The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (2 page)

“Pretty funny?” said Ralph, still high as a kite on his exposure to the scent of forbidden fruit. “I know a guy got a two-chair barbershop- you know ole Quintone James, Jack- says he have all kinda no-haircut niggers slidin’ in there every afternoon, jus’ ta watch ol’ Kangfish. Can’t stir ’em with a stick.”

Jack saw Linda stiffen. she wasn’t readier than any other Yankee to hear “nigger” a dozen times a day, as she soon would. “Oh,” she said, “That’s a lotta people, all right. You say it’s on every day? Seems like it was a weekly show, back when.”

“Five days a week, now.” Ralph said. “I heard the NAACP got on ’em- the network, I mean- and they cancelled it. Don’t know who they thought they was pleasin’; people up north, I reckon. But we get it out of
Atlanta
now, and five times as much to boot.”

Jack looked up in the mirror to catch Ralph’s eye. “Remember when he was on the Tonight show last year, talkin’ about shootin’ up his in-laws?”

“Shoot, I can’t stay up that late and get to work in the mornin’.”

“Oh, man, it was hilarious! Somebody stole a roast out of his refrigerator, and he got after his in-laws with a pistol. He was laughin’ about it the way he did- ‘heh, heh, heh-’ said ‘You oughta seen dem in-laws scatter when I let loose wid dat gun.’ And when the cops came he just told ’em, ‘I de ole Kangfish,’ and got them to laughin’!”

“He’s dead now, ain’t he?” asked Ralph.

“Yeah, I think he died pretty soon after that. Too bad; but he was gettin’ up there.”

“Bisque,” Linda said as they passed the city limits sign. “Why do you say it that way?”

“BIS-kew? ’Cause that’s the way they’ve always said it, I guess. I don’t believe I’d like bein’ from ‘Bisk,’ anyway.”

“They’s a town down the road apiece named
Cairo,” said Ralph, pronouncing it “KAY-ro”. “Guess peoples just started callin’ it what it looked like it said, same as Bisque, ’less of course you be French or sump’m.”

“You’re not likely to go wrong,” Jack said with a grin, “to give anything havin’ to do with Bisque the most literal interpretation possible.”

“But that would have to include you, Smilin’ Jack,” she said.

Jack looked up in the mirror in time to see an ear-to-ear grin. “Ralph and I’re just the exceptions that prove the rule.”

“Betcha I’ll run across one or two more before we skip town,” she said.

“Y’know,” said Linda, briskly drying herself after the first hot shower since they’d cast off from the Coconut Grove marina, “That horny-eyed little cook of Reba’s really knows his way around breakfast. I’m good till sundown, anyway.”

“You’re better than good,” Jack said from his side of the bed, “At least as well as I can remember. By the way, Nelson Lord, that ‘horny-eyed little cook,’ doesn’t take much notice of females over eighteen, so consider yourself part of a distinguished minority.”

“Just what I need,” she said with a stage shudder.

Hands behind his head, cock brought to attention by the toweling tit-gyration, he looked her long tanned body up and down. “Get in here, girl.”

Chuckling, she created a temporary tent, tossing her towel onto his cock as she dropped down next to him. “Just because we haven’t been in a real bed for a couple of weeks. Like we didn’t screw much.”

“Yeah, but it’s not like being in Mose’s big ol’ bed, is it?” Smiling as he drew her to him, he shot a “thanks” at Flx, wherever he was, who’d had the delicacy not to put in an appearance during their run from Coconut Grove up the Intracoastal Waterway, but who’d speculated about sex underway on the flying bridge while Linda minded the helm. She’d loved it that way, at least until they got into cold weather. She called it “doing the dragonfly.”

“Now we’re calling him Mose again?”

“You kiddin’? All you’re gonna be hearin’ is ‘Mose this’ and ‘Mose that’ as long as we’re here. He was the man-about-Bisque. May as well get used to it; just think of that gent Peter Wessel down in Coconut Grove as a completely different guy. Anyway, I’d really have a job thinkin’ of him as anyone but Mose within these four walls.”

“How old were you when you first came out here?”

“Ten, I guess. He bought it the first year he was here. We’ve had a helluva lot of good times in this joint.”

