Hooligans

  "I appreciate your candor," he said, stopping to clear his voice halfway through the sentence. "I understand about your . . . previous ties to Dunetown. All this is probably difficult for you, too."

  He wasn't doing bad at the innuendo himself. A lot of information was bouncing back and forth between us, a lot of it tacitly. I almost asked him what had been troubling him.

  Instead, I dug it in a little deeper.

  "It hasn't got anything to do with old ties, Mr. Raines," I said. "I'm an investigator for the government. I came to help clean up your town. I've been here five days and I only know one thing for sure. Everybody of importance I turn to for help, kicks me in the shins instead. Callahan wouldn't have told you all this. He wouldn't be that inconsiderate. I, on the other hand, have never scored too well in diplomacy. It doesn't work in my job."

  I stopped talking. The dialogue was beginning to sound defensive.

  Raines looked at Callahan. "Can you confirm this?" he asked quietly.

  Callahan nodded slowly.

  "My God," Raines said again. And then suddenly he turned his attention back to Pancho Callahan.

  "The blame rests squarely with the trainer," Raines snapped, almost as if he had forgotten the conversation moments before. It was as if it had given him some inner strength. The weight seemed to be gone. Fire and steel slowly replaced it, as if he'd made a final judgment and it was time to move on. "I'll have Barton's ass. I'll get him out of here along with that damn Butazolidin."

  Callahan chimed in: "Seems to me, sir, we're talking about two different things here. Buting up the horse today and fixing the race on Sunday. They're connected this time, but they're two different problems."

  "Yes, I understand that," he said. He braced his shoulders like a marine on parade and ground his fist into the palm of his other hand.

  "We talked to the jockey . . . "

  "Impastato," Raines said, letting us know he knew his track.

  "Right. Impastato got chewed out by Smokey Barton for letting Disaway out at the five-furlong post—he usually goes at the three-quarter. Anyway, it was Thibideau who told him to run the race that way."

  "That happens; it's not uncommon," Raines said, attempting to be fair.

  "No. But it's usually not done in a race where the horse is favored and the track is right for him."

  "I agree," said Raines, who was turning out to be nobody's fool, "but it's not enough to prove the race was a fix."

  "No, but there's something else. The last race Disaway ran, Impastato says the horse was shying to the left going out of the backstretch. Started running wide."

  "Look, I'm sorry, Callahan," Raines said impatiently, "but I need to know where you got this thing about the race being fixed. I can't go to the stewards and tell them I heard it around the track."

  "You can't take it to the stewards at all . . . or the Jockey Club," Callahan said, looking to me for support.

  "And why not?"

  "We can't prove any of it," I said. "You're a lawyer. All of this is expert conjecture. You could get your tail in as big a crack as ours would be."

  "My tail's already in a crack," he growled.

  Callahan said, "What Jake means is, we can't prove the horse was burned out so he wouldn't run well. We can't prove Thibideau put the final touch on it by opening him up too early. We can't even prove it was Thibideau. Fact is, we can't even prove for sure the horse has been running with a hairline crack in his foreleg."

  Raines' anger was turning to frustration.

  "Why don't you just spell it out for me," he said.

  "Okay," said Callahan. "The way I see it, they couldn't Bute him on Sunday because there's a little kick to Butes; the horse might just have done the job anyway, and he was favored. The fix was for Disaway to lose. They had to Bute him today because he was going lame after the workouts, and today was his day to win. So Disaway ran like a cheetah, couldn't feel the pain in his foreleg until he went down. What I think is that Thibideau set up the loss on Sunday. Smokey's only sin was not pulling the pony because he was going lame. Hell, you could run a lot of trainers off the track for doing that."

  "Then I'll run 'em off," Raines said angrily. He finished his second brandy and stood with his back to us, staring down at the track. "An owner's greed, a trainer's stupidity, and two horses are dead. One jockey may never ride again, and another is lying in pain in the hospital." He turned back to face us.

  "To my knowledge, there's never been a fix at this track, not in almost three years."

