Merlin of the Magnolias

by Gardner Landry

  Although he had served on the BBCC board in the past, Mac had never been one to get involved in politics of any kind, especially club politics. That was one of the reasons he pursued a medical career in the first place—even though, as he learned quickly, organizational politics are a big part of the healthcare profession. Still he avoided these situations when possible, but this clamping down on so many rules and now banning and burning books was sailing even normally even-keel Mac Swearingen, M.D., toward the edge of his world. What in the blue blazes is coming next? he wondered.

  That night, Mac dreamed about blue blazes of unquenchable flame consuming stacks of his favorite novels from his younger days. Then volumes from his medical library began to fall into the fire. He woke up with a start and registered a cold sweat on his brow. It was a long time before he was able to return to sleep.

  • Twelve

  As spring nose-dived toward the torrid, torpor-inducing months of the Houston summer, two aspects of Merlin’s world bifurcated and diverged. On one hand, he was facing more constraints from Tite Dûche and his board cronies at the club; on the other, his professional life seemed to be in a dizzying ascent. While he fine-tuned his skills in blimp passenger appointment management and notification, the blimp manufacturer was so impressed with Merlin’s software program streamlining blimp maintenance and repair that they sent someone down from corporate to have a closer look. After this visit, which prompted Merlin to wear one of his best season-appropriate outfits, the blimp manufacturer let it be known they wanted to license the program for all of their customers.

  News of this unexpected business coup quickly made its way to the vast hardwood desk of T. Rex Mondeaux III, who met it with the unrestrained delight that he never failed to experience when happening on unexpected good fortune. This was like finding the golden egg at the annual club Easter egg hunt when he was a kid. (Little Rexie had several early 1960s golden eggs to his credit.) Mondeaux was smiling and shaking his head in a state of surprise approaching disbelief, and after the news bearer, Ms. Sukhova, left his office, he thought of old Arthur McNaughton and how happy he would have been to know that his grandson had created something of value that stood on its own in the business world.

  Usually one to take as much as he could when a pecuniary opportunity presented itself, Mondeaux decided to consult with Merlin regarding how Mondoco and Merlin could share in the profits from his high-tech creation. His memory of his friendship with Arthur, who was an advisor in his early days of business, spurred Rex to make this decision. Mondeaux himself made a trip to the blimp base to talk with Merlin about the arrangement, explaining that even though the employment contract Merlin signed provided that any invention during his employment would belong to Mondoco, he was personally overriding it and instructing Mondoco’s lawyers to create a special agreement so that Mondoco and Merlin could share in future profits from the sales and licensing of the program. Mondeaux did not expect the software to generate massive amounts of money or provide anything approaching a sinecure for Merlin, but whatever it did generate, Merlin would have the knowledge that he would always get a significant percentage of it.

  Although this development was as pleasantly surprising for Merlin as it was for his corporate overlord, and gave him a sense of previously unrealized self-worth, what really fired Merlin’s excitement and imagination continued to be the ride-alongs in the blimp with Captain Kajerka and Svetlana. One day on one of their daytime flights, Kajerka threw out a surprise of his own.

  “Anyone wanna give this blimp-flying thing a try?”

  Svetlana immediately piped up. “Me? Fly bleemp? Da! Yes! I want to try!” And in a flash, Kajerka had exited the pilot’s seat in midflight and motioned Svetlana to take his place. The svelte young Slav slid into the worn black leather of the seat with the nimble ease of a Soviet-era gymnast mounting a pommel horse at the Olympic games. Although the seat was far too commodious for Svetlana, Dirk Kajerka wasted no time in moving levers to scoot her nearer to the airship controls and instruments, relishing this first chance to move so close to her under the auspices of providing her with an optimally comfortable first-time-at-the-blimp-controls experience.

  With a spine frozen upright like an ice-encased birch in a protracted Siberian winter, Svetlana stared with single-minded focus, taking in the privileged pilot’s view through the cockpit windshield of the Airmadillo as it traversed the dense humid airspace a couple of thousand feet above the concrete-encrusted yet fetid coastal plain of Greater Houston. She glanced quickly at each of the controls and instruments as Dirk pointed them out.

