Catch-22 (33 page)

   M & M Enterprises verged on collapse. Milo cursed himself
hourly for his monumental greed and stupidity in purchasing the entire Egyptian
cotton crop, but a contract was a contract and had to be honored, and one
night, after a sumptuous evening meal, all Milo’s fighters and bombers took
off, joined in formation directly overhead and began dropping bombs on the
group. He had landed another contract with the Germans, this time to bomb his
own outfit. Milo’s planes separated in a well co-ordinated attack and bombed
the fuel stocks and the ordnance dump, the repair hangars and the B-25 bombers
resting on the lollipop-shaped hardstands at the field. His crews spared the
landing strip and the mess halls so that they could land safely when their work
was done and enjoy a hot snack before retiring. They bombed with their landing
lights on, since no one was shooting back. They bombed all four squadrons, the
officers’ club and the Group Headquarters building. Men bolted from their tents
in sheer terror and did not know in which direction to turn. Wounded soon lay
screaming everywhere. A cluster of fragmentation bombs exploded in the yard of
the officers’ club and punched jagged holes in the side of the wooden building
and in the bellies and backs of a row of lieutenants and captains standing at
the bar. They doubled over in agony and dropped. The rest of the officers fled
toward the two exits in panic and jammed up the doorways like a dense, howling
dam of human flesh as they shrank from going farther.

   Colonel Cathcart clawed and elbowed his way through the
unruly, bewildered mass until he stood outside by himself. He stared up at the
sky in stark astonishment and horror. Milo’s planes, ballooning serenely in
over the blossoming treetops with their bomb bay doors open and wing flaps down
and with their monstrous, bug-eyed, blinding, fiercely flickering, eerie
landing lights on, were the most apocalyptic sight he had ever beheld. Colonel
Cathcart let go a stricken gasp of dismay and hurled himself headlong into his
jeep, almost sobbing. He found the gas pedal and the ignition and sped toward
the airfield as fast as the rocking car would carry him, his huge flabby hands
clenched and bloodless on the wheel or blaring his horn tormentedly. Once he
almost killed himself when he swerved with a banshee screech of tires to avoid
plowing into a bunch of men running crazily toward the hills in their underwear
with their stunned faces down and their thin arms pressed high around their
temples as puny shields. Yellow, orange and red fires were burning on both
sides of the road. Tents and trees were in flames, and Milo’s planes kept
coming around interminably with their blinking white landing lights on and
their bomb bay doors open. Colonel Cathcart almost turned the jeep over when he
slammed the brakes on at the control tower. He leaped from the car while it was
still skidding dangerously and hurtled up the flight of steps inside, where
three men were busy at the instruments and the controls. He bowled two of them
aside in his lunge for the nickel-plated microphone, his eyes glittering wildly
and his beefy face contorted with stress. He squeezed the microphone in a
bestial grip and began shouting hysterically at the top of his voice.

   ‘ Milo, you son of a bitch! Are you crazy? What the hell are
you doing? Come down! Come down!’

   ‘Stop hollering so much, will you?’ answered Milo, who was
standing there right beside him in the control tower with a microphone of his
own. ‘I’m right here.’ Milo looked at him with reproof and turned back to his
work. ‘Very good, men, very good,’ he chanted into his microphone. ‘But I see
one supply shed still standing. That will never do, Purvis—I’ve spoken to you
about that kind of shoddy work before. Now, you go right back there this minute
and try it again. And this time come in slowly… slowly. Haste makes waste,
Purvis. Haste makes waste. If I’ve told you that once, I must have told you
that a hundred times. Haste makes waste.’ The loudspeaker overhead began
squawking. ‘ Milo, this is Alvin Brown. I’ve finished dropping my bombs. What
should I do now?’

   ‘Strafe,’ said Milo.

   ‘Strafe?’ Alvin Brown was shocked.

   ‘We have no choice,’ Milo informed him resignedly. ‘It’s in
the contract.’

