Catch-22 (29 page)

   ‘That will be all, men,’ he ordered tersely, his eyes glaring
with disapproval and his square jaw firm, and that’s all there was. ‘I run a
fighting outfit,’ he told them sternly, when the room had grown absolutely
quiet and the men on the benches were all cowering sheepishly, ‘and there’ll be
no more moaning in this group as long as I’m in command. Is that clear?’ It was
clear to everybody but Major Danby, who was still concentrating on his wrist
watch and counting down the seconds aloud. ‘…four… three… two… one… time!’
called out Major Danby, and raised his eyes triumphantly to discover that no
one had been listening to him and that he would have to begin all over again. ‘Ooooh,’
he moaned in frustration.

   ‘What was that?’ roared General Dreedle incredulously, and
whirled around in a murderous rage upon Major Danby, who staggered back in
terrified confusion and began to quail and perspire. ‘Who is this man?’

   ‘M-major Danby, sir,’ Colonel Cathcart stammered. ‘My group
operations officer.’

   ‘Take him out and shoot him,’ ordered General Dreedle.

   ‘S-sir?’

   ‘I said take him out and shoot him. Can’t you hear?’

   ‘Yes, sir!’ Colonel Cathcart responded smartly, swallowing
hard, and turned in a brisk manner to his chauffeur and his meteorologist.
‘Take Major Danby out and shoot him.’

   ‘S-sir?’ his chauffeur and his meteorologist stammered.

   ‘I said take Major Danby out and shoot him,’ Colonel Cathcart
snapped. ‘Can’t you hear?’ The two young lieutenants nodded lumpishly and gaped
at each other in stunned and flaccid reluctance, each waiting for the other to
initiate the procedure of taking Major Danby outside and shooting him. Neither
had ever taken Major Danby outside and shot him before. They inched their way
dubiously toward Major Danby from opposite sides. Major Danby was white with
fear. His legs collapsed suddenly and he began to fall, and the two young
lieutenants sprang forward and seized him under both arms to save him from
slumping to the floor. Now that they had Major Danby, the rest seemed easy, but
there were no guns. Major Danby began to cry. Colonel Cathcart wanted to rush
to his side and comfort him, but did not want to look like a sissy in front of
General Dreedle. He remembered that Appleby and Havermeyer always brought
their.45 automatics on the missions, and he began to scan the rows of men in
search of them.

   As soon as Major Danby began to cry, Colonel Moodus, who had
been vacillating wretchedly on the sidelines, could restrain himself no longer
and stepped out diffidently toward General Dreedle with a sickly air of
self-sacrifice. ‘I think you’d better wait a minute, Dad,’ he suggested
hesitantly. ‘I don’t think you can shoot him.’ General Dreedle was infuriated
by his intervention. ‘Who the hell says I can’t?’ he thundered pugnaciously in
a voice loud enough to rattle the whole building. Colonel Moodus, his face
flushing with embarrassment, bent close to whisper into his ear. ‘Why the hell
can’t I?’ General Dreedle bellowed. Colonel Moodus whispered some more. ‘You
mean I can’t shoot anyone I want to?’ General Dreedle demanded with
uncompromising indignation. He pricked up his ears with interest as Colonel
Moodus continued whispering. ‘Is that a fact?’ he inquired, his rage tamed by
curiosity.

   ‘Yes, Dad. I’m afraid it is.’

   ‘I guess you think you’re pretty goddam smart, don’t you?’
General Dreedle lashed out at Colonel Moodus suddenly.

   Colonel Moodus turned crimson again. ‘No, Dad, it isn’t—’

   ‘All right, let the insubordinate son of a bitch go,’ General
Dreedle snarled, turning bitterly away from his son-in-law and barking
peevishly at Colonel Cathcart’s chauffeur and Colonel Cathcart’s meteorologist.
‘But get him out of this building and keep him out. And let’s continue this
goddam briefing before the war ends. I’ve never seen so much incompetence.’
Colonel Cathcart nodded lamely at General Dreedle and signaled his men
hurriedly to push Major Danby outside the building. As soon as Major Danby had
been pushed outside, though, there was no one to continue the briefing.
Everyone gawked at everyone else in oafish surprise. General Dreedle turned
purple with rage as nothing happened. Colonel Cathcart had no idea what to do.
He was about to begin moaning aloud when Colonel Korn came to the rescue by
stepping forward and taking control. Colonel Cathcart sighed with enormous,
tearful relief, almost overwhelmed with gratitude.

