The Rough English Equivalent (The Jack Mason Saga Book 1)

by Stan Hayes

  “No. I called him ‘Herr Boss,’ which sorta tickled ’im and pissed ’im off at th’ same time. And my mama came from the kind of Jewish background that didn’t have much truck with God beyond a polite nod at the various holy days as they came and went. As a kid, I asked him why most of the people that lived around us went to church, and we didn’t. ‘Superstition,’ he’d say. ‘A total waste of time.’ And that was it for him. Case closed.”

  “So that’s how you look at it too?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. Guess I’d say, like Huxley, if you can’t see it or measure it somehow, it’s not worth worryin’ about. Meanwhile, the church bandies the Holy Trinity about, and th’ faithful respond with th’ Bisque Trifecta- low self-esteem, delayed gratification and parenthood- early and frequent. Long as that goes on, I don’t see how people have a chance in hell of gettin’ a handle on what life’s about.”

  “All this hootin’ an’ hollerin’ about God an’ what he wants us to do about this an’ that.”

  “Well, it comes down mostly to fear. Most people don’t like to think about dyin’, and more so not havin’ a nice place to go when they do. And that’s one thing every religion I know anything about guarantees. When you die, you go someplace else, good, bad or indifferent. And generally, the closer you ‘cleave’ to the rules of whatever religion that’s under consideration, the nicer your new destination’s likely to be. Plus, it’s an ego shot for whatever priesthood’s involved. Easy to imagine what the first caveman priesthood had to say to each other about gettin’ th’ parishioners cranked up; ‘Hey- let’s tell ’em they’ll get it all in this place, Heaven, after they die, as long as they agree how bad they’ve been and kick a tenth of their bearskins into the- let’s call it, umm, church, then their, uh, spirits’ll live really well, forever, in Heaven!’ Makes th’ old saw ‘Whacha dunno won’t hurt ya’ ring a little hollow, huh?”

  Jack chuckled. “So you don’t believe we go anywhere when we die?”

  “Nowhere but back to Mother Earth, sooner or later. Don’t see much evidence to th’ contrary.”

  “That’s pretty much what Mom says, too. Sometimes. And if there is a god- does that mean you need to worship it? Why would it care? So why are so many people religious?”

  “I’ve got no better answer than what I said a minute ago: just th’ simple human fear of dyin’. Unless it’s sump’m that scares a lot of people more than dyin’.”

  “What’s that?” Jack asked, eyes shiny with the search for truth.

  “Hell, son. Bein’ different.”

  “Hurry, Di, ’fore she changes her mind!” Dolores Bishop’s long legs propelled her through the front door into the warm Fall afternoon, her twin sister at her heels. She ran across the porch and down the steps, snatching open the white car’s driver’s door. Diana, unhappy at being outmaneuvered, slid with clinched teeth onto the front seat from the other side. Dolores stepped on the starter as she closed the door, pulled the gearshift lever down into low, and got the car moving down the driveway. Unconsciously matching her gum-chewing rhythm to the wheels’ skrunch-skrunch over the pea-gravel, she glanced with a wide-eyed grin at her twin sister. “I still don’t believe it!” she said as they turned north out of the driveway toward Bisque, the big straight-eight’s torque building implacably under her right foot. We’re drivin’ to town, just you an’ me!”

  “Damn these learners’ licenses anyway. Be a lot better if we could just cruise around by ourselves, steada’ havin’ to pick Evvie up,” said Diana. “Just ’cause she’s got a license. Any boys we run into’ll spend all their time lookin’ at her chest. “

  “We promised Mama we’d go straight to pick her up, and that’s what we’re gonna do. If that’s all we have to do to get out cruisin’ in this ole car, Evvie can lean out the window and shake them titties in the breeze if she wants to.”

  “That’s what we’d have to do to get some attention, with her along,” said Diana.

  “I will if you will,” Dolores said with a grin, not taking her eyes off the road.

  Evelyn Summers lived in a small house near Bradenton Mills, one of many virtually identical clapboard bungalows that the textile company built in the thirties to house its workers. She stepped out onto the front porch within seconds of Dolores’ drumming out “shave-and-a-haircut” on the horn.

