The Son of John Devlin by Charles Kenney Page B

went along for you in high school? Smooth sailing.” Jack hesitated.
    “I wouldn’t say that.”
    “Oh?”
    He shifted his position. “I had some … ah … some difficult times.”
    She waited, but he said nothing more.
    When he did not reply, she said gently: “I’d like to hear.”
    He looked away, then back at her. Why did she want to know? he wondered, but he knew as soon as he’d asked himself the question that he was being defensive. She wanted to know because she was interested in him. Because she cared about him.
    “I got into some trouble,” he said evenly. “When I was in school. I had a kind of violent temper, and every now and then I’d fly off the handle and get into a fight.” He paused and looked down at the floor. “I was a very angry young man.”
    She nodded sympathetically. “Understandably,” she said.
    “And every once in a while my anger would get the better of me.”
    “Isn’t that part of being a boy?” she asked.
    “These were nasty.”
    She hesitated. “Nasty?”
    Jack took a long, slow breath. “There was a kid named Hills,” he said, “who played defense for Matignon High School. They were our main rivals. We’d win the state championship almost every year, but when we didn’t win it, they did. Anyway, the games between us andMatignon were always very intense. Hills was a big kid, six-five, something like two twenty-five. Great skater and he hit very hard. So we were playing them this one night and he was really on me all through the game. Lot of trash-talk, taunting me. He wanted me to do something stupid so I’d get a penalty. You can’t score from the penalty box. So I ignored him, but then in the third period we get caught up ice behind the play. Ref is down the other end following the play, nobody’s looking, so he gives me a couple of slashes in the back of the knees. No padding. It hurts, but it can also do some damage. I ignore it, though, because the ref usually sees the person retaliating and I don’t want to get a penalty.
    “But on the next shift, there’s this kid we have, a little guy, a freshman, very fast, who’s on our fourth line. A great kid, very talented, extremely enthusiastic. But small. And he’s out there and he’s along the boards, his head down, and Hills comes in from behind and levels him. Totally illegal check with no purpose other than to hurt the kid. Which he did. The kid’s knee buckled, went the wrong way, and bang, he was out for the rest of the season. Hills gets a two-minute penalty and skates to the box with a big smile on his face.
    “Fortunately, we go on to win and the game ends, and we go into our locker room and they go into theirs and we shower and change and kind of hang around. So after a while I leave the locker room and I’m walking down this long hallway under the stands, and suddenly I come to the end of the hallway and there’s this waiting area near the rear entrance to the rink. And there are a couple dozen people milling around. I don’t pay any attention and I’m walking out, and all of a sudden I hearthis low voice, kind of whispering, saying: ‘Going to the hospital?’
    “And I turned and there’s Hills, standing right behind me. ‘Going to the hospital to see your pal?’ he says. And he’s got this smile on his face as though he’s happy this little kid has been hurt. And he’s talking very quietly because he doesn’t want any of the parents or other people around to hear him.
    “I’m carrying my equipment bag and a couple of sticks, and I put them down and look up at him and say, also very quietly, ‘Let’s go right now.’ And he starts to step back, but I don’t let him. I throw a punch that just catches him on the edge of the jaw and kind of stuns him.”
    As Jack said this, Emily turned away and winced.
    “And it got worse from there,” Jack said. He did not tell her all of the details—did not tell her that he had caught Hills with eleven unanswered punches to the head,