by Stan Hayes
“No doubt,” said Moses. “The Tabernacle, huh? That’s funny. And you’re the music man.”
“Minister of Music. You never knew of my musical side.”
“Well, there was all that singing in the Berlin bars, but I never thought of you as a musician.”
“I am. Somewhat. Loyola, remember? I took a minor in music.”
“Yes, of course. New Orleans.”
“Yes. So it wasn’t hard to get into the Tabernacle’s routine. I’d heard all the songs, time and again.”
“How’d you get the job?”
“My predecessor went away. Came into some money.”
“Well, ’most everyone has his price, hm? When did you sign on with these birds?”
“Almost six months ago. Joined them in Fairburn, a little town west of Atlanta. I’d seen a writeup on them in the Atlanta paper during the operation’s research phase.”
“So when does the show start?”
“Wednesday. Guess we’ll be cutting into your business.”
“Maybe the movies. But I’m sure to sell more beer.”
The blond man laughed again. “How the hell did you find this place?”
“My car broke down on my way to Cuba, and I had to wait on a new radiator. This theater was for sale, and I bought it. Always loved the movies.”
“And what else?”
“A woman. A beauty. And, believe it or not, her son.”
“Ah, yes. Are you married?”
“No. She wouldn’t. Obsessed with her art- she’s a scupltress. Now we’re beyond thinking of it. But she’s my dearest friend- and -how does it go? -severest critic.”
“But you’ve obviously made this place your home.”
“Until now,” said Moses, his gaze leveled at the blond man.
“Yes. It would be foolish to assume that you’d feel otherwise, but you’re in no danger, believe me. I only wish I was in your shoes. What can I do to convince you that my being here’s no threat to you?”
“Nothing. This is no one’s fault, Dieter; I can’t believe I haven’t seen it coming. Even after ten years, I’m still an outsider here. From what you say, the goddam Savannah River thing’s too big, and too close. AEC and FBI agents are in and outa here all the time, and God knows who’ll be here next week. Whether you’d showed up here or not, they’ll get around to looking at me. And if they look back beyond Baltimore, they won’t like what they’ll find. Aside from bein’ glad to see you, I’m lucky that you showed up. Otherwise, I might’ve just sat here, fat, dumb and happy, and let the past catch up with me.”
Brück smiled. “Peter. Moses. This has been a shock, an unbelievable shock, to us both. This is too incredible; it’s like a dream.”
“Yes,” said Moses, “It is. We gotta make sure that it doesn’t turn into a nightmare.”
The sun had been up less than half an hour when he pulled open the F3F’s dew-covered canopy. He hadn’t slept that much; he and Dieter Brück had talked all night. He woke Gene Debs from a sound sleep to stand by while he started the engine. The only way I can start making sense out of this, he thought, is to go bore a few holes in the sky. He’d logged three hundred and twenty hours in the F3F since they bought it, and much of that time, thanks to Gene Debs, was spent getting to know what it could do aerobatically. Flying at what Gene Debs called “the outside of the envelope,” using as near 100% of its capabilities as possible, had become Moses’ preferred way of depressurizing.
He left the engine at takeoff power, trimming the aircraft for maximum rate of climb and spinning the landing gear crank the thirty-two turns necessary to pull the bird’s wheels into its belly. He retrimmed as he cranked, countering the nose’s tendency to rise as the wheels’ drag was eliminated. The clean airframe let him ease the throttle back slightly and maintain his rate of climb. He turned slowly, right to left and back again, looking for other aircraft above, below and on either side of the plane’s raised nose, which blocked direct forward vision in climb attitude. Looking into the rapidly brightening morning sky, he basked in the roar that washed over the cockpit from the engine’s nine flaming exhaust ports, feeling what a thousand horsepower could do to erase the frustrations of life on the ground. He looked with satisfaction from one set of dove-gray wingtips to the other, and between them at the flowing green and red-brown checkerboard of Hamm County.
