Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

  “There’s a police blockade on the Traffic Street Bridge going toward Shreveport,” Jax said.

  Red Malone had turned his chair around and straddled it with his arms folded over the back.

  “That Delia’s no damned good,” said Mama B to no one in particular.

  “No need to rehash it,” Royce said. “What’s done is done.”

  “Every judge and jury in Bossier go to Delia’s,” observed Jax.

  Red looked up quickly but said nothing.

  Royce reached into his shirt pocket for his Lucky Strikes and shook one out of the dark green pack. He opened the back door, letting in fresh air and bands of sunlight, and cocked his head as he lit the cigarette. The three men sat in silence while he smoked and Mama B served them bread pudding, which they ate between sips of scalding coffee. Afterward, they sat some more, and Royce smoked some more, and Mama B cleaned the kitchen.

  “Where you from, Red?” Jax asked, finally.

  “New York. And Hot Springs of late,” Red answered glumly. “Royce, I need to call the missus if I can’t get outta here tonight.”

  Royce said, “Telephone’s in the parlor but it’s a party line. Don’t recommend using it.”

  Jax swirled the loose grounds in the bottom of his cup and said, “I have an idea to get you out of here, Red. How do you feel about airplanes?”

  A couple of hours after leaving Mama B’s, Jax flew to her neighborhood in the Monoprep. He set the little red airplane down on the unnamed dirt road in front of her house, which dead ended at the edge of a vast and fallow cotton field. On the far side of the field, work crews had already begun grading the land to transform the former plantation into an army airfield. Mama B, Royce, and Red came out of the house, and Jax opened the passenger door but he did not cut the engine.

  Red ran to the plane and climbed in next to Jax. “You got the number I gave you?” Red asked Royce.

  “Got it right here.” Royce patted his shirt pocket.

  “Give us about half an hour before you call,” Jax said.

  Royce nodded.

  Red said, “You go over to Delia’s and get Boolie outta there. Drive her up to Hot Springs in my car, will you?”

  “Red, you know I can’t go driving a white woman to Hot Springs.”

  Red grinned and elbowed Jax. “Who said she was white?”

  Royce did not smile. “What if she doesn’t want to?”

  “Tell her I love her. Tell her I’ll get her away from that damned whorehouse and set her up in an apartment in Hot Springs. Got it all figured out.”

  “I’ll call you when things cool down,” Royce said. “Y’all best get going.” He backed away from the airplane.

  “Tell Boolie everything I said,” Red shouted as Jax pulled away.

  Mama B and Royce stood in the yard, and Jax waved to them as he taxied to the end of the road to give the Prep plenty of room. He spun the airplane around on the mains with the tail skid scraping the dirt. A neighbor’s face showed in a gap in the curtains of her front window for a minute before she backed into the shadows.

  Jax opened the throttle, and the Prep accelerated. He raised the tail skid enough to clear the dirt but kept the propeller high above the rutted road. As soon as the airplane lifted from the ground, Jax eased the stick forward. The Prep rode a frictionless cushion of air a foot or so above the road, and the airspeed needle wound to eighty miles per hour. They sailed to the end of the road and over the cotton field, the wheels inches above last year’s broken stalks. Then Jax pulled the stick back and to the left, and the Prep made a dramatic climbing turn, rocketing out of the twilight shadows into slanting sunlight.

  “Hot damn!” exclaimed Red.

  “Ever been up before?”

  “Hell no!”

  Jax leveled off a thousand feet above the ground and turned the airplane north. Below them, the eastbound lane of Shed Road, leaving Bossier City, was clogged with automobiles. Jax pointed and said, “Another roadblock.”

  “Go over there. I wanna see.”

  Jax turned the airplane toward the flashing lights of the police blockade.

  “You see any state guys?” Red asked. “Or G-men?”

  “I only saw local boys.”

  Jax put the police under the right wing, and Red hung over the door and hurled expletives and insults at what he called those coonass cops until they fell away behind the airplane’s tail.

  “Circle around again,” he told Jax.

