"As good as drink is, it ends in thirst."—Irish Proverb
Ends in Thirst
At practice the next morning, Jack's brain had been replaced by a gigantic, throbbing plum bruise that felt like it was on the verge of swelling out of his skull. Once his cranium exploded, he could only imagine the shards of bone stabbing into the ice like spears, while the flecks of pus and blood spattered the scene like the aftermath of murder. It would probably be a very disgusting thing for his teammates to witness, but an extremely relieving moment for him personally—like lancing a bothersome boil. At the very least, the pain from a shattering skull would be no worse than the headache he was dealing with right now.
Everything from his neck up seemed to be twice as heavy as normal, which was probably scientific proof that beer, like mucus, could congeal in the sinuses. His eyes, as if they had been replaced in nerves but not appearance by some subterranean creature's, were too sensitive to the light and longed to be covered every time a ray reflected off the ice. As far as his mouth was concerned, it was seemingly content to remain frozen in one combination of a scowl and smirk, since it didn't want to respond to any internal commands to contort his lips into different positions. Even his nose felt—he wasn't sure because he hadn't bothered to confirm in a mirror or in the glass around the rink, because he didn't wish to know whether he looked as terrible as he felt—as red as Rudolph's nose.
Clearly his not-so-trusty hangover cure learned from his father—another bite of the dog that bit you, as the expression went—hadn't worked, but at least he had gotten to start his day off with a nice cold Corona. That Corona didn't feel so nice now, though, with the way it kept crashing and churning like an ocean around in his seasick stomach, which meant that Jack was at the tipping point of mentally swearing to God and all the saints that he would never get drunk again if they just healed his hangover.
Before Jack could discover whether his bargaining with celestial powers would have any impact on his earthly woes, Rizzo, who was probably as sensorily impaired as Jack and who had been acting like a chef by serving up turnover after turnover this practice, coughed up the puck yet again in the offensive zone, where they were trying to score against Jimmy, although with the pathetic inability to put the puck on net their side of the scrimmage was demonstrating thus far, Jimmy's time would have been more profitably spent taking a cat nap on his goalie stick.
Eric Strobel corralled the puck and spun around, his skate blades barely carving into the ice in a smooth pivot that Jack especially admired in his coordination-challenged state, where he felt lucky that both his feet—by and large—were moving in the same direction. As Eric sped toward Jack's defensive zone, Rammer, who was Jack's partner in this exercise, slammed him into the boards with enough eager force that Jack's ears rang from feet away.
The puck sailed from the edge of Eric's stick and slid across the ice to Mark Johnson, which meant that Rammer had taken himself out of position to deliver a hit again, and Jack wouldn't have cared too much if it had only been Rob McClanahan whom Rammer had smashed against the boards, since any reason to push McClanahan around was a good one in Jack's studied opinion.
Controlling the puck deftly, Mark continued to try to demolish land speed records in his race toward Janny's goal. Already feeling as if an anchor had been dropped into the ocean of his stomach, Jack fell back as he watched a two-on-one take shape with Mark Johnson and Rob McClanahan rushing toward him as he tried to position himself in the best possible place to limit their shooting and passing lanes. Unfortunately, his legs felt like blocks of concrete and his skates seemed to be cutting through sand rather than ice, which was bad news mainly because if there was a list of players Jack didn't want to be caught flat-footed against, McClanahan and Johnson were definitely high enough on it that they would need oxygen tanks to breathe.
Clenching his jaw, Jack lurched forward to pressure Mark, whose eyes gleamed as he stickhandled around Jack and ended up about an inch outside of Janny's crease.
As Jack moved to clear the crease, Mark rifled a pass over to Rob, who was lurking just outside the left paint of the crease and slid the puck under Janny's outstretched leg into the back of the net.
Fishing the puck out of Janny's goal because it gave him an excuse not to check how punch-ably smug Rob's face was, Jack muttered to his goaltender, "Sorry to leave you hanging out to dry like that, Janny."
"Doesn't matter." Janny snatched up the water bottle that was on top of his net and squirted a jet into his mouth. "I should've had that one. My fault."
While Janny might have been prepared to forgive the lapses of others, Herb wasn't ready to pardon anyone. After blowing sharply on his whistle to guarantee that he had everybody's attention riveted on him for his impending tirade, Herb snapped, "Rizzo, that must've been the tenth time you turned over the puck today! Why the hell don't you use hands instead of stones to hold your stick?"
