The Hunting Trip (32 page)

Two hours later, Brunhilde-the-wife, driving the Ford station wagon with “Little Phil,” as he had come to be known, and Franz Josef aboard, and Phil, driving the Jaguar with “Little Brunhilde,” as she had come to be known, and four cases of Winchester AA 12-gauge shotgun shells containing 1⅛ ounces of #9 shot that had been Master Sergeant Quigley's farewell gift aboard, departed the gate of the U.S. Army School of Infantry Excellence for the last time.

They headed for Troy State University in Troy, Alabama, where Phil—presuming their offer to make him a junior assistant athletic coach (Archery) was still open—thought he might begin his new life as an academic until he could figure out how to disclose his undisclosed affluence to the woman with whom he and their three children were marching down the path of life.

—

Mrs. Brunhilde Williams
took a good look at the campus of Troy State University and all the cultural and other advantages of the school and its campus, and announced that if Phil thought she would live here, he had best change his thinking, as rather than living here, she would rather spend the rest of her life at 103B Bataan Death March Avenue in NCO Town in Fort Benning.

“So, if you had another option, what would you like to do, Brunhilde?” Phil asked.

“As we came down that cow path—the one with potholes and
signs that said U.S. Highway 231 South and was lined with cheap motels—I noticed another sign that said,
Stay on US 231 South to the Sun-Drenched White
Sandy Beaches of Gulf Shores, Alabama
. So get in that funny-looking car of yours and follow me. We're off to Gulf Shores!”

—

Perhaps predictably
—Phil had learned that the mother of his children could, and often did, get lost in a closet—rather than ending their drive that day in Alabama, they wound up in Mississippi, in a bucolic burb called Goodhope.

There, when Phil asked a local if he could recommend a place where for a low price they might rest their weary heads overnight, the Goodhopian—who quietly hated all foreigners and, even more, all Yankees, and to his joy realized he had one of each at his mercy—directed them to the Grand Hotel, which he said was in Foggy Point, just a couple miles down Mississippi Scenic Highway 98.

Phil questioned the “low price” business as soon as they drove up to the magnificent front door of the Grand Hotel. Then he saw the cars parked there, the most shabby of these being an enormous two-year-old glistening black Mercedes-Benz. There were more Jaguars than Phil had ever seen in one place before.

“Speaking of Jaguars,” Brunhilde said. “We're going to get something to eat and rest our weary heads in here if you have to sell yours to pay for it.”

Brunhilde fell in love with the Grand Hotel the moment the tailcoat-attired
maître d'hotel
in the Grand Dining Room handed her a menu and then announced the special offering of the day was
Weiner Schnitzel Auf Weiner Art
, and the dessert of the day
Sachertorte mit importiert vom Ausland Schlagsahne
, which Phil knew, since he spoke German, meant a layer cake named after the hotel immediately
behind the Vienna State Opera, and came topped with whipped cream imported from abroad.

Brunhilde told the headwaiter she was both thrilled and surprised that the menu featured such Viennese delicacies. He replied that this was because of Madame Violet Tenser-Schultz McNamara, who was a very good friend of Mrs. Gladys O'Hara, whose husband K.J. owned the Grand Hotel and just about all of the rest of Foggy Point, including the Foggy Point Country Club, and was—Madame Violet Tenser-Schultz McNamara was, or had in her bygone youth been—a Viennese.

When the headwaiter had left, Brunhilde said, “Say goodbye to your Jaguar, Phil. This is where we're going to stay until we run out of money, including the money we're going to get by selling that stupid Jaguar you never should have bought in the first place.”

Phil of course wasn't worried about having to sell the Jaguar to pay the bill, because of the cash he had in his City-Diamond account. And anyway, the hotel cost was a deductible expense against his income tax. Rabbi Warblerman had told him that because of a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (
The Internal Revenue Service v. William Bradford Huie
) all of his travel expenses, no matter where in the wide world he chose to go, or how much money he spent in so going, were deductible.

