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

  “All of your hours in that Champ you told me about?”

  “Yep. Little green rascal. Wish I could fly it tomorrow.”

  “Guess you always have a soft spot in your heart for the first bird you solo. I feel that way about the ol’ J-3. That’s one that we can fly tomorrow, or at least in a day or two, unless Gene Debs’s got it torn down.”

  “That’s a deal,” she said, glancing at Castro’s still-gesticulating image. Hey. This flying talk’s got me hungry. You cooking, or are we going out again?”

  “None of the above. I figured that you might still be a little pooped from the trip, so I picked up a package at Tubby’s Barbecue. What’s your position on Brunswick Stew and chopped swine sandwiches?”

  “At strict attention, sport. After what you’ve told me about that joint, you better’ve brought plenty.”

  His breath came easier now; round three and he still felt good. Not as good as the Cuban light-heavy in the tan headgear who faced him in the opposite corner, but good. Good for a guy who’ll never see the sunny side of fifty again, for sure, he thought. Not that young Pepe over there couldn’t murder me, but now I’m making him work for it. Or he’s making it look like I am.

  “OK,” said Frank Sanchez, turning away from a neutral-corner conversation with another Cuban in an eggshell-hued Palm Beach suit. Peter Weller hoisted his gloves off the ropes and moved toward his rangy adversary. Slipping the kid’s opening jab and countering with one of his own, he moved to his left as he held up his end of their staccato exchange of lefts. If I’m careful, Pete thought, maybe I can surprise him with a combination; Pepe’s not used to my having much left for round three. He moved back to the right, still jabbing. The kid assayed a hook, not his best move, that Pete saw coming; planting his right foot, he bobbed his head back and to the right. Countering as the glove whistled past, the raised silver stitching of the EVERLAST label looking six inches high, Pete drove his right into the kid’s side. That’ll slow the rascal down, he thought as he took a step back, jabbing where he thought Pepe would be but catching some air of his own.

  “Move EEN, Whaler, move EEN! Ju mees jour shance wid heen! See, he raddy now, bot for dot momen’ he was opeen for de oopercoot. Ju can’ score back on jour heels, mon!” Nodding quickly in acknowledgment at Sanchez, Pete moved back left, squaring his stance in readiness for renewed aggression from Pepe. No fighter, least of all a Latin, likes being embarrassed, even slightly, and Pete looked for a new opportunity in that. This, Pete thought, can be my best round ever with the kid. But the charge, if you could call it that, consisted of a flutter of rapid lefts, easily parried and indicative of Pepe’s increased respect for the old man’s right hand. “Time!” bellowed Sanchez. Backslapping the fighters simultaneously, he said to Pepe, “Cool out onna beeg bog, Chico. Dis Pete, he steel hov some e-stoff, sí?”

  Loosening his headgear, the boy shot a shy smile Pete’s way. “Sí; ju sorprice me, Pete; I no geev ju dot shot no more.”

  “Can’t blame an old guy for trying, Pepe; nice workout. Thanks,” Pete said as he caught his breath.

  “Ju got some right hand for old mon,” Sanchez said when they were alone. Running his trainer’s eye up and down Weller’s powerful sub-six-foot body, he continued, “Pero ju old as me; why you do dees? Ju mi-ey get hit hard someday. Ees bayder ways to stay een tchape, mon.”

  “Claro, Francisco,” said Pete with a grin. Pero lo necesito. Absolutamente.”

  Tossing his workout bag into the old Buick limousine’s back seat, he slid under the steering wheel and hit the starter. The highly-tuned straight eight leapt to life with a roar that he was still getting used to. Can this be the same car, he thought as he drove out into the early evening on Miami’s Calle Ocho, that brought me down from Baltimore all those years ago? I never thought I’d see it again after Bisque, and never really wanted to once those damn Bishop twins got hold of it. Can’t imagine what it cost Jack to get it in this kind of shape. If Buick had built ’em this way in 1941, there’s no telling how many they’dve sold. But it’s one of a kind, and so is he. Can’t wait ’til the little pissant gets back down here. And Linda, not that we don’t have a few things to sort out among ourselves. I didn’t expect her to go after him the way she did when he first showed up down here, but that’s women for you. She’s got the goods on Jack and me, and it looks like she thinks she can do as she pleases. Way too much like her mother. But we can sort it out. Hell, we’ve got to.

