Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,15

myself from the dog’s playful grasp.

“Oh, my Lord,” Tom said, sighing, shoulders collapsing, his face an anguished mask. “Look here, Noodle, I’m melted after all I’ve been through these last hours. I’ll make you some tea and you get yourself a couple of lovely pieces of fresh bread with butter.”

“That’s not a proper breakfast,” Pop said. “He’s not on death row, you know. Surely he deserves better than thieves and murderers.”

“Fine. Tea and toast, then, the act of toasting adds nutrients to the bread, same as if it were a bowl of oatmeal.”

“What nutrients, Uncle Tom?” I asked.

“Zinc.”

“Well, you know what I think?” Pop said. “There’s nothing like a miracle to make a man crave a drink.”

“There’s no one to say we didn’t earn it,” Tom said.

“Bartender!” Uncle Tom snapped his fingers in my direction.

I jumped down from my stool and ran to the cellar to get them their beer, startling the mostly sleeping dogs, who leapt from their spots, barking, wondering what all the fuss was about. Uncle Tom and Pop watched silently for once as I carefully set out two immaculately clean, tall and skinny, cylindrical glasses.

“Why do they represent a better choice for drinking beer?” Tom quizzed me.

“Nuance,” I said, whispering, concentrating on the pour, tipping the glass on a forty-five-degree angle, focusing on the slope. I poured with confidence—I’d been doing it for half my life. The bottle half-empty, I shifted the glass to ninety degrees and kept pouring down the middle, creating a perfect foam head.

“Beautiful, Collie!” Pop said. “You’re the champ.”

“Not bad,” Tom said. “You’ll do until someone better comes along.”

I handed the drinks over without so much as inhaling. Pop made me take the pledge of total abstinence when I was three years old, and which I’ve maintained to this day, with the exception of one adolescent slip.

“Here’s to Bing Algernon Flanagan,” Pop said, raising his glass in salute. “Died and rose again on April 7, 1969.”

“So, Collie, what do you say?” Uncle Tom jabbed me in the ribs. “Can you spell ‘thaumaturgy’?”

CHAPTER FOUR

WITH HIS SLIGHT BUILD AND HABITUALLY UNDONE SHOELACES, Bingo, despite a kind of slouching natural elegance and balmy rich-kid veneer, was as wild as if wolves had raised him. Perpetually on the prowl, he was always looking to mess around and make trouble, always changing shape and challenging the people around him to keep pace.

Bing had a kind of heightened vibrancy, as if he’d emerged intact from Walt Disney’s imagination. His chestnut-colored hair, the same rich shade as Ma’s, hung in his eyes—he had an annoying way of constantly shoving it off his forehead and tucking it behind his ears. When he was younger, Uncle Tom used to grab him every few months, catching him for an impromptu trim on the way out the door. “The virgin accountant,” Uncle Tom dubbed the result, an ear-skimming Alfalfa cut with a slick center part.

With his spooky green eyes and translucent white face, he was a freckled landscape, like an animated Jackson Pollock, with big brown spots wall to wall—I swear Ma must’ve shacked up with a Dalmatian.

He was always in some kind of jam, mostly arising out of his sense of humor, which overran him like a form of Tourette’s. The nuns and priests had his prison cell picked out by the time he was ten years old, though Ma waged guerrilla war against anyone attempting to discipline him, including Pop, who had a special talent for throwing up his hands.

When Bingo was twelve he started to throw snowballs at the altar boys as they arrived to serve Mass at St. Basil’s on Sundays, me yelling at him to cut it out, both of us forced to attend church by Ma because she knew how much it annoyed the Falcon. I’m sure the only reason Ma converted to Catholicism was to bug her old man—meanwhile she so scandalized the priests with her views during obligatory marriage classes, they canceled her wedding to Pop the day before it was to take place. Despite his opposition to the marriage, the Falcon reluctantly went into secret negotiations with the bishop, and things went off as planned.

“After some discussion,” he told me, “the bishop and I both concluded that your parents deserved one another.”

The nuns warned Bingo over and over to stop tormenting the altar boys, but he wouldn’t listen. He loved it—the nuns’ wrath, scolding, and threats were like fuel supplying his incorrigibility. Finally one of our teachers, Sister Mary Ellen, out of patience, grabbed