“You boys are gonna get a meal you won’t be forgettin,” he said.
He was not exaggerating. We started off with Escargots de Bourgogne, proceeded to L’Oignon Gratinee, and were then served Veal Maison, with a bottle of Mouton-Routhschild to top if off. Whatever else he might have been, J.J. DuBose was not provincial in his tastes in food.
The dinner conversation was basically a monologue delivered by DuBose, broken up by occasional questions from Landry, who seemed intent on gleaning every possible bit of information from The Great Man himself. When we had at last consumed every bit of the food on our plates, and refused the Filipino’s offers of more, I excused myself and went in search of a restroom. It proved difficult to locate, and once I stumbled into a pantry and once into DuBose’s den, but when I found the correct room I stopped in my tracks and looked it over from one end to the other.
The spigots on the sink and in the sunken bathtub were fashioned from solid gold, as was the flush device on the toilet. All the rest was china, and the marbled floor and walls gleamed from having been recently scrubbed. I do not think there was a single speck of dirt anywhere in that room. The ancient cliche “the floor was clean enough to eat off of” found a curiously truthful approximation here.
By the time I returned to the dining hall our host had served brandy, and both he and Landry were drawing on two Partagas Visible Immensas fully nine inches in length. I declined his offer of one, but accepted a glass of brandy. The conversation had evolved once again while I had been out of the room, and the turn it had taken frightened me.
“So you claim no one would have the nerve to do it?” Landry was saying.
J.J. DuBose shook his head. “It’s not just a question of nerve, it’s a question of acceptin what would, from that day on, be an un-ac-cept-able handicap t’some folks, somethin a fella’d have t’live with the rest o’his days. This isn’t quite the same thing as that little test I give you back at Albert’s. Ah wouldn’t be fakin this time, cause there’s no way in hail ah could be. You’d know there wasn’t but one way the thing’d turn out. An, like a magician, ah nevah do the same trick twice.”
“And how much would you be willing to pay?” asked Landry.
DuBose drew on his cigar and considered the question a moment before answering.
“Why, a man’d be willin t’do that, why, that man’d be worth a half a million dollars, ah reckon.”
The gleam in Landry’s eyes turned my stomach. “You’d pay half a million dollars?”
The Texan nodded. “Ah would. The money means nothin t’me anymore — they’s no way ah’d ever get aroun t’spendin it. But ah’d be satisfied knowin it was bein spent by a man with the balls t’do somethin like that.”
“Like what?” I asked. I noticed my voice trembled.
Neither man took any notice of my question. Their eyes were locked, and remained that way even after J. J. DuBose rose to his feet.
“Doc Jenkins’ll be here in just a bit. You’ll be OK afterwards — he’ll see t’it.” He took a last puff off his cigar, then crushed it out in an ashtray. “We may as well git the show on the road,” he said, and turned and headed toward the door.
Landry was already out of his chair and following DuBose. I stopped him and said, “What the hell’s the idea?”
“Never mind,” Landry said. His eyes remained fixed on DuBose’s retreating figure. “Just c’mon along. I’ll need a witness.”
“A witness to what?”
He didn’t reply, but merely followed DuBose out the door that gave on a long corridor. I had no choice but to follow. We traversed the corridor. At its end was another door. DuBose opened it, and we followed him out.
We were in an enormous room I recognized at once as an airplane hangar. The air hung heavy with paint fumes and the smell of grease and machine parts, and there were paintcans and crude workbenches and shelves built into the walls on our end. In the center of the hangar, its wings spanning the width of the room itself, was an enormous biplane of vaguely pre-World War II design.
“This here’s a Martin T4M-1,” DuBose announced. His voice echoed across the walls as he strode off towards the plane. “It was built for the Navy in 19 and 27. It was a torpedo-bomber.”
When he reached the plane he pulled himself up and into the cockpit. Thus ensconsed, he called out to us, and his voice sounded more terrifying than ever, amplified as it was by the acoustics of the room.
“Here’s Doc Jenkins now.”
His announcement caused me to turn. Sure enough, a man dressed in sombre dark clothes, carrying a small medical bag, had entered the room through another door, and now stood awaiting DuBose’s orders.
“He’ll patch y’up when this is over,” the Texan said. “Wail, I guess that’s enough of the pre-liminaries. You know the arrangements as well as ah do, so what say we just go on ahaid?”
“Anytime you’re ready,” Landry called back.
J.J. DuBose smiled his crooked smile one final time, and then nodded.
One of DuBose’s men whom I had not noticed before but who had evidently followed us into the hangar came forward, and, taking hold of one of the great propeller blades with both his hands, turned it as DuBose switched on the plane’s engine. It didn’t catch the first time, so he was obliged to try again, this time putting the full strength of his broad shoulders into the effort. This time the propeller blades instantly converted to a blur of whirring speed, and the hangar was filled with the deafening roar of their rotation. It blanked out nearly everything else, and became all I could think of. I tried to blank it out of my mind, but when I turned back to face Landry I saw that he was concentrating hard on the plane, and on the propeller in particular.
“Steve!” I shouted. “You’re not going to—”
Still staring straight ahead, Landry said, “Stand aside.”
I moved in front of him, blocking his way. “No. I’m not going to let you do it.”
His eyes finally turned to take me in. “Shut up, and stand aside,” he said.
“Steve—”
He pushed me, a rough shove, and I fell back a foot or so. I took a step towards him and then noticed two of DuBose’s men, big, broad-shouldered Texans, take several purposeful strides in my general direction, and stop. I hesitated, deciding to make one final appear.
“Steve!” I shouted. “For God’s sake! Steve!”
He did not turn around. Instead, he took another few steps in the direction of the whirring propeller blades.
Try as I might, I could not take my eyes off them. They were moving so fast they were lost to sight. There was only a vaguely silverish blur that might have had nothing to do with speed or power. It fostered the illusion that there was nothing there at all, no blades, and that if you wanted to you could thrust your hand directly into their path, and nothing would happen because there was nothing there. Nothing that could shred the skin and chop away the bones of your hand, nothing that could turn living tissue and muscle and flesh and bone into a bleeding raw stump in a fraction of a second.
And even as I looked I saw that Landry had raised not one hand but both of them, and was moving towards the whirring blades. He was no more than three feet from them, I should judge. I started forward again, and the second I did DuBose’s two men started towards me, their intentions unmistakable. I could not have stopped Landry even if they hadn’t been there: he had the look of a zombie in his eyes, the blank stare that betokened mindlessness, or rather, blind devotion to one single idea: that he could stick both his hands into the path of the propeller blades and come away from it a rich man. And high above him, in the cockpit of the biplane, sat J.J. DuBose, his grin a wrinkled river running from ear to ear, watching Landry’s progress with frenzied anticipation. He had been right: there was no way he could stop the whirring blades in time. Nothing in the world could stop the fateful encounter at this point.