The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga)

by Stan Hayes

  “Hey! She’s just thirty-two!”

  “And still lookin’ damn good. Well, maybe you’ll get a break in the weather on the run back south.”

  “Hell, I sure hope so.”

  “Enough sprightly palaver. I need to talk to you about something, and she’ll be calling you for breakfast.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think it’s time that you started thinking about me in human terms.”

  “Human terms?”

  “Yup. You’re a grown man now, sport. I helped you get there with this bird act, but I’m as human as you are, only more so. I’ve hinted at that much, and now it’s time for you to know more of the story. But before I get into that with you, I want to deal with you man-to-man. The fact that I’m a little farther along the evolution trail than you are’s no big deal; thing is, you’re grown now. You’ll likely want a little advice from me every now and then, and it shouldn’t be coming from a bird. Sorry to spring this on you all at once, but it’s time.”

  Jack took some time to get the words out. “What’ll you look like?”

  “All depends on you. How about the Duke?”

  “John Wayne? You kidding? I can pick a celebrity?”

  “Whomever you like; Harry-fucking-Truman, if you want to go in that direction. But please, pick someone you’re sure you’ll be happy with. I don’t want to be jumping from one identity to another. It’s too damn much trouble.”

  Jack didn’t bother to wipe the tears from his cheeks. “Well, it sure as hell can’t be the Duke. Not if I still need a shoulder to cry on, and I probably will. How about Nick Charles?”

  “Nick Charles.”

  “Yeah. You know, the William Powell character in The Thin Man.”

  “Why him?”

  “Because he has what I need and if I see it in you it’ll be that much easier for me to have it.”

  “Hm. And what might that be?”

  “Aplomb.”

  “Aplomb?”

  “Yeah. Greatest commodity since canned beer. I did a paper in my junior year on Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery; some of my references cited his having a lot of it. I looked it up, and I’ll never forget it: ‘...that self-possession which arises from perfect self-confidence.’ Well, I wouldn’t want to hang out with a Field Marshal, but Nick Charles has it, too; in spades.”

  2 TARGET BISQUE

  Jack washed the breakfast dishes in quid pro quo for Linda’s Denver omelets and went back to the shooting stand while she changed clothes. Dead-center of the table sat an inch-and-a-half tall icon of Flx, his friend, mentor and confidant for more than a decade of his life. Its markings faithful to those of a mature Northern Goshawk, the figure’s dominating feature was a set of piercing eyes that suggested the bird was about to take flight. It was attached to a silvery chain, its fine links disproportionately heavy for their size. A MiniFlx, he thought; the likeness was perfect. Jack took it in his hand, sensing indestructibility in its warmth. Not porcelain, he thought, having taken a couple of minutes to regain his composure. Slipping the chain over his head, he turned, smiling, and walked back up to the house.

  Linda, in Levi’s, a jade silk turtleneck, white ski jacket and rough-side-out half-Wellington boots, stepped through the kitchen door to meet him. “Looks like you could handle just about anything in that outfit,” he said, grinning. “I may have to upgrade my wardrobe.”

  “I’ve found it best to be as prepared as possible when dealing with you,” she said, slipping an arm around his waist. “What I know, so far, about Bisque’s convinced me that I should be ready for anything. Including a riding lesson that I thought that you might find possible to work in before the day’s over.”

  “Might be a little breezy,” he said as they headed toward the car, “But I expect you already factored that in.” Waiting for him to lock the gate, the sun warm through the windshield on her legs, she looked south down the empty road. She wondered what it had been like for Jack, dealing with this little town’s grief. Quite a thing, she reflected, for someone his age to pull off. Just consoling his mother over the death of her lover, knowing that he was alive. That had to have been one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do, quite apart from dealing with the general run of townspeople, most of whom, apparently, liked Mose, to say nothing of his employees. On top of everything else, she reflected, Jack’s gotta have become quite the little actor. “Let’s run on out and see Gene Debs first,” he said, looking back over his shoulder as he pulled the wagon out onto the road. “He’s subject to sneakin’ off to Atlanta on the weekend, so we need to catch him before he starts to get Saturday night on his mind. Plus there’s no telling how long this weather’s gonna hold; if we don’t get a hop in today, it may be a while before we do.”

