"C'mon," she said, her voice filled with erotic promise. "Let's get you out of that suit."
Peter awoke refreshed on Christmas morning, though he'd slept only a couple of hours. He refused the breakfast they brought him and told the attending nurse that he wished to be left alone. It was Christmas Day, he told her, and he wanted to enjoy it in peace. A dull ache in his chest reminded him of the night before, but the memory awakened only a delirious sense of anticipation.
The adventure was just beginning.
When the room was quiet, he closed his eyes and rose from his crippled body. It was like being lifted out of a vat of bland syrup in which you could somehow breathe, but only barely.
He slipped through the glass into the sunny glare of Christmas morning.
In his indecision of the night before, Will had parked his truck at the top of the hill. As a result, Peter saw only Kelly's snow-heaped Subaru in the turnaround. When he entered the house—this time through the bedroom window, hoping to catch her sleeping late—the furthest thing from his mind was that she might not be alone. His trespasses of the past few weeks had instilled in him a deep sense of ownership, and he'd all but dismissed the possibility of the stranger's return.
The discovery was like salt in an open wound.
He found them seated at the kitchen table, giggling over the big floppy Santa hat her boyfriend had cocked on his head. The sight was even more infuriating than the first time he'd caught them together, and Peter simply hung there, paralyzed anew. As he watched them, the scene seemed to grow in brightness until it glared.
Kelly wore only a nightie, a ghost of a thing you could see through. Her tits winked out at him like fog-bound stoplights—and now the fucker she was with reached out and cupped one of them!
That broke the spell.
The power was suddenly huge, uncontainable, and Peter aimed it like a sputtering flamethrower; he aimed it at the jackass in the Santa hat—and when he let it go, the exhilaration was tremendous.
But nothing happened.
They went on giggling, and Peter found himself stuck in the wall like a misflung spear. Unbelieving, he pulled himself free and tried again, this time targeting Kelly.
Again, nothing.
A swarming maroon filled Peter's vision—and when he blinked he was back in his bed. Back in the drowning pool of his body.
A nurse at the desk down the hall heard his agonized howl, but decided, wisely, to ignore it.
TWENTY-NINE
Gardner," Coach Tessaro called from the doorway of his cubbyhole office.
Sam, who was gearing up with his teammates, did not appear to have heard him. He was sitting hunched over his knees, lacing his skates, but close enough so that Tessaro's big voice should have reached him.
"Hey Gardner!" the coach called again, and this time Rolly Sawchuck, the Sudbury goaltender, nudged Sam's shoulder with his glove. Sam looked around, stood, then started toward the office with a listless nod.
The kid was in a daze, Tessaro knew, what with his mother so recently dead (not to mention the way she died, Tessaro thought grimly), and the coach was having serious second thoughts about playing him. There wasn't much question that without him the team would suffer—at the tender age of twenty, Gardner was their key playmaker—but maybe the kid would suffer more. He was not at his best, not even close, and tonight they were in for a grudge match. The last time Sudbury had met the Ottawa U. Raiders, just before Christmas on Ottawa's home ice, the Ottawa team had been badly humiliated—mostly due to Gardner's scoring ability—and tonight tempers would be hot. Their goons would be laying for Gardner.
"Yeah, Coach?"
"Come in here a minute, would you?"
Sam angled past Tessaro's big belly, his skate blades thudding on the rubberized carpet, and stood before the littered aluminum table that served as the coach's desk. Tessaro closed the door and shot the bolt, then squeezed in behind his desk.
"Listen, kid," he said, looking squarely at Sam. "We all feel shitty about what happened to your mom."
Right, Sam thought. That's why so many of you showed up at the funeral.
"It was a hell of a thing. A hell of a thing." His gaze fell from Sam's. "I think it shows a lotta guts that you're out here tonight—and believe me, kid, we'd probably get our butts kicked without you." He shrugged. "But do you think you should be back in it so soon? I mean, it's only been a couple of weeks, and we're in for a real barn-burner tonight, I can promise you that. That yard ape Kiley's gonna be gunnin' for you. You really smoked him last time out, and clean check or not, Kiley's gonna be on your ass like a rash." He met Sam's eyes again. "What I'm trying to say, kid, is that maybe you should sit this one out. You can stay geared up, watch from the bench, but—"
"No," Sam said, breaking a written-in-stone rule by interrupting the coach. "Kiley doesn't scare me." Bobby Kiley was Rhett Kiley's brother. And Rhett Kiley, full-time drunk and part-time mechanic, had once been a "friend" of Peter's. "I want to play."