In what became known as “the Whorehouse Decision,” Rabbi Warblerman had told Phil, the Supreme Court had unanimously come down on the side of the plaintiff, the journalist and author Mr. Huie, who claimed that all of the expenses he had incurred making trips to a Nevada brothel called The Fly Inn for Fun Inn, Inc., which had its own landing strip and into which he had flown in a Cessna 172 aircraft to stay ten days, were deductible as legitimate research expenses as he planned to pen a report on what life was like in The Fly Inn for Fun Inn, Inc., said report to be published in one or more
magazines in which Mr. Huie had previously published reports of other notable topics he had investigated.

The steadfast position of the IRS, in brief, was that everybody already knew what goes on in a whorehouse, and that it was simply outrageous and possibly criminal for Mr. Huie to expect the American taxpayer to subsidize his amoral and prurient interest in what goes on in a whorehouse by claiming it as a deductible research expense.

Mr. Huie's law firm, which listed Mr. Warblerman as “of counsel” on its letterhead, countered that under Amendment I to the United States Constitution (“Freedom of the Press”) the IRS had no more right to question what Mr. Huie thought he should investigate and write about than it did to question the veracity of all those congressmen who denied doing all the multifarious amoral and illegal things everybody knew they were doing.

The effect of the decision with regard to Phil was that he could deduct all his travel expenses because he was a bona fide author.

“Your Honor,” as Phil was now permitted to call Mr. Warblerman, said that Phil now qualified as a published writer because he had actually published and sold books, not just bought a typewriter and announced his intention to someday write one, as a whole lot of people had done once the Whorehouse Decision became public.

[ THREE ]

O
n their fifth day in the Grand Hotel in Foggy Point, Brunhilde, as she had every day since they checked in, got in the Ford station wagon “to have a look around Goodhope.”

While she looked around, Phil spent the days watching their children as they splashed around the hotel's enormous swimming pool, which was said to be the largest swimming pool east of the Mississippi and certainly looked like it.

Upon her return on the fifth day, there was a man in a suit and tie with her. He carried a briefcase, from which he took a six-inch-thick stack of legal forms that Brunhilde then laid before Phil, handed him a pen, and showed him where he was to make his mark.

“What am I signing?”

“We've bought a house,” Brunhilde said. “Or will have bought a house just as soon as you sign these documents. You don't have to worry about how we're going to pay for it for two reasons. One, you're getting it on a Veterans Administration loan, which means no money down and $136.70 a month for the rest of your life. And, two, because after we sell your Jaguar, we'll have enough money to pay that $136.70 a month for a year, after which the Brunhilde Wienerwald School of Ballet should be up and running and in a position to pay the $136.70 every month
ad infinitum
. So sign it and shut up.”

XIII

FAMILY WILLIAMS MOVES QUICKLY UPWARD SOCIALLY

[ ONE ]

Goodhope, Mississippi

Sunday, January 16, 1955

P
hil liked the house Brunhilde had found for them on Creek Drive in Goodhope, which had three bedrooms, two baths, and a one-car garage. Creek Drive was thus called because it was on The Creek, which previously had been Fly Creek, and which in turn had previously been called Bayou Volante, which Phil, because he spoke French, knew meant “Flying Creek.”

Investigation revealed that it had so been named by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville (February 23, 1680–March 7, 1767), who had spent a few days in what was now Goodhope, Mississippi, en route to establish a city that would come to be known as New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Sieur had apparently been in what was now Goodhope during
a heavy rain, which had turned the gentle flow of the creek, or bayou, in what was now Phil's backyard, from a trickle into something stronger, which the Sieur decided justified deeming the creek Bayou Volante.

Brunhilde was very disappointed that what she thought of as her Ford station wagon would not fit into the garage. The Jaguar, however, not only did fit therein but left enough space, almost five feet over, so that Phil could build a shelf two and a half feet wide on which he put his “new”—actually used—$29.95 Underwood typewriter from Sears, Roebuck and Company. A “kitchen stool” ($6.50) from the same place fit in the remaining two and a half feet, and he now had an office in which to practice his creative writing.

In his own exploring of Goodhope, Phil found two things that interested him.

One was a small private school called the Organic School, which brought to Phil's mind the growing of tomatoes, for example, in water, but which he learned in fact made reference to the theories of the school's founder, Miss Marietta Fieldstone, who held that education was organic to life. But what really interested him about the school was that it didn't grade the students on how well they did on tests, but rather on how hard they tried.

