Last Laugh
The mood in the locker room as Mark stepped out of the shower, towel tied around his waist, was jubilant. They had just finished winning their first game of the tournament, and it was hard to complain about starting a competition off with a victory. It felt like a good omen—like everyone leaving the locker room before a game in the proper order with Jim Craig first and Bah at his heels—and hockey players were a superstitious bunch forever inventing lucky rituals and reading portent in everything.
As the tam toweled dry and changed into their jeans and sweatshirts, the babble focused on the hundreds of small triumphs that had made this victory possible. Their voices rising into the atmosphere like helium balloons, boys hollered across the room, complimenting one another on smooth passes and goals, or asking if someone had seen the strength of their slapshot or the cunning of some speedy maneuver.
In the tapestry of tones, Mark thought that he could not have picked out the thread of a single voice, but he was proven wrong when he clearly heard Rob's piercing yelp as an open water bottle plummeted to the floor, squirting water all over Rob's sneakers and pants, although he should probably have just been grateful to have leapt away from the toppling water bottle swiftly enough to avoid a wet smack in the face.
Frowning down at the now empty and smashed water bottle, Mark tried to piece together what had transpired from the broken plastic fragments that had fallen inches from his feet. Rob, already dressed in his polo shirt and khakis, had been about to put his pads into his duffel bag, and when he lifted them he had apparently dislodged an open water bottle perched precariously on top of them. Yet, conscientious Rob McClanahan would never leave an open water bottle on top of his equipment, nonetheless be dumb enough to forget that he had done so and be genuinely shocked when it dropped, nearly soaking him…
That meant that someone else had done this as a prank, and, eyes scanning the room in search of the culprit, Mark had a keen idea as to whom. Rizzo, wrapped in a baggy scarlet BU sweatshirt and faded blue jeans, was staring intently at Rob's plight and laughing loudly—even more loudly than usual, which was an impressive achievement.
"Rizzo!" snapped Rob, glaring knives at the addressed, as heads throughout the locker room swiveled to fix on him, wondering why he was doing his best to transform the mood from joviality to righteous indignation. "That's not funny. You could have damaged my shoes."
"It's just water." Rizzo's frame was quaking with so much mirth that Mark, arriving at his locker and beginning to slip into a sweatshirt, thought that it was remarkable Rizzo could speak through his amusement at all. Then again, it would be a cold day on the sun before Rizzo experienced any difficulty in talking. "And it's just a harmless joke. You've heard of them before, haven't you, Mac?"
"Yeah, I've heard of them before." Mark, busy zipping the fly on his jeans, did not have to turn to see the scowl his roommate was riveting on Rizzo. He could hear it as ringing as a trumpet in Rob's tone. "I hope your parents bought you a handsome tombstone for Christmas, because that's what you'll need after I play a harmless joke on you."
Exhaling gustily, Mark pinched the bridge of his nose, asking himself, for the millionth time this month, how he had come to be the only sane player on a team of lunatics. As witty with words as he was, Rob found practical jokes more insulting than hilarious. Sarcasm, in Rob's opinion, was a riot, but pranks were low brow and just not funny. Since Mark preferred calm to chaos and possessed a rather dry sense of humor, he didn't mind having a roommate whose jokes tended more toward the verbal than the practical. If it meant that he never had to worry about discovering a frog between his sheets, he was glad to share a room with somebody who had a penchant for hinting that his shot wasn't as great as he thought it was.
