Easy and Hard Ways Out: A Novel

By Robert Grossbach

An underachieving engineer building a fighter plane faces a life-changing decision in this Vietnam-era novel perfect for fans of Kurt Vonnegut, Joshua Ferris, and Joseph Heller.
 This furious, slapstick tale has been praised by the New York Times as one of the “best and brightest” novels about the Vietnam War. We follow the travails of Harvey Brank and his fellow employees, all undrafted malcontents working in a spectacularly small-minded, almost Kafkaesque engineering company. Assigned to build a fighter plane and drawn into office intrigues, Brank faces impossible demands. His wife, despairing of his patchy employment history and restlessness, hopes against hope that Brank won’t get himself fired this time. But what do you do when everything conspires against your vision of a decent, peaceable life?

Easy and Hard Ways Out is a blunt, freewheeling look at the men who stay home during wartime—a story about the everyday, with a timeless moral at its heart. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jan 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781453295342

Robert Grossbach

Robert Grossbach worked for many years at a firm that manufactures electronic components, and wrote from experience. His novels include Someone Great (1971), Never Say Die (1979),and A Shortage of Engineers (2001). Grossbach lives in Commack, New York.  

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AUERBACH LABORATORIES

Inter-Office Memorandum 10/27/66

From: EPICAC

To: W. Murphy

cc: N. Klapholtz, binary file

Subject: Soap expenditures

The accounting department monthly expense audit has, for the past three periods, shown an approximately linear increase in funds appropriated for soap to stock the lavatories. This month’s spending was sufficient to actuate the pre-danger-level warning loop, the programming of which has resulted in this memorandum. Since none of us want to risk the consequences of an actual danger alert, kindly restrain expenditures in the area indicated.

Sincerely,

EPICAC

E: terminal

PROLOGUE: GATEWAY TO THE EAST

Often, Buchfarer had dreams in which his buddies were killed and he visited and consoled their wives, who made coffee and sexual advances. In the dreams, Buchfarer resisted the overtures in honor of the departed, although in real life he was not sure he’d have the strength. In dreams he was a doer, in life, a dreamer, a mote of dust carried by the currents. Besides, in real life, they didn’t make advances.

A little before three in the morning, the voice of Kinsella, his bombardier-navigator, came blasting over the intercom. Hey, Mitch. I’m tryin’ a think of something from history. Who was the guy who sailed around Africa and discovered the trade route to India?

A name leapt into Buchfarer’s consciousness, then quickly incandesced into nothing before he could retrieve it. These kids like Kinsella. No feel for mood, for situation. Eighty miles south of Haiphong, about to interdict the shit out of the enemy by vaporizing his trucks, and look what his BN thinks about. Damn unfeeling kid.

Give me a minute, said Buchfarer into his oxygen mask.

He checked ahead, and to his left saw the plane of the flight leader, Colonel Chaplin. No trade routes in that craft. A decrepit forty-one years of age, Chaplin was a large-nosed, John Wayne-of-a-man with few outward emotions, even fewer inward ones, and a set of great, rippling jaw muscles that made Buchfarer afraid. Buchfarer did not know Chaplin’s BN, Reed, although once, while swimming, he’d seen the man quickly glance around, and then blow his nose into the pool. He felt certain now that history stumpers would hold little interest for pool nose-blowers.

Abruptly, Buchfarer saw Chaplin bank slightly and begin to descend. Buchfarer gripped the stick in his right hand and followed, hurtling down through the dome of icy sky, the clear, crescent-moonlit blackness. The time was 0258, and they were four minutes from point India, the target. They leveled off, finally, at 18,000 feet, and below, Buchfarer could make out some darkly silvered trees against the ebony background. At the pre-flight briefing, the aerology officer had told them to expect a low ceiling, maybe 500 feet, at the target, but it seemed as if he might be wrong. Buchfarer hoped so. Low ceilings made it nearly impossible to spot the SAM launching flashes on the ground, and if you didn’t see the launches it was difficult to take evasive action in time. You had to rely on your break-lock equipment then, to screw up the enemy’s guidance, and Buchfarer, himself an engineering graduate, hated to have to trust anything designed by engineers. The thought of that made him nervous, and to calm himself he opened his mask and ate a quick plum, which he loved, and which was one of several he carried with him.

