Catch-22 (19 page)

   Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren, the
inoffensive joint squadron operations officers, were both mild, soft-spoken men
of less than middle height who enjoyed flying combat missions and begged
nothing more of life and Colonel Cathcart than the opportunity to continue
flying them. They had flown hundreds of combat missions and wanted to fly
hundreds more. They assigned themselves to every one. Nothing so wonderful as
war had ever happened to them before; and they were afraid it might never
happen to them again. They conducted their duties humbly and reticently, with a
minimum of fuss, and went to great lengths not to antagonize anyone. They
smiled quickly at everyone they passed. When they spoke, they mumbled. They
were shifty, cheerful, subservient men who were comfortable only with each
other and never met anyone else’s eye, not even Yossarian’s eye at the open-air
meeting they called to reprimand him publicly for making Kid Sampson turn back
from the mission to Bologna.

   ‘Fellas,’ said Captain Piltchard, who had thinning dark hair
and smiled awkwardly. ‘When you turn back from a mission, try to make sure it’s
for something important, will you? Not for something unimportant… like a
defective intercom… or something like that. Okay? Captain Wren has more he
wants to say to you on that subject.’

   ‘Captain Piltchard’s right, fellas,’ said Captain Wren. ‘And
that’s all I’m going to say to you on that subject. Well, we finally got to
Bologna today, and we found out it’s a milk run. We were all a little nervous,
I guess, and didn’t do too much damage. Well, listen to this. Colonel Cathcart
got permission for us to go back. And tomorrow we’re really going to paste
those ammunition dumps. Now, what do you think about that?’ And to prove to
Yossarian that they bore him no animosity, they even assigned him to fly lead
bombardier with McWatt in the first formation when they went back to Bologna
the next day. He came in on the target like a Havermeyer, confidently taking no
evasive action at all, and suddenly they were shooting the living shit out of
him!

   Heavy flak was everywhere! He had been lulled, lured and
trapped, and there was nothing he could do but sit there like an idiot and
watch the ugly black puffs smashing up to kill him. There was nothing he could
do until his bombs dropped but look back into the bombsight, where the fine
cross-hairs in the lens were glued magnetically over the target exactly where
he had placed them, intersecting perfectly deep inside the yard of his block of
camouflaged warehouses before the base of the first building. He was trembling
steadily as the plane crept ahead. He could hear the hollow boom-boom-boom-boom
of the flak pounding all around him in overlapping measures of four, the sharp,
piercing crack! of a single shell exploding suddenly very close by. His head
was bursting with a thousand dissonant impulses as he prayed for the bombs to
drop. He wanted to sob. The engines droned on monotonously like a fat, lazy
fly. At last the indices on the bombsight crossed, tripping away the eight
500-pounders one after the other. The plane lurched upward buoyantly with the
lightened load. Yossarian bent away from the bombsight crookedly to watch the
indicator on his left. When the pointer touched zero, he closed the bomb bay
doors and, over the intercom, at the very top of his voice, shrieked: ‘Turn
right hard!’ McWatt responded instantly. With a grinding howl of engines, he
flipped the plane over on one wing and wrung it around remorselessly in a
screaming turn away from the twin spires of flak Yossarian had spied stabbing
toward them. Then Yossarian had McWatt climb and keep climbing higher and
higher until they tore free finally into a calm, diamond-blue sky that was
sunny and pure everywhere and laced in the distance with long white veils of
tenuous fluff. The wind strummed soothingly against the cylindrical panes of
his windows, and he relaxed exultantly only until they picked up speed again
and then turned McWatt left and plunged him right back down, noticing with a
transitory spasm of elation the mushrooming clusters of flak leaping open high
above him and back over his shoulder to the right, exactly where he could have
been if he had not turned left and dived. He leveled McWatt out with another
harsh cry and whipped him upward and around again into a ragged blue patch of
unpolluted air just as the bombs he had dropped began to strike. The first one
fell in the yard, exactly where he had aimed, and then the rest of the bombs
from his own plane and from the other planes in his flight burst open on the
ground in a charge of rapid orange flashes across the tops of the buildings,
which collapsed instantly in a vast, churning wave of pink and gray and
coal-black smoke that went rolling out turbulently in all directions and quaked
convulsively in its bowels as though from great blasts of red and white and
golden sheet lightning.

