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

  “I was just thinking- you’ve never been in a ‘gangbang,’ have you?”

  Jack turned his head, trying to look Nick in the eye. “If what you mean is two or more guys and one girl, no, I haven’t. Or the other way around, either, for that matter.”

  “Didn’t think so,” Nick said, “But I thought you might’ve slipped one by me somewhere along the line. I remember you and Rick teaming up on the Bishop twins a time or two, though.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jack said, smiling at the memory. “I wouldn’t mind an encore of that engagement one of these days.”

  “So what appears to be bothering you,” Nick observed, “isn’t the concept of group sex, but the casting.”

  Jack’s head swiveled once again in Nick’s direction. “Actually, what’s definitely bothering me’s the concept of falling out of love with a woman who’s captivated me all these years, but who’ll fuck anyone she takes a notion to. Don’t tell me that wouldn’t bother you.”

  “In your shoes, of course it would. Maybe all you need’s a trip to the shoe store.”

  “Spare me the homely analogies; just tell me.”

  Nick’s eyes went skyward momentarily; he exhaled noisily as they refocused on Jack. “I’ll put it in the form of a question. Why would you want to squander the good luck that you’ve had all these years with a bad ending? You’ve gotten everything out of this on-and-off-Linda roller-coaster that you’re likely to get without putting a permanent wedge between you and Pete. You’re grown up now, sort of, but to her you’re still a kid with a permanent hard-on. Titillating as all hell, but sort of a pain in the ass when you’re not actually fucking her brains out. Which is why I said ‘just like a man.’ Just reverse your roles for a minute and imagine how you’d feel about some precocious fourteen-year-old that was puttin’ out for you.”

  Jack stopped at a traffic light. Pulling away as it went green, he said, “At least I’d tell the kid not to expect anything beyond a good fucking, and not to be imagining spending her life with me.”

  “Don’t look now,” said Nick, “But I think that’s exactly what she’s been telling you. She knows you’ve still got some growing up to do, and that when you’ve done it you’re likely to see things in a rather different light. And even if she were inclined to settle down with you, she knows that sooner or later she’ll make you miserable.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “See what I mean? A grown-up would simply be grateful to have a friend like Linda, instead of wanting to add her to his baggage. Enjoy her for who she is, screw her when feasible, and be glad that she and Pete hold you in such high regard, peckerhead. A lot of people in this situation would’ve consigned you to permanent fifth-wheel status by now.”

  “Don’t you think I know that? And don’t you think, goddammit, that I know that she and Pete probably ought to be together? And if that happens, I don’t think that either one of them would ever be able to look at me without wondering how much of my mind’s on her pussy. That’ll put me in fifth-wheel status soon enough.”

  “Not if you don’t push it. All this situation needs is a little depressurization. Nobody’s mad at anybody, at least not yet; matter of fact, just the opposite. The next few days’ll be a little tricky, but the three of you are up to it, particularly now that there’s a new airplane to play with. But if I were you, I’d get my ass back to Bisque after the most minimum of decent intervals, instead of hanging around here. You don’t need the flight time; you’ll be getting plenty of that, courtesy of the Navy. Pete and Linda’ll get their multi-engine and type ratings that much faster, too.”

  “You make it sound pretty damn simple,” Jack said.

  “That’s because it is. The hard things usually are; simplicity doesn’t make getting them done any easier, of course. But in this case, buddy, you really have no choice. Stick around here and see how quickly things start falling apart.”

  “So what do I tell them? After everybody’s talked so much about my being here until it was time to check in at Pensacola...”

  “Well, hell, obligations can crop up, can’t they?” Nick interrupted. “How about your Mom? You could do worse, as a son, to pay her a visit before making this major move in your life. I’m surprised you hadn’t thought about doing it anyway.”

  “How do you know I haven’t? If in fact the great artiste can make some time for me. Matter of fact, YOU owe me a little sit-down, bub. The one you promised me when you stopped being Flx.”

  “I do indeed. That’s not likely to be a short session, however, and we won’t want to be interrupted. I’d prefer to do it at Chez Mose with the gate locked, if you don’t mind.”