  At nineteen, she dressed to command the attention of every postpubescent male who crossed her path. Her shiny, straight brown hair fell in a heavy mass onto the shoulders of a teal-blue sweater, which, with no blouse underneath it, embraced the contours of firm, black-lace-brassiere-constrained adolescent breasts the size and shape of fancy-grade tangerines. A tiny football player, suspended in midstride from a fine-linked, gold-colored chain, shot a stiff-arm into her cleavage. The view presented by the sweater’s scooped neckline, its effect diminished only slightly by a scattershot of tiny skin eruptions over the hemispheres that continued up over her neck and face, promised a hard tweak to small-town sensibilities. Her tan wool skirt, cut modishly long, split well past the knee on the right side, dropped down over black mesh stockings whose seam ran from panty-girdle clips into ballerina slippers.

  She opened the car’s back door and looked inside. “Godamighty!” she breathed, gauging the distance from the folded jump seats on her right to the back seat on her left. “What a playpen!” Climbing in, she settled herself on the white car’s dove-gray upholstery, extending her arms to stroke it with flattened palms, exhaling a small sigh that pushed the scent of her perfume forward to the twins. “You sure you can drive this thang?”

  “We’re here, ain’t we?” said Diana, twisting around to look at her. “We’ve been drivin’ it all over the ranch for a year; we’re way past ready.”

  “Well, then, drive on, honey; I’ll just lay back on this di-van and see if I can get over that ball game last niit. Winnin’ a game, after this losin’s gone on forever- it’us tough on us pore cheerleaders when them boys’d just go out an’ get beat, game in an’ game out. I’m glad I’m not doin’ it no more- by th’ second half, even if we’us ta win, th’ crowd prob’ly won’t yell, ’less you ‘end up’ after every cheer, and show ’em yer cute little asses.”

  “Sounds like fun to me, ’specially if they’re gonna win now an’ then,” said Diana. “We’re tryin’ out next year. Maybe you can help us out- we need to practice showing ‘em our cute little asses.”

  “Sure; I guess so,” Evvie said. Good lands, she thought, when Maxine said she’d gimme ten bucks to ride around with these kids on Saturday afternoon, I didn’t bargain for no “big sister” bidness. But it’s more’n I make in a niit of sellin’ tickets at the Winston, and their daddy’s loaded. I guess I could get to know me a rich boy or two if I went to their friends’ parties. It’s not like I’m that much older. And they seem like they could be kinda wild if they got the chance. “I can get you girls all set to get picked next year, but you’ll have to work with me. It’ll take some tiime.”

  “How would we do it?” asked Dolores, as she turned right on Main Street.

  “Well, we could practice once a week for an hour. Some time when I’m not workin’. And I can tell you a few thangs about gettin’ friendly with th’ junior cheerleaders, who’ll be seniors then. They all have a vote on who the new ones’ll be.” Maxine’s gonna hafta pay me more than she figured, thought Evvie. But she’ll get it the same place that she got this ten; from these kids’ mama. Since they’re sisters and all.

  “That sounds great to me,” said Diana, pulling down the sun visor to peer into the vanity mirror mounted on its back side. “Wonder who’ll be at th’ Dog House?”

  “Well, we’ll know in just a minute,” said Dolores as the car approached the top of the hill at Main and Fifteenth streets. As they reached the intersection, the girls all looked to the left at a couple of dozen cars parked in a cratered, gravel-surfaced lot. The lot sloped up toward a small building sitting under translucent red light bulbs that spelled out DON’S DOG HOUSE. Dolores
put her arm out the window to signal a stop. They began identifying cars as they waited for a break in the oncoming traffic that would let her turn into the lot.

  “There’s Gary Sartain’s ‘48 Mercury,” Evvie said as they turned into the lot. “They say he’s had it up to a hunderd and fifteen or somethin’.”

  “What’s he doin’ now, anyway?” asked Dolores. “He’s been outa school for a couple of years.”

  “Anybody he can, I reckon,” Evvie said with the faintest of smiles.

  Dolores pulled the car into a vacant spot under a big oak tree. A slight negro boy in a white coat and paper Dog House hat saw them parking and walked out to the car. “Whachoo ladies gonna have today?” he asked, smiling as he looked the white car over from stem to stern.

  “Hey there, Eugene. Lemme have a cherry Co’cola and an a order a’ pickles,” said Evvie.

  “Me, too,” said Diana.

  “Make it three,” said Dolores, craning her neck to survey the cars and the boys standing around them. As the carhop left, she said, “I shoulda backed in here.”

  “No,” said Evvie. “Don’t make it look like you wanta see these ole boys that much. They’ll start comin’ over directly; this’s a new car to th’ Dog House, an’ they’ll wanta see who’s in it.”

