Regiment of Women (33 page)

In a moral state like sleepwalking, he limped through the open door of the office and faced the comic book, which was
Wonderwoman
.

He waited an eternity without acknowledgment from the attendant. He stared through the glass at the girl, who was gesticulating madly in the cab of the ambulance.

Dully, he said: “Your money or your life.”

The attendant lowered the comic book and said in an even duller voice than his: “Standard or high test and how many?” She was about twenty, low-foreheaded and acne-cheeked.

Cornell had forgotten to pretend there was a gun in his pocket. He began to tremble.

“You don't understand,” he said nevertheless. “This is a holdup.”

The attendant remained motionless, impassive, the comic book flat on the desk. Cornell touched his thigh with his left hand, the right still feeling numb. “Don't make me use this,” he said. By accident he had patted his penis, which had lodged there in the disorder of the fall. He made his ghastly grin again.

The pimpled attendant was trying to say something. Cornell leaned helpfully over the desk in an effort to hear.

The frightened youth pushed her chair back. “Don't kill me,” she said. “Take it all.”

She pointed at a cash register on top of a showcase full of canned oil arranged in a pyramid. Cornell went there and pried at the drawer. “Press the No Change button,” said the youth. He did so. The drawer shot out, making a bell ring and hitting him in the belt buckle.

He claimed the bills from all three slots, and took the zinc dollars too. He was wondering about the lesser change when he heard the ambulance horn.

“Thank you,” he told the attendant, and ran to the door, where he stopped long enough to say: “I wouldn't really have killed you!”

The girl was behind the wheel, but a hose from the gas pump was attached to the filler pipe of the ambulance and the pump was whirring away.

The girl pointed down the street to something he could not see from his angle. “Cops!” she shouted. “Let's go,” and started off as he climbed in. He heard the gas hose tear away and then a sharper noise as they roared off the apron. Looking back, he saw the attendant shooting at them with a pistol. A police car came slowly up the street and stopped abruptly when its occupants saw the attendant. Both cops got out and began to fire at
her
. At this point the girl negotiated the corner in a sweeping turn that took them over the curb and across a portion of sidewalk before she could straighten the vehicle.

After they had bumped down into the street again, she asked: “How much did you get?”

Cornell stared at the money still clutched in his hands. He had probably dropped some of the zinc dollars. He counted the bills. “Forty-seven dollars in paper…. And six zincs.”

“You're kidding.”

“That's it.”

“Enough for two hamburgers.”

“With coffee,” said Cornell. He had become strangely calm since climbing into the ambulance, perhaps owing to the total unreality of the experience. It was impossible to believe he had robbed a gas station.

“No wonder she didn't resist,” said the girl. “You sure you got everything in the register?”

“I cleaned it out.”

She peered at the fuel indicator. “Good thing I thought about the gas. About half a tank. Next time we get filled up first,
then
hit the register.”

“Next time?” He instantly felt awful again.

“We'd better pick a station in a more prosperous area. Forty-seven dollars!”

“Plus six zincs.”

“Damn!” She hit the wheel. But after a moment she said: “You did a good job, Georgie. I knew you had it in you.”

His ankle and wrist were sore again. He had forgotten them during the action.

“I don't know what I would have done if she had pulled out that pistol while I was in there.”

“Kick it out of her hand,” said the girl. “Karate-chop her arm.”

Cornell closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

“Where are we heading? New York?” He looked out. Once or twice a year the smog was slight enough between Manhattan and Jersey so that you could see one from the other. It was too much to expect this would be one of those days. “We can reach Manhattan on the gas we have now, can't we? So why rob more stations?”

“We can't go to New York,” she said firmly. “That's definite. Eventually, even the Army will get around to putting out an alert, and some time or another even a stupid New York cop might spot one of us, even if we maintained our disguises. You don't look like a real girl, and I don't look like a man.”

This puzzled Cornell, though it was true enough.

“Then what was all that stuff about you wanting to be a man?”

She was driving intently. “What stuff?”

Cornell was annoyed. “Why,” he said, “that act back at the hospital, and then the desperation about getting into those clothes as soon as we left camp. And before that Lieutenant Aster told me you had sex-identification problems. And what about in jail and as a barracks leader? You must have thought you looked like a man then!”

She murmured, not in the least disturbed, “Mmm.”

“Mmm?
I think you owe me an explanation.”

“Well, what about you?” He saw now that she
had
been pricked and that behind her apparent calm she had prepared a counterattack. “You were all aggressive and effective at the hospital. You took charge. But as soon as we got into the ambulance you acted like a basket case, huddled there naked in your blanket, whimpering and sniveling.”

“I was
not
whimpering and sniveling.”

“You were too.”

“I was—” He halted. This was degrading. He cleared his throat and said: “Well, I'm not in the blanket now. As to the ambulance, I don't know how to drive. That puts me in a weak situation. I can go only so far when I lack knowledge of how to do something. The girl friend who was supposedly teaching me to drive sneered at every little mistake I made and kept joking about men drivers. That attitude may be why men
are
often none too effective behind the wheel—and at a lot of other things as well.”

Now she surprised him again by nodding in agreement. “Maybe it is. And maybe always expecting a woman to perform perfectly in any assignment, or if she meets with a reverse to accept it like a female, with a stiff upper lip, never surrendering to pressure, never betraying her emotions—maybe that's wrong too.”

“I never thought of that,” said Cornell. “I always assumed women had things pretty much their own way.”

She laughed bitterly. “You know that treatment of Aster's? I
hated
to play with guns when I was a child. I made the mistake of telling her that, and how they made me be a cowboy and forced me to play cops ‘n' robbers, and how I'd get hysterical and vomit. She said that's why we should try to recapitulate that time of life and brought me that toy tommygun. And I was terrible at sports and I hated them. So she brings the football and baseball bat and hockey stick!”

