The Hunting Trip (11 page)

Although he now had his hands on some real money, which he and Moses could—and did—immediately put to work making more real money, Randy believed that they could make even more money if they could tap into the Randolph C. Bruce Trust.

He realized that this was going to be difficult if not impossible. He knew that Auntie Abby devoutly believed in the words of Benjamin Franklin—specifically
A penny saved is a penny earned
and
Neither a borrower nor a lender be
—even though she regarded the kite-flying founder of the U.S. Postal Service as “a shameful libertine who cavorted with Parisian ladies of the evening young enough to be his granddaughters and should have been castrated.”

Worse, Randy knew that tapping his trust would be absolutely out of the question if either Auntie Abby or Auntie Penny caught him at any philandering, gambling, and over-imbibing whatsoever. She could no longer withhold his allowance, but she could, and would, keep him from borrowing any of his own money.

So he decided he had to follow the old military adage
vis-à-vis
sin and the flagpole, and keep his philandering, gambling, and over-imbibing one hundred miles from the flagpole on the lawn in front of “Our Tara.”

He never got even close to dipping into the money in the trust. But once, when he and Moses were discussing a cash flow problem—Moses had dropped a large bundle at the baccarat table in Biloxi's famed Hotel Beau Rivage Casino and Randy had had to settle a lawsuit with a
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
outrageous sum of money after a boat owner during duck-hunting season innocently sailed into the tidewaters near the MSB&DD&CSR&FC, Inc., facility and, he alleged, had been brought under gunfire that reminded him of his service at
the Inchon Landing in Korea—Randy did happen to mention to Moses that his grandmother was getting on in years, and there was a family tradition of accidental death by firearm.

“Forget it, Randy,” Moses wisely counseled. “No one's going to believe that an eighty-four-year-old in a wheelchair took out her eighty-six-year-old sister by accident while cleaning her shotgun.”

But as the years passed—and especially since the formation of MSB&DD&CSR&FC, Inc., which had brought both Señor Pancho Gonzales and Executive Apartment One in The Warren into the equation—Randy began to wonder if it was really necessary for him to keep religiously following the One Hundred Mile Rule.

For one thing, the ladies didn't seem to notice—Auntie Abby's sight wasn't what it used to be, and Auntie Penny was of course confined to her wheelchair—that he on occasion was already violating both the no-imbibing and no-gambling tenets.

They believed, for example, that when he went to Executive Apartment Three with Moses Lipshutz and other gentlemen, it really was to discuss business in a private social atmosphere, not that they were playing No Limit Texas Hold 'Em.

Neither did either of the ladies seem to find anything out of the ordinary when he took tea with them each Thursday afternoon at five that his tea came in an oversized cup with ice cubes and a glass of water on the side.

He hadn't violated the third no-no, the one dealing with philandering, until two months ago, and then Demon Rum, so to speak, was involved.

Feeling a strong urge to bust some birds, and fearing that if he telephoned his shooting crony Phil Williams to ask if he felt similarly inclined, Phil would say, “Sorry, working,” and hang up, Randy elected instead to drive to Mr. Williams's residence to ask him face-to-face.

So he got in his Lamborghini and drove the forty-odd miles from “Our Tara” to Foggy Point.

At first, things seemed to be going his way. As he turned off Scenic U.S. Highway 98 onto the grounds of the Foggy Point Country Club, a fire-engine-red Mercedes-Benz convertible coupe—making perhaps thirty-five miles per hour over the posted twenty-five-mile speed limit—caused Randy to drive into a ditch to avoid a collision.

Wonderful!
Randy thought, having recognized the driver as Mrs. Philip W. (Brunhilde) Williams.
The AA won't be home.

“The AA,” which was the acronym for Angry Austrian, was not one of Randy's admirers.

And when he turned into the drive of 102 Country Club Road, he saw a twenty-year-old Jaguar in the process of being hauled away by a wrecker bearing the corporate logo of Foggy Point Garage & Good As New Used Parts.

Wonderful!
Randy thought again.
Ol' Phil will be home, since the Jag apparently once again needs a little attention
.