Brunhilde, his daughter, was almost five, and soon she would be old enough for the pre-kindergarten class at the Organic School.

Phil was later to serve for decades on the Board of Directors of the Marietta Fieldstone School of Organic Education even though he had only a two-year College GED diploma and everybody else had either a Ph.D., an M.D., a D.D.S., or similar degree, or was, as the president of the board was, an Organic Old Boy in addition to being president of the First National Bank of Goodhope, which gave that gentleman a pass, educational degree–wise.

But that's me getting ahead of this romance novel narrative. Again.

The second thing Phil noticed while driving the Jaguar around Goodhope was the Goodhope Slightly Used Children's Clothing Discount Outlet.

He had already learned that as sure as the sun rises in the morning, two weeks after one buys one's children a pair of shoes, one's children have outgrown them.

So one day, he loaded Little Phil, who was now four, into the Jaguar and drove him to the Goodhope Slightly Used Children's Clothing Discount Outlet. As he was trying slightly used shoes on Little Phil, he heard a woman's voice say, “What a darling little boy!”

He got to Little Phil in time to keep Little Phil from kicking the lady, who had a kind face and a motherly ambience.

“Thank you,” Phil said.

“Can he swim?” the lady asked.

“No, but he splashes around wading pools very well.”

“My God, if you don't teach that darling little boy to swim, he'll drown. Goodhope is, after all, on Muddiebay Bay, into which other navigable streams, such as The Creek, formerly Bayou Volante, flow. There's water all over the place.”

“I take your point,” Phil said.

“And I mean right now,” the nice lady said. “Not when you get around to it in your own good time.”

“I don't want to drown, Daddy!” Little Phil said, looking up at Big Phil and tugging at his hand. “I want to learn to swim so I won't drown and have to be buried where the worms will eat me up.”

The nice lady nodded. “The thing for you to do, sir, if you don't mind a little advice, is take this darling little boy out to the Grand Hotel, this very afternoon, look up Woody Woodson, the Foggy Point Country Club's recreation director, and enroll this darling little boy in the swimming classes.”

“Please, Daddy!” Little Phil said.

“I appreciate the suggestion, but I've been out there and I'm not sure I could afford that,” Phil lied, and was immediately ashamed of himself, as this was not the truth and this was obviously a nice lady.

“Maybe, were it not for that overpriced Jaguar I saw you drive up in, you would have the money to buy swimming lessons for this darling little boy to keep him from drowning.”

“I'm sorry I tried to kick you when you called me a ‘darling little boy,'” Little Phil said.

“Two things,” Phil replied. “Not only does a little more than eight years remain on the ten-year loan I used to purchase my Jaguar, but I have two more children in addition to this one, which is why I can't afford to take any of them out to the Grand Hotel and buy them swimming lessons.”

The lies came quickly to his lips because of his experience in the intelligence business, where he had acquired the ability to lie automatically when the truth got in the way. Being a good liar was of course a hallmark of someone in the intelligence business.

But now he was ashamed of having lied to this nice lady. That had never happened before.

Is it conceivable,
Phil wondered,
that I have been away from the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation long enough to have reacquired some shreds of decency?

“I can understand that,” the nice lady said, “as I have a son about your age who is always buying fancy cars he can't afford and otherwise squandering money. So, not because I like you, but because I don't want this darling little boy to drown, I'll tell you what I'm going to do.”

“Yes, ma'am?”

She scrawled something on the back of a business card of the Goodhope Slightly Used Children's Clothing Discount Outlet and then handed it to him.

“Take this out to the Grand Hotel, ask for Mr. Woody Woodson, and give this to him. If you don't, and this darling little boy drowns in Muddiebay Bay because he can't swim, God will get you.”

Phil read what the nice lady had written on the back of the card.

“Please, Daddy, do what the nice lady says, so I can learn to swim and won't drown,” Little Phil said.

“And please give some consideration
vis-à-vis
whether or not you need that expensive XJ6,” the nice lady said. “Or whether that money could better be spent on this darling little boy.”

She bent over and kissed Little Phil.