“Careful,” said Cornell, pointing to an acute fork into which the street divided. She chose the right leg and darted into it. They were now getting towards the suburbs, passing five-story apartment houses separated one from the next by concrete yards full of clotheslines, the kind of places where male commuters lived. One of the boys at Huff House lived in Jersey and swore by it, despite the two-and-a-half hour trip he had to make to reach Manhattan each day: said it was worth it to breathe fresh air in the evening. It was true that the atmosphere here had just a tinge of yellow, nowhere near the bright lemon hue of the New York sky, which often indeed deepened into dark mustard.

Cornell got some relief from observing the area. He was rather embarrassed by the girl's confession, though he had solicited it. “Gee,” he said, “I haven't worn a gas mask in—” How many days was it since he had come to camp? Not even a week?

Or was he jealous of her emotional problem, having a massive one of his own? If so, then he was weaker than she.

“Yes,” he said, “that therapeutic reprise didn't work with me, either. But I don't think it disturbed me as much as yours did you. She never really drew blood with me. I was mainly bored as a teenager.” Which of course was not true. He had been utterly miserable since the beginning of pubescence, getting a beard, pubic and armpit hair, and an odor to his sweat. “But I always liked the dolls they made us play with as little kids, though I could seldom get the one with the prettiest dress.”

“I stole a doll for my very own once,” the girl said slyly. “But they took it away from me.”

“I remember some girl doing that!” Cornell said eagerly. “Which elementary facility were you in?”

“AC
-2967,
in Boston.”

“Couldn't have been you then. I was in New York. But of course you're a lot younger than me anyway.”

“I'm twenty-two,” she said. “You can't be over twenty-five.”

He murmured. But then this other self (whether a better one or worse had yet to be proved) again made its assertion. He stared bravely at her. “I'll be thirty next month, to tell the truth.”

She frowned. “How can that be?”

He explained.

“Well,” she said, “you don't look it.”

He thanked her ritually, but was more interested in another matter than in the compliment. “I thought you would have known that, being FBI.”

“I don't know anything about you, Georgie, except you got away from me in jail.” She steered around a pothole in the street. “The liaison between the Bureau and the New York Police Department is very poor. I was on assignment in the Men's House of Detention without the knowledge of the police. It's our practice to let them in on a case only at the arrest, otherwise they would blow the whole operation, either because of ineptness or corruption. Most of them are on the take from criminal elements. For example, that men's-lib movement. The police have known for years about the subway tunnel.”

“They have?”

She removed a hand from the wheel and rubbed two fingers together. “The payoff. We've known about it too, but have failed to act for different reasons. To arrest those Movement clowns would be to give them undeserved publicity. As they are, they're completely ineffectual. This sperm-camp action, the jerking-off stunt you were supposed to incite, is the only new idea they've had in years. You saw how hopeless that was. Otherwise it's endless so-called revolutionary manifestoes, which they can't get any boy to read, let alone believe.”

“You could hardly have been waiting in jail for me,” said Cornell. “It was totally accidental that I was there at all.” She looked a lot better since he had toned down her makeup; he was even getting used to the clashing colors of her outfit.

“It was a crappy assignment,” she went on. “With no particular aim, just to sniff out whatever sedition might exist. We had anonymous reports from time to time that the prisoners were talking revolution. And of course, if they were it might be serious, unlike that subway Movement, prisoners being supposedly hardened, ruthless criminals, not a bunch of prating buffoons with mimeograph machines.”

“I saw some of them,” said Cornell. “I tried to get them to break out with me.”

“Then you know.” She smirked. “Alongside of them, even that ridiculous Movement looks dangerous. The ones who have enough spirit left to get off their bunks sell their tails to the guards for extra food.” The corners of her mouth drooped. “Lousy assignment. I got it because I screwed up every other one I was ever given.”

“Really?”

“And in that case you knocked me down and tied me up. You, a little secretary, arrested for the first time in your life.”

Cornell felt compassion for her. “I'm little only in a figurative sense. Actually I'm a head taller than you. But up to that fight, you did a terrific job. You don't look basically anything like a man, and yet you fooled me for a whole day, wasn't it?”

“I've always been a flop as a federal agent,” she said. “In two years I haven't made one arrest. I had a bank robber cornered once, but just as I was about to take her, I got menstrual cramps, and she knocked me out. Lucky I wasn't killed.”

“Maybe you're too hard on yourself,” said Cornell. “After all, you're still young and able to profit from your mistakes.”

She shook her head. “It's all over now. See, after you overpowered me, I was taken out of the field and put on a desk. When the tip came in that you had turned up in the camp, another agent got the assignment to go after you. But she's a friend of mine, and I talked her into letting me take it. Now she'll be in the soup too.”

“Gee,” Cornell said. “Who'd think they'd go to such trouble to catch a first-offender transvestite?”

“You crossed a state line,” said the girl. Then she gave him a sensitive glance. “Also, to save face I told them you were a dangerous saboteur.”

To alleviate her embarrassment he looked out his window. Now they were traveling past private houses, the kind owned by minor executives, who often kept men in them. The slang term for this male role was “mattress.” Cornell of course had been Pauline Witkovsky's mattress years before, but at least she was a creative artist and not some commuting business-bore with narrow-brimmed felt hat and attache case. He saw two of these boys on the sidewalk now: both wore curlers, and one pushed a shopping cart full of supermarket bags. The plight of the kept man was often the subject of magazine articles: empty days spent alone in front of the TV or gossipy card parties with their neighbors. A lot of them reportedly lived on tranquilizers, and many had a drinking problem.

At one house a dopey-looking, frizzy blond in a flowered housecoat was only now, almost noon, fetching in the newspaper and milk from the front step.