The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (6 page)

Moving to regain the initiative, Jack said, “And you’re just leaving now?” Giving his aunt a playful butt-slap as they separated. “You won’t be down there ’til
midnight.”

“You’re not the only one that can fly someplace, y’know,” she said, slapping him back. She cocked her head at the sound of a ringing telephone. “Matter of fact, I gotta get movin’. Lindsey Rankin’s pickin’ me up in the Firestone plane, and he’s probably sittin’ out there waitin’. Hold on a minute.” Stepping up on the porch, she walked quickly to the door, extracted a bag from just inside it and turned the key that was already in the lock. “Glad y’all didn’t show up five minutes later,” she said. “I gotta go; gimme a hug.” This last to Linda. “Mm-m. Don’chall have too much fun scandalizin’ th’ ol’ hometown ’til I get back to help ya. Wish us luck; we’re th’ only
Plymouth
in th’ field. Lemme outa here now.” Throwing the bag into the 300’s back seat, she had its engine turning over seconds later, the tailpipes growling like an unlimited hydroplane.

“Hm,” Linda mused as they watched the Chrysler roar away. “Wonder who painted those coveralls onto her. Some kinfolk you have, hon.”

“And you ain’t even met my Mama.”

“Good thing I don’t have to today, if she’s anything like that handful. They’re buddies, huh?”

“Lifelong. And stayed that way, even when she married Buster.”

“Mama wasn’t in favor of it?”

“Not much, from the few things I’ve heard her say over the years. We were living in
New York, and I was still in diapers.”

“Did y’all come down for the wedding?”

“Nah. They eloped. But, as they say, enough about her. You gettin’ hungry?”

“Not a bit. What do you say we just go for an early dinner?”

“Fine with me,” he said. You up for hot dogs and/or hamburgers? I thought we’d stop by Don’s Dog House after HCBC. It’s close, and we’ll probably see an example or two of the natives’ Saturday-night mating ritual. Too cold for curb service, but they’ll bring us a set-up so we can have cocktails in the car.”

“How quaint. Got some booze at the office?”

“Cat got an ass?”

The wagon followed its nose for the three miles or so back into town, the road changing names to
Academy Street
at the city limits. Waiting for a break in the Saturday afternoon traffic at the
Lee Street
stop sign, Jack smiled and said “Country-come-to-town.”

“What?”

“That’s what Pap used to say about Saturdays,” he said as he slipped the wagon through a break in the traffic. “People from out in the county making their weekly trek to Bisque for supplies and entertainment, clogging up traffic and doing slow country business. Not that he minded; he knew damn well you couldn’t speed ’em up; it was simply a cost of doing business. ‘Aw, it’s just country-come-to-town.’ Sounded to me like sump’m he’d heard growin’ up in the
Tennessee
hills. Only my guess is that it was him and his folks being referred to that way, instead of the other way around.”

“Tennessee, huh? So how is it that he made it all away down here in to red-clay country?”

“The army. The ‘State Guard,’ that is. Pap was a in a Tennessee State Guard unit that was sent to Camp McPherson, over in Atlanta, for their active duty training, back before World War I. He met Pete Hartwell, the guy who was carrying on with my grandma, there. Pete brought ’im home for a visit. One thing led to another, and he ended up going to work alongside Pete at Old Man Hartwell’s cotton brokerage.”

“Hell, another Pete! And one of those ‘things that led to another’ was your grandma.”

“The lovely Rose Watkins, eldest daughter of a once-prominent
Richmond
County
plantation family, who wanted in the worst way to marry Pete, who wasn’t having any of it. In wedlock, that is. Not so old Pap, as I’ve told you. Well, there it is,” he said shortly after a left turn on
Seventh Street. “The Hamm County Beverage Company. Everybody went home at
noon, but I thought you might be interested in looking at ‘The House That Mose Built’ without the distraction of a lot of ‘hey-how’re-you’s’. There’ll be lots of time for those later.” Pulling into a parking spot next to the building, stenciled letters on its wall identifying it as belonging to the Employee Of The Month, Jack said, “I’ll meet you at the front door. Gotta shut off the alarm.”

