The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) Read online

  The Quintessence of Quick

  By

  Stan Hayes

  A Highside Press Book

  The Quintessence of Quick

  Copyright © 2010, 2012, Stanley J. Hayes, all rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Highside Press

  1055 Riverbend Club Drive

  Atlanta, GA 30339

  www.stanhayes.com

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people and events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-9826518-2-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  Also by Stan Hayes

  The opening of the Jack Mason Saga:

  The Rough English Equivalent

  Cover design: Mark Hufham

  To Dee…

  With all my love.

  Our ability to create models- virtual realities- in our brains, combined with our modest-looking thumbs, has been sufficient to usher in another form of evolution: technology. That development enabled the persistence of the accelerating pace that started with biological evolution. It will continue until the entire universe is at our fingertips.

  -Raymond Kurzweil

  We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

  -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1 Up A Lazy River

  2 Target Bisque

  3 “Some Kinfolk…”

  4 Sunday Ride

  5 Gory Detail

  6 Private Ricky

  7 Draftin’ Ol’ Fireball

  8 On The Step

  9 Jai Alai High

  10 Anchors Aweigh

  11 Whereaway, O Whereaway?

  12 Tertiary Force Array

  13 Seeing As How…

  14 Milady’s Bust

  15 Return to Crotch Island

  16 Drama Queen

  17 Angst Ahoy

  18 Fig Newton

  19 “Oh, Scorpio Dick…”

  20 Double-Chek

  21 When in Cuban Waters

  22 Wings & Things

  23 HOTFOOT

  24 Bahia de Cochinos

  25 Freedom 7

  26 Eye Don’t See It

  27 Time & Place

  28 Dimensionally Stable

  29 Once More, With Feeling

  30 Spring Rolls & Pot-Stickers

  Epilogue

  PROLOGUE

  Call me Flx, for now. The kid named me that in 1944, when I hatched from an outsized, egg-shaped marble, a perfect little Northern Goshawk. We were hightailing it out of Los Alamos on US 66 At the time, on the bus that inspired my name, an asthmatic FLXible riding on six “maypop” tires of dubious origin. His mother, the redoubtable Serena, having had a bellyful of Los Alamos, we split, leaving Jack’s physicist pappy high and dry in the high desert. Destination? Her hometown, Bisque, Georgia; natives pronounce it BIS-kew.

  Jack and his buddies had scraped a marble ring out of the sandy clay between two splintery Manhattan Project duplexes, but my little birth-orb’s humpty-shape made it worthless as a shooting taw. So he glued cardboard fins on it and painted it olive-drab, prefiguring the nuclear surprise that Dad and his Manhattan Project confreres would soon produce for special delivery to the Empire of Japan. Presently, he’d realize that the explosion of his mini-bomb was way more significant, at least to him, than Fat Man, the primitive device that devastated Nagasaki.

  I chose a bird’s persona to communicate with Jack. He loved watching the Goshawks fly in great, swooping arcs over the desert, so my guise as a newborn example was a low-threat approach. And unless I allow it, no one but Jack can see me. In his sadness and confusion at being separated from his father, Jack needed a resourceful friend. For the last fifteen years, that’s been yours truly. So in a sense we’ve grown up together; I to full hawkness, he to young manhood: scholar, athlete, lover, airman… and felon.

  “So,” you say, “yakking agate-borne predator, assuming that we’re buying it, what the hell do you get out of this exercise?” Just a close-up look at my blood line, fellow homo sapiens. Something I’m sure that you’d do in my place, i.e. more than two millennia down the road, dispensing with the bipedal crap-factory that houses your brain, and transiting spacetime at superluminal velocities. Just think of it as quick. The quintessence of quick.

  We’ll be in deep water soon enough. First, into the shallows, off the bank of the just-navigable Savannah River. Augusta, Georgia, hard by the plutonium-spawning Savannah River Project, the Masters Golf Classic and Bradford’s Full-Service Boatyard & Marina, winter, 1959...

