Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner

18

AS IF I DIDN’T have troubles enough, I happen to be a forty-two long. So on Monday afternoon, two days after my double date with Max and one day before the scheduled bank robbery, I was the one who put on the other uniform Max had stolen from the Army-Navy store and joined Eddie Troyn to be the inside men in the great laser caper.

Eddie had been spending a lot of time out at the camp this past week. Partly of course it was to get the lay of the land, but I think also it was partly nostalgia; Eddie liked Camp Quattatunk, he liked walking around an Army base with a Captain’s uniform on, he liked giving and receiving salutes, he liked dropping into the Officer’s Club and having a Jack Daniels on the rocks and signing the bill ‘Captain Robinson’. (“There isn’t an Army base in the country,” he explained to me, “that doesn’t have at least one Captain Robinson assigned to it.”)

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.

It had been years since I’d thought of all that but the memory could still make me wince. Bring on that drink, I thought.

Inside the Officer’s Club some attempt had been made to disguise the raw functionalism of the structure, but to no avail. The curtains on the windows, the artificial potted plants scattered about, the Japanese screens used as room dividers, all managed to make the place look merely like an impoverished touring company of “Teahouse of the August Moon.” A goodly number of officers, most of them young and moustached and looking almost exactly like Max Nolan, sat at the bar or at formica-top tables across the way. A dining room was beyond this area, impossible to see through a labyrinth of Japanese screens.

And now, inside the Officer’s Club, Eddie Troyn all at once blossomed into a completely new man. The silent, rigid, humorless military pastiche I was used to altered into what he had surely been before his fall from grace; a benign authority figure, crisp and assured, almost graceful. It was amazing to watch.

Eddie had been coming to this base no more than a week, but half a dozen of the younger officers at the bar hailed him as an old-time comrade. “It’s Captain Robinson!’’ one of them called out, in respectful delight, and they all made room for him at the bar.

“Afternoon, boys,” Eddie said, reserved but genial. “This is Lieutenant Smith.”

“Call me Harry,” I said, because I knew if I was called Lieutenant Smith I’d never think to answer.

The bartender, a big, heavy man with meaty shoulders, had come over at once to lean toward Eddie and listen respectfully to his order. “My usual, Jack,” Eddie told him. “And the same for Lieutenant Smith.”

“Yessir, Captain.”

One of the officers said, “How’s the count coming, sir?”

“So far,” Eddie answered, with mock sternness, “you boys seem to have lost three tanks and a quonset hut.”

They were delighted. As our drinks were brought-Eddie’s ‘usual’ turned out to be bourbon and water-the officers tried to top one another with suggestions about what had been done with the missing tanks and hut. One said the tanks had been stolen by gypsies, painted different colors, and used as wagons. One said the hut had been sent to New York City where it had become a four-story apartment building. Another said no, it was the tanks that had been sent to New York City and converted into five room apartments, while the hut had been floated across the Atlantic to Africa where it was about to become an independent nation. Another said, “Right. They’re calling it Pattonagonia,” and everybody groaned.

We spent an hour at the bar with the young officers, in a general aura of coltish hilarity. Most of the chatter came from the young men, who in an easygoing way were vying with one another for Eddie’s attention and approval, but Eddie too had his occasional small quips, most of them of a mildly right-wing nature. The young officers hung on his every word, whooping with laughter and clapping one another on the back at his little punch lines, while he stood swirling his drink, the small smile of the accomplished raconteur tugging gently at his lips.

Eddie was so good at this easygoing paternalism, this enjoying of an informal chat with the boys after duty hours, that I could see he was absolutely wasted in prison. I still don’t know what crime he’d been sentenced for, but surely society was losing too much in refusing to permit him to be himself.

As for me, I kept quiet, smiled when everybody else laughed, pulled steadily at my bourbon and water, and kept listening for clues as to just who the hell Eddie and I were supposed to be. The general impression Eddie had apparently given was that he was here on some sort of accounting or inventory mission outside the normal sequence of such events, possibly from the Inspector General’s office, or maybe even from Army Intelligence. The story seemed to be concrete enough to satisfy idle curiosity, vague enough so he couldn’t be pinned down or contradicted on details, and broad enough to justify his turning up almost anywhere he wanted on the base.

My own role was dealt with in a sentence: “Lieutenant Smith is here from DomBac to help finish up,” Eddie said, and of course the natural response to that was for the young men to fasten on the phrase ‘finish up,’ and to ask just how soon their friend Captain Robinson would be leaving, thus ending curiosity about me for good and all.

“Possibly by the end of the week,” Eddie told them, “or, with Lieutenant Smith here, it could be even sooner.”

One of them, grinning, said, “You’ll be giving us a clean bill of health, Captain?”

“Considering the number of WAC uniform skirts that are missing,” Eddie answered, “not to mention female unmentionables, I’m not entirely sure every one of you boys could be considered completely healthy.”

How they laughed over that, punching and poking one another. There’s nothing like a joke about homosexuality to make men rub each other's shoulders.

Promptly at six-thirty Eddie consulted his watch and announced, “I believe it’s mess call, gentlemen. If you’ll excuse me?”

A chorus of of courses followed that, and the bartender promptly presented his bill. With a restrained flourish Eddie wrote across its face 'Captain Robinson/ smacked the pen down on top of it, and pushed it back across the bar. “Thank you, Captain,” the bartender said. “Evening, now.”

“Evening, Jack,” Eddie said.

We zigzagged through the Japanese screens to the dining room, which was less than half full. The management had dealt with the decorating problem in here by turning all the lights off and making do with candles on the tables; it was too dark to see what the place looked like.

