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

  “You don’t say,” Jack said in what he intended to be an ironic tone.

  “Yea, verily, I do say.”

  “So when was all this, anyway?”

  “Early fifth millennium, in current terminology.”

  They rode their stationary motorcycles in silence, thought-fragments roaring around the motordrome of Jack’s mind like the open-ported Indians in the carny board-barrel “motordromes” of Hamm County fairs long past. “Guess flying saucers were like model T’s by then.”

  “More like oxcarts,” Nick said, “but I’m glad to see that you get the idea. There’re thousands of years between us, chronologically; as much time as there is between you and, say, Imhotep. Think about what you’d have to say to him about airplanes, submarines and television, and multiply that by a factor of hell, I don’t know, twenty-five or thirty. That’s what you’re about to hear from me.”

  “Except that I can’t get back there to tell him.”

  “Nope. But I could take a message.”

  “Ha, ha. So since you’re here, I take it that humanity didn’t take the opportunity, with the A-bomb, to blow itself off the face of the earth.”

  Nick grinned. “Or fuck itself off, either, although it came close to doing both. We’ll get into that, but pardon me while I leap ahead. As you might imagine, having survived our own foolishness, we got serious and made quite a lot of progress. Sort of pushed on beyond relativity, you might say. You’ll see a tantalizing hint or two, in your lifetime, of the path we took, but that’s all they’ll be; hints. Physics at the sub-atomic level, et cetera. Sometime when we have an hour or two, ask me about quantum entanglement, which was what let me get into the ‘condition’ I’m in. Anyway, the result of all that is Nick Charles, hanging out with you in this whacked-out little museum.”

  “Excuse me if I leap ahead a little,” Jack said. “Not that I haven’t enjoyed it… hell, that’s an understatement… but why? Of everybody who’s ever lived, Sir Francis Drake, Julius Caesar; how is it that you decided to spend all this time with me?”

  “Since I know that you’ll be busy teaching La Skipper how to ride this morning, which I don’t necessarily recommend, I’ll give you the short answer, subject to later expansion, if you don’t mind.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Entertainment. Talk to you later.” With that, Nick, still in a seated posture, zipped smartly across Chez Jock and through its east wall.

  Well, Jack thought, at least that part hasn’t changed, but Flx did it with a bit more style.

  The aroma of the beans that Jack had ground last night snaked its way down to her from the Chemex (one more piece of the wall-to-wall Mose-ness of this entire fucking place shoved under my nose, she thought; I’dve been better off sleeping on the goddamn boat). Linda rolled onto her back and stretched, long arms and legs a flat naked X, the electric blanket’s warmth shifting its caress to toes, pudenda, belly and nipples. Shifting out of the moist patch that lurked near dead-center in the king-size bed, she began working her way slowly backwards through yesterday, beginning with an inward chuckle at Jack’s rough reciprocal of her very thorough fellation on the drive back from the Dog House. One more thing I’ll have to teach him. How the hell did I end up with this job, anyway?

  She twisted erect to sit on the side of the bed, soles recoiling from the floor’s chill. Was falling for Roger Brannon’s con job the start of it, or was he just the New York version of a type that’s been my downfall ever since dear old Dad? His act was by far the flossiest, she reflected, padding down the hall for coffee. The Petrel, the keystone prop, my sailor’s lust dragging me deeper every day that I lived on board, collaborating with the Coast Guard training courses to make myself its master. Roger himself a very close second in the prop closet, big New York ad man with prick to match, that I burnished to as high a shine as I did the Petrel’s binnacle. Fucking Peter Pan pissant; how the hell could I have gotten too old for him when he was ten years older than me? She poured coffee from the Chemex, looked for saccharin, found none, settled for sugar. Surveying the gray new day from the kitchen window, she watched geese consult each other at the far end of the pond, a couple in the water, the rest on the bank. That’s me; a fucking goose. A seagoing fucking goose. Or is that an Albatross?

