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Danny gets all the empty boxes he wants at Manitou Fine Liquors.

He also gets a fifth of Jim Beam.

At four o’clock that afternoon the boxes are piled up in his bedroom and the bottle of Beam is on the kitchen table.

He sits there looking at it with his hands folded in front of him.

He’s trying to think of the last time he drank whiskey.

Not on the night he got arrested for standing on Margie’s lawn and shouting at her house; that night he’d been beered up.

He’d downed almost a case of Coors between Manitou and Wichita.

He could still remember vomiting it up into the stainless steel toilet of the cell they put him in, then going to sleep not on the bunk but underneath it, as if sleeping on concrete was some kind of penance.

He decides the last time he got into the high-tension stuff was fishing with Deke Mathers.

The two of them were so loaded they didn’t find their way out to Route 327 until it was almost dark, by then both of them badly hungover and promising never again, never again.

He didn’t know how that had worked out with Deke, Danny had lost touch with him since moving to Oak Grove, but he hadn’t touched brown liquor since.

Not any beer for the last couple of years, either.

Jim Beam won’t solve his problems, he knows that.

They’ll still be there when he gets up on Tuesday morning, only with a hangover to add to his misery.

But what it would do is to blot out DJ’s sad face, at least for awhile.

She said What if Ma decides she wants Bobby for a boyfriend again? She said He can’t fix the car if it busts! She said (and somehow this was the worst of all, God knew why) I don’t want cake, I don’t care if I ever have cake again.

“That dream,” he says.

“That fucking goddam dream.”

Only the dream isn’t really the problem.

Jalbert is the problem.

Jalbert has sprayed his goddam life with his version of Agent Orange.

He’s trying to poison everything, including a little girl who thought her life was pretty much okey-dokey: her mom finally had a boyfriend Darla Jean liked, who didn’t shout and send her from the table without her supper.

Jalbert.

All Jalbert.

Danny unscrews the cap, tips the bottle toward himself, takes a good long sniff.

He remembers how he and Deke Mathers laughed there on the riverbank, everything fine.

Then he remembers how they cursed as they shoved through that final blackberry tangle to the road, getting all scratched up and sweating into those scratches, making the sting even worse.

Jalbert would love you to get drunk, he thinks.

Get drunk and do something stupid.

He goes into the bathroom, pours the whiskey into the toilet, and flushes it away.

Then he starts packing his clothes into boxes.

He can’t beat Jalbert except by leaving, so that’s what he’s going to do.

He’ll get to spend time with Stevie, who knows where everything is in the Table Mesa King Soopers.

As for Darla Jean… she’ll have to find her way.

In the end, most kids do.

So he tells himself.