The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (18 page)

“So am I,” I said. “Thanks for not mentioning the ‘last’ part at the time.”

“I would have, but at the time I wasn’t sure.”

“But you are sure now.”

“Yes. Not that I won’t miss it, but if we go on the way that we have been, FlxAir’s a dead duck for sure. And I don’t think any of us want that.”

“So- you and Pete go on as a couple?”

“I think that’s best, at least for the moment. Don’t you?”

“You know, I really do. I guess it was your decision all along. He and I talked about it last night after you left, but as far as I could tell we didn’t decide anything.”

“Yes, he told me. Jack, I wish-”

“That there were two of you? Because that’s what I wish.”

Giving me another I’m-older-and-know-better smile, she said, “We’d better go.”

So there’s truly no telling, he thought, what might have happened if I’d hung around. All of which goes to prove, above all else, that a stiff dick has a narrow perspective. I’ll miss the shit out of her, sure, but what price pussy? I’d miss Pete a whole lot more, and I think I’m bailing out soon enough so that there’ll be no problem with him. Who knows what the hell we’ll get into, once I’ve got this Navy hitch behind me?

He let the rhythm of the drive take over, taking pleasure in his luxurious-but-purposeful cabin environment and the knowledge that this bolide was his alone to drive, anywhere he chose, for the next month and a half. At home with his solitude in the way that’s unique to only-children, he began to examine his alternatives. The trip to
New York
alone could eat up a couple or three weeks, if he were actually to go. Spring was still some way off in that part of the world; he’d frozen his ass off up there more than once in April, during Spring vacations that he’d spent with his father. An ironic grin flickered across his face at the realization that he’d told Pete and Linda that he felt that a visit to his mother, as opposed to his parents, would be in order before casting off for the Navy. He hoped that Pete hadn’t seen that as a cheap shot at him; his mother’s preference for
New York
and its art world over life in Bisque with Moses Kubielski was hers and hers alone, with no blame attaching to the man now known as Peter Wessel.

His father was there too, of course, burrowing ever deeper into the woodwork of
Columbia’s Department of Physics as he nursed the hope of becoming its chairman, and if he went he’d be visiting both of them, embattled at opposite ends of
Manhattan, still married and rarely exchanging a word. At least there’d be no pilgrimage to Long Island’s north shore, his father’s parents and their flinty scrutiny having died, within a couple of months of each other, a little over a year ago. Jack wondered if either of them had ever uttered a word of forgiveness to their son for the transgression of marrying outside their circle of Eastern Brahmins. And if that weren’t bad enough, she had to be some little jumped-up hussy from Georgia, the daughter of nobodies that he’d chanced upon in one of the hipster dens that
Columbia
University
had allowed to infest its campus’ periphery. And knock her up before they could talk some sense into him and have the marriage annulled. Sic transit gloria humbug, right down to passing along some whacky Abolitionist gene to their son, one effect of which was his refusal to set foot south of the
Mason-Dixon line
except in the line of duty. And his duty obviously didn’t include visiting his son in enemy territory.

He’d not acquired this knowledge easily, as one of the few things that his father and mother were able to agree on was that one would not speak ill of the other to him. His picture of his parents’ coming together had been constructed piecemeal, over a long period of time. A slip of the tongue here, a stealthy observation there until, at about the time a young Jew would have been bar mitzvahed, he’d asked his father point-blank. To Jack’s chagrin, he got more than he bargained for. In his typical dispassionate manner, Dr. Mason laid out the essentials of his meeting Serena at Columbia, how he, Jack, had appeared at a rather inconvenient moment, and their subsequent early family life in New York, the primary feature of which was, Jack had long ago concluded, both parents’ preoccupations with their own lives. His father frequently justified their move to the desert sands of
Los Alamos,
New Mexico
as the family’s contribution to the “war effort.” And he’d remained silent over the years, in observation of the speak-no-evil agreement, concerning Jack’s and his mother’s boarding a hot, rattly Flxible bus, soon after their arrival, for Bisque. Jack’s often-jangled
New York
sensibilities weren’t much help as he tried to figure out which of the two alien heat sinks he hated more. Since his then-beloved father was still in
Los Alamos, however, the title went to Bisque by default.

The miles flew past, orange juice signs giving way to less frequent ones hawking papershell pecans as the Cunningham put
Florida
behind them. The white-on-red Burma-Shave signs remained a constant, their doggerel meter infiltrating his thoughts as the wastelands of
South Georgia
whizzed by:

A man who passes

On hills and curves

Is not a man

Of iron nerves

He’s crazy!

Burma-Shave

I’ve seen those signs ever since we moved to Bisque, he thought, but I’ve never seen Burma-Shave. Wonder where you can buy it? Is it any good? Thinking of the “See
Rock
City” barn-roof signage that far outnumbered any other roadside advertisements, it occurred to him that you could probably get it at
Rock
City. Stands to reason that roadside merchants would stick together. Have to go there someday. Maybe if I bought enough of the shit, they’d let me put my own message on a set of those damn signs. Maybe something like

Avoid older women

Whatever you do

For sooner or later

They’ll shit

Right on you!

Burma-Shave

Or maybe-

The guy whom you

Hoped would one day

Be your Dad

Is screwing your honey

And driving you mad!

Burma-Shave

He was beginning to see the efficacy of the Burma-Shave approach to life. If nothing else, it would’ve been a big help at exam time back at
Georgia, keeping the philosophers and Shakespearean characters straight. But right now, he’d adapt the technique to get a handle on life in general, and his own in particular:

What the fuck

Am I doing

Going out of my head

With money to burn,

Plenty women to bed?

