The Hunting Trip
Page 32
I suppose it’s futile of me to suggest that you should legally change your name, but I don’t think it unreasonable of me to ask that you stay as far south of the Mason-Dixon Line as possible. Forever.
In case you have been fantasizing vis-à-vis inheriting any of the Williams family money, please be advised that on my demise all of my worldly possessions, in other words, every last Buffalo nickel, will go to the fund for the preservation of the Mayflower-Williams House.
Sincerely,
Grace Alice Patricia Hortense Williams (Miss)
[ THREE ]
Phil of course made other friends in the years that passed as the water flowed under the Muddiebay Bay Causeway and ultimately into the Gulf of Mexico.
One of the oldest of these was Bobby “Fender” Bender, proprietor of the Foggy Point Garage & Good As New Used Parts, whom he met while still residing in the Grand Hotel, in other words, before Brunhilde was Madame Brunhilde and before Brunhilde had bought the house on Creek Drive.
Phil had gone to Mr. Bender’s place of business to have the oil changed in the Jaguar, which had driven all those miles from Fort Benning. He would have preferred to take the car to a Jaguar dealer, but the list of “Your Neighborhood Jaguar Dealers” that came with the car listed the nearest dealer to Foggy Point, Mississippi, as being in New Orleans, Louisiana, which the map showed was a long EXPLETIVE DELETED!! way to go to have the oil in one’s Jaguar replaced.
Mr. Bender’s place of business was on a dirt road about three miles inland from Foggy Point. It was located inside a barn, or shed, that had seen better days. It was advertised by a welcoming sign mounted over an ancient fire truck:
FOGGY POINT GARAGE & GOOD AS NEW USED PARTS
NO SOLICITING
SALESMEN WILL BE SHOT
NO TRESPASSING
When Mr. Bender came out of the barn, he was wearing a soup-strainer mustache, blue denim overalls, no shirt or undershirt, and an old pair of Army combat boots.
“What?” Mr. Bender greeted Phil.
“I was hoping to have the oil in my Jaguar changed.”
“I don’t like Yankees and I hate EXPLETIVE DELETED!! foreign cars.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Sorry to have troubled you.”
“Wait a minute. Maybe we can work something out. What are those cartons in the backseat?”
“Shotgun shells. Specifically Winchester AA 12-gauge shotgun shells containing 1⅛-ounce #9 Shot.”
“That’s what people shoot at coffee saucers, or whatever the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! they’re called, for fun, right?”
“That is correct, Mr. Bender. They are called ‘clay pigeons.’”
“They look like coffee saucers for midgets. But I got a buddy who does that off his pier,” Mr. Bender explained. “You want to swap, say, ten boxes of them for an oil change and a lube job?”
“I would be delighted to do so.”
“Okay, when I open the door, drive that ugly EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Jag-You-Are inside.”
“Yes, sir.”
The barn door creaked open. Phil drove into the barn and found himself next to a Maserati convertible, and with his bumper against the doors of a Lincoln and a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost sedan. Elsewhere in the barn was what looked like half a million dollars’ worth of the very latest service equipment, a half-dozen luxury cars of assorted makes, and three motorcycles in various stages of disassembly.
“Nice cars,” Phil said as he got out of the Jaguar.
“The Italian Special there,” Mr. Bender explained, “which is a EXPLETIVE DELETED!! nightmare to keep running, belongs to my pal Junior, the one I told you shoots at those midget coffee saucers off his pier. The Lincoln belongs to his mother, who is a great lady. The Rolls-Royce, which is a EXPLETIVE DELETED!! nightmare in EXPLETIVE DELETED!! spades to keep running, belongs to the Grand Hotel, which is owned by my buddy’s father, who is married to my buddy’s mother.”
“I see.”
“Well, let’s get your EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Limey Special in the air, drain the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! oil out of the ugly EXPLETIVE DELETED!!, and see what the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! else is wrong with it. Because there’s always something wrong with a Jag-You-Are, if you can get them to run. Lucas Electronics isn’t called the Prince of Darkness for nothing.”