The problem with Rob wasn't that he had no sense of humor (Mark could attest to the fact that he had a very twisted one), or even the wrong sense of humor. It was that he refused to be amused by the proclivity of pranks inflicted upon him in the locker room. Instead, he lost his temper at the perpetrator, and the hilarity of his overreactions spurred other players to make him the punchline of their practical jokes. Then, in a vicious cycle, the more players pranked Rob, the more epic were his explosions…
If only Rob would learn to laugh when a prank was more hurtful than funny, or just suffer in silence when amusement could not be feigned—as Mark had mastered that art his first few weeks at Wisconsin when everyone whispered just loudly enough for him to hear that he was only on the team because his father was coach, and he had been the brunt of pranks more malicious than hilarious and intrasquad checks that turned his ribcage black and blue with bruises—all their lives would be much easier. After all, Mark suspected that the abuse at Wisconsin had ceased as much because he had proven that he could take a joke as because he had shown that he could play hockey. Hockey players were like a pack of wolves; if they sensed blood, they would come in for the kill.
"Was that death threat directed at me?" Rizzo gasped, dark eyes expanding comically.
"No," scoffed Rob, chin jutting out, "it was meant for the person next to you dancing the disco."
"What a relief." Chuckling, Rizzo glanced around him. "Oh, wait, there is nobody around me doing the disco."
"Wow." Rob rolled his eyes. "I guess I've got to get up before noon if I want to trick you. I'll remember that for my revenge."
"Let's put an end to all this talk of revenge," Ken Morrow interjected serenely before Rizzo could reply. "It doesn't add to team unity, and, Robbie, I think you need to calm down a bit."
"Thanks for the suggestion, Ken," answered Rob in the sugar-spun manner he always assumed when he was about to say the most biting thing in the politest fashion. "You can file it where the sun doesn't shine, though, because I think you need to stop sticking your big nose in other people's business."
Ken, many people's friend but no one's punching bag, was not about to apologize for attempting to break up a quarrel, although he was too level-headed to be drawn into his own argument with Rob. Meanwhile, one glance at Rob's stony face made it plain that he was not ready to make nice to anyone in the locker room, and, if anything, Ken's comment had only hardened his heart.
The tension in the room mounted with every second the stalemate between Ken and Rob lasted. Chomping meditatively on his lower lip, Mark considered intervening to get his line mate to play nicely with the other boys. Normally, because he put his foot down so rarely, Rob was willing to at least listen to him if not accede to his demands, and if he promised to let Rob determine the strategy for their next ten face-offs as long as Rob stopped arguing immediately, he was confident that Rob would accept the bribe as readily as a child would a sundae.
When they had become line mates, one of the first things that Mark had discovered about Rob was that the left-winger was obsessed with face-offs and would harp on about them until he was blue in the cheeks if given half a chance. In Rob's view, face-offs were an unappreciated but vital component of the game, because, as he pointed out whenever he had an opportunity, you couldn't score unless you got the puck, and face-offs were the most reliable way to attain the puck...Yes, Mark concluded, face-offs would be the perfect incentive to get Rob to tone the attitude down by about twenty decibels, and he was just opening his mouth to offer his deal to his roommate when Buzz Schneider spoke up.
"You know, guys, I saw a grill just down the street," remarked Buzz, giving his warm smile which could probably have melted the conflict in Afghanistan. "I bet they cook up some tasty burgers. We could head over to buy some beer and burgers to celebrate our win."
"That's a wonderful idea," Janny enthused, his eagerness making it obvious that he was trying to fill the air with pleasant words before Rob could resume any of the two spats he was waging, and Mark thanked God that there appeared to be just enough peacemakers on the team to prevent homicide from being committed in the locker room today.
"Yeah, we'll have a great time." Rizzo, his disagreement with Rob forgotten as quickly as last month's headlines, strode over to pound Buzz excitedly on the back. "A magnificent start like this to a tournament needs to be celebrated in style, that's what I always say."
"And nothing says classy celebration like a bad burger joint." All derision, Rob snorted. "That's what I always say."
"Come on, Robbie!" exclaimed Rizzo, all heartiness. For a second, he moved as if to clap Rob on the shoulder. Then he seemed to realize that the gesture would be as welcome as a blizzard in July and kept his hands to himself with a visible effort. "You know you want to get a burger with us."
