Catch-22 (41 page)

   ‘What do you mean, me?’ Yossarian wanted to know. ‘Where are
you going to be?’ Orr’s stunted torso shook suddenly with a muffled spasm of
amusement. ‘I don’t know,’ he exclaimed, and a weird, wavering giggle gushed
out suddenly through his chattering buck teeth like an exploding jet of
emotion. He was still laughing when he continued, and his voice was clogged
with saliva. ‘If they keep on shooting me down this way, I don’t know where I’m
going to be.’ Yossarian was moved. ‘Why don’t you try to stop flying, Orr?
You’ve got an excuse.’

   ‘I’ve only got eighteen missions.’

   ‘But you’ve been shot down on almost every one. You’re either
ditching or crash-landing every time you go up.’

   ‘Oh, I don’t mind flying missions. I guess they’re lots of
fun. You ought to try flying a few with me when you’re not flying lead. Just
for laughs. Tee-hee.’ Orr gazed up at Yossarian through the corners of his eyes
with a look of pointed mirth.

   Yossarian avoided his stare. ‘They’ve got me flying lead
again.’

   ‘When you’re not flying lead. If you had any brains, do you
know what you’d do? You’d go right to Piltchard and Wren and tell them you want
to fly with me.’

   ‘And get shot down with you every time you go up? What’s the
fun in that?’

   ‘That’s just why you ought to do it,’ Orr insisted. ‘I guess
I’m just about the best pilot around now when it comes to ditching or making
crash landings. It would be good practice for you.’

   ‘Good practice for what?’

   ‘Good practice in case you ever have to ditch or make a crash
landing. Tee-hee-hee.’

   ‘Have you got another bottle of beer for me?’ Yossarian asked
morosely.

   ‘Do you want to bust it down on my head?’ This time Yossarian
did laugh. ‘Like that whore in that apartment in Rome?’ Orr sniggered lewdly,
his bulging crab apple cheeks blowing outward with pleasure. ‘Do you really
want to know why she was hitting me over the head with her shoe?’ he teased.

   ‘I do know,’ Yossarian teased back. ‘Nately’s whore told me.’
Orr grinned like a gargoyle. ‘No she didn’t.’ Yossarian felt sorry for Orr. Orr
was so small and ugly. Who would protect him if he lived? Who would protect a
warm-hearted, simple-minded gnome like Orr from rowdies and cliques and from
expert athletes like Appleby who had flies in their eyes and would walk right
over him with swaggering conceit and self-assurance every chance they got?
Yossarian worried frequently about Orr. Who would shield him against animosity and
deceit, against people with ambition and the embittered snobbery of the big
shot’s wife, against the squalid, corrupting indignities of the profit motive
and the friendly neighborhood butcher with inferior meat? Orr was a happy and
unsuspecting simpleton with a thick mass of wavy polychromatic hair parted down
the center. He would be mere child’s play for them. They would take his money,
screw his wife and show no kindness to his children. Yossarian felt a flood of
compassion sweep over him.

   Orr was an eccentric midget, a freakish, likable dwarf with a
smutty mind and a thousand valuable skills that would keep him in a low income
group all his life. He could use a soldering iron and hammer two boards
together so that the wood did not split and the nails did not bend. He could
drill holes. He had built a good deal more in the tent while Yossarian was away
in the hospital. He had filed or chiseled a perfect channel in the cement so
that the slender gasoline line was flush with the floor as it ran to the stove
from the tank he had built outside on an elevated platform. He had constructed
andirons for the fireplace out of excess bomb parts and had filled them with
stout silver logs, and he had framed with stained wood the photographs of girls
with big breasts he had torn out of cheesecake magazines and hung over the
mantelpiece. Orr could open a can of paint. He could mix paint, thin paint,
remove paint. He could chop wood and measure things with a ruler. He knew how
to build fires. He could dig holes, and he had a real gift for bringing water
for them both in cans and canteens from the tanks near the mess hall. He could
engross himself in an inconsequential task for hours without growing restless
or bored, as oblivious to fatigue as the stump of a tree, and almost as
taciturn. He had an uncanny knowledge of wildlife and was not afraid of dogs or
cats or beetles or moths, or of foods like scrod or tripe.

