by John Boyd
Suddenly she sat up. “What air ye y-clept?”
Bemused, he realized she was using words from Chaucer’s era. “John, but quit talking Middle English.”
“Is that what that is? I reckon I’m a little out of my head. John, what you going ’round shooting girls for?”
“I’m a hunter.”
“It ain’t hunting season.”
“There’s no season on girls. Lie back down! Where’d you learn Middle English?”
“From Geoffrey Chaucer. He’s a writer. Mama took me out of school when Papa got put in jail for selling corn… Mama says that’s the way it is with the Barnards. No Ramsbotham’s ever done time. That’s Mama’s family, the Ramsbothams.”
She was rambling, and he was interested in her ramblings. By listening, he could map her recovery from the sodium pentothal, and he knew, now, that she had no idea who he was.
Finally, she staggered back to the subject.
“Mama let me read Chaucer because that was the only book she had from normal school. It was wrote in two columns; one column like he talked and one like we talk, and I liked his way of talking best.”
“His poetry scans better in Middle English,” Pope said.
“You read after him?”
“Most of the Canterbury Tales.”
“Why, John, you’re the only boy I ever saw who’s read Chaucer.”
“Cora Lee, you’re the only girl I ever saw who read Chaucer.”
“I wondered why I liked you so much. Which one of them stories did you like best?”
“I suppose The Miller’s Tale.”
“I didn’t like the way that one ended,” she said. “That Alison was the meanest thing, making poor old Absolon do what he did. I’d liefer Absolon hadde brender hir haunche-bon than Nicholay’s. I reckon talking Chaucer comes in handy, sometimes. I’d never say anything like that, plain out… Where am I?”
“You’re in sort of a Trappist-Capuchin monastery.”
“Them hunters! If you be my friend, John, why’d you shoot me?”
“Because the future President of the United States wants to come courting, and your mama wouldn’t let any boys into the cove.”
“Does Mama know where I am?”
“At the moment, no, but she knows you’re safe. She’s got a radiophone call, by now, from President Habersham, asking her permission for the next President to come courting. She’ll know where you are, in good time.”
“Good times is something Mama don’t know much of… Is that next President as good-looking as you?”
“That doesn’t make any difference, if he’s going to be President of the United States.”
“I don’t care what he does for a living… How’s he know what I look like?”
“He learned through me. I saw you, once before, when I was on a hunting trip.”
“You think I’m pretty enough for him?”
Here, he thought, was a girl of incredible beauty, an authority on Geoffrey Chaucer, and modest. He could have loved her for her beauty alone, or for her appreciation of Chaucer alone, or for her modesty alone. Suddenly, he hungered to speak with absolute frankness to this girl, to tell her the truth with no holds barred.
“Cora Lee, I’m a policeman of sorts. I have lied to girls—most of the time, as a matter of fact—but I’m your friend and I want to tell you the absolute truth, cross my heart and hope to die.
“You are the most beautiful girl in the world. If your mother had let boys into that cove, you would have seen this with your eyes long ago and felt it with your lips.”
“Shoot fire, you sound like you mean that! Mama was strict. She used to tell me she couldn’t let boys see me because they’d want to get on top of me, and I’d have a woods colt. I never wanted one of them to do that, but then I never saw a boy as pretty as you… John, would you marry me?”
“I certainly would! If that Presidential candidate drops dead between now and election day, girl, you’ll be spoke for, by me.”
“John, way you talk makes me feel good all over.”
He noticed he had taken her hand as he talked, and he thought: He had been assigned to go and get her, have her chastity certified by the doctor, and then convince her that she should accept McCormick’s suit. His mission was accomplished.
Pope slipped his eyes out of focus and said, “Cora Lee, your mother never said anything about you getting on top of a boy, did she?”
“Not that I recollect.”
“Would you do it for me?”
“You’re my friend, John, the only one I got. I reckon I’d do anything for you ’cept brender your haunch-bon.”
