Closing Time (44 page)

"But a shoe? By now there must be fifty fucking shoe companies turning out shoes for fucking feet for fucks like us."

"But none with an exclusive franchise for an official U.S. Government shoe."

"Men's shoes or women's shoes?" pondered Milo.

"Both, now that women get killed in combat too." Yossarian was sorry he had started. "Forget it. There's much about business I don't understand. I still can't see how you guys bought eggs for seven cents apiece, sold them for five cents, and made a profit."

"We still do," bragged Wintergreen.

"Eggs spoil," Milo ruminated pitifully. "And break. I'd rather have a shoe. Eugene, look it up."

"I'd rather have the plane," Wintergreen grumbled.

"But after the plane? Suppose there's no more danger of war?"

"I'll look it up."

"I'm not happy with the plane," said Yossarian.

"Are you thinking of leaving us again?" Wintergreen jeered. "You've been objecting for years."

Yossarian was stung by the gibe but ignored it. "Your Shhhhh! could destroy the world, couldn't: it?"

"You've been peeking," answered Wintergreen.

"And it can't," said Milo, with heartache. "We conceded that much at the meeting."

"But maybe Strangelove's can?" Wintergreen needled.

"And that's why," said Milo, "we want the meeting with Noodles Cook."

Yossarian again was shaking his head. "And I'm not happy with the atom bomb. I don't like it anymore."

"Who would you like to see get the contract?" Wintergreen argued. "Fucking Strangelove?"

"And we don't have the bomb." conciliated Milo. "We only have plans for a plane that will deliver it."

"And our plane won't work."

"We'll guarantee that, Yossarian. Even in writing. Our planes won't fly, our missiles won't fire. If they take off, they'll crash; if they fire, they'll miss. We never fail. It's the company motto."

"You can find it on our fucking letterhead," Wintergreen added, and continued deliberately with a sneer. "But let me ask you this, Mr. Yo-Yo. What country would you rather see be strongest if not us? That's the fucking catch, isn't it?"

"That's the catch, all right," Yossarian had to agree.

"And if we don't sell our fucking war products to everyone who wants to buy, our friendly fucking allies and competitors will. There's nothing you can do about it. Time's run out for your fucking ideals. Tell me, if you're so smart, what the fuck would you do if you were running the country?"

"I wouldn't know what to do either," Yossarian admitted, and was enraged with himself for being bested in argument. It never used to happen that way. "But I know I'd want my conscience to be clear."

"Our conscience is clear," responded both.

"I don't want the guilt."

"That's horseshit, Yossarian."

"And I wouldn't: be responsible."

"And that's more horseshit," countered Wintergreen. "There's nothing you can do about it, and you
will
be responsible. If the world's going to blow up anyway, what the fuck difference does it make who does it?"

"At least my hands will be clean."

Wintergreen laughed coarsely. "They'll be blown off at the wrists, your fucking clean hands. No one will even know they're yours. You won't even be found."

"Go fuck yourself, Wintergreen!" Yossarian answered irately, with raised voice. "Go straight to hell, with
your
clear conscience!" He turned away, sulking. "I wish you were dead already, so I could finally in this lifetime get at least a little bit of pleasure out of you."

"Yossarian, Yossarian," chided Milo. "Be reasonable. One thing you do know about me-I never lie."

"Unless he has to," appended Wintergreen.

"I think he knows that, Eugene. I'm as moral as the next man. Right, Eugene?"

"Absolutely, Mr. Minderbinder."

"Milo, have you ever," asked Yossarian, "in your life done anything dishonest?"

"Oh, no," Milo responded like a shot. "That would be dishonest. And there's never been need to."

"And that's why," said Wintergreen, "we want this secret meeting with Noodles Cook, to get him to speak secretly to the President. We want everything out in the open."

"Yossarian," said Milo, "aren't you safer with us? Our planes can't work. We have the technology. Please call Noodles Cook."

"Set up the meeting and stop fucking around. And we want to be there."

"You don't trust me?"

"You say you don't fucking understand business."

"You say it puzzles you."

"Yes, and what does fucking puzzle me," said Yossarian, giving in, "is how guys like you do understand it."