He wished, while replacing his mask, that he’d eaten breakfast that evening. He wished he were on an easier mission. He wished the plum he’d just chewed were sweet instead of sour. And he wished he were flying a different plane. This was a new one, and Buchfarer didn’t quite trust it yet. True, the yellow sheet had shown only minor malfunctions, all corrected of course, but still …

Of all the men Buchfarer had spoken to, only Kinsella couldn’t wait to fly it. Kinsella, who opened his Cracker Jacks from the bottom to get more quickly at the toy.

The soft whine of the jets was beating comfortably in Buchfarer’s ears, and his mind had once more drifted to an eastern trade route when he received a radio signal on tactical primary.

Dragon-two, from Dragon-one, came Chaplin’s voice in his headphones.

Dragon-two. Go ahead, Dragon-one, said Buchfarer.

Looks like you’re trailing a bit of hydraulic fluid.

The tone was mechanical, devoid of emotion. All the older fellows were that way. They said Roger instead of O.K. as the younger guys did, and they were distant, correct, and imperturbable. Buchfarer banked slightly and saw it behind him—a thin trail of droplets unwinding through the night air. He checked his hydraulic pressure gauge, and saw it was down only slightly.

Thank you, Dragon-one, said Buchfarer.

Quickly, he checked the rest of his instruments, gyro, compass, altimeter, airspeed indicator—red-lit caretakers of his life now. Not serious, he told himself. Worst that could happen would be he’d have to lower the landing gear manually. Words of a ubiquitous poster passed through his head: Please Wingman, No Fancy Footwork, Just Solid Airmanship. Let’s see some goddamn solid airmanship, he said to himself. But an inner, less rational voice said, First the plum, and now this.

Suddenly, Kinsella’s excited squeal rang through his helmet. Hey, I got it, I got it!

Colonel Chaplin’s more elaborate communication followed immediately—a remote, disinterested pronouncement, as if describing a third-floor sale on waterless cookware. Dragon-two, from Dragon-one. My gadget shows target bearing zero-four-five degrees, thirteen miles relative. Confirm.

Roger one, affirmative, target range and bearing.

Shit, thought Buchfarer. He’d said Roger. Unthinking error. Bad habit. He thought of another poster: Complacency Kills. He’d have to be ever alert. No more Rogers. Vasco da Gama popped into his head just as he looked down, expecting to see the scattered lights of Haiphong, seeing instead a low sea of clouds. On top of everything else, the aerology officer had been correct.

AUERBACH LABORATORIES

Inter-Office Memorandum 10/28/66

From: W. Murphy

To: N. Klapholtz

cc: ——

Subject: Money spent on soap

What kind of shit is this to get that stupid letter from your lousy computer? You got something you want to say to me you say it in person you don’t need that lousy machine to do it for you. As for the soap we buy what we need what should we do? Maybe the machine don’t have to wash its hands after taking a crap but us people do. Anyway it don’t even say whether this was bar soap or powder. Some machine!

Very truly yours,

William Murphy

SUPERVISOR, MAINTENANCE

WM:wm

SOMEDAY YOU’LL LOOK BACK ON THIS … AND YOU’LL LAUGH

a. A Unique Ability

When Brank was fifteen and good in everything but not interested in anything, his parents had led him to a building that smelled of disinfectant, and made him take a series of aptitude tests. Later, when the results were so uniformly good that they indicated nothing, the psychologist had said, only half jokingly, It appears that his greatest talent is for taking aptitude tests.

b. A Non-unique Inability

The women clustered quietly in a corner of the patio while Brank stood on the grass with the men. They were husbands of his wife’s friends, an accountant, a drug salesman, a printer—easygoing aliens, non-engineers—and they talked about shrub transplants and fertilizers.