   ‘Now, men, we’re going to synchronize our watches,’ Colonel
Korn began promptly in a sharp, commanding manner, rolling his eyes
flirtatiously in General Dreedle’s direction. ‘We’re going to synchronize our
watches one time and one time only, and if it doesn’t come off in that one
time, General Dreedle and I are going to want to know why. Is that clear?’ He
fluttered his eyes toward General Dreedle again to make sure his plug had
registered. ‘Now set your watches for nine-eighteen.’ Colonel Korn synchronized
their watches without a single hitch and moved ahead with confidence. He gave
the men the colors of the day and reviewed the weather conditions with an
agile, flashy versatility, casting sidelong, simpering looks at General Dreedle
every few seconds to draw increased encouragement from the excellent impression
he saw he was making. Preening and pruning himself effulgendy and strutting
vaingloriously about the platform as he picked up momentum, he gave the men the
colors of the day again and shifted nimbly into a rousing pep talk on the
importance of the bridge at Avignon to the war effort and the obligation of
each man on the mission to place love of country above love of life. When his
inspiring dissertation was finished, he gave the men the colors of the day
still one more time, stressed the angle of approach and reviewed the weather
conditions again. Colonel Korn felt himself at the full height of his powers.
He belonged in the spotlight.

   Comprehension dawned slowly on Colonel Cathcart; when it
came, he was struck dumb. His face grew longer and longer as he enviously watched
Colonel Korn’s treachery continue, and he was almost afraid to listen when
General Dreedle moved up beside him and, in a whisper blustery enough to be
heard throughout the room, demanded, ‘Who is that man?’ Colonel Cathcart
answered with wan foreboding, and General Dreedle then cupped his hand over his
mouth and whispered something that made Colonel Cathcart’s face glow with
immense joy. Colonel Korn saw and quivered with uncontainable rapture. Had he
just been promoted in the field by General Dreedle to full colonel? He could
not endure the suspense. With a masterful flourish, he brought the briefing to
a close and turned expectantly to receive ardent congratulations from General
Dreedle—who was already striding out of the building without a glance backward,
trailing his nurse and Colonel Moodus behind him. Colonel Korn was stunned by
this disappointing sight, but only for an instant. His eyes found Colonel
Cathcart, who was still standing erect in a grinning trance, and he rushed over
jubilantly and began pulling on his arm.

   ‘What’d he say about me?’ he demanded excitedly in a fervor
of proud and blissful anticipation. ‘What did General Dreedle say?’

   ‘He wanted to know who you were.’

   ‘I know that. I know that. But what’d he say about me? What’d
he say?’

   ‘You make him sick.’

   That was the mission on which Yossarian
lost his nerve. Yossarian lost his nerve on the mission to Avignon because
Snowden lost his guts, and Snowden lost his guts because their pilot that day
was Huple, who was only fifteen years old, and their co-pilot was Dobbs, who
was even worse and who wanted Yossarian to join with him in a plot to murder
Colonel Cathcart. Huple was a good pilot, Yossarian knew, but he was only a
kid, and Dobbs had no confidence in him, either, and wrested the controls away
without warning after they had dropped their bombs, going berserk in mid-air
and tipping the plane over into that heart-stopping, ear-splitting,
indescribably petrifying fatal dive that tore Yossarian’s earphones free from
their connection and hung him helplessly to the roof of the nose by the top of
his head.

   Oh, God! Yossarian had shrieked soundlessly as he felt them
all falling. Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! he had shrieked beseechingly
through lips that could not open as the plane fell and he dangled without
weight by the top of his head until Huple managed to seize the controls back
and leveled the plane out down inside the crazy, craggy, patchwork canyon of
crashing antiaircraft fire from which they had climbed away and from which they
would now have to escape again. Almost at once there was a thud and a hole the
size of a big fist in the plexiglass. Yossarian’s cheeks were stinging with
shimmering splinters. There was no blood.

