Читать книгу Moonglow - Michael Chabon, Michael Chabon - Страница 12

On December 8, 1941, unemployed, bored, and known as a shark in every pool hall within a hundred miles of the corner of Fourth and Ritner, my grandfather enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers. Bequeathing his custom Brunswick cue to Uncle Ray—depriving the world, in time, of a tzaddik—he boarded a troop train for Rapides Parish, Louisiana. After six weeks of basic he was sent to a Corps base near Peoria, Illinois, for training in the construction of airfields, bridges, and roads.

His hustler’s instinct was to underplay and advertise nothing, but among the raw recruits of Camp Claiborne and the bohunks and golems of Camp Ellis, he could not conceal the caliber of his game as a soldier and an engineer. He was strong and durable. His frugality with words got interpreted variously but to his advantage as manliness, self-possession, imperviousness. Inevitably word got around that he held an engineering degree from Drexel Tech, spoke fluent German, was all but unbeatable at pool,* and on intimate terms with motors, batteries, and radios. One afternoon when he and his fellow trainees were out butchering a meadow along the Spoon River, some idiot drove a truck through the line that connected their field telephone to the switchboard. My grandfather improvised a new connection using a nearby barbed-wire fence. When it started to rain and the wet fence posts grounded the line, he cut a spare inner tube into foldable bits and sent men down along the fence for two miles to insulate wire from wood.

The next day he was ordered to report to the commanding officer of his cadre. The major was a lean Princetonian, stained and yellowed by years of spanning chasms and draining swamps in malarial climes. His cheeks were all peeling skin and gin blossoms. He filled a briar pipe and took his time about it. Every now and then he sneaked a sidelong look at my grandfather, who stood uncomfortably at ease, wondering what he had done wrong. After the major had set fire to his pipe, he informed my grandfather that he was to be recommended for transfer to the Corps’s officer candidate school at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

The atmosphere of life as an enlisted man was toxic with disdain for officers, and from the first my grandfather had breathed that atmosphere freely, without need of filter or adjustment period.

“Sir,” my grandfather replied after a moment of irresolution. He had nothing against this particular major. It was officers as a class whom he despised. “I’ll swing a hammer until we’ve built a highway from here to Berlin. But, all due respect, I’d rather be a dancing chicken in a box on the Steel Pier than a commissioned officer. No offense, sir.”

“None taken. I understand what you’re saying, and between you and me, your dancing-chicken analogy is very close to the mark.”

“Sir.”

“All the same, are you aware that if you were to make the grade as a first lieutenant, it would add fifty dollars to your monthly soldier’s pay?”

It happened that my great-grandfather’s final enterprise, a lunch counter near Shibe Park, had recently gone under. He was working now at a package store, grappling in a hernia truss with steel kegs of Yuengling. For years my great-grandmother had taken in piecework, sewing ribbon and trim for a milliner. Now she had been obliged to get a job outside the house, boxing cakes and pastries in a bakery where the bakers, two half brothers, burned off their mutual contempt by abusing the counter help. My grandfather knew that his parents would shoulder any work and stomach any companions to pay the upkeep on Ray’s education, in which they lodged their dreams.

“No, sir,” he said, “I was not aware of that.”

Two weeks later—the day before the men of his cadre boarded a train for Dawson Creek, BC, where they pitched in to work on the Alaskan Highway—my grandfather was ordered to report to the Corps OCS at Fort Belvoir. It was a bitter journey.

Far from the frozen north or the war’s early battlefields, three hours from Shunk Street, more bored than ever, my grandfather began to brood. His years in poolrooms and classrooms inclined him to divide men into patsies, idiots, and shams, and there was little evidence at Fort Belvoir to debunk this taxonomy. Everywhere he looked he discovered laziness, incompetence, waste, bluster. In other soldiers’ hearts such discoveries bred cynicism, but in my grandfather’s there arose a more or less permanent state of aggravation.

Given the proximity of Fort Belvoir to Washington, D.C., it was only a matter of time before his exasperation generalized beyond the perimeter fence to encompass the seat of government itself. In spite of Pearl Harbor and the invasion panics it inspired, the capital had yet to lose its complacency toward enemies who were continents and oceans away. Anti-aircraft batteries were spotty. Elderly Curtiss biplanes patrolled sputtering overhead. A handful of Coast Guard tubs policed the rivers and bridges.