Noodles Cook grasped quickly what was wanted of him.

"I know, I know," he began, after the introductions had been effected, speaking directly to Yossarian. "You think I'm a shit, don't you?"

"Hardly ever," answered Yossarian, without surprise, while the other two watched. "Noodles, when people think of the dauphin, they don't always think of you."

"Touche," laughed Noodles. "But I do enjoy being here. Please don't ask me why." What they wanted, he went on, was clearly improper, unsuitable, indefensible, and perhaps illegal. "Normally, gentlemen, I could lobby with the best of them. But we have ethics in government now."

"Who's in charge of our Department of Ethics?"

"They're holding it open until Porter Lovejoy gets out of jail."

"I have a thought," said Yossarian, feeling it was a good one. "You're permitted to give speeches, aren't you?"

"I give them regularly."

"And to receive an honorarium for them?"

"I would not do it without one."

"Noodles," said Yossarian, "I believe these gentlemen want you to make a speech. To an audience of one. To the President alone, recommending that the government buy their plane. Could you deliver a successful speech like that one?"

"I could give a very successful speech like that one."

"And in return, they would give you an honorarium."

"Yes," said Milo. "We would give you an honorarium."

"And how much would that honorarium be?" inquired Noodles.

"Milo?" Yossarian stepped back, for there was much about business he still did not understand.

"Four hundred million dollars," said Milo.

"That sounds fair," responded Noodles, in a manner equally innocuous, as though he too were hearing nothing rare, and it was then, Yossarian recalled with amusement as he killed time later in his hospital bed, that Noodles offered to give him a peek into the Presidential Game Room, after the others had dashed away to the urgent financial meeting they'd mentioned for which they were already anxious to depart, for Gaffney's joke about antitrust approval for the M2 marriage to Christina Maxon turned out, after all, not to be a joke.

"And for you, Yossarian…" began Milo, when the three were parting.

"For that wonderful idea you came up with…" Wintergreen joined in, expansively.

"That's why we need him, Eugene. To you, Yossarian, we're giving, in gratitude, five hundred thousand dollars."

Yossarian, who had expected nothing, responded levelly, learning fast. "That sounds fair," he said with disappointment.

Milo looked embarrassed. "It's a little bit more than one percent," he insisted sensitively.

"And a little bit less than the one and a half percent of our standard finder's fee, isn't it?" said Yossarian. "But it still sounds fair."

"Yossarian," Wintergreen cajoled, "you're almost seventy and, pretty well off. Look into your heart. Does it really matter if you make another hundred thousand dollars, or even if the world does come to an end in a nuclear explosion after you're gone?" >

Yossarian took a good look into his heart and answered honestly.

"No. But you two are just as old. Do you really care if you make millions more or not?"

"Yes," said Milo emphatically.

"And that's the big difference between us."

"Well, we're alone now," said Noodles. "You do think I'm a shit, don't you?"

"No more than me," said Yossarian.

"Are you crazy?" cried Noodles Cook. "You can't compare! Look what I just agreed to do!"

"I proposed it."

"I accepted!" argued Noodles. "Yossarian, there are nine other tutors here who are much bigger shits than you'll ever amount to, and they don't come close to me."

"I give in," said Yossarian. "You're a bigger shit than I am, Noodles Cook." '

"I'm glad you see it my way. Now let me show you our playroom. I'm getting good at video games, better than all the others. He's very proud of me."

The renovated Oval Office of the country's chief executive had been reduced in size drastically to make room for the spacious game room into which it now led. In the shrunken quarters, which now could comfortably hold no more than three or four others, presidential meetings were fewer and quicker, conspiracies simpler, cover-ups instantaneous. The President had more time free for his video games, and these he found more true to life than life itself, he'd said once publicly.

