mick (4 page)

I put my arm around him. “He
is
home, Sully. He lives two streets away from you. In your mother’s house.”

He threw my arm off of his shoulder. “That ain’t funny,” he said.

“Change, man,” I said.

“It’s too quick,” he said.

“So?”

“And too close.”

“Aha...”

“Aha, what?”

“Afraid?”

“I ain’t no racist,” Sully assured me. “I mean it. That ain’t what this is about.”

“What’s it about, then?”

“It’s like, y’know how them rappers Public Enemy have that disc talkin’ about ‘Fear of a Black Planet’? Well, I ain’t got that. It wouldn’t matter to me if ninety percent of the earth went black, and I couldn’t travel to any of them places without getting killed. ’Cause then I would just stay home where I belong. So I ain’t got no fear of a black planet. What I got is a fear of a black Sycamore Street.”

I had never thought about it like that before. But as soon as he said it, I knew what he meant. Sycamore
was
getting to be a scary place, a foreign place, when not too long ago it was
our
place. And it sure was awfully close to home.

But being scared and being ignorant don’t have to be the same thing. They don’t.

They don’t.

“Know what I mean?” he asked.

“No. I don’t know what you mean.” We were approaching the parade route, could hear bagpipes, Sycamore Street was far enough behind us to be unreal again. “I ain’t afraid of nothin’,” I said, which Sully found pretty amusing.

We wound our way around, looking for people we knew, which was pointless since we knew just about everybody at the St. Patrick’s Day parade. We were supposed to meet Baba, who said we’d be able to spot him by his
GOD MADE THE IRISH #1
sweatshirt. Probably ninety-five percent of the crowd had that same sweatshirt on, with their coats spread wide open to the cold to show them off.

“Yo, Bones,” Baba called out, and we went to him. He had already found Terry and his friends, and all were sitting on a prime piece of curb a quarter mile from the start of the parade. They were all drinking long neck Budweisers, bar bottles, from a case Terry was sitting on. They were eating hard-boiled eggs. People were packed elbow to elbow at all good curbside locations, but nobody was within ten feet of these guys.

“Oh my god,” Sully said, pinching his nose shut.

Terry walked right up to me with an egg in his hand and punched me in the stomach, meaning he liked me. “Mornin’, boyo,” he said. “Have a egg.”

He was stuffing it in my mouth already by the time I wrestled it out of his hand. “No thanks,” I said, and automatically flipped the egg to Baba, who ate it whole without shelling it. Baba would have eaten dung if they threw it at him. To impress them. Baba’s dream was to be, in seven or eight years, just like Terry and Augie, only bigger and stupider and more dangerous. He was being groomed for the position.

“Well, have a beer, then,” he said, ripping a cap off a bottle with his teeth. “Courtesy of our sponsor,” he said, referring to Bloody Sundays, who had supplied not only the beer but the eggs.

A shopping bag filled with cartons of eggs.

I gagged. All I could do was shake my head.

Terry threw me a disgusted look. “Just as I was starting to have some hope for ya.”

“Don’t be so hard on the kid,” Danny said from his cross-legged perch on the ground. “I think we seen some potential in the boy last night.”

“Was that last night?” Augie said. “Feels like it was just yesterday.”

“Or this mornin’,” Terry said, and they all yukked it up. Sully looked at me. I shrugged. I still didn’t get it. Baba didn’t get it either, but he wanted to. He took a long drink from a curved pocket flask and called for another beer. He had the right idea, if what he wanted was to get closer to the boys. I realized as I scanned the group, cock-eyed and bleary and reeking a million reeks beyond the boiled nasty stench of last night, that they hadn’t gone home, they’d stayed in the bar until coming here.

“What
about
last night?” I asked, which made them howl. “No, I’m not kidding, what about last night?”

“You’re a hoot, kid,” Fatt Cormac said, balancing an egg on the mouth of a bottle before chugging it all down together. “When your big brother there finally gets himself killed—which could be any time now—you’re gonna take right over. Hell, you’re ready already, stuff you were sayin’.”

“What? What,
what
did I say?” It was no use. The more I asked, the more everybody laughed at me and said things like, oh, you crazy shit, and get outta town and stuff like that that made me feel worse. This was beyond embarrassing, forgetting the things I said, it was frightening. Not only did I not know, but whatever it was it was making me into a sort of hero to
Terry’s friends
.

