Pynchon as protagonist--2 of 4

[Paul Di Filippo]

"C'mon, Bodine, it's time to meet your fate."
Pig started struggling.  "No, no, I won't go, don't
make me, General LeMay will hang me by the balls!"
Yoyodyne prodded him with the rifle.  "Quit fighting,
and take it like a man.  You can do at least one noble thing
in your miserable life."
Pig straightened up.  "You've made me see the error of
my ways, Benny.  C'mon, Tom, I'm ready now."
I marched Pig down the ramp to the dock.  He exuded
such an air of holy martyrdom that I found myself almost
feeling sorry for him.
As soon as we rounded the corner of a warehouse, Pig
unsnapped the shackles from his wrists and collapsed atop a
barrel, racked by laughter.
"As Bugs Bunny would say," I commented, "'Ehhh, what a
maroon!'"
"He really thought I was like all reformed in an
instant.  Jesus, some guys deserve the Navy.  Let's hit the
road, Jack Ker-oh-wack!"
It was a sweet warm July evening, we were instantly and
unforgivably AWOL, and the King was playing the next
night about a hundred miles to the south.  Uncle Sam and the
rest of the western world was pausing like a punchdrunk
fighter between the penultimate and final round in a
senseless slugfest, a brief moment of mocking peace, to have
his mouth spritzed and the blood wiped from his brow, before
plunging back into the fray with the pug-ugly,
cauliflower-eared Papa Nikita and his robotic Commie hordes.
I had never felt more alive, nor ever would.
Kiel was crawling with SP's and MP's (S&MP's
one and all,fer shure), striding imperially among the
crowds of refugees, black-marketeers, NATO-deputized
civilian cops and homeless war-orphans, all Dondi-eyed in
rags and viscious as lampreys as they tried to attach
themselves to Pig and I as unlikely saviors. The kids were
dressed in Carnaby Street rags collected by Swinging London
matrons and debs.  Polka-dotted caps, paisley shirts,
striped trousers.  Fab gear.
Pig and I had to dart from shadow to shadow, down
rubble-filled alleys, into doorways that were all that
remained of the buildings they had been attached to, and up
stairs leading to nowhere to avoid getting orphan-mobbed or
cop-trammelled.  Using the moon, we worked our way south, to
the outskirts of the city. On the autobahn, we were lucky
enough to hook a ride with a camo-decorated canvas-backed
Mustang-model truck heading Hamburg-way.
The driver was a blonde English lieutenant named Jane
"Sugarbunny" Lane.  Her cuddly co-pilot was a dark-haired
Romanian exile with the handle of Viorica Tokes, now also a
member of the British armed forces.  Ribbons from a double
handful of campaigns:  the Congo, Panama, Algeria, Finland,
Manchuria....  Experienced, these two!  Been in more
theatres than Hope, Burns and Berle combined.  The gals, it
developed, were also illicitly on their way to the Presley
show, having wrangled the assignment of delivering the
truck's contents to the big DP camp outside Hamburg.
Viorica reached across my lap to crack the glove
compartment and liberate a bottle of Swedish vodka, which
Pig immediately and immoderately snatched away.  I flipped
on the truck's radio, tuning for the NATO station,
which, once found, proved to be broadcasting a bland diet of
anti-war tunes.  Streisand singing "A Pox on Marx (And Lenin
Too)."  Barry Sadler with "The Day We Took Moscow."  Dionne
Warwick doing the Bacharach tune "Do You Know the Way to
Riga Bay?".  You dig, I'm sure.  I snapped it off.
      "So what kind of mercy mission to the poor displaced person-types 
is this?" asked Pig after a swig, squeezing Sugarbunny's thigh as she 
drove.  To ease the crowding--the door lever was pushing my service 
revolver into my hip--I placed my arm around Viorica, whose accented 
English I found entrancing.
"Is that a billygoat
  club in your pants, or are you
just being glad to see me?" the Romanian babe responded,
sending Pig into gales of vodka-scented laughter.  When
Bodine's snorts tapered off, I repeated his question,
rephrased.
"Yeah, what's in the back?  Blankets, medicines,
powdered eggs?"
Sugarbunny smiled.  "Something even more vital.
Propaganda.  Namely, comics."
My heart nearly stopped.  "American?" I asked, not
daring to hope.  "New?"
Viorica nodded.  "Americanski comics, yes.  And very
much recently up-to-date."
"Stop the truck right now."  Sensing the urgency in my
voice, Sugarbunny did as I asked.  In less time than it
takes to tell, I was back in the cab with a shrink-wrapped
bundle in my lap.  I couldn't believe my luck.  This whole
crazy misadventure was starting to remind me of an episode
of Hogan's Heroes.  The one where Hogan talks the idiotic
camp commander Gerasimov into letting him and the boys
borrow a truck to deliver some beets to the borsht factory
and they make a sidetrip to blow up the tank factory, along
the way pulling a truckload of beautiful female Young Soviet
Pioneers out of a ditch.
With trembling hands I ripped the shrink-wrapping off.
The Fantastic Four had been enlisted on the
Middle-Eastern front.  The sight of the Human Torch zipping
through Red Egyptian jets, hot metal splattering above the
Sphinx, was just what I needed to see to remind me of the
United States media machine I had left behind. The Invisible
Girl fell in love with a handsome Israeli soldier, and the
Thing called
  "Clobberin' Time!" on a bunch of Russian
generals. Meanwhile Superman was busy in the Pacific,
lifting entire Commie aircraft carriers out of the sea and
dashing them down off the coast of sleepy and ostensibly
neutral Japan, inadvertantly causing a tidal wave which he
then had to outrace before it washed over the ruins of
Tokyo.  And there was more.  The Flash picked up General
Westmoreland and rushed him across China just in time to
meet Chiang Kai-Shek. The Submariner in Australia, Captain
America in Tibet, Green Lantern in French Indochina....
So engrossed had I become that I barely noticed when
the truck pulled off the road, into the grounds of an
abandoned farm. 
  
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