MASH 12 MASH goes to Texas Read online

  Not only did the other paying customers begin to register complaints that while they, as loyal New Orleanians, liked “When the Saints Go Marching In” as well as the next fellow, it did begin to grate on the nerves a little toward the end of the game, after it was played, in its entirety, by a one-hundred-six-piece band, heavy on the brass, not only every time the Saints scored a touchdown, but whenever the Saints tackled a member of the opposing team.

  Moreover, it quickly became apparent that the reason the Knights were so anxious to be on the fifty-yard line, at ground level, was that from that location it was very convenient for them to race out onto the field and demonstrate with officials who had, in their opinion, come to the erroneous conclusion that a member of the Saints had somehow violated the rules.

  After it was put to Horsey that an impasse existed (after visiting the hospital room of an official who had both of his shoulders dislocated by one of the Knights after he had made an unpopular call, the umpires’ association had gone on strike with the announcement that they would not return to their duties until the Knights were somehow placed under control), the ground-level seats on the fifty-yard line were exchanged for enclosed, air-conditioned boxes high above the field. So that the fans would not be deprived of the musical offerings of the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., Marching Band, it was agreed that they would perform at half-time. It was also agreed, tacitly, that any official found on the field while the marching band was performing was fair game.

  But it was the post-game social festivities that caused the most trouble. Chevaux Petroleum Corporation, International, in the interests of maintaining high employee efficiency through high employee morale, customarily arranged for what was described as an “employee banquet, dance and social.”

  Employees and their families were housed on a floor or two of the nearest suitable hotel; the hotel’s Grand Ballroom was engaged for the banquet and dance, and lesser facilities were set aside and designated as the Ladies’ Lounge, the Men’s Bar and the Kiddies’ Karrousel. Since it was not fair to expect a performance by the Bayou Perdu Council, K. of C., Marching Band (they were, of course, exhausted after playing at the game), Papa Louis’ Old-Tyme New Orleans Dixieland Jazz Band was customarily flown in from New Orleans to provide a musical background.

  A standing invitation to the Saints team and their families to join in either the victory festivities or the wake generally saw about half the team and their families in attendance, despite objections of the Saints’ management.

  Much effort was expended by all concerned parties to keep events, scheduled and unscheduled, under control. Normally, all this effort met with only limited success. If it were possible, in other words, for something to go wrong, it usually did.

  On one memorable occasion, in the Dallas Hilton, for example, it did not come to the attention of responsible officials that the Texas Women’s Christian Temperance Union was holding its annual convention in Ballroom A of the hotel until a delegation of Knights, each clutching a half-gallon bottle of Old White Stagg Blended Kentucky Bourbon, marched into the meeting to the strains of Papa Louis’ band playing “Cigarettes, Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women” in the belief that they were entering Ballroom B, where a Miss Bonnie Bazooms was scheduled to offer a display of her terpsichorean art.*

  (* Miss Bonnie Bazooms’ “Dance of the Pigeons,” during which specially trained pigeons cleverly removed one piece of her attire at a time, had, over the years, become almost as much a sacred tradition of a post-game party as the reenactment of the Saints’ successful touchdown attempts in the lobbies of the various hotels.)

  The point has been made. It would not be really necessary to dwell at such length upon the subject were it not for the fact that Mrs. Mary Pierce, wife to the aforementioned Dr. Hawkeye Pierce, was (a) fully aware of the legends surrounding the Bayou Perdu Council post-game socials and (b) happened to learn that Esther Flanagan was going to the game.

  Esther Flanagan, R.N., was a foot taller, thirty pounds heavier and twenty years older than Mary Pierce. Esther Flanagan, as has been previously reported, was also a retired naval officer who had spent twenty-odd years of her life following the flag to various exotic corners of the world. Despite this background, Mary Pierce, whose highest military rank had been neighbor chairgirl for the 1949 cookie sale of the Girl Scouts of America, and who had never traveled farther than fifty miles from her home unless accompanied by father, brother or husband, had come to the conclusion that Esther Flanagan was nothing but an innocent girl about to find herself in a situation fraught with unspeakable (at least in mixed company) danger.