   ‘Well, will you look at that,’ Aarfy marveled sonorously
right beside Yossarian, his plump, orbicular face sparkling with a look of
bright enchantment. ‘There must have been an ammunition dump down there.’
Yossarian had forgotten about Aarfy. ‘Get out!’ he shouted at him. ‘Get out of
the nose!’ Aarfy smiled politely and pointed down toward the target in a
generous invitation for Yossarian to look. Yossarian began slapping at him
insistently and signaled wildly toward the entrance of the crawlway.

   ‘Get back in the ship!’ he cried frantically. ‘Get back in
the ship!’ Aarfy shrugged amiably. ‘I can’t hear you,’ he explained.

   Yossarian seized him by the straps of his parachute harness
and pushed him backward toward the crawlway just as the plane was hit with a
jarring concussion that rattled his bones and made his heart stop. He knew at
once they were all dead.

   ‘Climb!’ he screamed into the intercom at McWatt when he saw
he was still alive. ‘Climb, you bastard! Climb, climb, climb, climb!’ The plane
zoomed upward again in a climb that was swift and straining, until he leveled
it out with another harsh shout at McWatt and wrenched it around once more in a
roaring, merciless forty-five-degree turn that sucked his insides out in one
enervating sniff and left him floating fleshless in mid-air until he leveled
McWatt out again just long enough to hurl him back around toward the right and
then down into a screeching dive. Through endless blobs of ghostly black smoke
he sped, the hanging smut wafting against the smooth plexiglass nose of the
ship like an evil, damp, sooty vapor against his cheeks. His heart was
hammering again in aching terror as he hurtled upward and downward through the
blind gangs of flak charging murderously into the sky at him, then sagging
inertly. Sweat gushed from his neck in torrents and poured down over his chest
and waist with the feeling of warm slime. He was vaguely aware for an instant
that the planes in his formation were no longer there, and then he was aware of
only himself. His throat hurt like a raw slash from the strangling intensity
with which he shrieked each command to McWatt. The engines rose to a deafening,
agonized, ululating bellow each time McWatt changed direction. And far out in
front the bursts of flak were still swarming into the sky from new batteries of
guns poking around for accurate altitude as they waited sadistically for him to
fly into range.

   The plane was slammed again suddenly with another loud,
jarring explosion that almost rocked it over on its back, and the nose filled
immediately with sweet clouds of blue smoke. Something was on fire! Yossarian
whirled to escape and smacked into Aarfy, who had struck a match and was
placidly lighting his pipe. Yossarian gaped at his grinning, moon-faced navigator
in utter shock and confusion. It occurred to him that one of them was mad.

   ‘Jesus Christ!’ he screamed at Aarfy in tortured amazement.
‘Get the hell out of the nose! Are you crazy? Get out!’

   ‘What?’ said Aarfy.

   ‘Get out!’ Yossarian yelled hysterically, and began clubbing
Aarfy backhanded with both fists to drive him away. ‘Get out!’

   ‘I still can’t hear you,’ Aarfy called back innocently with
an expression of mild and reproving perplexity. ‘You’ll have to talk a little
louder.’

   ‘Get out of the nose!’ Yossarian shrieked in frustration.
‘They’re trying to kill us! Don’t you understand? They’re trying to kill us!’

   ‘Which way should I go, goddam it?’ McWatt shouted furiously
over the intercom in a suffering, high-pitched voice. ‘Which way should I go?’

   ‘Turn left! Left, you goddam dirty son of a bitch! Turn left
hard!’ Aarfy crept up close behind Yossarian and jabbed him sharply in the ribs
with the stem of his pipe. Yossarian flew up toward the ceiling with a
whinnying cry, then jumped completely around on his knees, white as a sheet and
quivering with rage. Aarfy winked encouragingly and jerked his thumb back
toward McWatt with a humorous moue.

   ‘What’s eating him?’ he asked with a laugh.

   Yossarian was struck with a weird sense of distortion. ‘Will
you get out of here?’ he yelped beseechingly, and shoved Aarfy over with all
his strength. ‘Are you deaf or something? Get back in the plane!’ And to McWatt
he screamed, ‘Dive! Dive!’ Down they sank once more into the crunching, thudding,
voluminous barrage of bursting antiaircraft shells as Aarfy came creeping back
behind Yossarian and jabbed him sharply in the ribs again. Yossarian shied
upward with another whinnying gasp.