  "Well," Callahan said, "it was well thought out and impossible to prove. Would've worked like a Turkish charm, too, except the leg was weaker than they thought, which is always the case when a horse breaks a leg in a race."

  "Then just what the hell can I do?" Raines roared, and for a moment he sounded like Chief Findley.

  Callahan finished his drink and stood up.

  "About this one? Nothing. Thibideau lost his horse; he's paid a price. The other two horses and jockeys? Don't know what to say. It'll go down in the books, just another accident. I don't think—see, the reason we told you this, it isn't the last time it's going to be tried. I know how you feel about the track and the horses. It's something you needed to know."

  Raines sighed and sat back in his chair and pinched his lower lip.

  "I appreciate it, thanks," he said. But he was distracted. His gaze once again was focused somewhere far away.

  "Mr. Raines, it wouldn't help us—Callahan here, myself, and the rest of Morehead's people—for you to talk about this fix business. Not for just now. Maybe in a day or two, okay?"

  He could hardly refuse the request and didn't.

  "I respect your confidence," he said, without looking at either of us. "Will forty-eight hours be enough?"

  Callahan looked at me and I shrugged. "Sure," I said, "that'll be fine. We'll be checking with you."

  We left him sitting there, staring out at the track he had created and which he obviously loved and cherished and felt protective of, the same way Chief felt about Dunetown. I felt sorry for him; he was like a schoolboy who had just discovered some ugly fact of life. Callahan didn't say anything until we were outside the building and walking back around the infield to the car.

  "You were pretty tough in there," he said.

  "Callahan, do you ever get tired of dealing with pussyfooters?" I asked with a sigh.

  "All the time," he said, looking down the track, where they were repairing the infield fence.

  "That's what just happened to me. I got the feeling Raines is anything but. But he's surrounded by a bunch of pussies."

  "It's your business to tell him?"

  "Nobody else was going to do it. Time somebody played honest with the man."

  "Did that all right," he said. "Just wonder what Dutch is going to say."

  "I wouldn't worry about Dutch," I replied. "I'd worry about Stoney Titan."

  After a moment Callahan said, "Yeah . . . " and seemed awed at the prospect.

  I didn't tell him what else had happened, that I was measuring the man to see what kind of stuff he was made of.

  I wasn't sure I liked the answer.

  58

  FLASHBACK: NAM DIARY, THE SECOND SIX

  The 182nd day: We know this village is a VC hideout. We go by the place, there's this pot of rice cooking, enough for maybe a hundred people, and there's some old folks around, a dozen kids, two or three younger women, that's all.

  "They sure are skinny, to eat that much," Jesse Hatch says as we walk by.

  Flagler's replacement is this kid from Pennsylvania, handles a .60 caliber like it was part of his arm. He learns fast too. We call him Gunner. He says he used to hunt all the time, poaching and everything, summer and winter, since he was maybe eight, nine years old. Nothing scares him. He achieved "aw fuck it" status before he ever got to Nam.

  Anyway, we go back tonight to see if maybe the village is a gook shelter and there was activity all over the place. What we got is Gook City. We flare t
he place and hit it from both sides, only there's a stream on the back side of the village and they get on the other side and we are pinned down. There are green tracers going all over the place, rounds bouncing off shit, kicking around us.

  We're pouring stuff into the hooches, just shooting the shit out of them, and all of a sudden one of them goes off. They must've had all their ammo stored inside because it was the Fourth of July—squared. Grenades, mortars, tracers, mines. Everybody's freaking out, running around. Then Hatch catches one in the leg from the other side of the stream and he goes over the side into the water and he panics and starts yelling that he can't swim and Carmody is yelling, "Shut up, for Christ sakes" only it's too late and Jesse catches a couple in the head. Carmody and me, we go over the side and drag him back. But I knew he was finished. It was like trying to lift a house.

  Carmody keeps saying, over and over, "Why did he yell, why the fuck did he yell. Fuckin' stream was only three feet deep."

  But it was dark and everything had gone wrong and Jesse couldn't swim. Hell, I don't know why I'm apologizing for old Hatch, look what it cost him.