Phil intuited on the spot that he had found the man to maintain his beloved Jaguar against all mechanical evil whatsoever.
And so it came to pass, even as the years passed and he hung onto the car despite the demands of Madame Brunhilde of him to get rid of what she called das alte Gottverdammt Cat Car.
Phil was to come to realize that he kept the Jaguar because Madame Brunhilde hated it. It had become, in effect, his silent defiance of his wife.
XV
EVERYBODY GOES HUNTING
Muddiebay, Mississippi
Monday, September 15, 1975
On the morning of the day that everybody went hunting for whatever they intended to hunt for, Phil went to his office, which was in the house he had originally bought on a no-money-down Veterans Administration Guaranteed Loan and from which he had moved out approximately a year later.
What happened there was that Phil, after having been a member of the Foggy Point Country Club for just over a year, had asked Woody Woodson, the Foggy Point Country Club’s recreation director, making reference to one of the dozen or so very nice homes on the country club property, “What’s a house like that, say, the one at 102 Country Club Road, worth, Woody?”
“If you’re thinking you’d like to move into 102 Country Club Road, after you bought it, of course, forget about it, Phil,” Woody replied. “It’s not the price that’ll keep you from ever living here. It’s the law of supply and demand.”
“How so?”
“So few houses, so many people who would sell their grandmothers to get one of them. One of them comes on the market every two or three years. It goes to the Number One Person on the waiting list. To get on the waiting list you have to go through a vetting policy that makes the vetting policy to get in our country club look like an open-door policy. Forget it, Phil. It’s just not in the cards for you.”
Two weeks later, when Phil drove Junior out to Foggy Point Garage & Good As New Used Parts to pick up Junior’s new toy—a Lamborghini that had died every ten miles on the way home from the dealer’s in Miami, and which ol’ Fender Bender was fixing—and also to sit around and shuck oysters and suck on cans of beer while listening to ol’ Fender Bender deliver one of his learned lectures on the current state of EXPLETIVE DELETED!! politics and international EXPLETIVE DELETED!! diplomacy, Junior said, “There’s something I forgot to tell you, Phil.”
“Which is?”
“When my mother asked where I was going, and I told her you were going to drive me out here, she said, tell Phil to please call the real estate guy if he still wants to buy 102 Country Club Road. And if he’s a little short of cash, not to be embarrassed, speak up and I’ll cut a check to tide him over.”
So the Williams family had the next week moved from Creek Drive in Goodhope to 102 Country Club Road in Foggy Point, which raised the question of what to do with the house on Creek Drive.
On the advice of Lacey Richards, L.L.D., Phil’s septuagenarian local legal counsel—Gustave “Rabbi” Warblerman, L.L.D., of course was his literary legal counsel, so Phil now was pretty well lawyered up—he retained the house as his office.
Lawyer Richards had an agenda vis-à-vis his recommendation. He was about to draw the curtain mostly shut on his long legal career. He would no longer appeal with his famed eloquence to the mercy of jurors in the Muddiebay County Courthouse to let his clients go home despite the allegations of the merciless police that they had been driving under the influence of intoxicants. Instead, Lacey Richards would devote all of his legal skill to managing trust funds, which are a l
egal device by which parents can leave their children all their worldly goods and not see the hard-earned goods squandered in six months.
He would no longer need his present chambers to do this, as he could manage trusts by sitting at a desk and using a pencil. He proposed that he close his legal chambers and move into the house on Creek Drive. He would then continue to represent Phil on local legal issues pro bono, which means for free. This would have the additional benefit of keeping the greedy claws of the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Internal Revenue Service out of their respective pies, so to speak.
And there was yet another benefit. There was a spare bedroom in the house on Creek Drive into which Lawyer Richards could hide from the wrath of his third wife.