   ‘What happened? What happened?’ he cried, and trembled
violently when he could not hear his own voice in his ears. He was cowed by the
empty silence on the intercom and almost too horrified to move as he crouched
like a trapped mouse on his hands and knees and waited without daring to
breathe until he finally spied the gleaming cylindrical jack plug of his
headset swinging back and forth in front of his eyes and jammed it back into
its receptacle with fingers that rattled. Oh, God! he kept shrieking with no
abatement of terror as the flak thumped and mushroomed all about him. Oh, God!

   Dobbs was weeping when Yossarian jammed his jack plug back
into the intercom system and was able to hear again.

   ‘Help him, help him,’ Dobbs was sobbing. ‘Help him, help
him.’

   ‘Help who? Help who?’ Yossarian called back. ‘Help who?’

   ‘The bombardier, the bombardier,’ Dobbs cried. ‘He doesn’t
answer. Help the bombardier, help the bombardier.’

   ‘I’m the bombardier,’ Yossarian cried back at him. ‘I’m the
bombardier. I’m all right. I’m all right.’

   ‘Then help him, help him,’ Dobbs wept. ‘Help him, help him.’

   ‘Help who? Help who?’

   ‘The radio-gunner,’ Dobbs begged. ‘Help the radio-gunner.’

   ‘I’m cold,’ Snowden whimpered feebly over the intercom system
then in a bleat of plaintive agony. ‘Please help me. I’m cold.’ And Yossarian
crept out through the crawlway and climbed up over the bomb bay and down into
the rear section of the plane where Snowden lay on the floor wounded and
freezing to death in a yellow splash of sunlight near the new tail-gunner lying
stretched out on the floor beside him in a dead faint.

   Dobbs was the worst pilot in the world and knew it, a
shattered wreck of a virile young man who was continually striving to convince
his superiors that he was no longer fit to pilot a plane. None of his superiors
would listen, and it was the day the number of missions was raised to sixty
that Dobbs stole into Yossarian’s tent while Orr was out looking for gaskets
and disclosed the plot he had formulated to murder Colonel Cathcart. He needed
Yossarian’s assistance.

   ‘You want us to kill him in cold blood?’ Yossarian objected.

   ‘That’s right,’ Dobbs agreed with an optimistic smile,
encouraged by Yossarian’s ready grasp of the situation. ‘We’ll shoot him to
death with the Luger I brought back from Sicily that nobody knows I’ve got.’

   ‘I don’t think I could do it,’ Yossarian concluded, after
weighing the idea in silence awhile.

   Dobbs was astonished. ‘Why not?’

   ‘Look. Nothing would please me more than to have the son of a
bitch break his neck or get killed in a crash or to find out that someone else
had shot him to death. But I don’t think I could kill him.’

   ‘He’d do it to you,’ Dobbs argued. ‘In fact, you’re the one
who told me he is doing it to us by keeping us in combat so long.’

   ‘But I don’t think I could do it to him. He’s got a right to
live, too, I guess.’

   ‘Not as long as he’s trying to rob you and me of our right to
live. What’s the matter with you?’ Dobbs was flabbergasted. ‘I used to listen
to you arguing that same thing with Clevinger. And look what happened to him.
Right inside that cloud.’

   ‘Stop shouting, will you?’ Yossarian shushed him.

   ‘I’m not shouting!’ Dobbs shouted louder, his face red with
revolutionary fervor. His eyes and nostrils were running, and his palpitating
crimson lower lip was splattered with a foamy dew. ‘There must have been close
to a hundred men in the group who had finished their fifty-five missions when
he raised the number to sixty. There must have been at least another hundred
like you with just a couple more to fly. He’s going to kill us all if we let
him go on forever. We’ve got to kill him first.’ Yossarian nodded
expressionlessly, without committing himself. ‘Do you think we could get away
with it?’

