We Were Kings Read Online Free PDF

until you could no longer clearly make out either. The important parts were gone. Lynne’s face was gone.
    There was a reverberation of sound, the treble created by two identical records playing on phonographs alongside each other, their music half a second apart and so creating a partial echo. The lights and sounds and movement of people blurred; everything was shuddering. The edges of his world were turning black, as so often happened, the darkness moving slowly inward toward the center of his vision. He took some bennies from his pocket and popped them back quickly with a glass of water before Dante could notice his shaking hand, then with a smile plastered to his face he focused on a straight line toward a single spot—through the crowd to where the band played upon the stage; he focused first on the pianist, then the fiddler, the horn section, the drummer, the bass player, the accordionist, and gradually the room widened, the blackness at its edges retreated, and he saw the world fully again.
    At the intermission between sets, while Owen was in the restroom, Anne took Cal aside. She wore a blue sequined dress that sparkled and shone under the light. Her red hair was done up in a bun and she had large, wide, and serious eyes. But there was almost nothing serious or demure about Anne Kelly—she’d grown up in a family of all boys, most of them firemen now, and she had a flippant sense of humor that Cal enjoyed.
    “Cal,” she said, “would you do me a favor and take Owen down to the bar? It’s his birthday but you would think someone had died—buy him a couple of drinks, cheer him up. I want him to have a good time. Us ladies, we’ll be just fine.”
    When Owen came back to the table he looked a hundred times worse. Anne, who was talking with Claudia, pretended as if nothing were wrong, but she glanced at Cal and he got the hint.
    “Owen,” he said. “You look as if you’re gonna puke. C’mon, you need a drink. Let’s you and me and Dante go down to McPherson’s. I’m dying of the heat in here myself.”
    Downstairs, the long bar at McPherson’s stretched the length of the building and men were lined up at it five deep. Fans turned slowly above their heads. They were putting back their drinks, loosening up their feet and tongues to go talk to women and ask them to dance. It was after ten o’clock and soon most of them would file out in anticipation of the band’s playlist, which they knew down to the minute. As the three of them made their way to the back of the bar someone shouted from the hallway, “They’re playing ‘The Star of the County Down’!” and half the men put back their pints and began moving toward the door.
    At the end of the bar Cal ordered them each a beer and a whiskey and when the drinks came he and Dante raised their glasses to Owen and drank them down and then Cal ordered them another round. Above their heads they could feel the vibrations from the ballroom. The strains of the fiddle, blasts from the trumpets, and the steady boom of the bass drum tremored throughout the building. Owen and Dante lit cigarettes and Cal took off his jacket, loosened his tie. Sweat stained his pale blue shirt dark beneath his arms and along his spine.
    Cal looked at Owen. “Owen, you’re as pale as a ghost.”
    “Ah, I’m fine. It’s just this fucking heat.”
    “Anne thinks you’re not having a good time. It’s your birthday, she wants you to have a good time.”
    “I am having a good time, it’s a fucking gas.” Owen shook his head in frustration, lifted his glass, and finished his whiskey.
    Dante raised his hand to the barkeep for another round.
    “Drink isn’t going to help,” Owen said.
    “Have one anyway,” Dante said. “It’s too hot not to.”
    Owen took a deep drag of his cigarette and exhaled, tapped the butt end into an ashtray, and left it smoldering on the rim. “We set up a net to catch a boat coming into Charlestown this morning,” he said. “We received a tip