Mr. Williams answered the ring of his doorbell—actually a chime, which played the first twenty bars of “Wiener Blut”—after the third repetition of said theme caused by Randy holding his finger steadily on the button.

“Hey, Randy,” he greeted him cheerfully. “What's up?”

Wonderful!
Randy thought a third time.
The absence of the AA has understandably put ol' Phil in a good mood.

“How would you like to bust some birds?”

“I'd love to . . .”

“Wonderful!”

“. . . but . . .”

Oh, shit!

“But what?”

“I called out to the range to make a reservation, and they told me the traps are undergoing semiannual overhaul and that the range is closed.”

“All the traps?”

“That's what they told me.”

“Every
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
trap on every
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
range?”

“That's what they said,” Phil said. “Give me a call in a couple of days and we'll have another shot at it.”

“Well, then, let's go out to the clubhouse and have a couple of tastes.”

“Sorry, but when the AA flew off on her broom, and knowing that busting birds was off the agenda, I started to work,” Phil said. “And that's what I'm going to do.”

He closed the door.

Randy went to the clubhouse of the Foggy Point Country Club and into its bar even though a sign in the lobby proclaimed that it was Ladies' Day and the last thing he needed was a barroom full of Foggy Point and Muddiebay females in their forties and up.

He was on his third double Famous Pheasant, two ice cubes, water on the side, when he simultaneously smelled some interesting perfume and felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Well, whatever are you doing here, Randy, on Ladies' Day?”

He turned to see Mrs. Carol-Anne Crandall, wife to Homer C. Crandall, president of the First National Bank of Muddiebay.

Resisting the very strong temptation to reply by asking,
What does it look like I'm doing, you dumb broad? Calisthenics?
he instead said, “Hey, Carol-Anne.”

“Yes, thank you, don't mind if I do,” Carol-Anne replied. “Barman!”

Carol-Anne drank her first—of three—double Famous Pheasant, two ice cubes, water on the side, while standing. When she was halfway through number two, the seat beside Randy became vacant, and
as she moved to slide onto it she lost her balance and seemed to be about to fall down.

Randy had a good deal of experience in keeping his male drinking buddies from falling, and his reaction to Carol-Anne's predicament was Pavlovian. He grabbed what on a male drinking buddy would have been the seat of his pants and hoisted Carol-Anne onto the empty stool.

My God, what have I done?
he wondered.

At that point, Carol-Anne leaned close to him, stuck her tongue in his ear, and whispered, “You naughty, naughty boy! If you're planning on doing that again, we'd better find a nicer place to do it.”

She thereupon finished her second drink and signaled for a refill.

My God,
Randy wondered,
what am I going to do now?

I can't screw the wife of Homer C. Crandall, president of the First National Bank of Muddiebay.

He took a pull at his third Famous Pheasant.

On the other hand, why not?

Every time I have to borrow money from that usurious
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
he screws me.

Turnabout is fair play!

“Carol-Anne,” he said, “have you ever seen the sun set over the waters of beautiful Muddiebay Bay?”

“Now that you mention it, no. Why do you ask?”

“I have a little
pied-à-terre
that nobody knows about, from the windows of which one can see the sun set over the waters of beautiful Muddiebay Bay. Does that answer your description of a nicer place to do again what I did before?”

“Oh, you naughty boy,” she said, as she again lasciviously teased the external and middle sections of his auditory organ with the extraordinarily long external portion of her tongue. “I don't give a darn
about the sun setting, and, anyway, I will have to be at home waiting for Homer to come home from the bank before it does.”

“I understand,” Randy said.

I have just been saved from a potential disaster!

“But I'm sure we can find something interesting for you to do to me, and vice versa, in your little
pied-à-terre
that nobody knows about in the little time we have between now and when I will have to leave in order to be home when Homer gets home from First National. Presuming we leave right now.”

She raised her glass.

“Bottoms up, Randy!”

—

In the days and weeks
that followed, Randy had tried hard, but utterly failed, to put his relationship with Carol-Anne into some sort of perspective.

