The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga)

by Stan Hayes

  “Most of it,” said Jackson. “It’s one of two alternatives near the hangar for lunch, since the “O” club doesn’t open ’til 1600 and the BOQ dining room doesn’t serve beer.”

  “Best thing on the menu,” Weems said, “is the goat. Tasty as hell. They call it fricassee, but you won’t be far off if you just think of it as stewed goat, with lotsa garlic. Comes with rice and beans, and they call it ‘riis-an-binns-an-mitt,’ when they’re talking to us about it. That and a couple of Coronas is a great morale booster; you almost won’t mind going back to work.”

  The bar reminded Jack of roadside oases he’d seen all over the South. A long rectangle, low ceiling, rough wood floor on which sat a dozen or so tables, and a bar with short, swiveling, bolted-down barstools that would accommodate a dozen more. As they sat down at one of the center tables, Jackson was the first to notice an attractive young woman trying as hard as she could not to be noticed. She sat at the extreme western end of the room, nursing a cup of coffee. While she was doing what she could to hide it, Jack wondered if his fellow diners saw the purposeful look in her eyes for what it was; a mute anxiety that said “If I don’t get laid soon, I’ll scream.” Jackson sent a tentative wave and a smiling mute “Hi” her way. Her minimal return acknowledgment was a definite signal to the trio that she wasn’t interested in joining them. “And who might that be?” Jack asked, sensing the tension in his dining partners.

  “Tory Singleton,” Jackson said through his teeth. “Fred Singleton’s wife. Don’t tell me the O-wives’ve moved their lunch meeting out here.” The waiter’s arrival cut his speculation short for a minute or so while everyone ordered Weems’ lunch recommendation. By the time he returned with the first round of Coronas, another early arrival, an athletic-looking Chief Aviation Electronics Mate, walked in. Jack happened to look up as the Chief appeared to make a swift calculation as to whether or not he could get away with a brief hello-on-the-fly in the three officers’ direction; that seemingly ruled out, he stopped.

  “Morning, gentlemen. Beatin’ the crowd, eh?”

  “Caught us in the act, Chief,” Jackson said, smiling as he nodded toward Jack. “We’re just making sure that all of Ensign Mason’s check-in blocks are checked.”

  Returning the smile, the Chief redirected it to Jack and extended his hand. “Mr. Mason. Chief Barkley. Welcome aboard, sir. Have you gotten a crew assignment yet?”

  Shaking the proffered hand, Jack said, “Not yet, Chief; guess that comes this afternoon sometime. Care to join us, or are you meeting someone?”

  Unable to stifle his gulp reflex completely, Barkley said, “Uh, no, sir, thanks just the same. Just stopped in to get a couple of bags of plantain chips. One of these days maybe they’ll have ’em at the PX. Well, looking forward to seeing you around the hangar, Mr. Mason. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I gotta hustle home with the chips.” As he said this, Mrs. Singleton passed behind him and out the door without a further word to her husband’s squadron-mates. And closely following her exit, the waiter deposited three hefty plates on the table. Barkeley proceeded immediately to the bar, purchased his plantain chips, and with a farewell nod, also exited.

  Following a quick toast with the second round of Coronas, Jackson watched Mrs. Singleton’s gray Renault Dauphine drive past the gate. “Hey. Tory Singleton just headed toward Ceiba. Wonder why she’d do that?”

  “Dunno,” Weems responded, “but Barkley’s going that way too.” He wagged a finger at Barkley’s Dodge van, wallowing its way onto the pavement and past the right turn into the Naval Station’s Gate Three. “Boys, what’ll you bet that, before we get halfway into these beers , we’ll see both of those cars headed back the other way towards a bedroom in Naguabo?”

  A couple of pulls off Corona Round Two brought Dauphine and Dodge back into view, nose-to-tail and helter-skelter, Naguabo bound, to the intense amusement of all three. “There you go, boys,” Weems said when he caught his breath, “sex wins again.”

  “When does it ever lose,” Jackson said, tears rolling down his cheeks. Catching his breath, he said, “They’re probably neighbors over in Capehart!”

  “That’s the new married housing quarters for senior grades,” Weems told Jack, “Capehart Housing, for both officer and enlisted. “Married JO’s have to make do in the old married quarters on Puerca Point.”

  Weems’ information set Jack laughing all over again. “Pirka? How do you spell that?”

