Closing Time (Catch-22 2)

"Right, 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 running for his life from a half-dozen policemen running just as fast and closing in on him from different sides because he had just murdered with a knife someone in another part of the terminal. Pounding among them in heavy black shoes was Tom McMahon, who looked ill from the strain. Cut off in front, the nimble youth left them all in the lurch by swerving sharply and ducking down into the same emergency stairwell Yossarian had taken with McBride and probably, Yossarian mused fancifully, would never be heard of again--or better still, was already back on their level, walking behind them in his sneakers, looking blameless. They passed a man sitting asleep on the floor in a puddle of his own making, and another teenager, out cold, and then found their way blocked by a skinny woman somewhere near forty with stringy blonde hair and a lurid blister on her mouth.

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