We took a table along the side wall, where I discovered that the walls were fronted by dark brown draperies, and Eddie said, “A fine group of young men, that. May they never have to face the guns of the enemy.”

By God, he was Mister Chips!

A waiter brought us menus and we ordered; Eddie had the sole meuniere and I chose the veal parmigiana. In the waiter’s hearing, Eddie said, “Perhaps a half bottle of white, Lieutenant?” When I agreed, he ordered soave. The waiter departed and Eddie, glancing around in proprietary satisfaction, said, “Well, Lieutenant, what do you think of our little club?”

It didn’t seem to me there were any occupied tables close enough for us to be overheard, but if Eddie wanted to maintain tight security that was fine with me. Particularly since, with all the bourbon I’d put away over the last hour and a promise of white wine to come, I was probably going to wind up as tight as the security. So I said, “It’s fine, sir. I particularly enjoyed meeting your young friends.”

“Fine men,” he agreed. “They’ll make their country proud some day. They remind me of a Lieutenant Eberschwartz I once knew. Motor Pool officer. Fine ingenious young man. Someone had been siphoning fuel out of the two-by-sixes at night, and Lieutenant Eberschwartz set himself to catch the fellow. But the thief was clever; he would never come around on a night when Lieutenant Eberschwartz had posted himself there. So finally he came up with a solution. He rigged a camera with a flashbulb inside an office window, and ran wires connecting it to one of the trucks’ gasoline cap. When the cap was turned, the fellow’s picture would be taken.”

“Very clever,” I said. “Did it work?”

“Beyond his wildest expectations. The thief already had several open cans of gasoline about himself when he turned that particular cap. The camera went off, but the electronic impulse of the flashbulb ignited the gasoline fumes in the air, and the explosion demolished the thief, seven vehicles and the Motor Pool office.”

“Urn,” I said.

“Absolutely put a stop to pilfering on that base,” he said, and nodded with remembered satisfaction.

“I can see where it would,” I said.

“There was nothing left of the thief, of course,” he said. “We had to find him by a process of elimination, scanning the Morning Reports for missing men until we’d narrowed it down to just one possibility. Then we got some sheep parts from the mess hall, put them in a plastic bag, and shipped them home to the fellow’s parents. Said he died falling out of a jeep.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“That’s the standard explanation, of course, for all noncombatant Army deaths. Died falling out of a jeep.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’ve seen that in newspaper reports.”

“The odd thing is,” he said, “I once knew a fellow who did die from falling out of a jeep.”

“Oh?”

“He was having intercourse with a nurse at the time,” he said. “At a given moment she lunged upward so vigorously she flipped him completely out of the jeep.”

“Was it moving?”

“Hm? Oh, the jeep. No, he landed on a mine.”

“Urn,” I said.

“Speaking of landing on mines,” he said, “that reminds me of another funny story.” And he proceeded to tell it. Soon our food came, and so did the wine, but Eddie kept on telling me his reminiscences. Friends of his had fallen under tanks, walked into airplane propellers, inadvertently bumped their elbows against the firing mechanism of thousand-pound bombs and walked backwards off the flight deck of an aircraft carrier while backing up to take a group photograph. Other friends had misread the control directions on a robot tank and driven it through a Pennsylvania town’s two hundredth anniversary celebration square dance, had fired a bazooka while it was facing the wrong way, had massacred a USO Gilbert and Sullivan troop rehearsing “The Mikado” under the mistaken impression they were peaceful Vietnamese villagers, and had ordered a nearby enlisted man to look in that mortar and see why the shell hadn’t come out.

It began after a while to seem as though Eddie’s military career had been an endless red-black vista of explosions, fires and crumpling destruction, all intermixed with hoarse cries, anonymous thuds and terminal screams. Eddie recounted these disasters in his normal bloodless style, with touches of that dry avuncular humor he’d displayed during our hour at the bar. I managed to eat very little of my veal parmigiana-it kept looking like a body fragment-but became increasingly sober nonetheless. A brandy later with coffee, accompanied by a Korean War story about a friend of Eddie’s trapped in a box canyon for nine days by a combination of a blizzard and a North Korean offensive, who kept himself alive by sawing off his own wounded leg and eating steaks from it, but who later died in Honolulu from gangrene of the stomach, didn’t help much.

Or maybe it did, in a way. By the time we left the Officer’s Club, shortly before nine o’clock, I was numb with horror, but the subject of my numbness had been transferred from the laser larceny to Eddie’s memoirs. I sup pose I was in the best possible frame of mind for the events to follow: cold sober, and actively anxious to be distracted, even if that distraction had to be the commission of a felony.

The streets of the camp were well illuminated, but there was very little traffic. Eddie and I strolled along, he pausing at last in his recital to puff a cigar in the crisp night air and to take an obvious sensual pleasure from his surroundings; he was like the captain of a great steamship out for a promenade around the deck. This was his environment, well-understood and well-loved. All it lacked to make it really homey for him, I thought, was a few burned bodies and the distant rattle of machine-gun fire.

After three or four blocks we moved out of the housing and administrative area clustered in the vicinity of the main gate. From here on sprawled the storage section, starting with great hulking curved quonset huts, looking like headless armadillos. The ordinary streetlights were replaced here by floodlights at the corners of the buildings, and sentries stood guard at many of the doorways.

Judiciously Eddie said, “Wouldn’t like an explosion around this area.”

I looked at him, apprehensive. “Why’s that?”

He motioned to the quonset huts around us. “Some cyanide compounds,” he said. “Other poison gases, some defoliants, a few sterilizing agents. Enough chemical weaponry right here to strip the Earth naked.”

“Oh,” I said, and for a while after that I found it very difficult not to walk on tiptoe.