For example, after they had frolicked—her term—the first time, she had shyly confessed that it was her first time with someone besides ol' Homer.

He had serious reservations about the veracity of this claim, inasmuch as he was perfectly willing to admit that despite his extensive experience in this area, he had never met someone as eager to explore the many possibilities of physical union as Carol-Anne.

After a couple of weeks, she shyly admitted that she had not been fully entitled to the white dress she had worn down the aisle the day she became Mrs. Homer C. Crandall, as she had had “some little naughty schoolgirl experiences” at Ole Miss.

Randy had no trouble with imagining what these might have been. Before Mommy and Daddy had been called home to the Lord, and Miss Abby was in a position to shut off his allowance if she caught
him philandering, he had worked his way through at least half of the sorority sisters at Ole Miss, including most of those in Kappa Omega Delta, to which sisterhood Carol-Anne belonged.

But months passed before Randy concluded he had the real answer to what caused Carol-Anne's now unleashed passion. It was a combination of the fact that ol' Homer was getting a little long in the tooth with a concomitant decline in libido; that Carol-Anne, on the other hand, having gone through the change of life, had emerged on the other side with a newfound freedom to enjoy herself without the black cloud of conception hovering over her; and finally that Carol-Anne had bought a book in a yard sale.

It was leather bound with gold leaf decoration, and she thought it would look very nice in the living room on the coffee table beside her leather-bound copy of
The Memoirs of General J. Bonaparte Robertson, CSA
. On the cover of the book she bought at the yard sale was the legend
The Kama Sutra. Translated from Hindi by Sir Richard Burton
.

Once she'd read the title, Carol-Anne had no interest in the book beyond its attractive leather binding. She had never liked cookbooks to begin with, and she was really not interested in anything Sir Richard Burton translated from any language, especially after the despicable way he had treated poor Elizabeth Taylor.

But one day—two weeks before she bumped into Randy at the bar of the Foggy Point Country Club clubhouse—she had accidentally dropped the book to the floor while dusting the table on which it had rested unopened for about five years. The impact caused it to open.

At first she was absolutely shocked at what she saw. It was really wicked, even for Richard Burton—and the whole world knew what a s*x maniac he was.

But then she remembered that every picture she had ever seen of Elizabeth Taylor had shown her smiling . . . as if she was satisfied about something.

At that point, she had another look at the
Kama Sutra
.

And another.

And another.

After about two weeks, she concluded there was a price for everything, and the price she was paying for her good life in Muddiebay was that there were no oversexed, wholly amoral men like Sir Richard Burton around who were going to carry her off and work their wicked way on her body following the illustrated “How to Do It” instructions in the
Kama Sutra
.

That very afternoon, she happened to bump into Randolph C. Bruce in the bar of the clubhouse of the Foggy Point Country Club. She had no way of knowing if he was oversexed or not, but if one believed only half the things they said about ol' Randy, there was no question that he was wholly amoral.

So, taking a deep breath and tossing down what was left of her drink, she walked over to him and laid her hand on his shoulder.

—

There were other problems
with their illicit relationship, of course, but the main sources of annoyance from the beginning had been the lack of someplace other than Executive Apartment One to do what they were doing, and the limited time to do what they wanted to do once they'd made it into what Carol-Anne called “Our Little Naughty Love Nest.”

It was obvious that the lovebirds had to find a place where they could be alone for more than forty-five minutes at a time. But where?

Ordinarily, when Randy had a problem, he would discuss it with his two best friends—Moses Lipshutz, B.S., M.B.A., L.L.D., and Philip W. Williams, 2yrCollege GED Test—because between them they had a wealth of experience, and, although Randy really hated to admit it, both were smarter than he.

But he could not do so here. For reasons Randy didn't pretend to understand, both Moses and ol' Phil were faithful husbands. They didn't fool around even a little on business trips or hunting trips or anywhere else, even when there was zilch chance of getting caught. And they even frowned upon people who availed themselves of the opportunities presented when there was zilch chance of getting caught.