wifeââ here the doctor lowered his voice â âmy wifeâs not acting herself these days. I think sheâs fucking around. Can you believe that? Fifteen years of . . .â Starky searched for but could not find the right words to describe his marriage.
âItâs going like mad, Starks. I canât guarantee Iâll have anything left by the end of the week.â
âI canât take the chance. You know, I caught her going through my office yesterday. Sheâs looking for something she can hold over my head ââ
âCost, Starker. Iâll give it to you at cost, because youâre a friend. I want to move it, thatâs all. Iâm trying to make room for new inventory.â
Starky stood up. No. Sorry.
âTuesday night, Sticks. Shoot some hoops, okay? You gonna be there, Sticks? You gonna shoot some hoops?â
. . .
Rudy liked Duke. Theyâd gone to a Duke game once, maybe five years ago, back when Murph was still clinging to the diminishing dream of his son one day playing pro hoops. Rudy had the time of his life. Murph took the kid to the locker room afterwards (he was friends with a friend of the trainer), and all the guys had come over and said hello and signed a hat for him. Rudy wore that Duke hat every day for two years, until it was finally nothing but a band of tattered cloth and plastic, stapled together.
Maybe heâd get Rudy a Duke hat. Notre Dame was on sale. He asked for the sale price on the Duke hat. The store owner said no. Heâd got a deal on the Notre Dame hats. The Duke hats were cost plus as it was. He couldnât give Murph a break. Heâd like to, but he couldnât.
Murph cut through the park on the way back to his car. Heâd still wanted to get something for Rudy, something for Rudy to remember. They hadnât had many memories lately. He thought of Babyâs First Book and all the things it missed and all the things heâd never know about his son. His first kiss. His first orgasm. His first screw. His first disappointment. His first betrayal. His first bad trip. His first crime. His first good love gone bad. Everything. It.
Murph passed a couple of teenagers, lurking in the shadows by the monkey bars. He could tell one was holding, he knew the look, heâd worn the look himself; maybe he was wearing it now.
âOH vam QaQ shit?â the one kid asked.
The young dealer closed his eyes and nodded emphatically. âHIjaâ, ioD, vam shit âoH QaQ . . .â
. . .
The Klingon concept of Honour is tremendously complex. Unlike contemporary Western culture, which renders every complicated idea into an abstraction (honour, love, valour, truth, peace), Klingons leave nothing up to interpretation. Their Code of Honour, the paq voâ quv, runs some twenty-five thousand pages and is constantly being expanded and reinterpreted by the Klingon High Council. In fact, like Earthâs Eskimos, who have some fifty words to cover every nuance and grade of the concept snow, Klingons have some eight hundred and sixty degrees (counting changes in inflection and dialect quirks) of honour. There is the honour of a warrior in his first battle (âquv lakâ), which varies greatly from the honour of a warrior in his last battle (âquV LuZâ). There is the honour a Klingon woman shows her living mate (for example, âqUUv lOn,â although this can vary depending on the mateâs standing within in the community), which should not be confused with the honour she shows her deceased mate (which, again, varies greatly depending on the manner in which her mate died). Surprisingly too, for such a essentially conservative culture, there is the honour of a divorced woman, which ranges from the lowest order, âquvV tU,â for the woman who quietly acquiesces as her mate takes another lover, to âquv tulG,â reserved only for those great women who kill their mates in a highly
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