Rising Sun Descending, page 30
The San Diego Public Library, for a modest fee, sent me a copy of his obituary, recorded in the local daily newspaper, the Union-Tribune. Listed among his survivors was his daughter, my second cousin, Jeannie Woodstrup, whom I was able to track down to northern California.
Jeannie, Jake’s adoptive daughter, graciously provided me with his record of continuous service and other documents relative to his 30-year career in the U.S. Navy. My mother's recollection of the last time she saw Uncle Jake jibes, incidentally, with his service record, which shows that he was transferred from San Diego to Headquarters Squadron 5-2, Norfolk, Va. in March of 1945, before returning to San Diego, where he was retired from service in September of that year.
The real Jake led a life almost as interesting as that of the pretend Jake in Rising Sun Descending. A chief aviation machinist mate, Jake Utley was among a relatively few enlisted men the navy trained to be pilots. They were called Naval Aviation Pilots; NAP for short.
His record of continuous service shows that he was stationed variously at South Island, San Diego; Pensacola, Florida; Hampton Roads, Virginia; and Coco Solo in the Panama Canal Zone, where his seaplane squadron likely fell under the authority of the base commander, John S. McCain Jr., father of the senator from Arizona.
Researching the history of naval aviation, I was surprised at how soon after the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk sailors began trying to figure out how to fly planes off of ships. They put ramps and catapults on the turrets of battleships and flung rattletrap biplanes into the air with the abandon of little boys let loose in a toy store. And damned if it didn’t work. The USS Enterprise, CV-6, and other similarly modeled aircraft carriers were America’s salvation in the early and dismal days of World War II.
Among the Jake memorabilia Jeannie mailed to me were two pictures of him in naval attire. One of them was taken, I think, aboard a seaplane tender somewhere off Alaska. It is paired with a second photograph showing Jake in foul weather gear.
Jake was stationed with VP-7, a patrol plane squadron based in San Diego from 1930-1934. During that time the squadron participated in an aerial photographic survey of Alaska.
In 1937, Jake Utley was ordered east from San Diego to join the commissioning crew of the USS Enterprise in Virginia. He told Jeannie that he rode the Enterprise down the rails on the day it was launched. He was the leading chief petty officer for VT-6, the squadron of Douglas Devastator torpedo bombers that was decimated at the Battle of Midway.
Jake served with VT-6 until just before the famous Doolittle raid on Tokyo. He was stationed at Barbers Point, Hawaii, at the time of the epic battle of Midway.
Jeannie says that he left the Enterprise because of a bout with appendicitis. And he finished the war as an inspector at the Consolidated Aircraft Company in San Diego, where the famous Catalina float planes, so instrumental in the victory in the Pacific, were mass produced.
When Jake died in May of 1962, I was an 11-year-old boy, infatuated by my grandfather’s stories of his mysterious brother, leading chief of the USS Enterprise.
My sincere appreciation goes to Ron Graetz, John Eberle, and Jeannie Woodstrup for introducing me to the real Uncle Jake and for investing a make-believe character and his wartime exploits with flesh and blood.
Wade Fowler
New Cumberland, PA
Want to hear more from Revere Polk and Liv Pearson? As a bonus to readers of Rising Sun Descending, the first five chapters of their continuing exploits follow. The Honey Trap will be published in 2015 by Sunbury Press.
Chapter 1
11:30 p.m. Friday, January 6, 2012, Harrisburg, PA
The exotic dancer known as Crystal Cleavage bumped and ground her way toward his table through a miasma of cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, and testosterone, having just finished her set at the Pink Pony. Up onstage, a shopworn prostitute named Galaxy strutted to Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” for the benefit of a bachelor party's rowdy guests. The song choice was apropos, but the groom-to-be and his drunken entourage didn’t seem to mind that Galaxy’s stuff was better left un-strutted.
He had selected this spot, set far back from the stage, specifically to avoid intimate contact with the dancers. He had no dollar bills to dispense and no desire for a lap dance. Crystal had summoned him here. He acquiesced because they had a history rife with repetition despite his best efforts to forestall it.
“Do you really enjoy doing that?”
“Doing what?” Her feigned innocence belied her outfit. A G-string, pasties, and a thin dressing gown did little to obscure her assets both fore and aft as she pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from him. Young, tall, honey blonde, green-eyed, and buxom, Crystal outclassed the other dancers by several city blocks.
Her legs, in the vernacular of the bawdy house bard, extended all the way to her ass.
“Parading naked for the amusement of men.”
“You love a parade, or at least you used to.” She winked and licked her lips.
He recoiled, raising his arms and waving them like an evangelist beckoning the sinners to the altar. “We’re related for Christ’s sake. I want better for you than this!”
“I’m your stepsister. We are not related by blood ... other than the blood I shed the first time we―”
“Enough!”
She laughed. “Don’t be such a prude, bro. You didn’t do anything I didn’t want you to do. I seduced you all those years ago because virginity was such a drag.”
“Yours or mine?” he asked, his bitterness palpable.
“It was your first time, too?”
