The Big Broad Jump

by Troy Conway

  She was really happy then. So happy, she bounced up and down like a kid with a new toy. Well, it was. The Damon Joy Toy. It’s made so many people happy. Girl-people, I mean. I’m no queer.

  So Wilhelmina enjoyed herself and so did I and Flight 117 raced on toward Munich. I lost track of what time it was when she finally crept back to her job serving coffee and sandwiches at dawn and generally making do for the S.O.B.’s. She had done fine for me.

  Believe me, it’s the only way to run an airline.

  And the only way to fly.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Flight 117 touched down in Munich, Wilhelmina kissed me a tearful farewell and put her breasts into it, and I promised devoutly I’d look her up on the flight back. Maybe even take her to St Moritz for skiing and sheing. Both propositions tickled her and she jiggled nicely in appreciation. But tearstained airline stewardesses, no matter how well constructed, were far from my mind once the plane landed. The prospects of The King’s Inn and meeting my new blonde contact, Walrus-moustache’s fair-skinned, flaxen-haired female, were running around in my head. That and the mystery of silver pills and Betchnika lynchings. If the Coxe Foundation had to know why twenty-five men over sixty were hanged because they were oversexed, then I had to find out too. After all, it was Sexology research, also. And that is the name of my game.

  But Wilhelmina got a stranglehold on me and mine between the customs counter and the airport terminal door leading out. She just wrapped her goodies around me, kissed me lustily, and churned her pelvic cage into mine. Shameless hussy!

  “Darling,” she murmured. “You must come back.”

  “I always do. Like a bad penny.”

  “You are the greatest man I ever met”.

  “'Twas ever thus.”

  “Never have I known flying to be such a trip! You’re better than all the LSD in the world.”

  “True, true. Well, Willie, auf wiedersehen, so long, goodbye, and meet you in the wild blue yonder someday. Soon.”

  That was when she started to cry, and hug and squeeze and her fine hands attacked the family jewels again. Right out there in the open, in front of all those people getting their luggage checked for entry into Germany. She just didn’t give a damn for appearances.

  “Willie, please—”

  “But I may never see you again! Never know the touch of you, the feel of you—” She demonstrated and I had to pull myself loose. Her tears were staining my nice suit.

  “Them’s the breaks, kid. Be a big girl now. Damon will return. I promise you.” She’d practically put the grapes through a wringer.

  “Oh, if only I didn’t have to fly on to Budapest. Rod, Rod—kiss me, liebchen and be a good boy in Miinchen.”

  “I eat all over,” I grinned. Munich. München. What an opening.

  “Beast.” She slapped me lightly and we kissed, putting everything we had left into it. Willie groaned aloud at her loss. My virginial skycap would never be the same again. I had made a woman of her and she knew it. She wasn’t going to wait twenty more years for sex.

  My last sight of her was going away. Me out the door, her toward the powder room on the next level, above the escalator stairs. She walked tall and proud even though her shoulders in the blue uniform were shaking with sobs. She had a rear end like the first horse in a parade. Sighing, I tightened my grip on my bag and attaché case and went out the revolving glass doors to the sidewalk to look for a cab. And get a good look at Munich. Hitler’s old backyard.

  The educated ghosts of Dealey, Yankowski, De Loma and Von Firtz, as well as that horny old Arab, Jalal al-Din al-Siyuti, cursed at me in five languages for deserting the virgin I had introduced to the field of battle. All these sexologists, centuries apart but closer than the pages of a book in womanizing, had all agreed that of all women to instruct in love-play and erotica, the endowed virgin reigns supreme. They can give you prime time and superior cooperation because of their willingness to learn. And the freshness of their skin and flesh.

  “Tophole!” as Dealey would say.

  “Da!” Yankowski once said. “Never a nyet will they say!”

  “Madonna!” was De Loma’s contribution, and that wily Teuton, Von Firtz, simply called a virginal encounter a “Gott in himmel!” As for my Arab mentor, whom I idealized above all others—his word was law to me— he is untranslatable, really, but it would boil down to something like “Yeah, Bo!”

  But duty called. I had to get to The King’s Inn and check out the action. Especially if Christina Ketch was waiting for me.

  I looked at Munich.

  It looked at me.

