What happened was that Randy telephoned Phil and said he was about to go to Uruguay to shoot perdiz, which is what the Uruguayans call quail, and wondered if Phil would like to go along. Surprising Randy, Phil said that he would have to ask permission of Madame Brunhilde and would get back to him.
When Phil asked Madame Brunhilde if he could go to Uruguay with Randy, Madame Brunhilde responded, surprising Phil not at all, “I don’t give a good EXPLETIVE DELETED!! where you go.”
So Phil called Randy back and said he would be delighted to go, providing they had a pre-trip agreement between gentlemen about who paid for what. From everything he had heard about Randy Bruce, he thought it entirely possible that once they arrived in Uruguay, Randy would announce, “Oh, my God, I forgot my EXPLETIVE DELETED!! wallet. You pay now, and I’ll pay you later.”
What Randy proposed was that each would pay separately for the airplane tickets, and that other expenses would be paid for on a “Your Turn–My Turn” basis. In other words, Randy would pay for their first meal on the road, and then Phil would pay for the next mutual expense, whether it was a taxi ride, or another meal, et cetera.
And so they went to Uruguay, where the perdiz shooting over dogs is the best in the world, the beef magnificent, the women attractive—albeit moral, which disappointed Randy—and up near the Brazilian border, where they hunted, the price of Famous Pheasant Scotch, which is about $36 per bottle in the States, was $6.50.
So they hunted and ate and drank a lot of Famous Pheasant at $6.50 per bottle, or $0.45 per drink in Uruguay’s famed whiskerías. And then it was time to go home.
They got as far as Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where they would board Aerolíneas Argentinas’s Flight 707 for the next leg of their flight to America’s Token Third World Airport, commonly known as Miami International. From Florida they would fly directly home to Muddiebay.
There at the gate in Buenos Aires, with tears in her dark eyes, an Aerolíneas Argentinas agent announced (a) there would be a slight delay in the departure of Flight 707, and (b) that the Gaucho Club, Aerolíneas Argentinas’s club for business-class passengers that offered complimentary intoxicants and peanuts to those awaiting their flights, was temporarily closed for repairs.
She then handed them vouchers good for one twelve-ounce bottle of Quilmes cerveza, which means beer, and one one-ounce bag of peanuts at the Ezeiza Airport Cocktail Lounge.
“Well, what the hell,” Randy announced, “let’s wait over there and have a drink of Famous Pheasant. It’s my turn to buy.”
Four hours later, Randy and Phil learned there was a price differential in the cost of Famous Pheasant by the drink in the whiskerías of Uruguay and the Ezeiza Airport Cocktail Lounge. In the former, as previously noted, the cost was $0.45 per drink. In the latter, it was $13.50. And the six bags of peanuts they consumed after consuming the free one-ounce bag came at a cost of $5 per bag.
It took Phil a little bit of time to realize that Randy was having to pull twenty- and fifty-dollar bills from where he had had them cleverly concealed on his person to come up with the wherewithal to settle the tab, but he took a look at same.
“Hey, we should split this,” Phil said, rather thickly, as he had been soaking up what he thought were $0.45 drinks like a blotter for four hours.
“Listen to me, Phil,” Randy replied. “Although I have been royally EXPLETIVE DELETED!! raped by these EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Argentinians, I am an Old Boy of the Muddiebay Military Academy, and when we MBMA Old Boys make a deal, we keep it. It was my turn, and I will pay the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! price for not looking at the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! menu to see what these thieving EXPLETIVE DELETED!! were charging.”
And he would not be dissuaded, even though he was bombed, as they say, out of his mind.
After that, Phil looked more kindly on Randy and, as the years passed, went hunting with him all over the world, and gave in, as has been previously chronicled, to Randy’s pleadings to go to Scotland and meet with Charles William George Michael Bertram, the Earl of Abercrombie, who, as has been previously related, was already known to Phil as Bertie from Bertie’s steeplechasing days.
There were several reasons Phil could go all over the world to hunt with Randy.
