Hooligans Part 29

"I don't know," I said with disgust. "It's one of the b.a.l.l.s I've been juggling."

I was surprised at how easily it came out.

"Well, if you want an amateur's opinion, I sure wouldn't throw that one away."

"Her husband's the f.u.c.king racing commissioner," I said.

"I know who her f.u.c.king husband is," he said with a chuckle. "Anybody who's been in town for fifteen minutes knows who her husband is."

More driving. More silence. Then he started to chuckle again. "I got to tell you, Jake, I really do admire your style."

"It hasn't got anything to do with the job," I told him. "This is old, personal business. Something that was never finished properly."

"O-kay," he said, drawing out the "Oh" for about five minutes. "Well, I'm glad you're doing it up right this time."

"Don't be an a.s.shole," I grumbled.

"Why don't you talk about it?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Okay." A long pause. "But I know you want to."

"I don't want to talk about anything!"

"It's just like the blues. I can tell."

"d.a.m.n it, Stick, drop it."

"Done," he said, and dropped it. I didn't. He was right-I had to get it off my chest.

"There was a time-in my . . . late-blooming youth-when I thought I was going to marry her. I took it for granted, one of my more spectacular mistakes."

"Marry her, huh. s.h.i.+t, you do have a problem."

"It's no problem."

"Hey, this is the Stick, my friend. You can bulls.h.i.+t me about not finis.h.i.+ng things properly and all that c.r.a.p, but don't tell me it's no problem."

"It's no problem," I said emphatically. It sounded more like I was trying to convince myself than him.

"Jake, getting into it is never the problem. Getting out of it, that's the problem."

"I'm already out of it. What I'm trying to avoid is getting back in."

"Oh, that's what you're trying to do?"

"Yes!"

"You got a unique approach," he said, and after a few seconds he asked, "Are you still in love with her?"

"s.h.i.+t."

"No s.h.i.+t."

I sighed. "h.e.l.l, I don't know. Maybe I'm in love with the idea of her. Maybe I never took the time to get out of love with her. I haven't worked it out."

"When are you going to see her again?"

I had a moment of panic, as though I'd told him too much already. The old paranoia.

"What time tonight are you going to see her?" he repeated.

"Who says I'm going to see her tonight?"

He shot me another crazy smile.

"Nine o'clock," I said.

"You need some backup?"

"Don't get funny."

"I don't mean that, Jake," he said seriously. "I mean do you want me to cover you? Keep an eye on the place, make sure n.o.body's houndd.o.g.g.i.ng you? What I'm trying to say is, I'm for you. Whatever it means to you, I hope it comes out right."

I was moved by his concern. There was a lot of Teddy in Stick. But I was wary of him. I was wary of everybody. I had taken two steps, back to back. First opening up to Doe, and now Stick. I was moving farther away from my safe spots. It scared h.e.l.l out of me.

"I shouldn't have come back to this f.u.c.king place," I snapped finally.

"Aw, c'mon," he said. "Then you wouldn't have met me. I'm the magic man, my friend. I can wave my hand and make the impossible come true."

"Where are we going?" I asked, deciding to change the subject.

"City docks."

"What's out there?"

"We got a surprise for you."

"Who's 'we'?"

"Me and Zapata."

"Well, try to keep it under ninety, will you?"

"The Bird here runs a little rough under ninety," he said, grinning as he patted the steering wheel.

"Too bad about the Bird," I said. "I run a little rough over ninety. What happens at the city docks?"

"The shrimpers unload there," he said, as if that explained everything. I decided to be surprised and said no more.

He turned right onto Front Street and drove slowly in the direction of the beach. In the first two blocks I saw six hookers, working in pairs. Two were chatting with a very friendly policeman, whose hands moved from one rear end to the other throughout the conversation; another pair was negotiating something with a middle-aged couple in a Winnebago wearing Iowa plates; and two more almost jumped in front of the car trying to get our attention. After that I lost interest.

"I took a detour. This is the scenic route," Stick said as I watched the strip joints, lingerie stores, and p.o.r.no houses glide past the window. "I thought you'd like to see it in the daytime."

"So this is what America's all about," I said. "Fifty-year-old swingers in recreation vans are replacing Bunker Hill. Whatever happened to Beaver Cleaver and the father who knew best and the days when a major crisis was whether Ricky was going to run out of gas in the Nelsons' Chevy?"

"Who's Beaver Cleaver?" he said, sarcastically.

When I'd seen enough, Stick turned off Front, went two blocks north, and turned east on Ocean Boulevard. There was very little traffic to disturb the palmettos, palm trees, and azaleas that lined the divided highway. It looked much better in the daylight, without benefit of Day-Glo streetlights.

The day had turned hot and humid and we drove with the windows down, back over the bridge to Thunderhead Island. We were still an island away from the ocean, but I could feel the air getting cooler.

I was remembering Oglethorpe County twenty years ago, and riding the two-lane blacktop out to the beach on warm summer nights. The county spread out over ten or eleven islands and the people had a fierce kind of pride that all islanders seem to possess, an independence which, I suppose, comes from living in a place that is detached from the mainland. The islanders I knew didn't give a d.a.m.n what anybody else thought or did. They did it their own way.

"Y'know, years before booze was legal in the state, drinks were sold openly across the bar in this county," I told him. "They called it the free state of Oglethorpe."

"Breaking the law in those days had a certain charm to it," he said. "That's probably where t.i.tan's power started."

I had never thought about it before, but Stick was probably right. That's where the patronage had begun. G.o.d knows where it had spread.

