The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga)

by Stan Hayes

  Rick grinned, shaking his head. “Well, let’s do we can to make it a sweet one, anyway. Since I tried that road myself one time, all I can say is that I hope it works better for him than it did for me.”

  Jack grinned back, remembering the weekend excursion that Rick and the Bishop twins made in pursuit of a traveling evangelist’s caravan when they were still in high school. “I’ll tell you this, bub; he’s not likely to have as many good-looking traveling companions as you did. I saw ’em in New York, by the way.”

  “Oh you did, did you? And when were you going to unburden yourself of these tidings, shitbird?”

  “Sorry, turd-knocker, I thought I just did. There is, however, a little more to it than that. What do you say we check out the bar before you turn emerald-green?”

  “If you’re waitin’ on me, you’re backin’ up.” As he stood up, Rick noticed a small object on the floor. He picked it up, looked at it momentarily, tossed it up in the air, caught it and skimmed it across the bedspread toward Jack. J’you lose a little bird?”

  “Evening, ma’am,” Rick greeted La Carrousel’s elegant hostess, raising his voice over a recorded Sonny Rollins. Jack had gone into the men’s room, and they were late.

  “Good evening to you, sir. My name is Sherman. Party of one?”

  “Ah, no. Two. My friend’ll be here in just a minute. I believe Reggie Williams made reservations for us; Jack Mason?”

  “Oh, yes. The friends from his home town. I’ve put you at a nice table on the wall with his other home town friend. I know you’ll want to talk between sets, and you can hear each other a lot better back there. Is this your friend?” She nodded toward Jack’s approaching figure.

  The light in the back of the room came from small red-bulbed electric candles on each table, and Rick didn’t have a chance to question Mrs. Sherman about the other “... home town friend.” Still in the lead, his hand was on the back of a chair before he recognized her. It was Trisha McNeil, her Mona Lisa look in place, dark hair longer, and straighter, then he’d ever seen it. “Hi, Ricky,” she said, her smile tentative but genuine.

  Rick froze. Jack, pulling up short to avoid running into him, felt Rick’s vise-grip on his forearm before Trisha’s face registered on him. Within seconds, he found himself being towed on the reverse course from the one that had brought them to the table. Mrs. Sherman’s jaw was just the first to slacken as Rick strode out of La Carrousel, Jack, struggling to keep his feet, following him out the door.

  “So I take the night off,” Nick groused, a yellow ostrich driving shoe hiked up on the hump of the Cunningham’s transmission tunnel, “And I miss Oscar-winning high drama in Sepiaville. The kid don’t cotton to the Trisha/Ziggy combo, stages a Grade One bailout, and you’ve got major egg on your face with the Williams boys. Trisha too, but you’re not losing much sleep over that, right?”

  “I’ve lost enough goddamn sleep already,” Jack shot back, “Trying to keep that fucker from killing his ass driving back to Bisque drunk in the middle of the night. After all of the goddam water that’s gone over the goddam dam, she gets his ass one more goddam time. And make no mistake, this is her goddam work. At least he didn’t stick around and give her the chance to spell it out for him; one look was all he needed. She might as well have had ‘I’m fucking dear old Ziggy in the name of desegregation’ tattooed on her forehead. Her latest of many ‘look at me’ ploys. And now she’s sucked poor old Ziggy in. No telling what she told him so he’d OK her being there when we showed up.”

  “It’s a shame for this to have happened right now,” Nick said. “He’s going to need his wits about him a hundred percent of the time to get through OCS.”

  “He sure as hell will. I didn’t notice exactly when you began your night off. Were you there when he was talking about the very real possibility of his making the Army a career? Going to Ranger school, and after that, Special Forces? You don’t have to be around him long to realize that he’s not the same guy that he was before boot camp. Relighting the torch that he carried for Trisha for so long could put him completely out of business where an army career’s concerned.”

  “Well, he needs to put that girl behind him, and the sooner the better. Under the circumstances, I may have to give him a little boost myself.”

  17 ANGST AHOY

  “Hello.”

  “Hey,” Rick said. Wasn’t sure you’d be back yet.”

  “Just got in, a couple of hours ago. How’re you doing?”

