Closing Time

by Joseph Heller

  "I am Major John Yossarian of the M & M Pentagon Air Force Project," Yossarian replied in crisp, stern tones. "You insolent cocksucker. Where's your superior?"

  "Captain McMahon here," said an older man, with emotionless surprise. "What's your trouble, sir?"

  "This is Major John Yossarian of the M & M Pentagon Air Force Project, Captain. You've got my son there. I don't want him touched, I don't want him moved, I don't want him put near anyone who might harm him. And that includes your cops. Do we understand each other?"

  "I understand you," McMahon came back coolly. "But I don't think you understand me. Who did you say this is?"

  "John Yossarian, Major John Yossarian. And if you tie me up on this any longer it will be your ass too. I'll be there in six minutes."

  To the taxi driver he gave a hundred-dollar bill and said respectfully, hearing his heart pound: "Please pass every traffic light you can pass safely. If you're stopped by a cop I'll give you another hundred and go the rest of the way on foot. I've got a child in trouble."

  That the child was past thirty-seven did not matter. That he was defenseless did.

  But Michael was still safe, handcuffed to the wall on a chain as though he would founder to the floor if he did not have that chain for support, and he was white as a ghost.

  The station was in an uproar. People were moving and shouting everywhere. The cages were swarming with arms and sweaty faces and with gleaming eyes and mouths, the hallway too, the air stank of everything, and the officers and prison guards, sweating and swarming all over too, labored powerfully in picking, pulling, shoving, and heaving prisoners to be steered outside into vans and trucked downtown for delivery into other hands. Of all who were there, only Michael and Yossarian showed awareness of anything uncommon. Even the prisoners seemed ideally acclimated to the turbulent environment and vigorous procedures. Many were bored, others were amused and contemptuous, some ranted crazily. Several young women were hooting with laughter and shrieking obscenities brazenly in taunting debauchery, baiting and incensing the frustrated guards, who had to endure and cope with them without retaliating.

  McMahon and the desk sergeant were awaiting him with stony faces.

  "Captain--you him?" Yossarian began, talking directly into McMahon's light-blue, steely eyes with a hard-boiled stare of his own. "Get used to the idea! You're not going to put him into one of those cells. And I don't want him in a van with those others either. A squad car is all right, but I'll want to go with him. If you like, I'll hire a private car, and you can put some officers in with us."

  McMahon listened with folded arms. "Is that right?" he said quietly. He was slim, straight, and more than six feet tall, with a bony face with tiny features, and the crests of his high cheekbones were spotted pink with a faint efflorescence, as though in savoring anticipation of the conflict at hand. "Tell me again, sir. Who did you say you were?"

  "Major John Yossarian. I'm at work on the M & M Pentagon Air Force Project."

  "And you think that makes your son an exception?"

  "He is an exception."

  "Is he?"

  "Are you blind?" Yossarian exploded. "Take a good look, for Christ sakes. He's the only one here with a dry crotch and a dry nose. He's the only one here who's white."

  "No, he's not, Captain," meekly corrected the sergeant. "We've got two other Caucasians we're holding in back who beat up a cop by mistake. They were looking for money."

  Everyone around was contemplating Yossarian now as though he were something bizarre. And when he finally appreciated why, that he was poised before them with his arms raised in an asinine prizefighter's stance, as though ready to punch, he wanted to whimper in ironic woe. He had forgotten his age. Michael too had been regarding him with astonishment.

  And at just that point of unnerving self-discovery, McBride wandered up and, in a gentle manner both firm and conciliatory, asked: "What's up, guys?"

  Yossarian saw a sturdy man of middle height with a flushed face and a polyester suit of vapid light gray, with a broad chest that bellied outward and down so that from his neck to his waist he seemed a bulwark.

  "Who the fuck are you?" sighed Yossarian in despair.

  McBride replied softly, with the fearless confidence of a man competent at riot control. "Hello. I'm Deputy Supervisor Lawrence McBride of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Hello, Tommy. Something going on?"

  "He thinks he's big," said McMahon. "He says he's a major. And he thinks he can tell us what to do."

