MASH 08 MASH Goes to Hollywood Read online

  Outside the theater, Trapper asked. “How’s it going?”

  “We’re all set,” Hawkeye replied. “Is he going to be out before long?”

  “I hope so,” Trapper said. “And just to make sure, I added a little something to the booze. But I’ve been thinking. Isn’t it a dirty trick to knock him out and carry him off unconscious to dump him in the deep woods?”

  “All right, we’ll call the whole thing off and take him home with us,” Hawkeye said. “To your house, since it’s your idea.”

  Trapper John took a small white bottle from his pocket. “I only had one bottle of this stuff,” he said. “I wonder if it’s enough?”

  “I think it’ll be enough,” Hawkeye said. “I took the precaution of putting a few drops of my own in before I sent the bottles into the sitting room.”

  At that point, there came the sound of a round of applause as Miss Bonnie Bazoom (and presumably her replacement pigeons) came onto the stage. This was followed by a horrible crashing noise as if someone had gotten to his feet and applauded and then collapsed, as if drugged.

  Hawkeye peered into the theater and then motioned for Trapper John to follow him. In a moment, puffing and wheezing, one healer to each leg, they dragged Boris, who wore a smile on his face, out of the room.

  “That does it,” Trapper said, breathing heavily, after they finally propped Boris against the wall under a 60 x 48 Augustus John oil portrait of a long-forgotten Framingham Fellow. “I knew this wouldn’t work. How do you propose to get him from here to the airplane?”

  “You underestimate me, Doctor,” Hawkeye said, gesturing toward the staircase, up which bounded four muscular young men in green nylon tunics. “Here come the cheery chaps from Tranquil Glades.” *

  “My apologies,” Trapper said. “I should have known you could be counted on in a pinch.”

  “We are going to take this gentleman to the seaplane terminal at Boston Harbor,” Hawkeye ordered, regally. “And place him aboard Flight Six of the Spruce Harbor Flying Service. Strap him to the stretcher, men, and we’re off!”

  (* The Tranquil Glades Health Farm and Alcoholic Rehabilitation Center had had a long and mutually beneficial relationship with the Framingham Foundation and its fellows. Mr. Korsky-Rimsakov was only the last of a long line of fellows who had to be transported in an unconscious condition from foundation headquarters with great discretion.)

  Chapter Eight

  Wrong Way Napolitano, pilot in command of Spruce Harbor Flying Service’s Flight Six (one-class Beaver service to Boston and points north), to the considerable surprise of his brother Angelo, found Boston Harbor on the first try.

  With a tremor of justifiable pride in his voice (on previous occasions, while seeking Boston Harbor, he had landed on such diverse bodies of water as Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, and the Leonia, New Jersey, Municipal Reservoir), Wrong Way turned in his seat and announced:

  “Spruce Harbor Flying Service announces the arrival of Flight Six at Boston, Massachusetts. Please remain in your seats until the aircraft stops moving.”

  “Boston?” one of the passengers, a tall, lanky blond in a beehive hairdo replied. “Thank God! For a while there, Wes-Baby, you really had me going. I really thought we were actually going out in the woods.”

  “Shut up, you dumb broad,” Wesley St. James said, rousing himself from slumber. He leaned forward in his seat and addressed the aircraft commander in high, piercing, angry-canary-like tones: “Boston? What the hell do you mean, Boston?”

  “Boston, Massachusetts,” Wrong Way replied.

  “Wesley,” Don Rhotten (who was, of course, traveling incognito as Mr. John Smith) asked, “are we on the ground? Can I open my eyes?”

  “I asked you,” Wesley St. James (who had decided to shun public adulation himself and was using his real name, Wladislaw Syniowlski) shouted in Wrong Way’s ear, “what the hell are we doing in Boston? Where the hell is that unspoiled, crystal-clear jewel of a lake I’m paying for?”

  Angelo Napolitano, who had chosen to use the nom de guide of Pierre LeGrande in order to conceal his close association with the proprietor of the Spruce Harbor Flying Service, put on his best French-Canadian accent and replied.

  “M’sieu,” he said, “eet is zee code of zee deep woods.”

  Wesley St. James had never been close to a deep Maine woods guide before. He realized there was a lot about things up here he didn’t know.

  “What’s the code of the deep woods?” he asked.