  “OK, for a crazy fucker. Hope you’re not too pissed off.”

  “Not as much as I would have been if I’d found your heap wheels-up in a ditch somewhere between here and the Biltmore.”

  “It’s still right chilly around midnight, with all the windows down. I was cold sober by the time I hit Snellville. Lawyers steal you blind?”

  “No more than usual, I guess. How ’bout the Dog House a little later?”

  “Sure. Bring any hookers home with you?”

  “Dropped ’em off at the county line. Guess we could check with Nelson Lord.”

  “Pass. I’ve already missed one excellent chance of getting locked up this week.”

  “So what, around four?”

  “Yeah. Throw a jug in the car, willya?”

  Jack tossed a bag-shrouded fifth of Smirnoff through the ’55 Nomad’s window; Rick caught it one-handed with unconscious ease. “Thought you might like a Bloody Mary,” Jack said, sliding onto the wagon’s leather seat with a grin.

  Rick blipped the horn, bringing Don’s Dog House’s new curb boy, Fred, who might’ve been a Harlem Globetrotter out of uniform, to his window. “Sounds right painless. Fred, 2 large cups up to about here with tomato juice, another big cup of ice, wooster, Tabasco and a lemon.” Fred nodded and made for the service counter, slowing to scrutinize the Cunningham as he passed it. Turning to Jack, Rick assayed a rueful smile. “So what’s going on with our old pals, anyway?”

  “You knew I’d check.”

  “Hell, if I didn’t know you by now, sump’md be bad wrong. What’d you do, go back there after you put me on the road?”

  “You kiddin’? After the exit that we made? I figured I’d better call Ziggy first, to see how pissed off he was. Know what he did?”

  “No tellin’.”

  “Laughed like hell. Said he knew it’d be a surprise for us to find Trisha there, but that he guessed he should’ve asked her a little bit more about how things were amongst us. Asked me to tell you he was sorry, and that next time you and I could count on a table for two.”

  Rick responded with several spasmodic micronods, his smile the grimace of the guest of honor at a firing squad. “Yeah, I imagine she might’ve glossed a few things over, recalling the old days. How the hell did they get together? What’d he say about that?”

  “Ran into her on campus. She’s teaching English at Clark; Ziggy’s still working on his degree at Morris Brown. Seems like he was about as surprised to see her as we were the other night. He told her we were coming to hear him, and she asked him if he thought we’d mind if she came too. Obviously she didn’t say much more than that, or Ziggy wouldn’ta gone for it. Seems like he just thought of it as kind of a nice surprise- old home week and so forth.”

  Rick’s face slowly released the dreadful smile. “Funny- I was sure the spell was broken. Then she shows up out of the blue, and I go nuts. Thanks, Fred,” he said as the lanky Negro slipped a tray onto the car’s doorsill. Busying himself with the Bloody Marys, he put one cup, then the other, between his legs, squeezing lemon onto the tomato juice, adding Worcestershire, Tabasco, three fingers of vodka and ice. “Here you go, Spanky; take this straw and stir it up good, or you’ll have hair on your tonsils.”

  Jack stirred, then used the straw to drink from the bottom of the cup. “Yow. You do nice work for a crazy fucker.”

  “Next one’ll be better. To old friends,”

  Jack raised his cup in response. “Old friends. Sorry about Friday...”

  “Over and don
e with, buddy,” Rick interrupted. I got blindsided. If ever we need to replay that scene, you’ll think I’m an ice sculpture.”

  “Took me back, too,” Jack said. What he didn’t say was that he had gone back to La Carrousel Saturday night, and was duly impressed, not only with Ziggy’s way with a variety of jazz standards, but with the obvious sizable torch that Trisha carried for him. No telling how long ago, if ever, that on-campus “chance meeting” had happened. However it had happened, the fact was that these two onetime Bisquites were now some sort of item, marinating in a mixture of academe, art and civil rights according to the emerging avatar Martin Luther King, whose advent in Atlanta was, according to the happy couple, imminent.

  “He just got back from India last month; stayed with Mahatma Gandhi and his family,” Ziggy had said, smiling, his head moving from side to side, overwhelmed with the implications of that fact alone. “He’s leavin’ Dexter Baptist, his Montgomery church, and comin’ here to co-pastor Ebenezer, with Daddy King. It’s gonna be a great day for Atlanta; no, make that the world.”

