Chapter 7

Later that afternoon, I was sitting on a pool side chaise lounge under an umbrella brooding over what I had just relived. The last time I went through it, my life was a train wreck. Not only did I have nightmares, I had daytime visions of blood and brains covering my face. What right did those assholes have to reopen that old wound? It just wasn't right.

Unthinkingly, I wiped at the vision of Eric's blood and brains that I hadn't felt on my face since I was out of therapy. I looked at my shaking hand and saw it was only sweat. I groaned in frustration. The nightmare, the visions, and the trauma were all back.

"JD, are you okay?"

I turned to the amazingly mature fourteen year old girl. "Les, thanks for asking. This morning came as a shock. It took a long time for me to put Samson Hooker behind me. I need to pull myself together and suck it up. I'm not likely to be decent company for a bit."

"Yeah, I know the feeling. When I was a kid I lost both of my parents in a bank robbery. Then, the same bank threw us out of our home. Then, Child Protection tried to take me away from my sisters. To top it all off, the doctor told me I was going to die because the state children's insurance fund wouldn't pay for the only procedure that would save my life. They considered it an experimental procedure because it was too new.

"Life can just suck sometimes. What I did find out, JD was that facing problems alone is not an option. You need help. You need people who care to help get through your nightmares. If nothing else, JD, you have people. Let us help."

"Les I'm ashamed of myself. After all you've been through you are trying to comfort me. Are you sure you're not forty one? I do feel blessed. All these people here accept me as a long lost friend. I just don't understand it. I appreciate it. I just don't understand it."

"Oh I can explain that," continued the young girl. "In order to live a long safe life, people in the new family business, prostitution, have to be good judges of character. If they are not they could have a quick and painful end of career. You passed muster, so that makes you a pretty good guy.

"Somehow or another, you've put a fire back in Aunt Sal's eyes. Everyone here loves Sal. For what you did for her alone we love you.

"Then you stepped between harm and Billie. To Sander that made you family. Sander's family is dear to us.

"Then you literally charmed the pants off my dyke sisters. That took a real man, and we need more real men in this area. I can see why everyone has grabbed hold of you. The fact that you don't see it makes you all the more special."

About that time, Sal found us. "There you are. JD, we need to get your family out here tonight for grilled steaks. We started out poorly. I'd like to start over, especially with your father. Could you give them a call?"

"Sure Sal. This young lady just convinced me that I need both my old and new family around me right now."

Later, I took some laps in the pool to work out some of the tension. As I climbed out of the pool, my friend from the other side decided to finish his walk-a-bout and join me.

"Howdy JD, it's good to see you fighting this thing. That young un is a pretty sharp kid. It'd be good for you to pay attention."

I looked at the table and saw him in a solid form. "Hey Pinkie, you seem to be getting more real every time I see you."

"I may be real just to you, young feller. No one else can see or hear me. Maybe you are crazy. Ever think of that?"

"Pinky quit with the mind games. I thought we were partners."

He laughed, "I'm a ghost. I can't get laid, so I have to have a little fun where I can find it. You can't hold that against me, can you?"

"You're right Pinky. Sorry to be such an ass."

"You know something, JD?"

"No."

"Everyone alive has a kind of glow of energy about them. I was a little strange when I was alive. If that glow was strong enough, I could see it. Now, I can see everyone's energy glow.

"Your glow is almost identical to Sam Jackson's. I think that may be why Sal almost dropped her pants the moment she saw you. She's drawn to your aura."

"You knew Sal's husband?"

"I was the cowboy he saved when he was killed. I was never able to pay that back, and that may be why I'm still around. You and Sal are really taking on this sheriff thing at a bad time. I might be of more help than any of us would like. Then again, they just might not want me in hell. Who knows?"

That night after dinner both of my families broke bread together. Mary, Sal, Billie, Sander, Les, and the Polly Anna sat on one side and Mandy, Steve and Pop on the other. Pinky just kind of floated around. After the great steaks with all the trimmings and copious amounts of a good French Merlot, everyone was mellow.

I was really proud of Pop. He started out actually humble. You got to understand that Pop doesn't do humble. He's got more ego than a rooster in a hen house. I think it is part of being a professor. He's always right. Anyway, after a few drinks, things got a little loose and Pop got a little talkative.

"I have been a total ass. You folks took in my son when he came here from back east and treated him like family. You worked with him to find his livestock, and then took care of him when he was shot. You were all totally kind and gracious.

"I returned your kindness with rudeness and harsh words. It is no excuse that I hadn't been able sleep for the two days after I heard about JD. It is no excuse to claim that I've been under professional pressure. You did not deserve to be subjected to my bad manners.

"Ms Jackson, can you ever forgive me for what I said and how I acted yesterday?"

Sal quickly responded, "Professor Barton, I agree that we started out on the wrong foot. I suggest we go directly to Jeff and Sal. Then we can just forget about our not so pleasant start."

"Thanks Sal. That's more than I deserve. You're very kind."

He reached to shake her hand, but Sal pulled him into a hug instead.

Later Pop sat down next to me. "Pop, I hope you didn't lose all that sleep over little old me."

"I have to admit that you were only part of the problem. I've been working with the White House to find a means of limiting the losses from the banking bailout. The Treasury Secretary called me about a week before you were shot and told me that since I helped the previous administration come up with the original bailout plan that I should be willing to help fix the problems it generated."

Here was my opening. I thought the way the bailout was handled was dumb from the start. "You know I wondered how you bought into that fiasco."