  They slept late, waking to a clear, cool morning. Throwing a leg over Jack’s prone form, she felt his butt cheeks contract once, twice, three times. “You sending me a message, boy?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “And what might that be?”

  He turned his head toward her, opening one eye. “Need a little taste,” he grunted.

  “Taste of what? Brunswick Stew?”

  “If that’s what that little thing’s tastin’ like this mornin’.”

  It was after eleven when they woke up again. “You could at least fix a girl some coffee,” she said into the nape of his neck.

  Reaching behind him, he squeezed her butt. “Ooo-kay. Settle for instant?”

  “Shit no- I saw that Chemex on the counter.”

  Jack disarmed the alarm system and they took their coffee outside, exhaling vapor clouds as they walked up the hill behind the house to the horse barn that Mose had converted to workout space and garage. Opening the door, Jack reached up without looking, throwing the main power switch, then flipping the half-dozen light switches below it. A regulation-size boxing ring, heavy bag, speed-bag, weight bench, wall pulleys, an assortment of barbells and dumbbells occupied the right side of the floodlit space. Arrayed in line on the left side, in front of a towering red Snap-On toolbox, were five motorcycles: A Vincent Black Shadow, a Harley-Davidson 80 cubic-inch sidecar rig, a 1940 Indian Four, a single-cylinder BMW R27 and a BSA Gold Star Clubman. “Welcome to Chez Jock,” said Jack, grinning broadly.

  “Jesus. As much as you’ve both talked about it, I’m still amazed. ‘Chez Jock,’ huh?”

  “That’s what the local newscaster Lee Webster, Mose’s old drinking buddy, started calling it. Actually, he first named the whole place ‘Chez Mose.’ As time went on, he named the house ‘Chez Cock’ and the barn ‘Chez Jock.’”

  “Leaving very little to the imagination,” she observed. “I’ve yet to see much of this little burg, but I’m already imagining what a commotion ol’ Mose let loose around here.” She walked over to the motorcycles, stopping at the Vincent. “The Vincent,” she read the gilt scroll on the gas tank. “Looks like it’s doing a hundred standing still.” She blew on the tank. “Needs a good dusting. Why don’t you cover ’em up?”

  “Probably should. Usually they don’t sit long enough to gather much dust. We’ll have to get covers for ’em anyway when we ship ’em south.”

  “You ARE going to teach me to ride before you ship ’em.”

  Jack’s grin reappeared, wider than ever. “Thought you’d never ask.”

  They walked the rest of the three-acre property, working their way around to the front of the house. Sitting in the swing that Jack had hung from a large Poplar tree that overlooked the lake, they watched ducks and geese compete for occupancy of the swimmers’ raft. “Hard to imagine you’d ever want to leave here,” Linda said to him. “Seems like a pretty good place to call home.”

  “Yeah, there are lots worse places than Bisque to spend your life, but Mose was the best part of Bisque for me. Before he got here, I felt like I’d been kidnapped, first from New York and then from Los Alamos. Pretty soon, in every way that counted, he got to be both mother and father to me.”

  Turning to look at the sidecar rig, she said, “He was good at that.”

  “Same with you, right? Well, now that he’s gone, there’s not that much left to get excited about. The quicker I get out of here, the better.”

  She smiled. “It seemed like there was never a problem that he couldn’t handle. Of course I le
ft before he did, but when he’d gone, I felt exactly the same way about Baltimore. Nobody left but my juicehead mother, and she was beyond help, even his. Guess it’s natural to want to put the old hometown behind you when you get out on your own. Like most of the people I knew at Johns Hopkins, for me New York was the Holy Grail. Or Paris, or San Francisco. Somewhere where there was at least a chance of making a place for yourself in the art world, or at least being in the art world. Maybe I should’ve tried Paris; New York’s no place to be unless you have some money.”