  Anyway, she reflected on her way back down the hall, Daddy missed his chance, and so did Moses, until much later. By then he was Peter. And what a Peter; short-circuited my mourning for Dieter to a very quick couple of weeks. Memories of him and those first intense months in Havana went up in smoke, burnt to a crisp by my passion for the man I’d first known as Moses. All I wanted to do was to live out my girlhood dreams with the man who’d been my mother’s lover. He’d wanted me, too, all those years ago in Baltimore. I never knew it, though, and channeled my yen for him into besting the desultory academics of high school, while old Mama Sarah fought him and fucked him, spiraling down into the alcoholic world in which she’s so comfortable. After I’d escaped to Johns Hopkins and found out he’d made up the considerable difference between my scholarship and what four years and summa cum laude actually cost, he’d disappeared. Just like Daddy. Then he shows up, years later, with “little” Jack in tow. And me hovering around the zenith of my sexuality, ready to take them both on, which I would have, given the chance. Not that they’d have gone for it; you didn’t have to be around the two of them for long before it was clear that he’d already adopted the boy. So I adopted him, too, in my way, with what turned out to be his full connivance. And Moses would have to wait, until he turned into Peter.

  He put it to me so casually that night at Reuben’s. I’d just about had my fill of New York, both Roger and the Petrel streaming in my wake, or vice versa. “Why don’t you just close up shop here, run on back down to Baltimore and find a nice, seaworthy sportfisherman you like, and send me the tab? Shake her down, put a chart package together for a Baltimore-Havana run, and call me when you’re ready to pick up a couple of survivors from an unfortunate air accident.” Just like that. A few weeks later I was aboard Striker, circling the prescribed coordinates offshore South Carolina late one summer afternoon, monitoring my VHF and scanning the skies for an airplane trailing smoke, both of its occupants fated to become my lovers.

  Sitting in bed, lounging against the pillows, her thoughts drifted to Serena, Jack’s mother, and how much pleasure Moses had shared with her on this big bed. Quite a matrix we have here; he and Serena, now Jack and I, and Moses has had both of us, to say nothing of my mother. I wonder which one he liked best; being the youngest, you’d think that it’d be sweet little Linda in a cake walk. He’s never said much to me about the others, but Jack’s told me more than he realizes about that willful bitch that whelped him, and neither Moses and I, nor Peter and I, ever made quite as much noise as what I remember rattling the walls in Baltimore. Although I did squeal pretty good that morning in Havana, the first time he slid that torpedo up my butt. Made this little cum laude cum loudly. Smiling to herself, she thought about Jack’s reaction when she asked him, down in Coconut Grove, to do her that way. You’dve thought I’d asked him to kiss a cobra; but bless his heart, he is adaptable, and now sliding up my chute’s integrated into his already-admirable skill set.

  So a fair amount of above-average fucking, a pretty nice boat, a private pilot’s ticket and a sojourn in Havana among a galaxy of lowlifes the likes of which I could’ve never imagined, brings me to this weird little red-clay town in the company of a boy millionaire. Soon-to-be, anyway. And today I add motorcycling to my ever-growing skill set. Question is, when the fuck do I cash in? I don’t want their fucking money, not without working for it and presenting nice fat invoices for professional services rendered. The hell of it is, I love both these guys. I really do. My mother brought home a novel once, called The Cauliflower Heart. I didn’t read it, but now the title fits my condition to a T. Cauliflower ear, cauliflower heart. All that aside, I’m really not in the marrying mood, even if either of them asked. What I
’ve gotta do is start fattening up the Linda Green account, and see what I can do about exorcising the ghost of Moses the mother-fucker. While Pete’s down there, incommunicado, doing God knows what with his new buddy Howard Hunt. Meantime, that little rat’s gonna be in here any minute, wanting a little before breakfast… with any luck at all.

  An hour or so later, libido eclipsed by simpler hunger, Linda padded back into the kitchen, switched on the oven and split the bagels that Jack had gotten out of the freezer last night. Dropping them onto its topmost rack, she turned the oven’s thermometer down to 350 and unwrapped a fresh-enough-looking block of cream cheese. She was slicing it crosswise into bagel-sized pieces when Jack opened the back door. “Mornin’, bagel-burner.”

  “What there is left of it, Barney Oldfield. Trouble getting the bikes started?”