"Well, after Lehman Brothers tanked I think we all sort of panicked. Here we watched a company that was too big to go under sink like the Titanic, and then AIG started going the same way. We found ourselves faced with a financial concept no one, not in business or academia had faced since the Sherman Act limited the size of companies and the market share they controlled, "Too Big To Fail." TBTF is now both an academic standard and accepted phenomena. We had to do something. We in our ivory towers had no idea that the senior management that went through our business schools would have the audacity to sell their tail of woe and suck up those bailout funds and then divert them to their bonuses. I still can't believe they lied to us on what they were going to do with the money. It was supposed to be used to buy bad mortgages and other toxic paper, not graft."

"Pop, I'm not surprised, nor were most of the American people who have real jobs and have to deal with this scum on a daily basis. Here is an entire industry made up of people who would steal money out of the Sunday morning collection plate if the ushers didn't watch them supported by pork barrel politicians who provide the money to get reelected, and you gave them almost a trillion dollars with no strings. Shit, even I could have told you that, without accountability, the money would have gone to their own pockets. A leopard doesn't change its spots. A snake is a snake. A skunk is a skunk. A banker is a banker. A crock of shi..."

I was going to keep listing what was what, but a killing look from Sal put an end to that string of what is what.

"I see that now, but we told them to use the money to clean up the sub-prime mess."

"Father, that was like was like handing a bank robber a bag of money and saying, 'Go forth my son and steal no more.' That's not the real problem, though. Now there is a new business model that will most likely now be taught at the Harvard School of Business and their business school clones. Be a bad business man, let your greed get ahead of your common sense, steal your ass off, and at the end of the day, the government will give you more money to piss away."

"You can say that now, but we had no idea they'd throw it in our faces. My God, who would have thought that they would give bonuses for destroying a financial institution? I mean giant bonuses."

"I know that I'm Monday morning quarterbacking, but think of the kind of slime you were giving that money to. Here were people who knowingly induced innocent people, yes dumb people, but innocent anyway into getting into financial instruments that they could not afford. They induced these poor suckers into these loans and mortgages with the intention of flipping this paper to some third world country before they defaulted.

"The problem was that they were such good liars that they started to believe their own crap and other divisions of their own companies bought the radioactive instruments. That's when the American companies started going south. Then it was just an avalanche of failures. Common sense, traditional standards and protective ratios didn't mean anything compared to those huge bonus checks.

"These people should have been put in jail. You gave them more money. Hell, I don't blame them for throwing it in your face. At least this administration is putting strings on the money it's giving away now. They're still rewarding poor, even unethical business practices, but they're making them squirm. I'm just not sure the cure isn't worse than the disease."

Pop looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

"Sorry, Pop, I just wonder what would make normally smart men do something so dumb. I may have gotten carried away."

"No JD, You're right on target. Why do you think I was losing all that sleep? I made up my mind about something after my blowup, though. I'm getting out of the gilded cage. I need a real job."

Sal was listening to our conversation and added, "Jeff, maybe what you need is to teach in the real world. Ivy League schools have become Ivory Tower schools in the last years. They have lost their relevance. What is taught there is some pie in the sky boondoggle.

"I understand you did a great job at Texas and enjoyed doing it. Maybe you just need a new place to do your job."

Pop looked at Sal with a new sign of respect and interest. He was just now seeing what I saw. I decided they needed my two cents. "Smart, ain't she Pa?"

"Yes, Son, and she's a looker too."

Pinky reminded me about that time that he was still in my head. "He's not such clown after all."

Not to be left out, Polly turned on me. "JD may have been a little too tough on Wall Street's sense of ethics. I think the problem is the system they work in. Academia has been trying for years to make business a science. It's really an art. When you develop formulas, limits, and averages controlled by numbers you lose the human touch. When you lose the human touch, human misery and death follow. They just forgot one basic rule that we learned quickly after our parents died. 'Never underestimate he power of human greed and he desire to get something for the least amount of effort.'"

Anna followed, "We'll grant that the world's economy is too large to do business on a face to face basis, but what happens is simple. The practitioners of the black arts of business get too far away from the fact that business is the interaction of people represented by those numbers. They start to see it as an interaction of numbers only, and remove themselves from the consequences of their manipulations. I don't believe that any one deliberately sets out to ruin people's lives, but when you lose the human touch, business becomes little more than a giant Monopoly game without people's lives taken into consideration."

"It's sort of like the story my dad told us about Granddad in Viet Nam," continued Polly. "In the late 1960's, The Navy was working on ways to interrupt the Viet Cong supply lines in the Mekong Delta. The Delta was made up of thousands of miles of rivers and navigable canals. Almost all the communist supply lines had to either use or cross these waterways.

"The idea was to make a small fleet of boats that could run up and down these rivers and canals to police the traffic. They tried using super fast outboard motorboats, but that turned out to have limited success. Then they tried a variation of the old World War Two PT boats called swift boats.

"Swift boats worked when allowed to use their speed and maneuverability, but when they had to slow down because of the conditions of the water, they were not much more that a piece of plastic holding big engines. What they needed was something that could stand toe to toe with entrenched shore based fighters and come out in one piece.

"What they came up with was a reinforced Marine landing craft, Class M. These 'Mike' Boats did the trick. Now while the crew of a Mike Boat had the life expectancy of a helicopter door gunner, they were so successful that the Navy made variations of the craft to meet special needs.

"Some were fitted with helicopter flight decks. Some were fitted with 105 mm guns. Some were made command boats, and others were fitted with napalm tanks. These later ones were called Zippos, and our grandfather, a Navy Chief Petty Officer, commanded one. He killed himself after he accidentally killed most of a friendly village."

Les got into the story then. "It seems there was a major movement of North Vietnamese regulars going through the area. They cut off a patrol from a combined force of ARVN (Army of the Republic of Viet Nam) and United States Army Ninth Infantry Division advisors. The NVA (North Viet Nam Army) was on one side of a friendly village and the river was on the other.