  The 198th day: The lieutenant's beginning to act weird. It started a couple of weeks ago when we lost Jesse Hatch. It's like he has a hard time making up his mind about anything.

  Last night I go by his hooch and I say, "C'mon, Lieutenant, let's have a beer." And he just sits there, looking at me, and then he says, "Let me think about it." Think about having a beer?

  Today he says, "My luck's going bad. I shouldn't have lost Flagler and Hatch."

  "You can't blame yourself," I say to him.

  "Who'm I going to blame, Nixon?" he says, only he says it with bitterness. He's lost his sense of humor, too.

  The 215th day: We got separated from our outfit and we were two days out in the boonies. We come up on this handful of gooks. Ten of them, maybe. We just break through some brush and there they are, twenty feet away plus change.

  Everybody goes to the deck but the lieutenant. I don't know what happened. He just pulls a short circuit and stands there. This one VC has his AK-47 over his shoulder, he rolls backward and gets one burst off. Carmody takes three hits. He's lying there, a few feet away from me, jerking real hard in the dirt.

  It's the shortest firefight I ever saw. It's over in about ten seconds. Everybody is shooting at once. We are on top of these people and Carmody is the only one gets hit. One of the gooks jumps in the river and Gunner just goes right in after him, takes him out with his K-bar. Just keeps stabbing him until he's too tired to stab anymore.

  I take the lieutenant in my arms and hold him as tight as I can and keep telling him it's going to be all right. I hold him that way until he stops shaking and I feel him go stiff on me.

  It doesn't seem possible. A month to go, that's all he had. I don't know why I thought the lieutenant was invincible. You'd think I'd know better after six months out here.

  The 254th day: It's almost six weeks since Carmody took it. I wish the hell I would have time to thank the lieutenant. If he had just come around for a minute or two. Shit, you just take too much for granted out here.

  I've been acting squad leader ever since. They made me a sergeant. Doc, Gunner, me, we're the only old-timers left. Jordan beat the rap and rotated back to the World. The night before he left we got him so drunk, shit, he was out cold. So we tie him to the back of this PT-boat and drag him back up to the base, which is about eight or nine kliks. He almost drowned. By the time we got to the base, he was sober. So we got him drunk all over again. He was a wreck when he got on the chopper to Cam Ranh. I'll bet he's still got a hangover. Something to remember us by.

  Can you beat that, six months and I'm an old-timer.

  I never even told the lieutenant I liked him.

  The 268th day: I got called down to Dau Tieng today, which is division HQ, and I talked with this captain who seems to run the whole show in this sector. He tells me I'm recommended for a Silver Star for this thing up at Hi Pien. It was a rescue mission and I guess I looked pretty good that day.

  He asks me how I feel about the war. Can you imagine? How does anybody feel about the war, for Christ sakes.

  "I've had better times," I said. "Like the time I had my appendix out."

  The captain has real dark eyes, like he needs sleep and could use a week or two in the sun, and he got a kick out of that.

  "I mean, how do you feel about the war politically," he says.

  "I don't know about that," I say to him. "I'm not interested in political bullshit. I'm here because I was sent here. I don't even know what the hell we're doing over here, Captain. Right now it looks like all we're doing is getting our ass kicked."

  "Does that concern you? I mean, that we seem to be getting our ass whipped?"

  "You some kind of shrink or something?" I ask him.

  He laughs again and says no, he's not a shrink.

  So I say to him, "Nobody's over here to lose."

  Then he asks me how old I am and I tell him I'm twenty-one and he says to me, "You're a damn good line soldier."

  "I'll tell you, Captain, I'm almost a short-timer. I got six months left to pull and I got two objectives in life. Get me back whole, get my men back whole. I don't think about anything past that. There isn't anything past that. You start thinking about what's past that and you're a dead man."

  "I'm going to field-commission you," he says, just like that.

  "Shit no," I says. "Don't do that to me, Captain. Gimme a break. What do you want from me?"

