Catch-22 (10 page)

   ‘Yes, sir.’

   ‘Then we’ll go on. What did you say to Yossarian?’

   ‘I said to him, sir, that you couldn’t find me guilty of the
offense with which I am charged and still be faithful to the cause of…’

   ‘Of what? You’re mumbling.’

   ‘Stop mumbling.’

   ‘Yes, sir.’

   ‘And mumble “sir” when you do.’

   ‘Metcalf, you bastard!’

   ‘Yes, sir,’ mumbled Clevinger. ‘Of justice, sir. That you
couldn’t find—’

   ‘Justice?’ The colonel was astounded. ‘What is justice?’

   ‘Justice, sir—’

   ‘That’s not what justice is,’ the colonel jeered, and began
pounding the table again with his big fat hand. ‘That’s what Karl Marx is. I’ll
tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the
chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a
battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning.
Garroting. That’s what justice is when we’ve all got to be tough enough and
rough enough to fight Billy Petrolle. From the hip. Get it?’

   ‘No, sir.’

   ‘Don’t sir me!’

   ‘Yes, sir.’

   ‘And say “sir” when you don’t,’ ordered Major
Metcalf.

   Clevinger was guilty, of course, or he would not have been
accused, and since the only way to prove it was to find him guilty, it was
their patriotic duty to do so. He was sentenced to walk fifty-seven punishment
tours. Popinjay was locked up to be taught a lesson, and Major Metcalf was
shipped to the Solomon Islands to bury bodies. A punishment tour for Clevinger
was fifty minutes of a weekend hour spent pacing back and forth before the
provost marshal’s building with a ton of an unloaded rifle on his shoulder.

   It was all very confusing to Clevinger. There were many
strange things taking place, but the strangest of all, to Clevinger, was the
hatred, the brutal, uncloaked, inexorable hatred of the members of the Action
Board, glazing their unforgiving expressions with a hard, vindictive surface,
glowing in their narrowed eyes malignantly like inextinguishable coals.
Clevinger was stunned to discover it. They would have lynched him if they
could. They were three grown men and he was a boy, and they hated him and
wished him dead. They had hated him before he came, hated him while he was
there, hated him after he left, carried their hatred for him away malignantly
like some pampered treasure after they separated from each other and went to
their solitude.

   Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before.
‘You haven’t got a chance, kid,’ he told him glumly. ‘They hate Jews.’

   ‘But I’m not Jewish,’ answered Clevinger.

   ‘It will make no difference,’ Yossarian promised, and
Yossarian was right. ‘They’re after everybody.’ Clevinger recoiled from their
hatred as though from a blinding light. These three men who hated him spoke his
language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably
into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in
the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the
bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame
throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering
Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in
Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more.

   Major Major Major Major had had a
difficult time from the start.

   Like Minniver Cheevy, he had been born too late—exactly
thirty-six hours too late for the physical well-being of his mother, a gentle,
ailing woman who, after a full day and a half’s agony in the rigors of
childbirth, was depleted of all resolve to pursue further the argument over the
new child’s name. In the hospital corridor, her husband moved ahead with the
unsmiling determination of someone who knew what he was about. Major Major’s
father was a towering, gaunt man in heavy shoes and a black woolen suit. He
filled out the birth certificate without faltering, betraying no emotion at all
as he handed the completed form to the floor nurse. The nurse took it from him
without comment and padded out of sight. He watched her go, wondering what she
had on underneath.

   Back in the ward, he found his wife lying vanquished beneath
the blankets like a desiccated old vegetable, wrinkled, dry and white, her
enfeebled tissues absolutely still. Her bed was at the very end of the ward,
near a cracked window thickened with grime. Rain splashed from a moiling sky
and the day was dreary and cold. In other parts of the hospital chalky people
with aged, blue lips were dying on time. The man stood erect beside the bed and
gazed down at the woman a long time.

   ‘I have named the boy Caleb,’ he announced to her finally in
a soft voice. ‘In accordance with your wishes.’ The woman made no answer, and
slowly the man smiled. He had planned it all perfectly, for his wife was asleep
and would never know that he had lied to her as she lay on her sickbed in the
poor ward of the county hospital.