Really surprising Phil, Little Phil kissed her back. Usually when women tried to kiss him, he either kicked them or spit at them, or both.

[ TWO ]

W
oody Woodson turned out to be a bald, diminutive gentleman in his fifties with dark tanned leathery skin, the result of having spent most of his life in the fierce southern sun.

“Gladys gets what Gladys wants around here,” Woody said when
he had read the back of the card the nice lady had written on. “Consider it done. If you will give me your address, the post office will shortly deliver thereto your membership card in the Foggy Point Country Club, the keys to your locker at the clubhouse, the keys to your personal golf cart, a sticker for that Jaguar you drove up in which will permit you to leave the grounds without having your Jaguar searched for items you might have purloined, and some other stuff. Welcome to the Foggy Point Country Club.”

“I can't do it,” Phil said.

“You understand that all of the above is free of charge because of Gladys's generosity?”

“That's the problem. She is being so generous because she doesn't think I have any money. Tell me, how much does it cost to join the Foggy Point Country Club?”

“More than you can afford.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, first you have to be recommended by two members, and three is better. Then you submit a cashier's check for five large—”

“As in five thousand?” Phil interrupted.

“Uh-huh, five large, which partially covers the cost of the Full Background Investigation. The results of the FBI, as we call it . . .”

“I know both what an FBI is and what the FBI is. Go on.”

“. . . the results are presented to the Membership Committee, which meets twice a year, for their review. One Proposee in three makes it through that review, as the Membership Committee loves to drop black balls in the box. Then, presuming the Proposee has gotten that far, his application is sent to Mr. K. J. O'Hara, Senior, who is president of the Foggy Point Country Club, because he owns it, for his review. One Proposee in four gets past Mr. K.J. Senior's review. If Mr. K.J. Senior does, the Proposee then is permitted to submit the cashier's checks.”

“Checks plural? And what are those?”

“One is for fifty large and that pays for basic membership. Another five large is a deposit against towels, soap, and other incidentals at the clubhouse, and the third is also for five large, and is a deposit against the loss overboard of fishing rods, et cetera, when fishing off the club's fishing vessel, a seventy-two-foot Bertram called
The K.J.
And the fourth check is for just one large to cover the first month's dues.”

“I see.”

“And then the whole thing is laid on Gladys's desk for her approval. Nothing gets done around here unless Gladys approves.”

“Just to satisfy my curiosity, what would happen if I were to write a check here and now for sixty-six thousand? Sixty-six large? Would that get me in?”

“You're kidding, right?”

Phil shook his head.

“No, I just can't bring myself to take advantage of Gladys's generosity because I lied to her about not having any money. I just can't take a free membership.”

Woody Woodson considered that for a full thirty seconds.

“Well, like I said, what Gladys wants around here, Gladys gets. Most of that Membership Application Procedure is just
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
anyway to keep the riffraff out. Gladys wants you in the Foggy Point Country Club, and I can't see where your being willing to pay for it is an insurmountable barrier in that regard. Write the check, and we'll see what happens.”

[ THREE ]

T
he next morning at about eight-thirty, Phil was hard at work writing creatively on his plywood desk in the garage when he heard the telephone ringing. When it stopped ringing, he decided that Brunhilde had either answered it or decided not to as she was busy setting up the advertisement she planned to run in
The Muddiebay Register-Press
newspaper announcing the establishment of the Brunhilde Wienerwald School of Classical Viennese Opera Ballet Dancing.

When the telephone rang again several minutes later, he decided much the same thing. But when it rang again several minutes after that, he said, “Oh,
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
,” and went into the house and answered it.

“Mr. Philip Williams, please,” his caller said. “Mrs. Gladys O'Hara calling.”

“This is he, ma'am.”

“You lied to me yesterday, didn't you, Philip? The reason I know is because when I came to my office this morning I found a check drawn on your First National City Bank of New York City-Diamond checking account for sixty-six thousand dollars to pay for your membership in the Foggy Point Country Club.”

“I'm not exactly broke, ma'am.”

“Nobody with City-Diamond checking accounts is. I know that because I have one. Why did you intimate to me that you were broke, or nearly so?”

“I'm trying to keep my affluence under wraps, Mrs. O'Hara.”