“And quite a joint it is. I’m looking forward to matching up some visuals with all the stories the two of you’ve told me. Amazing how he wormed his way in here, being a Yankee, and Jewish on top of that.”

Her remark triggered Jack’s lightning rewind of Moses’ life. He was nineteen when Moses fully confided in him, asking his help in the operation that would allow the onetime Nazi spy and his former colleague, Dieter Brück, to escape the Savannah River Project’s tightening ring of security. Brück, who had saved his life during the Spanish Civil War, had been sent to penetrate the Savannah River Project by his latest employer, the Soviet KGB. “Mose never wormed his way into anything,” Jack told her, his voice heating up. People were always glad to help him.”

“Starting with your mother.”

“No, starting with me, but no tellin’ how many times they made love right here in this bed. Probably on these same sheets.”

Smiling at his resurgent erection, she gave it a firm squeeze, caught the resulting flow of his clear pre-ejaculate with the circle of her thumb and forefinger and spread it along the shaft.  She took him into her mouth for a moment, then rolled onto her side. “Well, Sparky, if you want to follow in that hallowed tradition, you’d better get with it. That shower made me sleepy.”

Jack was back at the house, which he’d always think of as Chez Mose, a little after six. Lee Webster, Bisque’s longtime “radio personality” and Mose’s erstwhile drinking partner, began calling it that, and soon it was all over Bisque, uttered in various degrees of appreciation, envy or ignorance. Linda sat with her customary large Scotch in the living room, watching the news. “What’s goin’ on?” he asked, the question barely out of his mouth before she shushed him.

“Get a drink and sit down. They’re saying Castro’s rounding ’em up by the thousands.”

“That goin’ on right now?”

“Looks like. They say he was on Cuban TV yesterday until two in the morning.”

“Hairy bastard, ain’t he? Looks like he’da had a chance to clean up by now.”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t be a bad looking guy with a clean shave. Can’t be much over thirty.”

“Looks older there. Revolutionizin’ must be a right rough job.”

“Well, Cubans’ve been at each other’s throats for a long time, with lots of outside help. Batista’s bunch were just the worst of a bad lot. At least up to now.”

“Guess y’all saw quite a bit of it down there.”

Linda shifted on the couch to look him in the eye. “And we lost Dieter,” she said, her voice catching for a split second over the name.

She’d told him about falling in love with Dieter Brück on their run down to
Cuba. Since then, Jack had been careful to avoid mentioning his name. This time there was no getting around it. He could handle a live rival, he thought, but competing with a dead man was a losing proposition. He fought the urge to reach for her hand. “Wasn’t too long after y’all got there, was it?”

“Just a few months. March 13th of ’57. Castro’s people attacked the presidential palace that afternoon, and it was Dieter’s bad luck to be in a taxi that got caught in the crossfire. I’m over it now, thanks to you and Pete, but it’s taken a while. Funny how things happen, though. I doubt that I’d have gotten interested in flying if Pete hadn’t used it to try to take my mind off what happened.”

That and screwing you every so often, he thought. Quick to seize on something they had in common, Jack asked her, “Where was it y’all flew out of? Baradera?”

“Varadero. A ways east of
Havana. Nice little field; runway paralleling the beach, and not too much traffic. Wind usually right on the nose, zero-nine-zero, 10 to 15 knots. Pretty good conditions for a fledgling pilota.”

“Sounds like it; Pete’s a damn good instructor, ain’t he?”

“He really is, but I didn’t find out until after I soloed. It took him that long to find someone he could bribe to transcribe his ‘Moses Kubielski’ hours onto a new ‘Peter Weller’ logbook and have them certified as having been flown in
Cuba. Then he had check rides to fly. So my first twenty hours or so of flight time were with Tony Rivera, the same guy who gave Pete his multi-engine instruction.”

“All of your hours in that Champ you told me about?”

“Yep. Little green rascal. Wish I could fly it tomorrow.”

“Guess you always have a soft spot in your heart for the first bird you solo. I feel that way about the ol’ J-3. That’s one that we can fly tomorrow, or at least in a day or two, unless Gene Debs’s got it torn down.”