He opened the two deadbolt locks securing the heavily-barred plate glass door, holding it open for her as he reached to the right to flip the light switches for the office. “Hamm
County
people must drink a lot of beer, judging from the size of this place,” Linda said as she peered down a long passageway that ended in double doors.

“They do, but we reach out a little farther than that. We’re licensed in eight counties, with more to come when a few more dry counties vote the right way.” Putting a hand on her shoulder, he steered her slightly to the left to a door that led to a still-darkened office. He flipped a switch on the inside of the doorjamb that turned on twin lamps that sat on a credenza and a green-glass-shaded gooseneck desk lamp. “Voilá; the operation’s nerve center.”

She looked silently around the room. Then she said, “Looks pretty much like I thought it would. No concession to fluorescent light for him. The house in
Cuba
had them in the kitchen; he had them torn out and replaced with a big-ass chandelier.”

“Hm. You know, I never thought about it, but I can’t think of a single one out at the house. And I thought I knew everything there was to know about him.”

“So did I, at one time. Well, show me the rest of this joint.”

They were back in the car in less than half an hour, joined by a paper bag shrouding the distinctive rectangular shape of a fifth of Ballantine Scotch Whisky. “Let’s take a quick run through the Park,” he said as the wagon rolled out of the parking lot. “Gotta go through niggertown, but we can do the round trip before dark, which is a good idea for white folks on Saturday.”

“Fair enough,” she said with a giggle.

“What’s so funny?”

“I was just thinking how funny it’d be to have a couple of my
New York
friends in the backseat, holding a jug in a paper bag and driving through ‘niggertown’ on a Saturday night. They absolutely would not believe it.”

“No doubt,” Jack said, smiling. “But as I recall, you never mentioned the possibility of going up to
Harlem
on a Saturday night.”

She giggled again, something she rarely did. “You mean with you? Hell, the last time I saw you in
New York
you still weren’t old enough to drink. In a public place, that is. I never cared for that part of town, anyway.”

“Me either, even though I think my artfully-altered Georgia Driver’s License would’ve stood up in Harlem as well as it did in Manhattan. Not that we went that many places; had that one great night in Birdland, though.”

“John Coltrane. Yeah, that was great. What in the hell do you suppose your dad was thinking, letting you stay out late with me like that?”

“Well, he damn sure didn’t think that you and I were lovers. He saw you, at least I think he saw you, as a sort of mentor to me.”

“Ha!”

“Well, darlin’, you were; he just didn’t know what the curriculum was.”

“Damn! You know, I saw my share of head-in-the-clouds academic types at Johns Hopkins, but as brilliant as he may be- no offense, baby- seems like he’s more of a head-up-the-ass type.”

“Can’t fool you, huh?”

As they neared the center of the three-block area of black-occupied houses, at least half of which had never seen a coat of paint, a black man, somewhere between the ages of fifty and seventy, raised a hesitant hand in greeting, his voluminous, ragged overcoat falling open as he did. Jack answered the wave with a tap of the horn. “Who’s that?” Linda asked.

“Dunno. Somebody mistaking me for Mose, most likely. Don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.”

“Well, that guy looked like he might’ve seen a ghost or two. He seems to have had quite a range of acquaintances; Mose, I mean.”

“Indeed he did; of course, he was the kinda guy that people wanted to know. All kinds of reasons.” The wagon topped the small rise at the park’s entrance; off to their right a foursome of golfers and their caddies, intent on finishing their round before dark, ignored them.

“A tad nippy for golf, if you ask me,” she said.

Jack shook his head. “That’s a very peculiar kind of insanity. Glad it never grabbed me. And speaking of insanity, get ready for a prime example.”

“What’s that?” she asked as they rounded the ninety-degree left turn past the clubhouse.

