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