  Rick drew down about a quarter of his drink, then swiveled to his right to face Jack more directly, throwing an arm on top of the seat back. “Jack.”

  “Hm.”

  “D’you think Trisha’s punishing herself?”

  “Doesn’t look much like that to me. Still, deciding to be with a colored man, even one you more or less grew up with, could come under that category, I guess. But if I put myself in her shoes, I think I’d be saying ‘I made a serious mistake, sure, but it’s over and done with, and I’ve put it behind me. Onward and upward.’”

  Rick pursed his lips in acknowledgement, then shook his head sharply, once, toward the windshield. Recapturing Jack’s eyes with his gaze, he said, “Sounds pretty reasonable, like something you, or even I, would do. And that’s exactly why she never would. She likes to hang on to misery, even when it’s misery she was the cause of. You made the call on her ass when she tried to tag me as the father of that baby. Remember?”

  Jack thought for a moment, then turned his palms upward. “What?”

  Rick looked the happiest he’d been all afternoon. “You said, ‘That girl’s nothin’ but a drama queen. Always was.’ And you were right, buddy. I got to thinking about her this morning, and now that you tell me what Ziggy said, it all kind of fits together. I’ve wondered for a long time what it was that kept me in love with her, and now, finally, I think I know.”

  “Go on,” Jack said, drawing the last of his drink through the straw with a staccato rattle.

  “She’d figured out that she could make me feel responsible for the shitty situation she found herself in when it came out that not only had she lied about bein’ pregnant, she’d been screwin’ both me and that asshole Preston Rogers. Then, before anybody could turn around twice, the bailout to Atlanta, and, man, she finally had the tubful of chaos she’d always dreamed about, and her fuckin’ splashing around in it like a beaver, throwing buckets of angst at anybody that was in range.” Rick hit the horn to summon Fred and a fresh setup.

  The first drink had affected Jack sufficiently that Rick’s soliloquy struck him as funny. Turning his head to the window, he yelled, “Hurry up, Fred, he’s talkin’ about angst in here!”

  “Hell yeah, I’m talking about it. What the hell’s the matter with that?” Rick asked between straw rattles of his own. “She sure as hell threw plenty of it at me.”

  Unable to erase the grin from his face, Jack held up a propitiating hand. “Not a thing, buddy,” he said. “I just didn’t think we’d be going off the high dive today. I know she took you over the jumps, but I guess I never knew the whole story, with you guys in Atlanta and me in Athens while so much of it was going on.”

  “Over the jumps ain’t the half of it. She wasn’t the same two days in a row, the whole time I was at Tech. Sometimes we’d go after it the way we used to, all loveyaloveyaloveyaloveyaohhoneyyes, then I wouldn’t see her for weeks, because she ‘felt like we oughta see other people,’ and by God, I took her at her word on that.

  “Takes me back to that Christmas when Terry brought ol’ Maybelle home from Georgia,” Jack said with a sly grin.

  “Oh, Jesus, Maybelle! That long drinka water. Filled her full of peach brandy and screwed her in her sleep, looking over my shoulder for the Marshes to get back home. And then that Sugar Bowl weekend in New Orleans; wouldn’t have happened if ol’ Mose hadn’t paid 150 bucks for my other two tickets and threw ’em away, so I wouldn’t have any trouble with Tech about non-family users. What a hell of a guy he was!”

  Jack had hit the straw-rattling zone again. “Bet your ass,” he said, handing his empty cup to Rick. “What do you say, we switch off of Bloody Mary’s? How about vodka and seven?” Rick simply gestured to Fred, who had assumed permanent standby on the porch’s guard rail. He took the new order and hotfooted away, calculating the likely growth of his tip as the contents of the Smirnoff bottle went down. “You know, he was more my dad than my dad ever was. Can’t imagine what’dve become of me if he hadn’t come along.”

  “He taught you one hell of a lot, that’s for sure. Planes, motorcycles, boxing...”

  “Yeah, he did. But more than all of that, he taught me the most important thing of all.”