"If you had written me that invitation, I would have used it as manure for my mother's begonias." Rob titled his nose in the air. "I wouldn't eat a burger with you unless it was a specific ransom demand made by someone who had kidnapped a family member or close friend."
"I'll keep that in mind for when I'm truly desperate for your company." Rizzo shrugged, and then waved at the door, saying, "Let's get a move on, everyone. If we hurry, we might make it in time for happy hour. Happy hour is always a perfect way to celebrate a great win."
As the team trickled out of the locker room, Mark walked over to Rob, who was sitting in his stall, fiddling with his left shoelace.
"The loops are uneven," muttered Rob by way of explication as Mark joined him, plopping onto the vacant stall to Rob's right.
With effort, Mark confined himself to a mental eye roll at this explanation. He was aware that shoelaces were one of the thousands of things Rob was fastidious about, insisting his laces always be double-knotted to reduce the odds that they would come untied, and that the loops not be long enough to run the risk of tripping him. However, this obsession with the loops being even with one another was a new and frankly weird one.
Reminding himself that Rob dealt with unpleasant emotions like stress and pain by focusing on details no matter how inconsequential, Mark responded, "All right. I'll wait while you get them even. Then we can go over to the grill together."
"I'm not going to the grill." The muscles in Rob's throat tightened visibly. "I thought I made that clear to anyone whose IQ didn't begin with a negative sign. For heaven's sake, even Rizzo grasped that and if one of his brain cells died, the other would perish from loneliness within the hour."
"I'm not going to let you sulk here by yourself." Sternly, Mark shook his head, even as he noticed what a disconcerting role reversal it was for him to be urging a friend to socialize when, typically, he was the one who craved solitude after a long day and had to be dragged from his shell by a more gregarious companion. There was a difference between choosing to go off by yourself and being lonely, and between exiling yourself and feeling excluded, though. Mark was afraid that if Rob stayed behind instead of going to dinner with the team, he would only feel lonelier and more excluded. Rob was not going to believe he was an outcast if Mark had anything to do with it. "You're going to come to dinner and have fun, since I know you well enough to understand that's what you really want to do."
"If you know anyone well enough to read basic body language, you'd realize that's the last thing I want to do right now." Rob folded his arms around his chest in a cocoon. "I just want to be left alone for awhile, Mark. Is that too much to ask?"
"Yes, because I'm never going to leave you alone." Mark's eyes locked on Rob's. "I might give you time to yourself, but I'm not going to leave you alone."
"Sticking to me like glue won't make me want to come to the grill," grumbled Rob. "If that's your grand plan, it's going to backfire faster than a faulty engine."
"The team expects you to come." Mark felt as if his tongue was swimming in corn syrup: like the words he wanted to use were rolling off his tongue in an indecipherable language. "Don't disappoint them."
"What about me, huh?" Rob was gritting his teeth; Mark could hear that in every strangled syllable. "Am I supposed to just forget that I have feelings and show up to dinner as if they haven't been hurt?"
Mark massaged his temples. This was the price Rob paid for his passion, for his trademark intensity on and off the ice. Rob felt everything, so he could be brilliant. Rob felt everything, so it pained him. Not that his emotions got in the way of his success. At least, Rob didn't think so, and, to be honest, Mark didn't either, or at least not as often as some people thought. Like Mrs. McClanahan, who always seemed to be chiding her son over the phone for pushing himself too hard, for taking crazy chances, for letting things matter too much, and for losing his carefully measured distance from a situation.
Mark didn't always disagree with Mrs. McClanahan's perspective, and sometimes, when Rob's impulsiveness had given him a bad fright or Rob's intensity became positively scathing, he wished that he could scold Rob, too, but, as a teammate, he had to find another way to let his friend know he had done too far, so he soothed him, made comments designed to get under his skin like splinters, or even deliberately flouted Rob's wishes. Anything to break him free of sorrow or frusturation. Anything to let him know Hey, what you did then was stupid.