How ’bout you, Harv? said the accountant to him after a while, trying to draw him into the conversation. You puttin’ anything in this year?

Brank felt naked, unprepared. Uh, no. Nothing. Not this year. Everything I touch dies.

Oh, said the accountant, genuinely dismayed. He wore green bermuda shorts and clip-on sunglasses, and his legs were flaccid above the knees and pasty white.

I’ll bet you don’t use manure, said the printer. I’ll bet you use one of those chemical fertilizers. I tell ya, I’ve had some marvelous success with manure this year.

Brank began backing away.

That’s your problem, Harv, said the printer after him.

I’ve never been lucky with manure, said Brank, feigning a wistful wandering out onto the lawn, actually desperate to evade further conversation. He saw his three-year-old son sitting behind the other children, watching glumly as they built an intricate structure from wooden blocks. And suddenly a wave of ineffable sadness washed over him, and he felt, crazily, as if he might burst into tears right there on the spot. The intensity of the feeling seemed tied to its very generality, a vagueness unusual for Brank, whose mind was always so clear and focused. And though it related mainly to his son, and his wife, and the ruined years he’d piled up behind him, it was also connected with the printer who was successful with cow shit and the accountant and his bleached thighs. Brank had heard that outsiders ranked accountants with engineers as the two dullest groups at a party. He felt like running over to the man and hugging him, saying, It’s all right, I understand, I’m dull, too. My thighs aren’t bronze pillars, either.

Instead, composing himself, he withdrew a weathered Spauldine from his pocket, and, glancing around to make sure no one was staring, he began to toss it in the air. He squeezed it as it came down each time, turning it over and over in his hand, getting the feel of its leathery roundness. Gradually he pumped it higher and higher, launching it straight up with a smooth, levered coordination of wrist, back, and arm, oblivious of everything but the whirling pink sphere suspended like a satellite in a dazzling universe of blue.

Back among the group of men, the accountant commented, I tell ya, he is weird. He does that whenever he and Joan come. A real weird.

c. A Shy Age

From the age of twenty-three to twenty-six, Brank would not take out money from the bank, feeling the tellers would talk about him when he left, perhaps even relate dozens of special teller withdrawal jokes to the other people on line, who would go paralyzed with laughter. During this period, he left several jobs; always too ashamed to quit directly, he would say things like I’ll be right back, or See you after lunch to his supervisor, and then never return. Twice, he didn’t even bother to collect his back pay. Although he had a stockbroker, Brank never called him, even to sell plummeting stocks, for fear his account wasn’t big enough, his losses not significant enough compared with the broker’s other clients’, certain the broker would comment to colleagues upon hanging up, These little guys, they lose a lousy grand and right away they hit the phones. Brank insisted that his wife buy him prophylactics in the drugstore, but would never under any circumstances buy her sanitary napkins. Once, when she’d run out of them, and she had a fever, and it was snowing out, she’d pleaded with him, Harvey, it’s done all the time. Please. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Please. I’m sick. He’d steeled himself then, and thought maybe he could drive to an out-of-neighborhood pharmacy and put sunglasses on and cover his mouth with his muffler. But then he asked what size Kotex she needed and she said, The super, and he’d folded completely, saying, That did it, I could never ask for super. And Joan had gone herself, with the fever.

d. Shatterproof Glasses

He was poor in athletics at age ten, and when there were four or more kids available on the handball courts he was the one who did not get to play. Sometimes, when they wanted to be nice, they’d ask him to stay around and ref, but mostly he would just kind of wander away by himself, pretending to be interested in something in the distance, carefully holding his face expressionless.

His parents could offer only indirect help, his nervous, overprotective father suggesting, for instance, that You’ll see, when you’re twenty, you’ll look back at this problem and you’ll laugh. His mother, who worked for an optometrist, said that perhaps he needed stronger glasses. Though Harvey had memorized the eye chart, thereby fooling the doctor for his last four visits, he was sure this had no bearing on his difficulty.