  Jax banked steeply and brought them back around to circle the checkpoint. Red shouted and cursed some more, but his voice was torn apart and swept away by the wind. Jax rolled out on a northerly heading and reached under the panel to open the valve for the heated air.

  “Snug as a bug in a rug,” Red said. He turned up his jacket collar and settled into his seat. The warm air and drone of the engine put him out like a light.

  A full moon shone through the windshield. Jax unfolded an Arkansas highway map he’d found with Ned’s gear and held it up to the moonlight, but he could not read it. He fished in the pocket beside the seat for a red filament flashlight the owner kept there and was grateful when his fingers found it. Jax had not driven, much less flown, into Arkansas before, and he wished desperately for one of the modern direction finders Ned talked about all the time. The device homed in on a radio beacon and led you straight to it.

  Jax scanned the darkness below and saw the twinkling lights of a town. South of the town flashed the green and white beacon of an airfield. Jax studied the map. They were passing Magnolia, Arkansas. An hour went by, and Jax searched for Hot Springs among the lights that flickered in and out of view. The earth seemed closer than it had in Louisiana, even though the altimeter reading had not changed. Jax pulled out the map again and shined the red light on it, searching for landmarks that would lead them to the landing field.

  There was a sudden rush of movement in his peripheral vision, followed by a scrape. The Prep bumped in the glass-smooth air, and Jax looked left and saw pine boughs speeding by just beneath the left wheel. Something—a branch?—twirled in the wheel’s spinning spokes. “What the hell?” he said aloud. The next second, Jax’s blood went cold in its courses. He jammed the throttle in and pulled back on the stick. The Prep lurched.

  Red woke up. “What the hell?” he cried.

  The airplane buffeted, and Jax was sure they were dragging treetops. Red’s head swiveled from side to side. The right wing dropped, and through his panic, Jax realized he was stalling the airplane. He lowered the nose, and the buffeting stopped.

  Jax collected himself. He willed himself to stop shaking. They were still flying. Below them—far below—moonlit pools of water shone among shadows. Wisps of white steam rose here and there like mystified cobras, and vapors clung to the treetops like disembodied spirits.

  Jax looked ahead and to the left and right until he was satisfied that everything was beneath them. They were climbing through twenty-six hundred feet. He leveled off and swung the airplane around to the left. Hot Springs came into view amid the massive dark shadows of mountains.

  Red said, “What the hell was all that ruckus?”

  “That bump? Oh nothing. We hit a patch of rough air back there. It happens. The map shows the airfield is southwest of town.”

  Red was still blinking. “Yeah,” he said.

  Jax banked toward the southwest. When they cleared the mountains, he pulled the power and descended rapidly over the lights.

  “That’s Grand Avenue,” Red said, pointing to a wide boulevard lined with streetlights. “Just follow Grand west and we should see the landing field.” Red lifted himself in the seat and craned to see over the nose. “There! Right there,” he said, pointing. A half dozen automobiles, parked side by side, shined their headlights across a field. “That’s my boys! Right on time.”

  Jax circled the field, losing altitude. He straightened out and put the airplane down at a speed so slow the Prep stopped almost as soon as the wheels touched the ground. To Jax’
s relief the left wheel rolled smoothly, undamaged. The pine branch that had been caught in the spokes had worked itself free and was gone.

  “That was great!” shouted Red as his men ran toward the Monoprep. “What a getaway!”

  “It’s the only way to go.”

  “You can say that again.” Red slapped Jax on the back. “I owe you one, Jaxy. Now, shut her down. You’re spending the night.”

  The next morning, Red said he was taking Jax to breakfast at the Venetian Dining Room in the Arlington Hotel, but his wife objected. “It’s business, my love,” Red told her. Ms. Malone was a large-bosomed, red-faced woman who cooked all the time, given the stench in the house, which had almost overwhelmed Jax when he stepped through the door the night before.

  “Go along, then,” she said. “But you gotta come back, lad, and let me put some meat on those bones.”

  “Yes ma’am,” Jax said, but he determined then and there he would avoid Mrs. Malone’s cooking like death itself.