  "Major Yossarian," Yossarian introduced himself. "He's got my son here, Mr. McBride, chained to that wall."

  "He's been arrested," said McBride pleasantly. "What would you want them to do with him?"

  "I want them to leave him where he is until we decide what we will do. That's all. He has no criminal record." To the police guard nearest Michael, Yossarian barked an order. "Unlock him now. Please do that right now."

  McMahon pondered a moment and signaled permission.

  Yossarian resumed amicably. "Tell us where you want him to be. We're not running away. I don't want trouble. Should I hire that car? Am I talking too much?"

  Michael was aggrieved. "They never even read me my right to be silent."

  "They probably didn't ask you to say anything," McBride explained. "Did they?"

  "And the handcuffs hurt like hell! Not that one. The real handcuffs, God damn it. That's brutality."

  "Tommy, what's he charged with?" asked McBride.

  McMahon hung his head. "Beating the subway fare."

  "Oh, shit, Tommy," said McBride, entreating.

  "Where's Gonzales?" McMahon asked the sergeant.

  "That's the guy who grabbed me," Michael called out.

  The sergeant blushed. "Back at the subway exit, Captain, making his quota."

  "I thought they had a fucking quota!" Michael shouted.

  "Major, can't you keep your son quiet while we settle this?" asked McMahon, begging a favor.

  "Tommy," said McBride, "couldn't you just give him a summons and release him on a DTA? We know he'll appear."

  "What did you think we were going to do, Larry?" McMahon replied. He appealed to Yossarian as though they were allies. "You hear that, Major? I'm a captain, he was a sergeant, and now he's telling me how to handle my business. Sir, are you really a major?"

  "Retired," admitted Yossarian. He found the business card he wanted of the several he carried. "My card, Captain. And one for you, Mr. McBride--McBride, is it?--in case I can return the favor. You've been a godsend."

  "Here's mine, Major," said McBride, and gave a second one to Michael. "And one for you too, in case you're ever in trouble here again."

  Michael was moping as they walked out with McBride. "It's a good thing I've still got you to look after me, isn't it?" he accused sullenly. Yossarian shrugged. "I feel like such a fucking weakling now."

  McBride intervened. "Hey, you did the right thing, kiddo." He paused for a chuckle, laughed louder. "How could you convince us you'd break our backs and legs, when we had you in handcuffs?"

  "Is that what I did?" said Yossarian with fright.

  McBride laughed again. "Where's the credibility? That right, Major Yossarian?"

  "Call me Yo-Yo, for God's sake," said Yossarian jovially. "I must have been forgetting my age."

  "You sure were," charged Michael. "I was scared, damn it. And you guys are laughing. You were a champ, Pop," he continued sardonically. "Me, I don't even have a loud voice. Before when I was stopped by that cop, my hands shook so much he was afraid I was having a heart attack and almost let me go."

  "It's the way we are, Michael, when we're angry or scared. I get crazy and talk too much."

  "I couldn't even give them my right name so they'd believe me. And when the hell were you really ever a major?"

  "Want a business card?" Yossarian snickered slyly and turned to McBride. "For about a minute and a half," he explained. "They gave me a temporary boost near the end because they didn't know what else to do with me.
Then they shipped me home, brought me back to my permanent grade, and gave me my honorable discharge. I had the medals, I had the points, I even had my Purple Heart."

  "You were wounded?" cried McBride.

  "Yeah, and crazy too," replied Michael, proudly. "Another time he went walking around naked."

  "You walked around naked?" cried McBride.

  "And they gave him a medal," boasted Michael, completely at ease now. "A medal for bravery."

  "You got a medal for bravery?" cried McBride.

  "And couldn't pin it on."

  "Because he was naked?"

  "Still naked."

  "Weren't you embarrassed? Didn't they do anything?"

  "He was crazy."

  "What'd you get the medal for, Major? How'd you get the Purple Heart? Why'd you walk around naked?"