  1 UP A LAZY RIVER

  Careless of the ripe fuck-aroma that clung to her like a wetsuit, Striker’s skipper booked dock space in Bradford’s office as Bisque’s youngest millionaire rustled their bags into the parking lot under a lowering overcast. Drowsy green eyes scanned the several rows of cars, but Ralph Williams saw him first; the Buick Century wagon’s familiar treble honk drew his eyes to the opening driver’s door and the lithe body unfolding from behind it. Jack Mason and the bags headed that way. “Hidy, Boss.” One large brown hand took Jack’s, then joined the other in helping him with the bags. “Where d’lady?”

  “Th’ Skipper’ll be along in a minute. Can’t just walk off and leave a boat like that without some paper work.”

  “Guess not,” he said, peering through the cyclone fence and down to the dock at the boat’s broad stern. “Striker. She’s right good-sized, sho ’nuf. Where’d j’all spend the night?”

  “A ways downriver, other side of the lock. And up at the crack a’ dawn, freezin’ our asses off, and no place to plug in for power. Th’ Skipper had to go through first, see; she wadn’t about to get behind some damn empty pulpwood barge.”

  Ralph cackled softly as he shook his head. “Sound like th’ Skipper kep you jumpin’.”

  “And vice versa.”

  Still cackling, Ralph closed the tailgate, again peering down the line of cars. His scan locked on her hips as they moved to a silent languid Merengue. “I reckon this’s her.”

  The Skipper’s Yankee-greeting-a-Negro-in-the-boondocks smile was firmly in place as she extended her hand. “Hi, Ralph, I’m Linda Green. Thanks for meeting us.”

  When it came to women, Ralph reserved his best smile for his wife and his mother. He produced it now for the auburn-haired Yankee boat captain, the finest-looking white woman he’d ever seen, tatty sweatshirt, threadbare jeans and no makeup be damned. “Ralph Williams, Miz Green. It’s my pleasure. Look like you might make a sailor outa this boy.”

  “All in good time, if he behaves himself,” she said, slipping into the front seat. Ralph closed the door behind her, savoring her scent, his blood pressure way north of where it should be, as Jack got behind the wheel and adjusted the seat for his six-two frame.

  “I ’magine y’all’d like to get some breakfast fo’ you do any unpackin’ or anything,” Ralph said as they rolled onto the highway, heading out of Augusta on U.S. 1 for Bisque. “I told Miz Reba today’s th’ day, and she made me promise to bring y’all by the cafe first thing. But since it’s gettin’ on towards nine, wouldja mind runnin’ me by th’ office first? You know Monday mornins in th’ beer bidness.”

  Jack turned the heater fan down a notch from full-blast. “Sure thing, buddy. No problems, I hope.”

  “No more’n usual; just Monday. Guess you’ll b
e comin’ by later on?”

  “Yeah, two-three, sump’m like that.”

  “OK. We can bring you up to date then.”

  “Audit get done all right?”

  “Yeah; least we ain’t heard from ’em since they left.”

  “Hm. Well, I guess no news is good news at this point.”

  “Reckon so.”

  “That’s the reddist dirt I ever saw,” Linda said as they drove between red clay banks cut for the highway’s right-of-way.

  “Now you know what they mean by ‘the red hills of Georgia,’” Jack said. “Guess they have to be seen to be believed.”

  “No doubt. But who’s this ‘they’ you’re talking about? It’s not something I ever heard.”

  “That’s because you never had the dubious pleasure of listening to a Georgia politician. Unwritten law requires that ‘the red hills of Georgia’ be included at least once in every campaign harangue.”

  “Like the Kingfish’s ‘every man a king.’ ”

  “What? Oh, that Kingfish. I was thinking Kingfish on Amos ’n Andy. Didn’t remember that in any of his routines.”

  “No,” she said with a wry grin, “I was reaching back to Huey Long. Different kind of entertainer, but I’m sure he’d like to’ve had the other Kingfish’s audience. That guy was pretty funny.”