   ‘I’ve got it all worked out. I—’

   ‘Stop shouting, for Christ’s sake!’

   ‘I’m not shouting. I’ve got it—’

   ‘Will you stop shouting!’

   ‘I’ve got it all worked out,’ Dobbs whispered, gripping the
side of Orr’s cot with white-knuckled hands to constrain them from waving. ‘Thursday
morning when he’s due back from that goddam farmhouse of his in the hills, I’ll
sneak up through the woods to that hairpin turn in the road and hide in the
bushes. He has to slow down there, and I can watch the road in both directions
to make sure there’s no one else around. When I see him coming, I’ll shove a
big log out into the road to make him stop his jeep. Then I’ll step out of the
bushes with my Luger and shoot him in the head until he’s dead. I’ll bury the
gun, come back down through the woods to the squadron and go about my business
just like everybody else. What could possibly go wrong?’ Yossarian had followed
each step attentively. ‘Where do I come in?’ he asked in puzzlement.

   ‘I couldn’t do it without you,’ Dobbs explained. ‘I need you
to tell me to go ahead.’ Yossarian found it hard to believe him. ‘Is that all
you want me to do? Just tell you to go ahead?’

   ‘That’s all I need from you,’ Dobbs answered. ‘Just tell me
to go ahead and I’ll blow his brains out all by myself the day after tomorrow.’
His voice was accelerating with emotion and rising again. ‘I’d like to shoot
Colonel Korn in the head, too, while we’re at it, although I’d like to spare
Major Danby, if that’s all right with you. Then I’d murder Appleby and
Havermeyer also, and after we finish murdering Appleby and Havermeyer I’d like
to murder McWatt.’

   ‘McWatt?’ cried Yossarian, almost jumping up in horror.
‘McWatt’s a friend of mine. What do you want from McWatt?’

   ‘I don’t know,’ Dobbs confessed with an air of floundering
embarrassment. ‘I just thought that as long as we were murdering Appleby and
Havermeyer we might as well murder McWatt too. Don’t you want to murder
McWatt?’ Yossarian took a firm stand. ‘Look, I might keep interested in this if
you stop shouting it all over the island and if you stick to killing Colonel
Cathcart. But if you’re going to turn this into a blood bath, you can forget
about me.’

   ‘All right, all right,’ Dobbs sought to placate him. ‘Just
Colonel Cathcart. Should I do it? Tell me to go ahead.’ Yossarian shook his
head. ‘I don’t think I could tell you to go ahead.’ Dobbs was frantic. ‘I’m
willing to compromise,’ he pleaded vehemently. ‘You don’t have to tell me to go
ahead. Just tell me it’s a good idea. Okay? Is it a good idea?’ Yossarian still
shook his head. ‘It would have been a great idea if you had gone ahead and done
it without even speaking to me. Now it’s too late. I don’t think I can tell you
anything. Give me some more time. I might change my mind.’

   ‘Then it will be too late.’ Yossarian kept shaking his head.
Dobbs was disappointed. He sat for a moment with a hangdog look, then spurted
to his feet suddenly and stamped away to have another impetuous crack at
persuading Doc Daneeka to ground him, knocking over Yossarian’s washstand with
his hip when he lurched around and tripping over the fuel line of the stove Orr
was still constructing. Doc Daneeka withstood Dobbs’s blustering and
gesticulating attack with a series of impatient nods and sent him to the
medical tent to describe his symptoms to Gus and Wes, who painted his gums
purple with gentian-violet solution the moment he started to talk. They painted
his toes purple, too, and forced a laxative down his throat when he opened his
mouth again to complain, and then they sent him away.