“Nah. Steph Baker. In the tenth grade. In the basement when Mom and Dad were at one of your peewee soccer games.”
She cocked her head to one side, activating her bullshit sensors.
“Liar.”
“Slut.”
She stuck out her tongue. “Stuffed shirt!”
That was his stepsister all over. It was as if two people resided within her skin: a temptress in one breath, a silly school girl in the next.
“So why did you ask me to meet you here, other than to humiliate the both of us?”
“I’m not humiliated,” she retorted. “I’m empowered. The men in here? They belong to me, the poor bastards. They think they own me. But it’s the other way round. I don’t please. I tease ... at two bills an hour, on average.”
“There are better ways to earn money,” he said.
“Such as being a high-and-mighty lawyer? That, by the way, is why I asked you to stop by.”
“You need legal advice?”
“No. You do.”
“How so?”
“Your boss. He’s doin’ the dirty with some of the dancers here.”
He put his finger to his lips. “No so loud. We might be overheard.”
She smiled. “So, Counselor, you concede that sexual impropriety on the part of your employer does not lie beyond the realm of possibility?”
He shrugged. “He’s a man’s man, and his wife …”
“Is a conniving bitch.” Crystal finished the sentence for him.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Your boss did. He’s a regular here, an adrenaline junkie. Doesn’t shy from a quickie in the alley if the price is right and the girl is willing. Says ever since his second tour in Afghanistan, nothing gets him off like danger. There’s a big payday here for the both of us, but I need your help springing a honey trap.”
“I’m not interested in selling out my boss,” he said.
“You’re already selling him out. If he knew who you were in bed with, he’d throw you under the bus quicker than you can say scat.”
“How do you know with whom I am in bed?”
“There’s no shortage of loose women and loose talk in a titty bar.”
He leaned forward. “Come on, sis. Cut me a break, I’ve got my own game going here.”
“Yeah, and if you don’t let me play, too, I’m going to tell him what you’ve been up to. And don’t play coy with me. You know what I mean.”
“He’d never believe it. You have no credibility. You’re just …”
“A slut? Maybe so. But these give me all the credibility I need.” She grabbed her breasts jiggled them, enjoying his discomfort. “Come on, bro. Let me play, too.”
“What do you have in mind?”
Onstage, Galaxy bent over and shook her ass in the face of a bachelor party reveler. The jukebox blared, providing musical accompaniment for a crime against good taste.
Crystal Cleavage leaned forward, centering her stepbrother in the crosshairs of her 38s and committed a felony of her own.
“Here’s what we need to do,” she said.
Chapter 2
11:30 a.m. Tuesday, January 24, 2012, Harrisburg, PA
The floor beneath Rev Polk’s feet trembled as the presses hit third gear down in the basement, churning out copies of the metro edition of the Daily Telegraph. Rev looked up from his computer screen and let his eyes wander. Sunshine streamed through banks of windows on the east side, bathing the newsroom in a warm glow on a cold winter morning.
The shutter of Rev’s internal camera clicked, capturing the moment like a still from a motion picture. In that image written forevermore to Rev’s metaphysical hard drive, Roxy Burton, the lifestyle editor chatted with George Berk, the slot man on the copy desk. Her fingers floated in the space between them like butterflies. Roxy couldn’t talk without moving her hands.
Back in the sports department, a collection of desks grouped to Rev’s right, Sammy Smith, the sports editor, muttered around the end of an unlit cigar, his eyes moving back and forth across hard copy. Sammy didn’t truck with computers. He did his editing on paper and gave the changes back to the reporter to input on the computer. It was an anachronism that management tolerated because Sammy could pump up a mediocre sports story with just a couple slashes of his red pen.
The big door leading to the southern stairwell banged open and a copy boy, a high school kid who for some strange reason aspired to be a print journalist in the electronic age, backed into the newsroom carrying a big stack of newspapers hot off the presses. He plopped the pile down on the nearest desk and began distributing the newspapers among the various departments.
The Daily Telegraph still offered its readers an afternoon paper, the metro edition they called it, designed for commuters to read on the bus on their way home from work. But the editor, Grayson Collingsworth, had become increasingly strident in the last two months. The p.m. product was dying. Circulation and profits were down, down, down, corresponding with Collingsworth’s mood: foul, foul, foul.
Rev thought of these things as he crossed the newsroom to pick up a newspaper, unwilling to wait for the copy boy to arrive at his work station. Rev had hurried back from a 9 a.m. press conference at which the governor had dropped a bombshell. Nothing got his adrenaline pumping like deadline writing. His synapses sizzled still in the afterglow.
Collecting his prize, he made his way back to his desk, sat down, and snapped the paper open, grunting in satisfaction when he saw his story in the hard news spot: front page upper right, with a three-deck headline over two columns.
Governor reverses field
Opts to support lottery
Privatization plan
I didn’t matter to Rev that a six-graph synopsis had been up for 40 minutes on the website. He snapped the paper a second time for emphasis. This was journalism. The newspaper’s website was no better than TV and radio, in Rev’s humble opinion. Synopses are for sissies.