  “Pretty funny?” said Ralph, still high as a kite on his exposure to the scent of forbidden fruit. “I know a guy got a two-chair barbershop- you know ole Quintone James, Jack- says he have all kinda no-haircut niggers slidin’ in there every afternoon, jus’ ta watch ol’ Kangfish. Can’t stir ’em with a stick.”

  Jack saw Linda stiffen. she wasn’t readier than any other Yankee to hear “nigger” a dozen times a day, as she soon would. “Oh,” she said, “That’s a lotta people, all right. You say it’s on every day? Seems like it was a weekly show, back when.”

  “Five days a week, now.” Ralph said. “I heard the NAACP got on ’em- the network, I mean- and they cancelled it. Don’t know who they thought they was pleasin’; people up north, I reckon. But we get it out of Atlanta now, and five times as much to boot.”

  Jack looked up in the mirror to catch Ralph’s eye. “Remember when he was on the Tonight show last year, talkin’ about shootin’ up his in-laws?”

  “Shoot, I can’t stay up that late and get to work in the mornin’.”

  “Oh, man, it was hilarious! Somebody stole a roast out of his refrigerator, and he got after his in-laws with a pistol. He was laughin’ about it the way he did- ‘heh, heh, heh-’ said ‘You oughta seen dem in-laws scatter when I let loose wid dat gun.’ And when the cops came he just told ’em, ‘I de ole Kangfish,’ and got them to laughin’!”

  “He’s dead now, ain’t he?” asked Ralph.

  “Yeah, I think he died pretty soon after that. Too bad; but he was gettin’ up there.”

  “Bisque,” Linda said as they passed the city limits sign. “Why do you say it that way?”

  “BIS-kew? ’Cause that’s the way they’ve always said it, I guess. I don’t believe I’d like bein’ from ‘Bisk,’ anyway.”

  “They’s a town down the road apiece named Cairo,” said Ralph, pronouncing it “KAY-ro”. “Guess peoples just started callin’ it what it looked like it said, same as Bisque, ’less of course you be French or sump’m.”

  “You’re not likely to go wrong,” Jack said with a grin, “to give anything havin’ to do with Bisque the most literal interpretation possible.”

  “But that would have to include you, Smilin’ Jack,” she said.

  Jack looked up in the mirror in time to see an ear-to-ear grin. “Ralph and I’re just the exceptions that prove the rule.”

  “Betcha I’ll run across one or two more before we skip town,” she said.

  “Y’know,” said Linda, briskly drying herself after the first hot shower since they’d cast off from the Coconut Grove marina, “That horny-eyed little cook of Reba’s really knows his way around breakfast. I’m good till sundown, anyway.”

  “You’re better than good,” Jack said from his side of the bed, “At least as well as I can remember. By the way, Nelson Lord, that ‘horny-eyed little cook,’ doesn’t take much notice of females over eighteen, so consider yourself part of a distinguished minority.”

  “Just what I need,” she said with a stage shudder.

  Hands behind his head, cock brought to attention by the toweling tit-gyration, he looked her long tanned body up and down. “Get in here, girl.”

  Chuckling, she created a temporary tent, tossing her towel onto his cock as she dropped down next to him. “Just because we haven’t been in a real bed for a couple of weeks. Like we didn’t screw much.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like being in Mose’s big ol’ bed, is it?” Smiling as he drew her to him, he shot a “thanks” at Flx, wherever he was, who’d had the delicacy not to put in an appearance during their run from Coconut Grove up the Intracoastal Waterway, but who’d speculated about sex underway on the flying bridge while Linda minded the helm. She’d loved it that way, at least until they got into cold weather. She called it “doing the dragonfly.”

  “Now we’re calling him Mose again?”

  “You kiddin’? All you’re gonna be hearin’ is ‘Mose this’ and ‘Mose that’ as long as we’re here. He was the man-about-Bisque. May as well get used to it; just think of that gent Peter Wessel down in Coconut Grove as a completely different guy. Anyway, I’d really have a job thinkin’ of him as anyone but Mose within these four walls.”