  “When a bush pilot is asked for help,” Angelo replied, momentarily forgetting the French-Canadian accent, “zee code of zee deep woods requires zat he give zee help.”

  “To hell with that,” Wesley St. James said. “I’m paying for the airplane.”

  “It is zee code of zee woods, M’sieu,” Angelo said.

  “What kind of help?” Wesley asked.

  Wrong Way had told Angelo very little of why they were making a passenger pickup in Boston, only that “I got to ferry some stiff for Hawkeye.” Angelo, like most practitioners of the legal profession, was highly skilled in taking one little fact and embellishing it somewhat.

  “Once a man has spent some time in zee deep woods, M’sieu,” Angelo said, “it is burned on his soul.”

  “Get to the bottom line, Pierre,” Wesley St. James said. “Spare me the sales talk.”

  “We are returning, M’sieu,” Angelo said, “the body of a man who once knew zee deep woods but was forced to leave zem. He asked that he be buried in zee deep woods, under zee spreading boughs of a large tree.”

  “What you’re telling me, in other words,” Wesley St. James said, “is that we’re giving some corpse a free ride on my chartered airplane?”

  “It is zee code of the deep woods, M’sieu,” Angelo said, with what he thought was a splendid Gallic shrug.

  “Corpse?” Don Rhotten asked. “Is that ‘corpse,’ as in ‘dead person’?”

  “So Frenchie says,” Wesley St. James replied, nodding at Angelo.

  “Wes, I’m afraid of dead people,” Don Rhotten said. “They’re ... they’re . .. icky!”

  “Shut up, Don,” Wesley St. James said. “I’m thinking.”

  “About what?” Don Rhotten asked. “You’re not actually going to let these awful people put a dead body in here with television’s most beloved young newscaster, are you?”

  “I told you to shut up, Don,” Wesley said. “I think I’m onto something.”

  “Onto what?” Don said. “Maybe Seymour was right after all. I should never have come with you. You didn’t say anything about dead people, Little Bunny, you know you didn’t. All you talked about was getting off alone in the woods with a couple of bimbos.”

  “Who are you calling a bimbo, skinhead?” the second of the female passengers, Miss LaVerne Schultz, replied angrily.

  “I think,” the blond, whose name was Louella Frump, said, “that you’re just awful, Mr. Synjowlski.”

  “Who cares what you think, you dumb . . . wait a minute,” Wesley St. James replied. “Why am I awful?”

  “You have no understanding at all!” Louella Frump said.

  “Don’t you say anything like that to Little Bunny!” Don Rhotten rose to his friend’s defense.

  “Shut up, Don,” Wesley St. James said. “Understanding about what?”

  “That code of the deep woods Mr. LeGrande is talking about,” she said. “That’s something fine and noble, and you don’t understand it at all. You have no feelings, Mr. Synjowlski!”

  “You really think so, huh?” Wesley St. James said, obviously pleased.

  “I really think so,” she said.

  “That code of the deep woods really gets to you, huh?” Wesley St. James pursued. “Right in the gut?”

  “It makes me want to cry,” she said.

  “She’s a corpse freak, that’s what she is!” Don Rhotten said. “My God! What am I doing going into the deep woods with a corpse freak?”

  “Shut up, Don,” Wesley said.
“I’m thinking.”

  The Beaver, which is what the technical aviation magazines refer to as a single-engine, high-wing, eight-place monoplane, had meanwhile taxied up to the seaplane terminal dock.

  Wrong Way turned around again. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “you’re going to have to move to the right side of the airplane so we can get the body in here.”

  “Wesley!” Don Rhotten cried, shielding his eyes with his hands. “Do something!”

  “Shut up, Don,” Wesley St. James said.

  It was a good thing that Mr. Rhotten shielded his eyes. Otherwise, he would have seen Dr. Benjamin Franklin Pierce and Dr. John Francis Xavier McIntyre supervising the loading of Boris “on his stretcher” onto the aircraft.

  Mr. Rhotten had met Drs. Pierce and McIntyre several times before, and the memory was quite painful to him.* Had he seen them at the seaplane terminal dock in Boston Harbor, the odds are that he would have gone off the deep end right there. But, with his hands over his eyes and his head cradled on the more than adequate bosom of Miss LaVerne Schultz, he saw nothing at all.

