Eddie spent most of the walk pointing to this or that engine of death and telling me its nomenclature and particular qualities, plus whatever anecdotes it had put him in mind of. He also called me ‘lieutenant’ from time to time. Dante had it good; he only went through Hell.
We were supposed to rendezvous at the west gate with Phil and Jerry at ten-thirty. We arrived ten minutes early and sat down in the unused guard shack to rest while we waited. The carton had become very heavy after a while, so I did a lot of flexing of my arm muscles, trying to get rid of the aches I’d developed. Looking back the way we had come, at the tanks and guns and armored cars and all the rest of the armament hulking there beneath the floodlights, it began to look to me like a true battle scene, frozen in time, with white flares glaring overhead and all the panoply of destruction poised beneath, ready to kill anything that moved.
This gate and its blacktop road were not in normal use by any of the Camp Quattatunk personnel. The main gate, where Eddie and I had come in, was the only one generally open. This one here, and several other supplementary entrances around the perimeter of the huge compound, was used exclusively for movement of stored materiel in and out of the base. Those tanks over there, for instance; if one of Eddie’s friends decided to use them to level Cleveland, they would exit through here rather than plunge through all the other weaponry to get to the main gate. Otherwise this entrance was kept locked. And, as the signs facing outward warned us, it was also kept electrified.
At precisely ten-thirty Eddie stepped outside the guard shack and peered into the darkness on the other side of the gate, looking in vain for Jerry and Phil. “They’re late,” he announced.
“They’ll be here,” I said, trying not to sound as fatalistic as I felt.
“That’s not like Phil,” Eddie said, and snapped his cuff back to look at his watch. The radium dial glinted in the darkness. Then he came back into the guard shack, a small square clapboard structure with windows on all four sides and room enough within for a chest-high desk, a couple of stools and a wooden bench. I was perched on the stool, gazing alternately at the petrified battle scene and the darkness beyond the fence, but Eddie preferred to stand, taut and serious, gazing steadfastly out the window toward our non-present gang. Once again he reminded me of a ship’s captain, this time on the bridge, gazing out at the expected sou’wester.
By twenty of eleven, I was beginning to hope that maybe something really had gone wrong with the others. Maybe somebody had been caught leaving the prison, or there was trouble about the stolen car. Maybe something really serious and time-consuming had taken place and we wouldn’t be able to steal the goddam laser after all. And if we couldn’t steal the laser we wouldn’t be able to pull the bank robbery.
That was something to look forward to.
On the other hand, if Phil and Jerry didn’t show up, we could be in big trouble. There was no way for us to get through that electrified gate, since Phil was the expert in that department, who would be bringing the bypass wires and the rubber gloves and all the other things needed to de-electrify the gate without alerting the MPs back at their headquarters. Which meant the main gate was our only exit, and the last bus left the base for town at eleven o’clock. That was twenty minutes from now, and my calculations had us a good hour’s walking time from the bus stop. Could we stroll out the main gate on foot at midnight and hope the MPs there wouldn’t do more than glance at our ID cards? I somehow doubted it.
I said, “What time is it?”
Radium dial glistened greenly in the dark. Eddie said, “Twenty-two forty-five hours.”
I translated that, and it came out quarter to eleven. I said, “Eddie, I don’t think they’re coming.”
“Of course they are,” he said.
“We’ve only got fifteen minutes to catch that bus.” There was enough illumination from the distant floodlights so I could see him scowl at me. “What bus?”
“The last bus back to town. Eddie, we can’t just walk out that main gate in the middle of the night without-” “Paragraph one,” Eddie said. “Our transportation will be coming, I have every confidence in Jerry and Phil. Paragraph two: we could not take the bus even if we were close enough to reach it, which we aren’t, because we would not be able to board it with that carton of materiel.” “We’ll have to leave it,” I said.
“Abort the mission? You can’t be serious.”
“Eddie, we don’t have any choice.”
“Lieutenant,” he said, and his voice was icy, strong, controlled, “we will have no more defeatist talk.”
“Eddie, I-”
“Captain, if you please!”
“Uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I said, and turned to look out the window toward the gate. Beyond it I saw no headlights approaching. Parking lights; they wouldn’t use headlights. Well, I didn’t see any of them approaching either.
“Did you hear me, Lieutenant?”
There are three rules one should live by, if one intends to make it successfully through life: Don’t carry a sofa upstairs by yourself. Don’t get involved with a Scorpio unless you mean it. And don’t argue with crazy people. “Yes, sir,” I said.
21
AT ELEVEN-THIRTY, one hour exactly after Phil and Jerry were supposed to have been here, Eddie roused himself from his parade rest stance in front of the gatefacing window and said, “Very well. We’ll have to improvise.”
Improvise. The bus was gone. There was no way off the base but the main gate, and our identification just wasn’t going to be good enough to get us through that main gate with this damn carton full of death and injury. In thirty minutes the relief sentry would arrive to take the place of the one we had tied up, and the alarm would then be sounded for fair, and this entire camp would be searched with a fine-tooth comb. And not just with a fine-tooth comb, either; there would also be floodlights mounted on jeeps, and men armed with rifles and machine guns, and tracker dogs, and maybe even helicopters. We were going to be caught, my insane friend and I, absolutely no later than one hour from right now. And when we were caught, we would really be caught. Our very presence on this base was an even more serious offense than our absence from the penitentiary. Then there were the uniforms that we weren’t authorized to wear, and the fake ID, and the grand larceny of all this shit in the carton, and the assault on the sentry . . .
A persistent image kept entering my brain. One summer vacation when I was a teenager my parents and I took a cottage by a lake in Maine. It rained all week, of course, but that isn’t the point. The point is, there was a fireplace, and we kept a fire going in it for a little warmth and dryness, and one time after my father tossed a flat piece of old board on the fire I noticed there was an ant on it. The piece of board was about four inches wide, making a kind of highway through the flames, and the ant just kept running back and forth on that highway, trying to find some way the hell out of there. Improvise. We were now, like that ant, going to improvise.
I said, hopelessly, “I suppose the only thing to do is try the main gate. Maybe, if we go through without the carton, just maybe they won’t look too closely at-”
“We will not abort,” Eddie told me sternly. “Put that out of your mind once and for all, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. When it doesn’t matter what you do, you might as well do what comes easiest, and right now the easiest thing to do was to go along with Eddie’s delusions. His delusion that he was a Captain, for instance, and that I was a Lieutenant. Not to mention his delusion that there was some way off this board and out of the fire.