I, on the other hand, was not happy at all. I was in the uniform of a First Lieutenant, but my own Army experience a dozen years ago as a draftee had been strictly limited to the life of the enlisted man and I didn’t feel at all comfortable in the role of officer. I was positive I would make a social or military gaffe, some immediate blunder that would tell any real officer I was a fake and an impostor and probably a Russian spy.
Max had provided us with identification, in what I had to admit was a clever way. Eddie and I, applying at the bank where we had our checking accounts, first obtained credit cards bearing our photographs. Then Max, who considered himself an expert in altering and adapting credit cards, altered these, with heat and colored ink and the assistance of Bob Dombey to do the tricky lettering, into Army ID cards that Eddie decreed were “certainly good enough.” They didn’t look good enough to me, but Eddie insisted no one would look closely. The card, he pointed out, would stay inside one of the scratchy plasticene pockets in my wallet, and all I’d ever have to do would be flash it at someone disposed already to believe in it. “The color is close enough,” he said, “the size is right, the photograph is accurate, the general appearance is appropriate. That’s all we need.”
Maybe. But all I could think was, I wouldn’t be shot on Tuesday as a bank robber, I’d be shot on Monday as a spy.
There was a free Army bus only for Camp Quattatunk personnel that went out to the base from downtown Stonevelt every hour on the hour, seven a.m. till midnight. We boarded the bus at five in the afternoon, Eddie matter-of-factly and me with terror in my heart, and the driver barely glanced at our identification. We shared a seat away from the other passengers, and all too soon the bus pulled away from the curb and joined the ebb of rush- hour traffic.
I seemed to be blinking a lot. I kept looking out the window at the happy Christmas shoppers strolling along the sidewalks. None of them were penitentiary prisoners, none of them were escapees, none of them were impostors in Army uniforms, none of them were on the verge of becoming bank robbers, none of them were compulsive practical jokers, and none of them were named Harry Kiint with or without an umlaut. To be any one of those things would be disheartening, and I was all of them.
The bus very soon left the town of Stonevelt and its rush hour behind and we traveled for a while on a small curving road through open countryside, mostly either apple orchards or uncleared forest, like alternating groups of neat and unruly children. There was an occasional farmhouse, an occasional roadhouse, an occasional grubby mobile home mounted on concrete blocks. There was little traffic once we were clear of town, all of it faster than the bus, a big-shouldered hulking lumbering thing in Army brown, looking like an ancient schoolbus that had been drafted by mistake.
Nevertheless, slow or not, inevitably it did reach Camp Quattatunk. My first indication of our arrival was the sudden high metal fence topped by barbed wire that appeared on the right side of the road, cutting us off from thick pine woods. Through the screen of pine needles I glimpsed an occasional building in tan or light green, set well back from the road. At one point I seemed also to see a row of dark-colored tanks, all with their snouts pointing my way. Much more clearly I could see the red and white signs on the fence itself, warning the civilian world that the strands of barbed wire were electrified.
I felt they didn’t want me there. I felt it was a mistake of me to intrude.
The bus slowed at the entrance gate, but didn’t stop. We had already showed our identification to the driver, and so wouldn’t have to show it to anyone else to gain entry to the camp. It had been Eddie’s contention that the bus driver, since he was physically removed from the camp at the time of seeing our identification, would be psychologically inclined to be more lax about ID cards than the MPs manning the gate, and he had turned out to be right. Now if only he was also right about everything else connected with this base there was just a chance we would get away with tonight’s burglary.
Though not tomorrow’s robbery. Was I going to go through with it? Would I actually walk into that bank tomorrow afternoon with these desperate criminals? If I ran away I would have to run away from the prison as well and become a hunted escapee, a role I doubted I was suited to. I would never again be able to use my rightful name, which in my case wasn’t an entirely unmixed curse, but I just couldn’t see myself as a successful fugitive. The question came down to a choice between fugitive and bank robber, and just which of those roles would I be the least ridiculous in. So far, I hadn’t found a satisfactory answer.
And I was, in any event, about to commit my second felony, assuming the milk box trick to have been the first. But this was .much more serious than any stunt with milk box and note; this was the United States Army.
Camp Quattatunk. The bus, waved through the main gate by a white-helmeted MP, had entered a neat but unreal community, looking like some science fiction parody of the Norman Rockwell type of small town. There were well-tended black-top streets, concrete sidewalks, neat lawns, shapely small trees, ordinary lamp posts and stop signs. But the buildings were all large dull rectangles, one or two stories high, all clapboard, all with the same kind of windows, all painted either tan or light green. Walks were lined with whitewashed rocks, there was no litter anywhere, and the occasional pedestrian-mostly neatly-uniformed military men, plus a few neatly-dressed civilians-seemed more like wind-up toys than human beings. It was a model train layout, a miniature of itself. Only the automobiles, the few of them moving on the streets and the batches of them tucked away in parking lots that I caught glimpses of between buildings, hinted at reality. Bulging or beetled, shiny or rust-pocked, they showed more variety and liveliness than everything else in the place combined. I never thought I’d be anywhere that an automobile would look more natural than a tree, but the Army had managed it; Stonevelt Penitentiary was a sprawling, teeming human beehive by comparison.
The bus drove three blocks through this bloodless complex and stopped before a larger building than any of the others: three stories high, light green clapboard, same windows, whitewashed rocks flanking the path, one plane tree centered on each side of the crewcut lawn, large wooden sign out by the sidewalk telling us this was Headquarters of the 2137 NorBomComDak, 8th Army, General Lester B. Winterhilf, Commandant.
We joined the other debusing passengers, and on the sidewalk Eddie looked around and said, “We might as well wait in the Officer’s Club.”
Fine. If I was about to be shot as a spy, I wanted my last meal to be a martini.
We walked two blocks through this architect’s rendering, me carefully avoiding the eyes of everybody we passed, certain that some colonel, some master sergeant, even some raw new recruit, would suddenly stop, stare, point at me and yell, “You’re no Lieutenant!” I was only here because this damned uniform was my size, yet it seemed badly fitted; the blouse collar was too big and sleeves too short, the shirt was too small, the trouser legs too long. I couldn’t decide if my garrison cap felt too large or too small, but I was sure I was wearing it wrong-tilted too far forward, or possibly too far back.
The Officer’s Club was the basic building in tan. We went up the wide outside wooden steps to the entrance, and as we did so I was suddenly flung back in memory to basic training when I was nineteen years old. Mail call. Only in basic was there an actual mail call, with a postal clerk who would stand on wooden steps like this and shout out last names to the trainees massed before him. For weeks my voice was raised forlornly: “Kiint! With an umlaut! Sir!” And vainly. I merely called attention to myself, as though the name didn’t do that sufficiently all by itself. People who had only heard me pronounce my name but had never seen it written down would turn to me with comic curiosity, gleams beginning to sparkle in the corners of their eyes, and they would say, “How do you spell your name?” “With an umlaut,” I would say, in useless hope. “Kunt!” the mail clerk would cry.