“Ya, and they almost didn’t let me back in after I took you home, ya little bastard,” Terry said, smiling, menacing at the same time.

One of the Cormacs went to crack an egg, but when he knocked it against his knee the whole runny mess slimed down his pants leg. They only had a dozen cooked eggs—the rest were raw.

Like the opening volley in a World War I battle, thirty snare drums started snapping in the distance, opening the parade. With one crazed voice, the whoop of joy flew the length of the route, making my head gong, but my heart thrum, as I screamed along.

It must be the drums. The drums that overwhelm you at the spearhead of the parade, that change things so completely that your own heart adjusts its beat to be in step. Patriotism. What the hell is that, patriotism? It’s in a drum. When the drums play, thirty at a time, I am a patriot. Or an acrobat, or a clown, when the circus comes to town and they get off the train for the elephant walk from South Station to the Garden and somebody beats and beats on those big drums and I forget about how bored and disappointed I am when I actually attend the circus. For the elephant walk I’m there, I’m juggling, I’m marching, I’m roaring, ready to pack up for clown college, because those drums do it, with that primal whatever it is, those drums make me feel like I
belong
to something when usually I don’t belong to anything, and I’m stupid with whatever it is they want me to feel.

Just like the St. Pat’s thing. The drums were beating for St. Pat and so there I was, like it or not, no matter what I thought about who I was yesterday or tomorrow, for that drums-beating-cold moment I was Mick, a mick, The Mick. It started with the fife-and-drum corps and if you can’t get all excited for the fifes and drums, then what are you? We were primed. Sully was clapping his hands raw with, I think, a tear in his eye. Terry screamed a rebel yell and of course his boys joined in, as the music subsided a bit, and the musicians were followed by the vets. World War I guys, the remaining six of them, all dignity and solemnity as they refused to wave, or smile, or focus, they stood at attention on the back of a flatbed truck passing at a crawl.

“Good Jesus God love ya, men,” cried a fifty-ish woman cheering from the opposite side of the street.

The World War II and Korea guys followed right behind, walking too fast, to prove that they didn’t yet need to ride the flatbed. A little less somber, a little more cocky, and a lot more drunk than the older soldiers, every one of them waved and pointed at somebody, because they were all somebody’s father and somebody’s grandfather.

“Uniform’s lookin’ a little tight there, Dad,” called a voice right behind me.

“I got a
gun
, boy,” answered the long tall marcher with the massive bulge under his shirt. He laughed and aimed the gun at his son, who must have been perched like an apple on my head. I ducked.

The Vietnam guys. The spooky part of the parade. They were the ones who always wore only part of the uniform. Fatigue pants with a white T-shirt. Olive drab shirt and cutoff dungarees. Beret decorated with medals over white karate pajamas. Every year lately, the Viet vets got a little more popular, the cheers increasing, their waves finally answering, but still, I thought the feeling in the crowd was more scared and anxious than anything else.

And the worst part, for them, was that they now came right ahead of the veterans of Desert Storm. First, it felt kind of funny to call them veterans since these were the same kids who still hung around the middle school playground and drank beer all Saturday night with the teenagers. And the other thing was, the ovation was
so
intense that I think it pissed off both the Vietnam and World War II guys, who turned and pretended to open fire, joking without laughing.

The Boy Scouts. The Girl Scouts. “Gimme a cookie,” Terry yelled, shocking the little girl who was walking close by, sending her crying the rest of the march. The Mulcahey School, Irish step dancers, came stomping, jigging, and hornpiping their way by “No jiggs, no jiggs,” Baba screamed, getting big laughs from both sides of the street.

There was a bit of calm as the Franklin School for the Disabled walked and wheeled by displaying their artwork. Papier-mâché dogs that looked like sheep, a painting of green. A nine-leaf clover. Terry and his friends shut up and drank, which was their sort of tribute. There was polite clapping all around. The
God love ’ems
were muttered
everywhere
in the crowd, but nobody shouted anything. The snow had stopped, but there was still plenty on the ground, making for a surreal, silent padding march. The boys drank harder, swallowing at a trot now, lining up the empties not in their slots in the case, but neatly along the curb. By the time the neighborhood youth soccer league quick-stepped by, knobby knees knocking in their short pants uniforms, the parade had no sound to it. The wait was on.

