Barbara Stokes - Swing Town U. S. A.

A black Porsche sped up the driveway which led to the Bayou Country Club. The long white lines of the columns fronting the club were almost imperceptible through the lush vegetation. As the Porsche neared the parking lot, the grounds broke into an explosion of color. Clumps of azaleas bordered the parking lot as well as the walkways leading to and from the club.

Kenneth "Catch" Callahan climbed out of the Porsche and stretched his six foot, two-inch frame. He blinked his eyes against the onslaught of the harsh Texas sun. He reached inside the pocket of his safari jacket and put on a pair of aviator-style sunglasses. Suddenly there was a nearby explosion and the ground shook beneath his feet. The windows of the country club rattled and several magnolia blossoms fell from the trees to the ground.

"Sonofabitch!"

He turned to his left and looked across the golf course to the hills beyond. The sides of the hills were already eroded from the explosives and the giant teeth of the bulldozers. The site just beyond the boundaries of the Bayou Country Club had been sold to the Land Development Corporation and was being turned into a housing development for middle to upper middle class residents.

"It's going to ruin the view," Catch muttered, and shook his head. "Just imagine golf balls crashing through the windows, bopping blue-haired matrons on the head."

Catch Callahan was a striking looking man, tall, muscularly built with steel-gray hair and an infectious smile. He looked more like Paul Newman's younger brother than a corporation "troubleshooter." His eyes, blue-gray and startling, seemed cold and calculating. His great hands, with their long tapered fingers seemed incapable of a caress. His full lips set in an eternal conventioneer's smile seemed incapable of true laughter.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Underneath his business-like exterior, Catch Callahan was a loving, gentle, imaginative and humorous man, but in his line of business, he preferred to adopt a certain image… one of strength and power.

He stubbed out the cigarette he had been smoking in the gravel and made his way up the concrete walk to the country club.

The Bayou Country Club was located just outside of Houston on a large tract of land at the edge of a bayou. It was designed along the lines of a southern plantation with tall majestic columns surrounding all four sides of the main building and similar southern colonial architecture in the smaller out-buildings.

It was constructed in 1917 by a wealthy southerner named Colonel Jarvis Jefferson. Jefferson was a notorious drinker. His wife was a bit of a tart and his children immensely unruly. This caused him and his family to be denied entrance to other country clubs in the area. Unperturbed by this slight to his dignity, Jefferson built his own country club and made it grander than all the others combined. People clamored for admission, even those who had kept Jefferson out of their clubs and then it was his turn to do the blackballing.

Colonel Jefferson ran the country club until he died in 1949. His family sold the business to a gentleman named Howard Winthrop, who was a southern snob but definitely not a businessman. He allowed the place to fall into disrepair and eventually it went bankrupt. In 1976 it was to the corporate firm of Dwyer, Keefe, Corson and Kelly. The heads of that corporation hired Catch Callahan to help them turn the country club into a money-making proposition. Catch had just finished working on, respectively, a struggling Las Vegas hotel, a Los Angeles nightclub and a giant amusement park in Salt Lake City. He was tired and needed a vacation and he didn't believe the country club could be turned into a profit-making venture. When he was first approached by Gerald Kelly, one of the heads of the corporation, Catch argued "country clubs are a thing of the past. They are like hoop skirts and cavaliers-nobody gives a damn anymore."

"There's where you're wrong, Mr. Callahan," Kelly had replied. "They may have faded in popularity a bit during the sixties and early seventies when everybody was going hippie. Hell, even fraternities and sororities were closing on campuses all over the country, but that's past now. There's a lot of new money and a lot of new snobs."

Callahan wanted to turn down the job, but the financial rewards offered to him were too much to pass up. Callahan was aware of the country club since he had been born and reared near Houston. Writing the first draft of his inquiries into the country club, he found himself bemused by the whole idea. Here he was hired to save the club from almost certain financial disaster and when he was a young man, he couldn't even go in through the front door.

He pushed open the front doors of the country club and walked over the highly polished mahogany floor boards. He turned right just past the reception area and opened the door to his temporary office. His secretary, the ever-efficient Miss Tyne, offered her usual banal comment about the day.

"Good morning, Mr. Callahan. It's just beau-ti-ful today, isn't it?"

"That it is, Miss Tyne," replied Callahan without glancing at her.

"May I bring you in a cup of coffee?"

"That would be nice. I take it…"

"I remember, Mr. Callahan, black and sweet."

Catch passed through Miss Tyne's office and opened the door to his own and closed it after him. Miss Tyne, a dusty-looking spinster in her early thirties, sighed after him. She pursed her colorless lips and went to the coffee-maker which was sitting on a sideboard. She looked into the mirror of the sideboard and pinched her pale cheeks.

Miss Tyne was not unattractive, neither was she attractive. She was one of the gray people who no matter what they wore or said, seemed to blend into the environment like a spilled drink in a plush carpet. She had brown hair which had recently begun to grow gray and was the color of a sparrow's wing. She wore a pair of black, horn-rimmed glasses which were ten years out of style and which emphasized her paleness. Her body was thin to the point of emaciation and her breasts caused her one and only lover to remark, "every time I see them things, I think of eggs, sunny side up."

Miss Tyne sighed again and picked up a translucent cup and saucer. She spooned in two heaping teaspoons of sugar and set it under the spigot of the coffee maker.

Miss Tyne was unabashedly in love with Catch Callahan and although she was a plain woman, she was extremely imaginative and would often indulge herself in flights of fancy concerning herself and her boss.

In that special part of the mind where wishes become truths and dreams reality, Miss Tyne replayed her morning scene with Catch:

Miss Tyne pictured herself sitting on the edge of a desk, her legs crossed. She was filing her nails. Suddenly the doors burst open and Catch Callahan sauntered in. He was wearing that beige safari suit she liked so much. Beautifully tailored, she could make out every outline of his muscular body beneath the fabric of the suit material.

"Good morning, Mr. Callahan," she breathed sensuously. "A beautiful morning, isn't it?"

He stopped in the center of the room, feet planted firmly on the carpet. He stared at her for a long moment through those fantastic blue-gray eyes of his. He flexed his thighs and said in reply, "not half as beautiful as you, Miss Tyne."

Flustered by his brashness, she asked, "can I make you a cup of coffee?"

"You know how I take it, Amanda!"

Amanda-he had called her Amanda!

"Extra sweet, Catch. I'll stir it with my finger."

When she slid off her desk, her stockings made a loud, slick noise as her thighs uncrossed. She walked slowly, provocatively, to the coffee-maker. She could feel his eyes on her back burning into her. Then she heard him go into his own office, but this time he didn't close the door. She filled the coffee cup and stirred it, as she had promised, with her finger. Then she sashayed into his office.