Catch-22 (40 page)

   ‘Who else will go?’

   McWatt went, and McWatt was not crazy. And
so did Yossarian, still walking with a limp, and when Yossarian had gone two
more times and then found himself menaced by the rumor of another mission to
Bologna, he limped determinedly into Dobbs’s tent early one warm afternoon, put
a finger to his mouth and said, ‘Shush!’

   ‘What are you shushing him for?’ asked Kid Sampson, peeling a
tangerine with his front teeth as he perused the dog-eared pages of a comic
book. ‘He isn’t even saying anything.’

   ‘Screw,’ said Yossarian to Kid Sampson, jerking his thumb
back over his shoulder toward the entrance of the tent.

   Kid Sampson cocked his blond eyebrows discerningly and rose
to co-operate. He whistled upward four times into his drooping yellow mustache
and spurted away into the hills on the dented old green motorcycle he had purchased
secondhand months before. Yossarian waited until the last faint bark of the
motor had died away in the distance. Things inside the tent did not seem quite
normal. The place was too neat. Dobbs was watching him curiously, smoking a fat
cigar. Now that Yossarian had made up his mind to be brave, he was deathly
afraid.

   ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s kill Colonel Cathcart. We’ll do
it together.’ Dobbs sprang forward off his cot with a look of wildest terror.
‘Shush!’ he roared. ‘Kill Colonel Cathcart? What are you talking about?’

   ‘Be quiet, damn it,’ Yossarian snarled. ‘The whole island
will hear. Have you still got that gun?’

   ‘Are you crazy or something?’ shouted Dobbs. ‘Why should I
want to kill Colonel Cathcart?’

   ‘Why?’ Yossarian stared at Dobbs with an incredulous scowl.
‘Why? It was your idea, wasn’t it? Didn’t you come to the hospital and ask me
to do it?’ Dobbs smiled slowly. ‘But that was when I had only fifty-eight
missions,’ he explained, puffing on his cigar luxuriously. ‘I’m all packed now
and I’m waiting to go home. I’ve finished my sixty missions.’

   ‘So what?’ Yossarian replied. ‘He’s only going to raise them
again.’

   ‘Maybe this time he won’t.’

   ‘He always raises them. What the hell’s the matter with you,
Dobbs? Ask Hungry Joe how many time he’s packed his bags.’

   ‘I’ve got to wait and see what happens,’ Dobbs maintained
stubbornly. ‘I’d have to be crazy to get mixed up in something like this now
that I’m out of combat.’ He flicked the ash from his cigar. ‘No, my advice to
you,’ he remarked, ‘is that you fly your sixty missions like the rest of us and
then see what happens.’ Yossarian resisted the impulse to spit squarely in his
eye. ‘I may not live through sixty,’ he wheedled in a flat, pessimistic voice.
‘There’s a rumor around that he volunteered the group for Bologna again.’

   ‘It’s only a rumor,’ Dobbs pointed out with a self-important
air. ‘You mustn’t believe every rumor you hear.’

   ‘Will you stop giving me advice?’

   ‘Why don’t you speak to Orr?’ Dobbs advised. ‘Orr got knocked
down into the water again last week on that second mission to Avignon. Maybe
he’s unhappy enough to kill him.’

   ‘Orr hasn’t got brains enough to be unhappy.’ Orr had been
knocked down into the water again while Yossarian was still in the hospital and
had eased his crippled airplane down gently into the glassy blue swells off
Marseilles with such flawless skill that not one member of the six-man crew
suffered the slightest bruise. The escape hatches in the front and rear
sections flew open while the sea was still foaming white and green around the
plane, and the men scrambled out as speedily as they could in their flaccid
orange Mae West life jackets that failed to inflate and dangled limp and
useless around their necks and waists. The life jackets failed to inflate
because Milo had removed the twin carbon-dioxide cylinders from the inflating
chambers to make the strawberry and crushed-pineapple ice-cream sodas he served
in the officers’ mess hall and had replaced them with mimeographed notes that
read: ‘What’s good for M & M Enterprises is good for the country.’ Orr
popped out of the sinking airplane last.

