Hooligans Read Online Free

didn‟t want to get too personal, I didn‟t want to play games,
    either.
    “Teddy Findley was my best friend,” I added after a second or two.
    “Oh,” he said. “Then you know what‟s been going on.”
    “No, I got out of touch with the family,” I said.
    “You know the Findley kid is dead?”
    “You mean Teddy?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Yes,” I said. “It‟s after that I kind of lost track of things.”
    “Well, what happened was the racetrack, that‟s what. The town got bent. Twenty years ago there was
    probably, what, seventy-five, a hundred thousand people?”
    “Sounds about right.”
    “Probably three hundred thousand now, about half of ‟em from the shady side of the tracks. What you
    got here, you got a major racetrack, and a beauty. Looks like Saratoga. A classy track, okay? That‟s a
    gimmee.”
    “Where is it?”
    “Back behind us, on the other side of the river. It‟s dark now, anyway.”
    “Okay, so you got a classy track. Then what?”
    “I think maybe what the money in town expected was kind of another Ascot. Everybody standing
    around sipping tea, wavin‟ their pinkies in the air. What they got is horseplayers, which come in every
    shape, size, and variety known to mankind, and about half of them smoke tea; they don‟t drink it.”
    “So that‟s what Front Street‟s all about?”
    “It appeals to some of that element. It isn‟t Front Street‟s gonna make your gonads shrink. It‟s what
    happened to the rest of the town. They turned it into a little Miami.”
    “They? Who‟s they?”
    “The wimps that took over. Look, Chief Findley‟s an old man. Most of the rest of the old power
    structure‟s dead. They turned it over to their heirs. Keepers of the kingdom, right? Wrong. Wimps, the
    lot of „em, with maybe an exception or two.”
    “1 probably know some of them,” I said.
    “Probably. But it wasn‟t just them, it was anybody had a square foot of ground they could sell.
    Condos all over the place. High-rise apartments. Three big hotels on the beach, another one going up.
    Real estate outta sight. Two marinas as big as Del Mar. You feel bad now, wait‟ll you see Doomstown
    in the daylight.”
    That was the first time I heard it called Doomstown, but it was far from the last.
    “I‟m still surprised Chief Findley and the old power structure let it happen,” I said.
    “Couldn‟t do anything about it,” Dutch growled, “They died or were too old to cope.”
    An edge had crept into his tone, a touch of anger mixed with contempt. He seemed to sense it himself
    and drove quietly while he calmed down.
    I tried to fill in the dead space. “My father used to say you can inherit blood but you can‟t inherit
    backbone.”
    For the first few blocks we drove through the Dunetown I wanted to remember, the large section of
    the midtown area that had been restored to its Revolutionary elegance.
    I remembered driving through the section with Chief and Teddy one Sunday afternoon a long time
    ago. It had fallen on hard times; block after block of broken-down row houses that were either
    boarded over or had been converted into cheap rooming houses. We were in Chief‟s black Rolls
    convertible and he was sitting on the edge of his seat, shoulders square, his white hair thrashing in the
    wind.
    “We‟re going to restore this whole damn part of town,” he had said grandly, in his soft, Irish-southern
    accent, while waving his arm at the drab ruins. “Not a damn museum like Williamsburg. I mean a
    livin‟, breathin‟ place where people will be proud to live. Feel like they‟re part of her history. Share
    bed and board with her ghosts. This is the heart of the city, by Cod! And if the heart stops, the city
    dies. You boys just remember that.” He paused to appraise the street, then added, half under his
    breath, “Someday it‟ll be your responsibility.” And Teddy looked over at me and winked, in those
    days I was one of the boys.
    It seemed he had kept that bargain, although