A familiar flush rose from beneath Tessaro's collar, then gradually receded. "Okay, kid. You can go on. But I'll be straight with you. If I see you fucking up out there, you're off the ice. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough," Sam said. "That it?"
At the coach's nod, Sam turned and clunked his way back to the locker room.
By 6:45 p.m. the arena was packed with fans, many of them already sipping spiked Cokes or swilling from forty-ouncers stuffed into brown paper bags. To their credit, the Ottawa team had managed a respectable turnout. Behind the Ottawa bench a mob of chanting fans hoisted a huge purple banner aloft while the team mascot, a guy in a brown bear costume, bounded up and down through the stands. On the Sudbury side similar festivities were in progress, all of it challenged for volume by the arena's organist, who keyed out something drab and repetitive.
In the Sudbury locker room, Sam lagged behind his teammates, who had filed out for the pre-game warm-up. Though heartsick at the death of his mother, ascendant over all of his emotions was guilt. The guilt was huge. It had begun Christmas morning, when he left the morgue to go tell his brother the tragic news, and it had plagued him unremittingly ever since. Peter had been up in his wheelchair that snowy morning, gazing trancelike through his ninth-story window. Sam had shuffled into the room swearing he'd be brave, that he would not allow the tears that were already falling—but before he'd gotten a word out, before his brother had even swiveled around to face him, Peter had said, "She's better off, Sam. We both know that."
"How did. . . ?" But surely one of the nurses had told him or someone from Pastoral Care? Or maybe he'd heard it on the news.
Peter's wheelchair hummed through a hundred-eighty degrees. His expression was chiseled in ice. "She was a drunk, Sam. A whore. A liability."
For the first time in his life Sam felt as though he should be furious with his brother, utterly outraged. His inbred instincts of decency and respect cried out for that rage. . . but it wouldn't come. It just wasn't there. Peter was right. Their mother had been all of those things and more.
And in the cold light of Peter's words, Sam realized that he was glad. Mother or not, the tormenting witch was gone, out of his life forever. And he was glad.
"Change your mind?"
Sam looked up into Tessaro's dark eyes. "No."
"Then get out there and skate."
Sam got to his feet. He plucked his stick from the rack, whacked its heel against the toe of one skate, and started down the damp cement corridor to the rink. In the pit of his stomach, all his emotions were focusing into a single hot flashpoint, like sunlight funneled through a magnifying glass. Even the guilt. Especially the guilt. Like frenzied insects they orgied together. . .
And their single hybrid offspring was rage.
The players for both teams had been on the ice for five minutes, skating brisk warm-up patterns and flicking wrist shots at their goalies, deliberately bumping shoulders with their opponents. As in almost no other sport, hockey was a game of intimidation.
On the ice, with two-hundred-pound slabs of muscle and padding hurtling at you at speeds of up to thirty miles an hour, fear was your ally. But only if you inspired it.
Sam stepped onto the ice and joined the carousel, slipping automatically into a practiced routine of limbering and stretching, flooding cold muscles with blood. After all was said and done, he was glad he'd accepted the spot on the Cambrian U. team. Though it used up a lot of prime study time—second year was even stiffer than first year had been—it also kept him sane. On the ice was perhaps the only place in the world where Sam felt totally alive, totally in control. The frosty wind in his face, the good heat of all-out exertion, the grace the skate blade afforded the human body. He would have been incomplete without it.
But tonight Sam felt none of these things. He felt alone, angry, confused—
Pain roared up Sam's left leg from his ankle, spinning him around and almost dropping him to the ice. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a puck deflect away from him, and an instant later Bobby Kiley was barreling toward him from the opposite blue line. The burly center scraped to a sidelong halt at the red line, inches from where Sam was standing.
"Ay, cocklips," Kiley squawked, grinning his greasy grin, his troll's face and shaved head gleaming with an unclean sweat. "It's you an' me tonight, rump ranger. Tooth and fuckin' nail."
