The Devil on Chardonnay (2 page)

The shimmering heat of a South Carolina July afternoon added to the heat from the four jet engines, and the feeling of sweat evaporating from his damp flight suit reminded Boyd he must be thirsty.  He pulled his water flask out of the G-suit pocket on his left calf and had a long drink.

The cool water reminded him of a warm night in Texas the summer before.  He remembered drinking out of a gallon jug like a parched desert traveler and looking into the laughing green eyes of a pretty girl with long hair.  Under the endless, starry Texas sky, they’d planned the adventure that changed their lives.  After water had slaked his body’s thirst, the inner man had demanded beer, and they had finished a six-pack of ice cold, silvery cans.

Boyd wondered whether a couple of longnecks would bring back that feeling.

“No,” he said aloud and sighed.  Longnecks would not bring back that feeling.  He turned to look down at the other aircraft, watching to see that the tires were properly chocked and that the crews were looking for damage, making sure the guns were safe and hitting each checkpoint.  He looked back over his shoulder to see whether the next flight was on time and ready to assume the positions his flight occupied. 

*******

“Shit hot, Boyd.  Shit hot.”  The squadron commander slapped Boyd on the shoulder as he stepped behind the bar in the pilot’s lounge in their squadron building to grab a cold beer, the day’s bomb scores in hand. 

Boyd smiled, tipped his beer bottle and took a sip.  He turned in the swivel seat at the end of the bar and scanned the room, watching the dozen guys excitedly reliving their day.  He tried to look like he was caught up in the camaraderie.  As soon as others began to head over to the Officer’s Lounge at the all-ranks club, Boyd left.

CHAPTER THREE

Bone’s Club

Bone’s Club was back in the bottomland, 200 yards from the gravel road and two miles from the highway bridge crossing the Great Pee Dee River.  Spanish moss hung from a live oak whose branches shaded the parking lot from the sun during the day and a lone mercury vapor light at night.  Behind the club, the Great Pee Dee slid past silent and dark.  Cypress trees marched out from the shore, thinning as the river grew deeper.

Moths circled the light and spiraled down to the gravel to recover and try again.  The club was made of concrete blocks with tiny windows up high; an ancient window air conditioner rattled against the heat and humidity.  The door was open.  The rich baritone voice of an old country and Western favorite spilled out into the night. 

Boyd cut the engine of his pickup, newer but otherwise identical to the half-dozen others already in the lot. He wore running shoes, jeans and a black T-shirt.  As he crossed the gravel to the door, he felt alive and engaged.  The feeling wasn’t there yet, but it was close.

Standing in the door, eyes adjusting to the light, he saw the room as the people in the room saw him. 
 
Tall, broad-shouldered and lean, he’d been there before, just looking, scouting it out.  It was perfect.  He crossed the room, passing the pool table where the big guy, Crank, stood with a cue, poised for a shot but staring at Boyd.

“Bud longneck,” Boyd said as he sat at the bar and turned to see Crank take his shot.  Bone opened the bottle and set it on the counter.  His dress shirt seemed out of place with the clientele and with his own greasy black hair and long sideburns.  The khaki work pants were clean, pressed and held up by a tooled black leather belt.  He wore Wellington boots.  He took Boyd’s money and returned with change from the mechanical cash register with the ornate metalwork of a bygone day.

Crank was clearly proud of his break.  He looked at Boyd and smirked, then walked around the table for his next shot, stretching the front of his huge bib overalls with his considerable girth.  Like statues, the others sat, leaned or stood, watching Boyd.  The next shot went in, and Crank flashed Boyd a grin, his teeth were punctuated by bits of tobacco from the wad of chew under his lower lip.  He spit into a coffee can under the table and took a third shot; stretching the length of the table, he revealed a thinning, dirty-blond crown.  Boyd took a long sip of beer and turned to make small talk with Bone.

When he felt the brush from behind, he knew it was time.  Boyd stiffened and saw Bone move away.  This was a club for regulars.  Strangers were an event, and the highway being two miles away wasn’t an accident.  Boyd understood Bone’s formal attire now.  It was sort of official, like a referee.  It was designed to keep things from getting out of hand.  Someone could get killed.

“Oh.  Sorry,” Bobby said, acting surprised.

They weren’t going to start with the big guy.  Bobby was a bit under six feet and chunky.  Of the six guys there, he looked to be the fourth-toughest.  They were going to give someone else a chance to kick some ass before the big guy stepped in to finish it.