   ‘I still couldn’t hear you,’ Aarfy said.

   ‘I said get out of here!’ Yossarian shouted, and broke into
tears. He began punching Aarfy in the body with both hands as hard as he could.
‘Get away from me! Get away!’ Punching Aarfy was like sinking his fists into a
limp sack of inflated rubber. There was no resistance, no response at all from
the soft, insensitive mass, and after a while Yossarian’s spirit died and his
arms dropped helplessly with exhaustion. He was overcome with a humiliating
feeling of impotence and was ready to weep in self-pity.

   ‘What did you say?’ Aarfy asked.

   ‘Get away from me,’ Yossarian answered, pleading with him
now. ‘Go back in the plane.’

   ‘I still can’t hear you.’

   ‘Never mind,’ wailed Yossarian, ‘never mind. Just leave me
alone.’

   ‘Never mind what?’ Yossarian began hitting himself in the
forehead. He seized Aarfy by the shirt front and, struggling to his feet for
traction, dragged him to the rear of the nose compartment and flung him down
like a bloated and unwieldy bag in the entrance of the crawlway. A shell banged
open with a stupendous clout right beside his ear as he was scrambling back
toward the front, and some undestroyed recess of his intelligence wondered that
it did not kill them all. They were climbing again. The engines were howling
again as though in pain, and the air inside the plane was acrid with the smell
of machinery and fetid with the stench of gasoline. The next thing he knew, it
was snowing!

   Thousands of tiny bits of white paper were falling like
snowflakes inside the plane, milling around his head so thickly that they clung
to his eyelashes when he blinked in astonishment and fluttered against his
nostrils and lips each time he inhaled. When he spun around in his
bewilderment, Aarfy was grinning proudly from ear to ear like something inhuman
as he held up a shattered paper map for Yossarian to see. A large chunk of flak
had ripped up from the floor through Aarfy’s colossal jumble of maps and had
ripped out through the ceiling inches away from their heads. Aarfy’s joy was
sublime.

   ‘Will you look at this?’ he murmured, waggling two of his
stubby fingers playfully into Yossarian’s face through the hole in one of his
maps. ‘Will you look at this?’ Yossarian was dumbfounded by his state of
rapturous contentment. Aarfy was like an eerie ogre in a dream, incapable of
being bruised or evaded, and Yossarian dreaded him for a complex of reasons he
was too petrified to untangle. Wind whistling up through the jagged gash in the
floor kept the myriad bits of paper circulating like alabaster particles in a
paperweight and contributed to a sensation of lacquered, waterlogged unreality.
Everything seemed strange, so tawdry and grotesque. His head was throbbing from
a shrill clamor that drilled relentlessly into both ears. It was McWatt,
begging for directions in an incoherent frenzy. Yossarian continued staring in
tormented fascination at Aarfy’s spherical countenance beaming at him so
serenely and vacantly through the drifting whorls of white paper bits and
concluded that he was a raving lunatic just as eight bursts of flak broke open
successively at eye level off to the right, then eight more, and then eight
more, the last group pulled over toward the left so that they were almost
directly in front.

   ‘Turn left hard!’ he hollered to McWatt, as Aarfy kept
grinning, and McWatt did turn left hard, but the flak turned left hard with
them, catching up fast, and Yossarian hollered, ‘I said hard, hard, hard, hard,
you bastard, hard!’ And McWatt bent the plane around even harder still, and
suddenly, miraculously, they were out of range. The flak ended. The guns
stopped booming at them. And they were alive.

   Behind him, men were dying. Strung out for miles in a
stricken, tortuous, squirming line, the other flights of planes were making the
same hazardous journey over the target, threading their swift way through the
swollen masses of new and old bursts of flak like rats racing in a pack through
their own droppings. One was on fire, and flapped lamely off by itself,
billowing gigantically like a monstrous blood-red star. As Yossarian watched,
the burning plane floated over on its side and began spiraling down slowly in
wide, tremulous, narrowing circles, its huge flaming burden blazing orange and
flaring out in back like a long, swirling cape of fire and smoke. There were
parachutes, one, two, three… four, and then the plane gyrated into a spin and
fell the rest of the way to the ground, fluttering insensibly inside its vivid
pyre like a shred of colored tissue paper. One whole flight of planes from
another squadron had been blasted apart.