   From this meager beginning had sprung the ineffectual
squadron commander who was now spending the better part of each working day in Pianosa
forging Washington Irving’s name to official documents. Major Major forged
diligently with his left hand to elude identification, insulated against
intrusion by his own undesired authority and camouflaged in his false mustache
and dark glasses as an additional safeguard against detection by anyone
chancing to peer in through the dowdy celluloid window from which some thief
had carved out a slice. In between these two low points of his birth and his
success lay thirty-one dismal years of loneliness and frustration.

   Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men
are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity
thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men
lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more
distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by
how unimpressive he was.

   Major Major had three strikes on him from the beginning—his
mother, his father and Henry Fonda, to whom he bore a sickly resemblance almost
from the moment of his birth. Long before he even suspected who Henry Fonda
was, he found himself the subject of unflattering comparisons everywhere he
went. Total strangers saw fit to deprecate him, with the result that he was
stricken early with a guilty fear of people and an obsequious impulse to
apologize to society for the fact that he was not Henry Fonda. It was not an
easy task for him to go through life looking something like Henry Fonda, but he
never once thought of quitting, having inherited his perseverance from his
father, a lanky man with a good sense of humor.

   Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea
of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a
God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that
federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift
and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty
was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government
paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he
did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny
he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not
produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On
long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he
sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the
chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing
more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for
advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. ‘As
ye sow, so shall ye reap,’ he counseled one and all, and everyone said, ‘Amen.’
Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government,
provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers
as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else
wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent
man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine,
whimper, wheedle, and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he
could. He was a devout man whose pulpit was everywhere.

   ‘The Lord gave us good farmers two strong hands so that we
could take as much as we could grab with both of them,’ he preached with ardor
on the courthouse steps or in front of the A&P as he waited for the bad-tempered
gum-chewing young cashier he was after to step outside and give him a nasty
look. ‘If the Lord didn’t want us to take as much as we could get,’ he
preached, ‘He wouldn’t have given us two good hands to take it with.’ And the
others murmured, ‘Amen.’ Major Major’s father had a Calvinist’s faith in
predestination and could perceive distinctly how everyone’s misfortunes but his
own were expressions of God’s will. He smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey, and
he thrived on good wit and stimulating intellectual conversation, particularly
his own when he was lying about his age or telling that good one about God and
his wife’s difficulties in delivering Major Major. The good one about God and
his wife’s difficulties had to do with the fact that it had taken God only six
days to produce the whole world, whereas his wife had spent a full day and a
half in labor just to produce Major Major. A lesser man might have wavered that
day in the hospital corridor, a weaker man might have compromised on such excellent
substitutes as Drum Major, Minor Major, Sergeant Major, or C. Sharp Major, but
Major Major’s father had waited fourteen years for just such an opportunity,
and he was not a person to waste it. Major Major’s father had a good joke about
opportunity. ‘ Opportunity only knocks once in this world,’ he would say. Major
Major’s father repeated this good joke at every opportunity.

   Being born with a sickly resemblance to Henry Fonda was the
first of along series of practical jokes of which destiny was to make Major
Major the unhappy victim throughout his joyless life. Being born Major Major
Major was the second. The fact that he had been born Major Major Major was a
secret known only to his father. Not until Major Major was enrolling in
kindergarten was the discovery of his real name made, and then the effects were
disastrous. The news killed his mother, who just lost her will to live and
wasted away and died, which was just fine with his father, who had decided to
marry the bad-tempered girl at the A&P if he had to and who had not been
optimistic about his chances of getting his wife off the land without paying
her some money or flogging her.

   On Major Major himself the consequences were only slightly
less severe. It was a harsh and stunning realization that was forced upon him
at so tender an age, the realization that he was not, as he had always been led
to believe, Caleb Major, but instead was some total stranger named Major Major
Major about whom he knew absolutely nothing and about whom nobody else had ever
heard before. What playmates he had withdrew from him and never returned,
disposed, as they were, to distrust all strangers, especially one who had
already deceived them by pretending to be someone they had known for years.
Nobody would have anything to do with him. He began to drop things and to trip.
He had a shy and hopeful manner in each new contact, and he was always
disappointed. Because he needed a friend so desperately, he never found one. He
grew awkwardly into a tall, strange, dreamy boy with fragile eyes and a very
delicate mouth whose tentative, groping smile collapsed instantly into hurt
disorder at every fresh rebuff.