  I was too young for World War II but I remembered all the war movies, the history books and newsreels. It looked just fine for a city that had been marched through by the tanks and men of the Seventh Army. Whatever bombing there had been had all practically disappeared. You couldn’t tell for looking. Munich is about as cosmopolitan as, say, Manhattan, New York, or Chicago, Illinois. There are big stone buildings, fine boulevards, a populace always on the go, and nothing about the dress and manner of the civilians could make you think you were in Germany until you started reading street signs and shop windows. Otherwise, you see just as many Volkswagens as you do in the good old U.S.A. Just as noisy and hectic a burg as anyplace Stateside. It figured. The Yankee Dollar had come to Munich in a floodtide right after the event called V-J Day. And the Marshall Plan and Big Business and let’s-forget-that-lousy-war-and-the-man-called-Adolph had done the rest. You can’t see any crematoria stacks anymore. Even though Dachau is a stone’s throw away.

  A cab found me, swallowed me up, and I gave the driver the address of The King's Inn. He looked at me a moment, shrugged, and then batted his meter gadget. His face was worn and creased like a beat-up wallet.

  “Why the face, Fritz?”

  We ploughed out into traffic and his vehicle, a Ford design made up to seem European, meshed with a flow of cars heading East.

  “I am Wilhelm,” he said, stiffly. It was my time for Willies. “Do you go to The Kings Inn to try the Bavarian beer and wines or did you simply want a drink? It is rather early in the day, mein Herr, for an interesting time at The King’s Inn.” His voice was reedy, frog-filled.

  He had spotted me for a tourist and it was early. It wasn’t very late in the afternoon, Munich time. The day was gray, smoky. Cool.

  “They rent rooms, don’t they?”

  “That too. In which case, any time is proper.”

  He was a thin, withered, old-timer. The kind who might have worn a swastika before I was born. His hoarse throat could be from too many Sieg Heils!

  “How far is it?”

  “Not very far. Perhaps ten kilometers—fifteen minutes.”

  I sat back on the leather seat, folded my arms, and watched the sweeping panorama of buildings, store fronts, cobbled alleys, going by. We were rapidly entering a more Teutonic-seeming section of the city. I spotted signs on hanging stanchions, curtained bakery windows, even a stable or two leading right out into the thoroughfare. The tavern signs were beginning to show up more frequently. Beer is where the German is. Without his stein, a Rhinelander is naked.

  “Amerikaner?” Wilhelm said, idly enough. But his eyes in the rearview mirror were tired, amused. I kept my cool. Walrus-moustache had taught me to be wary of any strangers and newcomers when I was in the field working as a Coxeman. Some of his instructions had rubbed off.

  “Want to see my tattoo? I have the first stanza of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ printed right across my ass.”

  That made him smile a bit more warmly and then I figured he was a harmless hackie. Same breed of weary travelers from Siam to Brooklyn.

  “Mein Herr has a sense of humor. Gut. There is very little to laugh about in Germany these last twenty-five years.”

  I nodded, feeling better. At least we agreed about that.

  “Where’s that beer hall where Hitler made his first push in '33?”

  He jerked a contemptible thumb. “Far over. Other side of
town. It is nothing. You wouldn’t care to see it”

  “I agree. How’s the women in Munich?”

  He grinned wryly. “You have two choices. Streetwalkers or grandmothers. And many, many a widow.”

  “Real gay town, huh?”

  “A cemetery in my opinion.” Wilhelm spun the cab around a corner, found a narrow, cobbled lane and then sped out into another main artery of traffic. I saw a sign that said, KING’S INN OSTEN. “Not too far now. We have made good time for a Friday.”

  “Suits me. I need a shower, a hot meal. The works. And I also want to sample this famous Bavarian beer I’ve heard tell about.”

  “And what kind of employment is mein Herr in?”

  Everybody wanted to know my business. I played it dumb. And for laughs, strictly. Besides, you never could tell.

  “I’m a contraceptive salesman. You know—prophylactics. Rubbers.”

  “Oh.” His hoarse voice was a low nothing sound.

  “What kind do you use? Sheiks, Trojans, Four X? I hope none of them because I represent Thinnies. New line. And business is expanding. Ballooning, you might say.”

  Wilhelm muttered under his breath.

  I tapped his shoulder. “You were saying—?”

