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

  “My goodness! Well, in that case it’s easy to see how the two of you got together. Jack came by the flying bug naturally, what with Gene Debs and all. And poor Moses Kubielski. I’m sure Jack’s told you about him.”

  “Yes, he has. He must’ve been a wonderful man.”

  “And like a father to Jack, and Ricky too, for that matter,” said Melinda. “Such a tragic way to go, and him so young. Oh, I’m sorry to bring all of it up, Jack; it’s just that I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to y’all.” She paused, looking at Jack with a face gone somber. “I guess I should wait and let him tell you, Jack, but I just can’t. Ricky got a notice from the draft board to report for his physical exam.”

  Jack took a minute before breaking the room’s dead quiet. “Is that right? From the Bisque draft board? I would’ve thought that he’dve changed his legal residence to Baltimore.”

  “He mentioned it a time or two, but I don’t suppose he did anything about it. You know how he puts things off.”

  “Well, it sure is bad timing. He had a great rookie season, and I’m sure the Colts’d be giving him more playing time this year. Even Ray Berry has to catch his breath now and then.”

  “Well, I was hoping he’d get it out of his system after a couple of years anyway, and get a regular job,” said Melinda. He didn’t get a degree from Georgia Tech for nothing, you know. And I worry day and night about him getting hurt. Maybe this is the Lord’s way of telling him it’s time to let football go.”

  Jack’s eyes transited the room’s ceiling tiles before they returned to her face. “That’s certainly a possibility. There’s also the possibility that he could fail the physical. Or he might get into the National Guard or Reserves. Has he given you any idea of what he’s thinking at this point?”

  Melinda’s hands were knotted in her lap. “Not a bit. We’ve only talked to him once since he got the notice; he said he’d be checking with some people in Baltimore to get their advice. I don’t expect that we’ll hear from him again before he gets home next week.”

  “Well, please try not to worry too much about it between now and then, Mrs. Terrell,” Linda said. “Even if he turns out to be drafted, we’re not at war, and with any luck we won’t be for the time that he’d be in the Army.” She looked at Jack. “It’d just be for two years, right?”

  “That’s it, as far as I know,” he said.

  They visited for a while longer; Greta, Rick’s sister, now a sophomore at Bisque High, was agonizing over whether or not to try out for cheerleading, and weren’t the new property taxes outrageous? Graciously declining the proffered BLT once more, Jack and Linda left Melinda Terrell to ponder her children’s destinies, promising to come to dinner one night next week.

  “She’s quite a lady, “ Linda observed as they backed out of the driveway.

  “That’s for sure,” said Jack. “Sometimes I feel like she raised me, too.”

  “She literally lives for her kids, doesn’t she?”

  “And ol’ Richard. She loves the shit out of that man, open debits and all.”

  “What the hell is an ‘open debit’, anyway?”

  “That means one of his agents quit, or got fired,” Jack chuckled. Seems like he’s had at least one open debit since Rick and I were little bitty boys.”

  “Agents?”

  “Life insurance salesmen. That’s what they call them.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Life insurance. That’s what he does?”

  “He’s an agency manager for Standard Mutual. I thought I’d told you. Anyway, it’s not bank robbery.”

  “No? My mother knew a guy who sold life insurance. He…”

  “You know what Richard used to say?” Jack interrupted. “Nobody loves the ‘policy man’ ’til the insured dies.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s just say that I sympathize even more with Miz Terrell than I did five minutes ago.”

  “What? You wouldn’t change places with her? Raisin’ fine, lusty chillun and havin’ supper ready when Daddy gets home?”

  Shifting in the seat, Linda slipped her hand between his legs and squeezed, a little less than gently. “You auditioning for the Daddy part, Sparky?”

  “Whoa!” he shouted as the car slipped over into the oncoming lane. “What do I get for a ‘yes’?”

  “Better take out a policy on your balls first,” she said, releasing them with a final squeeze and moving away. “Anyway, that draft notice’s got to be quite a shock for Rick.”

  “Yeah, it’s one of those things that you know can happen, but you never expect it’ll happen to you,” Jack said, lifting four fingers from the steering wheel to greet the unknown driver of a passing Pontiac. “Knowing that boy as I do, I expect he’s bouncing off the walls right now.”

