The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (13 page)

“Oh, no! I’m going for the full
Deep South
immersion, if it kills me.”

“And I haven’t even introduced you to the pineapple sandwich. Better have two, if you’re feelin’ these drinks like I am.”

“Well, Terrell,” Floyd Simmons said as Rick walked up to the bar, having disengaged himself temporarily from Cordelia and redirected his growing erection so that it pointed toward his belt buckle, “I don’t guess th’ Colts’ll miss ya half as bad as th’ Bisque Bears did in ’54. We coulda been state champs if you’n Jack had’a been there for y’all’s senior year.”

“Well, we sure would’ve given it a shot, Mr. Simmons.”

“Hell, son,” said Buster, refilling Rick’s glass. “Call ’im Flaw-id. We all family here, ain’t we?”

Rick took a couple of seconds to assimilate that thought, and then grinned at Floyd and said, “Yeah, Flaw-id, we’da had a damn good team in ’54. But, as pretty much everybody in Bisque knows, the hypocrites had their way, and it didn’t happen. I hate it most for Coach Whitehead; the championship would’ve meant a whole lot to him.”

“It woulda meant a whole lot to everbidy in
Hamm
County,” said Simmons, slapping the bar for emphasis and jarring half the contents of several glasses onto its surface. Letting a belch slip out of the corner of his mouth, he continued. “A champ’mship fuhbawl team does way more’n just pump up
county
priide; it’s good for bidness. Hell, people’ll drive fifty miles just to watch practice, or maybe just to say they been in th’ town that won th’ state championship. I know it’da picked up our floor traffic right smart.”

“Floyd!” Margie Simmons exclaimed, grabbing her husband’s elbow to pull his forearm out of the bar slop. “Watch what you’re doing!”

“S’okay,” said Buster as he picked up the affected glasses, wiped down the bar and produced fresh ones, which he quickly filled from the pitcher. Picking up on Floyd’s comment, he observed, “I lay the blame squarely on ’at lil’ sumbitch she’sa screwin’ all ’at time- whassis’ name-
Rogers.”

Jack, who’d been following the byplay at the bar from across the room, moved quickly to place himself between Rick and Floyd. Sliding his empty glass toward Buster, he said, “What’s it take to get a drink in thish’ere bar? You better let GD back there again.”

Buster swung his head around to Jack, his eyes taking a moment to refocus. “Hell, bwy, yo’ leg ain’t broke. Get yo’ ass on back’ere an’ let th’ old folks get some grub.” Touching Margie Simmons’ elbow, he said, “C’mon, honey, le’s get yo’ ol’ man fed ’fore he starts daincin’ on th’ bar.”

Jack and Rick, left alone, faced each other across the bar. “Looks like it’s gonna get pretty drunk out,” Jack said, glancing over at Linda and Cordelia, who’d had their heads together since Rick’s withdrawal. “I reckon you’re used to the rough-and-ready side of my family by now, but if I’d thought twice about it I wouldn’ta dragged you over here. We’gn get outa here any time you’re ready.”

“Whoa, buddy,” said Rick. “I’m havin’ a fiine time, ’long as it don’t bother you. That crack Buster made a minute ago just wiped out any scruples I mighta had about slippin’ one into Aunt Cordelia. I’m OK to let this play out.”

“Hell, son,” Jack said with a grin. “If I’us gonna get pissed at people for screwin’ Cordelia, I’d hafta square off with half of Bisque. You play it like you want to.” He’d barely finished the sentence as Cordelia and Linda moved to join them.

“Don’chall be plannin’ no devilment over here and not lettin’ us in on it,” Cordelia said, giving Rick a playful hip shot as she stepped up to the bar next to him. “Jack, Linda’s been tellin’ me about y’all lookin’ up Ziggy Williams while we’re in
Atlanta.” Shit, Jack thought, now it’s while we’re in
Atlanta-
“I didn’t know what’d become a’him since he got back from Ko-REA, ’cept that he didn’t come back home. Then I saw this little ad in the Constitution a few weeks back for some club in Atlanta, and it said sump’m like ‘Ziggy Williams and the Whoosis’- you know, a band’s name- an’ I thought then, ‘Hell, there can’t be two Ziggy Williams in this world.’ then I forgot all about it ’til Linda told me y’all were gonna see if you’gn meet up with ’im. I don’t wanta be pushy, hon, but d’you think I miit tag along?”