Sam ground his teeth against the knot of pain in his ankle. Kiley was not only known for his brawling; he had one of the meanest slap shots in the league and the accuracy of a laser-scope rifle.
"Stay out of my way," Sam warned flatly.
"Ooooh," Kiley baited, doing an effeminate little jig. "I'm shakin' all over."
In the sway of Sam's unflinching gaze, Kiley's grin faltered, and for a moment Sam thought the crazy mother was going to throw down his gloves right there. Then he was skating away, snorting laughter, snaring a puck and driving it at the open net.
The first period passed without altercation. A Sudbury defenseman drew a two-minute penalty for hooking. Gilles Peltier, the Sudbury right-winger, scored an unassisted goal at five minutes of play, and Bobby Kiley matched it less than a minute later. To the delight of the fans, Kiley snapped his stick in half over the ball-peen curve of his head as he skated back across the red line. It was Kiley's trademark, and even the Sudbury devotees roared their approval. Later in the period, Sam cross-checked Kiley in a clean play, knocking him sprawling, and everyone expected an immediate punch-up. But the big brawler only grinned and skated away. In a way, Sam was disappointed.
But the shit hit the fan during the first two minutes of the second period.
Closing full bore on the Ottawa net, Sam picked up the puck at the blue line, faked a slap shot, and then lobbed it over the goalie's shoulder. The puck wobbled into the right top corner of the net, making the score two to one.
The crowd roared.
Bobby Kiley came out of nowhere, a snarling locomotive moving at top speed. Two feet from his target he spiked up an elbow and slammed it into Sam's right ear, sending Sam's helmet flying and dropping him to the ice like a flung sac of seeds. Twelve hundred perfect Os punctuated the astonished faces of the fans, creating a chorused boo that thundered through the cavernous arena. Sam landed hard on his left shoulder, numbness bolting down his arm like a shot of novocaine. A whistle blew and one of Sam's teammates gave Kiley a shove, but Kiley decked this new adversary with a single punishing jab. He swung his stick at another attacker, shattering the visor of his mask, then threw off his gloves. Ignoring the referee and the fast-approaching linesmen, Kiley skated a mocking circle around Sam, spraying him with chill mists of ice.
"Get up, numbnuts," he taunted. "C'mon, chickenshit, get up before I spear out your eyeballs." He chortled like a lunatic, stabbing at Sam with his stick.
"Back off, Kiley," the referee warned, "or you're out of the game."
Kiley ignored the threat. The fans were on their feet now, thirsty for blood, shouting jeers and tossing debris onto the ice—and Kiley loved every minute of it.
Dazed, Sam started to climb to his feet. When he was halfway up, Kiley drove the blade of his stick into the back of Sam's knee, dropping him to the ice again. A linesman made a grab for Kiley, and Kiley shoved him away.
"That tears it," the referee bellowed, giving another sharp blast on his whistle. "Kiley, you're out of the game!"
"Nothing to lose, then," Kiley said.
A scrap broke out between an Ottawa defenseman and the Sudbury left-winger. One of the linesmen skated in to break it up, and then another skirmish developed. On the margins of the circle that had formed around Kiley and Sam, opposing players hugged and shoved, their fuses shortening by the second.
The fans were going wild.
"C'mon, fag," Kiley crowed. "Get up. Whatsa madda? Your momma not here to look out for you?" The light of cruel inspiration shone in Kiley's eyes then, and he leaned over Sam's heaving frame. "Hey, Gardner. Been to any good barbecues lately?"
Sam's body jerked as if shot. He got to his hands and knees on the scarred surface of the ice and spat out a mouthful of blood.
Bobby's brother Rhett had clambered down to the boards with his perpetual companion, Jerry Jeter, and now the red-faced mechanic egged Bobby on.
"Good call, Bobby!" he roared, having caught his brother's last comment. "Serve him up a plate of fried Momma!"
Still grinning, Bobby glanced proudly at Rhett as he glided past the net.
Then Sam was up and skating, head down, stick up, shoulders hunched like a rhino's. Rhett's eyes widened to astonished saucers, and he pointed a grease-blackened finger, trying to warn his unheeding brother.
He was too late.