  “No doubt. And you really think he has a future in professional football.”

  “I do. God knows he’s tough enough, and smart enough. He’s probably got better than a half–step on Berry right now, but he won’t be beating him out of his job any time soon. Where he is, is in a great place to learn all the tricks the Master has up his sleeve. That guy can get open when nobody else can, even if he’s not the world’s fastest human. A couple of years of playing behind Berry would have more than a few teams wanting to trade for him as a starter. If he goes away for two years, there’s no way he’ll get that opportunity back; some other quick rascal’ll be there pickin’ Ray-boy’s brains.”

  “Who was it that said ‘timing is everything’?” mused Linda.

  “Every damn coach, general and politician from Nebuchadnezzar to right now, I ’magine.”

  3 “SOME KINFOLK…”

  “Well,” said Jack as they pulled into the driveway that he still had a hard time believing was anyone’s but Pap’s, “having seen one sort of Bisque lady, I hope you’re ready for a completely different definition.” He stopped close behind the howitzer-caliber twin tailpipes of Cordelia’s ivory Chrysler 300 convertible.

  “I hope she’s ready,” Linda said, grinning brightly. “Should I tell her that I just had your balls in a vise?”

  “Be no surprise to her; she’s had Buster’s in one for twenty years. Maybe y’all can compare techniques.”

  “Could be,” Linda said, returning Cordelia’s wave as she turned her back on a backyard flowerbed to approach the car on the passenger’s side.

  Cordelia wore coveralls that someone had spent a long time tailoring to eliminate any hint of a wrinkle, cut from the blue-and-white pinstripe denim known to the locals as “railroad cloth.” A trim schooner, the Plymouth logo, sailed on her left breast; her name, embroidered in crimson script, leapt at you from the other one, bright serpentine counterpoint to ash-blond hair that had been cut to pageboy length since Jack last saw her. “Haayeey,” she said, grabbing her hand as Linda lowered the window sufficiently for her to get hold of it. “It’s Linda, riit? Y’all come on in,” she said, releasing it. “I gotta go in just a minute. Wondered when y’all’d get by here, Jackie, me bein’ your only aunt an’ all. Now that I see you, hon, I know Jack’s been showin’ you off around town like hell won’t have it , good-lookin’ as you are. Where’ve y’all been?”

  “Well, hon,” Jack said, “We thought it’d only be fittin’ to introduce Linda to the elder uncle first, so we dropped by Gene Debs’s, and yes we went flyin’, ’cause the little lady’s a pilot herself.” eyebrows arched, he looked at Linda. “Hope you don’t mind, hon. You’ve been explaining yourself all morning, so I thought I’d deliver the shocking news for a change.”

  “Be my guest, darlin’, but I’ll bet Cordelia knew already. After all, we’ve been in town for over twenty-four hours.” smiling at Cordelia, she said, “Jack tells me no secret’s safe in Bisque for more than twenty-four hours.”

  “Child,” she said, she looked at Linda with frank appreciation, “Where you’re concerned, it’d be more like twenty-four minutes. How d’ya like Bisque so far?”

  Linda let the question hang in the air for a quarter-beat. “Char
ming; what I’ve seen of it, that is. We just got here yesterday.”

  “And I gotta get outa here today. Don’t that beat all? Well, soon as I get back we’ll have y’all out here for a snifter. Hell, if Buster does good tomorrow we’ll really blow it out.”

  “What’s he doing tomorrow?” Linda asked her.

  “Hell, hon, Daytona’s tomorrow. At th’ new track. Don’t Jack tell you ennythang about th’ homefolks?”

  “Shit,” Jack said with an impatient headshake. “It’s tomorrow?”

  “Yes, sweetheart, it’s tomorrow!” Cordelia said, mimicking the headshake as she moved to put him in a mock headlock. “I swear, I don’t know what we’re gonna do with this boy,” she grinned at Linda over the top of his head. Releasing him, she said, “But you’ve got a pretty good excuse this time, Jackie. Th’ lovesick blues’ve been known to play absolute hell with a body’s calendar.”