  “Hey! What’s that?” They were passing Capri Chevrolet, where a very un-Chevrolet-looking coupe sat nose-down on a ramp, dead center of the used car lot. White with a double blue stripe bisecting it from nose to tail, its slotted aluminum wheels shod with what looked to Jack like racing rubber.

  “You mean the car,” said Nick.

  “Well, I don’t mean the stilts that it’s sittin’ on.”

  “Then that, wise-ass, is a Cunningham C3.”

  11 WHEREAWAY, O WHEREAWAY?

  It didn’t go all that badly, Jack thought as he hit the horn passing Capri Chevrolet on his way out of town, the porter interrupting his morning new-car washdown to return the salute with up-and-down swishes of his hose. The Chrysler Hemi’s insistent rhythm suffused him, prompting the surmise that one of life’s major secrets is just to fucking refocus now and then. Well, wide-fucking-open from here to Bisque ought to do it. Just me, this elegant beast, and Nick, if you’re listening, no you. Since you were insightful enough to insist that we pull into the dealer’s lot and inspect this rascal, I’m sure that you’ll understand just how much I need some time alone with it.

  He’d known about Cunninghams, of course; they’d been built just a few miles north, in West Palm Beach, before a miniscule marketplace and unfriendly sections of the Internal Revenue Service code ended their production. Anyone with the slightest interest in automotive competition knew what Briggs Cunningham and his team had done at Le Mans a few years back, putting three cars in the top ten in 1953, the year this coupe was built, and winning at Sebring on top of that. But what a difference, he thought, between those cars and this one; he’d seen C4Rs at an SCCA race at Hunter Air Force Base in Savannah, and pictures of its slicker brethren, the C5R and C6R, in car magazines. The racers were overpowering, not to say brutal, in appearance, but this little coupe, with its leather interior and body by Italian coachmaker Vignale, was a polished jewel by comparison. He was dismayed at first to see a bench seat up front instead of the expected buckets, but his test drive with a nervous salesman indicated that the seats’ two pull-down armrests, and the aircraft-grade seatbelts that looked like the ones in Gene Debs’ old J3, could keep driver and passenger securely in place during spirited driving. And spirited driving was exactly what Jack had in mind, straight up US 1. A thank-you nod to Mr. Cunningham passing through West Palm Beach, then on to Daytona and a turn inland at Jacksonville, grazing the top of the Okefenokee, eyes peeled for the speed traps on which not a few South Georgia towns based their budgets, then straight on into Bisque. Absent interference from the law, he figured to be there soon after dark.

  With Pete and Linda, all that had been necessary to clothe his abrupt change in plans in credibility was a halfhearted wave of the motherhood flag as Nick had suggested. Once they’d conducted a rather cursory planning session over lox and bagels for the new air charter business, which Jack had proposed be named FlxAir, it seemed to him that his friends were more than happy to speed him on his way. No questions at all about the name, or any proposed alternatives; hell, he thought, they’d probably have okayed ShitAir just to get me out of there. Maybe that’s a little bit hard on my pals; they seemed real happy that I’d found this car, each taking a brief demo run with me through the streets of Coconut Grove and telling me how much time I’d be logging in the good old Albatross when I came down on le
ave. When Linda asked me to pull off the road as we neared the end of her ride, I must have given her a pretty strange look. “Just anywhere, Jack,” she said with a touch of exasperation. “I’m not interested in scandalizing Miami this morning.” So I pulled over at the edge of a vacant lot and stopped, waiting to hear what she had to say and wondering how she could look so goddamned fresh after what I was sure were not one, but two recent, reasonably thorough fuckings. “I’m glad that I got to make love to you for one last time this morning,” she said, looking at me in a way that I’m sure was intended to remind me of her older-woman status.

  “So am I,” I said. “Thanks for not mentioning the ‘last’ part at the time.”

  “I would have, but at the time I wasn’t sure.”

  “But you are sure now.”

  “Yes. Not that I won’t miss it, but if we go on the way that we have been, FlxAir’s a dead duck for sure. And I don’t think any of us want that.”

  “So- you and Pete go on as a couple?”