   ‘You should have seen him!’ Sergeant Knight roared with
laughter as he related the episode to Yossarian. ‘It was the funniest goddam
thing you ever saw. None of the Mae Wests would work because Milo had stolen
the carbon dioxide to make those ice-cream sodas you bastards have been getting
in the officers’ mess. But that wasn’t too bad, as it turned out. Only one of
us couldn’t swim, and we lifted that guy up into the raft after Orr had worked
it over by its rope right up against the fuselage while we were all still
standing on the plane. That little crackpot sure has a knack for things like
that. Then the other raft came loose and drifted away, so that all six of us
wound up sitting in one with our elbows and legs pressed so close against each
other you almost couldn’t move without knocking the guy next to you out of the
raft into the water. The plane went down about three seconds after we left it
and we were out there all alone, and right after that we began unscrewing the
caps on our Mae Wests to see what the hell had gone wrong and found those
goddam notes from Milo telling us that what was good for him was good enough
for the rest of us. That bastard! Jesus, did we curse him, all except that
buddy of yours, Orr, who just kept grinning as though for all he cared what was
good for Milo might be good enough for the rest of us.

   ‘I swear, you should have seen him sitting up there on the
rim of the raft like the captain of a ship while the rest of us just watched
him and waited for him to tell us what to do. He kept slapping his hands on his
legs every few seconds as though he had the shakes and saying, “All right
now, all right,” and giggling like a crazy little freak, then saying,
“All right now, all right,” again, and giggling like a crazy little
freak some more. It was like watching some kind of a moron. Watching him was
all that kept us from going to pieces altogether during the first few minutes,
what with each wave washing over us into the raft or dumping a few of us back
into the water so that we had to climb back in again before the next wave came
along and washed us right back out. It was sure funny. We just kept falling out
and climbing back in. We had the guy who couldn’t swim stretched out in the
middle of the raft on the floor, but even there he almost drowned, because the
water inside the raft was deep enough to keep splashing in his face. Oh, boy!

   ‘Then Orr began opening up compartments in the raft, and the
fun really began. First he found a box of chocolate bars and he passed those
around so we sat there eating salty chocolate bars while the waves kept
knocking us out of the raft into the water. Next he found some bouillon cubes and
aluminum cups and made us some soup. Then he found some tea. Sure, he made it!
Can’t you see him serving us tea as we sat there soaking wet in water up to our
ass? Now I was falling out of the raft because I was laughing so much. We were
all laughing. And he was dead serious, except for that goofy giggle of his and
that crazy grin. What a jerk! Whatever he found he used. He found some shark
repellent and he sprinkled it right out into the water. He found some marker
dye and he threw it into the water. The next thing he finds is a fishing line
and dried bait, and his face lights up as though the Air-Sea Rescue launch had
just sped up to save us before we died of exposure or before the Germans sent a
boat out from Spezia to take us prisoner or machine-gun us. In no time at all,
Orr had that fishing line out into the water, trolling away as happy as a lark.
“Lieutenant, what do you expect to catch?” I asked him.
“Cod,” he told me. And he meant it. And it’s a good thing he didn’t
catch any, because he would have eaten that codfish raw if he had caught any,
and would have made us eat it, too, because he had found this little book that
said it was all right to eat codfish raw.

   ‘The next thing he found was this little blue oar about the
size of a Dixie-cup spoon, and, sure enough, he began rowing with it, trying to
move all nine hundred pounds of us with that little stick. Can you imagine?
After that he found a small magnetic compass and a big waterproof map, and he
spread the map open on his knees and set the compass on top of it. And that’s
how he spent the time until the launch picked us up about thirty minutes later,
sitting there with that baited fishing line out behind him, with the compass in
his lap and the map spread out on his knees, and paddling away as hard as he
could with that dinky blue oar as though he was speeding to Majorca. Jesus!’
Sergeant Knight knew all about Majorca, and so did Orr, because Yossarian had
told them often of such sanctuaries as Spain, Switzerland and Sweden where
American fliers could be interned for the duration of the war under conditions
of utmost ease and luxury merely by flying there. Yossarian was the squadron’s
leading authority on internment and had already begun plotting an emergency
heading into Switzerland on every mission he flew into northernmost Italy. He
would certainly have preferred Sweden, where the level of intelligence was high
and where he could swim nude with beautiful girls with low, demurring voices
and sire whole happy, undisciplined tribes of illegitimate Yossarians that the
state would assist through parturition and launch into life without stigma; but
Sweden was out of reach, too far away, and Yossarian waited for the piece of
flak that would knock out one engine over the Italian Alps and provide him with
the excuse for heading for Switzerland. He would not even tell his pilot he was
guiding him there. Yossarian often thought of scheming with some pilot he
trusted to fake a crippled engine and then destroy the evidence of deception
with a belly landing, but the only pilot he really trusted was McWatt, who was
happiest where he was and still got a big boot out of buzzing his plane over
Yossarian’s tent or roaring in so low over the bathers at the beach that the
fierce wind from his propellers slashed dark furrows in the water and whipped
sheets of spray flapping back for seconds afterward.

