A Drink Before the War Read Online Free PDF Page B

memory of my father for good measure. The hero fireman. The beloved city councilor. My father.
    Everyone knows Richie Colgan and I are friends. It’s half the reason people are a little more suspicious of me than used to be the case. We met when we were both majoring in Space Invaders with a Pub Etiquette minor at the Happy Harbor Campus of UMass/Boston. Now Richie’s the Trib ’s top columnist, a vicious bastard if he thinks you’re one of the three great evils—an elitist, a bigot, or a hypocrite. Since Sterling Mulkern is an embodiment of all three, Richie orders him for lunch once or twice a week.
    Everyone loved Richie Colgan—until they ran his picture over his byline. A good Irish name. A good Irish boy. Going after the corrupt, fat party bosses in city hall and the Statehouse. Then they ran his picture and everyone saw that his skin was blacker than Kurtz’s heart, and suddenlyhe was a “troublemaker.” But he sells papers, and his favorite target has always been Sterling Mulkern. Among the monikers he’s given the Senator there’s “Santa’s Evil Twin,” “Siphoner Sterling,” “Three-Lunch Mulkern,” and “Hypo the Hippo.” Boston’s not a town for the sensitive pol.
    And now, Mulkern wanted me to “have a word with him.” In for a penny, in for a pound. Next time I saw Mulkern, I decided, I’d give him the “Your money rents, it doesn’t buy” speech and tell him to leave my hero father out of it while I was at it.
    My father, Edgar Kenzie, had his fifteen minutes of local fame almost twenty years ago. He’d made the front page of both dailies; the photo even hit the wires and ended up on the back pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post . The photographer damn near won a Pulitzer.
    It was a hell of a photograph. My father, swathed in the black and yellow of the BFD, an oxygen tank strapped to his back, climbing up a ten story building on a rope of sheets. A woman had come down those sheets a few minutes earlier. Well, halfway down. She’d lost her grip and died on impact. The building was an old nineteenth-century factory that someone had converted into tenements, made of red brick and cheap wood that could have been tissue and gasoline as far as the fire was concerned.
    The woman had left her kids inside, telling them, in a moment of panic, to follow her down, instead of the other way around. The kids saw what happened to her and stopped moving, just stood in the black window and looked at their broken doll mother as smoke poured out of the room behind them. The window faced a parking lot and firemen were waiting for a tow truck to get the cars out so they could back a ladder in. My father grabbed an oxygen tank without a word, walked up to the sheets and started climbing. A window on the fifth floor blew out into his chest, and there’s another photo, slightly out of focus, of him flapping in the air as shards of glass explode off hisheavy black coat. He reached the tenth floor eventually and grabbed the kids—a four-year-old boy, a six-year-old girl—and went back down again. No big deal, he’d say with a shrug.
    When he retired five years later, people still remembered him, and I don’t think he ever paid for another drink in his life. He ran for city council on Sterling Mulkern’s suggestion and lived a good life of graft and large homes until cancer settled into his lungs like smoke in a closet and ate him and the money away.
    At home, the Hero was a different story. He made sure his dinner was waiting with a slap. Made sure the homework got done with a slap. Made sure everything went like clockwork with a slap. And if that didn’t work, a belt, or a punch or two, or once, an old washboard. Whatever it took to keep Edgar Kenzie’s world in order.
    I never knew, probably never will, if it was the job that did this to him—if he was just reacting in