PUP HAD NEVER BEEN INSIDE Mishka’s Tap before, even though it had stood on the same corner at the outskirts of Flanland for as long as he could remember. It was a huddled brick building decorated with a blue-striped awning that had been bleached gray by years of sunlight, and it didn’t even have a sign, just a neon Old Style logo that blinked in the front window. As Pup opened the dinged-up metal door and stepped inside for the first time, he wondered whether Mishka’s was even its actual name, or just a nickname like his own that the bar had been given long ago and never been able to shake.
When his eyes adjusted to the relative darkness of the room, he could make out a long, polished wood counter with rows of liquor bottles on one side of it and guys about his dad’s age on the other, drinking beer from glass mugs. The walls were decorated with faded photos of dead Chicago luminaries, and the jukebox was one of those old ones, where you hit a big metal button and a thick plastic page flips behind the glass. A sticky brown carpet covered the floor, curling up at the edges where the staples had come loose, and the whole place reeked of stale smoke and wet dog. The source of one of those smells was a mangy-looking mutt with a mottled, patchy coat stretched out beneath the jukebox, who barely lifted his lumpy head to glance at Pup as he stepped carefully past it.
The woman behind the bar was slow-moving and jiggly armed, with bottle-red hair and a low-cut T-shirt that revealed sun-spotted cleavage and said QUEEN OF FUCKING EVERYTHING across the front. When she saw Pup approach the counter, she put down the bottle of vanilla-flavored vodka she was wiping down with a dingy rag and shook her head emphatically.
“Oh, no you don’t,” she said. “Turn your skinny ass around and walk right back out that door. We don’t serve twelve-year-olds here.”
A few of the guys sitting at the bar swiveled in their stools to laugh at Pup and his skinny ass.
“I’m just looking for my brother,” he said.
“Yeah? Who’s your brother?”
“Luke Flanagan.”
A low whistle from one of the patrons, a snicker from another. The bartender set her bottle down on the counter, her face looking suddenly pinched.
“Well, you won’t find him here.”
“Are you sure?” Pup asked. “Because I know he’s been hanging out here a lot—”
“Used to hang out here a lot. Not anymore. He is no longer welcome in this establishment, if you must know the truth.”
“Fighting,” explained the gravel-voiced old man at the end of the counter, whose neck hung down to his collar in two grayish loops of skin.
“Oh,” said Pup.
The bartender replaced the vanilla vodka on the shelf and picked up another bottle, this one bubblegum flavored. “When you find him,” she said, twisting the rag along the neck of the bottle, “you tell him he owes me three hundred bucks for the mirror he busted in the men’s bathroom.”
As Pup stepped out of the old-ashtray stench of the bar and back into the freshness of the evening, he looked down at his hands and saw that they were shaking. Luke was missing. Luke was lost. He imagined it happening all over again: standing next to a coffin, with eyes that stung and shoes that pinched as the endless line snaked past. Men shaking his hand, women hugging him, some looking him dead in the eye, some looking away, but all of them saying the same thing: Sorry for your loss. Sorry for your loss. Sorry for your loss. He couldn’t bear to go through it again, to watch his family go through it again. To be the only son left. Rush hour was beginning to set in as he stood in the middle of the sidewalk and pulled his phone from his pocket. Professionally dressed people, freed from work for the day, moved past him, absorbed in their own phones, their own lives.
I just need a yes or a no, he wrote. Please. Are you alive?
He reached the bus stop just as his phone buzzed in his pocket.
YES
The wave of relief washed through his body, overwhelming him. He sagged against the bus shelter and wrote back, his fingers shaking.
Where are you
No response. He tried again:
Are you okay
Nothing.
Suddenly he was angry at himself for even following up. He’d made contact, hadn’t he? That was all he had wanted. To know that Luke was alive. He didn’t care if Luke was okay. Luke wasn’t okay. That much was obvious. He had attacked his own mother, had wrenched bone from joint, had knocked the air from her lungs.
He could have killed her.
Alcohol didn’t do that to everybody. Whiskey made his father sleepy. Wine made his sisters giggly. Beer made Izzy and Brody horny. It never made any of them violent. It never made them smash bar mirrors or pee all over floors or take swings at their siblings or fail out of law school. Pup thought about how his mother had looked lying there in the mess on the dining room floor, clawing the air to pull it back into her lungs. How when she’d fallen, her skirt had flipped up and he’d seen the crackles of thin purple veins across her bare thighs. The way she had struggled to get up, her hair falling out of its bun, the twisted pain in her face and the odd angle of her drooping shoulder. And Luke’s suffering cry, how it had set Pup’s hair standing on end, and made him love his brother the most he had ever loved him at the exact moment he was hating him more than he’d ever hated anyone.
Forget him.
He could come crawling back when he was ready to stop being a drunk asshole, when he was ready to ask their mother for forgiveness. When he was ready to set things right. And if that day never came, so be it. Pup didn’t need Luke: he still had five siblings left.
He turned off his phone and dropped it back into his pocket.