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.Checkers, Yahtzee, Ping-Pong, you name it.If there’s victory at stake, if one person is going to win and one is going to lose, I want to be the winner.No, wait, scratch that.I don’t want to be the winner.I have to be the winner.When you play-wrestle with a child, you’re supposed to let the kid win.I never did.I’m that kind of competitor.Is it healthy? Probably not.Can I do anything to change it? Probably not.The only two times that drive to win failed me, as it turned out, occurred when I was set to fight for world championships.Both times, I was involved with something beyond the fight game, a monkey on my back.Both times, I was a failure in the eyes of the sporting world.Try living with that.23The pellet-gun vandals stayed busy for the next two nights.Reports of shot-out car and house windows came in from the far West End, Blue Creek, Emerald Hills, the Heights—every neighborhood and enclave in Billings, it seemed.Monday morning, I trundled out to the driveway in my robe to fetch the morning paper and saw that my neighbor Bob Dilfer’s car had been relieved of its driver’s-side windows.That sent me on a frantic reconnoiter around my own property, which turned up clean, thank God.I went back inside without saying anything to Bob.It might make me small and petty, but I couldn’t face Dilfer’s yammering on about his damned Prius that early in the morning.In the Herald-Gleaner, both in the daily dinosaur of a print product and the Wild West of our online forums, the nightly bursts of thuggery were being cast as a Most Alarming Trend.The mayor and the police chief held grim-faced news conferences to assure the citizenry that Everything Possible Was Being Done.The Diploma commissioned a web chat with Chief Roscoe Hamer, and the website crashed under the weight of folks crowding in to express their fear that our fair burg was going to hell.About the only people who seemed happy were the owners of the glass repair places, which were enjoying a windfall to the tune of nearly $250,000.Lainie called me twice Sunday, and I ducked her both times.I wasn’t ready to talk, and I wasn’t ready to talk about why I wasn’t ready to talk.I like my life in compartments—work here, home here, social life there, with the pathways between them known only to me.Lainie was breaking down that discipline, crossing boundaries, learning things that I wasn’t ready to tell her, things I might never be ready to tell her.I’d spent more than twenty years finding a place of peace, or at least bearable unease, on the subject of Hugo, and she was already challenging my position there.What would she do or say when she found out more? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.Monday night, I was back on the desk at the Herald-Gleaner, and she called me again.Nowhere to hide.“Take me to lunch tomorrow?” she asked.“I can do that.”“I missed you yesterday.”“Yeah, busy.”“OK.Noon then? At the clinic?”“That’ll be fine.”We said our good-byes, and I hung up.I sat staring at the phone, wanting a do-over on the whole exchange.The Diploma came barreling out of his office, relieving me of that thought.“Damn, Mark, I need you to roll on this,” he said.“Miles and Eighth.Cops think they have the vandals.”I looked around the office.Just the copy editors, me, and Pennington.Everybody else was at dinner, I guess.“Where’s Eddy?” I asked.“City council meeting.Get going.Cops are there now.Grubbs is heading over to shoot it.”It had been years since I did a cop beat, clear back to my intern days at the Herald-Gleaner, before Trimear brought me aboard full-time with the sports staff and long before he figured out that he didn’t like me all that much.I remembered now how much I craved the adrenaline rush of a spontaneous, unpredictable story.Put back on the job by the Diploma, I fractured a fair number of traffic laws whipping my Malibu through downtown and up into the asscrack of midtown Billings.Near the intersection of Miles and Eighth, the strobes crossed my face, bathing the inside of my car in blue [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]