  He shrugged, trapped. “I am sixty-seven, mein Herr. I have not been good for a woman since I had my triple hernia. It is just as well. With the prices of things as they are, I could not afford a woman. Any woman. Also, I have not had that drive for a woman that a man must have. Not in years. Not since my Bertha died. In '49.”

  I kept my face serious. And gambled. “Really? Too bad. It’s a shame. You ever take a silver pill? It’s on the market now. A super-drug. It revives a man and makes him capable of remaining active for a good six hours.”

  Wilhelm had to slam on the brakes to avoid running up the back of a Volkswagen. When he straightened himself out, his face twisted toward me as he played with the steering wheel. His old eyes had taken on a hopeful glow. He looked almost hopefully insane.

  “Mein Herr is amusing himself with Wilhelm—”

  “Scout’s honor. Ask anybody. Ask your old cronies.”

  “But it is not true. We have never heard of such a thing. And I’m not ashamed to say we all have tried everything. Bee’s cream, patent drugs, glandular shots from our doctors—silver pills? If only it were true— where could one get his hands on such a treasure?”

  “It is new,” I admitted, “but Munich being so up-to-date and all, I was sure you’d have it here. Well, just ask your local druggist. Or your doctor.”

  Wilhelm’s voice rose, the frogs evicted. But I had found out what I wanted to know. He didn’t know about silver pills and the mass execution in Betchnika. Or the old roistering joy boys who had had a ball before they died. The calamity had not leaked across the Czech frontier.

  “That I shall do. And I am grateful to you, mein Herr. Gott! To think I could get my hands on that fat-assed waitress who always laughs at me in Muller’s! She would see what a man Wilhelm was when he was in his prime!”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “I would make her cry and beg for more and then I would turn her over on her stomach and do it again!”

  “Go get her, Wilhelm.”

  There were tears in his eyes, too. Who said Germans weren’t emotional? Between this old cabdriver and the young skycap, I could have filled the Rhine.

  I felt lousy about lying to the old rat, but what’s wrong with hope? Even if it was a dream, his mind would be filled with glorious pictures of conquest until he found out that there wasn’t anything on the open market like I had said. But who knows? He might firm up just thinking there was. Stranger things have happened. Remember—even Casey must have got another time at bat in baseball heaven.

  Suddenly the terrain changed.

  The buildings vanished, the lane opened into country. I began to see a cow or two, and trees, trees, trees. Now, the mighty height of the Bavarian Alps, snow-capped and magnificent, crowded the horizon to the east. As gray as the day was, the majesty of those peaks was awesome. We haven’t got anything like it back in America, really, and I am including the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. Also, I began to spy a dairymaid or two or three. From the moving cab, they all looked like Ingrid Bergman in the good old days of For Whom The Bell Tolls and Spellbound.

  Long rows of towering spruces and elms lined the roadway, and Wilhelm piloted the machine happily, his mind filled with the prospects and pleasures of the silver pills. Like a mental orgy with bells on.

  I was beginning to enjoy the view, like any hick or traveling salesman, when Wilhelm slammed on the brakes. We lurched to a stop in a pleasant little bower of flowers and ivy with the background of trees and mountains making the whole tiny area as picturesque as any post card. There was a sense of peace and beauty and the idea of being a spy and going to investigate a clan-type lynching seemed as remote as a wart on Raquel Welch’s fanny. Who would think such a thing?

  “The King’s Inn,” Wilhelm said triumphantly, and cranked his meter flag. “We are here.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  Wilhelm spread his hands. “If you have American money I should like to have it. Say the sura of three dollars. But no tip, mind you. I am grateful to you for what you have told me. If it is true, it is worth a million tips!”

  “But, Wilhelm—”

  “No, no. I insist. My pleasure.”

  “You’re sure? Money goes a long way, you know—”

  “Please, mein Herr. I will be happy with three American dollars. As a memento of our discussion. I would not use it even to buy my first silver pill!”

  So I paid him the three dollars, not having converted all my money to marks yet. One thing about the Coxe Foundation; they give you plenty of expense money to do their dirty little jobs. Real clean money.

  Wilhelm saluted me like a Prussian officer, wheeled his cab around and drove out of my life, forever. I thought forever anyway. I wouldn’t want to run into him again when he found out that the silver pill was a secret invention that nobody knew anything about. Including Amerikaner me. The fink.