  “Nope,” he said, mentally awarding himself a sharp head-slap. He hadn’t even checked the batteries; he’d simply sat, quite still, astride the Vincent for some time following Nick’s- at least he was beginning to assimilate what had happened sufficiently to start calling him that- departure. And since he hadn’t disconnected the trickle-chargers since leaving Bisque for Coconut Grove, all he really had to worry about was one of them having developed a bad cell. Shit. Who am I kidding? That’s the least of my goddamn worries. “And Barney Oldfield’s a car guy; I’d much prefer being associated in your mind with Glenn Curtiss.”

  “Well then, Glenn-baby, how about hauling out the orange juice? You look like you’ve already had enough coffee.”

  They sat cater-corner across the kitchen table, spreading cream cheese on bagel halves. “OK, Mr. Instructor,” Linda said, still trying to make out exactly what Jack’s mood was this morning. “What’s the plan?”

  “First, I’ll scare you up a hard hat; then I’ll bring the little BMW down here and check you out on the controls. Not a whole lot to it, particularly if you’ve ever ridden an English bicycle with the brake levers on the handlebars. The main thing you’ll need to get used to is working the clutch; no new rider, and I mean nobody, ever gives the engine enough gas and eeeases-” holding up his left fist, he slowly opened the fingers to their full extension- “the clutch out, letting it slip a little as you move forward. If you can keep the engine running the first time you try to get underway, I’ll kiss your ass at midday, and give you half an hour to draw a crowd.”

  “I’ll take you up on that, buster, and the location’s gonna be the Dog House parking lot.”

  “The Famous James’d love that,” Jack said with the first hint of a smile that she’d seen from him this morning. “Well, when you get the Kraut-cycle going in a straight line, just ride on up to the gate. I’ll be up there to help you get turned around, and you can make that round-trip from the house to the gate ’til you feel like you’ve got the hang of it. Then we’ll add shifting gears and when you’re ready, we’ll take it out on the road. I’ll trail you on the Vincent to the intersection at the bottom of the hill down there. Then you can hang a right and we’ll ride down that way for a short stretch, then back to the house. This time of day, I doubt there’ll be any traffic at all. After we’ve done that a few times, you’ll probably know enough to be dangerous.”

  “Oh, goody. Then we can ride into town.”

  It was no surprise to Jack that she turned out to be an apt student. A handful of round trips on the prescribed course of driveway and country road, interspersed with a few questions, were all she needed to achieve basic control of the little single-cylinder BMW. Relieving him of his apprehension of having to talk her out of an immediate ride into town, she ended her first lesson with the comment that there was a little bit more to this motorcycle thing than she’d imagined. Unbuckling the aluminum “pudding-bowl” helmet’s chinstrap, she freed her auburn hair with a shake. “I think I need to log a few more miles out here on the back roads before I start aiming this thing between cars,” she said. “Any reason I can’t spend this afternoon doing that?”

  Having gotten the motorcycles back in the barn before dark, they sat together before the fireplace in the den, Ballantine’s-and-sodas leaching out instructor/student tensions, feet up on the long, sturdy coffee table watching the flames crawl up out of the kindling and embrace the Poplar fire logs. “Well, Sparky, I sure had me some fun today,” Linda told him, underscoring the extent of her enjoyment with an affectionate squeeze of his thigh.

  “Yeah, I could tell.” After a deep pull on his drink, he said, “There’s this guy around town, Lonnie Buckles. Lost his left arm in a hay-baler, but that wasn’t enough to stop him riding. Traded his Harley for a Triumph so he could shift gears with his foot, switched the clutch lever to the right-hand bar, and kept on scootin’. He was the first person I ever heard say that riding a motorcycle’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

  She laughed abruptly, from a place down deep inside that she reserved for things that truly pleased her. “Weather permitting, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be a whole lot of fun with your clothes off.”

  “As long as you keep your boots on. I wonder how far we’d get, riding bare-ass from here to the Dog House. Be a nice say-bye to Bisque; they’d never forget it, or us either. And can you imagine the laugh that Pete’d get out of it?”

  “It’d turn him back into Mose, at least for a minute or two.” After their joint mirth subsided, she turned to look at him. “Hey, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. About Mose, and your mom.”

  Dialing up his inner caution a notch, Jack said, “What’s that?”

  “Was there ever any doubt in your mind that they were in love?”

  “No. It may not have been everyone’s notion of being in love, with her refusing to marry him or give up going back to New York, but they were definitely in love. I’m sure that they still are, in a manner of speaking. Why?”

  “I’ve just been wondering how you must’ve felt, seeing her grieving, believing that he was dead when you knew otherwise. Wasn’t that hard?”

  “Sure it was. It was damn hard.”

  “Weren’t you tempted to tell her?”

  “I wished I could tell her, every day, for a long time. But no, I wasn’t tempted to tell her.”

  “I can’t imagine that. It damn near killed my mom when he left, and she didn’t have to deal with his being dead.”

  Jack moved to freshen their drinks. “Not that you’ve told me all that much about your mother,” he said, splashing soda over the scotch, “But I’ve gotta believe that we’re talking about two very different people here. You and I, at least, had our moms around when we were growing up. Her mom died when she was fourteen, and left a tidy little scandal behind her for her children, the two younger ones at least, to deal with. Kids whispering ‘their maw got killed screwing their pappy’s partner’ behind their backs, and probably to their faces, day after day. I know that’s a big part of why my mom’s the way she is. She just lowered her head, got through high school as fast as she could, and went to college a long, long way from Bisque. After that, if she wanted something, nothing or nobody got in her way. She took me away from my dad when I was a little boy; it took me a long time to figure out why. What she told me was that Los Alamos was no place for a child to grow up, that it was hot, dusty, crowded and dangerous. Which of course it was. The real reason that she brought me back to Bisque, though, had nothing to do with that. What it boiled down to was that she was angry with him for agreeing to leave New York in the first place. She’d loved living there, and once we got to Los Alamos and she saw what the living conditions were like, she just wouldn’t put up with it. Next thing I knew, we were on a bus, bound for Bisque.”

  “Makes you wonder,” Linda mused, “why she didn’t just take you back to New York, if she loved it so much and had been given such a hard time here.”

  “We were in the middle of world War II, for one thing, and you didn’t just roll into New York and move into the kind of apartment that we’d left. Later, she told me that they w
ouldn’t have sent me to school in New York City for much longer anyway; we’dve had to move to Connecticut or Long Island, and the last thing she’d wanted to be was a suburban housewife. So she figured that the best- the easiest solution, for her- was for me to get through school in Bisque while she sharpened up her sculpture in her rooftop studio. Then, when I was off to college she’d be off, once again, to New York and life among les artistes.”

  “Sounds like she had it all figured out, except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When was your dad going to get back into the picture?”

  “I think that was such a low priority on her list as to be damn near nonexistent. She was satisfied to be separated from him, as opposed to being divorced, and after the war I could visit him a couple of times a year- he was back at Columbia by then- and life could proceed with minimal disruption.”

  “For her,” Linda said.

  “And for him. My dad, you see, wasn’t about to set foot in Georgia, to visit me or for any other reason.”

  “What?”

  “He literally has a phobia about being in the South. Not sure how that came to be, but my money’s on a simple transfer of prejudice from one generation to another. His dad was the same way. Mom said they wouldn’t come into the city- they lived in a big rockpile out on Long Island’s north shore- to see their new grandson, i.e. me. They had to haul my ass out there for inspection. He tried to explain it to me a time or two; blamed the war. The War Between the States, that is. Great Granddaddy Mason, see, took a little sightseeing trip down here with General Sherman. Apparently he didn’t like what he saw, and said that neither he nor his offspring would ever set foot in Georgia.”

  “Pretty extreme reaction, wasn’t it? Particularly in the light of who were the burners and who were the burnees. It’d be more reasonable if, say, your great-great-granddaddy’d sworn to keep his issue out of Union territory.”

  “But then,” Jack replied, “you’d be operating within the province of normal logic, and that didn’t suit my ancestors, ancient or otherwise. The only one who ever made any kind of sense to me was Pap- and Gene Debs, now and then.”