Level at ten thousand feet, he brought the throttle back slightly as his airspeed touched 210. He rolled left into a ninety-degree bank, pulling back hard on the stick as the wings went perpendicular to the ground, countering the nose’s dropping down as the wings’ lift was neutralized with steady pressure on the right rudder pedal. In seconds he rolled back level, the aircraft picking up speed as it lost altitude. For a little over half an hour, he rolled and looped the stubby fighter over miles of rural Georgia, his mind focused tightly on the maneuver he was performing, and shifting quickly to the next, and the next, and the next.
As he rolled off the runway and taxied back to the F3F’s parking spot near the house, Moses felt as though he’d cleared a large enough space in his mind to come to terms with the implications of Dieter Brück’s reentry into his life. Now, instead of cotton and pimiento peppers, neutrons in untold trillions would surge from the bowels of this land of Creeks, farmers and slavers, he thought as the engine’s noise disappeared and he sat in the cockpit’s deep silence. All of a sudden, I’ve got more water in the boat than I can bail. So I need a bigger fuckin’ bucket…
Chapter XXII. Hip-Deep in Sheep-Dip
Moses sat in the wagon, halfway up the block north of the hotel on Lee, looking at the green Studebaker’s projectile silhouette. The stores wouldn’t open for another hour, and traffic was still thin. Dieter would be out sooner or later. It turned out to be sooner, and as he’d hoped, alone. He walked to the car, backed it out into Main street and headed west. Moses had already gotten the wagon moving down Lee, just catching the traffic light and pulling behind the car behind the Studebaker. The car between them went straight when Dieter turned right. It would, Moses knew, be only a matter of time before Dieter made him in the mirror. When he did, he pulled over to let the wagon go by, then pulled out behind it.
They drove around the block, then South on Lee, past pool halls, cafes and stores that got progressively less seedy the closer that they got to Main. Turning left on Main, they drove several blocks east; Moses eased the wagon off the road and stopped it in front of the Bethel Baptist Church. He got out, opened the Studebaker’s door and slid in beside Brück. “How much time have ya got?”
“I should get over to the auditorium before long,” Bruck said as he pulled out onto the road again. “My first rehearsal’s this afternoon, and I need to unpack some stuff before the choir members start showing up.”
“I know you gotta stay on schedule,” Moses said, looking out at the colorful sprinkling of flowers on the graves in the cemetary sliding by on his side of the car, “but I’ve been thinking about something since we talked the other night.”
The blond man glanced sharply at him. “What’s that?”
“How would you like to walk away from the KGB- just disappear, with no trace whatever, and start a new life?”
His face took on the weariest of smiles. “If you knew how impossible what you just said would be to do, my friend, you’d never have said it. Let’s don’t spend the little time we have together talking about something so ridiculous. The only way I’ll leave the service will be as a corpse.”
“I’d be surprised if you felt any different without hearing my idea,” said Moses, “and after you do, we won’t speak of it again if you choose not to. But in the name of our friendship, assume for the moment that you could walk away. Would you?”
He said nothing until he’d turned off the road and headed the car back toward Bisque. “Yes,” he said, sad eyes focused on the increasing flow of traffic into town. “In the name of our friendship, yes, I would, of course. But unless you’re proposing that I change sides, you have
no idea of just how impossible it would be. They’d find me. Sooner or later, they’d find me.”
“Changing sides is no answer,” said Moses as Pulaski stopped the car in front of the church. “You’d just have a new master. I need more time to tell you what I’ve got in mind, but I’ll tell you this before you go. We’d both leave here, soon, and, as far as the world could determine, we’d be dead.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Oh yes. I’m deadly serious. I know you’ve got to go now, so here’s what I propose. We need to have some justification for being together. I thought that it could be motorcycles. Know anything about them?”
“A little,” said Pulaski, “but I haven’t ridden in a long time. A friend of mine down in New Orleans had an Indian; a Scout. I borrowed it from him now and then.”
“Perfect. How about if I meet you at the café in the morning? I’ll ride over on one of my bikes, a Vincent. I’ll park it where you can see it when you come down to the lobby. You can ask somebody whose it is, and we’re off.”
