MASH 12 MASH goes to Texas

by Richard Hooker+William Butterworth

  “Uh-oh,” the Reverend Mother said.

  “So what I was thinking, Bernie,” Hawkeye said, “was that if you could get away ...”

  “I’ve got a hospital to run, you know,” she said.

  “All work and no play, Bernie,” Hawkeye said, “as I was saying just the other day to Ben Franklin.”

  There was a pause, and then the Reverend Mother said, somewhat cheerfully, “You may have an idea, Hawkeye. I’d love to see the game. God knows, I haven’t had a couple of days off in a long time. And His Eminence is going.”

  “Sauce for the goose ...” Hawkeye said.

  “I hadn’t thought of it in quite those terms, Hawkeye,” the Reverend Mother said. “But what about tickets?”

  “You can have mine,” Hawkeye said. “I really can’t get away.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” the Reverend Mother said.

  “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his Saints-Cowboys tickets for his operating-room nurse,” Hawkeye said.

  “Forgive me for sounding cynical, Hawkeye,” the Reverend Mother said, “but getting me to go wouldn’t have anything to do with what it said in the paper today, would it?”

  “What did it say in the paper, Bernie?”

  “It said that, as usual, Hot Lips would serve as drum majorette for the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., Marching Band.”

  “You don’t like band music, Bernie?” Hawkeye asked.

  “You know what I mean, Hawkeye,” she said.

  “What I was really worried about, Bernie,” Hawkeye said, “was not so much the game, but the party after the game.”

  “I have no intention of going to the K. of C. party,” she said. “You should know better!”

  “That’s the whole point,” Hawkeye said. “Now that I’m exposed, if you don’t go to the party, Esther Flanagan won’t go to the party. That way I stand a much better chance of getting her back right away, instead of after thirty days on the Texas road gang for inciting to riot, or being drunk or disorderly, or worse.”

  “Okay, you got it,” the Reverend Mother said. “With a little bit of luck, I’ll be able to talk Hot Lips out of going, too.”

  “Bless you, Reverend Mother!” Hawkeye said piously.

  At this point, the conversation was terminated. Mr. T. Alfred Crumley, Sr., had the distinct impression that the Reverend Mother had slammed her handset down in the cradle.

  Chapter Two

  “Politics,” as one sagacious* observer of the political scene once observed, “makes strange bedfellows.”**

  (* “Sagacious,” adjective (from the Latin sagire): acute in perception, especially by smell.)

  (** He was making reference to the relationship between two or more politicians, and not to that strange bedfellow relationship that seems to exist between politicians and non-typing secretaries and other, generally female, government employees.)

  This seemed especially true in the case of the three distinguished representatives of the people of New Jersey, Illinois and Texas who met that same day aboard a forty-eight-foot Bertram shrimpboat dubbed The Ayes of Texas as it sailed up the Potomac River near our nation’s capital.

  Outwardly, Congressmen Antonio J. “Tiny Tony” Bambino (Ethnic Democrat, N.J.), Vladimir “Vibrato Val” Vishnefsky (Polish Republican, Ill.) and Davy Crockett “Alamo” Jones (Liberal-Conservative, Tex.) had little in common, except their hair, which in all three cases was silver-gray and lovingly coiffed.

  Tiny Tony Bambino, seated behind his desk, bore a carefully cultivated resemblance to the hatchet- featured, flowing-haired Roman senators one sees immortalized on tombs and other memorials around Rome (Italy). All of his official campaign photographs showed him seated behind his desk, a highly polished mahogany object nine feet long and five feet wide that had been a little gift to the congressman from the Sicilian-American Protective Society. The SAPS’ leader had had a little difficulty with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and they appreciated what Tiny Tony had done in his behalf, even if it had all been in vain, and the gentleman in question had been deported in chains.

  It was only when the congressman stood up that one sort of noticed his size. Including his silver-gray, two- and-a-half-inch pompadour, the Vice-Chairman of the House Committee on Honesty in Government stood five-feet two-inches tall. The visual result of his massive, Roman, leonine head and broad shoulders on his short frame was to suggest that he had been assembled from mismatching display-dummy parts by a window dresser who had been at the sauce.