Bringing the full brunt of his glower to rest on Rammer, Herb ranted on, "Rammer, if you're going to make that hit, you'e got to get the puck. If you don't, you've taken yourself out of position to make a hit, which makes you worse than useless as a defenseman."
Finished ripping Rammer to shreds, Herb went on tersely, glaring daggers at Jack, who wasn't even surprised when his cropped up for blame in this harangue, "As for you, Jack, if you're going to challenge Mark, then really challenge him. Don't just let him skate around you like you're a God damn traffic cone."
His cheeks flaming, Jack felt as badly burned as any meal Dad had tried (and, of course, failed) to cook in the oven when Mom was ill or otherwise engaged, and practice continued in this cheery vein for several hours.
When practice finally concluded, the locker room resounded with a chorus of weary complaints about Herb and his cruel coaching techniques, so that, at first, Jack initially supposed that the stream of profanities spewing from Rob's mouth was a particularly colored commentary on the day's practice before Rob shouted loudly enough to ensure that every war in the room heard, "My wallet is stolen!"
"Stolen?" repeated Eric, somewhat muffled by the shirt he was pulling over his head, after a stunned silence had swept the team like a tsunami, as if he had never encountered that verb form before in his existence. "Um, are you sure about that, Mac?"
"Of course I am, Electric, because I sure as hell didn't misplace it." Rob's withering answer was ostensibly directed toward Eric, but the coals blazing in his eyes were burning at Jack. "I never lose anything."
"Well, I don't think anyone in here took it from you, Robbie," chimed in Bill in his eminently placid, rational tone. "Why don't you look in your pockets and on the floor, okay?"
"I already checked those places," mumbled Rob, but he rummaged through his pockets and fumbled around on the floor probably so he could have the pleasure of pronouncing in a voice as tight as a drum skin, "It's not in either of those spots, and I always put my wallet in my sock, so I doubt it would've moved by itself, anyway, unless it's sprouted legs since I last saw it."
"Take a deep breath," Bill advised. "There's got to be an explanation for all this."
"Yeah, and it better be a fucking good one," snarled Rob, jerking his chin at Jack. "So, what do you have to say for yourself, O'Callahan? I'm all ears."
"I didn't steal your wallet, McClanahan." Jack's eyebrows contemptuously. "I don't take people's trash, if that's what you're implying."
"My wallet isn't trash." Rob bristled, as if an insult to one of his carefully selected, upscale accessories was an affront to every particle of his refined, upper-middle class being. "It was fine leather filled with perfectly legal tender, but I should've known that something terrible would happen to it the moment I was assigned a locker next to someone like you."
Rob lobbed out the final three words as though they were grenades, and Jack didn't even have to ask what the phrase meant. Low-class. Provincial. Common. Crass. Plain, poor, and hopeless. Jack was the rough neighborhood where he was born and raised, now and forever, world without end. That was the understanding.
"I didn't touch your fucking wallet." Jack growled, turning everything in his locker inside-out and dumping it on the floor for Rob's flinty inspection. "It's not here. See, asshole?"
"I see only what you want me to see." Rob's lips thinned into a line narrow and honed as a knife. "If you're a thief, you could just as easily be a liar to boot, so the fact that my wallet isn't in your locker proves nothing."
"What the fuck would prove that I'm not a crook?" demanded Jack, folding his arms across his chest to prevent himself from punching Rob into peach cobbler. "Do I have to search the entire arena from top to bottom with you until we find your wretched wallet before you believe me, huh?"
"You've probably just hidden the wallet somewhere else, but you won't pretend to find it until sufficient time has elapsed so that you can act like you didn't know where the hell it was." With a derisive snort, Rob stuck his nose high enough in the air that it likely was at risk of bleeding from the altitude. "I'll be gracious, though, and not press charges as long as the wallet and all its contents are returned to me by midnight."
Noting inwardly that it was a charming tendency of many brought up in luxury and ease to declare they were taking the high road while actually traveling the low one, Jack suggested tartly, "Why don't we comb through that trash can in the corner? Your wallet bears such a resemblance to litter that it might have wound up in the garbage by accident."