The physical compensations for the change lay in the larger, more imposing second room, which, with extension, was spacious enough for the straight-backed chairs and game tables for the multitudinous video screens, controls, and other attachments that now stood waiting like robotic stewards along the encircling periphery of the walls. The section nearest the entrance was designated THE WAR DEPARTMENT and contained individual games identified singly as
The Napoleonic War, The Battle of Gettysburg, The Battle of Bull Run, The Battle of Antietam, Victory in Grenada, Victory in Vietnam, Victory in Panama City, Victory at Pearl Harbor
, and
The Gulf War Refought
. A cheerful poster showed a gleaming apple-cheeked marine above the sentences:

STEP RIGHT UP AND TRY.

ANYONE CAN PLAY.

ANY SIDE CAN WIN.

Yossarian moved by games named
Indianapolis Speedway, Bombs Away, Beat the Draft
, and
Die Laughing
. The place of prominence in the Presidential Game Room contained a video screen grander than the others and, waist-high, on a surface with the proportions and foundations of a billiard table, a transparent contour map of the country, vivid with different hues of green, black, blue, and desert pinks and tans. On the colorful replica were sets of electric trains on labyrinths of tracks that crossed the continent on different planes and went belowground through tunnels. When Noodles, with an enigmatic smile, pressed the buttons that turned on bright internal lights and set the trains running, Yossarian perceived a model of a whole new miniature world of vast and hermetic complexity functioning beneath the surface of the continent on different plateaus, extending from border to border, through boundaries northward into Canada to Alaska, and eastward and westward to the oceans. The name for this game read:

TRIAGE

On the map, he spotted first, in the peninsula state of Florida, a tiny cabin-shaped marker labeled Federal Citrus Reservoir. Large numbers of the railroad cars traveling underground were mounted with missiles, and many others carried cannons and transported armored vehicles. He saw several medical trains marked with a red cross. His eyes found a Federal Wisconsin Cheese Depository on the banks of Lake Michigan not far from Kenosha. He noted another Citrus Fruit Reservoir in California and a nationwide subterranean dispersion of pizza parlors and meat lockers. There was the nuclear reactor at the Savannah River, about which he now knew. Star-shaped Washington, D.C. was enlarged in blue within a white circle; he read markers there for the White House, the Burning Tree Country Club, MASSPOB, the new National Military Cemetery, the newest war memorial, and Walter Reed Hospital. And underground beneath every one of these, if he comprehended what he was looking at, was a perfect reconstruction of each concealed on a lower tier. Traveling out from the capital city were directional arrows paralleling the train tracks leadings by subterranean route to destinations including the Greenbrier; Country Club in West Virginia, the Livermore Laboratories in California, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the Burn Treatment Center at New York Hospital, and also in New York City, he noted with tremendous surprise, PABT, the bus terminal so close to the building that was presently his home.

He was stunned to find PABT joined to MASSPOB and incorporated in a local network with an underground tentacle that slithered through the buried canal under Canal Street and a wall walling off Wall Street. In Brooklyn, he saw Coney Island symbolized on the surface by an iron-red miniature of a phallic tower he recognized as the defunct parachute jump of the old Steeplechase Park. And underground, on what appeared to be a facsimile of an amusement park, Steeplechase Park, was a sketch of a grinning face with flat hair and lots of teeth, which he also knew.

"But ours work," Noodles told him with pride. "Or they wouldn't be on our map. He had this whole model built to make sure it's as good as the one in the game. If there's one word he lives by, it's be prepared."

"fThat's two words, isn't it?" corrected Yossarian.

"I used to think that way too," said Noodles, "but now I see it his way. I'm getting better at golf also."

"Is that why those country clubs are there?"

"He's putting them into the video game so they'll both match. See up there in Vermont?" Yossarian saw a Ben & Jerry Federal Ice Cream Depository. "He found that one in the video game only a little while ago, and now he wants one too. We'll also have Haagen-Dazs. We may be underneath a long time when it ever comes to that, and he wants to be sure of his ice cream and his golf. This is confidential, but we already have a nine-hole course finished underneath Burning Tree, and it's identical to the one up here. He's down there now, practicing the course so he'll have an advantage over others when the time comes."

"Who would those others be?" asked Yossarian.

"Those of us who've been chosen to survive," answered Noodles, "and to keep the country running underground when there's not much left above."

"I see. When would that be?"

"When he unlocks the box and presses the button. You see that second unit beside the game? That's the Football."