  The Arlington Hotel towered over a downtown the likes of which Jax had never seen or imagined. Beautiful bathhouses and restaurants and gambling houses, right out in the open, lined Central Avenue going up to the hotel. Red said the Arlington was where all the bosses stayed when they came to town, and Jax had no reason to doubt him.

  The Venetian Dining Room was a high-ceilinged hall, bright with morning sunlight pouring through its tall windows. The creamy arched ceiling was supported by two rows of gilded columns, each with a vase of fresh flowers on a pedestal in front of it. The maître d’hôtel seated them at a white-clothed table set with the hotel’s signature crystal and china.

  “This is aces,” Jax said.

  “It ain’t bad,” agreed Red.

  All Jax could think about while Red prattled about new ways to make money was bringing Mae to Hot Springs for a weekend at the Arlington and watching her eat breakfast in this room. Jax didn’t know how he would possibly manage to get Mae to come to Hot Springs for a whole weekend, but his mind was whirling.

  “We can always use a visionary guy like you in the organization,” Red said.

  “The organization?”

  “The fella I work for, outta New York.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Jax said.

  “Ask me anything,” Red said. “You’re with me now.”

  “Why are you here instead of New York?”

  Red pushed his empty plate forward and leaned toward Jax with his elbows on the white tablecloth. “Got a little too hot in New York because of some business that went bad. G-men were all over me.”

  “What if they find out you’re here?”

  “Feds can’t touch me here. Local boys won’t give ‘em the time of day.” Red leaned back. “So what would you think about working directly for me?”

  Jax almost said, “And cut Royce out?” but he thought better of it. Instead, he said, “Royce and I got a pretty good system now. Better not upset the apple cart.”

  “Okay,” Red said. “But let’s me and you keep in touch.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Jax had been saving his bootleg money to buy Mae a house. He had his eye on a red brick bungalow with white trim, only two blocks from the Centenary campus. The house stood on a sweeping corner lot. It had two roomy bedrooms and a large living room with a picture window that faced Alexander Avenue. The kitchen was spacious, and there was even a sunroom across the rear of the house with tall windows that caught the morning light. He called the owner to ask about the price, and like every other piece of property since the crash, it was dirt cheap.

  Jax planned to present the house and a diamond engagement ring to Mae when he proposed, down on one knee. Red had given the ring to Jax in Hot Springs. No charge. “You’re in luck, Jaxy,” Red said when Jax told him about the girl he planned to marry. “I got a beautiful ring that fell off the back of a truck. It’s yours if you want it.”

  Jax was about to make an offer on the house on Alexander Avenue when Ned told him about a Cessna Model AW that had come up for sale in Longview, Texas. “Engine’s got 125 horsepower,” Ned said. “Ought to be plenty of power and speed for your runs. Let’s take the Monoprep over to Longview and have a look at her.”

  The Cessna was a beautiful bird, barely two years old, with a powerful radial engine just waiting to carry dozens of crates of Canadian Club to Billy Dean’s customers in Baton Rouge. Even more important, the Cessna had a rear seat to accommodate two extra passengers. The minute Jax saw the cabin’s side panels, inlaid with polished walnut, and the red upholstery with white stitching that still smelled like new leather, he had a revelation. He saw himself flying Mae and two other people—her girlfriends? another couple? did it matter as long as Mae went?—to Hot Springs.

  “She’ll carry anything you can fit in there,” said the man who owned the airplane.

  “She better,” Jax said.

  Ned looked at every nook and cranny of the engine. He read the maintenance logs cover to cover. He asked the owner a lot of questions about who had done what maintenance and when, to see if the owner’s answers matched the logs. Afterward, the owner let Ned and Jax take the Cessna for a test flight. Jax was surprised at how heavy the controls felt and how stable she was.

  “The bigger they are, the easier they are to handle,” Ned said.

  After they landed and were taxiing to the ramp, Jax asked Ned what he thought. “She’s in perfect shape,” Ned said. “And the price is a steal.”

  Jax counted thirty five C-notes?all the money for Mae’s house—into the owner’s outstretched hand. The old coot squared the stack of bills and said, “That airplane woulda cost you twice as much when she rolled off the line.”