Mostly, though, he kept his fears for Rob to himself, because all Rob's burning desire for justice, his reckless courage, his hunger for victory, and his obstinate refusal to accept defeat were what made him Rob. He wouldn't be Rob without his passion. Ultimately, Mark understood and respected that.
"Nobody on this team wants to hurt you," murmured Mark. "Rizzo was trying to have a good laugh at your expense, but if he realized that putting water on top of your pads was going to really upset you like this, he would never have done it. He's your annoyingly over-talkative friend, so he would never want to cause you any pain. He loves all people, including you."
"I can't believe you're defending him." Rob pulled his knees to his chest and cupped his chin in his palms. "If you're siding with him, you really have left me alone even if you're sitting beside me."
"No." To his own ears, Mark's voice sounded like a frayed string in an unraveling tapestry, because he would do anything—cross oceans or swallow pride—to keep this team intact, and it was ripping itself to shreds instead of rejoicing after a triumph. "There are no sides on this team. That's what I'm trying to tell you."
"Then tell the other guys to stop playing tricks on me." Rob looked like a statue. Like one of those marble warriors in the ancient Greece section of a museum: strong, focused, and completely expressionless. Mark reached for his friend's shoulder and touched it with one hand. Like marble, Rob didn't move. "It was funny the first thousand times they did it, but now the joke is getting stale, and my patience has evaporated."
"Pranks are a fact of locker room life, Robbie." Mark sighed. "The angrier you get about tricks, the more people will think that you're a hilarious target for their next practical joke. You have to learn to grin and bear pranks, because when you flip out, you just make things worse for yourself."
"That's easy for you to say," snarled Rob. "I bet you've never been pranked in your life, because you're MVP Magic Mark, but me, I'm always picked on since I like to make sure my equipment works, I read books without pictures, and my family apparently has too much money to be decent people. I had to put up with it freshman year at the U until I slipped a color-coded schedule into Don Micheletti's locker so he could arrive at practice on time for a change. After that, Don figured I wasn't a snob, after all, so he told his older brother Joe to get everyone to lay off me. Nobody was going to argue with the captain, because even Herb liked Joe as much as he can like any player, and so I wasn't bothered more than anyone else after that, but if I hadn't placed that schedule in Don's locker, I sometimes wonder if the abuse would have lasted forever."
"The first few weeks of college hockey were miserable for me, too." Mark could feel a fluttering feather at the back of his throat, and he swallowed it with difficulty. "Everyone thought I was on the Wisconsin team because Dad was the coach, and they really pounded into me, hoping to get rid of me. I'd try to tell myself a million times that it wasn't personal since they didn't even know me, but it still hurt because it felt like they didn't even want to know me. All I could do was just keep playing hockey as well as I could, no matter how hard they checked me, and not act pained by even their most vicious pranks. I knew that if I acted like I was wounded, they would lunge in for the kill."
"You're so steady," said Rob softly. "I just can't deal with pranks without losing my cool."
"That's because you have a spark inside you." Mark smiled slightly. "Everyone can see it burning, and sometimes they'll try to put it out, but they won't succeed."
"Maybe." Rob hesitated, and then went on slowly, as if he were testing the size and shape of each word in his mouth before verbalizing it, "I may have a spark blazing inside me, but I need sturdy, solid walls to keep it from being snuffed out."
"Then I'll be your walls," promised Mark, holding his hand out to Rob, and feeling relieved when his friend's fingers slid between his own. "Ready to go to dinner now?"
"Yep." Smirking, Rob rose and led the way out of the locker room. "The food will be terrible, and the company worse, but let's eat, drink, and be merry. After all, we did just win the first game of our tournament."
Glad to have Rob walking with a purpose again, because Mark always thought of Rob as a verb—always in motion—rather than as a noun, so it felt wrong to have him staying still and hunched in on himself, Mark grinned as they hurried down the corridor toward the doors to the outside wintry world.
"Look, Mark," Rob said awkwardly, as they neared the exit, "I'm sorry for losing my temper again. I know it's not very nice or mature."
