Read Online Saved by Jack Falla - Free Book Online

fund-raiser. “Whoa. Get back, Loretta,” Bruno said, taking out his phone and shutting off Loretta midmoan. A couple of nuns smiled.
    Our first-line center and top scorer is Jean-Baptiste “JB” Desjardin. JB will score forty to fifty goals a year and get close to a hundred points. He’ll also irritate most of the English-Canadian guys on the team because he’s an outspoken separatist. JB thinks Quebec should separate from the rest of Canada and form a new French-speaking country. “Hard to build a national economy on doughnut shops and chain-saw repair,” Cam tells him just to piss him off.
    Jean-Baptiste’s right winger is Luther Brown, an African-Canadian from Niagara Falls, Ontario. Luther almost always has his headphones on. For his first three seasons on the team I figured he was listening to Dr. Dre or Ludacris or various rappers who sing about hos and bitches and going down to the candy store and other lyrics you can’t play at the junior prom or in pregame warmup. One day last season when he was taking off the headphones before practice I asked Luther whom he was listening to.
    â€œCount Basie,” he said.
    Rex Conway, another of our forwards, is a combination shit disturber and Bible-thumping fundamentalist. Rex could score five goals in a game but he wouldn’t get on TV because every producer knows they’d blow the start of the ten o’clock news while Rex talked about how he owed his goals “to my personal relationship with my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” just as if it were Jesus and not JB and Luther who’d been feeding him the puck all night.
    Taki Yamamura, who can play wing as well as center, is the fastest skater in the league but not even the best athlete in his own family because that has to be his wife, Su, a principal dancer with the Boston Ballet. Taki brought some of us to the opening of The Nutcracker last November. We had one of those eight-seat private boxes like Abe Lincoln got himself shot in. At intermission—or “halftime” as Kevin Quigley called it—we hit the champagne pretty hard. Had a couple of glasses in the lobby and brought a tray of them back to our box. So when Su, as the Dew Drop Fairy, did a beautiful grande jete —a leap in which she hung in the air like Kobe Bryant—we clapped and whistled. Later we booed the army of mice and Quigley threw a plastic champagne glass at the Rat King. Taki told us the next day that Su said if he ever brought us to the ballet again she’d do things to him that would make Iwo Jima look like a Boy Scout jamboree.
    We’ll have a dozen other guys shuttling up and down from Providence. We call them the Black Aces. Packy calls them spare parts. The Mad Hatter calls them flotsam and jetsam.
    *   *   *
    At dinner with Cam on the night before our preseason game with the Rangers, I was set to plunge a dessert fork into the Inn at Essex’s killer crème brûlée when Cam said, “We really gotta have it between the pipes this season, JP.”
    â€œWhat the hell have you had for the last nine years?” I said, miffed that Cam seemed to have forgotten that I consistently put up good numbers and usually pass up a potential three-day midseason vacation and sex rodeo with a Sheri the Equestrienne by getting myself picked for the All-Star Game. The only mark on my rap sheet is that three or four times a year I’ll let in a long one.
    â€œThis can be a special year, JP. Gotta stay dialed. Can’t let in one of those rollers like against Montreal.”
    I looked up from the crème brûlée. “You son of a bitch you heard everything Lindsey said.”
    Cam was chuckling now.
    â€œYour own daughter is tuning me up and you let her.”
    â€œWhat’d you want me to do? Cross-check her into the living room? Besides”—he was laughing now—“she was right.”
    â€œIt was one stinkin’