It didn’t take long. Behind a street-wide banner came the group representing the new largest block of merchants in the area, also the second largest fishing operation and moving up fast. The Cambodians. For paraders, they were awfully unsmiling. They had reason to be.

The first noticeable thing was the nothingness. No clapping, no booing, only silent footfalls in the snow. But it was tense. The feeling seemed to be please just get through so we can be done with this. But then somebody clapped. Deep in the crowd on the opposite side of the street. A second person joined in, a third, then a few more but that was it. Nobody near us tried it.

“Cut the shit over there,” Terry hollered at the clappers.

The leader of the Cambodian Merchants Association, the man from the newscast, acknowledged the support, smiled, waved, and said, “Thank you.” Several others behind him also waved, an odd sight with a whole section of a parade focusing its attention on a small group of a half dozen, craning to see, to thank them, deep in the crowd.

“You shut your yellow hole too,” Terry yelled, pointing at the man.

The merchant turned our way. “I won’t,” he said clearly, evenly. He hadn’t yet closed his mouth behind the words when a snowball splattered in his face. The man stood still, the parade stopped behind him, and he wiped his eyes with the end of his scarf. He started walking again and was hit again, harder, with a motherball, the kind the Kellys on my street like to make, the kind they pack tight and dip in water to be left outside overnight stacked in pyramids like cannonballs to freeze into rocks. It sounded like a punch in the mouth with four school rings when the motherball hit his face.

The man doubled over, covered up, when the snowballs started flying everywhere. The woman behind him screamed, ran to him and they huddled together. Terry was standing on top of the beer case to get better leverage as he fired down on the Cambodians, throwing snowballs, ice-balls, whatever was handed up to him by two ten-year-old boys working slavishly by his sides. The fat Cormac brothers were too drunk and lazy to even rise, just sat there on the curbstone packing and hurling snow high into the air to rain down like mortar fire. Danny merely drank, nodded, scanned, like Patton observing a battlefield, pleased.

“Move along, move along,” said the policeman in charge of the detail. He and the rest of his men, who had all volunteered to work the parade for free, mostly just waved the marchers along without getting too close to them. “Okay, come on, you guys, cut it out now,” the sergeant said to the boys, like it was a mere prank rather than an assault that now involved fifty percent of the spectators.

Slowly, the parade did move again. “Good ruck, mucklucks,” Augie spat as they moved away.

“Here,” Terry screamed as he lobbed an egg. “Make some egg foo yung outta this.” The egg smacked directly into the back of the head of one of the last Cambodian marchers, but he didn’t stop or turn or slow down as the clingy raw egg ran down his neck, under the collar of his shirt.

The next group along, lagging notably behind, was the Neighborhood Society, headed by the city councillor from the district, who waved brainlessly, smiled, pointed at every individual like he was a long-lost friend. But his vision was strictly peripheral, as he refused to look straight ahead at the limping group not thirty yards ahead.

“Sharkskin,” Terry called, using the councillor’s neighborhood handle.

“
There
he is,” Sharkskin called, pointing at Terry. “There’s the boy.” Then, pointing at the bottle in Terry’s hand, Sharkskin motioned for Terry to bring him one. Terry rushed to the open-top convertible Le Baron and handed over the bottle, which Sharkskin raised high to a thunderous ovation. He took a long swallow, then motioned Terry toward him. “Lookin’ like goddamn downtown Saigon around here, ain’t it?” asked the councillor, who had fought hard against the opening up of the parade. “I was thinking of bringing them Nam vet loonies back here to wipe ’em all out.”

Terry rushed back to tell us all about it. Of course the boys cheered and toasted the good old Shark. Baba, notorious for his inability to control his temper, his mouth, or his liquor, was out cold facedown on the sidewalk. Sully looked at me. “This ain’t quite as much fun as I thought it would be,” he said.

I looked away from him, looking everywhere, for some sense, for something that made sense to me. My head hurt worse and worse. “Sure ain’t much of a
celebration
, is it?” I asked Sully, as low as I could. He shook his head.