“What about Ziggy Williams?” said Margie Simmons as she reclaimed her spot at the bar. “Bisque’s war hero paying us a visit? I’m surprised he’s got the time, busy as he is stirrin’ up his fellow niggers to go on the warpath.”

“Ziggy?” exclaimed Cordelia. “Whachu talkin’ about, Margie? He’s singin’ with a band in
Atlanta.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure he’s still in school,” said Jack. “What’s this about ‘niggers on the warpath’, Margie?”

“Does the name Martin Luther King ring a bell? Rosa Parks? The
Montgomery
bus boycott? People we talk to at the
Atlanta
banks’re saying that old Ziggy’s one of King’s chief agitators. And his being in school wouldn’t keep him from being part of what they’re calling the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.”

“Oh, my God,” Cordelia said, her voice up an octave. “Don’t tell me he’s part a’that!”

“Sorry, but that’s exactly what I am telling you. You might want to keep it under your hat; I didn’t think it was wise to tell Floyd, who would of course pass it right on to Buster. They’d just get mad and say stuff they’d probably be sorry for later on. Besides, they’ve got all they can do, keeping Bisque Chrysler-Plymouth between the ditches.” She stopped abruptly, her eyes focusing across the room. “Excuse me!” Reaching the couch that sat in front of the room’s back windows within seconds, she was still too late to prevent Floyd’s stretching out on it, but she did prevent his removing his second shoe. “Floyd! Come on! It’s time to go...”

“Go” had gotten only partially past her lips before they were shut by the back of Floyd’s hand. Rick, the closest to the pair, moved quickly to clamp Floyd’s wrist in his hand and lever him off the couch and onto the floor, converting the wrist hold to a hammerlock, his knee between the prone man’s legs. Floyd’s response was a descent into unconsciousness.

“Whoever it was that talked about something ending ‘not with a bang, but a whimper’ sure as hell wasn’t talking about a party at Cordelia’s,” Linda said to the lazy counterpoint of the wagon’s windshield wipers.

“Eliot, I think. Yeah, pretty much par for the course with Buster and Cordelia,” Jack observed as he rolled open the driver’s-side vent window to augment the defroster’s efforts. “The final bang’s probably still going on, in her back seat.”

“I felt bad for Margie; even if that slap of Floyd’s was accidental, it looked like a pretty solid shot, the way she fell back from it. And hauling away a comatose husband from a party at the boss’s house has got to be awkward, at best. It was nice of Gene Debs to say he’d follow them home.”

“Twenty years in the Navy’s given him expertise in quite a few things,” Jack said, “not the least of which is seeing drunks into a safe berth. And I sure as hell didn’t want any further part of ol’ Flaw-id this evenin’.”

“Buster didn’t seem too upset about the whole thing.”

“Nope; he was just glad to see the couch vacated so he could pass out on it.”

“Which certainly didn’t appear to upset Cordelia.”

“Again, par for the course,” Jack grunted. “Guess I’ll get a blow-by-blow from Rick tomorrow on his ‘ride home’.”

“That’s saying a lot in very few words, Skippy; guess I’ll be getting Cordelia’s perspective at about the same time.”

“How’s that?”

“She’s taking me over to
Augusta
for lunch and a check on how they’re coming with the boat- unless that conflicts with anything that you had in mind.”

“Good God, what’s goin’ on with you guys?”

“Well, she said that she and Ríni did everything together, and she hadn’t had a real girlfriend since your mom ‘went back north.”

“Damn . I didn’t think Cordelia had room for a girlfriend, what with all the boyfriends. Well, it doesn’t look like you’ll have decent weather for motorcycling, so if you want to seek out other perilous activity, just remember you’ve been forewarned.”

8  ON THE STEP

Jack woke early. The sky hadn’t lightened, and wouldn’t, he figured, for at least another hour. Padding barefoot into the Coconut Grove house’s kitchen, he was careful with coffee-making sounds so Pete and Linda would go on sleeping. God knows, he thought, I need this time to myself. Nouveau riche, Pensacola-bound, and all of a sudden the earth’s surface’s awash with ball bearings.