   Yossarian sighed drearily and began brooding about the
rumored mission to Bologna. The valve Orr was dismantling was about the size of
a thumb and contained thirty-seven separate parts, excluding the casing, many
of them so minute that Orr was required to pinch them tightly between the tips
of his fingernails as he placed them carefully on the floor in orderly,
catalogued rows, never quickening his movements or slowing them down, never
tiring, never pausing in his relentless, methodical, monotonous procedure
unless it was to leer at Yossarian with maniacal mischief. Yossarian tried not
to watch him. He counted the parts and thought he would go clear out of his
mind. He turned away, shutting his eyes, but that was even worse, for now he
had only the sounds, the tiny maddening, indefatigable, distinct clicks and
rustles of hands and weightless parts. Orr was breathing rhythmically with a
noise that was stertorous and repulsive. Yossarian clenched his fists and
looked at the long bone-handled hunting knife hanging in a holster over the cot
of the dead man in the tent. As soon as he thought of stabbing Orr, his tension
eased. The idea of murdering Orr was so ridiculous that he began to consider it
seriously with queer whimsy and fascination. He searched the nape of Orr’s neck
for the probable site of the medulla oblongata. Just the daintiest stick there
would kill him and solve so many serious, agonizing problems for them both.

   ‘Does it hurt?’ Orr asked at precisely that moment, as though
by protective instinct.

   Yossarian eyed him closely. ‘Does what hurt?’

   ‘Your leg,’ said Orr with a strange, mysterious laugh. ‘You
still limp a little.’

   ‘It’s just a habit, I guess,’ said Yossarian, breathing again
with relief. ‘I’ll probably get over it soon.’ Orr rolled over sideways to the
floor and came up on one knee, facing toward Yossarian. ‘Do you remember,’ he
drawled reflectively, with an air of labored recollection, ‘that girl who was
hitting me on the head that day in Rome?’ He chuckled at Yossarian’s
involuntary exclamation of tricked annoyance. ‘I’ll make a deal with you about
that girl. I’ll tell you why that girl was hitting me on the head with her shoe
that day if you answer one question.’

   ‘What’s the question?’

   ‘Did you ever screw Nately’s girl?’ Yossarian laughed with
surprise. ‘Me? No. Now tell me why that girl hit you with her shoe.’

   ‘That wasn’t the question,’ Orr informed him with victorious
delight. ‘That was just conversation. She acts like you screwed her.’

   ‘Well, I didn’t. How does she act?’

   ‘She acts like she don’t like you.’

   ‘She doesn’t like anyone.’

   ‘She likes Captain Black,’ Orr reminded.

   ‘That’s because he treats her like dirt. Anyone can get a
girl that way.’

   ‘She wears a slave bracelet on her leg with his name on it.’

   ‘He makes her wear it to needle Nately.’

   ‘She even gives him some of the money she gets from Nately.’

   ‘Listen, what do you want from me?’

   ‘Did you ever screw my girl?’

   ‘Your girl? Who the hell is your girl?’

   ‘The one who hit me over the head with her shoe.’

   ‘I’ve been with her a couple of times,’ Yossarian admitted.
‘Since when is she your girl? What are you getting at?’

   ‘She don’t like you, either.’

   ‘What the hell do I care if she likes me or not? She likes me
as much as she likes you.’

   ‘Did she ever hit you over the head with her shoe?’

   ‘Orr, I’m tired. Why don’t you leave me alone?’

   ‘Tee-hee-hee. How about that skinny countess in Rome and her
skinny daughter-in-law?’ Orr persisted impishly with increasing zest. ‘Did you
ever screw them?’

   ‘Oh, how I wish I could,’ sighed Yossarian honestly,
imagining, at the mere question, the prurient, used, decaying feel in his
petting hands of their teeny, pulpy buttocks and breasts.

   ‘They don’t like you either,’ commented Orr. ‘They like
Aarfy, and they like Nately, but they don’t like you. Women just don’t seem to
like you. I think they think you’re a bad influence.’

   ‘Women are crazy,’ Yossarian answered, and waited grimly for
what he knew was coming next.

   ‘How about that other girl of yours?’ Orr asked with a
pretense of pensive curiosity. ‘The fat one? The bald one? You know, that fat
bald one in Sicily with the turban who kept sweating all over us all night
long? Is she crazy too?’

   ‘Didn’t she like me either?’

   ‘How could you do it to a girl with no hair?’

   ‘How was I supposed to know she had no hair?’

   ‘I knew it,’ Orr bragged. ‘I knew it all the time.’

   ‘You knew she was bald?’ Yossarian exclaimed in wonder.

   ‘No, I knew this valve wouldn’t work if I left a part out,’
Orr answered, glowing with cranberry-red elation because he had just duped
Yossarian again. ‘Will you please hand me that small composition gasket that
rolled over there? It’s right near your foot.’

   ‘No it isn’t.’

   ‘Right here,’ said Orr, and took hold of something invisible
with the tips of his fingernails and held it up for Yossarian to see. ‘Now I’ll
have to start all over again.’

