MASH 12 MASH goes to Texas Read online

  “You want to go over that again, Ida-Sue?”

  “Texas, Texas, rah-rah-rah,” she obligingly repeated.

  “Texas, Texas, rah-rah-rah,” Alamo said. “Of course. I should have known right off. Exactly what does that mean, Ida-Sue?”

  “We were supposed to do it together,” Ida-Sue explained. “Scarlett was going to do the back flips on the Texas, Texas, and I was going to shake the pom-poms on the rah-rah-rah.”

  “I see.”

  “But I was going to really surprise them,” Ida-Sue said. “I’ve been practicing myself. And instead of me just standing there shaking the pom-poms while Scarlett was doing the backflips, I was going to do the backflips right along with her. I’m in much better shape than any of the other FUTMBPPG mommies, and when you’ve got it, flaunt it, as Daddy always used to say.”

  “Sure you are,” Alamo replied. “So what happened?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” Ida-Sue said. “I’ve never been so humiliated in my life.”

  “You split your cheerleader’s pants doing the backflips?” Alamo inquired after a moment’s thought.

  “That’s another thing wrong about you, Alamo,” Ida-Sue said. “All you think about is S.E.X.”

  “That’s not true, Ida-Sue, and you know it,” Alamo said.

  “And come to think of it, all you do is think about it, which is even worse,” Ida-Sue went on. “But it was even worse than that.”

  “What could be worse than splitting your pants doing backflips at the FUTMBPPG annual reunion?”

  “Having your daughter humiliate you by rejecting all that you hold dear—that’s what,” Ida-Sue said, a suggestion of triumph mixed with her tone of pain.

  “How did she do that?” Alamo asked.

  “She didn’t show up, that’s how she did it,” Ida-Sue replied.

  “Well, you know how girls are,” Scarlett’s father said. “Maybe something came up. Maybe Mr. Right came along, for example.”

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” Ida-Sue said. “I sent Eagle Eye MacNamara with the limousine to get her at school, and she wasn’t there.”

  “Didn’t she leave a note or something?”

  “I’ll say she did. I’ll read the note,” Ida-Sue said.

  “Go ahead,” Alamo said.

  “ ‘Dear Momma,’ it says,” Ida-Sue said, “ ‘I have come to the conclusion that there must be more to life than shaking pom-poms and doing backflips, and so I have gone off on my own to find a new life helping my fellowman in some small way.’ ”

  “Gee,” Alamo replied, “that really brings a lump to your throat, doesn’t it?”

  “Alamo,” Ida-Sue said, menace in every syllable, “Scarlett had no right, no right at all, to go off on her own to help her fellowman in some small way when her own mother needed her for Texas, Texas, rah-rah-rah at the FUTMBPPG annual reunion, and you know it.”

  “You’re right, of course, Ida-Sue. You always are.”

  “I know I am. Now, I want you to find her, Alamo, and have a good talk with her.”

  “How am I going to find her?”

  “You’re a congressman, dummy. You keep forgetting that. Send the F.B.I. looking for her.”

  “Speaking of Congress, Ida-Sue,” Alamo said.

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “We have a little problem, Ida-Sue,” Alamo said. “That’s what I called about.”

  “Let’s have it,” she said.

  “I just had a little talk with Vibrato Val Vishnefsky and Tiny Tony Bambino.”

  “So what?”

  “They’re a little unhappy about their dry holes, Ida-Sue. They say I promised them oil wells, and they want them.”

  “God, Alamo, you’re really stupid. Just tell them the wells came in and send each one a check. Even you should have been able to figure that out by yourself.”

  “Well, someone in the drilling department sent them reports saying the holes were dry. They don’t want the money; they want a flowing well. Vibrato Val says everything has to be on the up and up.”

  There was a pause.

  “The only place I know where there’s oil for sure is on Uncle Hiram’s spread,” Ida-Sue replied. “I guess we’ll just have to sink a couple of wells there.”

  “But we don’t own Uncle Hiram’s spread.”

  “I’ll go down there myself.” Ida-Sue replied, “and tell Uncle Hiram that Scarlett’s future happiness absolutely depends on him letting us have 140 acres of his spread ... God knows, he has enough ... so we can put down a couple of wells.”

