Joseph Heller - Closing Time

"Now? You think I'm planning to buy now?"

"One must always look ahead, says the good Senor Gaffney. It's waterfront property, Yo-Yo. You can triple your money in a couple of months. You have to see it."

"I won't have time. I have an appointment for lunch."

"Your appointment might be canceled."

"I might want to keep it."

"All plans are off if it's really a war."

"The wedding too?"

"With bombs coming in? We don't really need the wedding anymore, now that we have it on tape."

"Are there bombs coming in?"

Gaffney shrugged. McBride didn't know either, they found out, when they rode the long escalator down to the bottom from the final stop on the elevator. Neither did the disparate pair of intelligence agents, who had no idea what to do with themselves next.

Strangelove had an answer when he came back on. "No, no bombs are sighted yet coming this way. This has us confused. But those of us here have nothing to fear. Only one air force in the world has bombs that can penetrate this deeply before exploding, and they all belong to us. We have overlooked nothing, except some barbers. While we wait to see if anyone strikes back, we need some barbers, even one. Any barber who hears this, respond at once. We have overlooked nothing. All our facilities will be operational in two or three weeks if you abide by my rules. If any of you anticipate trouble following my instructions, please follow this instruction and leave today. General Bingam will now send all our B-Wares and Shhhhh! s out on a second-strike attack, after we confirm there are no tailors or barbers on board."

Raul scowled and said, "Merde." Gangly, orange-haired, freckle-faced Bob looked much less happy than usual. Both had families they worried about.

McBride worried too. "If there's a war outside, I'm not sure I want to be down here."

Michael did want to be, with Marlene agreeing, and Yossarian did not blame him.

There was need, said Strangelove, for a shoemaker.

"Merde," said Raul. "That man is so full of merde."

"Yes, we have overlooked nothing, but we forgot that too," Dr. Strangelove continued, with an affected snigger. "We have warehouses full of these lovely new state-of-the-art shoes, buf sooner or later they are going to need shines and repairs. Apart from that too, we have overlooked nothing. We can live here forever, if you do what I tell you."

They were near the platform of a train station overlooking narrow-gauge railroad tracks of a type Yossarian felt certain he had seen before. The reduced span of the tunnels ensured a train of small size, something on the scale of a miniature amusement ride.

"Here comes another one," called out McBride. "Let's sec what's there this time."

He moved closer to observe more quickly as a bright-red small locomotive pulled into sight at moderate speed with a signal bell clanging. It was running on electricity but flaunted a scarlet smokestack with designs in polished brass. Working the clapper of the bell with a piece of clothesline fixed to his control levers was a grinning engineer of middle age, uniformed in a red jacket with a circular MASSPOB shoulder patch. The little train went rolling on by, bringing smoothly in tow some open-topped, narrow passenger cars with people on board sitting two abreast! Again Yossarian could not believe his eyes. McBride pointed in frantic excitement at the two figures sitting in the first seat of the first car.

"Hey, I know those people! Who are they again?"

"Fiorello H. La Guardia and Franklin Delano Roosevelt," Yossarian answered, and said absolutely nothing about the two elderly couples who sat with his older brother in the seats in back of them.

In the next carriage he recognized John F. Kennedy with his wife alongside, behind the former governor of Texas and his wife who had been in the death car with him.

And by himself on a seat in the car that followed those immortals rode Noodles Cook, looking haggard, disoriented, and half dead in front of two government officials Yossarian remembered from news reports. One was fat and one was skinny, and seated side by side behind them in the last seat of this third of three cars were C. Porter Lovejoy and Milo Minderbinder. Lovejoy was talking, counting on his fingers. Both were alive, and Milo was smiling too.

"I could have sworn," said Yossarian, "that Milo had been left behind."

Gaffney formed with his mouth the one word "Never."

It was then that Yossarian decided to keep his date with Melissa. He did not want to remain down there with Strangelove and those others. Gaffney was shocked and thought he was mad. It was not in the cards.

"Oh, no, no, Yo-Yo." Gaffney was shaking his head. "You can't go out. It makes no sense now. You won't go."

"Gaffney, I am going. You're wrong again."

"But you won't get far. You won't last long."

"We'll see. I'll try."

"You'll have to be careful. There's danger outside."

"There's danger in here. Anyone coming?"

McBride, as though waiting, jumped forward and joined him. "You'd never find your way out without me." At Yossarian's side, he confessed, "I'm worried about Joan out there alone."

Gaffney would wait until he knew much more. "I know enough now not to take chances."

Michael too did not like taking chances, and Yossarian did not blame him for that one either.

Bob and Raul had too much intelligence to put themselves at risk when they did not have to, and could worry about their families just as well from down there.

As he saw Yossarian riding up away from him on the escalato to the elevator to keep a lunch date with his pregnant girlfriend, Michael, who'd been both proud and embarrassed by his father's love affair, had the listless, desolate feeling that one of them was dying, maybe both.

Yossarian, striding anxiously up the escalator to hurry back outside as fast as he could get there, was stimulated joyously by a resurrection of optimism more native to Melissa than himself the innate-and inane-conviction that nothing harmful could happen to him, that nothing bad could happen to a just man. This was nonsense, he knew; but he also knew, in his gut, he'd be as safe as she was, and had no doubt then that all three of them, he, Melissa, and the new baby, would survive, flourish, and live happily-forever after.

"Häagen-Dazs."

"What was that about?" the aviator Kid Sampson asked, from the back compartment of the invisible and noiseless sub-super sonic attack bomber.

"Was your father a shoemaker?" answered the pilot McWatt "Are you the son of a barber?"

"I can't sew either."

"Then we have to go on. It's another mission for us."

"Where to?"

"I've forgotten. But inertia will guide us. Our inertial guidance system will always take us."

"McWatt?"

"Sampson?"

"How long have we been together now? Two years, three?"

"It feels more like fifty. Sampson, you know what I regret? That we never talked more to each other."

"We never got more to talk about, did we?"

"What's that down there? A missile?"

"Let me see on my radar." Crossing below them on a course almost perpendicular were four parallel contrails gliding out from jet engines as though extruded in chalk. "It's an airliner, McWatt. A, passenger plane on the way to Australia."

"I wonder how those passengers would feel if they knew we were up here on this mission again amp; ghost riders in the sky."

"McWatt?"

"Sampson?"

"Do we really have to go in again?"

"I guess we have to, don't we?"

"Do we?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah. I think we have to."

"Oh, well. What the hell."

Sam Singer had no illusions. Unlike Yossarian, he had no hopes of finding romance and falling in love again with somebody new. Succumbing unresistingly to the harsh necessity of living alone, to which he had been presented with no agreeable alternative, he had not been shattered by the merciless deprivations. He had discussed this; future with Glenda, who, despite her terminal condition, worried more about his solitary years ahead than he had been able to do.