  “Well, Mom never got it out of her system. She’s happier’n a pig in shit to be back there. Pap’s dyin’ made it a good deal easier for her, of course, but she’dve done it anyway.”

  “And from what I’ve heard from you and Mose, she’s a pretty damn good sculptor. That improves her odds of making it, but I’ve seen a lot of damn good artists driving cabs and waiting tables until it was all squeezed out of ’em. You’ve gotta have connections to go along with your talent, or you may never get that first big break. I’m sure that having friends like that gallery owner didn’t hurt a bit.”

  “Hap. No, it can’t hurt to have friends who can help you along. Seems to me that’s true in any business, and art, at least if you’re trying to make a living out of it, is just another business.”

  She sighed. “True enough, in the sense that artists need to pay the bills. Trouble is, artists are artists, and they do what they do because they must, whether it makes money or not. So, paying the bills takes second place to that, at least while you’re young. But somewhere along the way most people either succeed, leave town, get a ‘real’ job or become some kind of an art whore.”

  Jack let a few seconds pass before he spoke. “Just out of curiosity, where were you in that process when you decided to leave?”

  She let more than a few seconds pass, then said, “Where did you get the idea that I considered myself an artist? What I wanted to do was just to live around artists, to be in that world and have a ‘real’ job in a gallery or, even better, a museum. I thought I could parlay a degree in art history into a life like that, one that would let me learn more and more about art and artists. Turned out a lot more people wanted to do that than there were opportunities to do it, even in New York. So, long story short, I traded on the friendship of a photographer that I’d gotten to know, and he helped me learn the photo stylist’s trade. From there it was far too short a hop into the bed of a charming ad agency vice president, who made sure that I had the pick of the agency’s assignments.”

  “Oh, yeah, the guy with the boat,” Jack said, hating him.

  “And the wife.”

  “Mmm-hm.”

  “Which really didn’t bother me at all; she was in Greenwich, and for me that was as good as being on the moon. And anyway, what you heard a lot back then, at least in the circles I was moving in, was ‘The good ones are always married.’ I wasn’t at all interested in being married myself, not then anyway. And since he wasn’t around much on weekends, I could spend those with my friend the photographer and other ‘artist-any-day-now’ friends, in whom he wasn’t much interested. It was actually quite nice- for a while.”

  “When did you start living on the boat?”

  “A few months after we started seeing each other. He didn’t like staying over at my place; I had a roommate, and it was pretty small apartment. We’d gone sailing several times, and I loved it. Him, too, or so I thought. The wife wanted no part of it; had a problem with motion sickness. She kept after him to sell it, and he kept telling her that he would. That, of course, was the farthest thing from his mind. So I moved aboard the good ship Petrel, and was still there on that fateful day a couple of years later, when you and Mose walked up the gangplank.”

  Jack grinned, remembering. “Fateful is right. That was some boat. Crew wasn’t bad, either.”

  She grinned back, reaching out to slap his cheek. “I still can’t believe what we did. You were quite the little stud at 16. Hope you never lose the boxer body.”

  “Me? Hell, I’d never seen a woman like you close up. Except in my dreams. I had a hard-on the whole damn time we were aboard.”

  “You were so cute when we went sailing the next day,” she said. “Wanting to learn everything about sailing, all at once. Watching you move around the boat in just a pair of shorts got me really hot. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t have your virginity to deal with. I caught you looking at me so many times I lost count, and when Mose mentioned having to be in meetings all day Monday, I wasn’t all that surprised to see you coming up the gangplank again. I just thought I’d see if you knew as much about what you were doing as I figured you did. A little bit scary, looking back on it; I could’ve had my ass locked up for statutory rape.”

  “By the time that day was over, I would’ve nominated your ass for sainthood, and sucked those sweet bing-cherry nipples for communion.”

  She laughed, looking down at the lake. “Going on seven years ago. Lots of water over the dam since then. We’ve had some good times, though, haven’t we, kid?”

  “Oh Yeah. Going to New York to visit my Dad got to be one helluva lot of fun. ’56 wasn’t so great, though. Next thing I knew, you guys were in Cuba.” After you’d joined me as an accessory to fraud, hauled Mose and Dieter out of the Atlantic after the fake plane crash, and fallen in love with the goddam kraut, he thought.

