Michael Malone - Weebly

Xerxes, into the clothes washer and watched him go
mad with terror), Lance had laughed at the punishment.
To be thrashed didn't frighten him, to be knocked to the
ground and pounded in the kidneys on the football field
didn't frighten him. Neither did marching to the
headmaster's, taking a girl on a dare up to the parking
lot beside the Falls; neither did dangling from a rope on
the sheer side of a cliff, or swooping among thickets
down a ski slope, or passing a bus on a hill in his
Jaguar, or facing the cynical dean of his college, or
flying through enemy flak high above the hazy, humid
mountains of Vietnam. He'd met every challenge that
centuries of his peers had devised to test him. He wasn't
afraid to fight, drink, dive, speed, steal, flunk, screw, or,
finally, and from eighteen thousand feet, kill.
Over the years of his developing manhood, Lance
had collected the tokens of successful rites of passage.
Black eyes, sprained ankles, broken arms and legs,
suspended licenses, a pyramid of beer cans, lettered
sweaters, stolen traffic signs, and, as he said, add it all
up, more cherries than crabs. Here in his bachelor
quarters, the second floor of the family carriage house,