  “Here on the left, this is the throttle. It makes the engine go faster or slower. The big wheel at your right hand is called the elevator wheel. It controls the up and down direction of the ship.”

  (Dirk liked to call the blimp “the ship” from time to time to make himself feel more substantial, if not important. “Captain of an airship” sounded a lot more formidable than “blimp pilot,” he reckoned.)

  Pointing at a row of switches just above the windshield, Dirk continued: “These right up here are your envelope pressure controls. You can add more helium into the ballonet, which is the big balloon inside this thing, or you can release it into the atmosphere. With these, you can actually maintain the trim and shape of the ship, and of course, they really come in handy when you need to do a fast descent for landing if the wind picks up.”

  Svetlana’s gaze locked onto the switches and gauges, but Kajerka broke her reverie as he continued his monologue and looked toward the floor in front of the pilot’s seat.

  “Now these pedals down here at your feet …”

  Dirk saw that Svetlana’s feet were barely reaching the pedals. “Hold on,” he cautioned.

  Dirk took this opportunity to once again adjust Svetlana’s seat, enjoying every second of it, as he moved her forward so she could rest her feet on the pedals. He resumed his former posture and tried to continue in a professional manner, although he had begun perspiring at the collar.

  “These here are your rudder pedals. They control the left and right direction of the blimp. Push on the left one and it goes left. Push on the right one and it goes right.”

  He sensed a tingling feeling where the perspiration was soaking the back of his neck on registering the contrast of Svetlana’s delicate high-heeled feet resting on the big black rubber rudder pedals of the blimp.

  Dirk encouraged her, “Okay, toots, take us somewhere!” With that Svetlana took a good look at the landscape below the blimp and pushed firmly on the left rudder pedal. With the strange slow delayed reaction to instrument promptings that is a hallmark of lighter-than-air flying, the blimp slowly, then more resolutely, began to turn. Svetlana turned the elevator wheel backward and in a few seconds the blimp began to rise. “I want to get better look,” she said. As she surveyed the formless suburban landscape, her eyes looked eastward toward the Post Oak–Galleria area. “Da. There is Galleria.” She looked at the compass on the instrument panel. “Heading is east northeast. 61 degrees.” She located the GPS on the instrument panel and entered the address of the Galleria mall complex, a number she had committed to memory not long after her arrival in Houston. A red line to the address appeared on the navigation screen, and she followed it with the same focused single-mindedness that she demonstrated on occupying the pilot’s seat moments earlier.

  As they approached the upscale mall complex, Svetlana turned the wheel downward and the blimp began to descend. “How low can bleemp go?” She asked Captain Kajerka with icy efficiency, not releasing her fixated gaze toward the Galleria. Mildly alarmed by her focused resolve, Dirk responded, “We need to keep her above a thousand feet.” Svetlana gave a slight, silent nod and watch the altimeter as it approached one thousand feet, turning the elevator wheel upward to level the dirigible just a few feet above the low-altitude flight restriction for lighter-than-air vehicles over Houston’s airspace.

  “I will circle,” Svetlana declared flatly.

  She ga
zed down on the high temple of Houston upscale retailing as she circled it, an act reminiscent of the way pilgrims to Mecca circle the great stone monolith of the Kaaba during the culmination of their Hajj to the holy city. As Svetlana venerated the shopping mecca from above, images of countless storefronts crowded themselves into her imagination: Fendi, Prada, Gucci, Tiffany, Burberry, Moncler, Vilebrequin, Brunello Cucinelli, Hermès, and Cartier. Dirk continued to find her intense concentration a little disconcerting, but Merlin reveled in the sight of someone other than Captain Kajerka flying the airship.

  “I want to come back at night and program sign to say ‘I love Fendi! I love Moschino!’” Svetlana enthused.

  “Uh, we can’t just do that,” ventured the captain. “Advertisers pay good money to share sky space with Fandango when we run their ads on the outdoor screen.”

  “Not even for one minute?”

  “I don’t think so,” Kajerka said.