  "Stop calling me Major, Mr. McBride," said Yossarian, who had no wish to talk now about the waist gunner from the South who'd been killed over Avignon and the small tail gunner Sam Singer from Coney Island who kept fainting away each time he came to and saw the waist gunner dying and Yossarian throwing up all over himself as he worked with bandages and tried vainly to save the dying man. It was sometimes funny to him since in just those gruesome anecdotal aspects. The wounded waist gunner was cold and in pain, and Yossarian could find nothing to do that would warm him up. Every time Singer revived, he opened his eyes on something else Yossarian was busy with that made him faint away again: retching, wrapping up dead flesh, wielding scissors. The dying gunner was freezing to death on the floor in a patch of Mediterranean sunlight, Sam Singer kept fainting, and Yossarian had taken off all his clothes because the sight of the vomit and blood on his flight uniform made him want to vomit some more and to feel with nauseated certitude that he would never want to have to wear any kind of uniform ever again, not ever, and by the time they landed, the medics were not sure which one of the three to take into the ambulance first. "Let's talk about you."

  Yossarian now knew that McBride's wife had left him--transformed almost overnight into a wrathful figure of pure fury by an inner rage he had never guessed existed--and that he had been living alone since his daughter had moved to California with a boyfriend to work as a physical therapist. To McBride, the unexpected breakup of his marriage was one more heartrending cruelty he could not puzzle out in a world he saw seething barbarously with multitudes of others. Former detective sergeant Larry McBride of the Port Authority police force was fifty and had the boyish, chubby face of an introspective seraph in hard times. As a cop he had never been able to outgrow the sympathy he suffered for every type of victim he encountered--even now his knowledge of the one-legged woman living in the terminal tormented him--and always after wrapping up a case, to his racking emotional detriment, he would begin suffering compassion for the criminals too, no matter how hardened, bestial, or obtuse, no matter how vicious the crime. He would see them all pityingly, as they'd been as children. When the opportunity arose to retire on a full pension and take the executive position at good salary at the bus terminal--in which, in fact, as one kind of guardian or another, he had by now spent his entire working life--he seized it joyfully.

  The end of a marriage he had thought satisfactory was a blow from which it seemed at first he did not think he would recover. Now, while Michael prepared to wait, Yossarian wondered what new thing McBride wanted to show him.

  "You tell me," McBride answered mysteriously.

  The time before, he had unveiled his plans for a maternity cell, for converting one of the two auxiliary prison cages in the rear, for which there never had been need, into a room for mothers of unwanted babies who most generally disposed of the newborn infants in alleys and hallways or threw them away into wastebaskets, garbage cans, and Dumpsters. He had already moved in at his own expense some pieces of furniture from his apartment for which he no longer had need. Yossarian nodded as he listened, sucking his cheeks inward a bit, and then he nodded some more. Nobody wanted those babies, he could have told him, and nobody cared for those mothers, who were rendering a service to the community by throwing them away.

  For the other jail cell, McBride resumed, he had in mind a sort of pediatric day care center for the several little kids always living in the bus terminal, to afford their mothers a clean, safe place in which to place their offspring while they journeyed outside to panhandle and hustle for drugs and booze and food, and also for the runaway kids who kept showing up in this heart of the city until they made their good connections with a satisfactory drug dealer or pimp.

  Yossarian broke in regretfully.

  "McBride?"

  "You think I'm nuts?" McBride rushed on defensively. "I know Tommy thinks I'm nuts. But we could have mobiles and stuffed toys and coloring books for the little ones. And for the older ones television sets and video games, maybe computers, sure, even word processors, couldn't they learn that?"

  "McBride?" repeated Yossarian.

  "Yossarian?" McBride had adopted unconsciously a number of Yossarian's speaking traits.

  "Mobiles and word processors for kids who want drugs and sex?"

  "Just while they're hanging around making their contacts. They'd be safer here than anywhere else, wouldn't they? What's wrong? Yossarian, what's wrong?"

  Yossarian sighed wearily, feeling undone. "You're talking about a facility in a police station for aspiring child prostitutes? Larry, the public would scream bloody murder. So would I."

  "What would you do that's better? They come here anyway, don't they?"

  From the fact that McBride had been silent since on the subject of these humanitarian undertakings, Yossarian surmised they'd been stalled or forbidden.