"No need to apologize." Mark clapped his companion lightly on the shoulder. "I have a bit of a nasty temper myself. I can't judge you harshly for that without condemning myself in the same breath."
"Please." Rob rolled his eyes as they stepped out of the rink and turned down the street toward the grill Buzz had mentioned. "If you have a bit of a nasty temper, I make a mad ax murderer look as patient as the Virgin Mary."
"I'm serious." Mark stared up at the obsidian sky overhead, allowing his eyes to adjust to the blackness so that he could see the stars as glitter in an overturned bowl, like the view from inside a snow globe. "When I was a kid, I mystified my parents, since I wouldn't make a fuss about something important that they expected me to make a big deal over, but then I'd have a complete breakdown over something minor and stupid. I wouldn't explode because of the little thing. The little thing was just the one too many that I was supposed to tolerate without making a scene. It was just the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back, you know. It took me years to even begin to figure out when I should follow my natural inclination to not make a stir and when I needed to speak up about something before I had a total meltdown. And I still have destructive flashes of temper. I mean, you saw me smash my stick in Oslo. Gosh, I was so furious that I didn't know what to say, or even how to speak. Talk about a shameful regression to childish behavior."
"Everybody regressed to childish behavior in Oslo." Rob nudged him gently in the ribs in a gesture that usually meant he believed that Mark was being too harsh with himself. "I myself forgot how to stand up. How embarrassing."
"I guess we'll have to sign a pact one day that we won't blackmail each other with our most humiliating moments." Mark chuckled as they entered the grill and searched the restaurant for their teammates.
"There goes my morally dubious get-rich-quick-with-no-effort scheme." Rob shook his head mournfully as they spotted their teammates crowded around several tables to the rear of the establishment and began wending a path through the packed grill toward the rest of the team. "What a pity I'll have to use my free time tomorrow to devise another one."
"Mark! Robbie!" called Bob Suter, who had watched every moment of the game that he had not been permitted to participate in, flapping his arm in the air like a crow's wing. "I saved you guys seats. I knew you'd find your way here eventually."
Sliding into the wicker chairs Bob indicated, Mark wished that Bob had possessed the foresight to reserve them seats that weren't next to the infamous tricksters Neal Broten and Dave Christian, who were prone to slipping hot sauce into a neighbor's drink while that person wasn't looking and to pulling chairs out from under people when they tried to sit down after returning from the bathroom.
"Hi," Neal chattered, as Mark and Rob joined the table. "We were starting to think that your empty chairs were ignoring us, because they never responded to us when we talked to them. It's awesome to have you here so we can get some proper answers to all our questions, and we won't have to worry about furniture being mad at us or anything."
"Pour yourself some drinks." Dave shoved a pitcher of beer from the center of the table toward Mark and Rob, who used it to fill their mugs. "You look like you could use a pick-me-up."
"Thanks." Rob wrinkled his nose as he sipped his beer. "You look wonderful, too, Dave."
"Better decide on your meals on the double." Neal grabbed two colorful, laminated menus from between the ketchup and barbecue sauce bottles, and then thrust them down the table to Rob and Mark, as Mark finally began to lower his guard. Neal and Dave were pranksters, but they weren't malicious. They could sense when a person couldn't tolerate being the victim of one more prank, and they always knew how to stop their jokes before they went too far. That was why, despite their devilish behavior, they were still much loved by everybody in the locker room. Right now, they were going to cheer Rob up, not push him to the breaking point again, because they knew that was what Rob needed. "The waitress will be back soon, and she's smoking hot, so you don't want to look like a fool in front of her, not knowing the answer to the question of what you want to eat. Of course, she might be used to people being overwhelmed by all the good options on the menu. I mean, I couldn't choose between the bacon cheeseburger and the Hawaiian burger. Both sounded positively mouth-watering, you know."
