The Hunting Trip (37 page)

Phil intuited on the spot that he had found the man to maintain his beloved Jaguar against all mechanical evil whatsoever.

And so it came to pass, even as the years passed and he hung onto the car despite the demands of Madame Brunhilde of him to get rid of what she called
das
alte Gottverdammt Cat Car.

Phil was to come to realize that he kept the Jaguar because Madame Brunhilde hated it. It had become, in effect, his silent defiance of his wife.

XV

EVERYBODY GOES HUNTING

Muddiebay, Mississippi

Monday, September 15, 1975

O
n the morning of the day that everybody went hunting for whatever they intended to hunt for, Phil went to his office, which was in the house he had originally bought on a no-money-down Veterans Administration Guaranteed Loan and from which he had moved out approximately a year later.

What happened there was that Phil, after having been a member of the Foggy Point Country Club for just over a year, had asked Woody Woodson, the Foggy Point Country Club's recreation director, making reference to one of the dozen or so very nice homes on the country club property, “What's a house like that, say, the one at 102 Country Club Road, worth, Woody?”

“If you're thinking you'd like to move into 102 Country Club Road, after you bought it, of course, forget about it, Phil,” Woody replied. “It's not the price that'll keep you from ever living here. It's the law of supply and demand.”

“How so?”

“So few houses, so many people who would sell their grandmothers to get one of them. One of them comes on the market every two or three years. It goes to the Number One Person on the waiting list. To get on the waiting list you have to go through a vetting policy that makes the vetting policy to get in our country club look like an open-door policy. Forget it, Phil. It's just not in the cards for you.”

Two weeks later, when Phil drove Junior out to Foggy Point Garage & Good As New Used Parts to pick up Junior's new toy—a Lamborghini that had died every ten miles on the way home from the dealer's in Miami, and which ol' Fender Bender was fixing—and also to sit around and shuck oysters and suck on cans of beer while listening to ol' Fender Bender deliver one of his learned lectures on the current state of
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politics and international
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diplomacy, Junior said, “There's something I forgot to tell you, Phil.”

“Which is?”

“When my mother asked where I was going, and I told her you were going to drive me out here, she said, tell Phil to please call the real estate guy if he still wants to buy 102 Country Club Road. And if he's a little short of cash, not to be embarrassed, speak up and I'll cut a check to tide him over.”

So the Williams family had the next week moved from Creek Drive in Goodhope to 102 Country Club Road in Foggy Point, which raised the question of what to do with the house on Creek Drive.

On the advice of Lacey Richards, L.L.D., Phil's septuagenarian local legal counsel—Gustave “Rabbi” Warblerman, L.L.D., of course was his literary legal counsel, so Phil now was pretty well lawyered up—he retained the house as his office.

Lawyer Richards had an agenda
vis-à-vis
his recommendation. He
was about to draw the curtain mostly shut on his long legal career. He would no longer appeal with his famed eloquence to the mercy of jurors in the Muddiebay County Courthouse to let his clients go home despite the allegations of the merciless police that they had been driving under the influence of intoxicants. Instead, Lacey Richards would devote all of his legal skill to managing trust funds, which are a legal device by which parents can leave their children all their worldly goods and not see the hard-earned goods squandered in six months.

He would no longer need his present chambers to do this, as he could manage trusts by sitting at a desk and using a pencil. He proposed that he close his legal chambers and move into the house on Creek Drive. He would then continue to represent Phil on local legal issues
pro bono
, which means for free. This would have the additional benefit of keeping the greedy claws of the
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
Internal Revenue Service out of their respective pies, so to speak.

And there was yet another benefit. There was a spare bedroom in the house on Creek Drive into which Lawyer Richards could hide from the wrath of his third wife.

The arrangement had worked out well over the years, in large measure because Lawyer Richards had thrown his paralegal, Mrs. Bonita Jones Pennyworth, into the deal. Paralegals are secretaries who know more about the law than the lawyers by whom they are employed and are compensated accordingly, providing they pretend “their” lawyer knows more about the law than they do.

In addition to providing legal advice to Lawyer Richards, Mrs. Pennyworth could also go for the mail, and make coffee, and, when this was necessary, cook breakfast for Lawyer Richards when he was temporarily residing in the house on Creek Drive between wives.

At this point in this narrative he was between Wife #6 and Wife #7.

—

So in the morning
of the day on which everybody was going to go hunting for whatever they were hunting for, Phil went to his office in what had once been the master bedroom of the house on Creek Drive when he lived there.

Mrs. Pennyworth brought him a cup of coffee and a chocolate-covered doughnut and assured him she would be happy to go with him in the Jaguar to Muddiebay, and then drive, very carefully, the car back to the office after dropping Phil off at Mr. Randy Bruce's home, “Our Tara,” the antebellum mansion in which Mr. Bruce lived and from which Mr. Bruce would then drive Phil to Muddiebay International Airport, where they would board the airplane that would then take them to Atlanta.

Then Phil got on the telephone.

