The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) (3 page)

BOOK: The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga)
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“Taste of what? Brunswick Stew?”

“If that’s what that little thing’s tastin’ like this mornin’.”

It was after eleven when they woke up again. “You could at least fix a girl some coffee,” she said into the nape of his neck.

Reaching behind him, he squeezed her butt. “Ooo-kay. Settle for instant?”

“Shit no- I saw that Chemex on the counter.”

Jack disarmed the alarm system and they took their coffee outside, exhaling vapor clouds as they walked up the hill behind the house to the horse barn that Mose had converted to workout space and garage. Opening the door, Jack reached up without looking, throwing the main power switch, then flipping the half-dozen light switches below it. A regulation-size boxing ring, heavy bag, speed-bag, weight bench, wall pulleys, an assortment of barbells and dumbbells occupied the right side of the floodlit space. Arrayed in line on the left side, in front of a towering red Snap-On toolbox, were five motorcycles: A Vincent Black Shadow, a Harley-Davidson 80 cubic-inch sidecar rig, a 1940 Indian Four, a single-cylinder BMW R27 and a BSA Gold Star Clubman. “Welcome to Chez Jock,” said Jack, grinning broadly.

“Jesus. As much as you’ve both talked about it, I’m still amazed. ‘Chez Jock,’ huh?”

“That’s what the local newscaster Lee Webster, Mose’s old drinking buddy, started calling it. Actually, he first named the whole place ‘Chez Mose.’ As time went on, he named the house ‘Chez Cock’ and the barn ‘Chez Jock.’”

“Leaving very little to the imagination,” she observed. “I’ve yet to see much of this little burg, but I’m already imagining what a commotion ol’ Mose let loose around here.” She walked over to the motorcycles, stopping at the Vincent. “The Vincent,” she read the gilt scroll on the gas tank. “Looks like it’s doing a hundred standing still.” She blew on the tank. “Needs a good dusting. Why don’t you cover ’em up?”

“Probably should. Usually they don’t sit long enough to gather much dust. We’ll have to get covers for ’em anyway when we ship ’em south.”

“You ARE going to teach me to ride before you ship ’em.”

Jack’s grin reappeared, wider than ever. “Thought you’d never ask.”

They walked the rest of the three-acre property, working their way around to the front of the house. Sitting in the swing that Jack had hung from a large Poplar tree that overlooked the lake, they watched ducks and geese compete for occupancy of the swimmers’ raft. “Hard to imagine you’d ever want to leave here,” Linda said to him. “Seems like a pretty good place to call home.”

“Yeah, there are lots worse places than Bisque to spend your life, but Mose was the best part of Bisque for me. Before he got here, I felt like I’d been kidnapped, first from
New York
and then from
Los Alamos. Pretty soon, in every way that counted, he got to be both mother and father to me.”

Turning to look at the sidecar rig, she said, “He was good at that.”

“Same with you, right? Well, now that he’s gone, there’s not that much left to get excited about. The quicker I get out of here, the better.”

She smiled. “It seemed like there was never a problem that he couldn’t handle. Of course I left before he did, but when he’d gone, I felt exactly the same way about
Baltimore. Nobody left but my juicehead mother, and she was beyond help, even his. Guess it’s natural to want to put the old hometown behind you when you get out on your own. Like most of the people I knew at Johns Hopkins, for me
New York
was the Holy Grail. Or
Paris, or
San Francisco. Somewhere where there was at least a chance of making a place for yourself in the art world, or at least being in the art world. Maybe I should’ve tried
Paris;
New York’s no place to be unless you have some money.”

“Well, Mom never got it out of her system. She’s happier’n a pig in shit to be back there. Pap’s dyin’ made it a good deal easier for her, of course, but she’dve done it anyway.”

“And from what I’ve heard from you and Mose, she’s a pretty damn good sculptor. That improves her odds of making it, but I’ve seen a lot of damn good artists driving cabs and waiting tables until it was all squeezed out of ’em. You’ve gotta have connections to go along with your talent, or you may never get that first big break. I’m sure that having friends like that gallery owner didn’t hurt a bit.”