“OK,” he said, looking out at the traffic. “A Vincent? What’s it look like?”
“A black vee-twin with gold pinstriping. British. Fast as stink. Anyone who likes bikes’d notice it right away. We’ll talk about it, and I’ll invite you out to look at my little collection.”
“Collection? How many do you have?”
“Just four. We’ll ride them later; I can’t think of a better way to justify getting friendly in a hurry. Bike nuts do that.”
“What else do you have?”
“An Indian 4-cylinder,” Moses said, opening the door. “A Sunbeam shaft-drive and a new single-cylinder BMW. A two-fifty. You might like to start out with it.”
“OK. We can talk about this, I guess. Meantime, I’ve got a revival to get off the ground.”
“Good. I’ll see you at the café about eight tomorrow. Got a warm jacket?”
“Excuse me, Miss…”
“My name’s Reba, Mr.-
“Pulaski. Paul Pulaski.”
“Aw, yeah,” she said, her eyes lighting up. Such a fine-lookin’ boy, she thought. Looks like that feller that played Ashley Wilkes. “You’re with th’ r’viv’l folks.”
“Yes,” he said, smiling. “Hope to see you there this Friday.”
“Oh yes sir. I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Good, good.” He gestured toward the window. “I wanted to ask you; do you know whose motorcycle that is?”
“Law, yeah; it’s Mose’s- uh, Mr. Kublesky’s. That’s him sittin’ right over yonder.”
He looked in the direction that she’d inclined her head. “Oh, yes! The movie man; I met him on Saturday. I must ask him about the motorcycle; I’ve never seen one like it.”
Reba moved to let him pass. “I dunno what y’all men see in ’im thangs; they skeer me t’death. He’s got two’r three of ’em,” she said, disapproving with a small shake of her head.
“Yes, well, I think you either have the disease or you don’t,” he said, smiling as he moved past her. “Thank you so much, Reba.” He approached Moses, who was reading yesterday’s Bugle. “Good morning, sir.”
Moses looked up at him. “Good morning.”
“You may remember our conversation of the other evening, at the theater. I’m Paul Pulaski. Jehovah’s Tabernacle.”
“Oh yes, of course. How’re you this morning? Please sit down.”
“Very well, thanks,” he said as he pulled a chair away from the table, “and very curious about your motorcycle. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like it before.”
“Well, you don’t see ’em every day, at least not around here. It’s a Vincent. Are you a rider, Mr. Pulaski?”
“Yes, but not for a year or two. We travel so much.”
“Would you like to have a look at her?”
“Oh yes. Very much.”
Moses paid his check and beckoned to Pulaski. They walked to the Vincent, parked on the sidewalk out of earshot of the café’s few patrons. “Let’s look her over for a couple of minutes,” said Moses, “while you get really excited about the bike. Then I’ll offer you a ride, and we’ll shoot out to my place.”
“I won’t have to fake it,” said Pulaski as he looked at the Black Shadow’s massive v-twin engine, its twin-drum front brakes and aluminum alloy fenders. This is one beautiful machine.”
“Yeah, I think you’ll enjoy the ride. The back wheel’s got hydraulic suspension, same as the front, and that saddle’s got a spot for both of us.”
“You said something about offering me a ride, I believe.”
“That I did. Shall we go?” Moses slung his leg over the bike and reached down to flip the kickstart lever out to the kicking position. He opened the gas tank’s tap and briefly touched both carburetors’ priming buttons. One kick with the ignition switched off; the engine answered the second kick with a bass burble, quickly changing to a roar as he blipped the throttle. He motioned to Pulaski to get aboard; his passenger’s feet secure on their footrests, Moses bumped the bike over the curb, checking traffic and moving onto the street, the Vincent exhaust’s impatient staccato boom rattling the café’s plate glass. Turning right on Lee Street, they picked up speed at a rate that amazed Pulaski, the lawns of stately houses merging into a green river roaring past his ears. He looked over Moses’ shoulder at the bike’s alarm-clock-sized speedometer in time to see its needle pass eighty. He chose to put the chattering of his teeth down to the chill blast of morning air that was bringing tears to his eyes.
