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"No"

"Very different from me, Dennis was He had our mother's looks She was Irish The old e half an hour froo, just to see what it looked like I could see why he left There was nothing there" He took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, lit one, blew out smoke "I look just like the old ot our mother's eyes"

"Eddie said Dennis was killed in Vietnareen eyes on me "I don't knohy the hell he went It would have been nothing at all to get him out of it I told him, I said, 'Dennis, for Christ's sake, all I have to do is pick up a phone' He wouldn't have it" He took the cigarette and ground it out in an ashtray "So he went over there," he said, "and they shot his ass off for hi, and we let the silence stretch For aup with dead people- Eddie, Dennis, Ballou's parents, and a few ghosts of ered on the edge of consciousness If I turned , or entle," he said "Maybe that hy he went, to prove a hardness he didn't have He was Eddie's friend, and Eddie came to the service for him After that he would come around sometimes I never had much for him to do"

"He told ht"

He looked at me Surprise showed in his eyes I didn't know if it was surprise that Eddie had toldit He said, "He told you that, did he?"

"In a basement somewhere around here, he said it was He said you were in a furnace rooth of clothesline, and you beat him to death with a baseball bat"

"Who was it?"

"He didn't say"

"And when did it happen?"

"Soet any more specific than that"

"And was he there?"

"So he said"

"Or do you suppose he just put hilass but didn't drink froh I don't think much of it as a story, do you? One man beats another with a ball bat It's nasty, but it doesn't make much of a story You couldn't dine out on a story like that"

"There was a better story going around a couple of years ago"

"Oh?"

"A fellow disappeared, a man named Farrelly"

"Paddy Farrelly," he said "A difficult ave you trouble, and then he disappeared"

"Is that what they said?"

"And they said you went into half the saloons on Ninth and Tenth Avenues carrying a bowling bag, and you would open the bag and show everybody Farrelly's head"

He drank some whiskey "The stories they tell," he said

"Was Eddie around when that happened?"

He looked at me There was no one anywhere near us now The bartender was all the way down at the end of the bar, and the odaarm in here," he said "What do you need that suit jacket for?"

He earing a jacket himself, tweed, heavier than mine "I'm comfortable," I said

"Take it off"

I looked at hi it over the back of the stool next to me

"The shirt, too," he said

I took it off, and the T-shirt after it "Good man," he said "God's sake, put your clothes back on before you catch cold You got to be careful, a bastard'll co you know it's all recorded, he's wearing a fucking wire Paddy Farrelly's head? My o, he used to say it was the hardest thing in the world to find athe Easter Rising Twenty brave men marched into that post office, he said, and thirty thousand marched out Well, it's that hard to find a son of a bitch on Tenth Avenue who didn't seeround the bloody head of poor Farrelly"

"Are you saying it didn't happen?"

"Oh, Jesus," he said "What happened and what didn't? Maybe I never opened the fucking bowling bag Maybe a fucking bowling ball was all it ever contained They all love a story, you know They love to hear it, they love to tell it, they love the little shiver it puts between their shoulder blades The Irish are the worst that way Especially in this fucking neighborhood" He drank, set the glass down "It's rich soil around here, you know Plant a seed and a story grows like weeds"

"What happened to Farrelly?"

"Why should I know? Maybe he's in Tahiti, drinking the irls Did anyone ever find his body? Or the legendary fucking head?"

"What did Eddie know thatHe was no danger to er to?"

"Nobody I can think of What did he ever do? He did so with some boys who took a load of furs out of a loft on Twenty-seventh Street That's the biggest thing I can think of that he was a part of, and there'd be no stink coed, the owner let theo, years ago Who was he a danger to? Jesus, didn't he hang hi happened between us, so that I find hard to explain, or even to understand We were silent for a few s to say about Eddie Dunphy Then he told a story about his brother Dennis, how he'd taken the bla Dennis had done when they were children Then I told a couple of cop stories froe