His own solution was hours of solitary practice hitting the ball against a wall, practice in which he imagined himself pitted against various friends, against famous athletes, practice under searing suns on sterilized schoolyard concrete so that it became almost a penance, a ritual, the goal of improvement secondary to the practice itself. He was leading Pancho Gonzalez 15-13 one day (his left hand was always the adversary and since he was a righty, his real self usually won) when two teenagers made their way through the schoolyard gate, approached him, and asked if they could use his court to play a game. Harvey said he’d be finished in fifteen minutes and suggested they use the adjacent court. The boys said that it had too many cracks and that they wanted his. He told them they’d have to challenge him.

Harvey resumed hitting his ball against the wall, a ten-year-old boy in a bathing suit, spectacles, and sneakers, with a straight, smooth, little-boy’s back that had downy, light brown hairs and delicate, birdlike wings.

This kid is asking to get the shit kicked out of him, said the boy with the white bandanna on his head, moving in Harvey’s direction.

The one with the curly hair stopped him. Oh, leave him alone, Ennis. We’ll play with him for two minutes and he’ll be satisfied. He was grinning.

They played with him for three minutes, but afterward Harvey still insisted they had to challenge for the court. He resumed throwing his pink ball against the concrete until a black ball buzzed past his shoulder and, smacked into the wall like a bullet.

Now beat it! shouted the bandanna, finger pointing, shoulder heaving. Next time, I hit ya!

Harvey didn’t move, and the next thing he knew, a sweaty arm was lifting him off the ground and depositing him on the side of the court. He sulked as the boys began to play, watched from the sidelines as their lubricated bodies scuttled over the cement. He brooded and plotted, the oil of reason completely drained from him now, his mind seizing and locking on a plan.

The ball hit on the ground, near the short line. Harvey took two quick steps, grabbed it, glanced once at Ennis’s outstretched, expectant hand, and heaved the ball as far as he could over the fence into the wooded area around the court. He turned and had managed to run two steps before he felt the fist smash into his ribs and a cloud of pain burst in his chest and chin and knee as he hit the ground. He began to cry.

The bandanna went to look for the ball, and several minutes later, when he couldn’t find it, Curly went to join him. You’ll be okay, he said, bending over briefly as he passed Harvey, still lying on the cement. Just get your breath. Why did you have to do that for anyway?

After supper, Harvey’s father asked essentially the same question.

I mean what were you trying to prove?

Nothing.

Then why didn’t you let them have the court?

Because it was my court.

But you knew they wanted it, didn’t you? And you knew they’d get mad if you didn’t get off.

Yes.

And I’m sure you didn’t deliberately want to get hurt, did you?

No.

So?

It was my court.

All right, said Harvey’s father. Someday you’ll look back on this incident and you’ll laugh. Although I still don’t see what you were hoping to accomplish.

Harvey looked at him, and for the first time it occurred to him that he and his father were very different. He wanted to explain that throwing the ball was something he had to do for himself, that Pancho Gonzalez would have done the same thing, that it had nothing to do with accomplishing anything, or getting the court. But the right words wouldn’t come.

They smiled at me and pretended to be nice when they weren’t, he said. I’m glad I lost their ball for them. And I won’t laugh about this ever.

At his mother’s insistence, however, he did get shatterproof glasses.

e. Probably Nothing

It seemed to Joan Brank that she might not end up divorced after all. Though she had pictured herself as a Sophia Loren—type loner, her gutsy coping with life’s cruel setbacks making her hopelessly attractive to sensual though protection-minded men, the image had never really settled in. In the first place she had small, un-Loren-like breasts. (Harvey said, when he wanted to be nice, that the smallness there was a sign of sensitivity.) Secondly, a man could have protective impulses but still not want anything much to do with a bony, thirty-four-year-old woman and a three-year-old boy; who, after all, was that protection-crazy? But now, it had begun to look as if lawyers were not in her future. Harvey’s father had stopped calling every day with the weather report, the incredible lawn and cesspool problems with their house had begun to ease, and best of all, Harvey had been at Auerbach Labs for over a year and a half and seemed, finally, finally, to have settled down. Her friend Sheila had invited them to a lawn party this weekend, and for the first time almost since she could remember, Joan did not have to worry about feeling trapped and embarrassed when the girls discussed their husbands’ jobs and their pension benefits and vacations.

