MASH 13 MASH goes to Montreal

by Richard Hooker+William Butterworth

  “Before that, I mean, when you opened your heart of hearts to me.”

  “What about it?”

  “You confessed that your greatest ambition in all the world was to join the staff of ‘One Hour.’ ”

  “So, I said that. So what?”

  “And you told me that Harley Hazardous and Trenchcoat Wally Michaels had slipped it to you. I mean, in addition to having you thrown in the fountain.”

  “Yes, they did,” Don Rhotten said. “When I told them I wanted to join ‘One Hour,’ they told me sure, just as soon as I dreamed up, and shot, a story on my own.”

  “And what’s happened?”

  “I’ve shot six different stories on my own, and they won’t show any of them,” Don Rhotten said. “Good stories, too, like, ‘A Day in the Life of a Bagel Baker.’ Now, if that isn’t a slice of life, what is?”

  “You think they don’t want you on the show, right?”

  “That’s what I think,” Don Rhotten said. “They turned down the story I shot on Bella Abzug, too, the one I called, ‘Will Being Our First Female President Spoil Bella Abzug?’ ”

  “You went a little far with that one, Don, when you said you had it on good authority that the Vatican was going to name her the first Jewish-American saint,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “But the point I’m making is how could Harley Hazardous and Trenchcoat Wally Michaels turn down something called ‘Burton Babcock & Company Is Poisoning Our Buffalos’?”

  “You don’t think they’d turn that down?”

  “How could they? For one thing, it’s true. And just to sweeten the old pot, Don, I wouldn’t ever say that I gave you the idea. You can say that you found out about what was going on by yourself. You’d get all the credit”

  “Well, maybe, Taylor. But I still think you ought to bring the buffalos to me, and we’ll just poison them in the studio.”

  “You told me you’d do anything to get on ‘One Hour,’ ” Taylor said. “Make any sacrifice, pay any price. That means going to Texas.”

  “How long would I have to stay?”

  “I got a jet laid on to take you from New York to Midland,” Taylor said. “And a helicopter laid on in Midland. You wouldn’t have to spend more than an hour or so actually in Texas. Just time enough for a couple of location shots, and maybe two minutes of the buffalo writhing in agony after we feed them this stuff.”

  “Well, O.K.,” Don Rhotten said.

  “Wear the safari suit, Don,” Taylor said. “But leave the sun helmet home.”

  “You know what happens to my head the minute I get in the sun,” Don Rhotten said. “I blister easily, Taylor.”

  “Wear your rug.”

  “When I wear the rug in the sun, my head sweats and the rug slips.”

  “We’ll work something out,” Taylor said. “I’ll meet you in Midland, Don.”

  When the ABS chartered jet arrived at the airport in Midland, Taylor P. Jambon had other details of the story worked out. The pig thief had reported that both Burton Babcock IV and Mrs. Josephine Babcock had left Burton County. Mrs. Babcock, in her jet, was going to Boston, and Burton Babcock IV was going to Maine, via Texas, after jumping his girl friend at Fort Bragg.

  “I’d sort of hoped to catch them in the act, Don,” Taylor said. “But what we’ll have to do is just shoot the pieces of the story. Get some footage of the buffalo here, some footage of the boxes of this stuff, then get some footage of Mrs. Babcock and her buffalo-poisoning son, and put it all together.”

  “What are you going to do about the buffalo writhing in agony?”

  “I got some stock footage of that in Hollywood. Out-takes from an old movie called Buffalo Bill at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Then all we have to do is splice it all together.”

  “Sure,” Don Rhotten said. “Why not? We do that all the time.”

  Finally, the makeup artists had Don Rhotten ready to face the cameras. The helicopter took off again, and then landed as the cameras turned. Wearing his familiar look of determination, Don Rhotten leapt out of the helicopter just before it touched down. He caught his toe in the landing skid and landed on all fours and said a dirty word, but that could be edited out. Then the cameras followed him as he walked over the rise to the run-down ranch house of the old T Bar X.

  “Jees,” he said. “Look at that hairy cow.”

  “That’s a buffalo, Don,” Taylor P. Jambon said.