  Rick’s eyes widened a fraction. “What was that?”

  “How to build and run a bullshitometer.”

  Rick laughed. “Absolutely, hands down, his crowning achievement.”

  Fred had brought 7-Up and ice. “You’d think so,” Jack said, smiling. “Fix me a drink and I’ll tell you why it wasn’t.”

  When he’d cleared the Bloody Mary residue from his palate with a gulp of Vodka and Seven, Jack broke the oath of silence that he’d sworn to Moses Kubielski. He told Rick that Moses, careful not to mention his true name, had served in the U.S. Navy as an Aviation Machinist’s Mate, then with Germany’s Luftwaffe as a fighter pilot and, after being injured during the Spanish Civil War, an agent of the Abwehr, the Nazi’s military intelligence service. As a decorated hero of the Third Reich whose native language was English, he was sent to New York in 1939, to assist the highly-regarded resident agent there. The agent, who had operated single-handed in New York since World War I, grudgingly accepted an assistant’s being thrust on him. In time, however, Agent “Kubielski” proved to be a resourceful and trustworthy helper, winning his boss’s unqualified trust.

  “I don’t believe it!” Rick said. Mose? Our Mose? A fucking kraut spy?”

  “Believe it,” Jack assured him. “He’d been railroaded into a court-martial as a sailor down in Guantánamo Bay, and even though he was acquitted it left a bad taste in his mouth. His dad was a native German, so he had dual citizenship. He was pissed at America, and decided to go back to Germany and work for his uncle, who owned a custom-tailoring business that catered to the carriage trade in Berlin. One of the shop’s best customers was a Luftwaffe colonel, and when the uncle told him of his nephew’s experience with U.S. Naval Aviation, he practically recruited him on the spot. In very short order, he found himself in western Russia, where the Luftwaffe was training its pilots in violation of the Versailles Treaty.”

  “Damn!” Rick exclaimed. “So he becomes a pilot, goes to Spain, gets shot down, and ends up in New York. OK. But he was still a fucking spy.”

  Jack held up his hand, waving a finger from side to side in testimony to his vodka intake. “Hold on. I like my stories to have happy endings whenever possible, and in this case it’s quite possible. Remember, we weren’t at war with Germany then, so even if he’d been caught they’dve just deported him. But things were getting nasty in Germany; as a member of the Abwehr, Mose knew what was going on with the Jews and Hitler’s ‘final solution.’ He was already looking for a way out in 1941, when his boss confided in him about a scheme he’d been working on that made his mind up for him on the spot.”

  “What was that?”

  “The boss had been dealing off-and-on with an Irish Republican Army fact
ion that was based in New York. They came to him with a fantastic proposal: the assassination of Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt. A highly-placed Nazi sympathizer in the British government had tipped them concerning the timing of the two leaders’ meeting off Newfoundland in August. An IRA member, a Royal Marine Warrant Officer committed to the suicide mission, would shoot both men as Churchill arrived aboard the USS Augusta. Only problem was, it was a cash-only deal; $3 million for both. Not wanting to risk a radio transmission requesting that kind of money from Berlin, he hotfooted it down to see their chief at the embassy in Washington. The chief agreed that it was the buy of the century, but was not at all encouraging about arranging that kind of money in US currency, which the IRA had said was all they’d take. Time was short; it was already the middle of June, and the meeting was scheduled for early August, I think the ninth. The down-in-the-mouth boss returned to New York and decided to share his frustration with Mose, who concealed his shock as well as he could. It climaxed a thought process he’d been involved in for months; he was, from that moment on, 100% American.”

  “Jesus,” Rick exhaled. “And about time, too. How’d he get out?”

  Jack took the Smirnoff bottle from between the seats. “Any ice left in that cup?” Rick poured the remains of the ice into Jack’s cup, giving the horn an impatient toot for an unseen Fred. Jack sipped vodka on the rocks with smiling satisfaction. “A lucky stroke, no pun intended. The boss- Kramer! That was ’is fuckin’ name- had started to have second thoughts about the whole operation. He knew he’d have to shut down the New York station, whether it was successful or not, and he worried himself into a heart attack. So guess who got elected to pick up the money and pay off the IRA?”