  “I couldn’t believe it when Mose told me what he was gonna do. Sometimes I still have trouble believing it. Working his ass off to be somebody in this town, then just turning his back on it to help a friend. He really is an incredible guy.”

  You still don’t know the half of it, Jack thought. Or do you? He’s got as much as I’ll have in the bank, if not more. And it’s way better in his pocket than in the Irish Republican Army’s. “That’s for sure. Put you through school, took you to Cuba, and made me a beer baron, at least temporarily.”

  “And being, as near as I can tell, a better lover of both your mother and of mine than either of them deserved. But this beer episode has to be the most amazing one of all,” she said. “Walking- well, flying- away from a multimillion-dollar business that he’d built and just dropping it in your lap, to do with as you pleased.”

  “No one was more amazed then me,” said Jack. “I guess he figured that he’d never have had the chance to build the business into what it is today if Pap, my granddad, hadn’t turned up the opportunity of buying it, and then financing it. I think he just thinks of it as payback, but it’s one hell of a payback.”

  Beats hell out of four years at Johns Hopkins and a Chris-Craft sportfisherman, she thought, but who’s counting? “When are you closing the deal?”

  “Two weeks from Monday. The sixteenth. Unless what I told them yesterday slows it down.”

  She swiveled to face him. “What did you tell them?”

  “I told Bruce, the lawyer, to tell them. They sent the contract back with lines drawn through a provision that I told them was not negotiable.”

  “What was that?”

  “Employment contracts. For Ralph and Beverly Tyler, the two people that really run the place.”

  “How much of a problem do you think they’ll have with that?”

  “Dunno. But it’s their problem; those two have put a big part of their lives into the business, and I’ll be damned if I’ll walk away from it without making sure they’re taken care of.”

  “What’s in the contracts?”

  “Employment in their current positions, or better, for five years, with annual salary increases based on increases in net profits, and continuation of their participation in the profit-sharing plan that Mose put in when he first took over.”

  “Sounds pretty good, at least from their point of view. I guess I can see why your buyer might have some reservations, though.”

  “Well, they better think about getting over them if they want HCBC.”

  “Want what?” she asked.

  “HCBC. Hamm County Beverage Company. If they want it
, they’re damn sure going to have to execute those contracts. Mose’d kick my ass if I didn’t take care of Ralph and Beverly.”

  Considering that, she paused to let some newfound respect for this twenty-three year-old kid take hold. Then she said, “You’re really prepared to kill this deal if they say no to the contracts?”

  “Yes ma’am. But I don’t really think there’s much danger in that. They want us bad. I can smell it.”

  “That’s some nose you’ve got there, sport. I know one thing it’s not picking up, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The smell of breakfast. My turn.” Reaching for his empty coffee cup, she said, “Sit tight and I’ll bring you a refill.”

  Jack sat alone in the swing, idly watching steam rise from his cup. The inimitable squawk came from directly above his head. “Flx?”

  “Who else, shitbird? Didn’t think I’d forgotten about you, didja? C’mon down to the lake; I need to perch where I can look you in the eye.”

  The lakeside lawn furniture had been put away for the winter, so Jack set his coffee down on the old shooting stand, from where he and Mose had blasted countless clay pigeons out of their apogee over the lake. Flx perched on its opposite side. “What’s up, Goshawk?”

  “Managing to stay out of trouble; how ‘bout you?”

  “‘Bout the same, I reckon. Hab’m seen yo’ ass since we cast off in Miami.”

  “I figured you had your hands full, to coin a phrase. I must say that I was tempted, on occasion, to see if there was enough water in the Intracoastal for y’all to navigate and screw at the same time. Since you’re here, I guess you did all right.”

  “That’s about it. It’s a long damn cruise from there to here, I’ll tell you that. And we froze our asses off the last third of the way.”

  “Probably not the best idea y’all ever came up with,” squawked the bird. “You’re still kind of a landlubber, but a woman that age, and a seasoned sailor at that...”