  “I don’t think he likes me,” Don Rhotten said. “Enough is enough.” He turned and ran back to the helicopter and nothing Taylor P. Jambon could do or say was sufficient to get him to leave again.

  Jambon returned to the ranch house with the camera crew. He took up a position on the porch from which he could direct their efforts and one which, he felt reasonably sure, would keep the buffalo from attacking.

  “Sneak up on that one lying down,” he ordered. “And then make a noise or something and get him to stand up. We can run the film backward with a voice-over saying he’s just eaten some of this stuff.”

  As they were doing that, his eyes naturally wandered around the premises. They fell upon what looked like a case of groceries. He walked over, ripped the carton open and came out with a can labeled Wild West Beanos. He had not, he told himself, become America’s Most Famous TV Gourmet by being unwilling to taste test everything that came to his attention. (This also contributed to his girth, which he regarded as his badge of bravery, culinarily speaking.)

  He took his Hammacher Schlemmer Gentleman’s Handy Dandy Can Opener from his vest pocket, opened the can, and then sampled the contents with his sterling silver folding fork.

  “Ummm,” he said. “Goody!” He wondered how it was that someone of all his all-around expertise, food-wise, had not encountered this product before. He examined the can carefully. “Packed by the BB&C Cannery,” it said. He had never heard of the BB&C Cannery, but it was as sure as the night follows day that, shortly after he extolled the virtues of this “100% Pure, 100% American Grown product to all his fans out there in TV Land, the BB&C Cannery would find some way in which to express their gratitude to him. Say with a nice little check plus, of course, a lifetime supply of Wild West Beanos.

  “You, there!” Taylor P. Jambon called to one of the grips. “When you finish waking that buffalo up, bring this case of my newly discovered gustatory goodie back with you to the helicopter.”

  When he returned to the helicopter, Don Rhotten, looking somewhat ashen faced, was slumped in his seat, his rug in his lap, mopping at his head with a handkerchief.

  “That was a harrowing experience!” he said. “That beast wanted me for supper, I could tell by the look in his eyes.”

  “Speaking of supper,” Taylor P. Jambon said, “have a taste of this, Don. My latest discovery.”

  “What is it?”

  “Trust me, Don,” Taylor said. “Before I’m through with it, it will be as American as Wheaties.”

  Don Rhotten carefully wiped Taylor P. Jambon’s sterling silver folding fork with the handkerchief he had been using on his head, and dipped in.

  “Say,” he said. “That’s good!”

  “It’s like peanuts,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “Once you start eating, you can’t stop. Fortunately, I have a whole case.”

  “What happens now?” Don Rhotten asked.

  “We go to Boston,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “Where you accost the chairperson and presidentress of Burton Babcock & Company personally, and demand to know, on behalf of the American people, how dare she poison America’s buffalos with her horrible soja hispida Babcockisis.’’

  “Serve her right,” Don Rhotten said, somewhat unclearly through a mouth stuffed with Wild West Beanos. “Cancelling TV advertising is tantamount to treason against the American way.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Wrong Way Napolitano, proprietor of Spruce Harbor International Airfield, looked up from the well-thumbed copy Of Playboyo Italiano with which he was whiling away his duty hours in the control tower to see a Learjet approaching from the
sea at about 450 knots and no more than a hundred feet over the water.

  He looked at it idly. It had been his experience that while an aircraft performing in that manner might be considered odd at other installations, it was not at all unusual at Spruce Harbor International. It was probably, he decided, either Col. Horsey de la Chevaux, making an unexpected visit in one of his airplanes, or an Air Hussid aircraft, bearing either His Royal Highness Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug or Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, the World’s Greatest Opera Singer.

  In just a second now, Wrong Way thought to himself rather professionally, the Learjet would pop the ol’ speed brakes, drop the ol’ gear, touch down, and hit the ol’ reverse thrust lever. Then his eyes widened as it became evident that the Learjet was about to do none of these things. Without losing a mile of airspeed, and dropping down to about fifty feet of altitude, it did a barrel roll down the runway, pointed its nose skyward, and kicked in something Wrong Way had not been previously aware was an optional accessory from the friendly folks at Learjet, what he thought of as the ol’ afterburner.