  Congressman Vibrato Val Vishnefsky, on the other hand, came with a six-foot, five-inch body. He had what he thought of as a Lincolnesque Adam’s apple, and from that area downward his body seemed to taper to a point. Soaking wet, Vibrato Val weighed one hundred fifty pounds. His silver-gray locks were almost shoulder length and completely hid his ears. One of his detractors (and there were, frankly, many of these) once compared him to a dripping vanilla icecream cone.

  The congressman was one of the Hill’s most accomplished orators. When it was known that Vibrato Val was to make another of his impassioned speeches to the Congress,* everybody not otherwise engaged came to the floor. It was really something to see his Adam’s apple vibrate like that.

  (* The congressman was flatly opposed to sin, war and wasteful governmental spending, and foursquare in favor of God, Mother, Country and the Congressional Pension System.)

  Like Tiny Tony Bambino, Vibrato Val had spent many years in the Congress, rising, via seniority, like a bubble of swamp gas, to the upper echelons of congressional leadership—specifically to become the Vice-Chairman of the House Committee on Closing Tax Loopholes and Soaking the Rich.

  Their host, el capitan of The Ayes of Texas, the Honorable Davy Crockett Jones, was, it must be admitted, the most handsome of the three. He stood six- feet-two, had broad shoulders, trim hips, white teeth and blue eyes. He had a firm grip, a firm jaw and a firm handshake.

  As his publicity handouts repeatedly reminded one and all, Davy “Alamo” Jones had been a star football player, a forward, while at the University of Texas, until a back injury had forced him off the team.

  He had hurt his back not, as legend had it, in his very first varsity game, but in what might well be called his very first scrimmage of life, specifically in the back seat of a 1952 Ford convertible parked at the time behind the Tau Omega sorority house.

  The convertible belonged to one Ida-Sue Dalrymple, a tall and statuesque Tau Omega senior who had spent three years so far at the University of Texas looking without success for someone suitable on whom she could bestow what she thought of at the time as her pearl of great price, and with whom she could subsequently march hand in hand down the rocky road of life.

  The moment Ida-Sue saw Davy Crockett Jones (she was a pom-pom girl with the university’s marching band; the first time she saw him was when he, together with his teammates, ran onto the field to the strains of “The Eyes of Texas”) she knew that her search was over. Here was the handsome man she had been waiting for.

  By the time the game was over, she had learned all that she felt she needed to know about him. Most important, he was unmarried. Four hours after she first laid eyes on him, Ida-Sue Dalrymple found herself lying under him in the back seat of the convertible her adoring father had given her for her last birthday.

  Davy Crockett Jones had moaned, and despite her relative inexperience in situations of that sort, Ida-Sue knew immediately that it was not a groan of either passion or ecstasy.

  “Darlin’,” she said, “what’s the matter?”

  “I hurt my back,” Davy Crockett Jones said, “something awful.”

  There was a moment’s thoughtful silence, and then Ida-Sue responded.

  “Great!” she said.

  “Pardon me, Betty-Sue?” Davy Crockett Jones said.

  “It’s Ida-Sue, darlin’,” Ida-Sue gently corrected him. “You’re going to have to remember that. It seems the very least you can do, now that you’ve stolen my pearl
of great price.”

  “Girl, whatever is you talking about?” Davy Crockett Jones replied. “I never seen no pearl.”

  “Never mind, darlin’,” Ida-Sue said. “The important thing is that we now have a good excuse to get you off the football team before someone smashes your darlin’ nose flat with his knee, or something.”

  “You sure talk funny, Betty-Sue,” Davy Crockett Jones replied.

  “For the last time, darlin’, that’s Ida-Sue,” she replied. “Now, get off me so’s we can go into the sorority house and announce our engagement.”

  “Our what?”

  “Our engagement, darlin’,” she said. “I accept.”

  “Excuse me, but I don’t remember proposing.”

  “But you did, darlin’,” she replied. “I remember it perfectly.”

  “I can’t afford no wife,” Davy Crockett Jones replied. “I’m here on a football scholarship. And you didn’t say nothing about getting married when you brought me out here. All you asked was if I wanted to fool around some.”