The arrangement had worked out well over the years, in large measure because Lawyer Richards had thrown his paralegal, Mrs. Bonita Jones Pennyworth, into the deal. Paralegals are secretaries who know more about the law than the lawyers by whom they are employed and are compensated accordingly, providing they pretend “their” lawyer knows more about the law than they do.
In addition to providing legal advice to Lawyer Richards, Mrs. Pennyworth could also go for the mail, and make coffee, and, when this was necessary, cook breakfast for Lawyer Richards when he was temporarily residing in the house on Creek Drive between wives.
At this point in this narrative he was between Wife #6 and Wife #7.
—
So in the morning of the day on which everybody was going to go hunting for whatever they were hunting for, Phil went to his office in what had once been the master bedroom of the house on Creek Drive when he lived there.
Mrs. Pennyworth brought him a cup of coffee and a chocolate-covered doughnut and assured him she would be happy to go with him in the Jaguar to Muddiebay, and then drive, very carefully, the car back to the office after dropping Phil off at Mr. Randy Bruce’s home, “Our Tara,” the antebellum mansion in which Mr. Bruce lived and from which Mr. Bruce would then drive Phil to Muddiebay International Airport, where they would board the airplane that would then take them to Atlanta.
Then Phil got on the telephone.
The first call he made was to Pat O’Malley, the world-famous author of The Hunt for Gray November and other famous literary works.
Chauncey S. “Steel” Hymen, vice president, publisher, and editor in chief of J. K. Perkins & Brothers, had introduced Phil to Pat just before the publication of The Hunt for Gray November, which Steel Hymen had bought, seeing in it a slight chance of making a buck with it.
Mr. Hymen wanted Pat to see in Phil how well J. K. Perkins & Brothers treated their best-selling authors, such as by buying them dinners at semi-fancy restaurants and putting them up in three—and even four—star hotels when they traveled to the Big Apple. This, he hoped, would inspire Mr. O’Malley to write a sequel to his first work, for which he would be paid another $2,500 on acceptance payment. Eventually, Steel told Pat, he, too, might become a best-selling author like Phil.
Phil and Pat hit it off from the beginning, in large measure because after Steel had gone off to deal with important authors and left Phil and Pat to amuse themselves, which they did by touring several Irish pubs in Lower Manhattan, Phil told Pat, who was then in the aluminum siding business in his native Maryland, about J. K. Perkins & Brothers generally and Steel Hymen specifically.
Specifically, Phil told Pat that Steel was a fine editor and a good guy, but that he should keep his hand on his wallet when dealing with other members of the J. K. Perkins & Brothers management troika as otherwise, before Pat knew what was happening, his aluminum siding business would become yet another subsidiary of J. K. Perkins & Brothers, Publishers since 1812.
By midnight, Pat was so full of Knappogue Castle twelve-year-old single malt Irish whisky that Phil didn’t think Pat could make it by himself to where J. K. Perkins & Brothers was putting him up at their expense at the Economy Motor Inn in Hoboken, New Jersey, as this would involve taking a ferry across the wide Hudson River. Phil took Pat to where J. K. Perkins & Brothers was putting him up at their expense, which was in an “economy class” room in The Algonquin Hotel, a historic venue located at 59 West Forty-fourth Street in Midtown Manhattan.
Phil got Pat into the right side of the queen-sized double bed with which the room was furnished without too much effort, but once his new buddy was on his back he began to snore. Worse, Pat instantly demonstrated that he was one hell of a snorer.
Phil sought refuge in the bathroom, taking with him a “bound galley” copy of The Hunt for Gray November. Pat had been carrying a box of the bound galleys around all night, as he had been unable to give any of them away.
An hour later, Phil, who had mastered the art of speed reading while editor in chief of the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation, had finished reading the 640-page tome.
“I’ll be a EXPLETIVE DELETED!! monkey’s uncle,” Phil announced aloud, although there was no one around to hear him except Pat O’Malley, and he was in no condition to hear anything, “this is great EXPLETIVE DELETED!! writing. Move over, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway. There is a new master!”
