“Yeah, I read Leviathan. I read that copy of The Peloponnesian War you sent. I read a lot. Ain’t nothing changed: you do your forty-cent-an-hour job, you do your reps at the weight pile, you go to chow when they call you and you sleep when it’s lights out. There’s still lotsa time left over to advance your education.” “You didn’t go Mao-Marxist on me did you?” Sparrow joked. “Nah. I’m just saying . . .” Oakley had been out for three weeks. His doomed fascination with a jewelry store up in Dothan had bought him a stretch of two years and ten months. Sparrow and Oakley had been best friends since grade school in a nameless, sunstruck tract of Section Eight housing on the outskirts of Mary Esther, Florida—itself a strip mall of a town that owed its existence to neighboring Eglin Air Force Base. They had shared the highs as well as the misery, looking out for each other in stir and out. They were on the balcony of Oakley’s second-floor crash in the old Spindrift Motel, a fifties-era relic, now condemned—pilings washed out by a June hurricane had destabilized the western wing. By this time next year, the pastel high-rise depicted on the billboard out front would take its place. Oakley was living there on the sly through the beneficence of Two-Eleven, the Spindrift’s one-time handyman, now caretaker-cum-watchman pro tem and old jailing buddy to them both. It was no big deal to Two-Eleven, as he figured to be let go when the developer sent the dozers in— which might be any day now. With two hundred feet of sand-covered extension cord, Oakley was stealing enough electricity from the absentee owners of the condo next door to power a refrigerator, a fifteen gallon hot water heater, and a couple of lamps. There was no A/C, but it was late September, so the heat was tolerable for sleeping—just. Money for the necessities came in from day trips as a deckhand on the charter boats out of East Pass, baiting hooks for tourists, cleaning their catches, swabbing the decks and gunnels, lugging ice—the flunky work of a nautical factotum. But Oakley, not one to take direction in the first place and chaffing at the dictatorial manner of the charter captains, was gaining a reputation as a malcontent on the marina. His other source of income, he’d told Sparrow, was “odd jobs.” They watched a young couple stroll out to the water’s edge and settle onto a blanket. For Sparrow, the girl added a carload of black chips to the quality of the beachscape. She was a stunner, a corn-silk blonde not older than twenty. In defiance of a municipal ordinance laid down by the local guardians of social order, she was wearing a thong—coral in hue, a mere afterthought in terms of beachwear. Sparrow shivered. “You get laid since you got out?”
TLR
ALLEN
35