“That’s a deal,” she said, glancing at Castro’s still-gesticulating image. Hey. This flying talk’s got me hungry. You cooking, or are we going out again?”

“None of the above. I figured that you might still be a little pooped from the trip, so I picked up a package at Tubby’s Barbecue. What’s your position on Brunswick Stew and chopped swine sandwiches?”

“At strict attention, sport. After what you’ve told me about that joint, you better’ve brought plenty.”

His breath came easier now; round three and he still felt good. Not as good as the Cuban light-heavy in the tan headgear who faced him in the opposite corner, but good. Good for a guy who’ll never see the sunny side of fifty again, for sure, he thought. Not that young Pepe over there couldn’t murder me, but now I’m making him work for it. Or he’s making it look like I am.

“OK,” said Frank Sanchez, turning away from a neutral-corner conversation with another Cuban in an eggshell-hued
Palm Beach
suit. Peter Weller hoisted his gloves off the ropes and moved toward his rangy adversary. Slipping the kid’s opening jab and countering with one of his own, he moved to his left as he held up his end of their staccato exchange of lefts. If I’m careful, Pete thought, maybe I can surprise him with a combination; Pepe’s not used to my having much left for round three. He moved back to the right, still jabbing. The kid assayed a hook, not his best move, that Pete saw coming; planting his right foot, he bobbed his head back and to the right. Countering as the glove whistled past, the raised silver stitching of the EVERLAST label looking six inches high, Pete drove his right into the kid’s side. That’ll slow the rascal down, he thought as he took a step back, jabbing where he thought Pepe would be but catching some air of his own.

“Move EEN, Whaler, move EEN! Ju mees jour shance wid heen! See, he raddy now, bot for dot momen’ he was opeen for de oopercoot. Ju can’ score back on jour heels, mon!” Nodding quickly in acknowledgment at Sanchez, Pete moved back left, squaring his stance in readiness for renewed aggression from Pepe. No fighter, least of all a Latin, likes being embarrassed, even slightly, and Pete looked for a new opportunity in that. This, Pete thought, can be my best round ever with the kid. But the charge, if you could call it that, consisted of a flutter of rapid lefts, easily parried and indicative of Pepe’s increased respect for the old man’s right hand. “Time!” bellowed Sanchez. Backslapping the fighters simultaneously, he said to Pepe, “Cool out onna beeg bog,
Chico. Dis Pete, he steel hov some e-stoff, sí?”

Loosening his headgear, the boy shot a shy smile Pete’s way. “Sí; ju sorprice me, Pete; I no geev ju dot shot no more.”

“Can’t blame an old guy for trying, Pepe; nice workout. Thanks,” Pete said as he caught his breath.

“Ju got some right hand for old mon,” Sanchez said when they were alone. Running his trainer’s eye up and down Weller’s powerful sub-six-foot body, he continued, “Pero ju old as me; why you do dees? Ju mi-ey get hit hard someday. Ees bayder ways to stay een tchape, mon.”

“Claro, Francisco,” said Pete with a grin. Pero lo necesito. Absolutamente.”

Tossing his workout bag into the old Buick limousine’s back seat, he slid under the steering wheel and hit the starter. The highly-tuned straight eight leapt to life with a roar that he was still getting used to. Can this be the same car, he thought as he drove out into the early evening on
Miami’s Calle Ocho, that brought me down from
Baltimore
all those years ago? I never thought I’d see it again after Bisque, and never really wanted to once those damn Bishop twins got hold of it. Can’t imagine what it cost Jack to get it in this kind of shape. If Buick had built ’em this way in 1941, there’s no telling how many they’dve sold. But it’s one of a kind, and so is he. Can’t wait ’til the little pissant gets back down here. And Linda, not that we don’t have a few things to sort out among ourselves. I didn’t expect her to go after him the way she did when he first showed up down here, but that’s women for you. She’s got the goods on Jack and me, and it looks like she thinks she can do as she pleases. Way too much like her mother. But we can sort it out. Hell, we’ve got to.

They slept late, waking to a clear, cool morning. Throwing a leg over Jack’s prone form, she felt his butt cheeks contract once, twice, three times. “You sending me a message, boy?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“And what might that be?”

He turned his head toward her, opening one eye. “Need a little taste,” he grunted.