  The King’s Inn was a fraud.

  It seemed no more than a gabled, shuttered, gingerbread house with a pebbled pathway leading up to a front door that resembled the entrance to a barn. You know the type. The door split in half that opens from the top or bottom or both. There was a sign shaped like a beer mug, lettered in Gothic figures that made the name of the place almost unreadable because of the crowding of the symbols. But it was Old World, for all of that. I expected to see good, pink-faced burgers with their Meerschaums and tankards of ale and kneepants with Tyrolean hats. The works. But like Wilhelm had said, it was too early in the day; there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. Not a car or a cart or a hayrick. There was a fine, heavy aroma of wine and cheese, though. The fragrance wasn’t exactly perfume, but to a wine-drinker I imagined it could be ambrosia and nectar. I’m a fan of Old Charter bourbon myself, but what the hell. You drink what you like and I’ll drink what I like.

  A bird chirped in a nearby tree and I palmed some sweat off the tip of my nose. The day was sunless but it was warm. There wasn’t even a country breeze to cool me off. I stalked to the front door of The King’s Inn, toting my bag and attaché case. I was a little pooped, but mainly physically uncomfortable. I needed a bath or a shower or both. And some bacon and eggs, or knockwurst and sauerkraut. Whatever. I wouldn’t be choosy.

  I knocked on the closed door of the inn. There was no knocker or bell or anything. Just stout oaken boards side by side, studded with brass-headed nails. The wood was brown and clean. As if a recent rain had washed it bare.

  There was no answer.

  Again I knocked.

  Silence.

  The bird stopped chirping and buzzed off, frightened. I set both bags down and drew back to really batter the panel. Just at that moment, the top half shot back and I was looking into a pair of bold blue eyes blinking out at me from the gloom of the unlighted in
terior of the place. Below the eyes was a pug nose, a red wide mouth with thick lips and then a defiant chin. From that point down, the view flowered into two of the largest mammary illusions (or realities) ever visited upon womankind. The boobs were incredible; the waist beneath it tinier than Twiggy’s. That was all I could see. The lower half of the front door, closed, shut out everything else.

  “So?” The girl, who looked all of eighteen, shrilled. “Who comes?”

  “Who else?” I smiled and doffed my hat.

  She leaned out, frowning, resting both arms on the top of the low part of the door. A thin shelf of wood accommodated her arms. They were pink like the rest of her, baby fat rolling. The face wrinkled in a scowl, completely unfeminine, having nothing to do with my looks or my words.

  “You want something?” she barked. “What is?”

  “This is an inn, isn’t it? I’d like a room, something to eat. And to drink. And a smile if you can spare one.” The girl snorted.

  “How long you stay? One night? Two? Three?” She held up three pudgy fingers. “You take room for week? Got festival of wine coming up. Can’t bother with fly-by-nighters.”

  “Let me in,” I sighed. “And we’ll talk it over. I flew by night and now it’s daytime. I also have money. Lots of money. And if you’re a good little girl I’ll let you have a look at it. Are you the innkeeper?”

  She laughed. “No. Gretchen. Landlord’s daughter. You come. We see. Carry own luggage, please. It’s time to milk the cows and no get fresh milk if hands dirty. Come, please.”

  She swung open the bottom half of the door and the rest of her tapered down to cream and butter and delectability. When the baby fat left, she would be a destroyer supreme. Right now, she was fleshed out mightily. When she turned around to lead me into the inn proper, the skirt and apron she wore seemed to be keeping her two mountainous buttocks tied into place. Captive balloons, all the way.

  Gretchen.

  The landlord’s daughter.

  Talk about traveling salesmen. I was beginning to feel like one all over. I wondered if there was only one extra bed and would I have to sleep with Gretchen in that one. You don’t know farmers and country fathers. They’ll do anything to unload a spinster daughter. Anything. Though there wasn’t a blessed thing wrong with Gretchen that losing ten pounds wouldn’t cure. Plus her whine and her snarls and frowns. Poor kid. Probably never been properly laid. It happens to a lot of daughters the world over, and they go into womanhood shrilling liks nags and shrews. Well, we’d see about that.