  Esther Flanagan, R.N., liked Mary Pierce. She liked her so much, in fact, that she did not laugh in her face when Mary came to her and suggested, ever so tactfully, that it might not be a very good idea for Nurse Flanagan to go so far from home alone to be among people who were not, as Mary phrased it, “really very nice,” and whose “standards of behavior,” as she put it, were “a little odd.”

  “It’s all right, Mary,” Esther Flanagan said. “I’ll be safe with Hot Lips.”

  “It’s not that I don’t like the Reverend Mother Emeritus,” Mary said. “But, frankly, I can’t help but wonder sometimes what someone called ‘Hot Lips’ did before, so to speak, she got the call.”

  “I’m going to the game, Mary,” Esther Flanagan said gently but firmly. “All work and no play, to coin a phrase, makes Esther Flanagan hard to live with.”

  “I hope you didn’t think, Esther,” Mary Pierce said quickly, “that I thought you, of all people, would do something wrong.”

  “Not at all,” Esther said.

  Fifteen minutes later Mary Pierce broached the subject to her husband.

  “If you think I’m going to let you let Esther Flanagan go to New Orleans and Texas alone, Hawkeye, you’ve got another think coming!”

  “You’re going with her? Great idea!”

  “Bite your tongue! I’m the mother of your children! How could you even suggest such a thing?”

  “A passing moment of madness,” Hawkeye said. “Well, then, what?”

  “Well, then, what, what?”

  “If you’re not going to go with her, who is?”

  “You are,” she said firmly.

  “I am not. I’m the father of your children! How could you even suggest such a thing?”

  “You and Trapper John are both going,” Mary announced with finality. “Lucinda* and I have talked it over.”

  (* Dr. John Francis Xavier McIntyre has been for some years united in the blessed bounds of matrimony with a lady named Lucinda. Lucinda and Mary Pierce are what is known in feminine circles as “best friends.”)

  “What’s sauce for the gander should be sauce for the goose,” Hawkeye said. “What you’re proposing, Mary, is sexual discrimination, pure and simple! The next thing you’ll be doing is expecting me to open doors for you, hold out your chair and such other disgustingly discriminating acts! Possibly even tip my hat!”

  “Shut up, Hawkeye,” Mary said.

  “I can’t go to Texas, Mary, as much as I would like to,” Hawkeye said piously. “I have things to do around here—doctor things. I have, you know, sworn solemnly to serve my fellowmen in their hours of medical difficulty.”

  “I thought of that,” she said. “And I know how much you were looking forward to your turn on the D.D.D.* schedule.”

  (* In a noble attempt to drive the last vestiges of sexism from the classroom, the Spruce Harbor Elementary School Parent-Teacher Association had come up with a plan whereby, on a rotation basis, each male parent (or “Daddy”) would serve as a (female) teacher’s helper for one school day. The designation cleverly selected to describe this operation was D.D.D., for Daddy’s Day of Duty.)

  “Perhaps, after all,” Hawkeye said, “I can tear myself away for a couple of days.”

  “I thought you’d come around,” Mary said.

  “But aren’t you and Lucinda worried,” he asked, curiosity having overcome his common sense
, “about Trapper John and me getting in trouble with the Knights?”

  “Esther will be there,” Mary said quickly. “She’ll keep an eye on you.”

  “Of course,” Hawkeye replied. Long years of marriage had taught him that one does not try to deal reasonably with one’s wife or even attempt to understand her thought processes. One simply chooses the path of least resistance. This is known as husbandly wisdom.

  Chapter Five

  As this conversation was taking place in Spruce Harbor, another member of what sometimes is referred to as the gentle sex examined a 22-by-28-inch photograph through large, canary-yellow-framed pink tinted glasses and made an announcement.

  “They’re darling!” she said. “Just darling! Both of them! Lance, you’re fantastic!”

  “I thought you’d be pleased,” Lance said. Lance Fairbanks had taken the photograph of which the lady approved. He smiled, and after running his index finger over his right eyebrow, he put his hand on his hip and called out, “Brucie, would you bring in the others now, please?”