  "I need a lieutenant on that squad and you're the best man for the job."

  "Look, gimme six stripes, okay, that way I outrank anybody else on the squad. I'll stay right there, do the same shit I been doing, but I don't want a goddamn bar, man. Bars get you killed. I'm walking away from this, Captain. I'm not dying in this swamp. You hand a bar to me, it's like a fuckin' hex."

  So he gives me six stripes and a night on the town, which is kind of a joke, and the next day I'm back at Hi Pien and nothing is changed. It's the same old shit.

  The 287th day: We had this nut colonel who came up on the line. He was an old campaigner, you could tell. He knew all the tricks and he just ignored them. He didn't even make a lot of sense when he talked. I don't think he was wrapped real tight anymore.

  Later in the day he was going to grab a medevac out and we're standing on the LZ on top of this knoll and he takes a leak right down the side of the hill, and just like that the VC start popping away at us. I don't know where they came from, and he's laughing, and I'm telling him, "Colonel, you better watch out, we seem to have Charlie all over the place."

  "Piss on 'em," he says.

  All of a sudden 9-millimeters were busting all around us. They must've busted fifty caps and the ground around his feet was churning up like little fountains. He finished, zipped up, and shot them a bird. Then the Huey comes in and he climbs aboard and they dust off. I thought, There's a guy needs to get off the line, bad.

  "That crazy son of a bitch'll get somebody killed," Doc says. "He doesn't give a shit anymore."

  "What the hell're they gonna do with him?" I say. "He's too crazy to send back to the World."

  "I don't know, send him to the crazy colonel place," Doc says, and we all laugh about that.

  The 306th day: Gunner was over in Saigon for a week of R and R and he meets this ordnance guy and they hang out and get drunk and raise some hell. Anyway, the ordnance guy shows Gunner how to take the timer out of a hand grenade and when Gunner comes back, he sits around every night, taking the timers out of M-4's and then loading them into ammo packs. He puts five or six to each bag.

  A coupla of nights later we're sitting on this LZ and the VC jump us. Gunner says follow him. He leaves the bags behind, we give them about thirty meters, hole in, and when they take the position we start a counter. Next thing I know there's hand grenades going off all over the place, gooks screaming, all this chaos. Then we went back and jumped them and took the position back. We wasted about twenty
. Half of them only had one arm.

  We did this a couple of times, moving off LZ's and what have you. Gunner keeps a coupla of bags of these grenades around all the time now. Every time we move out we leave a couple behind. It's like our trademark. Fuckin' monkeys never learn. It works like a charm every time.

  The 332nd day: We had this ARVN assigned to us. I don't trust Vietnamese, not even the southerners. They have a tendency to run when things get hot. I know that's a generalization, but over here, sometimes generalizing keeps you alive. Anyway, this ARVN scout was on point and he runs into a sniper. One lousy sniper but this crud leaves the point and comes running back to report. What it was, he didn't have the guts to cream the fucking gook.

  So he comes running back and the snipes pops off three men, one, two, three, just like that. We get up there and I get around behind the sniper and I empty half a clip into him.

  When we get back to base I radio upriver and tell them I'm sending this creep ARVN back to them, I can't use him.

  "Keep him," they say. "It's politics."

  Poli-fuckin'-tics. Jesus! Politics my ass.

  Tonight we're camped out in the bush, he heads back into town to see his lady friend. I take off my shoes and follow him. He's going to the river to hop a ride and I jump him before he gets to the dock and slit him ear to ear with my K-bar, just drop him in the fucking river.

  That's one son of a bitch isn't getting any more of my people killed.

  The 338th day: This time when I went down to Dau Tieng, it was the captain and this lieutenant named Harris, who looked like he didn't take shit from anybody, and we met in this bar which everybody jokingly calls the Cafe Society. I figure it's about the ARVN. They probably found him, he's some asshole's brother or something. It doesn't even come up.

  "You know the trouble with this war," the captain says. "We get these people. for a year. Just when they're getting good enough to stay alive and take a few tricks, they go home."