  “There’s Freddie Dawson over there talkin’ to that bunch in Lynne Browne-who-thinks-her-shit-don’t-stink’s car,” said Diana, indicating a tall boy with brush-cut blond hair, leaning on his hands against the driver’s door of a Plymouth station wagon with four girls inside.

  “Sho ’nuff,” said Evvie. “He had a good game last niit, even though we lost, as usual. Intercepted ’at one pass an’ ran it back all th’ way, for our only touchdown. Must’ve been thirty-five, forty yards.”

  “Cute as shit,” observed Dolores, “And smart, too. They say he’s goin’ to West Point.”

  “Where?” said Evvie

  “West Point. The Army school, up North.”

  “Oh.” No point in messin’ with him, Evvie thought. I need me a Georgia Tech boy or two, to go see in Atlanta.

  As the carhop locked the tray of paper-plated pickle slices and Coca-Colas onto Dolores’ door, Jack rapped on the trunk as he, Ricky and Walt Jefferson rode in on their Whizzers. The girls swiveled in unison as they rode to the base of the big tree in front of the car, “echo tube” exhausts booming, shutting the bikes down and leaning them against the big tree. “Hey girls,” said Jack, walking over to the car and looking inside. “Cruisin’ in the old Mose-mobile, huh?”

  “Hey, Jack,” said Evvie, looking at Walt Jefferson as she did. That Jefferson kid’s folks’ve got half the money in Hamm County, she thought, an’ that brother of his looks real sharp. “Wher’djall find them rattletraps? Gonna get mufflers for ’em some day?”

  “Mufflers?” said Ricky, looking through the back window at Evvie and her assets. “What for? That’s way too mellow a sound to be chokin’ down with a muffler. Come take a ride with me; you’ll like the sound when you’re sittin’ on it.”

  “You’re crazy,” Evvie sniffed. “This here’s the kinda riide I liike. Smooth an’ quiet; room ta stretch out. Hop in ’an see what I mean.”

  “I know all about this ole car,” said Jack as they scrambled into the back, he and Walt unfolding the jump seats as Ricky slid onto the back seat beside Evvie. “I rode around in it some with Mose Kubielski, before he traded it in. That was a long time ago; how do y’all like it?”

  “We learned to drive in it,” said Diana, smiling, turning on the seat to look back at him, wide-set brown eyes glowing with secret thoughts, “and we love it. I guess you always love the car you learned to drive in. J’you ever drive it?”

  “Nope. It was gone before I was big enough to want to. Looks like fun, though.”

  “Those motorbikes look like fun, too,” said Diana. “I’ve seen ya’ll on ’em at school. How fast can they go?”

  “Fifty-plus down that hill out there,” said Ricky, sitting as close to Evvie as he dared. “Walt’s brother’s got the new model; it’s a little faster than ours.”

  “Supposed to do sixty-five,” ventured Walt out of painful shyness. He’d heard about Evvie; who hadn’t? And now he was sitting in the same car with her, and Terrell trying to look down her dress. If they knew where I was right now, he thought, my folks’d shit. They hadn’t been that hot about his getting a Whizzer in the first place, even though Charlie, his older brother, had had the first one in Bisque. But it was different with Charlie, who’d go on to flunk out of Georgia in two quarters, which is fairly hard to do, and come home to his new career of nail-driving. So his folks had long since ratcheted down their expectations for Charlie, and at the same time ratcheted up for him. And their expectations didn’t include what his father would, he was sure, label “whore-mongering.” “He says he can soup up the older ones to be just as fast, though.”

  “As fast as that little black ’un Freddy useta have?” asked Evvie with a grin. “I had a riide on that rascal one tiime.”

  “You ought to catch a ride with ‘im now,” said Ricky, who had slid his arm from the top of the seat back down to a point where it barely grazed Evvie’s shoulders. “That ’40 coupe of his’s full-race.”

  “I know,” she said, sitting up on the edge of the seat and stretching her arms up to the headliner, arching her back and stopping all breathing in the back of the white car but her own. “Him an’ his Charles Atlas Di-matic Tension. He takes me home sometiimes after I get off at the Winston. It makes too dayum much noise, too.”

  “Does Mr. Kubielski ever let you drive that wagon of his, Jack?” asked Dolores.

  “Mose? Yeah, just a couple of times out to his house. I won’t have a learner’s license ’til next month.”