  “I think that’s best, at least for the moment. Don’t you?”

  “You know, I really do. I guess it was your decision all along. He and I talked about it last night after you left, but as far as I could tell we didn’t decide anything.”

  “Yes, he told me. Jack, I wish-”

  “That there were two of you? Because that’s what I wish.”

  Giving me another I’m-older-and-know-better smile, she said, “We’d better go.”

  So there’s truly no telling, he thought, what might have happened if I’d hung around. All of which goes to prove, above all else, that a stiff dick has a narrow perspective. I’ll miss the shit out of her, sure, but what price pussy? I’d miss Pete a whole lot more, and I think I’m bailing out soon enough so that there’ll be no problem with him. Who knows what the hell we’ll get into, once I’ve got this Navy hitch behind me?

  He let the rhythm of the drive take over, taking pleasure in his luxurious-but-purposeful cabin environment and the knowledge that this bolide was his alone to drive, anywhere he chose, for the next month and a half. At home with his solitude in the way that’s unique to only-children, he began to examine his alternatives. The trip to New York alone could eat up a couple or three weeks, if he were actually to go. Spring was still some way off in that part of the world; he’d frozen his ass off up there more than once in April, during Spring vacations that he’d spent with his father. An ironic grin flickered across his face at the realization that he’d told Pete and Linda that he felt that a visit to his mother, as opposed to his parents, would be in order before casting off for the Navy. He hoped that Pete hadn’t seen that as a cheap shot at him; his mother’s preference for New York and its art world over life in Bisque with Moses Kubielski was hers and hers alone, with no blame attaching to the man now known as Peter Wessel.

  His father was there too, of course, burrowing ever deeper into the woodwork of Columbia’s Department of Physics as he nursed the hope of becoming its chairman, and if he went he’d be visiting both of them, embattled at opposite ends of Manhattan, still married and rarely exchanging a word. At least there’d be no pilgrimage to Long Island’s north shore, his father’s parents and their flinty scrutiny having died, within a couple of months of each other, a little over a year ago. Jack wondered if either of them had ever uttered a word of forgiveness to their son for the transgression of marrying outside their circle of Eastern Brahmins. And if that weren’t bad enough, she had to be some little jumped-up hussy from Georgia, the daughter of nobodies that he’d chanced upon in one of the hipster dens that Columbia University had allowed to infest its campus’ periphery. And knock her up before they could talk some sense into him and have the marriage annulled. Sic transit gloria humbug, right down to passing along some whacky Abolitionist gene to their son, one effect of which was his refusal to set foot south of the Mason-Dixon line except in the line of duty. And his duty obviously didn’t include visiting his son in enemy territory.

  He’d not acquired this knowledge easily, as one of the few things that his father and mother were able to agree on was that one would not speak ill of the other to him. His picture of his parents’ coming together had been constructed piecemeal, over a long period of time. A slip of the tongue here, a stealthy observation there until, at about the time a young Jew would have been bar mitzvahed, he’d asked his father point-blank. To Jack’s chagrin, he got more than he bargained for. In his typical dispassionate manner, Dr. Mason laid out the essentials of his meeting Serena at Columbia, how he, Jack, had appeared at a rather inconvenient moment, and their subsequent early family life in New York, the primary feature of which was, Jack had long ago concluded, both parents’ preoccupations with their own lives. His father frequently justified their move to the desert sands of Los Alamos, New Mexico as the family’s contribution to the “war effort.” And he’d remained silent over the years, in observation of the speak-no-evil agreement, concerning Jack’s and his mother’s boarding a hot, rattly Flxible bus, soon after their arrival, for Bisque. Jack’s often-jangled New York sensibilities weren’t much help as he tried to figure out which of the two alien heat sinks he hated more. Since his then-beloved father was still in Los Alamos, however, the title went to Bisque by default.

  The miles flew past, orange juice signs giving way to less frequent ones hawking papershell pecans as the Cunningham put Florida behind them. The white-on-red Burma-Shave signs remained a constant, their doggerel meter infiltrating his thoughts as the wastelands of South Georgia whizzed by:

  A man who passes

  On hills and curves

  Is not a man

  Of iron nerves

  He’s crazy!