“Hap. No, it can’t hurt to have friends who can help you along. Seems to me that’s true in any business, and art, at least if you’re trying to make a living out of it, is just another business.”

She sighed. “True enough, in the sense that artists need to pay the bills. Trouble is, artists are artists, and they do what they do because they must, whether it makes money or not. So, paying the bills takes second place to that, at least while you’re young. But somewhere along the way most people either succeed, leave town, get a ‘real’ job or become some kind of an art whore.”

Jack let a few seconds pass before he spoke. “Just out of curiosity, where were you in that process when you decided to leave?”

She let more than a few seconds pass, then said, “Where did you get the idea that I considered myself an artist? What I wanted to do was just to live around artists, to be in that world and have a ‘real’ job in a gallery or, even better, a museum. I thought I could parlay a degree in art history into a life like that, one that would let me learn more and more about art and artists. Turned out a lot more people wanted to do that than there were opportunities to do it, even in
New York. So, long story short, I traded on the friendship of a photographer that I’d gotten to know, and he helped me learn the photo stylist’s trade. From there it was far too short a hop into the bed of a charming ad agency vice president, who made sure that I had the pick of the agency’s assignments.”

“Oh, yeah, the guy with the boat,” Jack said, hating him.

“And the wife.”

“Mmm-hm.”

“Which really didn’t bother me at all; she was in
Greenwich, and for me that was as good as being on the moon. And anyway, what you heard a lot back then, at least in the circles I was moving in, was ‘The good ones are always married.’ I wasn’t at all interested in being married myself, not then anyway. And since he wasn’t around much on weekends, I could spend those with my friend the photographer and other ‘artist-any-day-now’ friends, in whom he wasn’t much interested. It was actually quite nice- for a while.”

“When did you start living on the boat?”

“A few months after we started seeing each other. He didn’t like staying over at my place; I had a roommate, and it was pretty small apartment. We’d gone sailing several times, and I loved it. Him, too, or so I thought. The wife wanted no part of it; had a problem with motion sickness. She kept after him to sell it, and he kept telling her that he would. That, of course, was the farthest thing from his mind. So I moved aboard the good ship Petrel, and was still there on that fateful day a couple of years later, when you and Mose walked up the gangplank.”

Jack grinned, remembering. “Fateful is right. That was some boat. Crew wasn’t bad, either.”

She grinned back, reaching out to slap his cheek. “I still can’t believe what we did. You were quite the little stud at 16. Hope you never lose the boxer body.”

“Me? Hell, I’d never seen a woman like you close up. Except in my dreams. I had a hard-on the whole damn time we were aboard.”

“You were so cute when we went sailing the next day,” she said. “Wanting to learn everything about sailing, all at once. Watching you move around the boat in just a pair of shorts got me really hot. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t have your virginity to deal with. I caught you looking at me so many times I lost count, and when Mose mentioned having to be in meetings all day Monday, I wasn’t all that surprised to see you coming up the gangplank again. I just thought I’d see if you knew as much about what you were doing as I figured you did. A little bit scary, looking back on it; I could’ve had my ass locked up for statutory rape.”

“By the time that day was over, I would’ve nominated your ass for sainthood, and sucked those sweet bing-cherry nipples for communion.”

She laughed, looking down at the lake. “Going on seven years ago. Lots of water over the dam since then. We’ve had some good times, though, haven’t we, kid?”

“Oh Yeah. Going to
New York
to visit my Dad got to be one helluva lot of fun. ’56 wasn’t so great, though. Next thing I knew, you guys were in
Cuba.” After you’d joined me as an accessory to fraud, hauled Mose and Dieter out of the
Atlantic
after the fake plane crash, and fallen in love with the goddam kraut, he thought.

“I couldn’t believe it when Mose told me what he was gonna do. Sometimes I still have trouble believing it. Working his ass off to be somebody in this town, then just turning his back on it to help a friend. He really is an incredible guy.”