  Moving to regain the initiative, Jack said, “And you’re just leaving now?” Giving his aunt a playful butt-slap as they separated. “You won’t be down there ’til midnight.”

  “You’re not the only one that can fly someplace, y’know,” she said, slapping him back. She cocked her head at the sound of a ringing telephone. “Matter of fact, I gotta get movin’. Lindsey Rankin’s pickin’ me up in the Firestone plane, and he’s probably sittin’ out there waitin’. Hold on a minute.” Stepping up on the porch, she walked quickly to the door, extracted a bag from just inside it and turned the key that was already in the lock. “Glad y’all didn’t show up five minutes later,” she said. “I gotta go; gimme a hug.” This last to Linda. “Mm-m. Don’chall have too much fun scandalizin’ th’ ol’ hometown ’til I get back to help ya. Wish us luck; we’re th’ only Plymouth in th’ field. Lemme outa here now.” Throwing the bag into the 300’s back seat, she had its engine turning over seconds later, the tailpipes growling like an unlimited hydroplane.

  “Hm,” Linda mused as they watched the Chrysler roar away. “Wonder who painted those coveralls onto her. Some kinfolk you have, hon.”

  “And you ain’t even met my Mama.”

  “Good thing I don’t have to today, if she’s anything like that handful. They’re buddies, huh?”

  “Lifelong. And stayed that way, even when she married Buster.”

  “Mama wasn’t in favor of it?”

  “Not much, from the few things I’ve heard her say over the years. We were living in New York, and I was still in diapers.”

  “Did y’all come down for the wedding?”

  “Nah. They eloped. But, as they say, enough about her. You gettin’ hungry?”

  “Not a bit. What do you say we just go for an early dinner?”

  “Fine with me,” he said. You up for hot dogs and/or hamburgers? I thought we’d stop by Don’s Dog House after HCBC. It’s close, and we’ll probably see an example or two of the natives’ Saturday-night mating ritual. Too cold for curb service, but they’ll bring us a set-up so we can have cocktails in the car.”

  “How quaint. Got some booze at the office?”

  “Cat got an ass?”

  The wagon followed its nose for the three miles or so back into town, the road changing names to Academy Street at the city limits. Waiting for a break in the Saturday afternoon traffic at the Lee Street stop sign, Jack smiled and said “Country-come-to-town.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what Pap used to say about Saturdays,” he said as he slipped the wagon through a break in the traffic. “People from out in the county making their weekly trek to Bisque for supplies and entertainment, clogging up traffic and doing slow country business. Not that he minded; he knew damn well you couldn’t speed ’em up; it was simply a cost of doing business. ‘Aw, it’s just country-come-to-town.’ Sounded to me like sump’m he’d heard growin’ up in the Tennessee hills. Only my guess is that it was him and his folks being referred to that way, instead of the other way around.”

  “Tennessee, huh? So how is it that he made it all away down here in to red-clay country?”

  “The army. The ‘State Guard,’ that is. Pap was a in a Tennessee State Guard unit that was sent to Camp McPherson, over in Atlanta, for their active duty training, back before World War I. He met Pete Hartwell, the guy who was carrying on with my grandma, there. Pete brought ’im home for a visit. One thing led to another, and he ended up going to work alongside Pete at Old Man Hartwell’s cotton brokerage.”

  “Hell, another Pete! And one of those ‘things that led to another’ was your grandma.”

  “The lovely Rose Watkins, eldest daughter of a once-prominent Richmond County plantation family, who wanted in the worst way to marry Pete, who wasn’t having any of it. In wedlock, that is. Not so old Pap, as I’ve told you. Well, there it is,” he said shortly after a left turn on Seventh Street. “The Hamm County Beverage Company. Everybody went home at noon, but I thought you might be interested in looking at ‘The House That Mose Built’ without the distraction of a lot of ‘hey-how’re-you’s’. There’ll be lots of time for those later.” Pulling into a parking spot next to the building, stenciled letters on its wall identifying it as belonging to the Employee Of The Month, Jack said, “I’ll meet you at the front door. Gotta shut off the alarm.”