  “Think the old J-3’ll be ready to go?”

  “Pretty likely. This is still off-season for dusting, so he’s had time to get the maintenance out of the way on both airplanes. A lot easier than when he had the third one to be concerned with; it took more time than the other two put together.”

  “You mean the F3F,” she said.

  “Yep. The Navy’s last biplane. Not that it wasn’t worth the trouble. Too bad the only time you got to see it was when it was ditched.”

  “Yes, it was a beautiful airplane. Shame that it had to go that way.”

  “Yeah, particularly since I never had the chance to solo it. Well, at least I checked out in it, and that’s something not many people ever got to do, especially civilians. If it hadn’t been one of the two or three Grumman built as two-seaters, I’d never have had the chance. He wouldnt’ve let me just read the manual, pass a blindfold cockpit check and launch, the way Gene Debs and the other Navy guys who flew it had to do.”

  She turned to look at him. “Mose really brought it in beautifully, letting the tail drag in the water to take off as much airspeed as possible before he let the wing settle in. He landed so close to Striker that I was able to motor alongside in just a couple minutes. Those rascals barely got their feet wet.”

  “Yeah, he’d gotten really good in it by that time. Gene Debs always used to say that he’d have made a helluva fighter pilot.” What neither you nor Gene Debs is likely to ever know, he thought, it is that ol’ Mose WAS a fighter pilot. In the Luftwaffe.

  Jack tooted shave-and-a-haircut as they neared the end of the gravel road leading to Gene Debs’s. Both the crop duster, an ex-Navy Stearman N2S biplane trainer, and the Piper J-3 Cub sat outside the hangar, their tie-downs looped through massive eyebolts sunk into old concrete-filled truck tires. Gene Debs leaned his lanky frame out of the front door, threw a quick wave their way, and ducked back inside. “There’s the old buzzard,” Jack laughed. “Both those birds look like they’re ready to fly.”

  “Well, I hope the J-3 is, anyway,” Linda said. “Gene Debs’s a pretty good-sized guy, from the quick look that I got.”

  “Yeah, he is. Tall, anyway. That ol’ retired CPO’s still got a couple inches on me.”

  “CPO?”

  “Chief Petty Officer. One of the guys, he says, that really run the Navy.”

  “I thought you had to be an officer to fly.”

  “Not during the ’30’s and ’40’s; the Navy’s budget wouldn’t handle the payroll for the number of pilots they needed, so they put quite a few enlisted men through flight training. When they earned their wings they were designated Naval Aviation Pilots. He was actually promoted to Lieutenant j.g. during the war, but it was just temporary rank. To hear him tell it, he was tickled to death to put his Chief’s hat back on when the war was over. In his words, “I’m a goddam chief, and goddam proud of it.”

  Jack parked the wagon a short walk from the house’s front steps. “By the way,” she said, opening the passenger-side door.

  “What?”

  “The only Gene Debs that I’ve ever heard of, before now, was some kind of radical labor leader. Is your uncle named after him?”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell you about Miz Rose on the way b
ack to town.”

  “I’ll be looking forward to that,” she said as Gene Debs walked out onto the porch.

  “I like that guy,” Linda declared, flushed from an hour’s flying in the J-3 and the bottle of Carling Red Cap ale that followed it. “He’s got your green eyes.”

  “Or vice-a-versa. Offhand, I’d say he sorta took a shine to you, too,” Jack said, grinning broadly. “He’d never say it, but from a couple of looks that he gave me I could tell he was wondering how the hell I came up with you.”

  “Yeah, he was sporting a pretty good set of horns. Never been married, you said.”

  “That, as he would say, is affirmative.”

  “Hence his preference for Atlanta as the place to sew his wild oats. Hard for a lady to corner a guy who lives a hundred miles away.”

  “I’d say your instinct’s pretty good. But since he keeps that part of his life very much to himself, it’s only a guess. But as far as I know he’s never gone so far as to hold hands with anyone from around here.”

