was dark, just as it had been then. Yesterday Mickey had even considered strolling down there and offering a much-belated apology for punching him. Had the man’s jaw completely healed? Mickey’s own right hand, which he’d never seen a doctor about, still ached on rainy days and was prone to swelling. His own damn fault, of course. His father, who’d been a brawler in his youth, had warned him about physical violence, both its dangers and, especially, its pleasures. When you threw a punch, whatever was coiled in you got released, and release, well, what was better than that? Starting and finishing a fight with a single punch, as Mickey’d done with Troyer? That was the absolute best. Proving that any job, no matter how dubious, could be done well. Indeed, it was his father that Mickey had been thinking about that afternoon outside the SAE house. Bert. That’s what the guys in his father’s crew all called Michael Sr., due to his resemblance to Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. “Hey, Bert,” they’d say. “What makes the muskrat guard his musk?” And his old man, playing along, would reply, “Kuh-ridge.” And damned if those stone lions hadn’t looked just like him, too.
By contrast, the beating Mickey’d given Jacy’s father had felt like a distasteful duty, not even remotely pleasurable. Maybe it was the office setting, and that there’d been so many people around, the majority of them women, all of them horrified. Mickey’s first punch had reduced the man’s nose to ruined cartilage, and yeah, okay, that had felt pretty good. So had saying, “Your daughter says hello,” as the man lay there on the snazzy carpet. Maybe if that first punch had landed flush and he was out for the count, Mickey would feel better about it. Instead, Calloway had struggled to his feet not once but three more times, as if he didn’t want Mickey to stint on the beating they both knew he had coming. So Mickey had obliged, though with each subsequent punch he’d applied less force and torque. When the cops arrived and cuffed him, he was glad. He wouldn’t have to hit the man anymore. The experience had so soured him on violence that he hadn’t punched anyone since, except occasionally in his dreams.
Though the moon on the waves and the chill in the air were reminiscent of 1971, tonight was different, too, and not just because Jacy was gone. This night there would be no singing. They were sixty-six now, far too old to convince themselves that their chances were awfully good, that the world gave the tiniest little fuck about their hopes and dreams, assuming they had any left. Even so, before coming out onto the deck, he put some music on low. Delia, still pissed at him for blaming her for how things had turned out, finally did drift off, and she slept more soundly when there was music playing. Most nights she went to bed wearing headphones, claiming music muted the voices in her head that always reminded her that she was a piece of shit. Tonight, to mute his own dark thoughts, Mickey had rooted around in the kitchen cabinets until he found the bottle of good scotch Lincoln had mentioned buying in town. He hardly ever drank hard liquor anymore, not since going to the doctor with shortness of breath and being told about his defective heart valve. Of course it was defective. Was he not his father’s son? The pitcher of Bloody Marys he’d mixed that morning was the first booze he’d tasted in over a year. He’d promised Delia he was done with the hard stuff, and until today he’d kept his word in the vain hope that it might help her keep hers. Fat fucking chance. Mickey disliked standing in judgment, but he did wish people wouldn’t lie about being clean when they weren’t. Was that so much to ask?
Yet what was his own life but a web of lies, most of them unnecessary. That he should want his friends to believe he was still a serious boozer when all he ever had anymore was beer—which his doctors told him would kill him less quickly—mystified him. The mountain of ribs he’d eaten tonight had also been for show. Hell, if there’d been any coke around, he probably would’ve done that, too, all to convince Lincoln and Teddy that he was who he’d always been, that his life was