She had controlled spontaneity, he decided. In the beginning, her movements were shy, tentative, exploratory. She seemed to be searching for the correct rhythm, and he let her have her head, offering no suggestions. Finally, she sighed and rippled, quivered and swayed; then, she stifled a squeal and slapped, buckled, moaned, rocked, rattled, rolled, pitched, shimmied, groaned, walloped, pounded, and yelled. When she writhed, screamed, slapped and bounced, soared, and fell, he conceded.
“How about that?” she hooted, before she collapsed.
Hansen had to admit, Helga was a hummer. With skill and experience, she accomplished as much as the Bangkok belly dancer had accomplished with youth and enthusiasm.
It had all started with an impish challenge at the Norfolk Airport after he missed his plane from Washington. During her extended wait, Helga had had a few “drinkies,” and she was in the little girl’s room when he arrived in the bar. He spotted her table from her coat and her book, so he ordered another martini for her and a double for himself at the service bar. While waiting for the bartender to fill the order, he overheard a man down the bar say, “I saw a dame down twelve martinis and walk away.”
“Must have been a Swede,” his companion remarked. “They stow booze like water.”
Hansen took the order to the table and was waiting when she returned from the ladies’ room, radiant-eyed, to greet him with a hug and kiss.
Hansen related the Scandinavian story he had overheard at the bar, but Helga was not amused. “Jealousy,” she said. “Men can’t bear to see a woman beat them at their own game.”
“I’m not so narrow,” he said, as they clicked glasses for their first drink together after nineteen months, so many days, and some odd hours. (He had lost count in the Washington rat race and had to accept her tally.) “I recognize female superiority in all departments but one.”
“That’s because you’re generous-minded, Ben, and I agree. You’re a much better ship handler than I am.”
“I supposed I should have said two departments,” he said.
“No. One,” she demurred.
“After dinner,” he said, “I’ll demonstrate what I mean.”
From a slouching position in her chair, she looked him over with a calculating gaze. Then she downed her drink, slapped the glass on the tabletop, stood up, and said, “To hell with dinner! I’m taking you home, and I’m driving.”
Drive she did. She slowed the family jalopy to ninety when she hit the off-ramp at Virginia Beach, and geared down to a sedate sixty for the drive through residential streets. Fortunately, they had the house to themselves, for Joan Paula was out on a date with a boy from MIT, and now, he had to agree with Helga. His capable Swede excelled in all departments but ship handling.
When the sough-sough of her breathing slowed above him, he said, “Scuttlebutt around the Pentagon has it that the girls have formed some sort of conspiracy to withhold favors from the boys. You’ve just proved the rumor wrong.”
He felt her body grow tense. Her voice was flat and dull.
“No, Ben, the scuttlebutt’s correct. There is a conspiracy. It has grown into something evil and powerful.”
“Sounds interesting,” he said, contented in the deepening euphoria engendered by gin and satiety. “Sounds like something… affecting national… security.”
Forspent, he slept.
CHA
PTER 10
Russia, Primrose had said, was a nation of paranoiacs.
As Hansen shaved the next morning, it occurred to him that Primrose might have picked up a few delusions of persecution himself, while stationed in Moscow. Despite Hansen’s carefully phrased leading remark, last night, Helga had evinced no further interest in scuttlebutt around the Pentagon. On the basis of her behavior, the FEM conspiracy had no intelligence network, and even if a general withdrawal did occur, it would not include Helga Hansen.
Helga had been more excited over Joan Paula’s new beau, a lad from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As Hansen splattered himself with cologne, he shrugged. He would prefer a promising young bachelor officer, but he was growing accustomed to eggheads.
After breakfast, he commented over coffee, “Last night was quite a contrast to my first night home.”
“I had a cold, then.”
“That was my risk.”
“To tell the truth, Ben, a cold was only part of the problem.”
“Try me with the whole truth.”
“A wife doesn’t like to tell her husband everything.”
“From what I’ve heard around the Pentagon, I felt that your hen party, the night I came home, might have included a lecture on feminine hygiene.”