  “Pretty cagey old fart. Like someone else we know. By the way.”

  “What?”

  “When I asked you if he was named after Gene Debs the radical, you said you’d tell me about somebody named Miz Rose. There’s obviously some connection.”

  “Miz Rose,” Jack said, “Was my Granny. Apparently she picked up some socialist baggage while she was away at school, and when her firstborn appeared he got tagged with the name of her hero du jour, good ol’ Eugene Debs, who ran for President from a prison cell.”

  “I’ll be damned. She must’ve been quite a woman.”

  “I reckon. Never got to know her.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Nope. She was killed in a car accident before I was born.”

  “Oh, Jack. That’s awful. How old was she?”

  “Forty-sump’m. Out on a toot, the story goes, with an old boyfriend.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Name-dropper. You’ll love the next part; the guy was my granddad’s business partner.”

  “My God!”

  “You keep doing that. Quite a little soap opera, huh? He was the boyfriend who wouldn’t marry her. Brought Pap, my granddad, home with him from World War I, and he proved quite willing to marry her and father her three children. But she never quite got the other bastard out of her system, so one night they got drunk, jumped in the ol’ Stutz and proceeded to wrap it around a tree out in the country. Left Pap with three children to raise and the other half of a pretty good cotton brokerage.”

  “How old was your mother when it happened?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “It must’ve been hell for her.”

  “Had to’ve been. Never said much to me about it, though.”

  “As far as that goes,” she said, “it can’t have been all that great for your granddad. Dealing with the aftermath of a scandal like that, in a town this size, must’ve been its own kind of hell.”

  “And again, I can only imagine what that must’ve been like for him, because, in the best tradition of a Southern gentleman, he wasn’t about to tell his only grandchild shit about what it was like to go through something like that. By the time I came along, that whole situation was dead and buried, no pun intended. Gene Debs was in the Navy and Mom was in New York, pursuing not only her dreams but those of her dead mother and soon-to-be-dead grandmother, and Pap was here, soldiering along from day to day, with only Buster for company.”

  “The baby brother.”

  “None other. He was the only one who was satisfied to stay on in Bisque, having had no interest in going to college. Pap tried to groom him as his understudy in Gene Debs’s absence, but putting it kindly, Buster turned out not to be cut from the same cloth as Pap. Then the war came along and he was gone too, working in the Bell bomber plant over in Marietta, taking his own mini-scandal along with him.”

  “What do you mean, ‘mini-scandal’?”

  “I mean his lovely wife, Cordelia. Beautiful and gregarious, and too much of both qualities for Buster to handle all that well. All kinds of people have fallen for her, including her high school English teacher, never to be seen again. You’ll be seeing for yourself before long.”

  “So they’re back here now. He’s the stock-car racer, right?”

  “Yep. Turns out he did have talent, after all. Going as fast as possible in a perpetual left turn.”

  “Any money in that?”

  “Not much, unless you win all the time, which he doesn’t. Finishes in the top ten a fair percentage of the time, though, and writes the whole thing off to Redding Chrysler-Plymouth.”

  “Which he owns.”

  “Together with the bank and Chrysler Corporation’s finance division. His inheritance from Pap came along at a convenient time, just as Nash and Hudson merged. Until then he was the man to see if you wanted a Hudson, which not nearly enough people around here did. That, of course, was of slight consequence to him, as long as he could put one of those steel suppositories, better known as a Hudson Hornet, on a racetrack. So now he’s upgraded, but only slightly; most people in Bisque drive Fords or Chevrolets.”

  “Sounds like Buster’s a man who’s found his calling,” Linda observed.

  “Indeed he has. And Bisque’s finally found a Redding it can love.”

  “What about your granddad? Don’t tell me he wasn’t loved, as big a man in this town as he appears to have been.”

  “Respected, yes. But loved? I doubt anyone could’ve convinced him of that. Pap was a lot of things, but a ‘man of the people’ wasn’t one of them. Buster, on the other hand, plays that role to the hilt. He’s even got the race announcers calling him ‘the man from Bisque.’ He’s given this weird little burg’s weird little name more exposure than it’s had since they hacked it out of the woods. I swear, if he could play guitar they’d elect him to congress.”