Boyd stood.  They all stood.  He stepped away from the bar, not wanting to get pinned  there.  Crank grinned, obviously feeling as good as Boyd felt.

Bobby telegraphed the punch a millennium
before he threw it.  First, he squeezed up his face in a grimace, then shifted his weight to his right foot and feinted with his left hand while drawing back his right.  When he shifted to the left foot the punch came straight in.  Boyd’s head retreated ahead of it, allowing it to just graze his jaw.  He took two steps back to be in the center of the room.

Bobby was right with him, off-balance but coming with the right again, thinking Boyd was in full retreat.  Boyd slipped to his right, and the punch bounced off the side of his head.  The left was right behind it and hit Boyd square on the forehead.

Something clicked.  The feeling was there.  With the punch, the adrenaline kicked in at last.  The rush was better than a climax.  Bobby’s momentum carried him into Boyd and he grabbed for a bear hug.  Boyd pushed him back and, when Bobby flailed a windmill right, Boyd  flicked a left jab into his fat, wild-eyed face.  The solid contact with bone felt wonderful.  The right cross smashed Bobby’s cheekbone and he went down on his butt, dazed.

“Pickin’ on Bobby!”  someone shouted.

The next two came at once.  He slipped a right under another windmill punch and dropped the smaller one, but the other landed a solid punch that spun Boyd’s head around and staggered him back.  He grabbed the guy by the shirt and pulled him close, enduring some body punches and savoring the free-flowing high.  Pushing forward to the center of the room, he trapped the man’s hands between their bodies and pounded his face with a half-dozen fast jabs from close range, turning it into a pulpy mess.  He dropped him and stood alone.  Crank still had the pool cue as he strode across the space between them, tobacco-stained teeth bared in a gleeful, childlike grin.

*******

The pressure on his chest was not painful, just there.  Then there was the beep-beep of a Road Runner cartoon, punctuated by whistles and insane laughter, followed by a wet kiss, sloppy, all over his face, and warm.  It smelled like bacon.

The headache came when he opened his eyes.  Sitting on his chest were two children.  The 3-year-old, nude, flicked the channel changer between two cartoons while his 2-year-old brother, in a wet diaper, ate a piece of bacon and wrestled for control of the changer.  The dog, a hound mix, licked Boyd’s face while Boyd lay on a black Naugahyde couch beneath the front picture window of a 14-foot-wide mobile home.  Seeing his pants on the floor by the television, Boyd raised up to see blood on his boxer shorts, his only remaining garment.

“Oh.  You’re alive,” a female voice came from behind him.  He turned to see a woman in a faded cotton nightgown frying bacon in the kitchen.  She was in her mid-to-late 20s, and her breasts jiggled freely as she scraped the frying pan to remove the bacon.  Her long hair, shoulder length the night before, was tied in a simple knot behind her head.  He remembered her as the waitress at the bar at the hotel in Sumter.  He’d pulled those pink panties down sometime in a vague, misty past.

“When did I … uh,” he said, thickly.  His mouth tasted worse than the dog’s.

“Oh, you showed up about 12.  You came in here with a busted lip and a powerful need.”  She laughed and shook her head, breaking an egg into the bacon grease.

She looked fresh and happy.  Obviously not affected by whatever had made Boyd so ill, she moved quickly and efficiently around the kitchen.

“Did we, uh …”

“We sure did, baby,” she said with a smile, turning to face him.  “You were great, till you got into that moonshine jar Billy Ray left over there.  You better stick to fightin’ and lovin’ and leave the drinkin’ to Billy Ray.”

“Who’s Billy Ray?”

“My husband. Ex-husband, really.  The divorce is final sometime next month.  He lives with his mother.  You like your eggs runny?”

An officer and a gentleman, he thought, as he surveyed the scene he had created.  An open door across the living room showed a king-size bed with rumpled sheets.  His jaw was simply sore, but his right hand was swollen and purple behind the little finger.  The nude boy walked down the hall to the bedrooms in the back.  The other one dug into a plate of grits and sugar with a side of bacon his mother had just placed on the floor in front of him.  The dog looked alert for an opening on the bacon.

“This is Billy Ray’s weekend with the kids.  I need to take them over to his mother’s before 9.  Then we can get back to business.”

“Why 9?” he asked, just to say something.  He didn’t feel like what she was planning.