" I told him that we could each order one, and we'd split our meals in half, so we could each enjoy some of both foods," put in Dave, as Mark decided that he wanted the cheddar cheeseburger and returned his menu to its home between the ketchup and the barbecue sauce.
"Is there anything remotely healthy on this menu?" Rob forehead furrowed as he studied the dinner options in a distinctly unimpressed manner. "Or is everything here cooked to clog the arteries?"
"Just embrace the heart attack," Bob advised cheerily. "Health is overrated."
"Beliefs like that are why the average American has about a cubic yard of thigh fat," declared Rob crisply.
"I don't think we'll have to be concerned about obesity while we're training for the Olympics," Mark pointed out. "With Herb's crazy conditioning regimen, it would be impossible to increase in fat instead of muscle."
"I'm not taking any chances. When you're short, it's easy to become wider than you are tall." Rob pursed his lips and wedged his menu back between the ketchup and barbecue sauce. "I'm going with the chicken salad sandwich. Light meats are healthier than dark ones because they are less fatty."
"You're creeping me out," observed Bob, blunt as ever. "People our age aren't supposed to be worried about nutrition."
"You haven't seen him in action in the grocery store, comparing brands of whole wheat bread to determine which has more fiber," Mark informed Bob dryly. "Robbie is the only person under thirty I know who reads the nutrition facts on labels before he buys the food rather than to kill time while he eats it."
"It's not my fault that I'm the only person under thirty you know who behaves logically," countered Rob. "If other consumers around my age can't be bothered to make educated purchases, they are the ones with a problem, not me."
Before anyone could respond to this assertion, a blonde waitress who looked as though she had just strolled off the cover of a fashion magazine sashayed up to their table.
"What can I get you tonight?" she asked Bob, resting her pen over her notepad and arching her eyebrows prettily.
"Would you recommend the cheesesteak or the barbecue baby back ribs?" Bob gazed inquiringly at the waitress, and Mark wasn't surprised by the question.
Although Bob loved food so much that he would eat anything that was not plainly someone else's territory, he struggled to decide what to order at a restaurant. Often, he polled whomever he was dining with for an opinion about whether he should get a club sandwich or buffalo wings, and, when the table couldn't reach a consensus on what should be his meal, he would turn to the waitress for guidance.
"A lot of customers enjoy the cheesesteak." The waitress shot Bob an appraising glance and then decided he was cute enough for a wink. "For a strong man like you, though, I think the baby back ribs would be more appropriate."
"Thanks for the tip. I'll have the ribs, then." Bob smiled at the waitress, and then gave the table a smug look as if to announce that he was quite the stud chased by all the mares.
"Good choice." The waitress recorded Bob's order and then focused her attention on Rob. "And what can I get you, sir?"
"I'll have your chicken salad sandwich, please," replied Rob, who appeared pleased rather than nonplussed by this formal address. Mark could not envision a time when he would ever feel comfortable being referred to as a "sir" but clearly Rob felt differently, and there was no denying that Rob with his well-groomed appearance and perfectly ironed clothes was the most likely player on the team to be called "sir." He emitted a definite country club gentleman vibe.
"How about you?" The waitress fixed her charming smile on Mark once she had scribbled down Rob's order.
"The cheddar cheeseburger for me, thank you," Mark answered, forcing himself to speak levelly, as though his pounding heart hadn't noticed that this waitress raised the room temperature by about fifty degrees.
"What would you like?" When the waitress, finished taking Mark's order, turned to Dave, Mark felt a combination of relief and loss that reminded him he really needed to overcome his adolescent hormones once and for all.
"One of your Hawaiian burgers, please." Dave offered the waitress his most devastating roguish grin, but her attention was already riveted on Neal Broten.
"What can I get you, dear?" she trilled.
"The bacon cheeseburger." Neal managed to blush and squeak at the same time, which would surely be doubly attractive to any lady. "Please and thank you."