The Hamm County Beverage Company’s sale netted him close to ten million dollars, which would, of course, be whittled down significantly by the grasping of government. He’d known that the grasping would be minimized by Pete’s foresight (his friend, mentor, benefactor and father confessor, now Pete for evermore, the Bisque years as Moses Kubielski sealed in tamper-proof, hermetically-sealed storage, the way you’d stow the Star of India before driving through dead-of-night Calcutta) in setting up a trust for him years before that last flight out of Bisque. That, and mandating Bruce Goode’s consulting with a high-powered
Atlanta
firm of tax attorneys on his behalf. Anticipation, though, was one thing; realization quite another. Beyond his pending obligation to the Navy, there would be no need, whatever taxes’ ultimate bite, for Jack Mason ever to contemplate working another day in his life.

His greetings from the Hamm County Selective Service Board had arrived a few days after Rick’s departure for
Fort
Jackson. His aversion to becoming a dogface, and Gene Debs’ tales of his twenty years in Naval Aviation, had led to his acceptance as a Naval Aviation Officer Candidate. That commitment would take a five-year plug out of his life, as opposed to the two years of the numbing monotony of life as a private soldier. His only other option had been graduate school, a monotony more exquisite, but no less numbing. Whatever the coming five years might hold for him, he felt sure that numbing monotony wouldn’t be part of it.

Naval Aviation’s most immediate attraction was his removal from current circumstances. The time between now and his June 15th reporting date wouldn’t be, he was sure, anything like enough to get a handle on where his life was going, or of the roles that Pete and Linda would play in it. The four months of relative seclusion prescribed for Aviation Officer Candidates by the U.S. Navy School of Preflight seemed more attractive to him with every day that passed. Even after commissioning, life as an officer flight student wouldn’t include a lot of spare time, and he looked forward, guiltily, to leaving the ultimate question of Linda in Pete’s hands.

Not that being with her wasn’t fun; far from it. Smart, sexy, self-sufficient and a talented hell-raiser, she’d fucked his brains out all these years and clamored for more. She’d made their Bisque sojourn uproarious, unsettling fun, especially after she hooked up with Cordelia to plumb the nether regions of Bisque and the surrounding countryside. And by now they’d been together long enough for him to conclude that a lifetime with her, if that had ever been an option, was definitely not in the cards for him. She was, unquestionably, an alcoholic, meaning that sooner or later, among other things, she’d say the wrong thing to the wrong person about how the three of them happened to be together. If, the chilly thought intruded, she hasn’t already. But if anyone on the face of the earth can handle a situation like this, he thought, it’s Pete.

Having gone down that road as far as he cared to for the moment, he turned his thoughts to Pete’s plan, that he now knew had begun years ago, which had made him a rich man. Boy, actually; he’d been nineteen when ownership of the Hamm County Beverage Company was dropped in his lap. He wondered, off and on, if he’d imagined it making him this rich this fast, or if he was benefiting unduly from Pete’s desire to repay the late Dieter Brück for saving his life during the Spanish Civil War. He’d fought this notion to a standstill countless times before, and satisfied himself that Pete was, as he said, very happy with the way things had turned out. The thought, however, would still creep back at odd moments, along with its corollary that his, Jack’s, taking responsibility for Linda had been part of the master plan. Pete had, after all, been a deeply-experienced Abwehr agent, and long-range planning of that sort would be second nature to him.

Linda could have, inadvertently or otherwise, dropped him a hint or two over the years about their summer liaisons. As a matter of fact, Pete hadn’t been that specific about when Linda had told him that they’d been lovers since he was sixteen. After Pete introduced them when he and a Jack came to New York together in 1953, they’d seen each other regularly during his summer and Christmas holiday visits to his father. Dr. Lawrence Mason, Professor of Physics at
Columbia
University, had seemed not to notice, or to have been indifferent to, his absences, regardless of the excuse. Linda had been a significant part of his growing up, no question, and not, by any means, just where sex was concerned. But they’d been together now, as adults, for long enough to have taken each other’s measure.

It was evident to him on the run back to
Florida
that their relationship, still comradely and promiscuous, wouldn’t be permanent. Pete would, of course, figure that out for himself in time, but Jack still had no answer to the question that would define what the three of them would be to each other in the future. Did Pete have feelings for Linda that he’d suppressed to promote the relationship between her and Jack? She’d told him that she and Pete would make love now and then after Dieter was killed, and that she’d initiated it. They’d both lost someone whom they loved, and after that
Cuba
seemed to shrink under their feet. Both she and Pete missed Dieter, but she hadn’t realized until they’d become intimate how much Pete still loved Serena Mason. He’d never, she said, called her Ríni, as most of her friends in Bisque did. It was always Serena, and always with a light, loving caress.