  “P-u-e-r-c-a, I think. Ain’t that right, Ron?”

  “Yeah,” Jackson said, after some thought. “That’s it.”

  “Best I can remember,” Jack said, “Puerca means female hog. Sow. Married JO’s live at Sow Point.”

  That started another laughing fit. “Y’know,” Jackson said between gasps for air, “I think I’ve spied a couple over there from time to time.”

  “So, is the Old Man still giving his welcome-aboard temperance lecture?” Jackson asked Jack on their way back to the hangar.

  “In no uncertain terms. Did you get it when you checked in?”

  “No; it’s been a little over a year since I got here, so I checked in when he was still XO. Commander Rafferty was the CO then, and already knew that his orders were sending him to command an ROTC unit somewhere, squelching any dreams that he may have had of getting a fourth stripe. And show me a three-striper who doesn’t lust after stripe number four, if for no other reason than to put off retirement. As far as that goes, I’m sure they all think that they’d be jim-dandy Admirals. This Navy business is habit-forming to certain types, and the higher you go the less shit cascades onto your head. Anyway, Rafferty was a good old shit, gave me a nice ‘Ensigns should be seen and not heard.’ ditty, and off I went to probe the pleasures of Puerto Rico.”

  “He let me have it, double-strength, when I checked in last month,” said Weems. “But I guess he had his reasons. I knew him in JAX, just slightly, before the squadron changed home ports to Rosey. I was in VA-44, the A4D RAG, then, a couple of hangars west of VWW-3’s.”

  “How’d you happen to go from A4D’s to multi-engine, Harry?” Jack asked him.

  “My own damn fault, mostly. I got divorced in Jax a couple years back, and I didn’t take it too well. I commenced to drink pretty hard, and eventually it showed up in my work. Funny thing was, the ALNAV came out right before I got busted off-base for drunk driving. I was selected for Lieutenant Commander, and some detailer in BUPERS got the idea that I’d be more at home in this graveyard for O4’s-unlikely-ever-to-make-Commander. The letter in my jacket about the drunk driving conviction was hard to overlook, even if the Old Man was so inclined. And he wasn’t. He told me, ‘If you pull that trick down here, not only will I get rid of you so fast it’ll make your head swim, but you’ll probably do a year in a Puerto Rican jail. The Commonwealth just passed a very tough drunk driving law last year, and if you go on one of your crazy-ass liberties and get caught, I won’t be very much inclined to get you out of it. It would, of course, be the end of your Navy career, and I’m not so sure that would be a bad idea.’”

  Why is he telling us this? Jack thought.

  “So now you know, boys. One of any number of blabbermouths who were in the squadron in Jax would be only too happy to tell it their way, so I thought you ought to get it from the horse’s mouth. And believe me, all I’m gonna do down here is fly the shit out of these big bastards and do what I can to get the hell back where I belong, which is in some kind of jet outfit or other. Hell, I’d even take A3D’s.”

  “I’d take ’em too, even if the orders came tomorrow,” Jackson said. “What’s so bad about A3D’s, anyway?

  “Well, the old A3’s a bit of a widowmaker; big hoss to get aboard the carrier, over 80,000 pounds max gross, and no- repeat NO- ejection seats. They’ve got a cute little slidey chute for the crew to slip out, presuming, of course, that the aircraft is stable and has plenty of altitude. In other words, you’ll be fine except in the case of a real emergency. The Navy may call ’em SkyWarriors, but in th
e fleet A3D stands for ‘All Three Dead.’ But I’d take ’em, anyway.” Drawing a deep breath, he let it escape through his teeth. “For now, though, I’ll be driving these buses with you guys. With any kind of luck, we’ll have some fun poking ’em through wall clouds.”

  As they rolled into the parking lot, they met several cars, nose-to-tail, outbound. “Wonder where the hell they’re going,” said Jackson. He stopped behind a car that LTJG LeRoy Chandler was about to board. “What’s going on, LeRoy?”

  “We’re launching the primary aircraft, plus the skipper’s and Crew Six, ASAP. Is that Mason in the back seat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s on Crew Six. Orders are to grab a change of clothes and your toothbrush and muster aboard the aircraft.

  “What the hell is it about, anyway?”

  Chandler wrinkled his commodious brow, made so by premature baldness. “A bunch of maniacs have taken over a cruise ship and are holding the passengers hostage. We and a bunch of VP-types are supposed to go find ’em.”