"You squeaked," Dave taunted Neal as soon as the waitress disappeared to deliver their order to the kitchen. "Were you asking if she would be the Minnie to your Mickey?"
"Shut up." Scowling, Neal gulped his beer. "You're just jealous that she called me 'dear.'"
"I'm not." Dave chewed on the ice in his beer between words. "I know she only called you that because you look like you're about twelve. She'll probably bring you out the kiddie size of the Hawaiian burger."
"He does have a fair point, Neal," added Bob, snickering. "I bet you've never had to shave before in your life."
"How dare you insult me like that?" Neal's eyes widened indignantly, and his voice squeaked again, prompting a round of guffaws at the table. "If it weren't for Herb's ridiculous no-beard rule, I'd be sporting a mountain man beard to rival the one Verchota grows in the off-season."
"Technically," commented Rob, who was a master at identifying technicalities, "Herb doesn't have a no-beard policy. He has more of a no-new-growth policy wherein you can't develop a beard or moustache if you didn't have one at the start of the season, but if you did have one, it is protected under a sort of grandfather clause. That's considerable progress in the civil liberty department when you remember that, at the U, he really did have a no facial hair policy."
"I don't care about the legalities, Mac." Neal's mouth twisted in exaggerated petulance. "The point is Herb is cramping my style and creativity. I mean, if it were up to me, I'd have whiskers shaped like traffic cones reaching all the way down to my belly button, and I'd dye them all the colors of the rainbow."
"You should buy a beard like that at a costume store," suggested Dave, as the waitress returned with their meals. Once they had thanked her and she had swished off in a stream of lavender perfume to take another table's order, Dave resumed, "Then you should wear that beard to practice, and see how mad you can make Herb."
"If he gets angry at me, I'll just put on a baffled expression and say I have no idea how all that hair grew in overnight." Neal sliced his burger down the middle and handed half to Dave, who had done the same with his burger, giving half to Neal. Taking a bite out of a burger with pineapple popping out of it, Neal gestured exuberantly. "'Honestly, Coach, it was like Jack and the Beanstalk only with hair on my face. It was terrifying how it all grew in so quickly, but what's even more scary is all the guys talking about how I have to cut it all off with a razor. I'm not suicidal, Coach, so I don't want a razor near my neck, you see. Oh, and the guys keep mentioning puberty, and I'm embarrassed to ask them what that is, so maybe you could explain it to me…'"
"I'm sure Herb will tell you that there are three phrases he never wants to hear from a player." Rob paused between nibbles of chicken salad sandwich to count phrases off on his fingers. "'Jack and the Beanstalk' is the first, 'terrifying' is the second, and 'puberty' is the third. Use all three in one go, and you'll hit the triple jackpot."
"What's the prize?" demanded Neal, chomping away at his burger.
"A lifetime supply of Herbies," Dave quipped through a mouthful of bacon cheeseburger.
"In other words, a death sentence." Dramatically, Neal threw his arms into the air. "Perhaps I could have it converted to the electric chair."
"Or the firing squad," Dave suggested.
"Hanging," contributed Mark, starting to feel full, even though he was less than halfway through his cheeseburger. Sometimes, he thought he had the smallest stomach on the whole team, the slowest metabolism, or the deluxe package of both. "You know, if your neck doesn't snap with the velocity of jerking at the end of the rope, you have to wait until you suffocate to die."
"Delightful." Bob chortled. "But not as pleasant as drawing and quartering."
"The guillotine is my personal favorite." Rob smirked. "A body can still move for a second after its been decapitated, because its responding to signals sent out by the brain prior to the beheading. I bet that's why we have zombie stories, but the people in the French Revolution thought the guillotine was a humane form of execution. That has me in stitches every time."
"So many lovely deaths to choose from that I don't want to make my decision too hastily, even if I would never live to regret it," chirped Neal. Then, his attention captured by a television ad for Budweiser that featured a group of young, hairy men rescuing a barge and celebrating with a round of beer, he changed the subject. "Have you guys noticed that all beer commercials feature these big, hairy fellows who are supposed to attract all these ladies, but we never see any women in these beer commercials?"
