Free Mortal Faults by Michael Prescott Page B

cry. He waited until the bully faltered, worn out by the punishment he’d inflicted, and then with some unknown reserve of strength Jack launched a piledriver at the bastard’s jaw. He heard a crack of bone. The Mexican collapsed, blood in his mouth, eyes wild with pain. The other two fled, shouting curses. Jack stood over his fallen aggressor, then kicked him twice in the ribs and walked away. As it turned out, the punch had broken the bully’s jaw, which had to be wired up, his meals fed to him through a straw.
    That day he learned his anger could serve a purpose. He could feed off its heat and use it as a weapon. It made him stronger. Other fights followed. Sometimes he was the loser. Most times he was not. But he never backed away, and he never went down easy—and when beaten, he never forgot.
    The second turning point came when he was thirteen. A friend of his, who’d been rescued from a beating by Jack’s intervention, invited him on what he described as “a goof.” A goof, as it turned out, was a crime—the robbery of a convenience mart. Jack’s job was to watch for police. He did okay, and got a small share of the money. Other goofs followed. Nothing too serious—no one ever got hurt in any major way, and he avoided arrest, though sometimes narrowly. His activities brought him new respect. He began to realize that the other kids, the ones who never broke the law, were wary of him. They feared him. He liked that.
    This was his second lesson. He could scare people. And their fear, properly exploited, would make them do all kinds of useful things. They would empty their pockets for him. They would follow his orders. The girls found him dangerous and intriguing. He lost his virginity at fourteen in the girls’ locker room, where a blond sophomore had brought him for a quick introduction to the mysteries of sex.
    Learning to make others fear him had made him a man.
    The next year, at fifteen, came the third turning point. Until then, he had known that there were other people somewhere who had money and the freedom it bought, but he’d imagined no way of joining them. Suddenly he was big enough, agile enough, to compete in sports, and he saw his way out. Years later he attended a college lecture on a corrupt Tammany Hall politico who, the professor said, responded to criticism with the unapologetic defense, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.” The class had laughed. Reynolds hadn’t. He’d understood the Tammany Hall man perfectly. A man’s life was nothing but opportunities seized—or missed.
    Football was Jack’s opportunity. He devoted himself to it with a zealot’s passion. Football became his theology, and the ratty field hemmed in by tiers of wooden benches was his church. He pumped iron and ran miles and studied playbooks.
    He learned something about himself through football. He learned that he was a stubborn son of a bitch. Once he set his mind on something, he would not be denied. He aimed to win the quarterback position, to make himself the star of the team, and he succeeded.
    On the gridiron he learned another lesson. There was no worse fate than failure. Nothing could ease the ache of losing, and nothing was more unacceptable than the sour taste of humiliation at the hands of a stronger or more resilient adversary. He played to win, and usually he did win, often in last-minute comebacks that kept the school talking for days.
    But the real victory he aimed for was his ticket out of town. In his senior year he got it. He received a full athletic scholarship to Chico State. He was the first member of his family to attend college. His parents frankly did not know what to make of this development, whether to be pleased or appalled. His father had assumed Jack would join him at the canning factory after graduation. Instead Jack stuffed the few possessions he needed into a backpack and set off on his motorcycle to drive five hundred miles to rural northern California. Fields of crops