  “Sounds like he could be going places, at least for ‘a man from Bisque.’ Does Cordelia go to the races with him?”

  “Now and then, to the big ones; Daytona, of course, and Darlington, where the parties run a strong second to the race itself. Otherwise, she’s content to let Buster hit the road with his crew, which is much the better thing from a racing point of view. You’ll understand when you meet her. She may be on the shady side of forty, but she still looks good enough to be a major distraction in the pits.”

  Linda chuckled, the way she sometimes did in bed. “She sounds like quite a lady.”

  “I expect that even she’d say that’s a stretch,” Jack said with the faintest of smiles. “Still and all, she’s my mom’s best friend. Here in Bisque, anyway.”

  “Why don’t we have her out for drinks one day? I’m sure that she’s as curious about the ‘older woman’ that you brought home as you’ve made me about her.”

  “Good idea, but they’ll want to have us over to the home place, you being the visitor and all. Hell, she may want to give you a party. You’re at least as much of an attraction as a visiting preacher or a college football recruiter. Let’s just run by there after we stop off at the Terrells; if her car’s in the driveway, we could just duck in for a minute and say ‘hey’.”

  “Why not?” she said. “Guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  Turning off the highway just before it became one of Bisque’s principal streets, Jack headed east toward the Terrell’s house, which was in one of the not-so-new-anymore neighborhoods that had sprung up in the “stylish” south side of town on the heels of World War II. Mature trees, still wintry skeletons, would be shading its streets by Easter, and soon its driveways would host tricycles and plastic detritus belonging to the children of second and third-hand homeowners. The Terrells, who had built their home and raised Rick in it, were part of a small but sturdy minority who saw no need to “trade up.”

  “This won’t take long,” Jack said. “Miz Terrell wouldn’t hear of us not dropping by, even though Rick won’t be here ’til next week.”

  “Well, don’t
feel like you have to rush on my account,” said Linda. “Since her boy’s not here, she’s gonna want to mother you a little, particularly since yours isn’t around.”

  “Bingo. Been doing it for years.”

  A smiling Melinda Terrell, middle age settled comfortably on her shoulders, opened the door before Jack could knock, and enveloped him immediately in a hug. “Jack!”

  “Hey, Miz Terrell, how you doin’?”

  “Much better, now that I’m seeing you again, boy.” she said, smiling at Linda over Jack’s shoulder. Dropping half the hug, she offered her hand to Linda without releasing him. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Melinda Terrell.”

  “Linda Green,” Linda said, returning the smile as she took her hand.

  “It’s so nice to meet you, Linda. We almost ended up with the same name! Please, come in.”

  Ushering them into the den in which Jack felt he’d spent half his life, Melinda said, “Richard won’t be here ’til about one. I know he’d love to see you, but he’s out working an open debit, so I can’t even guarantee he’ll be back by one. And if I know him, he’ll be grabbing a sandwich at Tubby’s. Are y’all going some place for lunch? I could fix you a BLT in two shakes.”

  Sensing an underlying nervousness that was not at all typical of his friend’s mother, Jack said, “Oh, no, thanks; we had a late breakfast, and a pretty heavy one at that. But that coffee sure smells good, as usual.”

  Having brought a tray of coffee and cookies, Melinda sat on the edge of her husband’s Barcalounger. “I hope you’re going to enjoy your stay in our little town, Linda,” she said. “Don’t suppose you have a chance to see much of it, as yet.”

  “Actually, she saw all of it about an hour ago,” said Jack, grinning. “From five thousand feet.”

  “Jack! You devil! This girl’s just barely unpacked, and you shove her in to Gene Debs’s old airplane? Shame on you!”

  Jack laughed. “Don’t get mad at me; she made me do it.”

  “I’m a pilot, myself, Mrs. Terrell,” said Linda. When Jack told me that one of his uncles was a crop duster, I gave him no peace whatever until he promised that we’d go flying as soon as we got here.”