Tengu. John Donohue
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screaming in the backyard, despite the stockade fence Micky employed in a vain attempt at kid control.
Inside, there were people all over the place. I have two brothers and three sisters and they all seem bent on providing the world with as many young Burkes as is possible. I kissed my sisters Irene, Mary, and Kate hello and gave my mom a hug. My dad’s been dead for a while now, but I never come to these things and don’t imagine that I catch sight of him out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes I watch my mother sitting at gatherings like this and, in her unguarded moments, I imagine I see the brief light in her eyes, and I know she is feeling the same. Then there is a subtle sagging in her form as the illusion fades. I held on to her then, for a minute, feeling the bird-like fragility of her form.
But her eyes were clear and sharp, when she asked, “How have you been?” She worries.
I grinned and shrugged. “Good, Mom. It’s working out.” My mother has concerns about my career prospects. She was elated when I got the job at the university and was more upset than I was when I got canned. I think she worries that my youngest brother Jimmy will never leave her house and is terrified at the thought that I might return there as well.
I made reassuring small talk with her, letting her know I was keeping busy. I used to assure her I was staying out of trouble, but she talks to Micky and there’s no sense in lying to her. She’d find out anyway.
Deirdre was in the kitchen. She’s got high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, and it makes her seem as if she looks at the world with a great deal of skepticism. She married my brother Micky, so the appearance probably has some basis in reality. Dee is a product of the same Irish-American stew as the rest of us. She was smart enough to know life doesn’t always live up to our expectations, but deep down she was good enough never to entirely surrender the hope.
“Hey, Dee,” I said, giving her a peck on the cheek and a bouquet of flowers.
“Aww,” she said, “you didn’t have to do that. . . . ” She was pleased, but I could also see her eyes working. Dee worries about me, too. She’s convinced I’m living on the edge of destitution. I had no doubt that she and my mother would force a shopping bag of leftovers on me when I went home. I could see myself staggering down a train platform in Brooklyn, loaded down with excess rolls, meats, and other surprises. It was somewhat embarrassing. Connor Burke: scholar, martial artist, bagman.
“Michael,” she called out the window into the backyard.
“Wha!” a voice demanded.
“Connor’s here,” Dee called with a heavy Long Island accent. When she said my name, it sounded like ‘Kahna.’ Her kids said it the same way. Dee jerked her head toward the backyard. “Go see him. I’m gonna get a vase for these.”
The backyard was where the men and children hid from women, the controlling elements in their lives. Even in the cold, Micky was out there, hovering over a barbecue. He wasn’t alone. Our brother Tommy was huffing across the yard, clutching a football while three small children clung, screaming, to his legs. They were having the time of their lives, but Tommy, never in the best of shape, looked like he was going to die. Off in the far corner of the yard, some older Burke kids were murmuring to each other and pressing the toes of their sneakers against the thin sheet of ice that had formed on a shallow puddle. They looked like prisoners planning the Big Break.
I came out the door and Micky glanced at me. “Finally,” he said. “Now we can eat.” Micky is whipcord thin with a patch of white in his dark reddish-brown hair. He has a military mustache that bristles with energy. As a homicide cop he’s seen lots of things, the kind most of us don’t want to know about. It tends to make him cranky. The two of us have always been different in many ways. But when you peel us down to the core, the surface differences fall away and are unimportant. We’d been together, smelling blood, and lived through it. So when we look at each other, the recognition of experiences shared is like a current arcing through space and making a connection.
But we don’t talk much about that. Micky squinted at me, then bent down, opened the lid on a big orange cooler, and handed me a bottle of beer. He picked up his own bottle and clicked the neck against mine. “Confusion to our enemies,” he said and took a sip.
“Why should we be alone?” I replied.
Micky’s partner Art came through the sliding glass door that led to the den. He smiled at me. Art is bigger than my brother and his hair is a lighter, sandy sort of red. But he has the same cop mustache. And the same cop eyes.
“Deirdre wants to know how much longer, Mick,” Art said.
Micky poked the meat with a finger. “Gimme five minutes and we’re set.”
Art nodded at that. He started to head back to the house, then turned. “You talk to Connor about that thing yet?”
My sister Irene’s husband Nick came into the yard just then. Micky jerked his head in Nick’s direction. “Not now,” he told Art.
“There’s a thing?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Art said. “Right up your alley.”
“Art . . . ” Micky warned him. Then he looked at me. “After dinner. We’ll talk about the thing.”
“And what a thing it is,” Art said over his shoulder as he headed back into the house.
“I love it when you guys get technical,” I said to my brother.
Nick rooted around in the cooler and pulled out a beer, too. He looked at us with bright, expectant eyes, waiting to be let in on things. We changed the subject.
We had eaten and the light outside was fading. I always feel a bit overstuffed and sluggish after a family feed like this. But the kids hadn’t slowed down at all. They had gobbled down their meals and bolted for the yard, leaving paper plates piled haphazardly in the trash and a trail of potato chip crumbs that stretched from one end of the house to another. Twilight deepened and in the strengthening invisibility of night, they hooted like animals from far off jungles.
The den is Micky’s lair. It’s littered with old furniture and bad decorations. My brother paneled it himself, and in spots the wooden sheets of fake walnut are coming away from the furring strips. There’s a neat little space with a desk and a small file cabinet in one corner. On the wall to one side of the desk, there’s a framed collection of family pictures: my folks on the day they were married; all of us kids at the beach, squinting into the sun shining from behind the photographer. My dad, cocky and smooth-faced, posing outside a tent in Korea. He’s wearing a sidearm and a set of faded fatigues. His billed cap is pushed way back on his head. He looks young and thin and his ears seem big. He wouldn’t be that thin again until just before the cancer finally got him.
I sighed to myself, and Micky came up behind me and heard.
He handed me a beer, and in a rare moment of vulnerability, put his arm around my shoulders. We stood there for a hair’s breadth, sharing Dad, before he used the motion to turn me around to lead me to a seat. Art was with him. I looked at them expectantly, but Micky seemed like he didn’t want to talk business. Whatever it was.
Micky gestured at the picture. “Remember what Dad used to say about the Marine Corps?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Two things. ‘Best thing I ever did other than marry your mother . . . ’”
“And?”
“And ‘Don’t ever join,’” I finished.
“Smart man,” Art concluded approvingly.
“The Service . . . ” Micky said with poignant reminiscence. “It’s a whole other world.”
Now I knew my brother had in fact served a tour with the Marines in his younger years. It was both a source of exasperation and pride to our dad. He hadn’t relaxed until Micky came home. And in short order Dad began to worry again: Micky was, after all, home.
“You gotta watch out,” Art said, keeping this odd little