Bobby windmilled around with his stick, meaning to slash his unseen attacker, but Sam came in low, catching Kiley in the midsection, driving him into the now vacant net. The iron crossbar connected with Kiley's thick neck, the force of the impact lifting the goalposts off their pins. Sam, Kiley, and the net collided with the boards in front of the goal-judge box. Regaining some leverage, the heavier Kiley scrambled free of the net and caught Sam's jersey by the right shoulder, twisting it down and over in an effort to disable Sam's punching arm.
But Sam was a southpaw.
Sam's fist arced over Kiley's right arm and smacked the brawler on the beak, cracking it. Blood exploded from Kiley's nose in a startling gout, spraying Sam's face and drenching the front of his jersey. Locked in the classic scrappers' embrace, the two players commenced a rapid-fire exchange of blows, hammering away with furious abandon, turning flesh into pulp. Sam felt no pain, only a grim satisfaction each time his knuckles ground into Kiley's ugly mug. A particularly well placed uppercut dazed the big brawler momentarily, and now Sam worked his right ear, mashing it into a bloody rag. Reaching around with his suddenly free right hand, Sam caught hold of Kiley's jersey and yanked it over his head, temporarily blinding him. Exploiting this advantage, Sam hooked a leg behind Kiley's and tripped him, the abrupt shift of balance slamming him down on top of his thrashing foe. Dangerously vulnerable, Kiley cried out for a linesman, but by now the entire rink was a bloody battlefield littered with sticks and gloves and writhing bodies. Skaters came off the benches and joined in the fray. Even a few junk-tossing fans had hopped over the boards.
There was no one to save Bobby Kiley.
Sam straddled Bobby's chest, clutched him by the throat, and rained blows into his face. Kiley struggled for a while, but under the steady piston of Sam's fist he soon lay senseless and still.
Sam continued to pound.
A half-full bottle of Jim Beam buzzed past Sam's ear and shattered on the ice behind him. Sam looked up at Rhett Kiley, still safely stationed behind the boards.
"Get off' ’im, you’ fuckin' freak, "Rhett roared, his face the color of clay. "It's over! You're gonna kill 'im!"
Sam drew back to hammer Bobby again.
"Hey! Let 'im up or I'm gonna turn you into a fuckin' zucchini, just like your fuckin' brother!"
In that instant Sam c
ame totally unhinged. Later he would have little recollection of the events that followed. He sprang off Kiley's moaning frame and rocketed toward the boards. Blanching, Rhett and his sidekick turned tail. Rhett was furious, but he'd seen what this fucker had done to his kid brother, who was three times as tough as Rhett could ever hope to be. He headed for the stands at a run, Jerry Jeter hot on his heels.
Sam barely touched the boards as he vaulted over them. "Come back here, you bastard! You take that back!"
Then he was up in the aisles, frenzied fans shrinking back, sparks flying from his skates where the blades gouged the greasy cement. He ran headlong into a soda boy, sending his tray of wares flying, and charged after the fleeing hecklers.
On the ice below, the chaos continued, both teams locked in blood-battle. The referee and linesmen had abandoned all attempts at keeping the peace and were now engaged in the delicate business of staying out of the way.
Through a rear exit, a dozen helmeted policemen tramped into the arena.
"Come back here!" Sam screamed, a lifetime of repressed anger at long last given vent. "I'll kill you! You hear me?" Tears tracked his sweat- and blood-streaked face. An incisor dangled from his gumline by a bare tag of tissue. "Come back!"
Taking the corner at the top of the flight, Sam tripped over a discarded popcorn container and pitched to his face in the aisle. Ahead of him, Rhett and Jerry vanished through an exit, elbows still pumping.
Drained, hurt, and humiliated, Sam climbed back to his feet.
"Hey, kid," an excited fan shouted. "Look out!"
As he spun, Sam ducked his head, avoiding Bobby's slashing stick by bare inches. The blade struck the cement and splintered. Dazed and furious, Bobby threw down his stick and kicked at Sam with a skate. Releasing a warrior's cry, Sam came up inside the lethal kick, catching Kiley on the blunt knob of his chin with the last ounce of strength he had left.
Kiley's skates left the floor. His contorted face went suddenly blank, its only color a grisly smear of blood he'd cuffed across one cheek from his still bleeding nose. This time when he landed, he did not get up.
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