The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (40 page)

26 EYE DON’T SEE IT

 “Hey, Bart!”  Jack called to the bartender, some 50 feet away jiggling hamburgers on a hot grill. “We’re ready when you are, pal!”  It was early on the Friday evening before the squadron’s Saturday all-hands party, ordered by the Captain in celebration of Jack’s crew’s survival of the monster Hurricane Flora. His off-and-on girl friend of recent months, Louella Tambeaux, whom her friends call Lulu, had driven out to the base for the party.  After meeting her at the gate and authorizing a temporary pass for her car, he’d led her past his quarters in Bundy Housing to the main BOQ parking lot, all the Bundy parking spaces being reserved for occupants. Jack parked the Cunningham, planning to put Lulu’s car and her luggage in his parking spot down the hill when they returned from happy hour at the Officers’ Club. He was barely on his feet when he heard Burke Swearingen’s voice somewhere behind him.

“Jack! Hey, Jack!”  He turned to see Burke Swearingen standing at the far corner of the BOQ’s check-in desk.

“Yo, Burke. What’s up?”

“Is that Lulu?”

“Sure is.”

Swearingen, who spent every possible weekend in
San Juan, had been attracted to a clutch of civilian hedonists, most of them “mainland” transplants, whose Saturdays and Sundays revolved around cocktails, tanning and shoveling large loads of bullshit on the promenade deck of the Condado Beach Hotel. Jack, who had gone there a few times at his recommendation, could never get too enthused about this bunch, pretentious, effete and faux-literary, approximately in that order. He much preferred the bar at the Hilton, through which coursed a constant stream of Pan American flight attendants. He’d stopped by the Condado, however, late one Sunday afternoon when the Hilton stream had temporarily gone dry, and found Swearingen serving himself and a striking young Latin girl, not much past twenty, at the tapas bar. Momentarily taken aback, as he’d more or less consigned Swearingen to the group’s light-in-the-loafers contingent, he produced a happy-hour grin as her escort performed the introduction.

“ I love the way you talk,” the girl, Margarita Torres, said in a faint Latin-long-time-in-the-US accent. Where are you from?”

“Ohh, jus’ a little old
Georgia
town on th’ Cae’lina border,” Jack said, milking the opportunity. “Ain’t much more’n a whistle-stop.”

“Don’t buy that country bumpkin act,” said Swearingen. You ought to see his car.”

“I can’t believe it! Come on,” she said, taking hold of his arm and giving it a healthy tug. You must meet our little Lulu.”

Little Lulu, as it turned out, was five-eight in her stocking feet, just about as dark as Margarita, but with compelling midnight blue eyes. Shifting slightly toward him on her chaise, she smiled slyly up at him as Margarita led him to her. “Lulu, this is Jack. I can’t wait to see the two of you go at it,” she said. “Talking, I mean. You sound exactly alike.”

Full lips parted under pronounced cheekbones, revealing bright, even teeth that suggested pearls in a plush-lined strongbox. Extending a large, well-shaped hand, she said,  “Hey, Jack. How ’bout we shut up and make ’em beg?”

Not to be outdone, Jack retained her hand, replying, “Or we could just leave and make ’em wait a week. Or a month.”

She laughed out loud, harpooning him with those eyes. Patting the cushion next to her, she said, “ Let’s have a drink and see what happens.”

A fair amount had happened since then. Lulu, more formally Louella Marie Tombeaux, had moved around quite a bit in the couple of years since graduating from high school in
Gaffney,
South Carolina. Frankly admitting that she desired “the high life,” she hotfooted it to
New York, thinking that she could put her “commercial course” skills to work there as easily as she could in
Atlanta
or
Miami, her second and third choices. She diligently worked her only contact, her best friend’s father, the superintendent of a local textile mill, for a recommendation to a colleague at the company’s headquarters in
New York. “He’d been after me for the longest time,” she’d told Margarita, whose father was the
New York
colleague. “I’d get together with him now and then, down in
Columbia, after he called your daddy and got him to agree to interview me.”