  “You’re never going to have to worry about money again, darlin’,” Ida-Sue replied. “Daddy’s got lots of money, and Uncle Hiram’s got even more.”

  “No foolin’?”

  “No fooling, darlin’,” Ida-Sue said.

  Davy Crockett Jones rolled off her. Ida-Sue Dalrymple looked up at his massive chest, his flat stomach, his white teeth and his darlin’ nose.

  “On second thought,” Ida-Sue Dalrymple said, “I think it would be better if we eloped.”

  “You mean right now?” Davy Crockett Jones replied.

  “Davy, darlin’,” Ida-Sue responded, “you’ve swept me right off my feet, that’s what you’ve done!”

  They were married that very night (actually at three-thirty the next morning) by a justice of the peace in Lubbock.

  Nine months later Mrs. Davy Crockett Jones was delivered of a daughter, their first and only child.

  When the proud father (by then a junior at the university, with a part-time job as Executive Vice- President of Dalrymple Oil & Gas, Inc.) looked down at his wife and infant daughter, his bride looked back up at him through misty eyes and said, “I can see it now, darlin’, you in a morning coat, with a carnation in your lapel, walking through the Rose Garden with little Scarlett on your arm while the U.S. Marine Corps Band plays ‘I Love You Truly, Dear.’ ”

  “They still got you pretty well doped up, huh, Ida-Sue?” Davy Crockett Jones asked. “You ain’t making much sense.”

  “I’ve asked you, darlin’, not to say ‘ain’t.’ What would people think if you said ‘ain’t’ when you were President of the United States?”

  “I don’t want to be President of the United States,” Davy Crockett Jones replied. “All I want is a little spread of my own by the side of the road where I can be a friend of man.”

  “Let me put it to you this way, darlin’,” Ida-Sue said, shifting baby Scarlett from one side to the other. “If you really don’t want your loving wife and mother of your child to be the First Lady of the United States, that’s perfectly all right. I’ll just go back to Daddy on the ranch, and you can just go back to kicking dirt clods.”

  “Whatever you say, Ida-Sue,” Davy Crockett Jones replied. “You know that all I want in this world is to make you happy.”

  “I know, darlin’,” Ida-Sue Dalrymple Jones replied. “You’re the one who keeps forgettin’.”

  Davy Crockett Jones was graduated from the University of Texas the following year (Bachelor of Arts, football science) and almost immediately left with his family for England. This is the period of his life described in his official biographical literature as that during which he “studied economics and diplomacy in Europe.”

  The Crocketts spent three years in London. It took that long (painful experiments with a series of speech teachers having been a conspicuous failure) to rid the future congressman of his west Texas drawl and to cure him, once and for all, of saying “ain’t.” The economics he studied were, in truth, limited to calculating the odds at a game of chance called vingt-et-un* which he played at length (and with some success) at the better London gambling establishments.

  (* Ving-et-un, a game played with cards, is similar in many ways to blackjack, a game in which, pre-football scholarship, Mr. Jones had whiled away many an idle hour at the Last Gas for Ninety Miles service station, restaurant and pool hall in his native Snake Rock, Texas.)

  Through her connections with England-Irish & Texas Petroleum, Ltd., a subsidiary of Dalrymple Oil & Gas, Mrs. Jones was able to introduce her husband to some of the most exalted of British High Society. He even got to ride to the hounds.*

  (* To this day, in fact, The Upper Baldwyn-upon-Thistle Hunt always has a merry chuckle recalling the congressman’s first ride to the hounds with them. It was the first time that the hunt had ever seen the fox pursued by a rider in a ten-gallon hat, singing “Getalong Little Doggie” at the top of his lungs, and ultimately lassoing, throwing and tying the fox with a lariat.)

  Their European sojourn came to an end when Lothario Dalrymple, Chairman of the Board of Dalrymple Petroleum, and Ida-Sue’s beloved Daddy, was called to that Great Board Meeting in the Sky.

