his brother James was across from him. They used to joke — when white people died they came back as chickens so black people could eat them and finally do black people some good.
He laughed to himself. Hadn’t thought about that shit in years. Hey man, be nice, get out of this jam, get out of this hole, go back and see James, have some of Mama’s chicken.
Mama was a big Baptist woman. She worked for many years at some Jewish people’s in Pikesville and they treat her good. But nobody else treat her good, not Tyrone, her husband, who disappeared, and Willis, who moved in and used to beat her. His mother was a large, sorrowful praying woman who worked very hard every day in her life and died when her eldest boy, Nathan, was in tunnels in Vietnam and only heard about it from his brother James. Then James got killed. Another boy at a basketball game had a gun, said James called him something bad, shot him.
So Nathan came home to no Mama and no brother James, and all the men he’d fought with in the tunnels were dead too. Death was everywhere, like the rats that prowled the hot alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, in B- more, Maryland, and he could get no job or when he got a job and his head would ache because of the time he was blown up and buried in the tunnel and couldn’t work, he got fired.
TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, the sign had said in the DEROS station on the way back from ’Nam, but it was another white lie: today was the first day of no part of your life.
The sign should have said what another sign did say: FUCK NIGGERS.
Walls shook his head. He was gripping the shotgun hard enough to break it; no one understood how full of rage Pennsylvania Avenue could turn a man. Man do
Walls came out of his reverie when a drop of water hit him in the cheek. Was only this motherfucking tunnel, no lie, Jack, that seemed to go on forever and ever and—
And then he saw it.
Well, a long way to climb to see this shit, but this was it all right, this was what he’d come for.
It was a metal pipe, corrugated, cutting through the tunnel up ahead. But goddamn, it was rusted, and it was from the hole in it that the light originated.
Walls scrambled ahead, not straight up exactly, but on an angle toward that pipe. Was this where white shit came out of the fort in the mountain? But no, didn’t smell like no shit. He got up to it and crouched. Yes, the water came through here and had eaten the flues into the mountain from this spot. This was the main mother of all the tunnels he’d come through, this itty-bitty little thing. He reached up, touched the hole. Yes, by God, man could get through. Walls pulled himself into it. It was like being unborn: it was like crawling back into a pussy. His body had to work in an odd way to get into the rotted pipe, bending here, twisting there, wiggling his skinny hips this-way- that-way and — dammit, fucking gun
He was in the sucker.
Okay, motherfucker, where you go? He began to slither forward. His shoulders could barely move. The roof of the pipe was an inch above his nose. He wiggled ahead. He couldn’t turn to see. He could smell the metal. The gun was under him, it hurt — goddamn, it hurt — but he was so trapped he could move forward only by inches. Panic hit him again. Oh, shit, to die like this in some pipe like a turd in the sewer. He screamed, his scream coming back in his face off the metal above him. This was the worst. There was almost no room for movement at all in here; he just had to keep pushing himself forward inch by inch. A man could die in here, stuck and starved to death and the little rats would come and eat the skin and muscles off his bone.
Walls tried not to think of the rats, and thank Cod there weren’t any for him: only the pipe, above him, all around him, and the vague sense of light ahead and the rush now of absolute cool, dry air, and a vague hum. He squirmed on, and the seconds seemed to expand into hours. He felt like he’d been down here forever. He felt like this was his life. He couldn’t remember a goddamned thing, except that this morning he’d been worried about the Aryans whacking his ass in the shower as they’d sworn to do. He figured he ought to pray, but now he was out of gods. He could think of no gods to pray to. The Baptist God of Mama was no good down here. Besides, lots of guys believed in a Baptist God and they got wasted easy, the most recent of them being poor Witherspoon some hours back in the tunnel. But this guy Allah was no treat either, and the guys that ate up his action died just like the Baptists. Larry X, head Fruit of Islam in the pen, he got his throat splayed open as a fish mouth by an Aryan, Allah did his ass no good at all. So Walls could think of no one to pray to, and he just sang a verse of “Abraham, Martin, and John,” thinking, those dudes the closest thing to God I ever heard of, and squirmed ahead, and came, centuries later and awash in his own stench and sweat and terror, to the end of the tunnel.
He squirmed out. And there was God.
Tall and black and blank, God looked down on him impassively, in an air-conditioned chamber with the hum of machines. God was enormous. God was huge. God had no mercy, no meaning, no human face. God was flat and cold to the touch.
God was a rocket.
The teletype clattered for the first time in hours. The general made no move, however, to approach the machine and read the message. He simply remained crouched over Jack Hummerl’s shoulder, seemingly mesmerized by the flame so deep inside the block of titanium, as if he were
“Sir,” Jack heard someone say. “There’s a message here.”
The general finally tore himself away from the spectacle of the flame, went to the machine and ripped the message off the platen.
Then he went to the phone.
Jack heard the call.
“Major Yasotay. Tell the men they no longer need to obey language discipline. The Americans seemed to have figured out who we are.”
He put down the receiver and spoke quickly in another language to one of the guards in the command capsule. The silent boy responded and raced out; Jack heard them all talking, and then he recognized the language.
Impulsively, he turned and stood.
“You guys are
The general looked at him, and for just a moment Jack saw a hint of surprise flicker across the man’s smooth, handsome face.
“And so if we are, Mr. Hummel? What possible difference could that make to your family?”
“I’m not helping any Russians,” Jack said with absolute finality, feeling that he’d somehow made his breakthrough and had located sufficient grounds upon which to make his stand, though he felt his heart’s thudding go off like a jack-hammer and his knees begin to knock.
The general spoke quickly in Russian, and instantly two of the young troopers ducked into the room, their weapons aimed at Jack.
“Let’s end the farce, Mr. Hummel, without any silly fuss. If I say the word, my men fire. Then I’ll have to put a message through to the men at your family’s house and your wife and children die. There can’t be but an inch or two of metal left in there. Well get through it, with or without you. Your sacrifice accomplishes nothing; the sacrifice of your family accomplishes nothing.”
“Oh, no? Buddy, you may know missiles, but you don’t know welding. I give a yank on the tubes here”—he yanked the rubber hoses that ran from his torch to the cylinder of gas nearby—“and rip the sealers out, and you lose all your gas, then you’re out of fucking luck until you get a new cylinder in. Like, say, by noon tomorrow, huh?”
Jack’s knees shivered with desperate bravado. He felt the torch trembling in his hand. But he was right, of course; the whole crazy thing depended on nothing more than the seal between the hose and the tank; give it a hard yank, and this was all history.