  “What’s it got to do with Scarlett?”

  “If Tiny Tony and Vibrato Val don’t get their flowing wells, dummy, you’re through in Congress. And if you’re through in Congress, how are you going to be able to send the F.B.I. to find Scarlett?”

  “Gee, Ida-Sue, you really know how to figure things out, don’t you?” Alamo said respectfully.

  “You get the F.B.I. started, and I’ll fly down to Uncle Hiram’s ranch,” Ida-Sue replied. “There’s no point in staying here, anyway. How can I be a FUTMBPPG Mommy now that Scarlett’s run away?”

  Chapter Four

  The discerning reader may have noticed that comingled with Dr. Benjamin Franklin Pierce’s generous tender of his tickets to the New Orleans Saints-Dallas Cowboys football game was a suggestion, however subtle, that the post-game social ritually sponsored by the Bayou Perdu Council, Knights of Columbus, might tend to become just a shade rowdy.

  While it is, of course, true that chiefs of surgery, as a class, tend to be not only cynical and pessimistic, but first-class party-poopers, as well, it must be said that in this instance Dr. Pierce’s concern was based on long and somewhat painful experience with the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., and was not simply a manifestation of the acid indigestion brought on by taking luncheon in the Spruce Harbor Medical Center staff cafeteria.

  The fact that Dr. Pierce, a Protestant (of somewhat murky standing, to be sure, but a Protestant), is carried on the official rolls of the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., as Grand Exalted Surgeon and Healer and Social Disease Control Officer, when in other K. of organizations such high-level positions are granted only to those of the Catholic persuasion, is only the exposed tip of what might well be described as the iceberg of the Bayou Perdu Council differences from ordinary K. of C. councils.

  Dr. Pierce was proposed for membership and appointment to his position by Col.* Jean-Pierre de la Chevaux, Knight Guardian of the Golden Fleece of the Bayou Perdu Council. As the succinct little phrase has it around Bayou Perdu, “What Horsey de la Chevaux wants, Horsey gets.” Not only is Colonel de la Chevaux, as President, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of the Chevaux Petroleum Corporation, International, the “boss” of 98.7 percent of the members of the Bayou Perdu Council, but lifetime holder’ of the Bayou Perdu Golden Fists, Boots and Ax-Handles Belt, awarded for excellence in what, around Bayou Perdu, are considered the manly arts.

  (* Louisiana National Guard, retired.)

  Moreover, long before any members of the Bayou Perdu Council had laid eyes on Dr. Pierce, they had frequently heard from Horsey de la Chevaux how Dr. Pierce (and others) had saved his life and his leg when Horsey de la Chevaux had been a grievously wounded sergeant of the 223rd Infantry in Korea, and Dr. Pierce had been chief of surgery of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH.*

  (* The details of Sergeant de la Chevaux’s miltiary service, how he fell on the field of battle and how he was restored to good health, have been recorded in M*A*S*H Goes to New Orleans (Pocket Books), which is generally to be found on sale, a rose rising from the swamp, on most paperback bookracks.)

  Dr. Pierce was, according to the minutes of that meeting, received into membership and elected to his office “by acclamation.” Those same minutes also record for posterity that John Francis Xavier McIntyre, M.D., F.A.C.S., was similarly enlisted and elected (to be Deputy Grand Exalted Surgeon and Healer and Social Disease Control Officer
), and that, with certain restrictions, the Bayou Perdu Council finally gave in to pointed suggestions (from, among other people, the Archbishop of New Orleans) that they authorize a Ladies’ Auxiliary.

  “Any female of good reputation,” the authorization went, “is entitled to apply for membership in the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., provided only that such applicants be retired officers, in the grade of lieutenant colonel or better, of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.” By a strange coincidence, only one female, Margaret Houlihan Wachauf Wilson, R.N., met those criteria. Nurse Wilson, or “Hot Lips,” as she was known to her comrades-in-arms of the 4077th MASH, became the first, and for a long time, only, member of the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., Ladies’ Auxiliary.*

  (* Two years ago, again at Colonel de la Chevaux’s suggestion, the membership criteria were relaxed somewhat by the addition of the words “or in the grade of lieutenant commander, or better, or the Navy Nurse Corps.” Shortly afterward, Esther Flanagan, Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Navy Nurse Corps, retired, became the second member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary.)