She told Harvey about it at supper.

Sheila invited us for Saturday and I accepted. We haven’t seen them since the spring. Ron and Ellen will be there and some other people and all the kids.

Brank nodded. You hear that, Brucie? he said to his son. All the kids, too.

Am I a kid? asked Bruce.

Yes.

Are you a kid?

No. I’m an adult.

You mean you’re the biggest?

Yes.

When will you be little again like me?

In three months, said Brank.

Oh, Harvey, said Joan. Stop. He believes you.

He does not, said Brank. Do you believe Daddy, Brucie?

No, said Bruce, dropping a piece of meat to the floor, which Joan retrieved. When you get little, Daddy, will you be able to wear my pants?

Yes.

Your legs will be little?

Yes.

And your eyes?

Uh-huh.

And your penis?

No. That will stay big.

Harvey! said Joan.

I’m telling him the truth as best I perceive it, said Brank.

All right, said Joan, all right. So how was work today? Bruce, you’re spilling the soda!

Okay, said Brank, Usual Friday.

Dull?

A little. Still working on the plane.

Oh. Isn’t that supposed to be nearly finished?

Couple of weeks. The Air Force is coming soon to inspect.

Is your part okay? Bruce, if you touch that knife once more you’re going right up to sleep.

Hard to say. It just failed a temperature test today.

Daddy, said Bruce.

Is that serious? said Joan, her pulse quickening slightly.

Nah, said Brank.

Daddy, said Bruce.

What? said Brank.

Will my penis be as big as yours someday?

Almost, said Brank.

After supper, Brank played with Bruce in the living room for a half hour, the play mostly wrestling and fooling around since Bruce could not seem to concentrate on any more constructive activities. Near the beginning, Brank had tried to play a game in which each player moved a plastic piece to various squares on a board, the location depending upon the color of a card drawn from a deck. When the shouting and screaming became very loud, however, Joan had yelled from the kitchen, What’s going on there?

He moved his man to a green square even though he drew a red card, Brank yelled.

I love the green, said Bruce.

"But it’s not the game," said Brank.

Oh, play something else, Joan yelled.

Later, during a break in their wrestling, Bruce brought over a drawing of an amoeba with two birdlike claws protruding from it. It’s you, Daddy, he said.

Oh, that’s beautiful, said Brank, wondering if continual minor encouragements might lead Bruce to attempt a career as an artist, only to learn at age twenty-three from a crotchety watercolor teacher that his work showed the talent of a tree stump.

Brank knew, of course, that the next day or two days later he’d find the drawing shredded somewhere, or crumpled in a corner, something Bruce did with all the cutouts and paintings and artifacts he made. Though at first Brank had found the boy’s lack of regard for his own work faintly amusing, he’d lately become disturbed by it. When he asked Bruce why he did it, however, all he would say was, Because I love to, and never elaborate further.

After the play period, Bruce went pliantly to bed in his upstairs room, his small body lost and floating in an ocean of mattress and blanket. Later, Brank came up for a minute to watch him sleep, to check on the puffs of breath passing in and out through the slack cherub lips, to feel the perspiration soaking through the tiny pajama top, to see the miniature foot flex and rock in comforting womb-rhythm. His son.

He came down and read the paper, then he and Joan hung flap-jawed before the TV, scarcely watching as they massaged each other’s backs and legs. He threw the garbage out after the 11 P.M. news, then went upstairs to brush his teeth before going to sleep. She spoke to him from the bedroom as he raised a great blue lather in his mouth.

I got those special pellets for the cesspool.

Uh, guh.

And I got that poison for those bugs.

Guh.

And I bought that toilet pipe you told me to.

Ah vuh guh.

There was a pause as he reached in and got a usually untouched rear molar.

It’s not your fault, is it, Harv?

Wha?

That temperature test?

He spit out. "Oh, that. No, it just happened, that’s all. It just means