“All yours, Tzu.” Jack dumped his knapsackful of deadly intent on Tzu’s bamboo glasstop.
“So much?”
“Clausewitz learned it at Waterloo.”
“Total war was before my time.”
“Overkill — the only way to go.”
“But which?”
“Your call. I’m off.”
“Oh?”
“My week with the Flying Club’s Cessna.” Jack flipped Tzu a scrap of paper scribbled with a telephone 292 prefix code: Key West.
“So call me,” said Jack, and would not stay for an answer.
Jack was doing the Stingray Shuffle when the call came through.
“Jack! Larga distancia. Un hombre.”
What a rack on that callipygian Carlotta! And what a way to have passed the week.
“Coming, Carlotta.”
Stingrays fear you more than you fear them. But if you step on one, flat there and sand-buried, he’ll get you every time. So you shuffle when you walk in the surf. That way the stingray knows you’re coming and scoots.
Jack paused at the lapping water’s edge, facing the scraggly sea grape and sea oats that anchored the sand. Here I am, he smiled, one foot arguably in the Gulf of Mexico, the other in the Florida Straits arm of the Atlantic, bestriding the peninsula like a cut-rate Colossus. Nor was the salty ambivalence lost on him, of wishing his cash cow dead but unable to pull a trigger or guide a blade himself. He shrugged and trotted into the tin-roofed lanai, hopping hard on his left heel to clear his telephone ear.
“Gracias.” Jack took the phone from Carlotta, pinched her rump, and eyebrowed her out of the room.
“Yes, Tzu.”
“Mutatis mutandis.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Damned if I know, Jack. But my guru used to say Mutatis mutandis whenever we had a done deal.”
“Hildegarde. She’s...?”
“She’s,” said Tzu.
The Cessna hopscotched up the eighty-second meridian, her compass bracketing zero like a coursing hound as Jack flat-hatted the Gulf for the first eighty miles.
Jack squinted at the salt spray on the Plexiglass windscreen and saw himself through the misty scrim of years. He remembered his mother saying, “His hair is so fine — like silk,” and guests would smile and nod. Upon which Jack would do the only thing any human could do. He would try to grow more, finer hair right there at that very instant, feeling that if what he already had brought him such distinction, more of that same cash crop would corner the market in adulation. And he had been trying to please and feel good ever since, but had wised up to the fact that hair no longer did it for him.
“Money,” said Jack as he clipped a mangrove and goosed the Cessna up to thirty-five hundred over the looming scrubby land. “Money answereth all things,” assured Ecclesiastes.
Naples and Fort Myers sliding past the left wing. Look out for the Air Force boys from MacDill on their low-level runs. They still do that? Hell of a thing to mess up now. Off to the right, who but a farmer would name a town Frostproof? Time to find the strip and start down. There. Dead ahead. Thoughtfully provided by the tony Chalet Suzanne for its ritzy clientele. Now power down, and straight in on the skimpy strip. Windsock limp, ignoring little puffs from the north. Big orange sun cutting the horizon under the left wing like a slice of orange on an old-fashioned. Back, back on the wheel. This old tail-dragger keeps you honest; stall it in. Men from the boys.
Jack greased it on and taxied over to the faithful, waiting Tzu.
“Don’t tell me yet,” yelled Jack as he killed the engine.
Tzu helped Jack put the plane to bed, chocks and tiedowns. Then they strode in silence across the lawn and basket-weave brick patio to the Chalet Suzanne, Jack a step ahead.
“No, not the bar,” said Jack.
A wrought-iron glass-topped table overlooked the pond from an alcove. No big-eared bartender. The waitress brought the scotch and left.
“Tell me.”
“Damndest thing,” said Tzu.
“How?”
“She bought it this morning. From the Bok Tower.”
“Jesus, that’s a big first step!”
“Two hundred feet, at last count.”
“She flew farther than Orville Wright at Kill Devil.”
“And without the usual mechanical aids,” said Tzu.
“Why would she do a thing like that?”
“She thought she could make it.”
“Come on!”
“On the wings of a small spineless cactus, native to the Rio Grande valley.”
“Peyote!”
“The magic buttons of Chihuahua,” said Tzu.
“Then she was happy?”
“All smiles.”
“I’m glad. I liked Hildegarde.”
“Bystanders report she chanted, ‘Om Shanti’ all the way down.”
“Just twice, I’m guessing, in three seconds.”
“Not, however, slowly and reverently as I taught her.”
“You’ll live it down.”
“She landed on a roseate spoonbill, just missing the moat that might have saved her. But her copilot survived.”
“Copilot?”
“Hildegarde clutched her shih tzu puppy right up to touchdown.”
“Any landing you walk away from is a good landing.”
“The shih tzu made a good landing — on Hildegarde.”
“So did you, Tzu.”
“But I never laid a glove on her!”
“Nevertheless...”
“I wasn’t even there.”
“No matter.” Jack was already feeling his oats. Several million oats. “It happened on your watch. Even with an assist from the Hemlock Society, you’ll still get yours.”
“Thanks.”
“Read any good wills lately?” muttered Jack as the waitress brought refills to the quietly smiling couple.
The twelve-year-old-scotch drinkers drank twelve-hour-old toasts.
“To the quick,” said Jack.
“And the dead,” said Tzu.
Attorney Hamilton Bostwick cleared his throat. With his sense of the dramatic, that could have been an all-day job. Since attorneys are officers of the court, so was he now of Polk County Surrogate, no less for being in his own sunny, wood-paneled office with Jack and several legal cronies. He then spoke in that plummy, back-of-the-throat, button-down voice you often hear in travelogues describing glacier-trapped woolly mammoths.
“ ‘Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither.’ ”
“Amen,” said Jack. Leave it to old Bostwick to class things up with a little King Lear in a regimental striped tie.
A common housefly droned comfortingly about the pleasant room practicing touch-and-go landings on various of the personnel, and Jack flew with it, musing what to do with his loot.
... a little pied-a-terre in Monaco, the Cote d’Azur and all that... so central... so tax-free... hobnob with the Grimaldis... ski lodge a must... not Aspen — passe... perhaps Whitefish, Montana... the old Chet Huntley ranch... And, hey, for the theater and museums in New York, a bachelor pad at Central Park West not too far from Lincoln Center... can be small, but must be chic... maybe the Dakota if you can live with the Lennon thing... First off, get your ass out of that dump over the candy store... move into Hildegarde’s old place, spruce it up, a pool, tennis courts...