“Specifically, Miss Gallagher, Mr. Bruce concealed from Mr. Williams that there would be members of your gender on this hunting trip knowing that if Mr. Williams knew there would be females on the trip, he wouldn’t go.”
“Two questions,” Ginger said. “One, why would Master Williams object to members of my gender going on a hunting trip with him? Just off the top of my head, I can think of many ways this member of the gentle sex could royally entertain Master Williams on a hunting trip, especially at night when it would be too dark to see anything to shoot at.”
“Excuse me, Miss Gallagher,” Phil said. “Would you please cease and desist from calling me ‘Master’? Master Philip was what I was called by the teachers in the many boarding schools of my childhood and youth, and it brings back many painful memories. And right now, as I am experiencing my midlife crisis, I don’t think I can handle any more painful memories.”
“I will cease and desist calling you Master if you cease and desist calling me Miss Gallagher and instead call me Ginger, and if you tell me what you would like me to call you.”
“Ginger, I would not interpret your calling me Phil as disrespect on your part toward your elders, even taking into account the great disparity in our ages.”
“Thank you, Phil.”
“You’re welcome, Ginger.”
“Getting back to my second question,” Ginger said. “Why did that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! deceive Phil?”
“I haven’t gotten to the bottom of that mystery yet, but I will. But I know ol’ Randy well enough to suspect it has something to do with hanky-panky.”
Phil said, “It probably has something to do with that bimbo who came into the first-class cabin and said she was glad to see the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! as she was afraid he had missed what she called ‘our flight.’”
“That bimbo would be Mrs. Carol-Anne Crandall,” Moses said thoughtfully. “My Rachel has often confided in me that she suspects Carol-Anne is far more randy—lowercase r—than anyone suspects. But that is speculation. The question before us is what does Phil wish to do about Randy?”
“I don’t understand the question,” Ginger said.
“At the moment, Randy is about to be hauled off to Fulton County Jail on a variety of charges, including attacking a cripple on an airplane while in flight. Frankly, that would not break my heart, and I know my Rachel would be delighted, but on the other hand, I am his lawyer and have a certain obligation to defend the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! even though my heart isn’t in it.
“So the call is yours, Phil. Before you return home, do you want me to spring ol’ Randy from the slam, or do you wish to leave him in Durance Vile?”
“Two factors bear on the problem, Moses,” Phil said. “One is that, inasmuch as I am going through my midlife crisis, I’m just not up to going home and having to explain to the Angry Austrian—”
“Phil,” Ginger interrupted, “you’re not old enough to be having a midlife crisis. And who is the Angry Austrian?”
“Actually, I’m five and three-quarters years late in having it. Although I understand how someone of your tender years wouldn’t understand that. The Angry Austrian is my wife and the mother of our three children—the eldest of which is a daughter about as old as you . . .”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-five.”
“I may not look it, Phil, but at twenty-eight I’m much older than that.”
“You don’t look that old. But we’re getting off the subject. I really don’t want to go home because when the Angry Austrian hears both what that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Randy Bruce has done to me, and also how I’m suffering in my midlife crisis, she will find this amusing to the point where she will laugh hysterically.”
“That’s true,” Moses said thoughtfully.
“And then as I have been lying here with Ginger gently dabbing at my wounded forehead with her wonderfully smelling handkerchief, I have been considering the wise wisdom of the thirty-fifth President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who wrote, ‘Don’t get angry. Get even.’”
“How are you going to get even with Randy?” Moses asked.
“I haven’t figured out all the details yet, but I know I can’t get even if he’s in England and Scotland and I’m back home with the AA laughing hysterically at me.”
“Good thinking,” Moses said.
“So I guess I’ll have to go to England and Scotland.”
“But Randy will be in the Fulton County Jail, where it would be difficult for you to get at him to seek the justified vengeance you seek.”
“Not if you can keep him from getting hauled off to the Fulton County slam. Can you?”
“Of course I can. I’m a highly compensated attorney-at-law. I thought you knew that.”
“Then do so. Tell him that out of the goodness of my heart, I am not going to press charges.”
“You have a good heart, Phil,” Ginger said.
“And that he can go to London and Scotland,” Phil went on, “providing he rides to London in economy tourist class in the way back of the airplane, near the toilet, something he has never done before in his life.”
“That’s true and also very cruel of you,” Moses said. “Good for you.”
“And make sure he waits at the gate until he is the very last passenger to board so that as many passengers as possible will witness his humiliation,” Phil added. “And en route to London, I will think of other very cruel things I can do to the EXPLETIVE DELETED!!.”
“I’m on my way,” Moses said, and left.
Ginger leaned over Phil and resumed dabbing gently at the wound on his forehead, which had just about stopped bleeding.
He closed his eyes.
“Why did you close your eyes?” Ginger asked.
Phil opened his eyes and found himself looking into Ginger’s eyes.
He took a deep breath.
“Looking into your beautiful twenty-five-year-old blue eyes, Ginger, I find that I cannot lie to you. The reason I closed my eyes just now was because when they were open and you leaned over to dab at my wound, in so doing you exposed to my sight your absolutely spectacular and unrestrained-by-a-brassiere mammary glands, and I knew that as a forty-five-year-old man in the midst of his midlife crisis I should not be peering hungrily at the breastworks of someone only ten years senior of the single malt I sip, as doing so causes my heart to beat savagely.”