You still don’t know the half of it, Jack thought. Or do you? He’s got as much as I’ll have in the bank, if not more. And it’s way better in his pocket than in the Irish Republican Army’s. “That’s for sure. Put you through school, took you to
Cuba, and made me a beer baron, at least temporarily.”

“And being, as near as I can tell, a better lover of both your mother and of mine than either of them deserved. But this beer episode has to be the most amazing one of all,” she said. “Walking-  well, flying-  away from a multimillion-dollar business that he’d built and just dropping it in your lap, to do with as you pleased.”

“No one was more amazed then me,” said Jack. “I guess he figured that he’d never have had the chance to build the business into what it is today if Pap, my granddad, hadn’t turned up the opportunity of buying it, and then financing it. I think he just thinks of it as payback, but it’s one hell of a payback.”

Beats hell out of four years at Johns Hopkins and a Chris-Craft sportfisherman, she thought, but who’s counting? “When are you closing the deal?”

“Two weeks from Monday. The sixteenth. Unless what I told them yesterday slows it down.”

She swiveled to face him. “What did you tell them?”

“I told Bruce, the lawyer, to tell them. They sent the contract back with lines drawn through a provision that I told them was not negotiable.”

“What was that?”

“Employment contracts. For Ralph and Beverly Tyler, the two people that really run the place.”

“How much of a problem do you think they’ll have with that?”

“Dunno. But it’s their problem; those two have put a big part of their lives into the business, and I’ll be damned if I’ll walk away from it without making sure they’re taken care of.”

“What’s in the contracts?”

“Employment in their current positions, or better, for five years, with annual salary increases based on increases in net profits, and continuation of their participation in the profit-sharing plan that Mose put in when he first took over.”

“Sounds pretty good, at least from their point of view. I guess I can see why your buyer might have some reservations, though.”

“Well, they better think about getting over them if they want HCBC.”

“Want what?” she asked.

“HCBC. Hamm County Beverage Company. If they want it, they’re damn sure going to have to execute those contracts. Mose’d kick my ass if I didn’t take care of Ralph and Beverly.”

Considering that, she paused to let some newfound respect for this twenty-three year-old kid take hold. Then she said, “You’re really prepared to kill this deal if they say no to the contracts?”

“Yes ma’am. But I don’t really think there’s much danger in that. They want us bad. I can smell it.”

“That’s some nose you’ve got there, sport. I know one thing it’s not picking up, though.”

“What’s that?”

“The smell of breakfast. My turn.” Reaching for his empty coffee cup, she said, “Sit tight and I’ll bring you a refill.”

Jack sat alone in the swing, idly watching steam rise from his cup. The inimitable squawk came from directly above his head. “Flx?”

“Who else, shitbird? Didn’t think I’d forgotten about you, didja? C’mon down to the lake; I need to perch where I can look you in the eye.”

The lakeside lawn furniture had been put away for the winter, so Jack set his coffee down on the old shooting stand, from where he and Mose had blasted countless clay pigeons out of their apogee over the lake. Flx perched on its opposite side. “What’s up, Goshawk?”

“Managing to stay out of trouble; how ‘bout you?”

“‘Bout the same, I reckon. Hab’m seen yo’ ass since we cast off in
Miami.”

“I figured you had your hands full, to coin a phrase. I must say that I was tempted, on occasion, to see if there was enough water in the Intracoastal for y’all to navigate and screw at the same time. Since you’re here, I guess you did all right.”

“That’s about it. It’s a long damn cruise from there to here, I’ll tell you that. And we froze our asses off the last third of the way.”

“Probably not the best idea y’all ever came up with,” squawked the bird. “You’re still kind of a landlubber, but a woman that age, and a seasoned sailor at that...”

“Hey! She’s just thirty-two!”

“And still lookin’ damn good. Well, maybe you’ll get a break in the weather on the run back south.”

BOOK: The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga)
9.64Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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