For one thing, authors do not have eight-to-five, five-days-a-week jobs with two weeks off during the summer to visit Disneyland and other vacation spots. Instead, they work seven days a week from oh dark hundred until exhaustion. They can, however, take off for a week or more whenever the opportunity to do so arises. And then, too, there was the Whorehouse Decision, which made all of Phil’s hunting expenses deductible as long as he called them “research.”
[ TWO ]
Similarly, Phil developed sort of an older-brother-to-younger-brother relationship with K. J. O’Hara, Jr. They became close to the point where Junior confided in Phil that his heart had been captured by one of the airheaded blondes with nice breastworks and a tight little bottom and that he was thinking of asking her to become Mrs. K. J. O’Hara, Jr.
“Are you out of your EXPLETIVE DELETED!! mind?” Phil blurted. “That stupid bimbo is after your money, you dumb EXPLETIVE DELETED!! That’s all she’s after. And there’s a lot more money, now that your father and his brother proved your mother and I wrong about that stupid—now recognized as monumentally brilliant—idea they had about taking the wheels off truck trailers, calling them ‘containers,’ and loading them onto boats.”
“I’m disappointed to hear you say that,” Junior said.
“You asked for the truth and I gave it my best shot.”
“I meant that my intended will be disappointed not only to hear what you think of her but also that you won’t be my best man at our wedding, Thursday next, as I promised her, and personally hoped you would be.”
“If you promise not to tell Miss Airhead what I think about her, which would complicate our relationship post-honeymoon, I will stand up beside you while you marry your airhead.”
Phil was also Junior’s best man when Junior married Airhead Number Two, and Airhead Number Three, but not at Junior’s nuptials to Airhead Number Four, because Number Four had heard what Phil had said about her predecessors.
Airhead Number Four had absolutely forbidden Junior—now known, after the passing of both his father and his uncle, as K.J. the Container King—to have anything to do with Phil and his circle of friends, post-honeymoon, so K.J. the Container King had to reluctantly decline Mr. Randy Bruce’s kind invitation to go pop some pheasants in Scotland with The Tuesday Luncheon Club and the boys.
—
Phil had some familial losses of his own.
The year that Franz Josef matriculated in the pre-kindergarten class of the Marietta Fieldstone School of Organic Education, Phil took a picture of his offspring all decked out in their new go-to-school clothes from the Goodhope Slightly Used Children’s Clothing Discount Outlet and tucked it, together with a letter, into an envelope.
It read:
Dear Mother:
In case you have been wondering what I’ve been up to since we were last in touch, you will find enclosed a picture of my family.
Pictured (left to right) are your grandson Philip Wallingford Williams IV, who is six and in the first grade at the Marietta Fieldstone School of Organic Education here in Goodhope, Miss., where we make our home. Next to Little Phil, as we call him, is Brunhilde Wienerwald Williams, Junior, your granddaughter, who is seven, and in the second grade of the same school. Next, holding Franz Josef Williams, also your grandson, in a firm grip on her lap is my wife, Madame Brunhilde Wienerwald Williams, a former ballerina of the Vienna State Opera, who is deputy chair to the McNamara-O’Hara Chair of Classical Ballet Dancing at Hilly Springs College, a Jesuit institution in Muddiebay, which is across Muddiebay Bay from Goodhope. Franz Josef, who is five, will enter pre-kindergarten this year.
In case you di
dn’t recognize me, because of my receding forehead, I am the man standing behind Madame Brunhilde.
I have found interesting employment in the publishing industry, which supports a decent life for all of us.
With my best regards to Dr. Michaels, I am,
Your son,
Philip
P.S.: Please tell Dr. Michaels I hope he is enjoying my late father’s set of golf clubs.
After thinking it over, Phil sent essentially the same letter to his Aunt Grace, enclosing similar photographs. The first reply came three weeks later, the day Franz Josef became the first pre-kindergarten student in the history of the Organic School to be expelled. What he had done, in a skit on the grass, in which he and fellow prekindergartner Teresa-Ann Fogarty were supposed to skip onto the “stage” costumed (draped in brown cloth) as mushrooms, was to pour a gallon of gray paint over his costar and himself (he said that while he had never seen brown mushrooms he had seen a lot of gray Agaricus bisporus) to improve the costuming.