  While Lance Fairbanks’ voice was not at all unpleasant (it had a certain lilt to it), it could not accurately be described as heavily laden with what our Latin-American friends refer to as “machismo.” Compared to him, as a matter of fact, when the lady with the purple hair and the canary-yellow-framed pink tinted glasses asked, “Oh, you have more? Wonderful!” she sounded like Telly Savalas.

  “I have oodles and oodles,” Lance Fairbanks replied. “Brucie and I were up all night slaving and slaving in the darkroom!”

  Brucie came (perhaps “floated” would be a more accurate description of the way he moved) into the room, a small and precise little man attired in crushed velvet blue jeans, sandals and a horizontally striped T-shirt that was patterned after those worn in the French Navy. The chartreuse silk ascot around his neck matched the chartreuse silk scarf he wore in lieu of a belt to hold up the crushed velvet blue jeans.

  He carried in his outstretched arms a stack of at least twenty-five photographs, each as large, about two feet square, as the first one the lady had seen, and of which she had so gushingly approved.

  He laid them on a fire-engine-red table with all the elan of a liveried lackey setting, for example, a roast suckling pig before Catherine the Great of Russia. The simile is not farfetched. The lady with the purple hair was Sydney Prescott, founder, president and absolute mistress of Sydney Prescott & Associates, Advertising. She was known as the “Queen Bee of New York Advertising,” an appellation making reference both to her gender and her sting.

  Lance and Brucie stood back as Ms. Prescott went through the photographs. She went through them carefully, holding each one up in both hands for a moment, then laying them in three stacks.

  When she had finished, she turned to face Lance and Brucie, her back to the plate-glass wall, which offered a view of New York City, generally, and Park Avenue and the Pam Am Building, specifically, behind her.

  She extended one long and rather bony finger toward one of the stacks of photographs. The finger carried a twelve-carat square-cut diamond that had once adorned the finger of the czarina of all the Russias.

  “These are good,” she said. She moved her finger, the nail of which was adorned with metal-flaked purple nail polish, to the second stack. “These are better.” Lance and Brucie sort of swayed in ecstasy at her approval. “And these, darlings,” she said, smiling broadly and pointing to the third, largest and last stack, “are simply awful!”

  The smiles Lance and Brucie had been wearing vanished and they advanced somewhat timidly to look down at those that she disapproved of.

  “I see what you mean,” Lance Fairbanks said.

  “You’re right, of course,” Brucie chimed in.

  “I’m always right,” Sydney Prescott said. “Now, tell me where you shot these.”

  “In the wilds of Texas,” Lance said.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Would I kid you, Sydney?” Lance inquired.

  “Not unless you suddenly lost your senses,” Sydney Prescott replied.

  “Far from the frontiers of civilization,” Brucie chimed in again.

  Sydney Prescott went to the second stack, the photographs she had said were “better,” and she went through the half a dozen photographs it contained. She finally selected one of these, walked to an azure-blue corkboard mounted on her wall and stuck one of the photographs on it with glass-tipped thumbtacks.

  The object of her approbation showed two male human beings. They were squatting on the heels on their battered cowboy boots beside a campfire. Two pie-bald ponies, their reins hanging loosely to the ground, stood behind them. One of the men had his leathery face decorated with a somewhat shaggy mustache, matching the shaggy gray hair that stuck out from beneath a somewhat soiled ten-gallon hat. He was attired in a tight-fitting shirt, from the breast pocket of which hung the string of a package of roll-your-own cigarette tobacco, and well-worn jeans.

  The other man, of a somewhat darker hue, was similarly attired, down to the package of tobacco in his pocket (in his case, chewing tobacco), except that he had no mustache, and in lieu of a ten-gallon hat he had a feather sticking out of his hair, held in place by a band of leather tied across his forehead. He had a large knife jammed into his belt. The one with the mustache had a large Colt-.45 single-action revolver stuck in his belt.

