Outside Providence by Peter Farrelly

Author:Peter Farrelly [Farrelly, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-53949-6
Publisher: Crown
Published: 1988-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART Five

On my first night home for Christmas vacation I grabbed a bus up to Suicide and drank at the Hilltop Cafe with DeCenz, Drugs Delaney, and Tommy the Wire. It was the first time we’d been out together since Mousy’s funeral, and we were all feeling shitty. To make things worse, the Wire had just returned from his cousin’s cornball wedding. He’d never been accused of being a hopeless romantic and the ceremony had been planned by his cousin’s fruitcake fiancée, an ex-heroin addict, born-again Christian who’d left her brains in San Francisco.

“Tell you one thing,” the Wire said, “if I ever get hitched, it ain’t gonna be one of these make-up-your-own-poems-do-it-yourself jobs. That kind of crap’s for Delaney.”

I looked for Drugs’s reaction, but he was on drugs and just smiled into space.

“Drugs can climb a mountain at sunrise and stick petunias up everyone’s ass,” the Wire said. “When I get married, it’s gonna be ‘I do, she dooz, let’s party.’ And if my wife has to leave her guru at home, well, that’s just gonna be too bad.”

He slammed his bandaged hand on the table.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, looking up at the Bruins game on the tube. “Every time I think of it I get more pissed off.”

“Think of what?”

The Wire banged his empty glass on the table and filled it up from the pitcher.

“You know that mutt they keep inside the gate by the power lines?” he said.

“The one they put there because of your brother,” DeCenz said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, he’s always barking and snapping at—”

“Hold it,” I said. “You mean the big one that looks like an albino German shepherd?”

“Yeah,” the Wire said, “the white bastard.”

“That mutt never barks at me,” I said.

“Forget about it. He never used to bark. The last six months or so something’s been chapping his ass real bad. Anyway, I walk by him every day on my way home from school with my hands covering my ears because he’s always barking at me. So one day I come along with a skull-busting headache, and I wasn’t in no mood for his shit. So I go, ‘Come on, buddy, would you please shut up,’ and he keeps barking, so I go to myself, ‘I’ll fix this mutt.’ He’s standing right behind the fence, you know. It’s one of those wooden ones with the pointy tops.”

I nodded.

“So he keeps barking with his snout pressed right up against the fence and ‘POW!!!’”—the Wire uncorked an imaginary right jab—“I punched him right in the nose. I mean I cracked the prick. Right on the beak.”

“But you busted—”

“Hey,” Drugs said, “you guys ever notice how the floor in here is half tiles and half cement?”

“But you busted your hand on the fence?” I said.

“No,” the Wire said. “My wrist got stuck and the cock-sucker lunges at me and rips a slab of pork out of my hand.”

“He even had to get a tennis shot,” Drugs said, momentarily returning to earth.

“You deserved it,” DeCenz said.

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