   ‘Oh, okay, then,’ Alvin Brown acquiesced. ‘In that case I’ll
strafe.’ This time Milo had gone too far. Bombing his own men and planes was
more than even the most phlegmatic observer could stomach, and it looked like
the end for him. High-ranking government officials poured in to investigate.
Newspapers inveighed against Milo with glaring headlines, and Congressmen
denounced the atrocity in stentorian wrath and clamored for punishment. Mothers
with children in the service organized into militant groups and demanded
revenge. Not one voice was raised in his defense. Decent people everywhere were
affronted, and Milo was all washed up until he opened his books to the public
and disclosed the tremendous profit he had made. He could reimburse the
government for all the people and property he had destroyed and still have
enough money left over to continue buying Egyptian cotton. Everybody, of
course, owned a share. And the sweetest part of the whole deal was that there
really was no need to reimburse the government at all.

   ‘In a democracy, the government is the people,’ Milo
explained. ‘We’re people, aren’t we? So we might just as well keep the money
and eliminate the middleman. Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of
war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry. If we pay the
government everything we owe it, we’ll only be encouraging government control
and discouraging other individuals from bombing their own men and planes. We’ll
be taking away their incentive.’ Milo was correct, of course, as everyone soon
agreed but a few embittered misfits like Doc Daneeka, who sulked cantankerously
and muttered offensive insinuations about the morality of the whole venture
until Milo mollified him with a donation, in the name of the syndicate, of a
lightweight aluminum collapsible garden chair that Doc Daneeka could fold up
conveniently and carry outside his tent each time Chief White Halfoat came
inside his tent and carry back inside his tent each time Chief White Halfoat
came out. Doc Daneeka had lost his head during Milo’s bombardment; instead of
running for cover, he had remained out in the open and performed his duty,
slithering along the ground through shrapnel, strafing and incendiary bombs
like a furtive, wily lizard from casualty to casualty, administering
tourniquets, morphine, splints and sulfanilamide with a dark and doleful
visage, never saying one word more than he had to and reading in each man’s
bluing wound a dreadful portent of his own decay. He worked himself
relentlessly into exhaustion before the long night was over and came down with
a snife the next day that sent him hurrying querulously into the medical tent
to have his temperature taken by Gus and Wes and to obtain a mustard plaster
and vaporizer.

   Doc Daneeka tended each moaning man that night with the same
glum and profound and introverted grief he showed at the airfield the day of
the Avignon mission when Yossarian climbed down the few steps of his plane
naked, in a state of utter shock, with Snowden smeared abundantly all over his
bare heels and toes, knees, arms and fingers, and pointed inside wordlessly toward
where the young radio-gunner lay freezing to death on the floor beside the
still younger tail-gunner who kept falling back into a dead faint each time he
opened his eyes and saw Snowden dying.

   Doc Daneeka draped a blanket around Yossarian’s shoulders
almost tenderly after Snowden had been removed from the plane and carried into
an ambulance on a stretcher. He led Yossarian toward his jeep. McWatt helped,
and the three drove in silence to the squadron medical tent, where McWatt and
Doc Daneeka guided Yossarian inside to a chair and washed Snowden off him with
cold wet balls of absorbent cotton. Doc Daneeka gave him a pill and a shot that
put him to sleep for twelve hours. When Yossarian woke up and went to see him,
Doc Daneeka gave him another pill and a shot that put him to sleep for another
twelve hours. When Yossarian woke up again and went to see him, Doc Daneeka
made ready to give him another pill and a shot.

   ‘How long are you going to keep giving me those pills and
shots?’ Yossarian asked him.

   ‘Until you feel better.’

   ‘I feel all right now.’ Doc Daneeka’s frail suntanned
forehead furrowed with surprise. ‘Then why don’t you put some clothes on? Why
are you walking around naked?’

   ‘I don’t want to wear a uniform any more.’ Doc Daneeka accepted
the explanation and put away his hypodermic syringe. ‘Are you sure you feel all
right?’

   ‘I feel fine. I’m just a little logy from all those pills and
shots you’ve been giving me.’ Yossarian went about his business with no clothes
on all the rest of that day and was still naked late the next morning when
Milo, after hunting everywhere else, finally found him sitting up a tree a
small distance in back of the quaint little military cemetery at which Snowden
was being buried. Milo was dressed in his customary business attire—olive-drab
trousers, a fresh olive-drab shirt and tie, with one silver first lieutenant’s
bar gleaming on the collar, and a regulation dress cap with a stiff leather
bill.

   ‘I’ve been looking all over for you,’ Milo called up to Yossarian
from the ground reproachfully.

   ‘You should have looked for me in this tree,’ Yossarian
answered. ‘I’ve been up here all morning.’