  They were both in the act of eating from tin plates. Beside them on the ground were two cans of a product called Wild West Beanos.

  “And you actually got them to eat the Wild West Beanos!” Sydney Prescott said excitedly. “Lance, you really are fantastic!”

  “It was nothing, really,” Lance Fairbanks said modestly.

  “Tell mother all,” Ms. Prescott said, “from the very beginning!”

  “Well, there we were,” Lance began, “miles and miles from nowhere, so to speak, riding through the desert in our little Winnebago, and then Brucie spotted them.”

  “Brucie spotted them?” Sydney Prescott inquired.

  “Brucie said, ‘Lance, will you look at that?’ And I looked where he pointed, and there they were.”

  “Where were they?”

  “Riding through the desert,” Lance went on, “leading a buffalo on a rope.”

  “A buffalo on a rope? But I don’t see any buffalo in the pictures.”

  “I gave it some thought,” Lance said, “a great deal of thought. And I thought that there was such a thing as being too authentic. I mean, are a cowboy and an Indian and a buffalo credible?”

  “I see your point,” Ms. Prescott said.

  “So we drove over and tried to strike up a conversation,” Lance said.

  “Lance,” Brucie amplified, obviously very impressed with his friend’s behavior, “just jumped out of the Winnebago and said, ‘Hi, there, I’m Lance Fairbanks.’ ”

  “And what did they say?”

  “It didn’t go too well at first, to tell you the truth,” Lance said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Sitting Buffalo—that’s the Indian, his name is Sitting Buffalo—said, ‘Screw you, White Man,’ and he spit tobacco juice over the Winnebago’s windshield. It must have been a good ten feet, too.”

  “And then the cowboy took out his gun,” Brucie said, visibly excited at the memory, “and cocked it, and pointed it right at Lance and said, ‘We shoot trespassers in these parts, fella.’ ”

  “My God!” Ms. Prescott said.

  “But Lance rose to the occasion,” Brucie said, pride in every syllable.

  “What did he do?”

  “He made believe he fainted,” Brucie said. “The minute the cowboy pointed the gun at him, he went down like an express elevator.”

  “Good thinking, Lance,” Ms. Prescott said. “Then what?”

  “The next thing I remember,” Lance said, “I mean, when I pretended to be waking up from pretending to have fainted, Sitting Buffalo was pouring water on my face.”

  “I see.”

&nb
sp; “So then I told them that we weren’t really trespassing, but that we were lost,” Lance went on. “And he said that was a shame, because if we were lost then he couldn’t shoot us.”

  “But how did you get them to eat the Wild West Beanos?” Ms. Prescott asked. “That’s the important thing.”

  (It is necessary at this point, to maintain the continuity of this narrative, to parenthetically explain not only what Lance and Brucie were doing running around west Texas in their Winnebago and to tell something of the history of Wild West Beanos, but also to explain the interrelationship of Lance and Brucie, Wild West Beanos and Sydney Prescott & Associates, Advertising. The explanation follows:

  (Long before Sydney Prescott left J. Walter Batten-Barton, Advertising, Inc., to form Sydney Prescott & Associates, Advertising—in fact, long before Sydney Prescott had changed her name from Sadie Prausnitz —she had had her dream. Unlike others of her gender, however, however, her dream had nothing to do with cohabiting in a vine-covered cottage by the side of the road with a handsome knight in shining armor mounted on a white horse.

  (Sadie’s dream, even then, was to have for her very own the advertising business of Babcock Burton & Company. Babcock Burton & Company were in the tobacco game. They manufactured seven brands of cigarettes, fourteen brands of cigars, five brands of chewing tobacco and, for those who frowned on burning and chewing the filthy weed, four brands of snuff.*

  (* For the uninitiated, there are two kinds of snuff. One kind is removed from the can, believe it or not, by a pinch of the fingers and is then placed in a soggy ball in the mouth, between the teeth and the lip. The other kind is placed on the back on the hand and sucked into the nostrils with a healthy inhale. The snuff industry is not at all amused by the phrase “up your nose with a rubber hose.”)