  “What are we supposed to do when we find ’em?”

  “Chandler shot them a wry smile as he turned his palms upward. “How the hell do I know? Hey, Mason, need a ride to the BOQ?”

  11 February 1961

  Dear Dogface,

  Well, it’s been an interesting few days. Checked into my new squadron, hauled ass immediately out to sea in search of pirates, played footsie with Brazilian cuties in the garden spot of Recife while Uncle paid the bill, passed my post-trip VD check, and put on my JG bars yesterday (happy hour was on me, but at a quarter a drink, who’s counting?). I didn’t really imagine how “senior” I’d feel once I swapped the brown bars for silver ones. So far, I’ve just enjoyed the couple of times someone called me Lieutenant, and resisted the temptation to call the relatively few Ensigns around here “son.”

  It was the goddamnedest thing; the day after I checked in, the squadron was alerted as part of the search group ordered to find the Portuguese passenger liner Santa Maria. It had been hijacked by a group opposing Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, who were led by a former general of the Portuguese army, Henrique Galvao. They took the ship over somewhere in the eastern Caribbean, offloaded some injured at St. Lucia, and took off for God knew where. By the time we were launched (four of the squadron’s eight aircraft were assigned to the group; I was a last-minute addition, as second navigator, to the crew of aircraft #6) the next day, Galvao was broadcasting in the blind to anybody who would listen that his group were insurgents opposing the Salazar government, and intended to sail to the Portuguese colony of Angola. Trouble was, neither the British nor US bigwigs had the slightest idea of how to handle the situation, what with Portugal raising hell about piracy on the high seas. Meantime, the ship had made it into the Atlantic and was cruising around in what by now was a vast search area of blue water, still transmitting the entire time with a signal that was too weak for our radio direction finders to track.

  We launched a little after two in the afternoon, with orders to proceed directly to Piarco Airfield, Trinidad, there to receive further orders from the Commander, Caribbean Sea Frontier. The airport people (Piarco’s a civil airport; the Navy leases space for the few aircraft that the Naval Station has on strength) finally got our four Connies parked in various places, the Station providing Shore Patrol security guards. We spent the night on board the station, their hospitality getting stressed a bit with over a hundred officer and enlisted crew members.

  At our briefing the next morning, the skipper, Commander Watson, gave each Plane Commander a set of coordinates 750 miles from Piarco, marking the end of our respective search patterns. We’d fly at 10,000 feet, 180 knots, to achieve an optimum radar horizon. On reaching these coordinates, we were to fly a further search pattern that ended in our destination for the day, Belém, Brazil. These coordinates had us fanning out over much of the ocean area that the Santa Maria might have gone into over 36 hours of steaming at her maximum speed of 22 knots. They were set 450 miles apart, so that at the end of the tracks our radar horizons still overlapped each other, giving virtual radar saturation over the search area.

  In theory, we should’ve found her; in fact, we didn’t. 2000 miles or so of ocean later, we landed at Belém without a sniff. We saw plenty of ships, anywhere from 75 to 100 large vessels, but none was our Portuguese quarry. Then, more makeshift parking, even more makeshift accommodations for the crews, and out again the next day, repeating yesterday’s search patterns. But on the afternoon of this day, Naval Station San Juan broadcast a fix on the old girl, 12 degrees 18 minutes north latitude and 52 degrees 12 minutes west longitude, making about 19 knots, on an approximate course of 105 degrees true. This fix was confirmed by a freighter that passed her close aboard. Our closest aircraft, a P2V, reached the area shortly after sundown in bad weather, and circled the ship while the Plane Commander swapped bad Spanish for bad English with Senhor Galvao, until an English interpreter intervened for him.