"What do you think of t.i.tan?" I asked.

"The toughest seventy-five-year-old man I ever met," he said emphatically.

Twenty years had transformed Thunderhead Island from a deserted, marshy wonderland to a nightmare of condos; stark, white, three-story monoliths that lined the river to the north, while to the south, the marsh had been dredged out, cleaned up, and concreted into a sprawling marina. There was hardly a tree in sight, just steel and stone, and the masts of dozens of sailboats, endlessly bobbing up and down, up and down, like toothpicks.

I wondered who got rich-or richer-when they plundered this piece of paradise.

The Stick interrupted my angst.

"I had the computer pull the military files on everybody in the Triad who was in Nam," he said. "Costello was in Saigon for about six weeks on some legal thing. The rest of the time he was in Was.h.i.+ngton. Adjutant general's office. Big shot. A couple of their musclemen did time too. But Harvey Nance-that's his real name, Harvey-he's another case entirely. He was in Nam for two years. He was in CRIP, operating out of Dau Tieng. You know about CRIP?"

"Headhunters," I said, with a nod.

"I know this is gonna sound strange," Stick said, "but I still have this funny feeling about guys from Nam. You know, the chemistry. After a while you get so used to a guy, he starts a sentence, you finish it. And when he's hurting, you know he's hurting. Like you are now."

I knew what he was talking about. Once, just after I came back from Nam, I was in San Francisco and I went to the movies and when I came out there was this topkick sitting on the stairs. He had hashmarks up to his shoulder and I don't think I ever saw so many decorations and he was sitting there crying so hard he was sobbing. People were walking by, looking at him like maybe he was unglued. Well, maybe he was, he probably had the right. Anyway, I sat down beside him and put my arm around him and he looked up and all he said was "Ah, Jesus," and we sat that way for a long time and finally he got over it and said thanks and we left the theater. He went that way and I went this, so I knew what Stick was talking about.

And he was right, I was hurting.

"You lose track of reality fast," I said. "When I first went into combat, the Hueys took us into U Minh Forest. It was a free-strike zone. The B-52's had done it in that afternoon, and there was this old man sitting against a wall and he was clutching his leg to his chest, like he was afraid somebody was going to steal it. He bled to death like that, just clutching that leg. This old man, probably, I don't know, maybe sixty, sixty-five, too old to do anything to anybody. I started thinking, Holy s.h.i.+t, there's some weird people over here. Whoever's running this war needs to get his head rewired."

He was nodding along with me.

"It was the ultimate scam, Nam," he agreed. "Nam the scam, the big con. s.h.i.+t, from the day we're born we get sold the big con about war and manhood. We get conned up for that all our lives. The big f.u.c.kin' war payoff. Be a hero-except there weren't any heroes in Nam. All it was was a giant f.u.c.k-up with a high body count."

"That's what you wanted, Stick? To be a hero and have a parade?"

Stick laughed. "Would have been nice if somebody had made the offer."

"I never did figure out what it was all about," I said. "That was the worst part of it."

"Guilt is what it's all about."

I knew about that. First you're exhilarated because you're still alive and others around you are dead. You don't want to admit it, but that's the way it is. The guilt sets in later. That's the way it was with Teddy.

"Anyway," I said, "you get over the thing about camaraderie the first time one of them takes a shot at you. That's part of the scam."

"I didn't mean to get off the subject," Stick said. "The thing is, the CRIPS were mean motherf.u.c.kers and Nance was one of them."

"Why all this interest in Nance?" I asked.

"I'm about to show you."

He peeled off Ocean Boulevard just before we reached the bridge to Oceanby Island and the beaches. The city docks were clean, well-kept, concrete wharves, stretching several hundred feet along the river. It was early for the shrimpers. There was one boat unloading. It was jet black, its nets draped from the outriggers like the wings of a bat. The strikers were shoveling shrimp from the hold onto a conveyor belt that carried it into a sheet-metal building that was little more than an elaborate icehouse.

Stick pulled into a large parking lot flyspecked with battered fis.h.i.+ng cars and stopped near a beat-up Ford that looked vaguely familiar. Zapata peered out of the front seat and grinned.

"Hey, amigo," he said. "How's everything at the track?"

"I got an education," I answered.

"You're about to get another one," he said.

"How's that?"

He reached out between the cars and handed me a pair of binoculars.

"Check the belt."

I checked the belt running into the building. It appeared deserted.

"n.o.body around," I said.

"Just keep watching for a minute," said Zapata.

Stick put lighter to cigarette and hunched down behind the wheel.

A man with a clipboard came out of the shrimp house. He was a short man with a white beard, rather benevolent looking, with a stomach that was used to too many beers. His bullet head was covered by a bright green fis.h.i.+ng cap, and he was checking wooden crates piled against the back of the building. I watched him for a full minute before I realized it was Tuna Chevos. A new beard and dark gla.s.ses were my own excuses. I knew that face well.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," I said. "There he is, the missing link. I knew it! I knew that old b.a.s.t.a.r.d had to be around here. That means Nance can't be too far away. How did you tumble on to them?"

"s.h.i.+t, this was easy," Zapata said. "You said Chevos ran barges on the Ohio River. Seemed logical he'd stick to the same trade, especially since shrimp boats move a lot of gra.s.s. So I got out the phone book, turned to shrimp companies. I got lucky. This is the third place I checked out."

"What's the name of this joint?" I asked.

"Jalisco Shrimp Company," Stick answered.