  The love affair (often one-sided) between the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., and the New Orleans Saints football team goes back beyond the recruitment of Doctors Pierce and McIntyre and Nurses Wilson and Flanagan. It goes back, in fact, and to use the quaint patois of the bayou country, to Before Horsey’s Gas, or B.H.G. B.H.G. obviously requires explanation.

  Five years after Technical Sergeant Jean-Pierre de la Chevaux, late of the 223rd Infantry, was medically retired from the U.S. Army on a fifty percent disability pension for his wounds, the state of Louisiana, wishing to take advantage of some $295 million that happened to be lying around unspent in the federal highway fund, announced that it was going to build a super highway from the Texas border to the Mississippi border.

  Everything went swimmingly until it was discovered that someone actually owned sixteen thousand acres of land in the vicinity of Bayou Perdu, through which the superslab was to run. It was hard to believe at first (the property was described, accurately, as “swamp, with quicksand, brackish water and utterly unfit for any conceivable use by man or beast”), but a search of the records proved conclusively that His Most Catholic Majesty, Louis XIV, had, indeed, affixed the royal signature to a land grant for one Jean-Phillipe, Sieur de la Chevaux, awarding him eight thousand hectares of His Most Catholic Majesty’s land in the province of Louisiana.*

  (* Scholars are generally agreed that King Louis suspected the Sieur de la Chevaux of fooling around with the Queen, and that His Majesty was fully aware that the land he was granting was worthless. It is known (see T. Jennings Wilson’s Love, Life and Hanky-panky at the Court of Louis XIV) that when the Sieur de Bienville presented himself at court prior to sailing for the New World to take possession of his land grant and knelt before His Majesty, the King said to him, “A word to the wise, Jean-Phillipe, baby: don't come back; otherwise, you’ll be the Headless Horseman of the Bois de Boulogne.”)

  Inquiries made of the Chancellory of the Archdiocese of New Orleans revealed that descendants of the Sieur de la Chevaux had lived continually on the property since the time of the land grant, and that the present owner was a retired army sergeant named Jean-Pierre de la Chevaux.

  Initial attempts to meet with Horsey to discuss putting a highway across his swamp met with failure. The highway department engineers were mistaken by Horsey and his friends for representatives of the State Department of Alcoholic Beverage Taxation, and they were forced to retreat under a hail of small arms fire.

  Through the good offices of the Archbishop of New Orleans, however, a meeting was finally set up (on neutral territory in Mississippi, Horsey having no faith in the solemn word of any elected or appointive official of the state of Louisiana) and negotiations were undertaken.

  Horsey did not want a six-lane super highway running through his property at all, and it took considerable cajolery on the part of everyone else concerned to move him from this position.

  It was finally agreed that he would be awarded sixty thousand dollars (this figure was described by the New Orleans Picaroon-Statesman, in a flaming editorial, as “an unconscionable rape of the state treasury”) in exchange for a one-hundred-yard-wide right-of-way through his land, and his solemn promise not to shoot at the construction crews or otherwise interfere in any manner with the march of progress.

  Although this was not known to anyone but the principals, Horsey turned over to Father Jacques de-Presseps, the Bayou Perdu parish priest,* substantially all of the highway department check, reserving for himself only enough money for a few essentials. He treated himself to a half-gallon bottle of Old White Stagg Blended Kentucky Bourbon, a delicacy he had remembered with yearning from the patients’ club at the 4077th MASH; he gave his wife enough money to buy a new bonnet and a new dress; and he sent orders to Sears, Roebuck and Co. to ship him a new outboard motor for his pirogue and to come and drill him a new water well.

  (* Father dePresseps, a French national, had been sent to Bayou Perdu from his native Normandy as a result of negotiations at the highest levels of the Church. His predecessor, an American priest of Irish extraction, had been found floating down the Mississippi River in a pirogue, babbling mindlessly about "crazy Cajuns and crosses to bear.")

