Free Middle Man by David Rich Page B

cargo ships stacked with sealed containers were docked. A crane unloaded one of them gracefully and easily. Farther out, an oil tanker hooked up with a smaller ship, a lighter. I snapped a photo with my phone. A helicopter came out of the north, banked, and turned east over the bay. I decided I wanted to do that, too.
    The pilot was a former Marine and the proud owner of an MD 520 series helicopter, not too new but very clean, which he chartered, mostly to oil people like I was pretending to be. He had been a Flying Tiger, HMH-361, and he flew the big Super Stallion choppers during the Iraq invasion. Marine was not in my bio, so I told him my father had been a Marine chopper pilot who then flew a traffic copter in Arizona, and I used to go up with him all the time.
    When we got up I asked to circle the harbor first. The dark sedan was parked behind the helicopter shed. Two men in suits had gotten out. One was trying to use his phone, though the noise must have made it difficult. The rest of the ride would serve to solidify my identity as an oilman and make the followers worry that I might be going somewhere significant or meeting someone important. Maybe that would make them move faster. I asked to fly over some offshore platforms. The pilot said that was his most requested trip. He stopped talking and I did, too, and before long, the orange and gray dots grew into misshapen ships, forever moored. They grew in clusters that reminded me of the apartment complexes outside Phoenix that would erupt beyond the previous limits of urban life. At first they were brave outposts, but the seeds blew and others grew nearby, and soon after that no one could tell the area had been unpopulated just the other day. The platforms were multiplying in the same way.
    During my first tour in Afghanistan, Tom Rickun was wounded in the foot and shoulder and I carried him behind cover, where the medics could help him out. Tom was near the end of his tour, but after he got home, he always wrote to me, mostly about how he wanted to be a writer and tell everybody what he had seen in Afghanistan. He got a job writing marketing brochures for a real estate development company, and because they liked him so much and thought of him as a man of imagination and cleverness, they assigned him the task of compiling potential names for the various new developments. At first it was a pleasant distraction. He kept a digital voice recorder and would riff in the car, spouting out combinations that sounded good. He would edit those and hand over the lists. The boss called him into the office and praised him. It was the most attention and praise he had ever received for anything. They used about a dozen of the names he submitted: Normandy Hill, Avalon Heights, Sagebrush Terrace, Cornwall Crest, Canterbury Ridge are some I remember. The praise brought on something like writer’s block; he could do no work on his stories. All his time went into concocting pleasant sounding communities.
    Everything began to sound wrong to him, names like Anglesey Acres and Catalpa Circle, yet the company still liked his work and used the names. Next came contempt, which introduced book and movie names like Manderley, Tara, Twelve Oaks, and Brideshead: each one praised, accepted, used. He would get drunk and become obsessed with moving away from English and French references. The company had to break new ground he insisted: Bremen Sands, Brno Mews, and Stuttgart Court were rejected. He could do no writing other than letters to me, he said, and he feared the direction he was heading. He wanted to name a development near Las Vegas Korengal Valley, another, near Orlando, Peshawar Place.
    I wrote a long letter to him detailing a failed rescue mission my unit had undertaken and asked him to write it up as a short story. Instead, he wrote back saying that he would refrain from war locations, but he hated the bosses and was determined to embarrass them with French and German words and phrases