Closing Time

"Kilroy?"

"Flight, Larry?"

"Who's Kilroy?" asked Michael.

"McBride?"

"Yossarian?"

"In Washington once, I went to look for a name on the Vietnam Memorial, with the names of all who'd been killed there. Kilroy was there, one Kilroy."

"The same one?"

"How the fuck should I know?"

"I'll check him out," promised McBride. "And let's talk more about that wedding. Maybe we could do it, I believe we could. I'll check that out too."

"What's this about a wedding?" Michael demanded with truculence, when they were out of the police station and walking away through the terminal.

"Not mine." Yossarian laughed. "I'm too old to marry again."

"You're too old to get married again."

"That's what I said. And are you still too young? Marriage may not be good, but it's not always all bad."

"Now you're talking too much."

Yossarian had his routine for moving through panhandlers, handing one-dollar bills from the folded daily allotment in his pocket to those who were timid and to those who looked threatening. A hulking man with inflamed eyes and a scrap of cloth offered to wipe his eyeglasses for a dollar or smash them to pieces if he declined. Yossarian gave him two dollars and put his eyeglasses away. Nothing surprising seemed unusual anymore in this deregulated era of free enterprise. He was under a death sentence, he knew, but he tried imparting that news to Michael euphemistically. "Michael, I want you to stay in law school," he decided seriously.

Michael stepped away. "Oh, shit, Dad. I don't want that. It's expensive too. Someday," he went on, with a dejected pause, "I'd like to work at something worthwhile."

"Know anything? I'll pay for the law school."

"You won't know what I mean, but I don't want to feel like a parasite."

"Yes, I would. It's why I gave up commodities, currency trading, stock trading, arbitrage, and investment banking. Michael, I'll give you seven more years of good health. That's the most I can promise you."

"What happens then?"

"Ask Arlene."

"Who's Arlene?

"That woman you're living with. Isn't that her name? The one with the crystals and the tarot cards."

"That's Marlene, and she moved out. What happens to me in seven years?"

"To me, you damned fool. I'll be seventy-five. Michael, I'm already sixty-eight. I'll guarantee you seven more years of my good health in which to learn how to live without me. If you don't, you'll drown. After that I can't promise you anything. You can't live without money. It's addictive once you've tried it. People steal to get it. The most I'll be able to leave each of you, after taxes, will be about half a million."

"Dollars?" Michael brightened brilliantly. "That sounds like a fortune!"

"At eight percent," Yossarian told him flatly, "you'd get forty thousand a year. At least a third will go to taxes, leaving you twenty-seven."

"Hey, that's nothing! I can't live on that!"

"I know that too. That's why I am talking too much to you. Where's your future? Can you see one? Move this way."

They stepped out of the path of a young man in sneakers ru

"I'll do you for a nickel, mister," she offered.

"Please," said Yossarian, stepping around her.

"I'll do you both for a nickel each. I'll do you both at the same time for a nickel each. Pop, I'll do you both for the same nickel."

Michael, with a strained smile., skittered around her. She plucked at Yossarian's sleeve and held on.

"I'll lick your balls."

Yossarian stumbled free, mortified. His face burned. And Michael was aghast to see his father so shaken.

10 George G. Tilyou

At a rolltop desk many levels below, Mr. George C. Tilyou, the Coney Island entrepreneur, who'd been dead almost eighty years, counted his money and felt himself sitting on top of the world. His total never decreased. Before his eyes were the starting and finishing stations of the roller-coaster he'd had brought down after him from his Steeplechase amusement park. The tracks had never looked newer as they rose toward the crest of the highest gravity drop at the begi

He had renamed his roller-coaster the Dragon's Gorge. Elsewhere he had his Cave of the Winds, and at the entrance churned his Barrel of Fun, which brought the unpracticed to their knees right off on the circling bottom and kept them tumbling against each other in tilted disarray until they crawled out the farther end and regained their feet or were assisted by attendants or other customers more experienced. One who knew how could pass through without fuss merely by walking on a mild diagonal contrary to the direction of rotation, but that wasn't fun. Or stride and stride uphill upon the descending floor without getting anywhere and remain forever in the same place, but that was not much fun either. Onlookers of both sexes took special delight in witnessing the unbalanced distress of attractive ladies clutching to hold down their skirts in the days before slacks attained respectability as a befitting mode of female attire.

"If Paris is France," he could remember stating as the playground's foremost spokesman and impresario, "then Coney Island, between June and September, is the world."

The money he sat counting every day would never deteriorate or grow old. His cash was indestructible and would always have value. At his back rose a cast-iron safe that was taller than he was. He had guards and attendants from the old days, costumed in red coats and green jockey caps from the old days. Many were friends from the begi

With a genius unca

While heirs and executors disputed with each other and with government tax officials, Steeplechase (the " Fu