  For the first time since taking the pilot’s seat, Svetlana’s posture slumped a little, and she took her eyes off the Galleria. “Hey, what do you say we give Merlin a chance at helm?” Kajerka asked.

  Svetlana craned her neck around to see the largest blimp rider in the history of the Airmadillo and queried with subarctic chill, “Him?”

  “Yeah, maybe you could relax here in the back and take in the sights while he has a go.”

  The young Russian transplant shrugged her shoulders and said, “Why not?” She seemed to let go of her disappointment in not being allowed to program adulatory messages regarding overpriced European fashion brands as she rose and angled her way toward the passenger seats.

  After a sidelong appraisal of the newest blimp-flyer’s figure as she moved past him, Dirk changed his conversational tone to suit the next student pilot. He looked Merlin in the eye with avuncular benevolence and said, “Okay, big fella, you ready to fly?” Merlin met this direct question with one of his all-time most stunned, deer-in-the-headlights looks. He was mute as his eyes locked in terror with the captain’s. The great circles of Merlin’s wide-open eyes were now at full aperture, the big round metal frames of his eyeglasses providing perfectly symmetrical little rings for the bright Saturns of his ocular orbits.

  Dirk asked again, “Well?”

  This time Merlin knew he had to respond. He steeled himself, and with an uncharacteristic confidence, continued to look Dirk Kajerka in the eye while out of his vast chest cavity boomed a resounding “Yes!” With that utterance, it was like a force from somewhere beyond himself gave Merlin a kind of supernatural ability to move toward the pilot’s seat.

  Dirk exhaled and said, “Great, right this way.” He barely had time to step aside as Merlin began to squeeze past him toward the lone cockpit seat. Realizing that the seat remained in position for Svetlana, Dirk exclaimed, “Wait!” Merlin froze, and Dirk leapt to slide the seat backward on its tracks; he then cranked a seatside lever backward to lower the seat several inches toward the floor. Merlin had done everything he could to arrest his forward momentum when the captain interrupted his progress, but it seemed there was a latent propulsive force that he had contained, but not tamed, as at the moment Dirk Kajerka finished the seat adjustment and moved away from the chair, Merlin swept past him and landed his mass in the seat like a jumper from a burning building falling backward into the safety of a cartoon-esque fireman’s net.

  Merlin was wedged sideways into the seat at an acute angle. On registering that the seat still was not adjusted adequately for Merlin, Dirk went into action again.

  “Hold on, big fella.”

  Kajerka let the seat all the way back and with Merlin’s weight, it hit the back of its tracks with a loud metal on metal clank. He then cranked Merlin’s seat down as close as possible to the cockpit floor. Even with this extreme adjustment the seat seemed to barely accommodate its occupant, but barely would have to do. Svetlana had looked almost childlike in the pilot’s seat, and Merlin was the polar opposite, rolls of his mass tumbling out of the seat’s confines in every direction with his clothing barely preventing a dam break of hairy, sweat-covered flesh. Merlin didn’t notice any inconvenience as he gathered his composure and, again, drawing on a well of confidence whose source he could not identify, he turned to face forward.

  A wave of intense recognition washed over him. He beheld the controls and flight data instruments and sensed this was a view he was destined to see and that this pilot’s seat was somehow his seat and his place. He surveyed each instrument and control, nodding a little as he took it all in.

  Kajerka queried, “So you want me to go through this with you?”

  “No, no,” Merlin replied looking at the dials and levers. “I think I understood it when you explained it to Miss Svetlana.”

  “Why you call me miss?” Svetlana yelled from the passenger seat.

  Not wanting to explain the years of training in manners that still happened in parts of the American South, Merlin replied, “Sorry.” He then retrained his attention on the Airmadillo, which had veered from its tight circle over the Galleria.