Eyeing Jack with loathing intense enough to rival a thousand fiery suns, Rob crossed over to the garbage can, upended it with a bang, and sifted through the debris with his tennis shoes.
Deciding to be the better person—whether out of defiant Irish pride or the overwhelming, traditional Catholic urge to flagellate and martyr oneself—Jack knelt among the detritus of locker room life, seeking some trace of Rob's wallet but uncovering only used gum wrappers, empty soda cans, and wads of tape, and, thank God for small mercies, nothing more revolting than that.
When he and Rob had sorted through every piece of trash, they dumped all the garbage back into the can, and, without exchanging so much as a word or a look, continued to search along the floor and benches.
After a time that felt so depressingly long that Jack didn't want to check his watch for fear of what it would tell him, he and Rob had explored what seemed like every crevice and garbage can in the whole rink, a disgusting process that left him with a newfound appreciation for the travails sanitation workers endured on a daily basis, and had discovered nothing that even bore the faintest resemblance to Rob's Ralph Lauren wallet.
"I don't get it," Rob burst out in a voice rusty from disuse, because they hadn't spoken to each other since they began the search, as they rummaged through what seemed like their hundredth trash can. This one was beside the vending machines and so was exceptionally odiferous from the remains of snacks people had lost interest in eating. "I remember clearly as a movie picture stowing my wallet in my sock, and nobody who isn't on the team goes in the locker room, so if it wasn't one of you guys who stole it, who the hell had the opportunity and the motive to rob me?"
"If it wasn't one of you guys," Jack echoed, arching an eyebrow, as his hand closed with a crinkle of aluminum around an old Coke can sticky with sugary fingerprints. "Does that mean my time on my knees in the trash has convinced you of my innocence?"
"Your innocence or your idiocy." Rob shrugged, his brown eyes suddenly alight with a message Jack couldn't translate. "If you were a smart thief, you would've returned your plunder to me by now, so we could both get the fuck out of here instead of wading through these endless mounds of crap."
"Let's look more deeply into what you said." Putting on his best detective tone, Jack tossed a pile of rubbish back into the garbage can. "It might contain the clue we need to solve this mystery."
"Crap?" Rob's nose wrinkled. "What? Do you think somebody flushed my wallet down a toilet or something?"
"That would be really shitty." Jack shuddered, thinking that his need to be a good Samaritan would probably perish the second sewage became involved in the search. "Let's not even consider that possibility right now."
"What were you getting at, then?" Rob's forehead furrowed as he chucked more garbage back into the can.
"You said nobody but the team goes into the locker room, although that's not really true," pointed out Jack, thawing the last of the trash back into the can. "Our coaches come in and so does the janitor."
"Yeah, Drew goes in there all the time to clean up when we're at practice." His face shining with purpose, Rob pushed himself to his feet and set off down the hallway at a brisk pace. "Perhaps he saw something suspicious when he went in there today or noticed someone weird hanging around in the hallway. He might be in his office. We could try to go ask him."
"That's probably the most brilliant idea you'll come up with in a month, so we'll give it a whirl." Jack smirked and caught up with Rob, who was rushing down the corridor toward Drew's office.
The door was open, so they hurried inside without knocking, Rob greeting Drew, who dropped a copy of the Star Tribune on top of a bulging mountain of paper in astonishment at their unexpected entrance, rather breathlessly with the polite smile all well-off people flashed when striving to assure a menial laborer that they were all united in some vague, shared cause, "Hello, Drew. Long time, no see or speak. How have you been?"
"I can't complain too much, and even if I could, nobody would listen or give a shit." Drew's eyes were blinking at twice the normal rate and had difficulty fixing on Rob's face or anywhere else for that matter, as far as Jack could see. "How about you, Robbie?"
"Not too great." Jack could hear Rob taking a deep breath before taking the huge plunge into conversational no man's land. "I can't find my wallet, and I wanted to know if you'd seen anyone suspicious around or that sort of thing."
"No." Drew's palms crawled like spiders over the newspaper covering the bulk of his paperwork. "I haven't seen anybody suspicious except you two boys."
Adding up Drew's nervous mannerisms, the lump under his papers on the desk, and the debt he had confessed to yesterday night, Jack started to balance out an equation that equaled Drew's guilt in stealing Rob's wallet.