Burma-Shave

It might not be art- hell, it definitely wasn’t art- but it certainly fit his mood. and the more he thought about it, the more beholden he felt to the Hamm County Selective Service Board:

You’dve drafted my ass

Had I not joined the Navy

So thanks for

The butt-kick

It beats going crazy

Burma-Shave

Or maybe, he thought, given this fresh roadside leitmotif, I’m already headed around the bend. Refocusing, he hit the gas and watched the needle climb quickly toward, then through, the century mark.

He awoke with a surprisingly clear head, a little before ten. Stretching, he luxuriated in his solitude and, judging by the sun streaming through his windows, the promise of an ideal middle
Georgia
spring day. He lay still, letting the memories of recent days wash over him. Two weeks, he thought; all it took was a couple of weeks to shake my life down from soup to nuts. Swinging his feet to the floor, he sensed various near-invisible clues of Gene Debs’ visits to the house; no stale air, nothing out of place, and the faint smell of pine-scented disinfectant that indicated he’d had the maid in at least once. He’d called him during his
Jacksonville
gas stop to let him know that he was returning earlier, quite a bit earlier, than he’d told him he would be when he asked him to keep an eye on the place. Gene Debs had let this news pass unremarked, to Jack’s relief. He attributed this uncharacteristic lack of curiosity to his uncle’s getting a handle on his new job managing Bisque’s airport, knowing that he’d be fielding questions soon enough from the old aviator, and the others, about his “Miami connection.”

He walked to the kitchen, half expecting to find fresh ground coffee in the Chemex filter and water in the tea kettle. Smiling to himself at this minor absurdity, he set about the task himself. Waiting for the water to boil, he stepped out onto the patio, looking down the gently sloping lawn toward the pond. The duck population was always sparse at this time of the morning, but a couple of stragglers were another welcome cue that everything was pretty much as he’d left it when his plans had been to be gone a lot longer than he was. The teakettle’s whistling underscored the turmoil of his mixed feelings about being back home so soon, and the much longer absence from all things familiar that was just around the corner.

“Coffee’s ready, Nick,” he said, pouring water into the Chemex. “Almost, anyway.”

“Your ever-growing acuity,” the familiar voice observed, “never fails to amaze me, my boy.” Jack turned to see him sitting at his usual place at the kitchen table, debonair in a white golf cap and plus-fours in the Bobby Jones manner. “That’s the first time that you’ve let on you knew I was around before I ‘showed up,’ so to speak.”

“Well, I’ve gotten a little bit of a feeling now and then. Today, we might just put it down to the loud outfit. Speaks volumes, right by itself.”

Nick’s bright grin changed Jack’s attempted dig to a compliment. “I suppose dressing for golf in the classic style does take a bit of daring these days. Not that coming back home to dear old Bisque in a Cunningham doesn’t. Good thing you made it in under cover of darkness; you’dve had people following you home.”

“Not that I can take credit for planning it that way,” Jack said as he split one of the bagels that he’d taken out of the freezer the night before. “Glad I don’t have any well-wishers or snoops to run off so you and I can get down to business.”

“Yes, my boy,” Nick replied, nodding mute thanks for the coffee that Jack slid across the table, “we’re a bit overdue for a session of ‘what-am-I-doing-here.’ Shall I begin while the bagels toast? Unless you’d like to start with a question or two.”

“Oh, no,” said Jack. “The floor’s all yours.”

“Very well,” Nick responded, looking into the middle distance and pursing his lips in the way his namesake had done in the Thin Man films. “Let’s begin with the most important thing; despite the fact that I’m now what we call a ‘trans-temporal force field,’ I’m every bit as much a human being as you are.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“The thing is,” he went on as if Jack hadn’t spoken, “We’d learned a lot more about ourselves by the time I came along.”

“And when was that, exactly?”

“In terms of the Old Scale, that is to say the one with which you’re familiar, in the first third of the forty-third century.” Seeing that Jack had already started to juggle the numbers, Nick paused to let him finish.

“Jesus! That’s about as far in the future from here as there’s been recorded history, going back the other way.”

“Just about, at least with respect to the recorded history that’s been available to scholars of your era. So humanity’s had time to solve some problems that would currently appear to be insoluble.”

“Obviously including time travel,” said Jack.

“Hell, people had been subjecting themselves to one sort of time travel or another for over a thousand years before I came along, with varying degrees of success, or better said, satisfaction.”

“So H. G. Wells et al won’t give us much of a clue as to how they brought off the real thing.”

Nick chortled at Jack’s observation. “In that you’re asking for trouble subjecting the human body, at any degree of evolution, to velocities above the speed of light, I’d have to say that they came far wide of the mark. Flinging all that hardware hither and yon gradually produced results, but it cost a lot of lives. Those early efforts, in retrospect, were almost laughably simple. But ultimately we could send the equivalent of a small city to the desired time and place, with scout ships and the other bells and whistles so dear to the science-fiction writers that you’re reading today.”

“Wait a minute. ‘Scout ships?’ You talkin’ about flying saucers?”

“That’s exactly what I’m talkin’ about.”

“What about all the talk about aliens from outer space? Is there anything to that, or are you telling me, first, that the saucers are real, and second, that they come from the future? What about the aliens?”

“That’s about the size of it; allowing for the usual proportion of hallucinations, they’re real, they come from the future, and they’re operated by humans, and humanoids. So far as we’ve been able to determine up to now, there’re no aliens between here and Alpha Centauri; unless you want to count guys like me.” This said with a gentle smile.