  “How old were you when you first came out here?”

  “Ten, I guess. He bought it the first year he was here. We’ve had a helluva lot of good times in this joint.”

  “And quite a joint it is. I’m looking forward to matching up some visuals with all the stories the two of you’ve told me. Amazing how he wormed his way in here, being a Yankee, and Jewish on top of that.”

  Her remark triggered Jack’s lightning rewind of Moses’ life. He was nineteen when Moses fully confided in him, asking his help in the operation that would allow the onetime Nazi spy and his former colleague, Dieter Brück, to escape the Savannah River Project’s tightening ring of security. Brück, who had saved his life during the Spanish Civil War, had been sent to penetrate the Savannah River Project by his latest employer, the Soviet KGB. “Mose never wormed his way into anything,” Jack told her, his voice heating up. People were always glad to help him.”

  “Starting with your mother.”

  “No, starting with me, but no tellin’ how many times they made love right here in this bed. Probably on these same sheets.”

  Smiling at his resurgent erection, she gave it a firm squeeze, caught the resulting flow of his clear pre-ejaculate with the circle of her thumb and forefinger and spread it along the shaft. She took him into her mouth for a moment, then rolled onto her side. “Well, Sparky, if you want to follow in that hallowed tradition, you’d better get with it. That shower made me sleepy.”

  Jack was back at the house, which he’d always think of as Chez Mose, a little after six. Lee Webster, Bisque’s longtime “radio personality” and Mose’s erstwhile drinking partner, began calling it that, and soon it was all over Bisque, uttered in various degrees of appreciation, envy or ignorance. Linda sat with her customary large Scotch in the living room, watching the news. “What’s goin’ on?” he asked, the question barely out of his mouth before she shushed him.

  “Get a drink and sit down. They’re saying Castro’s rounding ’em up by the thousands.”

  “That goin’ on right now?”

  “Looks like. They say he was on Cuban TV yesterday until two in the morning.”

  “Hairy bastard, ain’t he? Looks like he’da had a chance to clean up by now.”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t be a bad looking guy with a clean shave. Can’t be much over thirty.”

  “Looks older there. Revolutionizin’ must be a right rough job.”

  “Well, Cubans’ve been at each other’s
throats for a long time, with lots of outside help. Batista’s bunch were just the worst of a bad lot. At least up to now.”

  “Guess y’all saw quite a bit of it down there.”

  Linda shifted on the couch to look him in the eye. “And we lost Dieter,” she said, her voice catching for a split second over the name.

  She’d told him about falling in love with Dieter Brück on their run down to Cuba. Since then, Jack had been careful to avoid mentioning his name. This time there was no getting around it. He could handle a live rival, he thought, but competing with a dead man was a losing proposition. He fought the urge to reach for her hand. “Wasn’t too long after y’all got there, was it?”

  “Just a few months. March 13th of ’57. Castro’s people attacked the presidential palace that afternoon, and it was Dieter’s bad luck to be in a taxi that got caught in the crossfire. I’m over it now, thanks to you and Pete, but it’s taken a while. Funny how things happen, though. I doubt that I’d have gotten interested in flying if Pete hadn’t used it to try to take my mind off what happened.”

  That and screwing you every so often, he thought. Quick to seize on something they had in common, Jack asked her, “Where was it y’all flew out of? Baradera?”

  “Varadero. A ways east of Havana. Nice little field; runway paralleling the beach, and not too much traffic. Wind usually right on the nose, zero-nine-zero, 10 to 15 knots. Pretty good conditions for a fledgling pilota.”

  “Sounds like it; Pete’s a damn good instructor, ain’t he?”

  “He really is, but I didn’t find out until after I soloed. It took him that long to find someone he could bribe to transcribe his ‘Moses Kubielski’ hours onto a new ‘Peter Weller’ logbook and have them certified as having been flown in Cuba. Then he had check rides to fly. So my first twenty hours or so of flight time were with Tony Rivera, the same guy who gave Pete his multi-engine instruction.”