"I want them to leave him where he is until we decide what we will do. That's all. He has no criminal record." To the police guard nearest Michael, Yossarian barked an order. "Unlock him now. Please do that right now."
McMahon pondered a moment and signaled permission.
Yossarian resumed amicably. "Tell us where you want him to be. We're not running away. I don't want trouble. Should I hire that car? Am I talking too much?"
Michael was aggrieved. "They never even read me my right to be silent."
"They probably didn't ask you to say anything," McBride explained. "Did they?"
"And the handcuffs hurt like hell! Not that one. The real handcuffs, God damn it. That's brutality."
"Tommy, what's he charged with?" asked McBride.
McMahon hung his head. "Beating the subway fare."
"Oh, shit, Tommy," said McBride, entreating.
"Where's Gonzales?" McMahon asked the sergeant.
"That's the guy who grabbed me," Michael called out.
The sergeant blushed. "Back at the subway exit, Captain, making his quota."
"I thought they had a fucking quota!" Michael shouted.
"Major, can't you keep your son quiet while we settle this?" asked McMahon, begging a favor.
"Tommy," said McBride, "couldn't you just give him a summons and release him on a DTA? We know he'll appear."
"What did you think we were going to do, Larry?" McMahon replied. He appealed to Yossarian as though they were allies. "You hear that, Major? I'm a captain, he was a sergeant, and now he's telling me how to handle my business. Sir, are you really a major?"
"Retired," admitted Yossarian. He found the business card he wanted of the several he carried. "My card, Captain. And one for you, Mr. McBride-McBride, is it?-in case I can return the favor. You've been a godsend."
"Here's mine, Major," said McBride, and gave a second one to Michael. "And one for you too, in case you're ever in trouble here again."
Michael was moping as they walked out with McBride. "It's a good thing I've still got you to look after me, isn't it?" he accused sullenly. Yossarian shrugged. "I feel like such a fucking weakling now."
McBride intervened. "Hey, you did the right thing, kiddo." He paused for a chuckle, laughed louder. "How could you convince us you'd break our backs and legs, when we had you in handcuffs?"
"Is that what I did?" said Yossarian with fright.
McBride laughed again. "Where's the credibility? That right, Major Yossarian?"
"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 gunner from the South who'd been killed over Avignon and the small tail gunner Sam Singer from Coney Island who kept fainting away each time he came to and saw the waist gunner dying and Yossarian throwing up all over himself as he worked with bandages and tried vainly to save the dying man. It was sometimes funny to him since in just those gruesome anecdotal aspects. The wounded waist gunner was cold and in pain, and Yossarian could find nothing to do that would warm him up. Every time Singer revived, he opened his eyes on something else Yossarian was busy with that made him faint away again: retching, wrapping up dead flesh, wielding scissors. The dying gunner was freezing to death on the floor in a patch of Mediterranean sunlight, Sam Singer kept fainting, and Yossarian had taken off all his clothes because the sight of the vomit and blood on his flight uniform made him want to vomit some more and to feel with nauseated certitude that he would never want to have to wear any kind of uniform ever again, not ever, and by the time they landed, the medics were not sure which one of the three to take into the ambulance first. "Let's talk about you."
Yossarian now knew that McBride's wife had left him-transformed almost overnight into a wrathful figure of pure fury by an inner rage he had never guessed existed-and that he had been living alone since his daughter had moved to California with a boyfriend to work as a physical therapist. To McBride, the unexpected breakup of his marriage was one more heartrending cruelty he could not puzzle out in a world he saw seething barbarously with multitudes of others. Former detective sergeant Larry McBride of the Port Authority police force was fifty and had the boyish, chubby face of an introspective seraph in hard times. As a cop he had never been able to outgrow the sympathy he suffered for every type of victim he encountered-even now his knowledge of the one-legged woman living in the terminal tormented him- and always after wrapping up a case, to his racking emotional detriment, he would begin suffering compassion for the criminals too, no matter how hardened, bestial, or obtuse, no matter how vicious the crime. He would. see them all pityingly, as they'd been as children. When the opportunity arose to retire on a full pension and take the executive position at good salary at the bus terminal -in which, in fact, as one kind of guardian or another, he had by now spent his entire working life-he seized it joyfully.
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 connections with a satisfactory drug dealer or pimp.