“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