Hooligans (49 page)

insulting. I stopped having a good time and started feeling sorry for him. A lot of Harry Raines‟

dreams had been destroyed in a very few minutes.

Pancho Callahan stared out the window at the racetrack. He had less to say than usual—nothing.

Raines got up, poured another round of brandy, and slumped on the corner of his desk.

“1 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 arid 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 favoured and the track is right for him.”

“1 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 favoured. 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

“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

crooking, 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 Cook City. We flare the 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 lever 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. Doe, 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 rue 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.”