Free The Bleeding Season by Greg F. Gifune Page B

standing in front of the window, gazing out at the snow.  But he knew Bernard was right too—Tommy had been the best of us.
    “I always felt bad for you, Alan, because you were there when it happened.  After he died a day didn’t go by when I didn’t think about staying after school that day, and how if I hadn’t, I’d have been with you guys.  Maybe I would’ve been the first one off the bus that day.  Maybe I’d have been lying in the street instead of him.  Would’ve made more sense…”
    My throat cinched and I struggled to control my emotion.  I had been two steps behind Tommy that day, and the same thoughts had crossed my mind ever since.  How easily it could’ve been me instead.  How perhaps it should have been.
    “But the one thing we all shared, the one thing we all knew,” Bernard said through a lengthy sigh, “was pain.  We all know pain don’t we fellas, and the rage that comes with it.  Yeah, we know rage too.  We know the rage of never amounting to what we should have, could  have been.  Falling short, that’s been our specialty.”
    Donald pushed himself to his feet and began to pace, arms folded across his narrow chest.
    “Rick, you could’ve been a pro football player.  It’s all you talked about from the time we were little, and you had it, you had it, man.  But the rage got you.  You almost beat that poor bastard to death over a parking space.  For what, to impress some fucking girl you were dating at the time?  The guy was in a coma for three days, for Christ’s sake.  A coma , Rick.  For a parking space.  I remember going to visit you in prison.  We’d all pile into the car and make the drive to Walpole, everybody dead quiet—God those were the longest trips because nobody said a word the whole way up and the whole way back.  And when I went away one of the things I was running from was having to go see you in that fucking hole.  You were always so strong—so much stronger than I was—I couldn’t stand seeing you broken, locked away in that place.
    “And look at you now, man.  Fifteen minutes of rage in a parking lot and your whole life went to shit.  Is that fair?  Is it?  Is that fucking fair?”  Bernard hesitated, apparently cognizant that the volume of his voice had increased considerably.   When he continued, his tone had returned to one softer and more controlled.  “Are you happy, Rick?  Life turn out the way you hoped?  A bouncer at a nightclub, alone, still chasing chicks like a high school kid, hanging around your apartment staring at those old trophies.  Jesus Christ, man, a far cry from the NFL, huh?”
    Donald looked at me through bloodshot eyes.  “This is absurd, why—”
    “Be quiet,” Rick snapped, his back still facing us.
    “I don’t think any of us need to hear this kind of—”
    “Shut the fuck up and listen, Donny.”  Rick turned slowly, looked at us over his shoulder with dark eyes.  “We’ve never had to hear anything so much.”
    “And then there’s Donald,” Bernard said flatly.  “The king of underachievement.  Fucking royalty in that department, huh, Donny?”
    The nearly gleeful tone in Bernard’s voice surprised me.  I’d never known him to revel in someone else’s pain, particularly if that someone was a friend.  Donald’s expression had shifted from discomfort to near-frenzy.  He glared at me, and I tried to convey a look that told him it was all right, that everything would be OK.
    “I always wondered who you thought you were punishing,” Bernard went on, his lifeless voice cutting the silence.  “You’re the smartest guy I’ve ever known, Donny, and one of the most unhappy.  Remember when we were kids and you’d talk about moving away when we grew up?  You used to talk about going to Paris and Berlin and London—all these places that seemed so impossibly far away back then.  You wanted to teach, remember?  You had it all planned out.  A teaching job in some little European