Closing Time

"Call me Yo-Yo, for God's sake," said Yossarian jovially. "I must have been forgetting my age."

"You sure were," charged Michael. "I was scared, damn it. And you guys are laughing. You were a champ, Pop," he continued sardonically. "Me, I don't even have a loud voice. Before when I was stopped by that cop, my hands shook so much he was afraid I was having a heart attack and almost let me go."

"It's the way we are, Michael, when we're angry or scared. I get crazy and talk too much."

"I couldn't even give them my right name so they'd believe me. And when the hell were you really ever a major?"

"Want a business card?" Yossarian snickered slyly and turned to McBride. "For about a minute and a half," he explained. "They gave me a temporary boost near the end because they didn't know what else to do with me. Then they shipped me home, brought me back to my permanent grade, and gave me my honorable discharge. I had the medals, I had the points, I even had my Purple Heart."

"You were wounded?" cried McBride.

"Yeah, and crazy too," replied Michael, proudly. "Another time he went walking around naked."

"You walked around naked?" cried McBride.

"And they gave him a medal," boasted Michael, completely at ease now. "A medal for bravery."

"You got a medal for bravery?" cried McBride.

"And couldn't pin it on."

"Because he was naked?"

"Still naked."

"Weren't you embarrassed? Didn't they do anything?"

"He was crazy."

"What'd you get the medal for, Major? How'd you get the Purple Heart? Why'd you walk around naked?"

"Stop calling me Major, Mr. McBride," said Yossarian, who had no wish to talk now about the waist gu

Yossarian now knew that McBride's wife had left him-transformed almost overnight into a wrathful figure of pure fury by an i

The end of a marriage he had thought satisfactory was a blow from which it seemed at first he did not think he would recover.

Now, while Michael prepared to wait, Yossarian wondered what new thing McBride wanted to show him.

"You tell me," McBride answered mysteriously.

The time before, he had unveiled his plans for a maternity cell, for converting one of the two auxiliary prison cages in the rear, for which there never had been need, into a room for mothers of unwanted babies who most generally disposed of the newborn infants in alleys and hallways or threw them away into wastebas-kets, garbage cans, and Dumpsters. He had already moved in at his own expense some pieces of furniture from his apartment for which he no longer had need. Yossarian nodded as he listened, sucking his cheeks inward a bit, and then he nodded some more. Nobody wanted those babies, he could have told him, and nobody cared for those mothers, who were rendering a service to the community by throwing them away.

For the other jail cell, McBride resumed, he had in mind a sort of pediatric day care center for the several little kids always living in the bus terminal, to afford their mothers a clean, safe place in which to place their offspring while they journeyed outside to panhandle and hustle for drugs and booze and food, and also for the runaway kids who kept showing up in this heart of the city until they made their good co

Yossarian broke in regretfully.

"McBride?"

"You think I'm nuts?" McBride rushed on defensively. "I know Tommy thinks I'm nuts. But we could have mobiles and stuffed toys and coloring books for the little ones. And for the older ones television sets and video games, maybe computers, sure, even word processors, couldn't they learn that?"

"McBride?" repeated Yossarian.

"Yossarian?" McBride had adopted unconsciously a number of Yossarian's speaking traits.

"Mobiles and word processors for kids who want drugs and sex?"

"Just while they're hanging around making their contacts. They'd be safer here than anywhere else, wouldn't they? What's wrong? Yossarian, what's wrong?"

Yossarian sighed wearily, feeling undone. "You're talking about a facility in a police station for aspiring child prostitutes? Larry, the public would scream bloody murder. So would I."

"What would you do that's better? They come here anyway, don't they?"

From the fact that McBride had been silent since on the subject of these humanitarian undertakings, Yossarian surmised they'd been stalled or forbidden.

Today he had some new surprise in store, and Yossarian went outside with him into the capacious structure of the bus terminal, where activities of all varieties had picked up bullishly. People were moving more quickly, and there were many more of them, traveling automatically like spirits who would have chosen a different course than the ones they were following had they found themselves free to decide. So many were eating as they walked, dripping crumbs and wrappers-candy bars, apples, hot dogs, pizzas, sandwiches, potato chips. The hustlers were at work at their assorted specialties, the best of them animated, with sharp eyes fishing around shrewdly for targets of opportunity, others blundering about crudely in search of just about anything, and still others, male and female, white and black, floating in blank-eyed, wistful stupors and looking less like predators than crippled prey.

"Pickpockets," McBride said, with a signal of his chin toward a group of three men and two girls, all of good appearance, and of Latin American countenance. "They're better trained than we are. They even know more law. Look."