  Burma-Shave

  I’ve seen those signs ever since we moved to Bisque, he thought, but I’ve never seen Burma-Shave. Wonder where you can buy it? Is it any good? Thinking of the “See Rock City” barn-roof signage that far outnumbered any other roadside advertisements, it occurred to him that you could probably get it at Rock City. Stands to reason that roadside merchants would stick together. Have to go there someday. Maybe if I bought enough of the shit, they’d let me put my own message on a set of those damn signs. Maybe something like

  Avoid older women

  Whatever you do

  For sooner or later

  They’ll shit

  Right on you!

  Burma-Shave

  Or maybe-

  The guy whom you

  Hoped would one day

  Be your Dad

  Is screwing your honey

  And driving you mad!

  Burma-Shave

  He was beginning to see the efficacy of the Burma-Shave approach to life. If nothing else, it would’ve been a big help at exam time back at Georgia, keeping the philosophers and Shakespearean characters straight. But right now, he’d adapt the technique to get a handle on life in general, and his own in particular:

  What the fuck

  Am I doing

  Going out of my head

  With money to burn,

  Plenty women to bed?

  Burma-Shave

  It might not be art- hell, it definitely wasn’t art- but it certainly fit his mood. and the more he thought about it, the more beholden he felt to the Hamm County Selective Service Board:

  You’dve drafted my ass

  Had I not joined the Navy

  So thanks for

  The butt-kick

  It beats going crazy

  Burma-Shave

  Or maybe, he thought, given this fresh roadside leitmotif, I’m already headed around the bend. Refocusing, he hit the gas and watched the needle climb quickly toward, then through, the century mark.

  He awoke with a surprisingly clear head, a little before ten. Stretching, he luxuriated in his solitude and, judging by the sun streaming through his windows, the promise of an ideal middle Georgia spring day. He lay still, letting the memories of recent days wash over him. Two weeks, he thought; all it took was a couple of weeks to shake
my life down from soup to nuts. Swinging his feet to the floor, he sensed various near-invisible clues of Gene Debs’ visits to the house; no stale air, nothing out of place, and the faint smell of pine-scented disinfectant that indicated he’d had the maid in at least once. He’d called him during his Jacksonville gas stop to let him know that he was returning earlier, quite a bit earlier, than he’d told him he would be when he asked him to keep an eye on the place. Gene Debs had let this news pass unremarked, to Jack’s relief. He attributed this uncharacteristic lack of curiosity to his uncle’s getting a handle on his new job managing Bisque’s airport, knowing that he’d be fielding questions soon enough from the old aviator, and the others, about his “Miami connection.”

  He walked to the kitchen, half expecting to find fresh ground coffee in the Chemex filter and water in the tea kettle. Smiling to himself at this minor absurdity, he set about the task himself. Waiting for the water to boil, he stepped out onto the patio, looking down the gently sloping lawn toward the pond. The duck population was always sparse at this time of the morning, but a couple of stragglers were another welcome cue that everything was pretty much as he’d left it when his plans had been to be gone a lot longer than he was. The teakettle’s whistling underscored the turmoil of his mixed feelings about being back home so soon, and the much longer absence from all things familiar that was just around the corner.

  “Coffee’s ready, Nick,” he said, pouring water into the Chemex. “Almost, anyway.”

  “Your ever-growing acuity,” the familiar voice observed, “never fails to amaze me, my boy.” Jack turned to see him sitting at his usual place at the kitchen table, debonair in a white golf cap and plus-fours in the Bobby Jones manner. “That’s the first time that you’ve let on you knew I was around before I ‘showed up,’ so to speak.”

  “Well, I’ve gotten a little bit of a feeling now and then. Today, we might just put it down to the loud outfit. Speaks volumes, right by itself.”

  Nick’s bright grin changed Jack’s attempted dig to a compliment. “I suppose dressing for golf in the classic style does take a bit of daring these days. Not that coming back home to dear old Bisque in a Cunningham doesn’t. Good thing you made it in under cover of darkness; you’dve had people following you home.”