  He opened the two deadbolt locks securing the heavily-barred plate glass door, holding it open for her as he reached to the right to flip the light switches for the office. “Hamm County people must drink a lot of beer, judging from the size of this place,” Linda said as she peered down a long passageway that ended in double doors.

  “They do, but we reach out a little farther than that. We’re licensed in eight counties, with more to come when a few more dry counties vote the right way.” Putting a hand on her shoulder, he steered her slightly to the left to a door that led to a still-darkened office. He flipped a switch on the inside of the doorjamb that turned on twin lamps that sat on a credenza and a green-glass-shaded gooseneck desk lamp. “Voilá; the operation’s nerve center.”

  She looked silently around the room. Then she said, “Looks pretty much like I thought it would. No concession to fluorescent light for him. The house in Cuba had them in the kitchen; he had them torn out and replaced with a big-ass chandelier.”

  “Hm. You know, I never thought about it, but I can’t think of a single one out at the house. And I thought I knew everything there was to know about him.”

  “So did I, at one time. Well, show me the rest of this joint.”

  They were back in the car in less than half an hour, joined by a paper bag shrouding the distinctive rectangular shape of a fifth of Ballantine Scotch Whisky. “Let’s take a quick run through the Park,” he said as the wagon rolled out of the parking lot. “Gotta go through niggertown, but we can do the round trip before dark, which is a good idea for white folks on Saturday.”

  “Fair enough,” she said with a giggle.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I was just thinking how funny it’d be to have a couple of my New York friends in the backseat, holding a jug in a paper bag and driving through ‘niggertown’ on a Saturday night. They absolutely would not believe it.”

  “No doubt,” Jack said, smiling. “But as I recall, you never mentioned the possibility of going up to Harlem on a Saturday night.”

  She giggled again, something she rarely did. “You mean with you? Hell, the last time I saw you in New York you still weren’t old enough to drink. In a public place, that is. I never cared for that part of town, anyway.”

  “Me either, even though I think my artfully-altered Georgia Driver’s License would’ve stood up in Harlem as well as it did in Manhattan. Not that we went that many places; had that one great night in Birdland, though.”

  “John Coltrane. Yeah, that was great. What in the hell do you suppose your dad was thinking, letting you stay out late with me like that?”

  “Well, he damn sure didn’t think that you and I were lovers. He saw you, at least I think he saw you, as a sort of mentor to me.”
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  “Ha!”

  “Well, darlin’, you were; he just didn’t know what the curriculum was.”

  “Damn! You know, I saw my share of head-in-the-clouds academic types at Johns Hopkins, but as brilliant as he may be- no offense, baby- seems like he’s more of a head-up-the-ass type.”

  “Can’t fool you, huh?”

  As they neared the center of the three-block area of black-occupied houses, at least half of which had never seen a coat of paint, a black man, somewhere between the ages of fifty and seventy, raised a hesitant hand in greeting, his voluminous, ragged overcoat falling open as he did. Jack answered the wave with a tap of the horn. “Who’s that?” Linda asked.

  “Dunno. Somebody mistaking me for Mose, most likely. Don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.”

  “Well, that guy looked like he might’ve seen a ghost or two. He seems to have had quite a range of acquaintances; Mose, I mean.”

  “Indeed he did; of course, he was the kinda guy that people wanted to know. All kinds of reasons.” The wagon topped the small rise at the park’s entrance; off to their right a foursome of golfers and their caddies, intent on finishing their round before dark, ignored them.

  “A tad nippy for golf, if you ask me,” she said.

  Jack shook his head. “That’s a very peculiar kind of insanity. Glad it never grabbed me. And speaking of insanity, get ready for a prime example.”

  “What’s that?” she asked as they rounded the ninety-degree left turn past the clubhouse.

  “Just up the way here a little bit.” As they passed an open dance pavilion on the left, its posts casting wan shadows in the fading light, he said, “See that building? He gestured toward a good-sized one-story brick structure, badly in need of a fresh coat of the flaking buff-colored paint that had once covered it. A driveway ran past a broad staircase that climbed up to a pair of doors set into glass brickwork.

  “Um-hmm. Looks like a bathhouse.”