He shook his head. “Fuck him, Trap. I hope he’s frying in hell.”
“Jack?” Blackburn said. He smiled and raised his own brown bottle to his lips. His hair was matted from wearing the wool cap and helmet that rested in his lap. “How’d the season go, Swanny? Still in Harrisburg?”
“Hershey,” Soupy said. His last season in the minors. The booze churned in his belly. His hand was now shaking so badly that he let the gun go and clutched the inside of his pocket. “Got hurt.”
Blackburn grunted. “I’ll bet. You were never too big on the conditioning. You just wanted to play.” He took another drink. “Just wanted to show off for the girls.” He and Leo laughed.
Soupy felt a surge of anger and took hold of the gun again, his index finger resting on the trigger. “Champy says hello, Jack,” he said.
“Pardon?”
Something rustled in the bushes behind Soupy. He looked around, keeping his hand in his pocket, and saw nothing.
“Just a deer that wants a beer,” Blackburn said. “He won’t hurt you, Swanny.”
“You don’t remember Champy, Jack?”
“What’s got you so hot under the collar?” Blackburn said. “Who?”
“Champy, Jack. Played for the Rats. You cut him, remember? But he turned out to be a player. Good wheels. Awesome hands. Better hands than me.”
Blackburn propped his bottle on his knee. “I had a lot of players, down here and up in the homeland. I don’t remember all of them. But nobody had better hands than you.”
“He had the stuff to make it big, Jack,” Soupy said. “But he’s all done now. Like me. He was pretty much done when he got to Hershey this year. You know, Jack, if we had a three-day break between games, Champy could blow through a pile of coke bigger than your head.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. What’s your point?”
“When Champy showed up in Hershey, I hadn’t seen him in years. We talked a lot, Jack. Talked a lot about you.”
Blackburn shifted the bottle to his other knee.
“Worried?” Soupy said. “You can probably figure what we talked about, huh, Jack? You probably thought nobody would ever talk about it. You were wrong.”
Leo stood. Blackburn looked at him and then back at Soupy. He said, “Spent the evening at Enright’s, eh, Swanny?”
“Don’t fucking call me that anymore.”
“Soupy,” Leo said. “What’s the matter?”
“Quiet, Leo,” Soupy said. “Don’t fuck around with me, Jack. You stayed in pretty close touch with Champy, didn’t you? Real close. His parents must have loved you helping him get the full ride to State. I wonder what they would’ve thought about you going to visit him now and then. Do you think they would’ve been happy about you fucking their son? Huh, Jack?”
“Jack?” Leo said.
Blackburn twisted the cap onto his bottle. “Let’s go, Leo. The boy’s had too much to drink.”
“No,” Soupy said, taking a step forward. He pulled out the gun and pointed it at Blackburn.
“What the hell?” Blackburn said.
Leo took a step toward Soupy. “My God, son.”
Soupy waved him back with the pistol. “Sit down, Leo. Ain’t about you. This is all about Jack. And Champy. And me.”
“What do you want?” Blackburn said.
“Hah,” Soupy said. “Whatever it is, Jack, it’s way too fucking late for you to give it to me. Or give it back.”
“You know what? I think you’re drunk, eh? I think you’re a little pissed off about your shitty little career and you’d like someone to blame. You might want to go look in a mirror, eh? As for your friend, Champy or whatever, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Tears had begun to burn in Soupy’s eyes. He lowered the gun barrel until it was aimed at Blackburn’s crotch. “What was his name, Jack?”
“Put the gun down, Swanny.”
“I’m going to blow your dick off, Jack.”
Blackburn lowered his voice. “You little shit. I never did anything you didn’t want me to.”
“Jack?” Leo said.
“What was his name?” Soupy said.
“Jeff,” Blackburn said. “Jeff Champagne, all right?”
“Fuck you, Jack.”
The shot went off as Blackburn somersaulted backward into the snow. The bullet missed him and pierced the snowmobile. Soupy aimed to fire again but Leo had jumped in his way, crying, “Oh, my God.” Blackburn scrambled out from behind the snowmobile and flung his bottle at Soupy’s head. Soupy ducked at the same time that something whacked him hard behind his left ear and he fell. In an instant Blackburn was on top of him with the pistol. He grabbed Soupy’s coat collar with one hand and pointed the gun at his head with the other. “You little shit,” he said. He forced the gun barrel into Soupy’s mouth. The metal banged against his teeth. “Suck on this,” Blackburn said. Soupy closed his eyes. He heard another voice, maybe Leo’s, he wasn’t sure, shout, “Get off that boy!” and then another-not Leo’s, not Blackburn’s, not one he recognized in his drunken grogginess-say, “You took it too far, Jack. Too damn far.” Then Blackburn cried out and his weight fell suddenly away and Soupy half opened his eyes to see Leo standing with the pistol in hand and Blackburn sitting in the snow, rubbing the back of his head.
“Get up, Soupy,” Leo said.
Soupy struggled to his feet. Blood was dripping from his left ear. Leo pointed the gun at Blackburn. It shook in his hand.
“You lied, Jack,” Leo said. “You didn’t stop.”
Blackburn groaned. “Jesus, Leo. You hit me.”
“You said you’d stopped.”
“It’s not my fault his life is all fucked up.”
“Enough,” Leo said. He swung the pistol awkwardly across Blackburn’s eye, as if he didn’t want to hurt him. Blackburn grunted and keeled over, his blood coursing red into the snow. Leo turned to Soupy. “Get out of here.”
“What are you going to do?” Soupy said.
“Just go.”
“I ran like hell,” Soupy told me. “Had to puke before I got to my truck.”
“Did you hear anything?”
He paused. Then he said, “A shot.”
“One shot? You didn’t turn around?”
“No way. Didn’t even stop.”
“Just one shot?”
“Yeah.”
That made for only two shots, as the police had concluded: one in the snowmobile, one in Blackburn’s head. It didn’t account for the bullet Perlmutter supposedly found embedded in the tree. Were there two bullets or three? Three people or four, as Perlmutter claimed?
“How come nobody else heard shots?” I said.
“What difference would it make? Drunk assholes are always shooting their guns off around here.”
“And the only ones out there were Blackburn and Leo?”
“All I saw. I might’ve heard someone else, but I don’t know for sure.”
“You didn’t hear somebody else running away?”
He shook his head.
Even though I’d never heard the story before, never came close to imagining it, hearing it made enough sense now that it gave me an eerie sense of deja vu, as if I’d been standing there myself, watching from the