  Normally, of course, the sudden influx of approximately fifty-nine thousand dollars to the parish treasury would not have gone unnoticed, and it would not have gone unnoticed here had not the Sears, Roebuck water-well drilling crew failed miserably in the accomplishment of their assigned duties.

  They found not a drop of water. What they found, in the words of the American Oil & Gas Journal, was “the largest pool of natural gas ever discovered anywhere.”

  The first partial payment on the first royalty check came to slightly over $1.4 million. The next day, the Chancellor of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Monsignor John Joseph Clancy, opened a letter bearing the return address of Saint Mary’s Church, Bayou Perdu. A check for $140,000 fluttered out, the first in a long series of checks representing ten percent of the gross proceeds.*

  (* Despite what some disgruntled Knights of Columbus of different councils have said, Horsey’s tithing gifts to the archdiocese are not the reason the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., seems to enjoy both special privilege and the archbishop’s favor. On the other hand, of course, it hasn’t hurt their relationship, either.)

  While they were delighted with Horsey’s (and their own) good fortune, both Monsignor Clancy and the archbishop privately feared that the sudden wealth would not be a good thing for the simple inhabitants of Bayou Perdu.

  “However,” the chancellor said to the archbishop, “it may not be a problem for long.”

  “What do you mean by that, Jack?” His Eminence inquired.

  “A Cajun and his money are soon parted,” the monsignor said.

  “I’m afraid you may be right, Jack,” the archbishop agreed with reluctance.

  He was wrong. His Eminence had either underestimated or misunderstood the character of both Cajuns and Normans. (He was, of course, an Irishman.) The greatest con men in the world tried, and failed, to part Horsey from his money. The combination of a Louisiana Cajun making business decisions with the advice of a Norman peasant priest was too much for them.

  The archbishop’s fears of conspicuous consumption on the part of Horsey and the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., were unfortunately and soon realized. The pilings were barely sunk for a new Saint Mary’s Church (a somewhat enlarged and improved version of Saint Peter’s in Venice) when construction of the new social hall for the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., began. No expense was spared. The New Social Hall, as it came to be called, had six bowling alleys, a swimming pool, an auditorium and the largest solid mahogany bar in the world.

  The uniforms with which, B.H.G., the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., had been equipped had first seen the light of day in the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, where they had adorned the ushers. After the visit of a gentleman f
rom Brooks Brothers Theatrical Costumes, Inc., the Knights were uniformed so splendiferously that they had to be seen to be believed, and even when seen they were rather unbelievable.

  The Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., Marching Band (originally three tubas, two bass drums, six Jew’s harps and a glockenspiel), which had, frankly, been rather outshined by other K. of C. bands within the New Orleans consistory, was, after augmentation by a number of professional musicians,* without question the leader of the pack.

  (* Horsey de la Chevaux had visited the governor, checkbook in hand, in the mistaken belief that the University of Louisiana Million-Dollar Marching Band was up for sale. The governor explained with such tact and grace that it wasn’t for sale that Horsey wrote him a little check for his expenses in the next campaign. Shortly aferward, recognizing in former Sergeant de la Chevaux characteristics of military leadership and all-around tactical genius that the state should not have to do without, the governor appointed Horsey as Colonel of Infantry on his staff.)

  After a series of unfortunate highway mishaps when the fleet of new Lincolns and Cadillacs with which the Knights had replaced the two Model A’s, one 1939 Buick, and two ex-school buses of the Bayou Perdu community proved too much (especially on the way home) for the Knights, Horsey got in touch with the people who make the Greyhound buses and ordered four of these vehicles, specially equipped.

  The buses were equipped with seats identical to those furnished for first-class passengers on intercontinental jet aircraft. There were on-board bar and rest room facilities. The buses were painted bright yellow and had mounted on their roofs a cluster of silver- plated air horns, which, when the horn button was pressed, played “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

  The initial delight experienced by upper-level management when the first ten rows of the fifty-yard section of seats were sold “in perpetuity” to a religiously based social organization without a quibble about the price was soon replaced with something less than the first blush of enthusiasm.