“What do you mean?” I replied.
“I mean, you didn?t have something going with the Raines dame, did you?”
I thought about that for a long time before I said no.
I don?t really think that was a lie. It should have been obvious to me all along that a dalliance with a
football player could never last, any more than one with a lifeguard. For me, the patterns of Dunetown
now fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Chief had erased me from Doe?s life, just as Titan
had erased Tony Lukatis; Harry Raines had filled the spot left by Teddy Findley, just as Sam
Donleavy had taken the place once reserved for me. In the end, when the puzzle was complete, the
picture was all sound and fury, and the irony was that Tagliani, who was never really a part of it, was
the catalyst that brought it all tumbling down. Uncle Franco had come to Dunetown seeking the same
kinds of things we all want. He thought he could buy respectability. All he bought was the long, dark,
forever tunnel. The one with no light at the end.
Looking back on it now, I think maybe the Stick, in his own way, was looking for the same things too.
I?ll never know the answer to that, but I?d like to think that he wanted to put some sense of order back
in his life, to find something of value to replace the values he had lost in that faraway place all of us
would like to forget and never will. Or maybe he had simply lost that dream forever. Maybe he was
just doing what he did best, the best way he knew how. Whatever he wanted, I hope he found it. I
hope death is kinder to him than life and, like all our fallen comrades, he is in some special place
reserved for those who stalked the rim of hell and never came back.
One thing for damn sure, Stick had one fine send-off. He was buried in that beat-up hat of his. The
hooligans were the pallbearers and there was an honour guard and Dutch read a eulogy that had
everybody weeping. And there was a bugler playing taps, and another, off somewhere in the
cemetery, echoing its sad eloquence. Everybody was there but Doe. Beautiful Doe, elusive to the end.
But DeeDee Lukatis was there, and Lark, and Cisco. And Chief Findley and Stonewall Titan showed
up. Salvatore even wore a tie.