  Long story short, a few hours of wrangling, climaxed by an exchange between our skipper and Galvao, produced his agreement to head the ship toward Recife, Brazil, which is where our squadron aircraft landed. This time our host was a Brazilian Air Force Base, which made things a lot easier. Buses came for us, and we motored into downtown Recife to check into a couple of what you’d have to call “mid-level” hotels. And here’s the best part; we didn’t know how long we’d be in Recife, and none of us had packed a damn thing in the way of clothes, shaving gear, etc., because we were launched under “soonest” orders. Since the best combined guesses of the State Department and our command, the Caribbean Sea Frontier, were that we’d be there for at least a week, arrangements were made with the US Consul for us all to go to the consulate and draw advance pay. The ground rules were that we could draw anything from two weeks to two months of our base pay. Most of the married types played it conservative and took two weeks. A very brief discussion among the single junior officers concluded that, since we weren’t likely to be in Brazil again anytime soon, we should draw the max, which put anywhere from $500 to $800 cash in our pockets. They told us that the exchange rate between the dollar and the Brazilian Cruzeiro was 1 to 350 or so, and that a ¾ liter bottle of Brahma Chopps beer was usually around 125 Cruzeiros, so you can imagine our instant optimism about the Recife sojourn!

  Two crews were on alert every day, and the other two had liberty, which meant no back-to-back hangovers. It also meant that we were free to explore the area in taxis hired at a day rate (20-25,000 Cruzeiros). One of the great places our first driver showed us was a four-story bawdy house known as The House on Stilts. False modesty aside, Mamacita, the Madame de Mesdames, and I began to get on famously shortly after we got there on our, you should excuse the expression, maiden visit. She looked a lot like Katy Jurado after a season at the Colts’ training table, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter. Real pros overcome their negatives, and I didn’t really mind the faint mustache. You’re more or less duty-bound to call me a liar, but I camped out in her bedroom for three nights, and she wouldn’t take my money, except for food and booze. On the morning after the last night, I slipped 50,000 Cruzeiros under her pillow.

  Later that afternoon while waiting for the bus to the airfield, I was getting a shoe shine outside the hotel. Up she rode in a taxi, saw me sitting there, climbed up in my lap and laid a tonsil-tickler on me! Then she dismounted, jumped in the taxi and hauled ass, waving until she was out of sight. When I got down off the shine stand, the shine man said something in rapid Portuguese as he pointed at the back of the chair. Son, she’d put that 50 grand in an envelope and slipped it behind my back while we were making out. All this, of course, is taking place in the presence of 30 or 40 of my squadron-mates, who will no doubt not let me live this down for a while. At least I’ll be in the memory of two Brazilians for awhile: Mamacita and the shine man, who got a 50,000 Cruzeiro tip.

  Cheers, Bubba. Eaten any good snakes lately?

  LTJG (“Officers don’t get
gonorrhea; they get non-specific urethritis.”) Jack

  24 BAHIA DE COCHINOS

  Linda pulled out of the Coconut Grove house’s driveway shortly after 9:30, exulting in the crimson Corvette’s exhaust note and ready wheelspin as she made her way through the few blocks between the house and NW 42nd Ave. Turning right on the Avenue, she gave the roadster its head in the light morning traffic, running it up to a hundred or so before easing it gradually down to a steady 75. God, she thought, I love this car; a year and a half later, I still can’t get enough of driving it. Pulling the gearshift lever down into fourth, she remembered the phone call from Capri Chevrolet that came a couple of months after Jack left. Pissed off at me, she thought, because I told him that I couldn’t go on seeing him if Pete and I were going to get the air taxi business going while he did his Navy hitch. “Miss Green? We have a 1960 fuel-injected Corvette roadster down here with your name on it, in Roman Red. I guess Mr. Mason told you about it; it’s paid for, licensed and ready to go, and it’d be my pleasure to deliver it.”

  When I called him to say thanks, to lighten the moment I said, “what are you doing giving me a going-away present, when you’re the one that’s going away?”

  “That was no going-away present. That was my parting shot,” he said. Pretty classy response from an old, well, inactive, lover. And with that in mind, I really shouldn’t be doing this, but Bernie was downright scary about how important it was for me to meet him, so here I am.

  Downshifting, Linda took the NW 36th Street exit off NW 42nd Avenue, slowing to turn right on NW 37th Avenue. Another right turn brought her into the Miami Fronton’s huge parking lot, which was substantially empty. The matinee jai alai matches were still several hours away. Bernard “Macho” Barker was already there, leaning against the left front fender of his government-green Ford sedan. She wondered why the CIA would be so obvious. Opening the door for her, he extended a hand as she spun ninety degrees to put her sandal-shod feet on the ground. The sun was already bringing the pavement up to stove-top temperature. Barker pulled her to him, kissing her passionately before stepping back to arm’s length, a smile that could be called tragic taking over his face. “Let’s get inside,” he said, indicating his car. “I left the air conditioning on.”