"Maybe there's an article about a convict on the run from the law that could give us a hint." Jack snatched the Star Tribune out of Drew's grasp and then feigned a gasp at the sight of the pile of papers. "Wow, you look swamped by paperwork. I'll just file these for you, sir, so you can get back to the joys of scrubbing toilets and mopping floors."
"That won't be necessary," Drew sputtered in a rush of syllables that tripped over one another's heels on the exit from his mouth, but Jack had already scooped up the whole pile, revealing a leather Ralph Lauren wallet.
Before Drew could react, Jack's hand darted like lightning to seize the wallet and toss it at Rob, who was so rattled that he nearly fumbled the catch.
"That looks a hell of a lot like Rob's missing wallet. You don't mind if he takes a look at it, do you, Drew?" crowed Jack.
"It is mine." Rob's voice was scarcely above a whisper as he flipped open the wallet to find himself staring into a miniature image of himself on his driver's license. Shaking his head as he glanced up at Drew again, he said simply, "I trusted you, Drew."
"As hired help," scoffed Drew. "I know how you rich college boys think about your janitors."
"No, as a person." Rob gnawed on his bottom lip. "Obviously, I was wrong to do that."
"I—" Drew was plainly fabricating an excuse as he spoke. "I just found your wallet on the floor in the locker room, and I took it back to my office for safekeeping, that's all. No need to be a bastard and assume the worst of me, you know."
"Why didn't you return it to me when I entered your office or mentioned that I'd lost it?" Skeptically, Rob tilted his head. "Those seem like prime opportunities to come forward with the wallet if you had any intention of doing so."
"I, er, forgot." Drew massaged his temples as if developing a migraine from manufacturing all these falsehoods.
"Right." Rob gritted his teeth loudly enough for Jack to hear the dental damage. "I see you took a generous fifty dollar tip for finding the wallet. How unconventional, since normally a reward is left to the discretion of the person the object is returned to, after all."
Flushing to the roots of his ginger hair as he pulled the fifty bucks out of his pocket and pushed it across the desk toward Rob, Drew explained, "It's just a loan that I swear I was going to pay back when I got my next pay check—"
"Oh, sure." Jack sneered while Rob returned the money to his wallet. "If you didn't gamble and booze it all away first."
"It's for my daughter's—my Molly's—school supplies." Ignoring Jack like a speck on the wall, Drew made his appeal to Rob. "She's so clever, and I just want to give here a better future, but I can't afford—"
"Yep, because you blew all your cash in a bar yesterday." Jack whistled in mock admiration. "What a responsible, self-sacrificing adult. That's a Parent of the Year Award worthy decision right there."
"Jack." Drew exhaled gustily. "I know what you're trying to do, and I'm the first one to admit that I haven't been a saint, but can you honestly look me in the eyeballs and tell me that you've never in your life made a mistake?"
Jack's spine stiffened. "We get to ask the questions here, not you, villain."
"Maybe I'm not the most competent dad in the world, and perhaps I'm not the most responsible adult on the planet, but I love my daughter, and I learn from what I do wrong." Drew's jaw trembled like Jello. "I shouldn't be punished by having my daughter taken away from me, and that's what I'm afraid might happen if the authorities find out about Molly showing up to school without any supplies. No one deserves that."
"You want to talk about deserving?" hissed Jack, his hands balling into fists as he wondered if he was shouting more at Drew or his own father. "What about a childhood of coming home from school and wondering whether you're going to see your father passed out on the sofa, stinking of cheap whiskey? Or hiding the invitations to Open School Night in the hope that your dad won't show up wasted and humiliate you in front of all your teachers? Do you think I deserved that, huh?"
The room went so quiet that the walls seemed to have a pulse. "Do you think she deserves that?" Jack corrected, cheeks ablaze, as he internally cursed his big mouth, and it's endless efforts to ruin his life. He tried to pretend that he couldn't see the pitying glance Rob shot him, because the last person he wanted feeling bad for him was the snot Rob McClanahan, who probably had a staid, suburban father who would never even dream of doing anything that the neighbors could gossip about.
"Drew, did you even really think about what you were doing before you stole from me?" Rob demanded, finally taking his eyes off Jack. "Do you realize that if I report this, you could be fired and find it very hard to use this job as a reference, so, basically, you risked a lifetime of income for a paltry fifty bucks?"