“Oh, well. I’ll confess a misdemeanor to clear myself of a felony. I couldn’t hoist ‘baker’ because I already had a flag up.”
“I’m sorry.” He was contrite. “I thought it was Vita-Lerp. Quite a few of the ladies are indulging, I heard.”
“Only the in-groups, and the wives of admirals and generals who have no other recourse.”
“Some of the country girls must be using it,” he said. “Five hundred Russian women are being imported to entertain the boys in the armed services. The first shipment of ten is supposed to arrive at Dulles next Tuesday.”
“You mean our government is allowing five hundred Red hussies into our country to subvert our boys?”
His heart soared at her indignation.
“Not only that. Your husband has been detailed as an official greeter.”
“Why, this is ridiculous!” She paused to ponder for a moment. “Ben, it isn’t even true! Five hundred Russian floozies, working at top speed, could only service one serviceman once every three years, in rotation. Those girls aren’t being imported for our servicemen. They’re coming for the staff officers.”
Surprisingly, he had never considered the mathematics, but Helga was completely correct. Five hundred women couldn’t service the Chattahoochee on a Saturday night.
“I never heard of such! Sometimes, I think Mother Carey is right! One cannot rehabilitate what has not been habilitated.”
“Mother Carey. Don’t tell me, Helga, that you’re one of her chickens.”
“Of course I am. How else would I have known about the conspiracy I started to tell you about last night?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve joined the in-group of Vita-Lerp users?”
“Ben, there’s something I simply must tell you.” She leaned forward, suddenly serious. “Get the word back to Admiral Primrose that Dr. Carey is announcing her candidacy for President of the United States, next Monday. She’s organizing cadres to spread her message and her methods into rural areas. If she succeeds, our nation will have reached some ultima Thule.”
“Ultimate what?”
“Ultima, Ben. Not ultimate, ultima Thule, the final dark regions of myth.”
“I thought Thule was in Greenland.”
“Oh, Ben! It’s Latin. But that woman is expecting to recruit Vita-Lerp users and swing them into her column by next November.” She rose for the coffeepot, and there was genuine anxiety in her voice and eyes as the poured.
“Don’t let it upset you, dear.” His voice was calm and reassuring. “The Navy’s working on the problem.”
“Now, I am upset!” She poured part of bis coffee into his saucer. “Listen, Ben. I’m with the League of Loyal Women Voters, and we’re on to her plots. One of her schemes is to order us married women to bet our husbands she win lose. Naturally, the men will vote for her in order to win their bets. Isn’t that devious?”
“She can’t win,” be said. “We’ve never had a woman President. She’s bucking tradition.”
“When the horse saw the first tractor, it no doubt heehawed! By the way, you can pass along the word to Admiral Primrose that one of the counterattacks conducted against Carey by die League of Loyal Women Voters is a do-it-yourself movement. Our movement keeps the waistline trim without forcing a girl to drink all that flatus-causing goo. Oh, we’re fighting her, Ben.”
“Your group is fighting Dr. Carey?” He kept his voice casual. Here was a bit of intelligence worth recording.
“Not openly. She’s too powerful, and if we’re blacklisted by the FEM’s, our espionage value is jeopardized. You can tell your little Sug that he has a partisan group fighting underground in his support and, Ben Hansen, if you start fooling around with any of those Commie Mata Haris Sug is bringing over, my girls will know about it, and you’ll go right back on top.”
“But the Vita-Lerp…”
“We’re fighting that, too. There’s no challenge to swallowing a pill upside down.”
“What inspired you to break with her, Helga?”
“Because I love you, Ben, and because I was one of the first members of the Virginia Beach Chapter of FEM, and I was in line to be the president when that woman. Dr. Carey, flew in, with no knowledge of local conditions, mind you, and set up a permanent table of organization. I was appointed merely vice president, and that dear little Sue Benson, who should have been my vice president, was made sergeant-at-arms. Can you imagine, Ben, of all the persons to make president, she chose that horsey, sharp-nosed Elaine Jackson, and her husband is an over-aged lieutenant commander in charge of a firing range.”
