The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (17 page)

Pete’s eyebrows flicked upward momentarily; then he chewed, swallowed and said, “Didn’t make sense to mention it to her ’til you and I had a chance to talk about it. And ’til both of you had a chance to take a ride in that big ol’ bird. With all that out of the way, I’ll be bringing it up over morning coffee, if you don’t mind making yourself scarce for a little while.”

“I can do that; mind telling me why?”

“Just to balance out this one-on-one discussion we’ve been having. Don’t want her to think we got together to figure out some sort of fait accompli for her. I’m not that comfortable with any two-out-of-three conversations where we’re concerned, and once we’re past this I’d like to eliminate them altogether.”

“For the next few days, you mean. They’ll be sort of hard for y’all to avoid after I’ve left.”

Pete laughed. “I just meant until she decides whether this is the thing that she wants to do. If she passes on it, then we’re back to square one. While you keep your date with the Navy.”

“Yep. Well, I need to start shopping for some wheels, so I’ll get on that first thing tomorrow. Think y’all will be done by lunchtime?”

Blowing out his cheeks, Pete said, “Shouldn’t take that long, one way or the other. Why don’t you bring back some stuff from the deli so we can have a quick bite before we go flying. Assuming this goes the way I think it will.”

10 ANCHORS AWEIGH

Mindful that she was a light sleeper at the best of times, Pete eased into Linda’s bed as quietly as he could. He needn’t have bothered. “Hi, Pete,” she said, no trace of sleep whatever in the husky greeting. “What took you so long?”

“Can’t fool you, huh?” he said, moving to close the distance between them, his knees touching the backs of hers, dick nestled between her butt cheeks, his face buried in the dark red hair that could have produced the rock-like hardness all by itself.

“Not by a jugful.” Reaching behind her to grasp his wrist, she brought his hand to cover her breast. “No pun intended.”

They made love with remembered precision, he rather more urgently as he reached the plentiful wetness that Jack had left behind. Spent, he rolled onto his back, pulling her to him so that she nestled snugly into his body’s crevices, space between them nonexistent. Looking up at him, she asked, “Was there anything else?”

“Matter of fact,” he said, “there is. I was wondering if you’d ever been president of an air charter service.”

Easing the Buick up Biscayne Boulevard, a lot more than breakfast on his mind, Jack registered only slight surprise when he heard “Oh, Jack!” followed closely by Nick’s appearance in the seat beside him.

“Too early in the morning for impressions, if you don’t mind,” Jack said, glancing briefly at Nick’s golf togs, noting the spiked cordovan/brown Foot-Joy saddle oxfords. “Who’s in your foursome, or did you plan to play all the balls yourself?”

Switching to Phil Harris’s gravelly baritone, Nick said, “Sorry if my Jack Benny ain’t up to your high standards,
Jackson,” his smile kilowatts brighter than usual. “Couldn’t wait to try it, once I was out of range of the original.”

“So, now you’re in showbiz? This oughta be good.”

“One’s education’s never complete, is it? I just took the opportunity to kibitz on a spot of tee-time badinage between Jack and Phil.”

“Phil.”

“Phil Harris, the bandleader.”

“I know; I was just bemused at how quickly you got on a first-name basis with- what shall I call them-  ‘the boys’?”

“And here I’m thinking that you’ll be pleased at the broadening of my horizons, that can only result in the broadening of your own. Yet I have to deal with this early-morning crankiness. I actually expected to find you still sacked in with Linda. You kids have a spat or something?”

“Nope; Pete suggested that I make myself scarce while he auditions Linda for the job of president of our new air charter company.”

“Well!”

“Will you please stop with the Jack Benny? I’m having enough trouble figuring out what I ought to do about this without that.”

“Sorry. Let me assay an option; why don’t you just get the hell out of here and let them play airplane by themselves? You’ll soon have your hands full at
Pensacola
anyway.”

“Yeah, that makes a lot of sense; at least it would if these people weren’t the best friends I have in the world. Present company excepted.”

“Thank you very much,” said Nick. “And I assume Rick’s still on that list.”

“Of course he is,” Jack shot back crankily, “and he’s also part of the problem. I got drunk enough last night to tell Pete about it. It’s not enough that she’s screwing both of us, she gets into a gangbang with him and that goddamn Cordelia!”

“Just like a man-  er, woman,” Nick observed, straight-faced.

“What the fuck’re you talking about?”

“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 leave. 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.