"Is that what's going to happen to me?" Drew gripped his desk so tightly that his knuckles became white as marble. "Are you going to tell on me?"
"Nope, that's not what I'm saying at all, as you'd know if you just thought for once!" Rob's fingers tore at his hair. "I'm saying that if you're going to ruin your life, reputation, and future you should put a higher price tag on that selling out than fifty measly dollars."
"That's middle class talk." Drew's lips pursed. "The middle class worries about morals, and the lower class is just concerned with survival. My Molly needs the school supplies now and not a week in the future."
"Oh, Drew." Rob sighed. "I would've been happy to help if you'd only asked for it, but I don't give charity to thieves."
There it was, Jack thought bitterly. The privileged person spitting into the face of the beggar grabbing at his ankles for alms because the beggar was deemed in some way gross. At that instant, he didn't know whether he hated Rob for his arrogant dismissal of a wretched creature or Drew for making all lower class people seem like repugnant beings with moral compasses that only pointed south.
"I wasn't about to ask for help." Drew's chin lifted obstinately.
"But you'd steal." Jack, who had always possessed to much pride to beg or to rob, rolled his eyes in disgust. "You're a regular pillar of the community with that attitude."
"I never claimed to be such," snarled Drew. "That claim was all the middle class."
"Give me the list of supplies your daughter needs," Rob ordered abruptly, and Jack was reminded of the few pedestrians in Boston who would duck into a deli to purchase a sandwich for a hungry beggar because they didn't trust him not to squander cash on drugs. Jack had always thought of those rare beings as the best practitioners of charity since they weren't so naive that they ended up doing harm in their attempts to do good but they weren't so jaded that they never stopped to help another in need. Maybe Rob had been brought up right, after all.
Fumbling around in his pocket to withdraw a wrinkled list that he thrust across the desk into Rob's proffered palm, Drew muttered, "I thought you just said you didn't help thieves, Robbie."
Scribbling down the list of supplies into a blank page of his planner, Rob replied in a tone crisp as popcorn, "I don't help thieves, but I do help innocent children like your little girl."
Before Drew could respond to this revelation, Rob shoved the list back across the desk to Drew. "I'll return tomorrow with the supplies your daughter needs." Then his face hardened, and he warned in a voice that contained more ice than the Arctic, "Don't ever try to steal from me again, Drew. If you do, I'll report you. I won't take any pleasure in it, but justice and my conscience will require that I do it. Get it?"
"Definitely." Drew managed to choke out, nodding. "Thank you for helping me."
"I'm doing this for your little girl, not you," Rob reminded Drew, spinning on his heel and leaving the office without any other form of farewell.
Not exactly wanting to spend more time with a robber, Jack chose the lesser of the two evils by exiting the office and joining Rob in the hallway. As they wended their way back to the locker room to collect their bags, Rob commented, speaking with an awkwardness that suggested his vocal cords were obstructed by gravel, "I misjudged you when I accused you of being a thief, and I'd like to make that up to you somehow."
Pushing open the door into the otherwise vacant locker room, Jack gave his most menacing scowl to encourage Rob to keep a wary distance. "What on God's green earth makes you think for one second that I'd want you to make anything up to me, McClanahan, when that would involve us having something to do with each other, the very idea of which threatens to make me barf?"
"You helped me find my wallet." Rob scraped at his cuticles as they walked over to their lockers to gather their belongings. "So, I just thought—"
"Never mind about what you thought." Jack slung his duffel over his shoulder. "Obviously, it was wrong." Then, because he couldn't suppress it as he sauntered toward the locker room door, he burst out with a laugh that contained a million cutting edges of glass. "Shit, McClanahan, were you actually under the impression that I helped you find your wallet for your sake? I just did it for my own honor and satisfaction, not to make you happy. In fact, the arrogance inherent in your assumption that I would want you to make anything up to me is exactly why we'll never be able to get along. Now I've got to dash, so—as we say in the back alleys of Charlestown— why don't you just go fuck yourself with a loaded gun?"
Before the door slammed in his wake, Jack could hear Rob retorting, "Right, and, as we say on the cul-de-sacs of North Oaks, why don't you go get embezzled by your accountant?"
