Hooligans

DOE

I finished my drink and said good night. My room on the third floor had a dormer window with a

chintz loveseat and coffee table in front of it, a vintage TV set, a double ted, and ceilings so high you

could fly a kite in it. Everything—the drapes, walls, carpeting, sills, and baseboards—was a

combination of green and white. The room looked like it had been designed by a rampant garden club.

I got out a bottle of amaretto and poured myself a couple of fingers.

Burned out, my bones aching with jet lag, I couldn‟t erase the images of the night from my mind.

Tagliani and Stinetto in the icebox. Mrs. Tagliani‟s monitor going deeeeeeee right in front of my eyes.

The haunting tape of two killers delivering their coup de grace and the bloody back wall of

Draganata‟s house. I had seen worse, but never in any civilized place I could remember.

Then I looked at the note I had picked up at the desk. The handwriting was so precise it could have

been calligraphy. I recognized it immediately and the old electricity streaked from my stomach to my

throat.

“I know you are here,” it said. I‟ll be in the boathouse at Windsong, tomorrow night, 9 p.m. Please.

D.”

She must have written it before she vent into the restaurant, before I had seen her downstairs.

I suppose you always remember the good things in life as being better than they really were. To me,

Dunetown was a slow-motion movie shot through a hazy lens. Everything was soft, the reflections

glittered like stars, and there were no hard edges on anything. It was the end of adolescence and being

exposed to the sweet life for what was an instant in my time. It was living high, dancing at the country

club, open cars and laughter and cool nights on the beach.

Fat City is what it was.

And it was Doe Findley.

Doe Findley had risen out of my past like a spectre. For twenty years she had been the hope in my

nightmares, a gauzy sylph brightening the dark corners of bad dreams like the nightlight at the end of

a long, dark hail.

1 thought about that boathouse and about Doe, dancing tightly against me to the music from the radio

as we fumbled with buttons and snaps and zippers. I couldn‟t remember the song now, but it had

stayed with me for a long time before Nam erased it.

The thought of her spread through me like a shot of good brandy. She was the memory of that lost

summer, the last green summer I could remember. It had all vanished that fall on a Saturday afternoon

in Sanford Stadium.

It‟s funny, Teddy and I used to joke about those days later in Nam. Anything for a laugh over there. I

remember Teddy once saying to me, “Y‟know something, Jake, we should have been born a little

earlier or a little later. Our timing was terrible. Think about it—we played during three of the worst

seasons the Bulldogs ever had. You remember what our record was for those three years?” Did I

remember? Hell, yes, I remembered. “Ten, sixteen, and four,” I answered with disgust. “Yeah,” he

said, “and the season after we graduated, Dooley came in and they had a seven, three, and one. Now

we‟re here. See what I mean? A dollar short and a day late, that‟s us.”

Looking back on it, he was right. Maybe we were just jinxed from the start. That Saturday that

changed my life, I was going wide to the right with Teddy in front of me and I made one of those hard

stopping turns I had become known for. The foot hit wrong. I could hear the ankle go before the pain

knocked my back teeth loose. It sounded like a branch cracking. All I remember after that is the

backfield coach staring down at my face, saying, “Shit! So much for this halfback.”

I got the letter from Chief Findley while I was still in the hospital. “Too bad, son,” it said. “Keep the

car. Doe sends her regards.” The pink slip for the MG was attached. That was it. That‟s how I found

out what an ex-running halfback with a bum ankle is worth in Dunetown. Findley had been my

sponsor. They couldn‟t pay us for playing football at the university, but there was always some rich

alumnus willing to provide a sports coat now and then, a car, a summer on the house. Sometimes even

a daughter.

She didn‟t even send a card.

Twenty years. I hadn‟t seen or heard from her since, not even when Teddy was killed. I can

understand that; I can understand not being able to deal with that kind of pair. Hell, I can understand it

all. When you love someone you forgive everything.

I had kicked most of the other monkeys off my back, all but Doe. I couldn‟t purge her from my

fantasies, what was left of them. Vietnam was bad for the soul. It was bad enough, what you saw and

did, but the worst thing was what you thought. You get over the rest of it but you never forget what it

does to the soul. Teddy Findley was the best friend I ever had, from the day I arrived at Georgia until

the day in Saigon that he bled to death in my arms. Teddy was a golden boy. Teddy hadn‟t hit a false

note. He was Chief‟s hope for immortality. The plan was perfect:

football for four years at Georgia, show what the kid could do, then law school somewhere in the

north to erase the jock image. Then back to take over the reins and keep the Findley hand in the

Dunetown pot.

Vietnam screwed it all up. Instead of Harvard Law School, Teddy ended up in Nam with me, a couple

of shavetail lieutenants doing the best we could to keep sane and alive.

Then all of a sudden Teddy was dead and the moment it sank in that he was dead, what I thought was:

Christ, Teddy, how can you do this to me, how can you leave me to tell Doe and Chief about this?

I still remember thinking that. I have pretty much erased everything else from my mind, but I still

remember that when Teddy died, I didn‟t think about Teddy, I worried about me. That‟s what I mean

about Nam and your soul.

Eventually, of course, I wrote the letter. I told them what I knew Chief wanted to hear.

I created the lie and I wrote the letter and I never got an answer, not even an acknowledgment that he

had received it.

So I started forgetting in earnest. Football heroes exist only on bright fall afternoons, and pretty girls

stay young only in picture frames

Except there was Doe, who hadn‟t changed a bit. She still had that young, amazed look she‟d had in

the early sixties. Still had the long, golden hair. Silk. Slim, firm body. Breasts that some women

would pay a fortune to try to imitate. Skin like cream. And suddenly she was no longer out of reach.

She wasn‟t a sylph or a fantasy; she was as painfully real as a shin splint and just a phone call away.

And now, twenty years after the fact, she expected me to come trotting to the boathouse like it never

happened.

Meet her in the boathouse? Who am I kidding, of course I‟d meet her in the boathouse. I‟d walk from

Pittsburgh to meet her in the boathouse.

Shit.

I got in bed with a copy of Donleavy‟s Meet My Maker, the Mad Molecule and read myself to sleep.

At two a.m. the phone woke me up. I put the book on the table and turned off the light.

The phone rang twelve times before it finally quit.

Fuck it, it had to be bad news.

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