  It soared practically straight up, giving off dense clouds of unburned fuel. Wrong Way grabbed for the red emergency telephone that connected the control tower directly with the Spruce Harbor Medical Center switchboard.

  “Now don’t get excited, Hazel,” he said to Mrs. Heidenheimer, in a piercing voice perhaps one-half decibel less loud than the sirens atop Spruce Harbor’s shining red fire engines. “But I think we’re about to have an emergency down here at the airport!”

  “An emergency emergency?” Hazel inquired. “Or are you out of Chianti again?”

  “You just tell Hawkeye and Trapper John I said they’d better get down here right away with an ambulance.” He slammed the phone down in the cradle and then, after glancing out the window, picked it up again. “Make that two ambulances, Hazel, I see two chutes opening.”

  There are those who point to the speed and enthusiasm with which Drs. Trapper John McIntyre and Hawkeye Pierce respond to an emergency call as another manifestation of the seriousness with which they regard the Hippocratic oath and their sacred and solemn duty to offer aid and succour to their fellowman at the earliest possible moment. There are those, too, to be evenhanded about it, who believe that both healers are flashing-red-light-and- siren freaks, to whom the professional services rendered at the conclusion of the journey is a small-enough price to pay for having been permitted (even encouraged) by society generally, and the minions of the law specifically, to race down tranquil streets at excessive speeds, red lights flashing, sirens and whoopers screaming and whoop-whoop-whooping, the cynosure of all eyes, scattering all lesser beings from their path.

  The proponents of this latter theory point to the facts that the two take turns at the wheel of the ambulance, that arguments about who will drive are a great source of disagreement between them, and that the nominal driver of the ambulance (to whom it is necessary to pay a hazardous duty bonus whenever either healer beats him to the wheel) often returns from riding in the back during a run in obvious need of medical tranquilization.

  No one, least of all Wrong Way Napolitano, therefore, was in the least surprised when Spruce Harbor Medical Center’s Ambulance Number Three (whose mechanical needs were seen to, at the insistence of Drs. Pierce and McIntyre, by the Rock Bound Coast Speed Shop, Hot Rod Emporium and Garage) arrived at Spruce Harbor International, setting a new record in the process, about thirty seconds before the two striped canopies deposited the escapees from the Learjet on terra firma.

  “Not bad,” Wrong Way said to Dr. Pierce, after consulting his stopwatch. “Two minutes, forty and sixty-four one hundredths seconds. That’s a new record, I think.”

  “I knew it was going to be a good run,” Hawkeye Pierce replied. “The roads were dry, and I was in good shape. But I’d like to express my appreciation to the fine mechanics at Rock Bound Coast SS, HRE and G,* without whom none of this would have been possible.”

  (* A.k.a. the Rock Bound Coast Speed Shop, Hot Rod Experts and Garage.)

  “Touchdown!” John F. X. McIntyre, M.D., F.A.C.S. said, obviously trying to change the subject.

  The larger of the two parachutists had indeed landed. “Look!” Wrong Way said. “He’s going to break the fall of the other one by catching it with his own.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Hawkeye said.

  “And whatever was wrong with the plane,” Wrong Way said, “has apparently been corrected. Look, here it comes in for a landing.”

  The two parachutists were now both on the ground, wrapped in what, even at that distance, was obviously a fond embrace.

  “I wonder what they’re doing?” Wrong Way asked.

  “I think he’s spreading pollen on her,” Trapper John said. He reached inside the ambulance and turned the siren on and off. The sound startled the parachutists, who broke apart, and then, holding hands, came gaily skipping down the grass beside the runway toward the ambulance.

  “Hello there, Doctors Pierce and McIntyre,” Bubba Babcock boomed in his deep voice, his pearly white teeth revealed in a wide smile. “You remember the Little Lady, of course?”

  “How’d you know we were coming?” Scarlet asked. “We thought we would drop in on you as a little surprise.”

  “We’re here for the blood test,” Bubba announced. “Under the circumstances, of course, the Little Lady and I wouldn’t dream of having someone else do it.”