Ginger chuckled.
“Close your eyes, Phil,” she said softly.
When he had done so, she went on softly, “Ask yourself, Phil, if you really think that when a twenty-eight-year-old female leans over a slightly older but remarkably well-preserved-except-for-male-pattern-baldness man in such a way that she knows she will be giving him an unrestrained view of her naked bosom, she’s doing so to chase him out of the room?”
“Let me think about that,” Phil replied.
Because of the beating of his heart, Phil had a hard time hearing himself think, but after ninety seconds or so of doing so, he opened his eyes and found himself looking into the eyes of the distinguished gentleman his own age he had first seen when they carried him off the airplane on the stretcher and from thence to the International Terminal where he was now.
“If I may, Herr Williams, may I present my card?” the man said, and proceeded to present it.
Phil glanced at it:
DR. WALDO PFEFFERKOPF
HAUPTGESCHÄFTSFÜHRER, GENERALDIREKTOR UND KÜNSTLERISCHER LEITER UND VORSITZENDER DES VORSTANDS
DIE WIENER STAATSOPER UND CORPS DE BALLET
OPERNRING 2, 1010 WEIN 1
Phil, because he spoke German, knew that he was holding the professional business card of Dr. Waldo Pfefferkopf, general manager, artistic director, and chairman of the board of the Vienna State Opera and Corps de Ballet, which did business at #1 Opernring in Vie
nna’s first district in Austria.
“What can I do for you, Doctor?” Phil asked politely, and then before Dr. Pfefferkopf had time to reply, asked, “Have we met before? You look familiar and ‘Waldo Pfefferkopf’ seems to ring a bell in my memory.”
“Very briefly, the day before you were married.”
“It’ll come to me,” Phil said.
But it didn’t for a while.
“Herr Williams, I would deeply appreciate a little of your time so that we may talk seriously about your wife, Madame Brunhilde Wienerwald Williams. Would it be convenient to have our little chat now?”
“Frankly, no. As you may have guessed, since I’m in the International Terminal, I’m about to travel internationally, specifically to London. Furthermore, I’m in the midst of my midlife crisis, and talking about my wife, Madame Brunhilde, is the last thing I wish to do right now.”
“Well, then, I guess I’ll have to have another shot at talking to you in London. I understand you’ll be staying at Claridge’s Hotel?”
“I will be, but how did you know that?”
“Madame Brunhilde told me,” Dr. Pfefferkopf said. “See you in London.”
He left.
“What was that all about?” Ginger asked.
“I have no idea.”
“You can open your eyes again, Phil, as I am about to lean over you again while I dab gently at your forehead,” Ginger said.
“Before you start dabbing and I start looking where I shouldn’t be looking, I really would like to get this EXPLETIVE DELETED!! cast off my leg. We’re already past security.”
“If you leave it on, Phil, I can push you in a wheelchair to the gate, and we can get on the London airplane ahead of everybody else.”
“Good thinking!” Phil said, and almost added, “Especially for a well-endowed blonde,” but instead said, “You’re going to London?”
“And Scotland. I’m hoping to show you that there are exceptions to your belief that all women on a hunting trip are a pain in that part of the anatomy on which we sit. All I need to do is make a quick telephone call to my private pilot to tell him to go to Heathrow and wait for me there.”
“If you have a private plane, why don’t we fly to London on that?”
“Your call. But I was thinking you wanted to see that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Randy Bruce’s humiliation as he makes his way all the way down the aisle to the last seat by the toilet in the economy tourist class cabin.”
“You’re right again, of course, Ginger! We really think alike, don’t we?”
“Oh, I hope so! Now open your eyes and look into mine, or at whatever else your heart desires.”
[ THREE ]
Heathrow International Airport
London, England
Tuesday morning, September 16, 1975
On the flight to London, Ginger discreetly took the cast off Phil’s leg just after takeoff and didn’t put it back on until just after they touched down at Heathrow International Airport.
Phil didn’t get to actually see Randy’s humiliation as he marched to the end of the aisle in the economy tourist class cabin, but Ginger recorded the event for posterity for him with her movie camera and said if they could find time when they got to Claridge’s Hotel he could watch it over and over to his heart’s content.
She said anything else he might have in mind for when they got there was fine with her.
On the flight to London, they sipped champagne and held hands and dozed, with her head resting on his shoulder in a position that permitted him to inhale the delightful smell of her long blond hair.
Cripples have the same de-boarding priorities as they do boarding priorities, so as Phil and Ginger had been first to get on the plane, they were first to get off and soon found themselves standing beside one of two of London’s famed red double-decker buses.
Instead of signs reading “Trafalgar Square” and “Kingston upon Thames” and “Greenwich and Lewisham,” and the like, the signs on these buses were hand-lettered “Magna Carta” and “Ladies Lunch.” Intuiting the latter was intended to indicate the bus on which The Ladies of The Tuesday Luncheon Club were to be carried to Claridge’s Hotel, Phil bowed Ginger onto the latter.