  (* The somewhat sordid details of their first encounter are recorded in an otherwise delightful, enriching tome, M*A*S*H GOES TO MOROCCO (Pocket Books, New York, 1975).)

  The muscular attendants from Tranquil Glades slid the stretcher, with Boris strapped to it, into the aircraft and then closed the door.

  Wesley St. James and Miss Louella Frump stared in horrified fascination at the grayish skin of the body on the stretcher.

  “Don’t yon people,” Wesley St. James finally asked, in a nervous chirp, “cover the faces of dead people? I mean, isn’t that the way it’s done up here?”

  Boris moaned. He was reliving in his tortured dreams the shame he had experienced on the stage of the opera. The moan was piteous, and a tear rolled down his freshly shaven cheeks.

  “My God!” Miss Louella Frump said. “It’s alive!”

  “Hey, Frenchie,” Wesley St. James chirped at Angelo, alias Pierre LeGrande, “I thought you said it was a stiff?” Angelo turned around in his seat, saw the tear, heard another moan, and saw the chest move in rhythmic breathing.

  “M’sieu,” he said, thinking quickly, “has misunderstood me. Pierre zay zat zee man go home to zee woods to die.” He paused and then repeated, “It is zee code of zee deep woods, M’sieu.”

  “Yeah,” Wesley St. James said, thoughtfully, “the code of the deep woods.” Then he turned to Miss Frump. “Say, sweetie,” he said, “there’d be more room in here if I sat on your lap. How ’bout it?”

  Without waiting for a reply, he climbed onto her lap. Miss Frump didn’t object. In fact, she smiled. She smiled right at Pierre LeGrande, and then her right eyelid, which had been tinted with a color known as Passionate Purple, snapped closed and open in a wink. Pierre LeGrande, blushing furiously, turned around in his seat.

  “I just can’t wait, now,” Miss Frump said, reaching out to toy with the hair at the back of Angelo’s neck, “to get to the deep woods!”

  Two hours later, Spruce Harbor Flying Service’s Flight Six landed on Lake Kelly. Wrong Way taxied the Beaver close to shore.

  “Now what?” Wesley St. James asked.

  Angelo not only had no idea where they were, he didn’t know what was about to happen. So he turned in his seat, put his finger to his lips to signify silence and said:

  “M’sieu, zis is zee sacred moment. Say nothing.”

  “My God!” Don Rhotten said in alarm. “There’s an elephant in the bushes!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Don,” Wesley St. James said. “There’s no elephants in the Maine woods.”

  “Then you tell me what’s bending those trees and making all that noise!” Don replied, somewhat hysterically.

  At that moment, pushing large saplings out of his way, State Trooper Steven J. Harris appeared at the water’s edge. With a mighty bound, he jumped from the shore onto the Beaver’s floats. The Beaver sagged on one side. Harris was an impressive-looking law-enforcement officer, with his Smokey-the-Bear hat, Sam Browne belt, enormous Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum pistol, tunic, and glistening boots. He was also the largest and ugliest human being that Wesley St. James had ever seen, with the possible exception of the stiff on the stretcher.

  “Jesus H. Christ! Who ... or what ... is that?” Mr. St. James inquired.

  “Zat,” Pierre LeGrande said, “is zee law of zee deep woods!”

  Harris pulled on the door.

  “Wrong Way,” he said, “Angelo. This the guy Hawkeye sent me?”

  “That’s him,” Wrong Way replied.

  Trooper Harris, with professional gestures, took a stethoscope from the pocket of his tunic, placed it on Boris’ chest, and listened to his heart. He took his pulse and then replaced the stethoscope. Then he unfastened the straps that bound Boris to the stretcher and, with no apparent effort whatever, pulled Boris from the stretcher and draped him over his shoulder.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Policeman, sir,” Wesley St. James asked. “Is he dead?”

  “Oh, no,” Trooper Harris replied, with a smile. “I’ll have him up and around in no time.”

  “Is that so?” Wesley St. James asked. “You know about things like that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Trooper Harris replied, politely. “You see, sir, there’s no doctors up here. The law has to fill in where needed.”

  “I’ll be goddamned!” Wesley St. James said.

  “I would consider it a personal favor, sir, if you would not use profanity and/or naughty words in the presence of ladies,” Trooper Harris said, sternly.

  “Yes, sir,” Wesley St. James said. “I apologize, ladies. I don’t know what came over me. Please accept my most humble and abject apologies!”