They turned off the road soon, Pulaski’s amazement carrying over to his first look at Moses’ house and grounds. As they drew to a stop on the driveway and the engine’s beat subsided, he spoke. “Incredible. Absolutely incredible. How can you possibly think of leaving this behind?”
“Oh, it’ll be in good hands,” said Moses. “Come on in and warm up; I’ll give ya the nickel tour later.” They entered the house through the garage. “Coffee’s ready; had any grits lately?”
They ate and talked about the essentials of disappearing. “What we do,” said Moses as he refilled their cups, “is convince everyone that we died accidentally, with no bodies to confirm it.”
“Neat trick,” said Pulaski. “What do you propose?”
“A plane crash- at sea.”
“Trust you for a spectaular solution. I’m listening.”
“Theoretically, it’s simple. We fly my plane out to deep water in the Atlantic, rendezvous with a boat, ditch the plane, climb in the boat and set course for Savannah while the plane blows up. Pick up the Inland Waterway to Miami, then cross to Cuba.”
“I see. Who’s handling the boat?”
“I’ve got someone in mind. A qualified skipper. One of four people who’ll know that Pulaski and Kubielski aren’t dead. She’d be going with us.”
“She?”
“She.” He told Pulaski about Linda, Jack and the F3F.
“So. When would we do this?”
“As soon as we can. It’ll take a few weeks to get it set up.”
“How do we make a living in Cuba?”
“Won’t be necessary. We’re retiring.”
“This is surreal. How can you conceive of doing all this? There can’t be that much money in movies and beer.”
“Believe me, money’s not an issue. We can do this, Dieter. I’m just so damn happy that now I can repay you for what you did for me. If you hadn’t gotten me out of that Heinkel, I wouldn’t be here at all. So please trust me on the details. I’ll tell you about them as I get them in place.”
“It seems that the point on which I must most seriously trust you, Peter, is on just that; on what you’re telling me isn’t an issue. You seem to have, or have access to, quite a lot of money. And I’ve learned that the more money a situation involves, the greater the number of people there are involved in the situation. I don’t see how you can expect me to make a move that amounts to stepping off a cliff with a set of wings that my friend assures me will turn me
into a bird, but won’t tell me who made them, what they cost, or why he thinks they’ll work.”
“Well, I’ve already told you that there’ll be two others that know we aren’t dead. No scheme’s perfect, but this one involves my ass to the same degree that it does yours, the single difference bein’ that I’m footin’ th’ bill. The money’s mine, and I’m very happy to share it with you. I’m going to anyway, whether you decide to join me in this operation or not. But for the moment, please just keep an open mind.”
“Fair enough. I hope that you understand how much the idea appeals to me, but this would an incredible undertaking, just on the face of it. I need to know that there are no surprises that you haven’t told me about.”
OK. When this revival’s over, we’ll talk about what else you need from me to make your decision.”
“Done. Let’s have a look at those bikes.”
I resisted the attempt of a local lady, one of the many volunteer workers recruited for this sort of thing, and her “Aren’t-we-having-fun-doing-the-Lord’s-work” look, to seat me “right down front.” My adult-sized rump joined those of hundreds of male Bisquites, young and old, prodded into place for the most part by their females, squeezed into the auditorium’s student-sized seats, awaiting the arrival of the apostle. I sat in the auditorium’s last row, set for an immediate getaway in case events brought up my gorge. Curiousity continues to force me into situations that I ought to leave alone. The station brass, knowing that I’ll probe for soft tissue, would never send me into a spot like this on assignment. So here I sit, self-assigned, wondering who snuck out the death-dealing fart, as Mose’s new pal, the Polack, steps out, stage left, for the kickoff.
“Good evening, and thanks for coming. We’re all so grateful to God to be here with you tonight. I wonder if any of you might know this little song?” Moving to center stage, dragging the mike cord behind him, he unleashed a pretty fair tenor as selected members of the Bisque High band struck up the tune:
