The Hunting Trip (38 page)

It was this—Pat's airplane—that Phil had in mind when he called Pat. If Pat had a little time to spare, going back and forth to Scotland in a private jet would be ever so much more comfortable than going through all the various levels of international transportation security
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in all those airports.

Painful experience had taught Phil that airport security devoutly believed that anyone desiring to take a shotgun with them on their travels was obviously a terrorist and to be treated accordingly.

“Sorry, Phil, old buddy, as much as I would like to go to Scotland with you,” Pat said, “I'm on my better half's
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list and she wouldn't even let me go into Annapolis to watch the Navy Academy Midshipwomen running aground in their sailboats, which is always good for laughs, much less go to Scotland.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Phil said. “What happened?”

Phil liked Pat's better half and he thought he might be able to talk her into forgiving Pat for whatever he had done.

“I had a couple too many sips of Knappogue Castle twelve-year-old single malt Irish to be driving my tank.”

Pat had given himself a little present when he got the check for
motion picture rights to his fifth literary work. He bought an M60A1 Patton tank from Army Surplus.

“But you drove it anyway?”

“Right through my better half's rose garden. Boy, was she
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”

“I can understand that.”

“But I'll tell you what I can do for you, Phil, old buddy. You'll be traveling on public air transportation, so you'll have to go through London, right?”

“Right.”

“While you're in London, go to the Tower of London. I was just there and had a ball.”

“Watching them execute people?”

“They don't do that anymore. What they do is lock up the Royal Jewels every night.”

“That sure sounds like fun.”

“You wouldn't believe all the
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diamonds the Queen has.”

“I'll take your word for it.”

“All purchased with the sweat of my poor oppressed Irish kinsmen, of course, but they're really something to see. And there's a great bar on the premises. Actually it's a club for those guys in the red coats.”

“You mean the Yeomen Warders?”

“Right. They're all retired soldiers. Warrant officers. That's what you were, right?”

“I never rose that high in our nation's war machine rank structure.”

“Trust me, Phil. Go to the Tower of London. I'll give them a call and get you an invitation. You need an invitation to get in. You'll be at Claridge's Hotel, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Have a ball, Phil. Got to go.”

The line went dead.

—

Phil next called
his literary agent, Jennifer “Big Bad Jennie” Waldron, who had replaced Cushman Johns in that role when ol' Cushman had gone to that Great Book Fair in the sky.

Jennie told him that she had just nailed, figuratively speaking of course, the scrotums of David “Two Gun” Gobbet and Chauncey S. “Steel” Hymen to the wall
vis-à-vis
the new contract for his work in progress.

She told him how much money J. K. Perkins & Brothers was going to tearfully part with for the privilege of publishing the sequel to
Love and Lust in the Kremlin Necropolis
, which was to be titled
Love and Lust in the
, which means,
Love and Lust in the Great Hall of the People
.

It was a lot of zeros, and normally Phil would have been very happy. But he wasn't very happy. His reaction was almost
So what?

He thought about this. The first thing he thought was that perhaps talking to Big Bad Jennie had made him think of ol' Cushman Johns. He really missed Ol' Cushman and his blue suede shoes, even if Jennifer was much better-looking and smelled a whole hell of a lot better than ol' Cush.

And that was when he had the epiphany:

My God, am I having that midlife crisis everybody talks about?

Is that possible?

My God, I'm only forty-five years old!

A quick check of actuarial statistics maintained by the Social Security Administration of the United States Government indicated that someone of his years, and not at the moment suffering from
either cancer, phlebitis, or any of the three most popular sexually transmittable social diseases, could expect to live to be 78.44 years of age.

The middle point of the lifetime of someone who will live to be 78.44 years old is 39.22 . . . 45 take away 39.22 leaves 5.78.

My God, I'm five and three-quarters years past my midlife!

Of course I'm having my midlife crisis!

I'm just having it five and three-quarters years, give or take, late!

It's all downhill from here!

I will not let this get me down!

Phil then went downstairs to the Emergency Kit and took from it a bottle of the good—that is to say, eighteen-year-old—Famous Pheasant and took two healthy medicinal pulls at the neck thereof.

Then he asked Mrs. Bonita Jones Pennyworth if she would be so kind as to drive him to Mr. Bruce's house in Muddiebay so that he might begin what he was beginning to think might very possibly be his last voyage on this
earth.

XVI

EN ROUTE TO OLD BLIGHTY

[ ONE ]

Muddiebay, Mississippi

Monday, September 15, 1975

M
r. Randy Bruce had given careful consideration to the solution of the problem he faced of getting Mr. Phil Williams onto the airplane—which would take them from Muddiebay International Airport to Atlanta International Airport, where they then would board the airplane that would take them to London's Heathrow Airport—without Mr. Williams learning there would be females accompanying them to the same destinations.

If Mr. Williams learned that there would be women going along, Mr. Bruce knew that Mr. Williams would be miffed and disappointed and would cancel his travel plans after causing Mr. Bruce great physical pain using the ancient techniques of Taekkyeon as he had done on three previous occasions when he had been really miffed by Mr. Bruce.

And if Mr. Williams did cancel his travel plans, this would really
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up Mr. Bruce's rather elaborate plans to get Mrs. Carol-Anne Crandall into a room in Claridge's Hotel for some nonstop romping.

There were a number of such females going along whom Mr. Bruce knew about and some that he didn't. The ones he knew about, starting of course with Mrs. Carol-Anne Crandall, were Mrs. Martha-Sue Castleberry, Mrs. Elizabeth-Anne Howard III, Mrs. Rachel Lipshutz, Mrs. Bobbie-Sue Smith, Mrs. Nancy-Jane Kingman, Mrs. “Bitsy” Skyler, and Mrs. Mary-Louise Frathingham.

The women whom Randy did not know would also be on the Muddiebay-Atlanta and Atlanta-Heathrow flights were six in number. They were Mrs. Algernon (Lucinda) Smith, whose husband was president of the Muddiebay Bank & Trust Company; Mrs. Dwight G. (Martha-Ann) Fosdick, whose husband was one of the Fosdicks in Fosdick & Fosdick, dealers in financial securities; Mrs. Ellwood (Mary-Alice) Fosdick, whose husband was the other Fosdick in Fosdick & Fosdick; Mrs. Truman (Patricia-Ann) Johnston, whose husband was a partner in the law firm of Truman, Wadsworth & Johnston; Mrs. Barton A. (Pricilla) Wadsworth, whose husband was another partner in the Truman, Wadsworth & Johnston law firm; and Mrs. Chester B. (Dorothy-Sue) Keller, whose husband was a dental surgeon specializing in the whitening and repair of molars, canines, and bicuspids.

These ladies consisted of the entire membership of the Muddiebay Chapter of the Dames of Runnymede, to get into which one had to prove that one was a direct descendant of someone who had been there when the Magna Carta was sealed under oath by King John at Runnymede on the bank of the River Thames near Windsor, England, at two-thirty in the afternoon of June 15 in 1215
A.D
.

The Dames—or “We Dames,” as the ladies thought of themselves—thought of themselves as somewhat socially superior to the Ladies of
The Tuesday Luncheon Club and consequently were a bit distressed when members of the latter let the word slip around Muddiebay that they were off to London to shop and take tea with H.M. the Queen at Buckingham Palace and then shoot pheasants in Scotland.

Dame Patricia-Ann Johnston was selected to run this troubling rumor to ground, and she did so by contacting Mrs. Mary-Louise Frathingham, of Muddiebay Exotic & Exciting Vacations Travel, Inc., who confirmed it.

“Tell me, Mrs. Frathingham, is there among the exotic and exciting vacations you offer one that would offer the husbands of the Dames of Runnymede an opportunity to shoot pheasants in an aristocratic ambience in Scotland?”

Mrs. Frathingham immediately rose to the challenge and found “Aristocratic Pheasant Shooting in Scotland, Outfitters, Ltd.” when she looked in her
Travel Professional's Guide to Scotland
.

APSSO, Ltd., offered for only £1,102.00 sterling, plus tax, per day, per person, an opportunity not only to shoot pheasants, but to be accommodated in a Ducal Castle while doing so, all meals included.

Mrs. Frathingham had no way of knowing, of course—the words “Castle Abercrombie” did not appear anywhere in the listing—that the “Ducal Castle” mentioned was in fact Castle Abercrombie, which was where the husbands of the Ladies of The Tuesday Luncheon Club were going to do their pheasant shooting.

But when Dame Patricia-Ann told her to make reservations for six couples at the Ducal Castle for a seven-day stay, it did occur to her that things might be a bit awkward if the Dames met the Ladies on the airplanes en route from Muddiebay International to Heathrow.

But then she saw a solution to this, too.

Because Mr. Randolph Bruce—whom she was now thinking of as Sir Randy Bruce of the White Panty Hose, and whom she intended to bed down with if at all possible as soon as possible once they
reached foreign shores—and his friend, Mr. Philip Williams, were traveling in the aircraft's first-class compartment and everybody else in business class, all she had to do was mention this to Dame Patricia-Ann, who immediately said, “Dames of Runnymede and their mates always travel first class. See to it.”

Travel for himself and Phil in first class was part of Randy's scheme to get Phil aboard the airplanes without Phil learning about their female fellow travelers.

The plan was simplicity itself.

Part of it was already fairly standard procedure for their travels around the world to shoot things. First, Randy would don over his left foot and lower left leg a massive ten-pound plaster of Paris cast, which came with a hidden zipper and had what looked like bloodstains. Then Randy would hobble down to his Mercedes and slip into the backseat. Phil would then drive them to the airport, where a wheelchair would be summoned. Phil would then push Randy to the head of the line of those waiting to be humiliated by airport security, meanwhile crying, “Make way for a cripple!”

This innocent little deception of theirs had saved them countless hours of waiting in lines to be humiliated by airport security.

And it would have worked the day everybody went to London, except that it fell to Randy to push Phil through Muddiebay International instead of Phil pushing Randy.

What happened was that when Mrs. Bonita Jones Pennyworth dropped Phil off at “Our Tara,” Phil was distressed, and said something about his undergoing his middle-life crisis five and three-quarter years late, and asked where the Famous Pheasant was.

When the time arrived to go to the airport, Phil was in no condition to sit up straight in the wheelchair, much less push it, so Randy put the ten-pound zippered plaster of Paris cast with bloodstains on Phil's foot and leg, carried him to the Mercedes, drove it himself, and then
at the airport loaded Phil into a wheelchair and crying, “Make way for an unconscious cripple!” pushed him to the head of the security line.

They were shortly thereafter installed in their seats in the first-class compartment.

A stewardess appeared and offered champagne.

Phil said, “Don't mind if I do. Leave the bottle as I am having my midlife crisis and need a lot of liquid courage to face it.”

The Dames of Runnymede filed in with their husbands, took their seats, and ordered champagne.

The stewardess reclaimed the bottle of bubbly she had left with Phil. When she did and saw that it was empty, she went for another one.

Phil then dozed off, and Randy relaxed, convinced they were on their way and he had no problems at least for the moment.

Randy was wrong.

As soon as they were airborne, and the stewardess gave her permission, Randy went to the First Class Unisex Lavatory right behind the pilot compartment, which, because he traveled a lot all over the world to slaughter wildlife, he knew was called the flight deck.

As he exited and started back down the aisle toward Phil, Carol-Anne Crandall pushed aside the curtain designed to keep the peasants from looking at the aristocrats, and cried, on seeing Randy, “Oh, thank God! When I didn't see you before, Randy, I was afraid you missed our flight to Atlanta and London!”

Randy made a shushing gesture.

Too late.

Carol-Anne's somewhat screechy tone of voice had raised Phil from his little doze.

“I heard that!” Phil cried, as he unfastened his seat belt. “I heard that bimbo call you ‘Randy' and say ‘our flight.' There are women
on this hunting trip, and you knew all along there would be, you
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duplicitous son of a
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, and I am going to tear you limb from skinny
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limb.”

He started up the aisle toward Randy.

Unfortunately—or, from Mr. Bruce's perspective, fortunately—Phil forgot that he had the ten-pound cast on his foot, which caused him to fall into the aisle after first bumping his head on an armrest, which in turn caused a minor, but copiously bleeding, abrasion on his forehead and for him to lose consciousness.

[ TWO ]

Atlanta International Airport

Atlanta, Georgia

5:45 p.m. Monday, September 15, 1975

W
hen the door of the aircraft was opened onto the airway of Gate 103, Terminal Five, at Atlanta International Airport, two police officers came aboard through it.

The senior stewardess pointed an accusing finger at Passenger Bruce, Randolph, and the police saw that his visage matched closely the description the pilot had radioed ahead of the unruly passenger who had cruelly attacked a poor fellow who had a twenty-pound cast on his leg. (The pilot had repeated the description provided by the senior stewardess, who wasn't very good at estimating size, or anything remotely associated with numbers.)

The police officers read Randy his Miranda rights and led him off the airplane with his hands handcuffed behind his back. As this was
happening, Randy cried out piteously, as he had so often done in the past, “Moses, my lawyer, I need you! I'm being railroaded! Or maybe airplaned!”

Moses Lipshutz, L.L.D., as he had so often done in the past, rushed to defend Randy by rising from his business-class seat, racing up the aisle of the airplane, and then chasing Randy and the cops up the airway.

Next, two Emergency Responder Medical Technicians entered the cabin and loaded Mr. Williams on a stretcher, then carried him off the airplane, up the airway, and into Terminal Five.

There two people looked down at Phil on the stretcher and said just about the same thing, but in different languages.

The male, a gentleman of distinguished appearance who was about Phil's age, said,
“Ach, mein Gott, Herr Williams, was ist mit euch?”
which Phil of course knew meant, “Oh my God, Mr. Williams, what happened to you?”

The female, who was considerably younger than Phil, and had the most beautiful bosoms Phil could ever remember seeing—and, looking down her blouse as she leaned over him, he could see them in all their glory because she wasn't wearing a brassiere—said, “Oh, my God, Master Williams, what happened to you?”

“Have we met?” Phil asked, wondering if this might be a welcome hallucination caused by the result of all the alcohol he'd consumed, the blow to his head. Or both.

“Yes, we did,” the man said. “Briefly, some years ago.”

“The master was talking to me, you
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foreigner, butt the
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out,” the beautiful blonde snarled, and then, in far more dulcet tones, went on, “Yes, Master, we have. In Miami. You were there with the gentleman the cops just took off this airplane in handcuffs. I'm flattered that you remembered me, even slightly.”

“You're welcome,” Phil said, grateful this wasn't a hallucination.

“Is there anything, anything at all, I can do for you?”

“Aside from getting me a drink, everything else I can think of that you could do for me would be, because of the vast difference in our ages, at best inappropriate and probably illegal.”

“Carry the master to the General's Club,” the blonde ordered the EMTs. “The one across from Gate 17 in the International Flights Terminal. And do so gently.”

—

As anyone who
has ever been in the Atlanta International Airport has painfully learned, it is a long way between terminals, and as Phil made that lengthy journey he could not help but notice that as the blonde walked beside his stretcher, she not only had a very nice behind but also that beneath her somewhat short white skirt she was wearing very brief intimate undergarments onto which had been embroidered many representations of two red hearts pierced by an arrow, presumably Cupid's, along with the legend
My Heart Belongs to Phil!