   Dobbs and Hungry Joe were out of the question, and so was
Orr, who was tinkering with the valve of the stove again when Yossarian limped
despondently back into the tent after Dobbs had turned him down. The stove Orr
was manufacturing out of an inverted metal drum stood in the middle of the
smooth cement floor he had constructed. He was working sedulously on both
knees. Yossarian tried paying no attention to him and limped wearily to his cot
and sat down with a labored, drawn-out grunt. Prickles of perspiration were
turning chilly on his forehead. Dobbs had depressed him. Doc Daneeka depressed
him. An ominous vision of doom depressed him when he looked at Orr. He began ticking
with a variety of internal tremors. Nerves twitched, and the vein in one wrist
began palpitating.

   Orr studied Yossarian over his shoulder, his moist lips drawn
back around convex rows of large buck teeth. Reaching sideways, he dug a bottle
of warm beer out of his foot locker, and he handed it to Yossarian after prying
off the cap. Neither said a word. Yossarian sipped the bubbles off the top and
tilted his head back. Orr watched him cunningly with a noiseless grin.
Yossarian eyed Orr guardedly. Orr snickered with a slight, mucid sibilance and
turned back to his work, squatting. Yossarian grew tense.

   ‘Don’t start,’ he begged in a threatening voice, both hands
tightening around his beer bottle. ‘Don’t start working on your stove.’ Orr
cackled quietly. ‘I’m almost finished.’

   ‘No, you’re not. You’re about to begin.’

   ‘Here’s the valve. See? It’s almost all together.’

   ‘And you’re about to take it apart. I know what you’re doing,
you bastard. I’ve seen you do it three hundred times.’ Orr shivered with glee.
‘I want to get the leak in this gasoline line out,’ he explained. ‘I’ve got it
down now to where it’s only an ooze.’

   ‘I can’t watch you,’ Yossarian confessed tonelessly. ‘If you
want to work with something big, that’s okay. But that valve is filled with
tiny parts, and I just haven’t got the patience right now to watch you working
so hard over things that are so goddam small and unimportant.’

   ‘Just because they’re small doesn’t mean they’re
unimportant.’

   ‘I don’t care.’

   ‘Once more?’

   ‘When I’m not around. You’re a happy imbecile and you don’t
know what it means to feel the way I do. Things happen to me when you work over
small things that I can’t even begin to explain. I find out that I can’t stand
you. I start to hate you, and I’m soon thinking seriously about busting this
bottle down on your head or stabbing you in the neck with that hunting knife
there. Do you understand?’ Orr nodded very intelligently. ‘I won’t take the
valve apart now,’ he said, and began taking it apart, working with slow,
tireless, interminable precision, his rustic, ungainly face bent very close to
the floor, picking painstakingly at the minute mechanism in his fingers with
such limitless, plodding concentration that he seemed scarcely to be thinking
of it at all.

   Yossarian cursed him silently and made up his mind to ignore
him. ‘What the hell’s your hurry with that stove, anyway?’ he barked out a
moment later in spite of himself. ‘It’s still hot out. We’re probably going
swimming later. What are you worried about the cold for.’

   ‘The days are getting shorter,’ Orr observed philosophically.
‘I’d like to get this all finished for you while there’s still time. You’ll
have the best stove in the squadron when I’m through. It will burn all night
with this feed control I’m fixing, and these metal plates will radiate the heat
all over the tent. If you leave a helmet full of water on this thing when you
go to sleep, you’ll have warm water to wash with all ready for you when you
wake up. Won’t that be nice? If you want to cook eggs or soup, all you’ll have
to do is set the pot down here and turn the fire up.’