   He was polite to his elders, who disliked him. Whatever his
elders told him to do, he did. They told him to look before he leaped, and he
always looked before he leaped. They told him never to put off until the next
day what he could do the day before, and he never did. He was told to honor his
father and his mother, and he honored his father and his mother. He was told
that he should not kill, and he did not kill, until he got into the Army. Then
he was told to kill, and he killed. He turned the other cheek on every occasion
and always did unto others exactly as he would have had others do unto him.
When he gave to charity, his left hand never knew what his right hand was
doing. He never once took the name of the Lord his God in vain, committed
adultery or coveted his neighbor’s ass. In fact, he loved his neighbor and
never even bore false witness against him. Major Major’s elders disliked him
because he was such a flagrant nonconformist.

   Since he had nothing better to do well in, he did well in
school. At the state university he took his studies so seriously that he was
suspected by the homosexuals of being a Communist and suspected by the
Communists of being a homosexual. He majored in English history, which was a
mistake.

   ‘English history!’ roared the silver-maned senior Senator
from his state indignantly. ‘What’s the matter with American history? American
history is as good as any history in the world!’ Major Major switched
immediately to American literature, but not before the F.B.I. had opened a file
on him. There were six people and a Scotch terrier inhabiting the remote
farmhouse Major Major called home, and five of them and the Scotch terrier
turned out to be agents for the F.B.I. Soon they had enough derogatory
information on Major Major to do whatever they wanted to with him. The only
thing they could find to do with him, however, was take him into the Army as a
private and make him a major four days later so that Congressmen with nothing
else on their minds could go trotting back and forth through the streets of
Washington, D.C., chanting, ‘Who promoted Major Major? Who promoted Major
Major?’ Actually, Major Major had been promoted by an I.B.M. machine with a
sense of humor almost as keen as his father’s. When war broke out, he was still
docile and compliant. They told him to enlist, and he enlisted. They told him
to apply for aviation cadet training, and he applied for aviation cadet
training, and the very next night found himself standing barefoot in icy mud at
three o’clock in the morning before a tough and belligerent sergeant from the
Southwest who told them he could beat hell out of any man in his outfit and was
ready to prove it. The recruits in his squadron had all been shaken roughly
awake only minutes before by the sergeant’s corporals and told to assemble in
front of the administration tent. It was still raining on Major Major. They
fell into ranks in the civilian clothes they had brought into the Army with
them three days before. Those who had lingered to put shoes and socks on were
sent back to their cold, wet, dark tents to remove them, and they were all
barefoot in the mud as the sergeant ran his stony eyes over their faces and
told them he could beat hell out of any man in his outfit. No one was inclined
to dispute him.

   Major Major’s unexpected promotion to major the next day
plunged the belligerent sergeant into a bottomless gloom, for he was no longer
able to boast that he could beat hell out of any man in his outfit. He brooded
for hours in his tent like Saul, receiving no visitors, while his elite guard
of corporals stood discouraged watch outside. At three o’clock in the morning
he found his solution, and Major Major and the other recruits were again shaken
roughly awake and ordered to assemble barefoot in the drizzly glare at the
administration tent, where the sergeant was already waiting, his fists clenched
on his hips cockily, so eager to speak that he could hardly wait for them to
arrive.

   ‘Me and Major Major,’ he boasted, in the same tough, clipped
tones of the night before, ‘can beat hell out of any man in my outfit.’ The
officers on the base took action on the Major Major problem later that same
day. How could they cope with a major like Major Major? To demean him
personally would be to demean all other officers of equal or lesser rank. To
treat him with courtesy, on the other hand, was unthinkable. Fortunately, Major
Major had applied for aviation cadet training. Orders transferring him away
were sent to the mimeograph room late in the afternoon, and at three o’clock in
the morning Major Major was again shaken roughly awake, bidden Godspeed by the
sergeant and placed aboard a plane heading west.

   Lieutenant Scheisskopf turned white as a sheet when Major
Major reported to him in California with bare feet and mudcaked toes. Major
Major had taken it for granted that he was being shaken roughly awake again to
stand barefoot in the mud and had left his shoes and socks in the tent. The
civilian clothing in which he reported for duty to Lieutenant Scheisskopf was
rumpled and dirty. Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who had not yet made his reputation
as a parader, shuddered violently at the picture Major Major would make
marching barefoot in his squadron that coming Sunday.

   ‘Go to the hospital quickly,’ he mumbled, when he had
recovered sufficiently to speak, ‘and tell them you’re sick. Stay there until
your allowance for uniforms catches up with you and you have some money to buy
some clothes. And some shoes. Buy some shoes.’