  “Mose. Why do we always want to call him Pedro, I wonder? Or Peter. We just can’t help it.”

  “Beats th’ hell outa me,” said Jack. “He’s a damn good guy, but I don’t think he’s Saint Peter.”

  “No,” said Diana, her face solemn. “We don’t think so either.”

  “He miit not be no saint,” said Evvie, “But he’s the best boss I ever had. Wish my boss on my full-time job was half as niice as Mr. K. If he ’us ten er fifteen years younger, I’d see what I could do about marryin’ ‘im.”

  “And all this time,” said Jack with a chuckle, “We’ve been thinkin’ you’d be Miz Wahoo someday.”

  Evvie skewered him with a look that made him realize he’d made a mistake. “I don’t think that giiy belongs in this here conversation, do you?” Watch ’im back offa this, she thought. That damn Wahoo miita stuck that big dick inta me a tiime or two, but it’s been in his mama, too, and everybidy in town, includin’ Jack, knows it.

  “Hey!” Jack said, reaching for the car’s door handle and opening it without looking at Evvie again. If we’re gonna make it over to Waterville today, we better shag ass. See y’all.”

  “Walt?” said Evvie before he could get to the door.

  “Uh, yeah?”

  “Would you mind doin’ somethin’ for me?”

  “What’s that?” he managed in a strangled squawk.

  “Tell Charlie I’d love a riide on that new model. Habn’t seen him since hiigh school.”

  “Uh, OK.”

  “Don’t forget. I’d rilly ’preshate it.”

  Diana hopped out of the car as they headed toward the Whizzers. “Jack. Wait a minute.” He turned as she walked up the hill toward them, almost as tall as he was, her white tennis outfit in sharp contrast to her slow-to-fade summer tan, the tenacious ghost of Evvie’s scent clinging to her. Smiling, she touched the bike’s clutch lever. “What’s this do?”

  “Clutch,” he said, still dealing with the olfactory message. “Lets th’ engine run when th’ bike’s standin’ still.”

  “I know what a clutch does,” she said. “How about a ride around the block?”

  “We’re just takin’ off to Waterville…”

  “Oh, come on, it’ll j
ust take a minute. You can drive our car…”

  “When?”

  “Anytime you want to. Don’t you have to get on first?”

  He said nothing for a minute, then smiled. “Yeah, I’ve gotta sit on the gas tank. You sit on the seat. There’s no place for your feet. Just let ‘em hang down, and watch out for stuff in the street. Wait while I crank up. Hey,” he called to Ricky and Walt, “Back in a minute; gonna take ’er for a quick ride.” He straddled the Whizzer combination of air-cooled motor and bicycle, a single cast iron cylinder on top of an aluminum crankcase that occupied the usually empty space between the wheels of its host, a maroon spring-fork Schwinn that had long since shed its fenders, but retained its pedals and chain. A combination of two “vee-belts” took the Whizzer’s booming, if asthmatic, power pulses from its flywheel first to the clutch pulley, thence to a sheave screw-clamped to the spokes of the rear wheel. Jack pulled the handlebar-mounted compression release to open the exhaust valve, rolled the Whizzer down the hill into the parking lot and pushed the release shut as the bike hit walking speed. Deceivingly powerful thrums exited the “echo tube.” Thus did some three horsepower take Young America into harm’s way.

  Jack swung the idling bike around, heading it downhill to let gravity, rather than some undignified pedaling, get them moving. Sliding forward onto the gas tank, he glanced down to check the clearance between his right knee and the spark plug, contact with which would bring a shock like a lick from a baseball bat. Responding to his beckoning wave, Diana ran out and swung a leg over the seat, putting her arms around Jack’s waist and grinning at Evvie and Dolores, who had gotten out of the car to observe the launch. “Don’t you get too far away, Di,” Dolores shouted.

  As Jack’s left hand gradually released the clutch lever, his right twisted the throttle grip open. They were off. He banked the bike to the right and headed across the parking lot to Fifteenth street, Diana’s outstretched legs an ongoing threat to stability.

  As they reached the end of the block where Fifteenth dead-ended into Juniper, Jack looked both ways and, with no traffic on Juniper, ran the stop sign, maintaining their momentum and crossing the street into the Juniper Street Grammar School’s parking lot. He turned left and headed toward the athletic field, loving the echo tube’s booming sounds as they bounced off the side of the building. “This is really fun!” Diana shouted as they circled the field. “I wanta ride it some time.”