Mr. Torres’s department lost their new secretary, however, the next year when Margarita graduated from
Hunter
College. The girls had become roommates after meeting during one of her visits to her father’s office. Soon after graduation, she decided that she could live no longer without
Caribbean
sun. “Since we can’t go back to
Cuba, at

least not until Castro’s out of there, I’m moving to
Puerto Rico. Wanna come?”  She didn’t have to ask little Lulu twice. The sister act moved to San Juan, where both girls quickly found work, again with the help of Dad’s connections, Margarita in one of the airport gift shops and Lulu in the San Juan office of a US-based public relations outfit. Lulu’s Spanish, which she’d taken as an elective outside her “commercial course”, improved through daily use, and while she wasn’t exactly fluent, she did better than just get by.

“Out here for the big party?”  Swearingen asked her, having talked them into the BOQ bar for “a congratulatory drink on the house.”

“Had to come out and make sure Mr. Wonderful’s OK, and to see you jerks tryin’ to act like adults,” Lulu said, elbowing him in the ribs. You comin’ tomorrow?”

Wincing from the vigorous elbow, Swearingen said, “Indeed I am; after all, it’s my party, in a sense. I’m the mess treasurer, and if anything came adrift at the Casa Coqui tomorrow night, if I weren’t there to fix it it’d be my ass-  er, butt. My boss’ll be there too, of course; the Commanding Officer of Naval Station, Roosevelt Roads.”

Lulu’s luxuriant eyebrows, a rare and devastating combination with her deep blue eyes, rose, then fell. “Came adrift where?

“That’s what they call the O Club, sweetie,” said Jack, grinning. Means...”

“House of the Little Frog,” Lulu said. “Eleutherodactylus coqui. The little rascal’s
Puerto Rico’s official mascot.”  Laughing at both men’s obvious befuddlement, she said, “Can’t believe I knew that, huh, boys? The
Commonwealth
of
Puerto Rico’s an account of ours.”  Draining her glass, she said, “Ol’ Bart really can whip up the daiquiris, can’t he? They’re so much better than those frozen headaches everybody drinks at the Condado.”  Looking at Jack, she said, “Better order us another round, sweetie, before he gets on another batch of burgers.”

At the end of the long  daiquiri trail, Lulu and Jack, the urgency of their first coupling spent, lay on their sides toying with each other. Lulu kidded him about the size of his cock, and he twitted her over the readiness of her clitoris to come readily out of its hood and stand to attention. “You’ve got the clit of a courtesan,” he said. At her smiling gratification, he added, “and a mouth to match. Eleutherodactylus coqui indeed.”

“You loved that, didn’t you, honey, when I laid that on ol’ Burke? Set that little
Princeton
pissant back on his heels for a change.”

“Yeah, I did. Tell you something else I’d love.”

“What?”

“Would you say it with a mouthful of daiquiri… and dick?”

Taking the fast-rising member in both hands, she moved to reverse her position on the bed. “Would you hand me one of those daiquiris, sweetie? Oh, by the way...”

“Hm?”

“Pay attention to the courtesan clit, diplomat. You can say what you want!”

They slept late, giving Jack’s roommate Roy Green, who had to relieve the Station’s off-going Officer of the Day at 0645, an open shot at the bathroom. He had made the customary large pot of coffee, and Lulu and Jack sat on the living room’s tired rattan sofa with cups that Jack had recently refilled. “So,” Lulu asked him, “are you guys going to give speeches tonight, or what?”

“Hell, no. Guess one or another of the brass’ll ask us for a few words after they have their say. I’ll be happy to oblige in that case, if I’m drunk enough.”

“Well, going by what the guys at the bar said last night, y’all are lucky to have gotten back. Those pictures in the San Juan Star were really something; those big ol’ tanks on the ends of the wing just flat blown off? The paper said each one was as heavy as a Volkswagen!”

“Hm. 600 gallons at 6 pounds a gallon; that’s more like two Volkswagens.”

“Must’ve scared the shit out of you, flying so low in that god-awful wind.”

“Bet your young ass it did. Damn thing had no eye.”

“No eye? I thought they all had that nice big eye in the middle.”

A short, sardonic laugh opened Jack’s lips for an instant. “That’s what we all thought, baby. But we wuz wrong.”