  Scarlett blushed. “We can’t wait until we get married,” she said.

  “I noticed,” Trapper John replied. “But this is the Rock Bound Coast, and around here the law says you have to wait.”

  The conversation was, fortuitously, interrupted at that point by the landing of Bubba’s personal airplane.

  “Colonel,” Bubba said to the jolly, bald-headed, barrel-chested pilot, Col. Merritt T. Charles, U.S.A., retired, “these gentlemen are Drs. Pierce and McIntyre —Hawkeye and Trapper John to their legion of friends —who advised Scarlett and I to enter the state of wedded bliss.”

  “What I did, actually,” Hawkeye corrected him, “was to agree with you and that religious chap whose name unfortunately escapes me at the moment that it is indeed better to marry than to burn. At the time I said that, I think it germane to point out, the two of you were already smoldering.”

  “No matter how you slice it, gentlemen,” Colonel Charles said, “your you-know-whats are in a crack with Bubba’s Mama for saying that.”

  “So we have been led to believe,” Trapper John said. “Colonel, you sound familiar. Have we met before?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing," Colonel Charles said. He paused thoughtfully. “You weren’t, by any chance, engaged in the Korean police action?”

  “You could put it that way,” Trapper John said.

  “The 4077th MASH!” Colonel Charles cried triumphantly. “You’re the two who encased Hot Lips’ boyfriend in plaster of paris.”

  “Guilty,” Hawkeye said.

  “And the ones who crucified the chaplain!” Colonel Charles said.

  “It might have looked to some people that way,” Trapper John said. “We really didn’t intend to leave him tied to the cross longer than overnight.”

  “Oh,” Colonel Charles said. “I’m really sorry to hear that!”

  “I gather you knew the reverend gentleman?” Hawkeye asked.

  “Unfortunately,” Colonel Charles said. “He took advantage of my condition.”

  “What condition was that?”

  “I had one broken leg and one broken arm,” Colonel Charles replied. “Suffered in the service of our country when I fell off my junk.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Scarlett asked.

  “An Oriental-type seagoing vessel, Scarlett,” Colonel Charles said.

  “I remember a guy with a broken arm and a broken leg who fell off his junk,” Trapper John said.

  “I remember him, too,” Hawkeye said. “But he was one of those natty young majors. It wasn’t this gu
y. Our guy was trim, slim and had a full head of hair.”

  “Thanks, a lot!” Colonel Charles said.

  “You were telling us that you knew ‘Swinging Sammy’?”* Trapper John said, hastily.

  (* Dr. McIntyre here referred to Rev. Samuel J. Abbott, now pastor of the Third Baptist Church of Ozark, Alabama, who once served (while a captain chaplain) as spiritual advisor to the 4077th MASH. He was retired medically from the service on a seventy-percent disability pension, having suffered what was described as severe mental and emotional trauma while at the 4077th MASH. The details are recorded in M*A*S*H Goes to New Orleans (Pocket Books, New York).)

  “There I was, up to my you-know-what in plaster of Paris,” Colonel Charles said, “when he spotted me. Talk about a captive audience! I’d probably be singing in a choir somewhere today if you guys hadn’t crucified him.”

  “We’re glad that we were able to be of some small service to you, Colonel,” Hawkeye said.

  “It was our pleasure,” Trapper John added.

  “And Hot Lips!” Colonel Charles said, warmed by the memory. “How often I’ve wondered about ol’ Hot Lips! You guys don’t happen to know whatever happened to her, do you? Now, there was a nurse!”

  “I was afraid you’d ask,” Hawkeye said.

  “She has, in a sense, taken to religion,” Trapper John said. “Would you believe that it’s the Reverend Mother Emeritus now, Colonel?”

  “Swinging Sammy got to her?” the Colonel asked in disbelief.

  “Not so far as I know,” Trapper John said.

  “Spiritually, the colonel means,” Hawkeye said.

  “Not that way, either,” Trapper John replied.

  “Gee, I’d like to see her again!” Colonel Charles said, wistfully.

  “I was afraid of that, too,” Hawkeye said. “The Reverend Mother Emeritus seems to have that effect on people.”