“Just up the way here a little bit.” As they passed an open dance pavilion on the left, its posts casting wan shadows in the fading light, he said, “See that building? He gestured toward a good-sized one-story brick structure, badly in need of a fresh coat of the flaking buff-colored paint that had once covered it. A driveway ran past a broad staircase that climbed up to a pair of doors set into glass brickwork.

“Um-hmm. Looks like a bathhouse.”

“Right the first time! Remember me telling y’all about a guy who tried to shoot up the hotel cafe getting killed by a runaway truck?”

“Uh- yeah- had something to do with that horny little cook, didn’t it?”

“Right again!” The wagon took them up a slight hill and through a hundred-and-eighty degree turn past one of the golf course’s greens. “Now- see that nice sloping meadow behind the bathhouse?”

“Um-hmm.”

“That used to be the City of
Bisque’s swimming pool.”

“Ooh, yeah. I remember now. Instead of integrating it, they filled it in and grassed it over.”

“Yup. Behind a very thin smokescreen of a deteriorating facility; a sanitation hazard that the city fathers just couldn’t find the money to replace with a new pool.”

“Damn! Where do the kids go to swim?”

“Well, they have a choice of the Elks Club or the country club. Members and guests, that is.”

“Which is to say, white people.”

“Some white people.”

“What about the blacks?”

“Whatever pond, lake or river that they don’t get run out of, is pretty much the story. See why I want to get the fuck outa here?”

“Yes,” she said, “I believe I do.”

“A lot of people in this little burg’re gonna have to die off before anybody with skin much darker’n mine’s gonna have more’n a snowball’s chance in hell of living a decent life here,” Jack grated as they drove past the park’s softball fields, glancing at the father-and-son pepper game that, besides golf, appeared to be the park’s sole activity that late afternoon. “Now, just hold on for a coupla minutes and I’ll show you where Ralph Williams lives.”

Returning to the intersection of the park’s entry and exit roads, Jack drove the Buick off the paved surface and onto the extension of the exit road, a reasonably well-graded dirt road that looked to Linda as though it had regular use. “Where’s this take us?”

“Among other places, past the county’s biggest employer, other than the textile mills.
Hamm
Foods. Ralph and his mother live right across the road from it.”

The road angled off slightly to the right as they topped a small rise, and Linda saw the corner post of a high cyclone fence, one side of which paralleled the road as it led down to the paved entry to a gatehouse. A collection of buildings, all but one of them one-story structures and some little more than sheds, stretched out for some distance beyond it. “That’s Hamm Foods,” Jack said with a wave of his hand in its direction, “And that’s Chez Williams over there on the left, fourth one down.” The house looked to be in somewhat better shape than its neighbors, with a fairly recent coat of white paint, bright green shutters and a walkway of a row of octagonal paving tiles, each cut into the bank to provide a level walkway up to a wider expanse of the same tiles that led to the front porch. Sparse fescue, awaiting spring’s greening cue, straggled down the bank toward the shallow ditch that separated it from the road. “That’s his car.” A shiny black 1957 Chevrolet BelAir hardtop sat gathering dust in front of the house.

“Want to stop in for a minute?” she asked him.

“Naah, not a good idea. The neighbors’d give his mama hell for weeks if Whitey paid a visit.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Unfortunately not. Like a lot of other things, segregation works both ways.”

“Well that just sucks,” she fumed.

“Yes it does. If the young ones, the good ones anyway, get a chance to get out of here, they take it and never come back. Like Ralph’s little brother, Ziggy.”

“The ex-Marine,” she said.

“That’s the one. The only Korean War vet from Bisque to win the Silver Star. Hell. Far as I know, he’s the only Bisque vet, from any war, to win one. And nobody ever won anything more important, that I know of. But you’ll never hear anyone of the white persuasion say a word about it.”

“I remember you and Mose talking about him when you first showed up down in Coconut Grove. Mose liked him a lot.”