  As he rested his meaty right hand gingerly on the elevator wheel and his enormous hiking boot–clad feet on the rudder pedals, he felt strangely at home. Merlin, who had never gotten a driver’s license and found the prospect of driving a car in a crowded city with so much ground-level sensory input beyond daunting, felt serene and in control at the helm of the blimp. He got his bearings and looked out on the city, and with the authority of a seasoned lighter-than-air pilot, pressed hard on the right rudder pedal while turning the elevator wheel backward to gain a little altitude. When Bayou Boughs came into view a couple of miles away, he straightened the blimp’s course and programmed his home address into the airship’s GPS. With an even greater intensity of focus than the seat’s previous occupant, he was primed to see his observatory and its environs from the inexplicable comfort of his newfound airborne digs.

  • Thirteen

  The arrangement Captain Dirk Kajerka had created continued with the unlikely blimp trio. Over the following couple of weeks or so Dirk took off, Svetlana flew, Merlin flew, and Dirk landed the blimp back at FUBAR. Dirk did his best during the critical time while Merlin was flying to ingratiate himself to the striking young Slav. He figured that about two weeks of chitchat with Svetlana while Merlin was at the controls would be required before he could make his move.

  During the airborne banter with Svetlana, he eyed the little curtain attached to a bar at the top of the blimp passenger compartment. From the blimp’s delivery several years earlier, the curtain had never been unsnapped and drawn closed to separate the pilot’s seat from the passenger compartment. He glanced at the little snap while he was talking with Svetlana the way a frisky teenager would consider the clasp on the back of his new girlfriend’s bra during their first make-out session. When would he have the opportunity to unsnap it, draw the curtain closed, and begin a new chapter in his checkered libidinous history? The left and right edges of his mustache twitched a little when he thought about it, so animated was he by the prospect. The object of his desire was not as immediately easy to woo as he had hoped, raising a dubious eyebrow here and there during their initial conversations and demonstrating a Russian shell that seemed as hard as the wintertime surface of a Ural Mountain lake, but, eventually, she thawed as the Airmadillo plied the Houston skies with the largest blimp pilot in the entire history of blimp pilots at its controls. Dirk was ready to pounce.

  The night was muggy and nearly windless, portending the greater unpleasantness of the oncoming Houston summer. The trio rose aloft, and when Dirk had leveled off the blimp at a suitable cruising altitude, he stood and motioned Svetlana to the pilot’s seat. She sat and adjusted the seat with the authority and confidence of a seasoned MiG pilot. Before takeoff, when none of the ground crew was looking, Dirk secreted aboard a small ice-filled cooler containing a bottle of good Russian vodka and a tin of caviar from the Caspian Sea. He had also stashed glasses, mixers, and toast points. (Someone at the
liquor store had told him the fancy way to serve caviar was on toast points, of which he had never heard. He was quick to find a specialty bakery that prepared them to order and made his first purchase of fresh toast points that afternoon.) As before, Svetlana was drawn to the lights of Uptown Houston like a Burberry plaid-patterned moth to a Tiffany lamp. Her level of excitement and animation was just as great as it had been on the first night flight, and her upbeat mood continued as the captain suggested that she let Merlin fly for a while.

  She sat near Dirk in the passenger compartment, smiled slightly, and said, “Such a nice night.” That was all he needed to segue into his pitch. “I brought along something to make it even nicer,” he offered with a fiendish half smile and mustache twitch. He lifted the small cooler up to seat level, opened it, and showed Svetlana the elixir within. Her eyes brightened considerably, and she exclaimed, “It’s my favorite!” Not wasting a nanosecond, Kajerka produced and opened an indigo velvet–lined box containing two crystal highball glasses. On seeing these, Svetlana exclaimed, “Baccarat! My favorite fine crystal brand!” The Kajerkan smile cracked a little more broadly.

  “Would you like a mixer?”

  “Meexer? No! We drink the Russian way!” Svetlana took the vodka bottle and one of the glasses and poured a couple of fingers. She almost ceremoniously handed the glass to the wily pilot. When he accepted it from her, she poured a glass for herself, making sure to dispense just a little less than she had poured for Dirk. She looked him in the eye, her smile leaving for a moment, and raised her glass to toast him, and he complied, surprised by what he perceived as some kind of exotic drinking ritual. They maintained eye contact as they took the first sip, after which Svetlana nodded approvingly. “Da, is just like Russian version of brand.”