When Franz Josef and Teresa-Ann skipped onto the stage, dripping gray paint at every skip, his costar’s mother screamed and then assaulted the skit’s directoress, twenty-two-year-old Miss Penelope Greene, with the umbrella under which she had been protecting her complexion from the harmful rays of the sun.
Miss Greene then fainted, necessitating the calling of the Goodhope Volunteer Ambulance Service. These first responders responded with alacrity, and soon both dancers, the girl dancer’s mother, and Miss Greene were on their way to the emergency room of Richards Hospital, which serves Goodhope.
Since there was no room in the Goodhope Volunteer Ambulance Service ambulance for Phil, he had to follow in his Jaguar, which caused him to arrive at Richards Hospital perhaps five minutes after the others.
When he entered the emergency room, he found Mrs. Helena Fogarty demanding of the medical staff that they remove the gray paint from Teresa-Ann immediately, rather than simultaneously from Teresa-Ann and Franz Josef, whom she described at the top of her lungs as “that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! five-year-old EXPLETIVE DELETED!! monster!”
“Madam,” Phil said politely, “please refrain from calling my Franz Josef a EXPLETIVE DELETED!! monster.”
At that point, Mr. Terence Fogarty, Teresa-Ann’s father, who had been known as “Terrible Terry” when he had been a 320-pound All-American tackle at Ole Miss, entered the conversation.
“My wife can call that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! monster of yours anything she pleases, you EXPLETIVE DELETED!!,” Mr. Fogarty said. And then, to emphasize his point, he grabbed Phil by the neck and lifted him off the ground.
This was a mistake on his part, Mr. Fogarty soon learned.
Phil, in a Pavlovian reaction, brought into play some of the wide variety of kicks and fist and elbow strikes of Taekkyeon that he had learned at the Royal Korean Archery & Taekkyeon Academy on Dried Fish Street in London and never forgotten.
Mr. “Terrible Terry” Fogarty instantly found himself begging for mercy as he lay on the ground, on his back, with Phil’s foot on his groin area.
Phil thought that would be the end of it—or would be the end of it, once the emergency room staff had finished shaving the heads of Teresa-Ann and Franz Josef—but he was wrong.
The very next day, Mr. Dyson Samuels, president of the Second National Bank of Goodhope and also of the board of directors of the Marietta Fieldstone School of Organic Education, called upon Mr. and Madame Williams and said that at the emergency meeting of the board held the previous evening, Phil had been elected to the board, and that if he accepted, Franz Josef would be allowed back into the school.
Phil was trying hard to think of a way he could decline the honor and at the same time have Franz Josef’s expulsion forgiven when Madame Brunhilde saved him the effort.
“Deal,” she said. “Say ‘thank you,’ Phil.”
And so Phil joined the board.
When he went to his first board meeting, Mr. Samuels took him aside and explained the board’s reasons and what Phil’s role on the board would be.
“We have a little problem, Mr. Williams,” Banker Samuels said. “It has plagued us for years, but has now reached something of a pinnacle, problem-wise. It deals with the attire in which our teenaged young lady students come to school to take advantage of all the educational benefits the Marietta Fieldstone School of Organic Education has to offer.”
“And what is that?”
“Don’t interrupt me. Bankers who loan people money don’t expect to be interrupted. All they expect to hear from people like you is ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘Thank you.’”
“Sorry.”
“Teresa-Ann, over whom your son Franz Josef poured the gray paint, has an older sister, Barbara-Sue, who is sixteen. Others of our young ladies look up to Barbara-Sue as a role model.”
“That’s nice.”
“It would be if Barbara-Sue was not in the habit of coming to school each morning dressed and made up as if she’s on her way to work as a hooker. By which I mean in a short skirt exposing much of her EXPLETIVE DELETED!!, topped by a T-shirt which (a) appears molded to her bosom and (b) on which is emblazoned such witticisms as ‘EXPLETIVE DELETED!! teachers’ and a picture of a rooster over the legend “EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Inspector’ and things of that sort.