“Go upstairs, baby,” he said.
“What did you call me?”
“Uh, slip of the tongue. A man my age should not be calling a woman your age anything personal like that under any circumstances. Chalk it up to my midlife crisis.”
“Don’t be silly, my precious. I love it when you call me baby!”
Ginger got on the bus and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Phil followed, enjoying the convenient point of view of her tight white skirt as it ascended before him.
“All the way up in front,” Phil suggested, once on the upper deck.
“All the way up in front what, Precious?”
Phil took her meaning.
“All the way up in front, baby,” he said, and blushed.
“See how easy it is, Precious?”
When they were sitting in the front row of seats—which, for those not familiar with London’s famed red double-decker buses, is way up front of the vehicle, even farther forward than the driver—Ginger asked why they were sitting there.
“I’ll tell you if you promise not to laugh,” Phil said.
“You have my word.”
“I have always regarded sitting up here as a thrilling surreal experience, like Salvador Dalí and his bent clocks. When the bus is moving, you race down the street, around corners, et cetera, and you have absolutely no control of how fast you’re going, et cetera. You see what I mean?”
“No,” Ginger confessed. “But as I am convinced that as we skip down life’s path together, I will inevitably say something stupid like that, that you won’t understand, you get a pass for that one.”
“There is a small problem with our skipping down life’s path together, as much as I would like nothing more, in that I am a married man with a wife and three children, one of whom is only three years younger than you.”
“So you keep reminding me. You know what I say, Precious?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Carpe diem. Think of what’s going on between us as a thrilling surreal experience that may or may not last, but will if I have anything to do with it, and worry about your Angry Austrian and your three kids if and when that problem rears its ugly head. Carpe diem.”
Phil of course knew Carpe diem meant “seize the moment.” So he seized the moment by seizing Ginger and kissing her. And she kissed him back.
Then there came what sounded at first to Phil like celestial trumpets a little out of tune, but which turned out to be the sound of the bus driver blowing the bus’s horns to attract the Lunch Ladies and their mates to his bus.
As they watched them dragging their luggage to the bus, Phil said, “I feel so good, Ginger baby, that with your permission I’m going to fire up a cigar.”
“You don’t need my permission, Precious. I love the smell of a good cigar. As a matter of fact it was the smell of your Don Fernando Super Churchill that first attracted me to you when I first saw you with that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Randy Bruce in Key Biscayne.”
So Phil fired up a hand-rolled Don Fernando Super Churchill eight-inch Duro with Connecticut shade-grown wrapper. He puffed happily away on it as Ginger sniffed the aroma appreciatively as the Lunch Ladies and their mates got onto the bus.
He saw the bimbo whom Moses tentatively identified as Carol-Anne Crandall, the randy lady who was most likely involved in hanky-panky with Randy. And of course Moses and Rachel Lipshutz, whom he knew. And Pancho Gonzales, who was with a beautiful Latina.
“That’s that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! fried banana eater and his so-called niece, Pilar,” Ginger said.
And then Phil exclaimed, “My God, look at that gorilla! He must
weigh at least three hundred and twenty pounds and stand six feet ten or more!”
He had no way of knowing it but he was referring to Mr. “King Kong” Kingman, the proprietor of the King Cadillac, Buick, Chevrolet, and Harley-Davidson Auto Mall in Muddiebay, who had been known as “King Kong Kingman” when he had been an All-American linebacker at Ole Miss because he had then weighed 320 pounds.
That he had picked up a little weight in the ensuing years was made evident by the degree to which the bus tilted when Mr. Kingman climbed aboard.
Finally, last and least, Mr. Randy Bruce boarded the bus, and it finally started off.
No sooner had it moved than a loud voice called out, “Hey, you in the front! Get rid of that stinking stogie!”
Phil inquired of Ginger if she had seen any “No Smoking” or even any “No Cigar Smoking” signs. She replied in the negative, so he took another puff on his Don Fernando Super Churchill.
“Hey, stupid!” came the call. “You deaf, or what? Get rid of that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! cigar!”
Phil returned rudeness in kind, by raising his left hand balled into a fist save for the index finger, which remained extended. It could have meant that for some reason he was signaling the number one, but he wasn’t, and the recipient of his signal took Phil’s intended meaning.
“All right, EXPLETIVE DELETED!!, get rid of that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! stogie or I’ll shove it up your EXPLETIVE DELETED!! and then throw you and your EXPLETIVE DELETED!! bimbo off the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! bus.”
Phil started to rise so that he could remonstrate with the gentleman, but Ginger restrained him, and limited their common response to raising her hand as Phil had raised his, that is, balled and with the index finger extended.
Then a female voice was heard.
Phil and Ginger had no way of knowing, but it was that of Mrs. Nancy-Jane Kingman, wife of King Kong, and reliably reported to be the only human being on the face of the planet Mr. Kingman lived in terror of.
“Wait until we get to the hotel, dumpling,” Mrs. Kingman was saying. “Then you can tear the stogie-puffing EXPLETIVE DELETED!! apart.”
[ FOUR ]
The Hunting Trip Page 34