His enmity for the electronic media was unchanged by management’s recent embrace of it. This was the real thing. It had substance, weight, and it would endure much longer than the newspaper’s current system software, which was incompatible with the six or seven versions that had preceded it.
A hundred years from now no one would be able to read the stories stored in bits and bytes, the programs that created them moribund. But newsprint? Rev mused: it’s immutable, baby.
Rev took solace in that thought as he reread his story to make sure the copy desk hadn’t messed it up.
By Revere Polk
Daily Telegraph Staff Writer
HARRISBURG, PA, Tuesday, January 24, 2012 – In a dramatic reversal of position, Pennsylvania Gov. Casey Lawrence indicated today that he will entertain legislation now hung up in the State House Finance Committee to privatize the state lottery.
The plan, the brainchild of state Rep. Shelby Winters, R-Bellefonte, would put the management of the lottery, which generates $530 million annually, in support of the Office of Aging, up for competitive bids.
“I think that there is an opportunity here to infuse the budget with a substantial amount of revenue without raising taxes, while at the same time ensuring that senior citizen programs continue to be funded at their current pace for the foreseeable future,” the governor said before a stunned press corps in the briefing room at the state capitol.
“I know that this announcement will not be welcomed by many of my Democratic brethren, but the time has come in the state budget process to think creatively and to reach out across the aisle when the other side comes up with a viable alternative to a dismal status quo.”
The privatization plan was based on a model developed by Jonathan Kelley Associates LLC, which would be among the top contenders to manage the lottery. Kelley, who lived most of the year in London, was a notorious recluse, and, reputedly, a front man for oil money flowing out of Russia.
Winters was delighted by the governor’s change of heart, saying: “The privatization plan will generate nearly a billion dollars up front by the most conservative of estimates, and guarantees annual revenues equaling or exceeding what is now being generated under state operation. There are certain things the private sector does better than the public. And one of them is making money.”
The governor’s announcement at his regular Tuesday morning press briefing drew immediate and sharp criticism from his Democratic base.
“Winters’ bill would give the new managers license to open up all sorts of new games not envisioned under the original legislation empowering the lottery,” said Roosevelt Franklin, D-Philadelphia, the ranking Democrat on the House Finance Committee. “The availability of even more lottery games will prey on the very poorest among us, and while it will infuse the state budget with a one-time lump sum, a steady stream of revenue over the years is by no means assured.
“Typical of most Republican plans, this one balances the budget on the backs of the working man. To generate the kind of revenues Winters’ plan promises would require the furlough of hundreds of state employees now making a decent living wage, replacing them with underpaid, overworked employees willing to accept positions beneath their station due to the horrible state of the commonwealth’s economy.”
Anticipating that criticism, the governor, in his press conference, said that one of the modifications he will insist upon will be the gradual furlough over several years of state workers now employed by the lottery, a generous severance package, and employment counseling and placement services, all at the expense of the new managers of the lottery.
Those words of assurance fell on deaf ears at the Harrisburg Chapter of the Pennsylvania Association of State Workers, an affiliate of the AFSME.
“Governor Lawrence is a traitor,” said chapter president Sylvester Adkins. “He won the governor’s house with the help of union workers and he will lose the governor’s house in the next election cycle due to his treachery.”
Chapter 3
2 p.m. Wednesday, January 25, 2012, Harrisburg, PA
Sprewell Madison and Russell Thompson sat knee to knee in a tiny anteroom on the third floor of the glass-fronted Locust Street Building in Harrisburg.
They had been escorted to the room by two buzz-topped rent-a-cops half their size, Sprewell from the basement mail room and Russell from a first-floor ladies room, which he was cleaning at the time.
The two men, one white and the other black, respectively, both were enormous, almost 13 feet and 500 pounds between them. Neither of the rent-a-cops had the authority or the physical attributes to compel Madison and Thompson to do anything they weren’t willing to do. They would stay until they decided to leave.
Sprewell and Russell knew each other well, but they couldn’t show it because there was no way to tell whether they were being watched. They were undercover cops, state police troopers to be more precise, attuned to the risk of indiscretion.
It had taken them three months to land their jobs with Jonathan Kelley Associates LLC, Russell as a janitor and Sprewell as a courier. It took two more months of grueling, mind-numbing work for them to secure passwords to the firm’s Cloud accounts―lots of searching under mouse pads, desk blotters, and paper clip trays when no one was looking. But the forensic guys couldn’t follow the supposed electronic trail from the Russian mafia to a Native American casino to an offshore account in the Caymans.
There had to be another level of security, another layer of intrigue to peel away. But how?
Being called together into the same room was ominous. They took pains to ignore each other when their paths crossed at work. So why had they been summoned to this tiny airless anteroom?
Their chairs faced a desk, back dropped by a bank of windows. Locust Street, one way east, lay three floors below. Behind the desk directly in front of the windows two large Klieg lights affixed to tripods lurked like props in an inquisition chamber. The lights were pointed squarely at their chairs.
Sprewell was the first to risk speech.
“Wonder what’s up with the lights.”
“Dunno, man.”