"Yeah." Mark nodded sagely. "Ladies don't care for boasting, so they've gotten tired of the men slapping each other on the back and gloating, 'We sure saved that barge, didn't we?' That's why all the women have abandoned our hairy heroes."
"Don't cry for our heroes, though." Bob snickered. "I'm certain that an hour later, the men will be saying to one another, 'Hey, let's go set that barge loose again!'"
"Meanwhile, real men whom ladies actually find appealing would sit back and say not to worry because the boat is probably insured when they see a random, unmanned barge float by on the way to disaster." Rob drank some more of his beer. "Women are always impressed when guys demonstrate financial savvy. They find it reassuring that, even in this awful economy, there is some smarty out there who can buy them the Victorian with the white picket fence in the nice neighborhood. They want their American Dream to come true, and they gamble that a guy who understands what insurance is will make that happen."
"Business majors have the strangest fantasies." Bob gnawed at his last rib, tossed the bone onto his plate, and eyed the food Mark was no longer eating with a look reminiscent of a puppy at the pound. "Are you planning on finishing that burger, Mark?"
"Nah." Mark shook his head, thinking that it was probably just as well he hadn't consumed his whole cheeseburger, since it most likely contained his daily value of calories in addition to representing a ticket to cardiac arrest. "Help yourself."
"And the fries?" Bob pressed, devouring the remainder of Mark's burger. "Are you going to eat those?"
"Bob, if I stopped eating a couple of minutes ago, you can eat anything you want off my plate without asking." Mark pushed his dish across the table to Bob. "We've reached that point in our friendship, and, frankly, I'd rather see someone eat the food I'm paying for than imagine it getting tossed into the restaurant dumpster."
"You're a great friend." Bob's eyes twinkled as he shoveled fry after fry into his mouth. "Not just because you give me free food, though that certainly helps."
"Between the two of you, you have a regular appetite," remarked Rob, and it didn't require a major disruption of brain tissue to calculate who had the oversized appetite and who had the undersized one. Then, his gaze lit on the barbecue sauce, gleamed craftily, and flickered over to Rizzo, who was holding court to Silky and O.C. at the table behind them, gesticulating wildly with a buffalo wing and proving the kernel of truth behind the old joke about Italians being unable to speak if their arms were tied.
"You know you want to, Robbie," said Neal, beaming, as he detected the locus of Rob's glance.
"What do I want to do, Neal?" Rob arched an eyebrow.
"Shoe check Rizzo, of course." Neal lowered his tone to a conspiratorial whisper, and Mark winced. Shoe checks involved a hockey player slipping under a table to dump a condiment all over a teammate's shoe. As far as pranks went, it was cliché but effectively irritating and humiliating. In other words, it was perfect for Rob's vengeance upon Rizzo. "I think it's a wonderful idea. Even someone as serious as you has to lighten up and laugh sometime. That's what I always tell everyone. I always say that you've got a great sense of humor buried inside you, and one day you're going to show it to the world in an epic prank. That's what I always say."
"Well." Rob's eyes sparkled with mischief as he snatched up the bottle of barbecue sauce from the center of the table. "If I shoe check Rizzo to amuse you, nobody can claim I did it for revenge."
With that, Rob ducked under the table, armed with the barbecue sauce bottle, and crawled under Rizzo's chair. He had poured a river of brown sauce all over Rizzo's white sneakers and slipped back into his seat before Rizzo, apparently feeling the wetness seep through to his socks, exclaimed, "What the heck is on my sneakers?"
"It's just barbecue sauce." Rob smirked. "And it's just a harmless joke. Haven't you heard of those before, Rizzo?"
"You'd better watch yourself, Mac." Rizzo waggled a warning finger. "My revenge may not be swift or particularly inspired, but it will be terrible. I promise you that."