   Dobbs was in even worse shape than Hungry Joe, who could at
least fly missions when he was not having nightmares. Dobbs was almost as bad
as Orr, who seemed happy as an undersized, grinning lark with his deranged and
galvanic giggle and shivering warped buck teeth and who was sent along for a
rest leave with Milo and Yossarian on the trip to Cairo for eggs when Milo
bought cotton instead and took off at dawn for Istanbul with his plane packed
to the gun turrets with exotic spiders and unripened red bananas. Orr was one
of the homeliest freaks Yossarian had ever encountered, and one of the most
attractive. He had a raw bulgy face, with hazel eyes squeezing from their
sockets like matching brown halves of marbles and thick, wavy particolored hair
sloping up to a peak on the top of his head like a pomaded pup tent. Orr was
knocked down into the water or had an engine shot out almost every time he went
up, and he began jerking on Yossarian’s arm like a wild man after they had
taken off for Naples and come down in Sicily to find the scheming,
cigar-smoking, ten-year-old pimp with the two twelve-year-old virgin sisters
waiting for them in town in front of the hotel in which there was room for only
Milo. Yossarian pulled back from Orr adamantly, gazing with some concern and
bewilderment at Mt. Etna instead of Mt. Vesuvius and wondering what they were
doing in Sicily instead of Naples as Orr kept entreating him in a tittering,
stuttering, concupiscent turmoil to go along with him behind the scheming
ten-year-old pimp to his two twelve-year-old virgin sisters who were not really
virgins and not really sisters and who were really only twenty-eight.

   ‘Go with him,’ Milo instructed Yossarian laconically.
‘Remember your mission.’

   ‘All right,’ Yossarian yielded with a sigh, remembering his
mission. ‘But at least let me try to find a hotel room first so I can get a
good night’s sleep afterward.’

   ‘You’ll get a good night’s sleep with the girls,’ Milo
replied with the same air of intrigue. ‘Remember your mission.’ But they got no
sleep at all, for Yossarian and Orr found themselves jammed into the same
double bed with the two twelve –year-old twenty-eight-year-old prostitutes, who
turned out to be oily and obese and who kept waking them up all night long to
ask them to switch partners. Yossarian’s perceptions were soon so fuzzy that he
paid no notice to the beige turban the fat one crowding into him kept wearing
until late the next morning when the scheming ten-year-old pimp with the Cuban
panatella snatched it off in public in a bestial caprice that exposed in the
brilliant Sicilian daylight her shocking, misshapen and denudate skull.
Vengeful neighbors had shaved her hair to the gleaming bone because she had
slept with Germans. The girl screeched in feminine outrage and waddled
comically after the scheming ten-year-old pimp, her grisly, bleak, violated
scalp slithering up and down ludicrously around the queer darkened wart of her
face like something bleached and obscene. Yossarian had never laid eyes on
anything so bare before. The pimp spun the turban high on his finger like a
trophy and kept himself skipping inches ahead of her finger tips as he led her
in a tantalizing circle around the square congested with people who were
howling with laughter and pointing to Yossarian with derision when Milo strode
up with a grim look of haste and puckered his lips reprovingly at the unseemly
spectacle of so much vice and frivolity. Milo insisted on leaving at once for
Malta.

   ‘We’re sleepy,’ Orr whined.

   ‘That’s your own fault,’ Milo censured them both
selfrighteously. ‘If you had spent the night in your hotel room instead of with
these immoral girls, you’d both feel as good as I do today.’

   ‘You told us to go with them,’ Yossarian retorted accusingly.
‘And we didn’t have a hotel room. You were the only one who could get a hotel
room.’

   ‘That wasn’t my fault, either,’ Milo explained haughtily.
‘How was I supposed to know all the buyers would be in town for the chick-pea
harvest?’

   ‘You knew it,’ Yossarian charged. ‘That explains why we’re
here in Sicily instead of Naples. You’ve probably got the whole damned plane
filled with chick-peas already.’

   ‘Shhhhhh!’ Milo cautioned sternly, with a meaningful glance
toward Orr. ‘Remember your mission.’ The bomb bay, the rear and tail sections
of the plane and most of the top turret gunner’s section were all filled with
bushels of chick-peas when they arrived at the airfield to take off for Malta.

   Yossarian’s mission on the trip was to distract Orr from
observing where Milo bought his eggs, even though Orr was a member of Milo’s
syndicate and, like every other member of Milo’s syndicate, owned a share. His
mission was silly, Yossarian felt, since it was common knowledge that Milo
bought his eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and sold them to the mess halls
in his syndicate for five cents apiece.