   ‘I’ll kill you if you do. I’ll murder you right on the spot.’

   ‘Why don’t you ever fly with me?’ Orr asked suddenly, and
looked straight into Yossarian’s face for the first time. ‘There, that’s the
question I want you to answer. Why don’t you ever fly with me?’ Yossarian
turned away with intense shame and embarrassment. ‘I told you why. They’ve got
me flying lead bombardier most of the time.’

   ‘That’s not why,’ Orr said, shaking his head. ‘You went to Piltchard
and Wren after the first Avignon mission and told them you didn’t ever want to
fly with me. That’s why, isn’t it?’ Yossarian felt his skin turn hot. ‘No I
didn’t,’ he lied.

   ‘Yes you did,’ Orr insisted equably. ‘You asked them not to
assign you to any plane piloted by me, Dobbs or Huple because you didn’t have
confidence in us at the controls. And Piltchard and Wren said they couldn’t
make an exception of you because it wouldn’t be fair to the men who did have to
fly with us.’

   ‘So?’ said Yossarian. ‘It didn’t make any difference then,
did it?’

   ‘But they’ve never made you fly with me.’ Orr, working on
both knees again, was addressing Yossarian without bitterness or reproach, but
with injured humility, which was infinitely more painful to observe, although
he was still grinning and snickering, as though the situation were comic. ‘You
really ought to fly with me, you know. I’m a pretty good pilot, and I’d take
care of you. I may get knocked down a lot, but that’s not my fault, and
nobody’s ever been hurt in my plane. Yes, sir—if you had any brains, you know
what you’d do? You’d go right to Piltchard and Wren and tell them you want to
fly all your missions with me.’ Yossarian leaned forward and peered closely
into Orr’s inscrutable mask of contradictory emotions. ‘Are you trying to tell
me something?’

   ‘Tee-hee-hee-hee,’ Orr responded. ‘I’m trying to tell you why
that big girl with the shoe was hitting me on the head that day. But you just
won’t let me.’

   ‘Tell me.’

   ‘Will you fly with me?’ Yossarian laughed and shook his head.
‘You’ll only get knocked down into the water again.’ Orr did get knocked down
into the water again when the rumored mission to Bologna was flown, and he
landed his single-engine plane with a smashing jar on the choppy, windswept
waves tossing and falling below the warlike black thunderclouds mobilizing
overhead. He was late getting out of the plane and ended up alone in a raft
that began drifting away from the men in the other raft and was out of sight by
the time the Air-Sea Rescue launch came plowing up through the wind and
splattering raindrops to take them aboard. Night was already falling by the
time they were returned to the squadron. There was no word of Orr.

   ‘Don’t worry,’ reassured Kid Sampson, still wrapped in the
heavy blankets and raincoat in which he had been swaddled on the boat by his
rescuers. ‘He’s probably been picked up already if he didn’t drown in that
storm. It didn’t last long. I bet he’ll show up any minute.’ Yossarian walked
back to his tent to wait for Orr to show up any minute and lit a fire to make
things warm for him. The stove worked perfectly, with a strong, robust blaze
that could be raised or lowered by turning the tap Orr had finally finished
repairing. A light rain was falling, drumming softly on the tent, the trees,
the ground. Yossarian cooked a can of hot soup to have ready for Orr and ate it
all himself as the time passed. He hard-boiled some eggs for Orr and ate those
too. Then he ate a whole tin of Cheddar cheese from a package of K rations.

   Each time he caught himself worrying he made himself remember
that Orr could do everything and broke into silent laughter at the picture of
Orr in the raft as Sergeant Knight had described him, bent forward with a busy,
preoccupied smile over the map and compass in his lap, stuffing one soaking-wet
chocolate bar after another into his grinning, tittering mouth as he paddled
away dutifully through the lightning, thunder and rain with the bright-blue
useless toy oar, the fishing line with dried bait trailing out behind him.
Yossarian really had no doubt about Orr’s ability to survive. If fish could be
caught with that silly fishing line, Orr would catch them, and if it was
codfish he was after, then Orr would catch a codfish, even though no codfish
had ever been caught in those waters before. Yossarian put another can of soup
up to cook and ate that too when it was hot. Every time a car door slammed, he
broke into a hopeful smile and turned expectantly toward the entrance,
listening for footsteps. He knew that any moment Orr would come walking into
the tent with big, glistening, rain-soaked eyes, cheeks and buck teeth, looking
ludicrously like a jolly New England oysterman in a yellow oilskin rain hat and
slicker numerous sizes too large for him and holding up proudly for Yossarian’s
amusement a great dead codfish he had caught. But he didn’t.