The Flaming Corsage Read Online Free PDF

four rubber coats and pieces of harness; and so no one would hire him now. He had come by his name when he chased somebody into Tommy Mullon’s icehouse on Erie Street and lost him, but three boys in the icehouse loft called out, “Look up, Matty, look up,” and
when he did they dumped a bag of horseshit on him.
    “Who’s a mudhole mick?” Matty Lookup said a second time.
    “I don’t remember,” Maginn said.
    “He’s making a joke,” Edward said. Always explaining Maginn’s jokes.
    “You calling me a mudhole mick?”
    “I don’t even know you,” Maginn said. “Why would I call you anything?”
    “You don’t like the Irish?”
    “I am Irish.”
    “You look like a goddamn Dutchman.”
    “I don’t have enough money to be Dutch.”
    “You talk like you don’t like the Irish.”
    “Why don’t you go find a mudhole that’ll accept you, and lay down and take a bath,” Maginn said.
    Matty Lookup grabbed Maginn’s throat with both hands, lifted him off his stool, then off the floor, and swung him around like the ball of a hammer. While Maginn the splinter flailed
helplessly with his fists (like pummeling a sack of grain), Jack came around the bar to pull the two apart but was staggered by Matty Lookup’s backhanded wallop. Matty was pinning Maginn to a
tabletop, positioning himself to bite off Maginn’s right ear, when Edward vaulted the bar, lifted the cauldron of bean soup off Jack’s stove with both hands, and moved with it toward
the unequal struggle. He yelled in his most urgent vibrato, “Look up, Matty! Look up!” and, as Matty’s teeth parted to release Maginn’s ear and his glance turned predictably
toward those mocking words, Edward hurled the boiling soup into his face; and Matty knew agony. He rolled off the table onto the sawdust of Black Jack’s floor, screeching the song of the
scalded beast. Edward stood over him, the pot raised above his head with both hands, ready to break the brute’s skull if his belligerence revived. Matty wailed in pain and Edward lowered the
pot. Jack, a short club in his right hand now, nudged Matty with his foot.
    “Get out you crazy son of a bitch, get out,” Jack told him. “Come in again, you’ll get worse.”
    Matty Lookup, whimpering out of his ruined flesh, stood up and shuffled his crumpled form out the door.
    “How’s your ear?” Edward asked Maginn, who, with a handkerchief, was blotting the blood that oozed from his lightly chewed ear. “Did he eat much of it?”
    “Don’t worry about it,” Maginn said. “I’ve got his nose in my pocket.”
    “You hurt any place?” Jack asked him. “I thought you were all done.”
    “I would’ve been, except for our nimble novelist here. Quick thinking, old man. I myself might’ve reached for a bottle to club him with, but I’d’ve never gone for
the soup. A genteel weapon. Your prospective in-laws would doubtless approve the choice.”
    Don’t say anything, Maginn.
    Jack tapped Edward’s arm with his club.
    “Good, Eddie,” he said. “You did good.” Then he went behind the bar to get the mop.
    The whistle blew in the Lumber District. Six o’clock. The men would be pouring in, any minute. Edward now hated this saloon, hated Matty Lookup, Matty Beansoup, Matty Noface, hated his own
savage response to the oaf. What was served by your attack and your sacrifice, Matty? What rubric of resistance did I serve with the soup? He held the empty pot in his hand. He looked at it: foot
and a half deep, blue enamel, chipped rim, charred bottom, implement of retribution. He looked up and saw Maginn staring at him and smiling, blotting soup from his coat. Jack came with the pail and
mop and went to work on the beans.
    Edward could not now ask Jack to be his best man. A great fellow, Jack. A generous man if ever there was one, and now he’s got Ruthie all to himself. But he doesn’t approve of
Katrina. Everybody’s generosity ends somewhere.
    Maginn was still smiling.
    “Shut up,