‘And,’ said Moxie, ‘the kind of person who’d blow up a truck due to its Confederate-themed décor probably wouldn’t appreciate the owner getting in his face over it.’
Parker considered all possible outcomes from a confrontation between Louis and Billy Ocean.
‘Actually,’ Parker replied, ‘he probably would.’
39
Billy Ocean hated folks calling him by that name. He hadn’t always hated it. To begin with he’d enjoyed having a nickname, especially after seeing those movies with George Clooney as the con artist Danny Ocean. His pleasure had only increased when it was pointed out to him that the Ocean’s movies were based on an older film, one in which Frank Sinatra played Danny Ocean, and you didn’t get much cooler than Sinatra in his Rat Pack prime.
The problem was that Billy’s father had been given his nickname out of a kind of respect, even a little affection. He was Bobby Ocean, King of the Wharfs. He wasn’t someone you wanted to cross, but he did his best not to screw over the workingman, not as long as the workingman was white – or if Bobby did screw him over, he made sure to hide his misdeeds behind a corporate entity that could be linked to him only by conjecture.
It was natural, then, that his son should inherit the Ocean moniker, just as he was destined someday to become Prince of the Piers, the heir to the empire. Except it hadn’t worked out that way, because his father didn’t trust Billy enough to make him privy to the important decisions, the ones that related to multimillion-dollar building projects, the endeavors that were changing the character of the city, stamping it with the identity of a man who had started out cleaning fish guts from market floors. Bobby Ocean had encouraged his son to learn about the family’s various business interests from the bottom up, to earn the respect of the men who would ultimately contribute to his wealth by laboring alongside them, but Billy didn’t have time for that kind of shit. Surely that was why his old man had slaved his ass off to begin with: so his son could ascend from a more elevated position, raising his father’s legacy to greater heights because he wasn’t mired in scales and fish heads.
But his father didn’t see it that way. His father looked at Billy and could barely conceal his disappointment. Billy resembled a bargain basement version of his old man: soft where the sire was muscular; dull-eyed where he was watchful; and conniving where he was clever. Billy was dumb and self-centered, but he wasn’t so dumb and self-centered as to be unable to perceive his father’s true feelings. It was just that he couldn’t comprehend the reason for them.
So instead of sitting in on meetings with developers, or managing a couple of bars and fancy restaurants with a sideline in chasing tail, Billy was scrabbling in the dirt. He knew folks around town laughed at him behind his back – and sometimes, if they’d had enough to drink, right in his face, although they always pretended after that it was all in good fun. ‘We didn’t mean anything by it,’ they’d say. ‘We’re just joshing with you. You’re a good guy, Billy.’ An arm would be thrown over his shoulders. Someone would sing a semi-mocking chorus of ‘When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going.’ (This was another thorn in Billy’s side: he listened to a lot of rap music, because one thing the Negroes did well was rap, although maybe not as well as Eminem, who was the best as far as Billy was concerned, and blacker than black. But Billy didn’t like having a nickname associated with a Negro. It wasn’t right.) So the call would go up for another round of drinks, and Billy would smile and take it because it was to this his father had reduced him: the butt of a joke, a punch for stronger men.
And then to cap it all, someone had blown up his fucking truck.
Billy loved that truck. It was everything he’d dreamed it would be, but he’d barely grown familiar with its ways before someone reduced it to a smoking shell. To make matters worse, Billy was supposed to be paying the insurance monthly, but what with one thing and another, including certain liquidity issues, he’d let the payments lapse.
Man, was his father pissed when he heard that.
Which left Billy looking for clues in the aftermath of the arson attack, only to receive shrugs in return. He knew there was no shortage of resentment toward him and his father. In a city as small as Portland, a man like Bobby Ocean couldn’t rise to a position of power without leaving wreckage in his wake, and some of the resulting anger would inevitably be deflected in his son’s direction. But blowing up a truck was a big step to take. Scratching it with a key, maybe, or slashing its tires: after all, Billy had done such deeds and worse to the vehicles of others. Destroying a thing of beauty like his truck, though …
Well, that required a debased mind.
But over the last couple of days, Billy had come to suspect his father knew more about what might have occurred than he was willing to share with his son. This inkling was the result of a conversation with Dean Harper, who had worked on the boats with his father back in the day. Now, thanks to Bobby’s loyalty to those who were loyal to him, Harper served as his driver, messenger, and general man-at-arms. Dean wasn’t considered bright, but he was a lot smarter than he pretended to be, and there wasn’t much that went on along the waterfront to which he was not privy.
Dean Harper’s weakness was alcohol, although he was hardly unique around the piers in this respect. Yet Dean was more disciplined than most in his habits. Twice a month, starting on Friday night and ending early Sunday morning, Dean went on the kind of bender that would frighten demons back into hell, which had led to him being blacklisted by all of the city’s better drinking establishments, and even some of the worse ones. Admittedly Dean enjoyed a golden period for about two hours on the Friday evening, when he was still only knocking back beers and hadn’t yet transformed into the hulking, brooding figure that had once, in the depths of a particularly bleak drunk, tried to ram a cruise liner with a lobster boat. It was during the most recent of these mellow patches that Dean let slip to Billy something about a ‘shine’ being in the bar shortly before Billy’s truck went ‘the way of the Hindenburg’, a reference Billy didn’t get, but figured involved smoke and fire.
‘I can’t tell you nothin’ more, Billy,’ Dean had added. ‘Your old man …’
Whereupon Dean’s mood had suddenly darkened, and he’d wandered off to bust up a pool table, leaving Billy to pay the tab and think about what he’d just heard.
A shine, the flags on his truck: it all started to make sense now. A Negro had taken offense at Billy’s choice of decoration, and the end result was the immolation of Billy’s pride and joy. Billy didn’t know a whole lot about history, but he recalled that brave men had died for his right to freedom of expression – which Billy chose to interpret as the right to be as offensive as he chose – and those fine individuals were not going to have sacrificed themselves in vain.
Billy didn’t like to think of the coloreds as shines, or – much worse – niggers. His father didn’t hold with that kind of language, and had passed this on to his son. Bobby Ocean took the view that only uncouth men used racially derogatory terms, so in public they were ‘blacks,’ and otherwise ‘Negroes.’ A man, said Bobby, could demean the Negroes all he liked – Latinos, Jews, and Arabs too – but had to learn to temper his language in both public and private. It was important to appear reasonable, to disguise prejudice with plausibility. Be moderate in your speech, his father would say, so you can be radical in your actions.
Queers were different, though. As far as Bobby Ocean was concerned, you could call them what you liked.