The first call he made was to Pat O'Malley, the world-famous author of
The Hunt for Gray November
and other famous literary works.

Chauncey S. “Steel” Hymen, vice president, publisher, and editor in chief of J. K. Perkins & Brothers, had introduced Phil to Pat just before the publication of
The Hunt for Gray November
, which Steel Hymen had bought, seeing in it a slight chance of making a buck with it.

Mr. Hymen wanted Pat to see in Phil how well J. K. Perkins & Brothers treated their best-selling authors, such as by buying them dinners at semi-fancy restaurants and putting them up in three—and even four—star hotels when they traveled to the Big Apple. This, he hoped, would inspire Mr. O'Malley to write a sequel to his first work, for which he would be paid another $2,500 on acceptance payment. Eventually, Steel told Pat, he, too, might become a best-selling author like Phil.

Phil and Pat hit it off from the beginning, in large measure because after Steel had gone off to deal with important authors and left Phil and Pat to amuse themselves, which they did by touring several Irish pubs in Lower Manhattan, Phil told Pat, who was then in the aluminum siding business in his native Maryland, about J. K. Perkins & Brothers generally and Steel Hymen specifically.

Specifically, Phil told Pat that Steel was a fine editor and a good guy, but that he should keep his hand on his wallet when dealing with other members of the J. K. Perkins & Brothers management troika as otherwise, before Pat knew what was happening, his aluminum siding business would become yet another subsidiary of J. K. Perkins & Brothers, Publishers since 1812.

By midnight, Pat was so full of Knappogue Castle twelve-year-old single malt Irish whisky that Phil didn't think Pat could make it by himself to where J. K. Perkins & Brothers was putting him up at their expense at the Economy Motor Inn in Hoboken, New Jersey, as this would involve taking a ferry across the wide Hudson River. Phil took Pat to where J. K. Perkins & Brothers was putting him up at their expense, which was in an “economy class” room in The Algonquin Hotel, a historic venue located at 59 West Forty-fourth Street in Midtown Manhattan.

Phil got Pat into the right side of the queen-sized double bed with which the room was furnished without too much effort, but once his new buddy was on his back he began to snore. Worse, Pat instantly demonstrated that he was one hell of a snorer.

Phil sought refuge in the bathroom, taking with him a “bound galley” copy of
The Hunt for Gray November
. Pat had been carrying a box of the bound galleys around all night, as he had been unable to give any of them away.

An hour later, Phil, who had mastered the art of speed reading
while editor in chief of the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation, had finished reading the 640-page tome.

“I'll be a
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monkey's uncle,” Phil announced aloud, although there was no one around to hear him except Pat O'Malley, and he was in no condition to hear anything, “this is great
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writing. Move over, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway. There is a new master!”

Unbeknownst to Phil, the resident of the master bedroom in the big white house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in our nation's capital had come to the same conclusion at just about the time Phil had so concluded.

He had purloined a copy of the galleys from the lap of a Secret Service agent who was sleeping in a chair outside the Presidential Apartments and taken it inside as he was having the same trouble with his wife,
vis-à-vis
snoring, as Phil was experiencing with Pat and had hoped it would bore him to sleep.

He announced this conclusion to the White House Press Corps at the eight-thirty presidential press conference the next morning.

Phil and Pat learned of this shortly after 1:30 p.m. when they were having their breakfast—vodka Bloody Mary, with triple doses of Tabasco, and one egg yolk—at the 21 Club. They learned of it through a media report on the television mounted above the bar.

Not long after,
The New York Daily News
and
The New York Times
added their versions. The former dedicated its entire front page to the story with a picture of the President holding up the bound galleys of
The Hunt for Gray November
over the cutline: WE ALWAYS TOLD YOU HE COULD READ!!!

The
Times
said, in part:

What happened next of course is history.

The Hunt for Gray November
immediately went on the
New York Times
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and other best-seller lists as #1 and stayed there for months. It was translated into sixty-one foreign languages and made into a major motion picture starring half of the members listed on the Hollywood “A-List of Stars” list.

And Pat's second book was even more successful than his first. And the third more successful than the second, and the fourth and fifth,
und so weiter
.

Phil, knowing people and the publishing business as he did, felt very sure that Pat's success would go to his head, and that the new giant of modern American literature would quickly forget he had ever met an obscure toiler in the literary vineyards named Phil Williams.

Phil was wrong.

Phil and Pat, if anything, became closer as the years passed. Phil taught Pat how to shoot, something Pat had always wanted to try and
now could afford to. Despite Phil's best efforts, Pat had trouble hitting the side of a barn, although he practiced just about daily in the indoor skeet range he created in the basement of his new house, “Castle O'Malley,” which he built on the site of a former summer camp for Jewish Young Ladies on the shores of Chesapeake Bay in his native Maryland.

And when he wasn't busy counting his money, or managing the Baltimore She Devils, the female hockey team he had bought, which took a lot of his time, Pat would often hop in his private jet airplane and fly down to Foggy Point to try to bust some birds off the end of the Container King's pier with Phil and the boys.