“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.”