“So y’all had no idea what you were flying into, just business as usual?

“Right. Commander Frick, the Executive Officer, was subbing for the Skipper as Plane Commander on this flight. I was listed as Third Pilot, and was first in the rotation for the left seat, but he preempted me and made the takeoff. Pretty much a normal takeoff, if you can call any takeoff in a full-tanks Connie normal. You’re always concerned about losing an engine on takeoff with full tanks, because at that weight three-engine climb performance’s more of a dream than a reality. Anyway, we didn’t lose an engine and everything else looked normal, so he leveled off at 1000 feet, OK’d CIC to fire the radar, and we were off on what looked like a normal storm recon flight. By the time we took off, hurricane Flora was just a little over an hour away, and by the time we reached her we were still a bit heavy to go in. I relieved Commander Frick, and he went back to CIC for a look at the storm on one of their big scopes; it looked sufficiently hairy that he had us head south for a few miles and orbit there until we’d burned some more fuel out of the tip tanks before going in. He surprised me by relieving me in the left seat after a little more than half an hour, ordering the crew to fasten seatbelts and check our Mae Wests. Then he called CIC and asked for a heading into the storm.”

Lulu frowned. “Was that enough time to burn much of the fuel in the tip tanks?”

“No. Not even 25%. That’s what surprised me, but I figured that what Commander Frick’d seen on the scope satisfied him that radar vectoring could get us into the eye without any unusual stress on the wing. Wrong again, as we were soon to find out.”

“So you were out of the cockpit when the plane headed into the storm?”

“Yeah. Ray Browning, the Second Pilot, stayed in the right seat, and I strapped myself into one of the four airliner-type seats just aft of the bunks.”

“Hey! Y’all have bunks in there?”

“Yeah; two on each side. Our flights generally go 14-15 hours. Little naps help a lot.”

“Be a great way to join the mile-high club,” she said with a contemplative smile.

“Oh. You’re not a member?”

“No, goddammit, and neither are you. Are you?”

“Just kiddin’, baby,” Jack said, grinning. “I’ve been savin’ it for you. Here to god-knows-where on a night flight in a Pan Am Clipper.”

“Anyway, you’re strapped in your seat and y’all are heading into the storm.”

“Right. Just a minute or two past 1230 when we hit the wall cloud. Felt like a million firehoses. I felt it when Commander Frick called for METO power; man, those engines were growling. Browning told me later that it was all they could do to hold the aircraft somewhere near straight and level. They managed to do it until we reached the area where the radar indicated the eye was, but it just wasn’t there. What was there was more wind, coming from different directions at the same time, and turbulence. We were getting bounced around like a cat’s toy, and it didn’t take Frick long to decide that we needed to get out of there. CIC gave him a heading out to the southeast, and we got the ride of our lives, pulling G’s that only a fighter pilot ought to be dealing with. Several people’s seatbelts gave way, and they were all over the aircraft, first on the overhead, then on the deck. Ray looked over at Frick, and he told me later that he just didn’t like what he saw, that he seemed to be falling behind the aircraft. Ray told him,  ‘I’ve got it.’

 It was just about then that I looked out the window and saw the port tip tank starting to tear loose. I got out of my seat and staggered up to the flight deck to tell them, and as we looked out the port side cockpit window it was gone. It didn’t take much more than a minute for it to be torn away from the aircraft. When it went, both pilots had all they could do to get the starboard wing up. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do to help them; I had to hang on to anything I could find to keep from getting bounced around the flight deck, so I made my way back to my seat as quickly as I could and strapped in again.”

“That had to be a helpless feeling.”

 “Damn right it was! We were going in, I was certain, and there wasn’t a thing that I could do about it, except to stay out of the way and try not to get hit by any of the shit that was flying around the cabin. Not long after I was back in my seat, we took the hardest hit yet, and shortly after that the starboard tip tank tore off, taking a piece of the wing with it. That at least got us level, giving Ray the opportunity to get out a MAYDAY transmission on guard channel. The Coast Guard launched an Albatross amphibian to provide assistance, and they got to us in a little over an hour, during which time Commander Frick took up a heading due west to get us out of the heavy weather area as quickly as possible.