Walking the streets one afternoon on a one-day pass, my grandfather nursed his anger and amused himself by planning the conquest of Washington. For verisimilitude he enacted his role of reichsmarschall in his grandfather’s Pressburger German, debating strategy with the added relish its glottals afforded. He ordered that crack commando units be trained to crew U-boats. He landed three hundred men on the Patuxent at the spot where the British had begun their invasion of 1814. His submarine jaegers blew up the Potomac bridges and electrical power stations, seized radio towers, cut telegraph and telephone cables. They entrenched the orderly street grid with grenade craters and razor wire, piled up chicanes across the approaches to the city. Thirty men sufficed to take the Capitol, a dozen to seize the White House. By the evening of the second day of his invasion, my grandfather stood in jackboots and peaked schirmmütze at the elbow of FDR, proffering his pen for the formal surrender.

He returned to Fort Belvoir that evening alarmed by the clarity and elegance of his plan. Before retiring for the night he formulated its essentials in a typed three-page memorandum to his CO, which was afterward mislaid, ignored, or possibly forgiven. In the darkness of the dormitory room he shared with an MIT-educated civil engineer named Orland Buck, he laid out the scheme again.

By pure chance, this Buck happened to be one of the few officer candidates not readily fitted onto my grandfather’s three-part schema of humanity. Orland Buck was a Maine Brahmin whose father and grandfather both had died fighting to build heroic bridges, in Argentina and the Philippines. A history of raising hell in genteel institutions and the weight of his patrimony inclined Buck to the arts of demolition, and he zeroed in on that element of my grandfather’s plan.

“One bridge would do,” he decided. “Make it the Francis Scott Key and you would get their attention, all right.”

Weeks passed without any acknowledgment of my grandfather’s memorandum. Orland Buck and my grandfather spent their leave hours ostentatiously casing the Francis Scott Key Bridge with its arches in elegant cavalcade. Buck took documentary pictures of my grandfather taking pictures, unmolested, of the bridge’s piers and abutments. Despite their efforts, no one questioned or even appeared to remark on the young men’s fascination with the bridge, built by the Corps in the twenties, engineered by an associate of Buck’s father.

In demolition training sessions, the Corps daily broadened their expertise, and at night Buck and my grandfather studied official copies of the bridge’s construction plans in the base library.

“It will teach them a lesson,” Buck said, lying on his bunk in the darkness. A radio, tuned low, brought news of Rommel’s capture of Tobruk. “It will serve the bastards right.”

My grandfather wondered how long ago, without his having noticed, his bunkmate had passed from the conditional to the future in talking about their plan. He didn’t believe for a moment that Buck wanted to teach anyone a lesson or had the slightest interest in seeing justice done. Buck was not a sorehead, a perfectionist, or a nurser of grievances. He was in it for fun and only saying what he thought my grandfather wanted to hear.

“Don’t get carried away,” my grandfather told him.

“Who, me?”

In a strongbox at the back of an old Mack truck that stood rusting without engine or wheels under a tarp in the motor pool, Buck and my grandfather had stashed ten bombs of their own manufacture. The bombs’ design was plausibly straightforward and effective: empty wooden ammo boxes stuffed with guncotton, which Buck and my grandfather had spirited away in amounts small enough to go unnoticed during demolitions training. A small amount of primer and Cordtex had been obtained in the same way, just enough for my grandfather to make his point harmlessly. Twisted to the end of each coil of Cordtex was a note typed by my grandfather that read nur zu demonstrationszwecken.*

“I don’t like it when people get carried away,” my grandfather said.

“Oh, no, neither do I,” Buck said shamelessly.

On the night appointed for the exploit they strapped on tool belts, retrieved their store of demonstration bombs from the strongbox, zipped the bombs into four duffel bags, and went AWOL with an ease that bore out my grandfather’s contempt for the way things were done at Fort Belvoir. They hiked through tall weeds and trash pine, across a service road, and into some woods that had been part of the original Belvoir plantation. They stumbled cursing in the dark of the forest until they came to the tracks of the RF&P, where they hopped a freight and rode an empty flatbed into Alexandria.

They jumped off just before the train entered the rail yard, in a neighborhood of low brick houses. From the Potomac Yard came a smell of diesel, an ozone scorch of pantograph sparkings. Those smells and the houses with their puzzled expressions stirred old yearnings and rancors in my grandfather’s heart. He wondered, as in the past and for years to come, if this might be the night on which his life, his true life, began at last.

They found an old Model A pickup parked in an alley. The rear window glass of its cab had been replaced by a sheet of pegboard. My grandfather stove in the pegboard with a jab of his left elbow and wriggled through. He had never hot-wired a car before, but the principle was trivial and the Ford unresisting. It took him under a minute to turn the engine over. He unlocked the door and slid across to the passenger side. Orland Buck got in behind the wheel and pawed it for a second or two.