  Today he had some new surprise in store, and Yossarian went outside with him into the capacious structure of the bus terminal, where activities of all varieties had picked up bullishly. People were moving more quickly, and there were many more of them, traveling automatically like spirits who would have chosen a different course than the ones they were following had they found themselves free to decide. So many were eating as they walked, dripping crumbs and wrappers--candy bars, apples, hot dogs, pizzas, sandwiches, potato chips. The hustlers were at work at their assorted specialties, the best of them animated, with sharp eyes fishing around shrewdly for targets of opportunity, others blundering about crudely in search of just about anything, and still others, male and female, white and black, floating in blank-eyed, wistful stupors and looking less like predators than crippled prey.

  "Pickpockets," McBride said, with a signal of his chin toward a group of three men and two girls, all of good appearance, and of Latin American countenance. "They're better trained than we are. They even know more law. Look."

  A jolly group of transvestites moved up by escalator to the floor above, the faces glistening with a cosmetic sheen, all androgynous and vain in face and attire, the entire bunch as frisky and flirtatious as pubescent girl scouts high on hormones.

  With McBride steering him, they passed the empty space below the pillars supporting the mezzanine floor of the observation bubble overhead with its staff of several employees doing drugs while monitoring the five dozen video screens in the Communications Control Center of the terminal. The hundreds of azure-eyed, dumb video cameras poked their flat snouts into every cranny on every level of the rambling, seven-story complex bestriding two city blocks, poking without blushing even into the men's toilets and the notorious emergency stairwells into which most of those living in the terminal crept at night for sleep and friendship and apathetic intercourse. Milo and Wintergreen were already thinking of the Communications Control Center converted into a lucrative enterprise by increasing the number of screens and selling units of time to eager spectators and players, who would replace the Port Authority employees and their salaries and their costly medical plans and vacation and retirement plans. People would flock to watch, to play cop and Peeping Tom. They could call it "The Real Thing." When crime slackened, they would present fakes and that way guarantee enoug
h sex and violence to satisfy even the most bloodthirsty paying crowds.

  They could book in Japanese tour groups. Sooner or later they could spin the whole thing off to a Japanese motion picture company.

  McBride moved past a newsstand run by Indians, with newspapers and colorful periodicals like Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine headlining the collapse of Russian socialism, the grandeur of American capitalism, and the latest business bankruptcy, unemployment figures, and sale of another national mercantile landmark to foreigners, and they came to the entrance of one of the emergency stairwells. Yossarian did not want to take that tour again.

  "Just one floor," promised McBride.

  "Something awful?"

  "I wouldn't do that."

  Loafing voices echoed mellifluously from above. The stairway was practically empty, the floor almost tidy. But the odors in this civilization were strong, the air reeking of smoke and unwashed bodies and their waste, a stench of rot and degradation that was violently disgusting and vilely intolerable to all but the mass producing it daily. By midnight there was scarcely a charmed body with enough living space to be free of another body more dissipated and fetid tumbled against it. People squabbled. There were shouts, quarrels, stabbings, burns, sex, drugs, drinking, and breaking glass; by morning there were casualties and an accumulation of filth of all sorts save industrial waste. There was no water or toilet. Garbage was not collected until morning, when the locals roused and took themselves to the sinks and the toilets in the rest rooms in sanitary preparation for the day's work ahead and, despite posted bans, to bathe and do laundry in the washbasins.

  By this hour, the maintenance men had been through with their hoses and face masks to clean away the messes of excrement, trash, and garbage left the night before, the charred matchsticks and empty vials from dope, the soda cans, needles, wine bottles, and used condoms and old Band-Aids. The astringent smell of caustic disinfectant hung ineradicably in the air like the carbolic harbinger of a remorseless decay.

  McBride took the staircase down past two raffish men of insolent and bored demeanor who were smoking marijuana and drinking wine and fell silent in tacit approbation after sizing him up and acknowledging with a kind of objective acceptance the latent authority and prowess he exuded. Near the bottom of the steps a solitary man slept with his back to the banister.