“He hits the bottle, too, I hear,” Hansen said.
“Who can blame him! I saw Elaine the other day in a miniskirt, and, I declare, Ben, her knees looked like arthritic golf balls… So Sue and I got together with two or three other girls…” Suddenly, Helga looked at him and smiled. “This woman talk must bore you stiff.”
“Not at all,” he said truthfully. “I enjoy it.”
“Joan Paula’s boy friend is coming by, then Sue and her husband will drop in for drinks, and we’ll all head to the club for the Saturday night dance.”
“Sounds great,” Hansen said. “But tell me, honest Injun, have you ever tried this Vita-Lerp?”
“I knew you’d get to that question, sooner or later.”
Slowly, she nodded her head, looking into his eyes for disapproval. “Are you angry, Ben?”
“Oh, no,” he admitted. “If all the girls reacted as you have, the High Command would order ‘bombs away.’ What did it feel like?”
“Like a paratrooper taking his first jump… That is, at first. Then, I thought, well, if I’m going to be raped, I might as well relax and enjoy it. But, I’ll admit, Ben, it wasn’t unpleasant, and I can see where it would be worth a dollar sixty-eight to spinsters. It felt like a cave full of frightened bats fluttering out in broad daylight…
“Get out of here, Ben, before I crawl over the table after you!”
Hansen exited chuckling. He loved the give-and-take of family life with its intimacies, and when he turned in his report to Sug and Ogie, they were going to be bowled over by its note of optimism.
Strangely, neither the admiral nor the Secretary of Defense seemed excited over the Partisan League of Women Voters. Admiral Primrose was alert, as always, doodling behind his desk, but the secretary, sprawled on the admiral’s settee with his hands linked across his stomach, listened with detachment. At times, one of them would break into his report with questions that seemed hardly relevant to the captain.
“Was your spouse absent for any length of time before commencement of coition?” The secretary’s question was asked in an abstract, almost bored manner.
“Absolutely
not.”
“Did you detect the odor of eucalyptus?”
“Never!”
“Chlorophyl?” His question was directed to the admiral.
Primrose, doodling on a note sheet, said, “Possibly. Carey knows chemistry.”
“How did Sue Benson impress you?” Defense drawled.
Hansen thought for a moment to gather his impressions into one succinct and appropriate figure of speech.
“Balls, sir,” he said finally. “She was wearing sandals and shorts when they dropped by in the afternoon. When she walked the muscles popped out on her calves like billiard balls, and her kneecaps were croquet balls. She was fairly broad abeam for a short girl, and she had a bouncy way of walking that made her buttocks look like basketballs being dribbled. And…”
Hansen caught himself. In his own voice, he heard the avidity for lewd details he so condemned in the men around him, but it had brought the Secretary of Defense bolt upright on the couch, leaning forward, gripping the edge of the seat. Out of the corner of his eye, Hansen could see the admiral’s pencil pause above a doodle.
He resumed the old abstract and impersonal tones of a naval officer describing a lady. “She was a very cute and charming young miss.”
“Continue, Captain. Continue,” Defense said. “Her breasts?”
“Her breasts, sir?”
“Bowling balls or tennis balls?”
Hansen was being taken aback by the civilian’s effrontery until the admiral interjected, “Or quoits?”
Looking directly at the admiral, Hansen answered, “Polo balls, sir.”
“Say, Sug,” Defense said, “did you hear about the girl from Detroit? With her thing she was very adroit. She could narrow it in to the width of a pin or flatten it out like a quoit.”
“At the moment I was thinking of a lady in Scotland,” the admiral said, resuming his doodling. “Tell me. Captain, at any time during your association, did you hear the ladies use words not familiar to you?”
“Well, sir, it was a very intellectual gathering. Both girls and my daughter read books, and Helga takes courses. Sue was talking about the neo-Romanticism of Capulets. Now, ‘neo-Romanticism’ isn’t a word that pops up…”