sponsor. They couldn?t pay us for playing football at the university, but there was always some rich
alumnus willing to provide a sports coat now and then, a car, a summer on the house. Sometimes even
a daughter.
She didn?t even send a card.
Twenty years. I hadn?t seen or heard from her since, not even when Teddy was killed. I can
understand that; I can understand not being able to deal with that kind of pair. Hell, I can understand it
all. When you love someone you forgive everything.
I had kicked most of the other monkeys off my back, all but Doe. I couldn?t purge her from my
fantasies, what was left of them. Vietnam was bad for the soul. It was bad enough, what you saw and
did, but the worst thing was what you thought. You get over the rest of it but you never forget what it
does to the soul. Teddy Findley was the best friend I ever had, from the day I arrived at Georgia until
the day in Saigon that he bled to death in my arms. Teddy was a golden boy. Teddy hadn?t hit a false
note. He was Chief?s hope for immortality. The plan was perfect:
football for four years at Georgia, show what the kid could do, then law school somewhere in the
north to erase the jock image. Then back to take over the reins and keep the Findley hand in the
Dunetown pot.
Vietnam screwed it all up. Instead of Harvard Law School, Teddy ended up in Nam with me, a couple
of shavetail lieutenants doing the best we could to keep sane and alive.
Then all of a sudden Teddy was dead and the moment it sank in that he was dead, what I thought was:
Christ, Teddy, how can you do this to me, how can you leave me to tell Doe and Chief about this?
I still remember thinking that. I have pretty much erased everything else from my mind, but I still
remember that when Teddy died, I didn?t think about Teddy, I worried about me. That?s what I mean
about Nam and your soul.
Eventually, of course, I wrote the letter. I told them what I knew Chief wanted to hear.
I created the lie and I wrote the letter and I never got an answer, not even an acknowledgment that he
had received it.
So I started forgetting in earnest. Football heroes exist only on bright fall afternoons, and pretty girls
stay young only in picture frames
Except there was Doe, who hadn?t changed a bit. She still had that young, amazed look she?d had in
the early sixties. Still had the long, golden hair. Silk. Slim, firm body. Breasts that some women
would pay a fortune to try to imitate. Skin like cream. And suddenly she was no longer out of reach.
She wasn?t a sylph or a fantasy; she was as painfully real as a shin splint and just a phone call away.
And now, twenty years after the fact, she expected me to come trotting to the boathouse like it never
