Page 23

“Don’t get carried away,” Jamieson said. “I’m sure you have stuff to feel guilty about without having to invent a bunch of might-have-beens.”

Jack looked up and grinned. When he did, Jamieson saw the man actually had tears in his eyes. Not falling, but brimming. “Now you sound like Randy.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“I think so. I think I’m lucky I found you.”

Jamieson discovered he actually felt lucky to have been found. “What else have you got on that list? Because time’s passing.”

“I went to Brown and graduated cum laude, but mostly I lied and cheated my way through. I was good at it. And—here’s a big one—the student advisor I had my senior year was a coke addict. I won’t go into how I found that out, like you said, time’s passing, but I did, and I made a deal with him. Good recommends in exchange for a key of coke. Plus, of course, he’d pay for the dope. I wasn’t into charity.”

“Key as in kilo?” Jamieson asked. His eyebrows went up most of the way to his hairline.

“Right. I brought it in through the Canadian border, tucked into the spare tire of my old Ford. Trying to look like any other college kid who’d spent his semester break having fun and getting laid in Toronto, but my heart was beating like crazy and I bet my blood pressure was red-lining. The car in front of me at the checkpoint got tossed completely, but I got waved right through after showing my driver’s license. Of course things were much looser back then.” He paused, then said, “I overcharged him for the key, too. Pocketed the difference.”

“But you didn’t use any of the cocaine yourself?”

“No, that was never my scene. I blew a little dope once in a while, but what I really wanted—still want—is grain alcohol. I lied to my bosses, but eventually that gave out. It wasn’t like college, and there was nobody to mule coke for. Not that I found, anyway.”

“What did you do, exactly?”

“Massaged my sell-sheets. Made up appointments that didn’t exist to explain days when I was too hungover to come in. Jiggered expense sheets. That first job was a good one. The sky was the limit. And I blew it.

“After they let me go, I decided what I really needed was a change of location. In AA that’s called a geographic cure. Never works, but I didn’t know that. Seems simple enough now; if you put an asshole on a plane in Boston, an asshole gets off in LA. Or Denver. Or Des Moines. I fucked up a second job, not as good as the first one, but good. That was in San Diego. And what I decided then was that I needed to get married and settle down. That would solve the problem. So I got married to a nice girl who deserved better than me. It lasted two years, me lying right down the line about my drinking. Inventing non-existent business appointments to explain why I was home late, inventing non-existent flu symptoms to explain why I was going in late or not at all. I could have bought stock in one of those breath mint companies—Altoids, Breath Savers—but was she fooled?”

“I’m guessing not,” Jamieson said. “Listen, are we approaching the end here?”

“Yes. Five more minutes. Promise.”

“Okay.”

“There were arguments that kept getting worse. Stuff got thrown occasionally, and not just by her. There was a night when I came home around midnight, stinking drunk, and she started in on me. You know, all the usual jabber, and all of it was true. I felt like she was throwing poison darts at me and never missing.”

Jack was looking at his hands again. His mouth was turned down at the corners so severely that for a moment he looked to Jamieson like Emmett Kelly, that famous sad-faced clown.

“You know what came into my mind while she was yelling at me? Glenn Ferguson, that boy I beat up in the fourth grade. How good it felt, like squeezing the pus out of an infected boil. I thought it would be good to beat her up, and for sure no one would send me home with a note for my mother, because my mom died the year after I graduated from Brown.”

“Whoa,” Jamieson said. Feeling good about this uninvited confession took a hike. Unease replaced it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what came next.

“I left,” Jack said. “But I was scared enough to know I had to do something about my drinking. That was the first time I tried AA, out there in San Diego. I was sober when I came back to New York, but that didn’t last. Tried again and that didn’t last, either. Neither did the third. But now I’ve got Randy, and this time I might make it. Partly thanks to you.” He held out his hand.

“Well, you’re welcome,” Jamieson said, and took it.

“There is one more thing,” Jack said. His grip was very strong. He was looking into Jamieson’s eyes and smiling. “I did leave, but I cut that bitch’s throat before I did. I didn’t stop drinking, but it made me feel better. The way beating up Glenn Ferguson made me feel better. And that wino I told you about? Kicking him around made me feel better, too. Don’t know if I killed him, but I sure did bust him up.”

Jamieson tried to pull back, but the grip was too strong. The other hand was once more inside the pocket of the Yankee hoodie.

“I really want to stop drinking, and I can’t do a complete Fifth Step without admitting that I seem to really enjoy…”

What felt like a streak of hot white light slid between Jamieson’s ribs, and when Jack pulled the dripping icepick away, once more tucking it into the pocket of his hoodie, Jamieson realized he couldn’t breathe.

“… killing people. It’s a character defect, I know, and probably the chief of my wrongs.”

He got to his feet.

“Thank you, sir. I don’t know what your name is, but you’ve helped me so much.”

He started away toward Central Park West, then turned back to Jamieson, who was grasping blindly for his Times… as if, perhaps, a quick scan of the Arts and Leisure section would put everything right.