“You bastard,” Orland Buck said happily. “God damn you.”

“Drive.”

A body slammed against the truck on Buck’s side. Buck’s window was filled with the eyes and red jaw of a dog. A man shouted from a house that backed onto the alley. Orland Buck laughed. He fought against the clutch and the gearshift. They lurched out of the alley under escort from the outraged dog before Buck hit the gas and they left the animal in their dust. The truck was not going to afford them very much in the way of stealth. As they turned onto the Jeff Davis Highway, it sounded like they were dragging a sack full of clocks behind them.

Orland Buck took himself in hand after that. He drove with care in the darkness, meeting the speed limit. They drove past the new airport, past the wasteland where they were putting up the new War Department building, past the cemetery where Buck’s father and grandfather lay under their white crosses. They dragged their load of clock parts across the roadbed of their intended victim and turned left on the District side. Upriver a little way from Georgetown, near the old terminus of the C&O canal, Buck put the truck into neutral and cut the engine. They rolled into the gravel lot of Fletcher’s Boathouse. Before getting out of the truck, they blackened their faces with burnt cork and pulled dark watch caps over their heads. Orland Buck was in heaven. My grandfather was obliged to admit that he was also enjoying himself so far.

“Now, did you ever paddle a canoe?” said Buck, a veteran of many Down East camps.

“I’ve seen it done,” my grandfather said, thinking in particular of a silent version of The Last of the Mohicans he had taken in at the Lyric in Germantown. “If Bela Lugosi can do it, I can do it.”

The hasp on the boathouse door broke at a tap of his hammer and chisel. My grandfather eased the door open a foot on its rollers and slipped inside. The darkness smelled of old canvas tennies. Buck found the canoe, lucky number 9, in which a War Department typist named Irma Budd once sucked him off. Bowed and loping, they ran it down to the boat ramp. My grandfather loaded in the duffel bags while Buck fetched two paddles. “Ready to have some fun, Lugosi?”

My grandfather dragged the canoe to the bottom of the ramp and climbed into the stern as the hull scraped, then slid free. It was not the type of question he would ever bother to answer.

In canoe number 9, silent as Piscataways, they breasted the Potomac. This was the part of the exploit that would expose them most to public view, and they had decided it would be better to get across and hug the Virginia bank, in those days still half wilderness. Adventure silenced Orland Buck. It brought out in him the sobersided Yankee, two wiry hands on a wooden shaft. For most of the crossing my grandfather was as useless as a Hungarian actor, though he did not give way to distress or embarrassment. By design they had chosen a moonless night, but the weather was clear, and over my grandfather’s head the circuitry of heaven was printed in bright joints of solder. By the time Buck brought them around for the short downstream run to the Key Bridge, my grandfather was handling his own paddle with aplomb. He was as happy as he had ever been.

The bridge seemed to hold itself in tension, straining at its tethers as Orland Buck and my grandfather slid beneath its haunch. It thrummed with the passage of a car overhead. My grandfather shipped his paddle and crouched, rocking the canoe a little as Buck eased them to the foot of the abutment that buried its massive burden in the soil of Virginia. Buck reached out to steady the boat. My grandfather zipped open one of the duffel bags and took out the first bomb and a roll of adhesive tape they had boosted from the infirmary. Given time and actual malicious intent, they would have holed the concrete with a pick or borer to sink the bombs, to give the blasts some muscle. Concrete was a bastard, and my grandfather estimated that to bring the Key Bridge down in earnest might take a thousand pounds of guncotton. He taped the first bomb to the bridge’s great concrete hoof. The strips of sticky tape as he unrolled them resounded in the arch like thunder cracks.

“Next,” he said.

Orland Buck stroked at the water and they went farther in under the bridge. The water slapped against the canoe and against the abutment.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge has five arches, three that take giant steps across the water, one at either end to anchor the bridge to land. Orland Buck and my grandfather took turns taping three bombs to each of the four central piers, six bombs per man. When they had finished, it was nearly four in the morning. My grandfather looked up at the belly of the bridge. He admired the way the gap between the top of each arch and the flat bridge deck was taken up by a series of daughter arches, each inverted U obliged to descend farther from the deck than the last as the mother arch curved down and away. The whole space hummed as the wind passed through it. Beyond the vault of steel and concrete the vernal animals and heroes wheeled in the greater vault of the sky. Arch upon arch upon arch bearing up, craving the weight, crushed by the force that held it together. He looked down at Orland Buck in the stern of the stolen canoe. Buck was holding a time pencil and a 150-foot coil of Cordtex my grandfather had never seen and knew nothing about.