   ‘Come on down and taste this and tell me if it’s good. It’s
very important.’ Yossarian shook his head. He sat nude on the lowest limb of
the tree and balanced himself with both hands grasping the bough directly
above. He refused to budge, and Milo had no choice but to stretch both arms
about the trunk in a distasteful hug and start climbing. He struggled upward clumsily
with loud grunts and wheezes, and his clothes were squashed and crooked by the
time he pulled himself up high enough to hook a leg over the limb and pause for
breath. His dress cap was askew and in danger of falling. Milo caught it just
in time when it began slipping. Globules of perspiration glistened like
transparent pearls around his mustache and swelled like opaque blisters under
his eyes. Yossarian watched him impassively. Cautiously Milo worked himself
around in a half circle so that he could face Yossarian. He unwrapped tissue
paper from something soft, round and brown and handed it to Yossarian.

   ‘Please taste this and let me know what you think. I’d like
to serve it to the men.’

   ‘What is it?’ asked Yossarian, and took a big bite.

   ‘Chocolate-covered cotton.’ Yossarian gagged convulsively and
sprayed his big mouthful of chocolate-covered cotton right into Milo’s face.
‘Here, take it back!’ he spouted angrily. ‘Jesus Christ! Have you gone crazy?
You didn’t even take the goddam seeds out.’

   ‘Give it a chance, will you?’ Milo begged. ‘It can’t be that
bad. Is it really that bad?’

   ‘It’s even worse.’

   ‘But I’ve got to make the mess halls feed it to the men.’

   ‘They’ll never be able to swallow it.’

   ‘They’ve got to swallow it,’ Milo ordained with dictatorial
grandeur, and almost broke his neck when he let go with one arm to wave a
righteous finger in the air.

   ‘Come on out here,’ Yossarian invited him. ‘You’ll be much
safer, and you can see everything.’ Gripping the bough above with both hands,
Milo began inching his way out on the limb sideways with utmost care and
apprehension. His face was rigid with tension, and he sighed with relief when
he found himself seated securely beside Yossarian. He stroked the tree
affectionately. ‘This is a pretty good tree,’ he observed admiringly with
proprietary gratitude.

   ‘It’s the tree of life,’ Yossarian answered, waggling his
toes, ‘and of knowledge of good and evil, too.’ Milo squinted closely at the
bark and branches. ‘No it isn’t,’ he replied. ‘It’s a chestnut tree. I ought to
know. I sell chestnuts.’

   ‘Have it your way.’ They sat in the tree without talking for
several seconds, their legs dangling and their hands almost straight up on the
bough above, the one completely nude but for a pair of crepe-soled sandals, the
other completely dressed in a coarse olive-drab woolen uniform with his tie
knotted tight. Milo studied Yossarian diffidently through the corner of his
eye, hesitating tactfully.

   ‘I want to ask you something,’ he said at last. ‘You don’t
have any clothes on. I don’t want to butt in or anything, but I just want to
know. Why aren’t you wearing your uniform?’

   ‘I don’t want to.’ Milo nodded rapidly like a sparrow
pecking. ‘I see, I see,’ he stated quickly with a look of vivid confusion. ‘I
understand perfectly. I heard Appleby and Captain Black say you had gone crazy,
and I just wanted to find out.’ He hesitated politely again, weighing his next
question. ‘Aren’t you ever going to put your uniform on again?’

   ‘I don’t think so.’ Milo nodded with spurious vim to indicate
he still understood and then sat silent, ruminating gravely with troubled
misgiving. A scarlet-crested bird shot by below, brushing sure dark wings
against a quivering bush. Yossarian and Milo were covered in their bower by
tissue-thin tiers of sloping green and largely surrounded by other gray
chestnut trees and a silver spruce. The sun was high overhead in a vast
sapphire-blue sky beaded with low, isolated, puffy clouds of dry and immaculate
white. There was no breeze, and the leaves about them hung motionless. The
shade was feathery. Everything was at peace but Milo, who straightened suddenly
with a muffled cry and began pointing excitedly.

   ‘Look at that!’ he exclaimed in alarm. ‘Look at that! That’s
a funeral going on down there. That looks like the cemetery. Isn’t it?’
Yossarian answered him slowly in a level voice. ‘They’re burying that kid who
got killed in my plane over Avignon the other day. Snowden.’