Moonglow. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