  “Yeah, well, times change,” said Jax.

  Ned flew the Cessna back to Shreveport, and Jax flew the Prep. Jax didn’t even mind when Ned outran him and was soon out of sight. During the flight home, Jax calculated how long it would take him to save enough money again to buy the house, but even the best case was too long. Then an idea came to him suddenly—as his best ideas always did—and he knew how he could have his cake and eat it too.

  Ned flew right seat with Jax until he could handle the Cessna on his own. Then Ned showed him how to compute weight and balance, a series of complicated mathematical computations that Jax had no patience for. “Listen to me, Jax,” Ned said. “What that old guy said isn’t true. You can’t just fill the airplane with cargo. You’ll kill yourself if you overload this bird. Or worse, if you load too far aft, she’ll go nose up on takeoff, and you are done, my friend. You will not be able to recover. Understand?”

  “Sure,” Jax said.

  “I’m not fooling around,” said Ned.

  “I got it.”

  Ned oversaw Jax’s weight and balance computations and flew the first run to Baton Rouge with him. During their takeoff roll, Jax was shocked at how long the Cessna bumped across the turf, tail up, and still she wouldn’t fly. “Patience,” Ned said when Jax tried to coax the wheels off prematurely. Ned pushed the stick forward and let the Cessna continue to build speed. When the sluggish airplane finally lifted from the earth, the controls were so heavy that Jax wondered how he’d land the thing again. But he managed well enough when they got to Baton Rouge, and Ned signed him off.

  Jax made a few more whiskey-laden runs to Baton Rouge alone, after which he felt he was ready to fly Mae to Hot Springs. One night at the juke joint on Bistineau, Jax told Hollister about his plan to take Mae away for the weekend, just to see what Hollister thought his chances were.

  “She won’t go,” Hollister said. “She’s not that kind of girl.”

  “Maybe she will if it isn’t just me and her. If it’s a group thing, you know? A bunch of friends.”

  “Maybe.”

  “She could invite a couple of her girlfriends,” Jax said.

  “My man,” Hollister said. “Do what you want, but what do you think those girls will do the minute you get to Hot Springs?”

  “Disappear?�
��

  “If I know girls.” Hollister refilled his glass from a bottle of Templeton on the table. He took a drink, smiled and said, “You want some help with this project of yours?”

  “I dunno.”

  “I could come along and bring a date.”

  “Who would you bring?”

  “I’ll ask Rita.”

  “Rita? Can’t you do better than that?”

  Rita was Delia’s daughter, a hardened professional at the ripe age of fifteen. Rita was dirty, surly, and skinny. She was too young and too old at the same time.

  Hollister shrugged and said, “No strings.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  A cold snap settled in after Mae returned to school from Christmas break, and it felt as if it would go on forever. She dragged to and from her classes with the weight of Whitesboro on her shoulders. Then one dreary afternoon in late February, Jax invited her to fly to Hot Springs with him, Hollister, and a girl named Rita.

  “We’re going up Saturday morning and coming back Sunday afternoon,” Jax said. “And we’re staying at the Arlington Hotel. Have you heard of it?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of the Arlington,” Mae said.

  “Have you been there?” Jax asked.

  “No, haven’t had the chance yet.”

  “Well, it’s absolutely aces. Hollister and I can bunk together, and you and Rita can share a room, if that’s okay.”

  “Now, who is Rita?”

  “She’s a girl Hollister knows. I met her a couple of times. Real nice girl from Bossier. You’ll love the Arlington Hotel. The rooms have hot mineral water that comes right out of a tap. The bathhouses are something to see too, but they say the Arlington has the best mineral treatments. It’s top drawer.”

  “How will we all fit in the airplane?”

  “I got a new bird that can carry all of us. Can’t wait to show her to you.”

  Mae hesitated. It was one thing to make a day trip with Jax, but it was altogether another to go off with him for the weekend. Mae didn’t want people to get the wrong idea about the kind of girl she was. “Are Rita and Hollister dating?” she asked.