can't believe it," Billy said while rubbing the back of his neck.
"That's your problem. Now if you're ready to change your life, take off that silly apron and come on board the cruise ship Lollypop with me. By the time we dock at Nassau in the Bahamas you will be a new man--strong, powerful, rich, successful and ready to conquer your world."
"That soon?"
"Perhaps. Now let me have the hundred dollars."
7
Billy stretched out in the oversized blue leather recliner in Hap Landing's stateroom while his new Mend and mentor poured two glasses of fine champagne. "Here," Hap said, "and may you become the man you've always wanted to be."
They clinked glasses, took a sip of the bubbly, and Billy said, "Please tell me, friend Hap, how are you going to awaken my dormant brain cells?"
Hap reached under his bed and pulled out a large stack of well-worn magazines. "While I take my leisurely stroll on deck I want you to look through these magazines and find someone you can be, whether a military warrior, a statesman, a famous author or whatever. Once you choose your hero I will show you how to become him, and in the magical process of taking on the new identity, your self-image will blossom and function as an alarm to awaken the initial group of sleeping cells, providing you with riches and power."
"I see." Billy moistened his lips as he opened the first magazine in his lap. Hearing the door close Billy quickly turned each page. Finding no one he wanted to be, he discarded the magazine and went to the second one, then continued through the stack. On the ninth page of the ninth magazine he gasped, sat up straight, leaned forward and gripped the magazine with both hands.
There in living color was all he wanted to be--dashing and dapper, bold and brave, sophisticated and sexy. It was a photograph of Scan Connery in his role as secret agent James Bond in an advertisement for the movie Dr. No. Bond was wearing a white dinner jacket, a martini in one hand, a gun in the other, a cigarette dangling from his lips, a beautiful scantily-clad woman hanging on his leg. That's me shouted Billy to himself as he jumped out of the chair.
When Hap Landing returned to the stateroom he noticed that Billy seemed taller, more erect, a sly grin on his face. "It would appear that you have found yourself," Hap said with a wink.
"Yes," said Billy returning the wink. "With a license to kill in the service of her majesty's government, I can now go forth as a daring, dauntless, self-confident man of the world. However I will need to purchase a white dinner jacket at the first opportunity, learn to smoke and drink martinis, and study the art of invincibility."
"And so you shall," Hap said with a crooked grin.
Before the cruise ship Lollypop reached Nassau Billy was curling the smoke from his mouth up into his nose in a French inhale, learning the difference in a shaken and stirred martini, and had been fitted with a summer tuxedo with extra wide shoulder pads and tailored trim at the waist. He and Hap had walked around the ship for hours upon hours, Hap drilling into Billy's mind that nothing could touch him, harm him, as long as he maintained the self-image of an intrepid, invulnerable, incomparable individual. Billy was walking tall, feeling good.
Visiting a casino in Nassau, Billy led the way through the door and his very presence froze the occupants in place, hundreds of eyes fastened on the sparkle in his as he paused to survey the crowd. With his command to "carry on" they suddenly thawed and returned to what they were doing--but a dozen women with bare shoulders and mini-skirts fell in line and followed him to the various gaming tables where he continued to win vast sums of money. A blonde voluptuous woman called Poopie from Peoria held to his arm, never letting him go until he agreed to sleep with her that night. Billy was riding high.
He gave Hap fifteen percent of his winnings as payment for the awakening brain cells, took Poopie to dinner at Pop's-on-the-Beach under the watchful stares of the diners who breathed envious thoughts of the most perfect of all couples sitting in their midst. Later, after making love to Poopie on satin sheets in her luxurious condo with the waves crashing fiercely on the beach below, she said, "Billy, your name doesn't go with your countenance. May I suggest you change it?"
Billy lifted his head from under the pillow and asked, "The name or the mien, air, presence that I present to the world?"
"The former. I think I like Bill Barker better than Billy Barker."
Billy jumped off the bed and walked to the mirror. "You're right. I don't look like a Billy." From that day forward Billy was known as Bill.
Bill Barker and Hap Landing decided to let the cruise ship Lollypop go on without them--they would stay in Nassau through the summer--and Bill bought six more white diner jackets and three pairs of new evening shoes. Word began spreading around town that he was indeed a secret agent, but not British. No, Bill Barker was an American, therefore he was a deep-cover spy for the Central Intelligence Agency. Bill liked that and began wearing a shoulder holster. He would think about a gun later.
One evening in August he and a new girl friend, Fitsie from Frisco, were strolling along the sandy beach when four men in wet suits suddenly sprang from the waves with harpoon guns and began shooting at them. Bill dodged the barbs while shielding Fitsie until the last one was fired, then pulled out a cigarette and lit it, took a deep drag and tilted his head up to blow away the smoke. He asked the men standing in their flippers, their harpoons hanging, "Who are you?"
One of the men said, "You are a fake, Bill Barker, an imposter, a pretender, for we are real CIA agents. And our orders are to murder you and throw your body to the fish, your flesh to be eaten until only salty bones are left to float out to sea."
Fitsie yawned and Bill Barker said with a laugh, "Still up to the same old tricks. You guys never learn. Anyway, tell your director that / have learned the secrets of psychomentalism and am therefore impregnable and undefeatable. I shall be glad to come to Langley to offer my services if he so desires. Now begone with you."
The four men dropped their harpoons and with heads hung low walked back into the water and disappeared into the waves. Fitsie said, "With your fearless self-image and awesome intimidation you were able to maintain the proper depiction of power. You are so marvelously wonderful, Bill Barker."
"Yes, I know."
8
Just before Labor Day Bill was having dinner at a fine restaurant with Charlene from Chicago when three fire trucks, two police cars and an ambulance raced down the street in front of their window table. Bill got up and pressed his nose to the glass. He could see a huge fire on the next corner near where his blue Mercedes convertible was parked. He told Charlene to continue with her eggplant pancake and pork meatballs and dashed out of the restaurant in his white dinner jacket, a red carnation in the lapel. Seeing that the fire was drawing closer to his automobile, he broke into a run; That's when he heard the screams of children from the top floor of the apartment building where the fire was licking the windows.
Without thinking he sprinted through the open front door of the building, past the firemen trying to remedy an airlock in the hose, past the police rifling the rooms on the first level, and up six flights of stairs to the echoing screams. He broke down the door to find six young children huddled together under the kitchen table.
With his reassuring smile they suddenly lost their fear and came running to him--and with one straddled on his neck, another on his back, and two in each arm, he rapidly descended the six flights of stairs and delivered the children to safety in the glare of lights
