Hooligans (28 page)

“4 don‟t want to talk about anything!

“It‟s just like the blues. I can tell.”

“Damn 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. Shit, you do have a problem.”

“It‟s no problem.”

“Hey, this is the Stick, my friend. You can bullshit me about not finishing things properly and all that

crap, but don‟t tell rue 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

“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?”

“Shit.”

“No shit.”

I sighed. “Hell, 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 nobody‟s hound-dogging 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 hell out of me.

“I shouldn‟t have come back to this Fucking 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

porno 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 r 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 damn 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 Titan‟s

power started.”

I had never thought about it before, but Stick was probably right. That‟s where the patronage had

begun. God knows where it had spread.

“What do you think of Titan?” 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

Washington. 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 top-kick 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 theatre. He went that way and I vent 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 shit, 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. Shit, 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

fuckin‟ war payoff. Be a hero—except there weren‟t any heroes in Nam. All it was was a giant fuckup 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 GRIPS were mean motherfuckers

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 shovelling 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 fishing 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.

“Nobody 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 fishing 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 glasses

were my own excuses. I knew that face well.

“Son of a bitch,” I said. “There he is, the missing link. I knew it! I knew that old bastard had to be

around here. That means Nance can‟t be too far away. How did you tumble on to them?”

“Shit, 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 grass. 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.

“Let‟s find out who owns it.”

“Check.”

Another man joined Chevos, a tall, lean, ferret of a man who walked on the balls of his feet, loose and

rangy. His head moved constantly, as though lie were stalking some unsuspecting prey. I could almost

smell his feral odour three hundred yards away.

“There he is,” I said, no longer trying to conceal my hatred of Turk Nance. “That‟s Nance.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Zapata said. He was grinning like the man in the moon.

“You did good, Chino,” I said.

“Thanks. Piece of cake, this one.”

“You really have a hard-on for Nance, don‟t you?” Stick said.

“I owe the son of a bitch.”

“Well, maybe we can fix it so you‟ll be accommodated,” Zapata said almost gleefully.

“That would be nice,” I answered. “At least we know they‟re all here.”

I watched them taking inventory of the shrimp boxes.

“They look like they‟re actually working for a living,” I said.

“These are the real bad ones, huh?” asked Zapata.

I kept watching Nance, his snake eyes gleaming malevolently. Nance had killed a dozen men I could

think of.

“The real badasses,” I affirmed. “The way it is, if anybody in the Tagliani outfit is capable of wasting

the whole family, it‟s Chevos, with Nance probably doing the batting.

“Twenty-four-hour surveillance on these two, okay?” I said to Zapata.

“I‟ll see to it personally,” he said, obviously proud of his score.

“It also might help to know where the two of them were last night. Particularly Nance. But don‟t let

them on to you.”

“That may be a little tougher but I‟ll see what I can do. You want Nance, you got him.”

I gave the glasses back to Zapata. „I‟ll tell you how I want Nance. I want Nance doing the full clock in

the worst joint there is. I want him screaming in solitary for the rest of his natural life.”

The Stick stared at me with surprise for several moments, then broke into his grin.