Thin Slice of Life

Chapter 04

Charlie got bored waiting at the harbor for his brother so he decided to look in on another member of the family. Charlie glanced over at Raul, who was riding shotgun. (Ringworm preferred the bed of the pickup truck.) The boy was watching the bay as if he was expecting to see the Ramrod chugging toward Fulton Harbor any instant. “Hey, Raul, you ever been to Shady’s, over on Ransom Island?” “Jes. Johnny take me there before.” “Then you know exactly where we’re going.” A few miles outside of Rockport they passed by the abandoned Starfish Drive-in. Charlie recalled a faint childhood memory of sitting in his mother’s lap in the family station wagon, watching the big outdoor screen.Johnnywassittingintheirdad’slapandthecarsmelledlikepopcorn. Or maybe he’d just invented the memory and it became so familiar to him in the years after his mother died that he thought it was real. Which reminded him of another memory that was real and that really did happen. One fall evening when he and Johnny were in high school they commandeered the Starfish projection room and replaced Walt Disney’s The Shaggy Dog with a bootleg Ann-Margret film called Kitten With A Whip. All the moms in attendance were gratifyingly horrified , although the dads at the drive-in secretly thought Ann-Margret CHAPTER 04 27 |04 was the kind of smokin’ hot babe who could give a hard-on to a cigar store Indian. The kids all wanted to see the anthropomorphized Disney pooch, not a sultry redhead starlet in a tight sweater. The Sweetwater boys thought they would end up in the prankster Hall of Fame. Whentheirdad,Dubber,returnedfromtheGulf,thefootballcoach came to the house and asked him to please, for God’s sake, please help him keep the boys out of trouble so they wouldn’t get suspended from school…and therefore be ineligible for the upcoming district playoffs. Dublin“Dubber”Sweetwaterneverremarriedaftertheboys’mother died. Over the next fifteen years he tried his best to rein in his two wildass sons, but with little success. The task was made harder because he was often out in the Gulf trawling for brown shrimp for weeks at a time. In spite of everything, he got both boys through high school and then into the University of Texas in Austin. To everyone’s amazement, both of them graduated. They stayed in school and got their degrees partly because “it was mama’s dying wish,” but also partly so they wouldn’t have to stay in Fulton to help Dad out with the family business. Totheboys,shrimpinglookedlikeasea-goingroadtoPalookaville. They loved their old man, but couldn’t help noticing that Dubber was stove up with arthritis at fifty, had lost part of two fingers in a winch accident and was usually about two good meals away from applying for food stamps. Piss on that. They had their own plans for the future. But after their dad died, it was Johnny who elected to move back to Fulton and take over their father’s shrimping business, even though Johnny had the most to lose—namely, a promising career as a landman for the Valero Energy Company and a lovely girlfriend from a prominent San Antonio family. She took one look at the rusty shrimp boats and the rough little town and said adios amigo. Johnny stayed and became a shrimper, and no matter how hard he tried to talk his brother into staying too, Charlie resisted. At the time he was having way too much fun drifting through an incautious assortment of schemes and opportunities in Mexico. Seeing the dilapidated old drive-in, Charlie felt sure that he had made the correct choice. — Just barely above water, Ransom Island rested in the middle of Redfish Bay like the exposed hull of a scuttled ship. In its day, the location was a fishing paradise and a lively hell-raising Mecca for G.I.s, Cajun 28 04| oilfield workers, cowboys, shrimpers and fishermen of all kinds. That heyday—roughly from the late Thirties through the early Sixties—was still fondly and endlessly recounted by the survivors of the era. Rupert Sweetwater had owned and operated Shady’s Boat and Leisure Club since he purchased the small crescent-shaped spit of land shortly after Prohibition. He and his brothers constructed all of the buildings and piers themselves, and all three of Rupert’s ex-wives helped...