  “He’s darling!” Louella Frump said. “I don’t think I have ever seen a more darling cop, and God knows, I’ve seen enough cops.”

  Trooper Harris blushed mightily.

  “Tell Hawkeye I’ll give him a call later tonight,” he said to Wrong Way. And then, effortlessly, with Boris draped over his shoulder, he jumped from the Beaver’s floats back onto shore. He paused at the water’s edge, turned and waved, and then plunged into the deep woods.

  “Did that great big ape say ‘Hawkeye’?” Don Rhotten asked. “Or has my mind already cracked under the strain?”

  “Shut up, Don,” Wesley St. James said.

  “He was not either a great big ape,” Miss LaVerne Schultz said to Mr. Rhotten. “He was a great big pussycat, that’s what he was!”

  “Wasn’t he?” Miss Frump replied, sort of cooing.

  “Well,” Don Rhotten sniffed, “if you ladies think he’s so hot, why don’t you just jump off here and go after him?”

  “Shut up, Don,” Wesley St. James said.

  “Don’t tempt me, baldy,” Miss LaVerne Schultz said.

  The issue was resolved when Wrong Way closed the door and shoved the throttle forward, and the Beaver turned away from the shore, gathered speed, and took off again. They flew for another forty-five minutes, twisting and turning, climbing and descending, and for the last ten minutes flying just above the treetops.

  The low-level flight was necessary. The Spruce Harbor Flying and Deep Maine Woods Guide Service had promised Mr. Wladislaw Synjowlski and Mr. John Smith an unspoiled, crystal-clear lake far from the noise and hubbub of civilization. If Wrong Way had flown the airplane any higher than two-hundred feet, the passengers would have been able to see that Lost Crystal Lake was about two miles, as the crow flies, from the wide concrete band of Interstate 95 and just over a small hill from a potato chip factory operated by one of Maine’s solons in the Senate.

  Wrong Way taxied to the extreme north end of the lake and cut the engine. An inflatable rubber boat was tossed out the door and blown up. With Pierre Le-Grande paddling enthusiastically, if somewhat unskillfully, the party of nature lovers was ferried to the shore, followed by their supplies.

  They stood on the shore and watched as Wrong Way took off again.

&
nbsp; Wesley St. James sniffed and then sniffed again.

  “Hey, Frenchie,” he asked, “what’s that awful smell?”

  “What awful smell is zat, M’sieu?”

  “It smells like rotten potatoes.”

  “Zat, M’sieu,” Pierre LeGrande replied with grand Gallic hauteur, “zat is zee smell of zee deep woods.”

  “It smells like rotten potatoes to me,” Don Rhotten said.

  “Shut up, Don,” Wesley St. James said. “What do you know?”

  “Yeah,” Miss LaVerne Schultz said. “Who are you, baldy, to question the word of Pierre LeGrande?” She winked at Angelo again. He hurriedly bent over a crate of supplies.

  Wesley St. James walked to the edge of the water. He leaned on a tree and inhaled deeply. A smile came to his lips, a look of near ecstasy. He was glad that he’d given in to the impulse to come to the deep woods. He already had been inspired. A whole new vista of program ideas was beginning to form in his mind. The details were a little vague so far, but things would become clear in time. He wasn’t known as the Napoleon of Daytime Drama for nothing.

  The cold truth is that when Wesley St. James left California for New York, he was not entirely motivated by an all-consuming desire to see Big Bunny and Uncle Ralph. The truth of the matter was that he was having a couple of problems, the solutions for which at the moment evaded him.

  Long ago, he had come to realize that when one is faced with a problem for which one has no answer, the prudent thing to do is make oneself scarce. He didn’t think that these problems would pursue him into the deep Maine woods, although he was by no means sure of this.

  Problem Number One was an actress, or rather the actress, Patience Throckbottom Worthington. Patience, to tell the truth, had been bugging him for a long time, since shortly after he had signed her to an exclusive seven-year contract with Wesley St. James Productions. At the time, he thought it had been a coup, a feather in his cap. Only six months before, he had been marching up and down State Street in Chicago, surrounded by sheets of plywood extolling the merits of Casimir Czylowski’s Old Pinsk Polish Sausage, and now here he was signing up one of America’s, indeed the world’s, most distinguished actresses.