Black Irish

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Authors: Stephan Talty
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cheating on her. With her little sister.” Or, “The money’s taped behind the toilet. I stole it because I’m lazy and I like nice things.” He swore that the first time a criminal made a full confession right off, he’d let them go with a hundred-dollar bill slipped into their palms. As a tip. It never happened.
    She stopped at a 7-Eleven for a black coffee to clear her head. She kicked the hard slush from behind all four tires, thinking about the Gaelic Club as she walked around the car. It was the next obvious stop. The place was like the mothership of the County. If you wanted to do anything in South Buffalo, if you wanted to get elected or laid or drunk or to show off your new car or to remember what it was like to be young, you went to the Gaelic Club. It was like walking into the lion’s mouth.
    Z called back. No Gerald or Gerard Williams in the database. She told him to play around with the names.
    Abbie angled her car against the Gaelic Club’s warm redbrick exterior and walked to the front. The Club had been a monument to Irish power in the city when the bricklayers and carpenters and construction workers who flocked to an empty lot after work to build it had been young, their backs strong, their hair still chestnut brown or flaming red. They’d still been able, after a full day’s work pouring concrete or laying brick, to come and do it again for a few hours while their families brought them ham sandwiches in cold wax paper and the officers of the Club ferried endless cups of beer. After it opened, the Club had been wall-to-wall with screaming kids running to the pool, the whole building resonating to the game of basketball in the gym, the sound of the ball like cannon shots, audible in every part of the building, while in the bar families ate their fish and chips and listened to the latest singer from Connemara or Dublin on thefoot-high stage in the corner of the bar, directly to the right as you entered.
    As Abbie walked into the small foyer, where old notices advertising folk singers or protest marches for the IRA were fluttering on a bulletin board, it was as if her mind was running on two parallel tracks. Now and 1989. In those days, she’d come to the Club on a Saturday afternoon to find her dad, the bar as loud as a carnival, packed with men and women in wool coats, the drapery of the brown and black and checked wool swaying like a theater curtain as people moved. That’s all you saw, this curtain of coats, and at the center of it, always, his right foot in a black leather loafer perched on a three-rung barstool and a Seven-and-Seven in his hand, her father, holding court.
    He would see her, order her a Shirley Temple, and the crowd would move back and allow her in. But her father would never take her up on his lap the way the other fathers did their daughters, or feed her the cherry from the Shirley Temple and stick the tiny pink paper umbrella in her hair after wiping it carefully with a napkin, the way that Mr. O’Neill did with his girl Siobhan. And she would sit there waiting for his eyes to fall on hers, but after that first look, it was as if she’d become someone else’s child. Another listener, another hanger-on.
    She pushed open the glass door. There were three people in the bar: two of them as old as her father, sitting at a small table, and a young bartender. A down-market flat-screen TV was up on the wall, showing a game of Gaelic football—she recognized it at a glance—and the heavy brogues of the announcers called the action. As she walked in, the bartender froze and watched her approach.
    “Hi, Billy,” she said.
    Billy Carney smiled.
    “No fucking
way,”
he said, placing his hands on the bar rail and leaning against it. “Abbie Kearney.”
    Billy had been the quarterback of the Timon varsity team in high school. She’d liked him. All the girls had liked him.
    “You really are back.”
    “I’ve been back for a year,” she said, climbing onto one of the rickety

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