“That’s when he usually comes to get 'em.  Last thing I need is to have you and Billy Ray trying to see who can throw who out that picture window first.”

She laughed again and looked at him, shaking her head in disbelief.  “Don’t know why I always get the ones with demons.”

A South Carolina Saturday morning, he thought, looking for his socks, feeling miserable and ashamed. 

CHAPTER FOUR

The Mission

“Chailland!  Wing Commander wants you in his office right now,” the squadron operations officer said, hanging up the desk phone in the office he shared with Boyd.  Boyd was just coming out of the men’s room where he’d been running cold water on his hand, hoping to minimize the swelling.

“What’d I do now?”  Boyd asked, trying to sound cheerful, but feeling no pleasure in the nagging worry that Crank might still be comatose.

When Boyd walked into the wing commander’s office, the secretary smiled and motioned him toward the open door.  He crossed the expanse of carpet smartly and was about to snap to attention and report when the brigadier general stood and spoke first.

“Come in, Boyd.  Have a seat.”  He motioned toward a chair to the side and sat back in his chair, looking across the shining, nearly empty desktop.

Boyd took the seat and looked down at the general’s desk to see his own personnel file there, open to his photo.  The general, taller than Boyd but much thinner, was dressed in a flight suit, the stars on his shoulders clearly setting him apart from the average jock.  He was relaxed, calm, almost mellow.  He looked back down at the record he’d been reading. 

“I was awakened at 5 this morning by a call that a major general was inbound from Andrews and due to land at 0800.  Not having heard about the visit beforehand, I assumed I was to be fired and replaced.”  He smiled and leaned back in his chair, enjoying his tale.  “Then, about 7, he radioed the command post that his visit was classified and he wanted no DV greeting, just a crew bus to bring him here for a meeting with me at 8:30, and with you at 9.”  Brigadier General Charles “Dunk” Wells looked at Boyd, waiting for a response.

“General Ferguson?”  Boyd asked, knowing it could be no one else.

“Old friends?  From another base perhaps?”  Wells wanted to know who this guy was. 

“No, sir,” Boyd said, straight-faced.  He couldn’t tell, and he didn’t want to make his boss mad.

“Well, I thought this might be something interesting, so I had Ginny pull your personnel file.  You are an extraordinary fellow.  I hadn’t heard that before.  You have an Air Force Cross, awarded last year.  The citation says it was for valor of the highest order during peacetime, and the aircraft and location are classified.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve never seen that before.  I’ve seen classified locations, never a classified aircraft.  Your flight record shows only T-37, T-38 and F-16.  Did you fly anything else?”

“Yes, sir.”  In his mind Boyd remembered the jolt and fire as the cannon shells hit the engine of the restored P-51 Mustang, and then the silence as he pushed the nose into a dive and, dead stick, began to gain on the attacker who’d assumed he was dead.

“I won’t ask.  It must be some story.  Apparently they want you to do it again, whatever it was.  The general is waiting in the office across the hall.  He said he wanted a few minutes with you and then lunch.  He’s due to leave at 1400.”

The feeling was back.  Ferguson was an admirer, but no friend.  Boyd had a deal with Ferguson:  Keep his mouth shut about what he knew and what he’d done the summer before, in exchange for a full three-year tour flying Falcons at Shaw followed by an assignment to Fighter Weapons School as faculty.  He didn’t want or need anything funny with the promotions board, though they’d offered that.  They had a fast track outlined that would have him with stars before he was 40,  but Boyd had turned them down because it was mostly schools and Pentagon assignments.  Boyd wanted to fly.  He’d not expected to ever see Ferguson again.

“Yes, sir,” Boyd said, standing, then smiled at the general and added, “As soon as they say it’s OK, I’ll be glad to tell you all about it.”  He knew they never would and that the details of one of the century’s most unusual adventures would be known only to him and a few other participants.  He also knew that day in Texas had spawned the demon that had made him go to Bone’s Place. 

He crossed the hall and opened the door. 

“Boyd.  Good to see you.”

Ferguson, dressed in a flight suit with two stars on the epaulets, told the lie with a warm sincere smile.  He rose from the couch in the vice commander’s office and shook Boyd’s hand.  In his other hand was a manila envelope filled with papers.  Boyd closed the door behind him, trying to hide the wince of pain from the general’s firm grip on his recent boxer’s fracture.