  Shortly after the funeral, the will was read. Ida-Sue Dalrymple Jones was surprised to learn that her Daddy had not, as she believed (and, indeed, as Daddy himself had told her), owned all the stock of the corporation. His brother, Hiram, in fact, owned almost half, specifically, forty-nine percent of it. Ten percent of the stock, moreover, of the stock of which her Daddy, in legal terms, had “died possessed,” was left in a bequest to Miss Francine Schwartz, her father’s personal secretary for many years. That left but forty-one percent of the stock for Lothario to leave to his “beloved baby daughter,” as the will put it.

  This was some ten percent shy of a majority, but Ida-Sue Dalrymple Jones, like her father before her, was not one to permit her well-laid plans to be shoved aside by a minor technicality. The odds against Uncle Hiram, who had not left his ranch for thirty-five years —not even to plant his only brother—challenging her take-over of the company were negligible.

  The stockholders (which is really to say Ida-Sue, attempts to locate Miss Schwartz having been futile) elected Davy Crockett Jones, who had been Executive Vice-President all along, to be President and Chairman of the Board. A faithful underling was entrusted with the actual operation of the company, and Ida-Sue was now free to begin the next step of her plan to go down in the history books as the first Texas Lady to be First Lady of the Republic.

  The future congressman went down to an ignoble defeat in his first bid for elected office. He ran on what seemed at the time to Ida-Sue to be a sure thing, voting his native Snake Rock County wet. Still something of a political novice, Ida Sue was unaware of a political reality, that on a question vis-à-vis the legal sale of booze, the combined efforts of hard-shell Baptists and bootleggers to keep an area dry are unassailable.

  The following year, however, Davy Crockett Jones entered and won election to the Texas State Legislature as the Temperance Party’s candidate from Snake Rock County. By then Ida-Sue had learned well her basic principles of practical politics. She went first to Big Sam Kegley, the generally acknowledged dean of Snake Rock County’s bootleggers, and told him that not only had she seen the error of her ways, but that she was willing to make up for it. For every dollar that Big Sam saw fit to contribute to her husband’s campaign, she would personally provide a matching dollar. She would, moreover, see to it that Big Sam’s name was kept out of the papers.*

  (* The Snake Rock County Intelligencer & Tribune, a weekly newspaper, was the only newspaper in Snake Rock County. It was a subsidiary of Dalrymple Oil & Gas.)

  Big Sam put up twenty-five thousand dollars. Ida- Sue, true to her word, put up a matching twenty-five thousand dollars and donated the whole to the Snake Rock County Baptist Battle Against Booze. After only pro forma objections, the Internal Revenue Service accepted her claim that the fifty thousa
nd dollars was a religious contribution, and, as such, deductible.

  Davy Crockett Jones served four terms in the state legislature, and then, in Ida-Sue’s judgment, it was time for him to go after the big time. He announced his candidacy on the Liberal ticket to go for the seat of Congressman John David “Brother Dave” Murgatroyd, a Conservative who had represented his district in Congress for twenty-six years.

  Alamo Jones’ campaign had really not been doing too well, actually, until the Dallas Police Department’s vice squad, in response to what they later termed “information from a public-spirited anonymous informer,” raided the Bali Hai Motel and discovered Brother Dave Murgatroyd frolicking in his birthday suit with three teen-aged Mexican-American hookers.

  Normally, of course, in Texas, as elsewhere, the police who had burst through the door of the Bali Hai Motel room would have been perfectly willing to accept whatever explanation the congressman offered for being where he was and doing what he was doing. But by a strange coincidence, “Eagle Eye” MacNamara, ace photo-journalist of the Snake Rock County Intelligencer & Tribune, just happened to be in the vice squad room of the Dallas police station when the telephoned tip vis-à-vis the hanky-panky going on in Room 117 of the Bali Hai came in. He accompanied the vice squad on their appointed rounds and was thus able to take the widely circulated photograph of the congressman wearing nothing but two naked Mexican-American young ladies and a look of surprise and indignation.

  Thus ended the long and distinguished career of the Honorable Brother Dave Murgatroyd; there was nothing left for him but to become a registered lobbyist, after, of course, the traditional “Bon Voyage” junket around the world at public expense ritually awarded to congressmen who are either defeated at the polls, or who, as in the case of Congressman Murgatroyd, announce they will not stand for reelection for reasons of health.