Unbeknownst to Phil, the resident of the master bedroom in the big white house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in our nation’s capital had come to the same conclusion at just about the time Phil had so concluded.
He had purloined a copy of the galleys from the lap of a Secret Service agent who was sleeping in a chair outside the Presidential Apartments and taken it inside as he was having the same trouble with his wife, vis-à-vis snoring, as Phil was experiencing with Pat and had hoped it would bore him to sleep.
He announced this conclusion to the White House Press Corps at the eight-thirty presidential press conference the next morning.
Phil and Pat learned of this shortly after 1:30 p.m. when they were having their breakfast—vodka Bloody Mary, with triple doses of Tabasco, and one egg yolk—at the 21 Club. They learned of it through a media report on the television mounted above the bar.
Not long after, The New York Daily News and The New York Times added their versions. The former dedicated its entire front page to the story with a picture of the President holding up the bound galleys of The Hunt for Gray November over the cutline: WE ALWAYS TOLD YOU HE COULD READ!!!
The Times said, in part:
The incumbent of the Oval Office, to which office he was elected by misguided right-wingers and others of that ignorant ilk while the wiser of our citizens were apparently asleep, today announced that he had just read what he called the finest piece of literature to come down the literary pike since Tolstoy, Dickens, and Hemingway.
Even if, as some White House insiders are alleging, the First Lady had to read The Hunt for Gray November to the President, because some of the big words were just too much for the former bit player in B-grade cowboy motion pictures, his effusive praise is worthy of note.
What happened next of course is history.
The Hunt for Gray November immediately went on the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other best-seller lists as #1 and stayed there for months. It was translated into sixty-one foreign languages and made into a major motion picture starring half of the members listed on the Hollywood “A-List of Stars” list.
And Pat’s second book was even more successful than his first. And the third more successful than the second, and the fourth and fifth, und so weiter.
Phil, knowing people and the publishing business as he did, felt very sure that Pat’s success would go to his head, and that the new giant of modern American literature would quickly forget he had ever met an obscure toiler in the literary vineyards named Phil Williams.
Phil was wrong.
Phil and Pat, if anything, became closer as the years passed. Phil taught Pat how to shoot, something Pat had always wanted to try and now could afford to. Despite Phil’s best efforts, Pat had trouble hitting the side of a barn, al
though he practiced just about daily in the indoor skeet range he created in the basement of his new house, “Castle O’Malley,” which he built on the site of a former summer camp for Jewish Young Ladies on the shores of Chesapeake Bay in his native Maryland.
And when he wasn’t busy counting his money, or managing the Baltimore She Devils, the female hockey team he had bought, which took a lot of his time, Pat would often hop in his private jet airplane and fly down to Foggy Point to try to bust some birds off the end of the Container King’s pier with Phil and the boys.
It was this—Pat’s airplane—that Phil had in mind when he called Pat. If Pat had a little time to spare, going back and forth to Scotland in a private jet would be ever so much more comfortable than going through all the various levels of international transportation security EXPLETIVE DELETED!! in all those airports.
Painful experience had taught Phil that airport security devoutly believed that anyone desiring to take a shotgun with them on their travels was obviously a terrorist and to be treated accordingly.
“Sorry, Phil, old buddy, as much as I would like to go to Scotland with you,” Pat said, “I’m on my better half’s EXPLETIVE DELETED!! list and she wouldn’t even let me go into Annapolis to watch the Navy Academy Midshipwomen running aground in their sailboats, which is always good for laughs, much less go to Scotland.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Phil said. “What happened?”
Phil liked Pat’s better half and he thought he might be able to talk her into forgiving Pat for whatever he had done.
“I had a couple too many sips of Knappogue Castle twelve-year-old single malt Irish to be driving my tank.”
Pat had given himself a little present when he got the check for motion picture rights to his fifth literary work. He bought an M60A1 Patton tank from Army Surplus.