“And because, as I said, Barbara-Sue is a role model to her peers, we have in the morning a parade of our young ladies which the casual observer would think was a parade of hookers marching to work in an economy-class brothel. This has the to-be-expected result of inflaming the hormones of our young gentleman students, to the detriment of their thinking about calculus and Modern European History, and turning it toward carnal congress outside the boundaries of holy matrimony. You taking my meaning?”
“Yes, sir. May I ask why you don’t have a word with Mrs. Fogarty about proper school attire for her daughter?”
“We have tried that. The last three times we tried to do that, Mrs. Fogarty said unkind things about the three gentlemen we sent in such a loud voice that it woke Terrible Terry up, whereupon he went to his front door, grabbed our board members by their collars, and threw them off the Fogarty porch and into the shrubbery.”
“I think I suspect where this is going,” Phil said.
“We thought perhaps, in view of the manner in which you set Mr. Fogarty on his EXPLETIVE DELETED!! in the emergency room yesterday . . .”
“I’ll have a word with him, if that is what you’re asking.”
“That is what I’m asking. And so far as your other duties as a board member are concerned, don’t worry about them. All you have to do is join the chorus of ‘Yes, sirs’ when I finish telling the board what they have just decided to do.”
“I understand.”
Phil served on the board until Franz Josef graduated, at which time Madame Brunhilde gave him permission to resign. During his reign, so to speak, the young ladies of the Marietta Fieldstone School of Organic Education came to school looking like happy, modestly dressed schoolgirls, as the fathers of the girls had heard and believed what Mr. Williams had done to Terrible Terry Fogarty in the emergency room of Richards Hospital and decided they would rather face the wrath of their wives and daughters than that of Mr. Williams.
As previously stated, the first reply to Phil’s letters to his mother and his Aunt Grace came three weeks later, the day Franz Josef became the first pre-kindergarten student in the history of the Organic School to be expelled.
Curiously, it was from his stepfather:
Dear Philip,
I am responding to your letter of recent date to your mother because she is undergoing psychiatric treatment under my psychiatric direction at the Seton Hall Psychiatric Institute here in South Orange and cannot do so herself.
Not only are patients at the SHPI denied for their own protection the use of sharp instruments, such as pencils, but your mother is no
t in a condition to use a pencil even if she was allowed to have one. In layman’s terms, she is completely bonkers, and her prognosis is not good. In other words, she’s not going to get any better.
In these circumstances, the Hippocratic Oath I took when I became a doctor of medicine so long ago, which included the phrase Primum non nocere, which in layman’s terms means “First do no harm,” obviously precludes my showing her your letter, which if she could read it, and she’s in no condition to read it, would push her even further across that line which separates the sane from the loony tunes.
She was always worried that you would marry some foreigner and contribute to the further degeneration of the gene pool by breeding, which the photograph you sent of those ugly children clearly demonstrates you have indeed done.
The kindest thing for you to do is stay out of what’s left of her life.
Under these circumstances, I’m sure you will understand that I have to withdraw my previous offer to provide you pro bono psychiatric services, even though you obviously need whatever psychiatric help you can get.
Insofar as your late father’s golf clubs are concerned: When I tried to turn them in on a better set, the Pro Shop at Baltusrol Country Club seized them because your father had not paid for them when he purchased them from the Winged Foot Country Club and they had apparently shared that information with Baltusrol.
With all best wishes, your stepfather,
KM
Keyes Michaels, M.D.
The second reply came three days after the first:
MISS GRACE ALICE PATRICIA HORTENSE WILLIAMS
MAYFLOWER-WILLIAMS HOUSE
BACK BAY, BOSTON, MASS.
Dear Nephew Philip:
Frankly, I always worried that when you married you would follow in the footsteps of your late father—my late brother—and take to wife someone whose position in life was below the salt, as he did.
I never in my wildest nightmares, however, dreamed that you would take to wife someone who is not only below the salt, but also below the pepper, the A.1. sauce, the Worcestershire sauce, and the Tabasco sauce as well.
The Hunting Trip Page 31