“You probably want to grab a paddle and put some distance between here and this boat,” said Orland Buck.

My grandfather nodded. On some level he had suspected Buck was planning something of this nature. He sat down and deftly turned the canoe upstream. Buck paid out the coated cord with one hand, taking care not to dislodge the detonator pencil. When they had gone about a hundred and forty feet along the bank on the District side, my grandfather swung the paddle up out of water and ensured that it made solid contact with the side of Orland Buck’s head. Buck fell onto his face. My grandfather twisted the time pencil free of the Cordtex and tossed it into the river. He sat Buck up, made sure that his friend was unconscious and not dead, and laid him out in the stern of the canoe. Then he paddled back to Fletcher’s. When they got there, Buck was still out cold. My grandfather returned the canoe to the shed by himself, leaving three dollars to pay for the broken hasp. He shoved the empty duffel bags into a trash bin and loaded Buck into the cab of the stolen truck.

When they were crossing the Key Bridge, Orland Buck made a noise, and opened his eyes. He looked out the window and saw where they were. He experimented with his fingers at the site of his injury and groaned again. He shook his head. “Christ,” he said with bitter respect.

“You got carried away,” said my grandfather.

The next afternoon, when my grandfather returned to quarters after Maps and Surveying, there was an MP stationed on either side of his door. My grandfather braced himself to flee and then accepted his fate as it bore down on him. His cheeks, ears, and inner organs burned at the thought that his mother would now be obliged to let those two bakers shit on her head for the rest of her life.

The snowdrops in their spotless helmets held still as he approached them. They stared death, hatred, and tedium at him, and my grandfather stared those things back.

“Looking for me?” he said, stopping in front of the door, equidistant to each of their throats.

“No, son,” said a voice from inside the room where he and Orland Buck had foolishly conspired to land themselves, my grandfather presumed, in Leavenworth. It was a rich man’s voice, lilting and soft but accustomed to being listened to. “I’m the one that’s looking for you.”

A big man, past middle age, sprang up from the chair when my grandfather walked in. Broad at the shoulder like my grandfather, a bruiser gone old and fat. He wore a gray Glen plaid suit gridded with red, a red and silver silk tie, and wonderful black bucks. Though he looked like an English lawyer, my grandfather could smell the army on him. The man took the measure of my grandfather coldly and openly, top to bottom. What he saw appeared to confirm report or rumor. His eyes were extraordinary. Remembering them to me, my grandfather groped to define their color, comparing them first to sea ice, then to a lit stove ring.

“I am sure it will come as no surprise to you, soldier,” the man said in his Park Avenue drawl, “to learn that you are in trouble.”

“No, sir.”

“No, indeed. How could it? You went looking for trouble, and you found it. Consistent behavior produces predictable results.”

“Sir, I wasn’t looking for trouble, I—”

“Don’t bother to deny it. One glance at you and I know the whole story. You’ve been looking for trouble all your life.”

“Sir—”

“Am I wrong, soldier?”

“No, sir.”

“You stole equipment and materiel from the U.S Army. Went AWOL. Hot-wired a truck. Purloined a canoe. Planted live explosives on federal property.”

“That part was not the plan,” my grandfather said. “The live charge.”

“No? Then how did it happen?”

It was clear that Buck had already confessed to everything, but my grandfather had not given up the whiskered girl in the train yard, and he was unwilling to give up his friend, even if his friend had turned out to be a rat.

“It was a breakdown in leadership,” my grandfather confessed.

The eyes went abruptly from ice to fire. My grandfather had the disconcerting sensation of being loved by the beefy old man.

“Orlie Buck’s father served in the Fighting Sixty-ninth as my aide-de-camp,” the old man said. “He was always looking for trouble, too, and he knew that if ever he called out to me, I would hasten to his side and endeavor to get him out of whatever fix he was in, one way or another. I believe that is why, when those two snowdrops out there showed up to arrest him, Orlie reached out to his old uncle Bill.”

A seine of anecdotes, genealogies, and dark allusions let out by Orland Buck over the past few months cinched together all at once in my grandfather’s mind and caught a darting hope.

“Colonel Donovan, can you get me out of trouble, too?” my grandfather said.

“Well, my boy,” Wild Bill Donovan said, “you know, the truth is I probably could. But as we’ve already established, that’s not what you really want, now, is it?”