"It would be a pleasure," he assured me with complete truth.
I was flipping through the latest copy of the Seattle newspaper later that day, looking for something to occupy myself with during my overnight stay there. I'd considered and then rejected the idea of asking Nina to come along with me. As much as her parents were growing to like me I did not think they liked me quite enough to allow their daughter to accompany me on an overnight trip. It was as I was perusing the sports page that I happened across a couple of advertisements that got my attention. I looked at them carefully, considering what I was thinking about. Was it possible to take care of two things at once on the Seattle trip?
I made a few long distance phone calls, putting my name down for reservations and promising I'd have checks in the mail the very next day. If my plans didn't work out I could always renege on these promises. I called up Ron again.
"Would it be a big problem," I asked him, "if you picked me up in Seattle around six o'clock at night instead of in the morning?"
"None at all," he assured me. "Got some plans?"
"Something like that." I said. "And would there be any problem with a passenger on the way up and back, and with, oh, say forty pounds of cargo or so for the return leg?"
"None at all," he repeated. "That's well within the weight limit of the plane. What do you have in mind?"
I told him and he assured me again that there was no problem with anything. Smiling, I hung up and then dialed Nina's number. Jack answered the phone and recognized my voice immediately.
"I'll get Nina," he said.
"No," I told him, "it's you I wanted to talk to."
"Me?"
"Yes," I explained. "Jack, you're on light duty right?"
"Yeah."
"Any chance you could take off the 23rd and the 24th of this month?"
He snorted. "All they have me doing is busy work. Besides, I've been there for thirty-three years. I can take off whenever I damn well please. Why do you ask?"
"A friend of my family is flying me to Seattle that day for a job interview," I told him. "And I'll be forced to stay overnight for various reasons. Now I was flipping through the paper and happened to notice that the Mariners are playing the A's on that day at four o'clock. I've managed to get my hands on a couple of home plate tickets. Interested?"
"You want to take me to a baseball game in Seattle?" he asked, surprised.
"Not only that," I went on, "but I also have a couple of reservations on a deep sea fishing boat that leaves the waterfront at 6:30 the next morning and stays out for eight or nine hours. I know you like fishing so I thought that maybe you'd like to come along. Ron, that's our friend, will pick us up at the airport at six o'clock that night and have us home by 8:00."
There was a long pause. Finally, "Bill, why didn't you ask one of your friends to do this with you?"
"I did Jack." I replied.
A slight cough. "Bill," he said, "you've got yourself a traveling companion. Thank you for inviting me. Of course you'll let me pay for…"
"Negative," I interrupted. "It's all on me. I can afford it. Just be packed and ready to go at 7:00 that morning."
"Thank you," he repeated, seemingly touched.
Of course, being me, I DID have an ulterior motive.
I picked Jack up at his house at 7:00 AM on the morning of the 23rd. He carried a small suitcase with him and seemed quite excited to be going on the adventure. Nina accompanied him out and gave me a hug and kiss before we drove off to the small, private airport.
When we arrived, we found Ron already there, performing the pre-flight checks on his small Cessna. Ron was sipping a cup of coffee and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. Aviator sunglasses were perched on his nose. He was a short, terminally joking man and I'd always liked him. He'd given me fifty bucks as a graduation gift.
The introductions were made and Ron noticed that Jack was giving nervous glances at the aircraft.
"Not afraid to fly are you?" he asked Jack gently.
"I was a paratrooper in the war," Jack replied. "The last time I flew it was over Berlin and I had a parachute and an M1 on my back."
"Well have no fear," Ron assured him. "I go along with the smart pilot's credo. There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots. I've been flying for more than twenty years, including a stint in A-1 Sandies in Vietnam. I've logged thirty-six combat missions and more than six thousand hours total. You are perfectly safe with me at the stick."
"That's good to know," Jack put in.
We roared into the sky shortly afterword, Jack sitting in the front next to Ron, me sitting in the back. The two older men exchanged tales of their war experiences as we soared over the gentle rolling hills of Eastern Washington and finally over the Cascades where the unstable air bounced us around quite frightfully. We landed perfectly normally at nine-fifteen that morning and caught a cab to the motel where I'd made reservations.
I changed into my suit and caught another cab to the medical center, arriving twenty minutes early. The interview went well, outstanding in fact. I was all but assured that the job was mine if I wanted it.
We went to the baseball game and spent a pleasant four hours just shooting the shit and drinking beer and eating hotdogs. Jack bought my beer for me and no one ever questioned the fact that I was drinking it. The Mariners, despite horrible odds to the contrary, beat the A's 4-3, coming back with a two run homer in the eighth just when things seemed hopeless.
We went back to our motel room and crashed hard, Jack in one bed, me in the other. Jack, I found, snored like a chainsaw.
A wake-up call at 5:30 the next morning got us up and around. The day was beautiful for fishing, with no clouds and no rain. Summer is the best part of the year in Seattle. We scored some coffee and a light breakfast from the motel restaurant and then caught a cab to the waterfront. I had a large ice chest with me, the same one I took on boat trips, and we filled it with ice and beer. We obtained our one-day fishing licenses, rented our equipment, and at 6:40, the seventy foot fishing boat headed out of Puget Sound for the open water.
The sea was very rough, with fifteen-foot swells bobbing us up and down like a cork in the Pacific Ocean. There were sixty fishermen and women on the boat and well over half of them became completely incapacitated with seasickness. Bodies were laying everywhere, on every bench, on every table.
The bathroom was flooded in vomit, it overflowed the toilet and ran across the floor.
Jack and I did just fine. Both of us had been deep-sea fishing before, Jack many times throughout his life, me on five consecutive years as part of a company function in my previous life. Of course I didn't tell Jack this and he admired my stamina. Those of us that remained un-sickened managed to catch the limit for everyone else that was unable to fish. We no sooner dropped our lines in and let them sink to the bottom than we were pulling them up with three fish on the hooks. I caught twelve rock cod and Jack caught ten. He also managed to hook a lingcod, an ugly, dangerous looking fish, which the first mate gaffed and drug aboard with a long pole.
Jack and I basked in male bonding throughout that day, becoming closer and closer to each other, becoming friends despite the differences in our ages (which wasn't quite as great as Jack thought it was). We drank beer and ate the sandwiches we'd bought at the waterfront deli before departure. We gave contemptuous glances and comments to those that were too sick to fish, even though their non-participation was a blessing because we rarely got our lines tangled with another fisherman.
By the time the all the lines were pulled in for the last time and the boat began heading back towards the protected water of Puget Sound, we were pleasantly exhausted, sunburned, and sore all over. We found a relatively clean spot near the stern of the boat and sat down, both of us cracking open a fresh beer. Jack surprised me by producing a couple of cigars from his belongings. He offered one to me and I took it, seeing with pleasure that it was a genuine Havana.