Catch-22 (50 page)

   ‘Dr. Stubbs?’ The chaplain shook his head in baffled protest.
‘I haven’t seen Dr. Stubbs, Colonel. I was brought here by three strange
officers who took me down into the cellar without authority and questioned and
insulted me.’ Colonel Korn poked the chaplain in the chest once more. ‘You know
damned well Dr. Stubbs has been telling the men in his squadron they didn’t
have to fly more than seventy missions.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Well, Padre, they
do have to fly more than seventy missions, because we’re transferring Dr.
Stubbs to the Pacific. So adios, Padre. Adios.’

   Dreedle was out, and General Peckem was
in, and General Peckem had hardly moved inside General Dreedle’s office to
replace him when his splendid military victory began falling to pieces around
him.

   ‘General Scheisskopf?’ he inquired unsuspectingly of the sergeant
in his new office who brought him word of the order that had come in that
morning. ‘You mean Colonel Scheisskopf, don’t you?’

   ‘No, sir, General Scheisskopf He was promoted to general this
morning, sir.’

   ‘Well, that’s certainly curious! Scheisskopf? A general? What
grade?’

   ‘Lieutenant general, sir, and—’

   ‘Lieutenant general!’

   ‘Yes, sir, and he wants you to issue no orders to anyone in
your command without first clearing them through him.’

   ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ mused General Peckem with
astonishment, swearing aloud for perhaps the first time in his life. ‘Cargill,
did you hear that? Scheisskopf was promoted way up to lieutenant general. I’ll
bet that promotion was intended for me and they gave it to him by mistake.’
Colonel Cargill had been rubbing his sturdy chin reflectively. ‘Why is he
giving orders to us?’ General Peckem’s sleek, scrubbed, distinguished face
tightened. ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ he said slowly with an uncomprehending frown. ‘Why
is he issuing orders to us if he’s still in Special Services and we’re in
combat operations?’

   ‘That’s another change that was made this morning, sir. All
combat operations are now under the jurisdiction of Special Services. General
Scheisskopf is our new commanding officer.’ General Peckem let out a sharp cry.
‘Oh, my God!’ he wailed, and all his practical composure went up in hysteria.
‘Scheisskopf in charge? Scheisskopf?’ He pressed his fists down on his eyes
with horror. ‘Cargill, get me Wintergreen! Scheisskopf? Not Scheisskopf!’ All
phones began ringing at once. A corporal ran in and saluted.

   ‘Sir, there’s a chaplain outside to see you with news of an
injustice in Colonel Cathcart’s squadron.’

   ‘Send him away, send him away! We’ve got enough injustices of
our own. Where’s Wintergreen?’

   ‘Sir, General Scheisskopf is on the phone. He wants to speak
to you at once.’

   ‘Tell him I haven’t arrived yet. Good Lord!’ General Peckem
screamed, as though struck by the enormity of the disaster for the first time.
‘Scheisskopf? The man’s a moron! I walked all over that blockhead, and now he’s
my superior officer. Oh, my Lord! Cargill! Cargill, don’t desert me! Where’s
Wintergreen?’

   ‘Sir, I have an ex-Sergeant Wintergreen on your other
telephone. He’s been trying to reach you all morning.’

   ‘General, I can’t get Wintergreen,’ Colonel Cargill shouted,
‘His line is busy.’ General Peckem was perspiring freely as he lunged for the
other telephone.

   ‘Wintergreen!’

   ‘Peckem, you son of a bitch—’

   ‘Wintergreen, have you heard what they’ve done?’

   ‘—what have you done, you stupid bastard?’

   ‘They put Scheisskopf in charge of everything!’ Wintergreen
was shrieking with rage and panic. ‘You and your goddam memorandums! They’ve
gone and transferred combat operations to Special Services!’

   ‘Oh, no,’ moaned General Peckem. ‘Is that what did it? My
memoranda? Is that what made them put Scheisskopf in charge? Why didn’t they
put me in charge?’

   ‘Because you weren’t in Special Services any more. You
transferred out and left him in charge. And do you know what he wants? Do you
know what the bastard wants us all to do?’

   ‘Sir, I think you’d better talk to General Scheisskopf,’
pleaded the sergeant nervously. ‘He insists on speaking to someone.’

   ‘Cargill, talk to Scheisskopf for me. I can’t do it. Find out
what he wants.’ Colonel Cargill listened to General Scheisskopf for a moment
and went white as a sheet. ‘Oh, my God!’ he cried, as the phone fell from his
fingers. ‘Do you know what he wants? He wants us to march. He wants everybody
to march!’

   Yossarian marched backward with his gun on
his hip and refused to fly any more missions. He marched backward because he
was continously spinning around as he walked to make certain no one was
sneaking up on him from behind. Every sound to his rear was a warning, every
person he passed a potential assassin. He kept his hand on his gun butt
constantly and smiled at no one but Hungry Joe. He told Captain Piltchard and
Captain Wren that he was through flying. Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren
left his name off the flight schedule for the next mission and reported the
matter to Group Headquarters.

   Colonel Korn laughed cahnly. ‘What the devil do you mean, he
won’t fly more missions?’ he asked with a smile, as Colonel Cathcart crept away
into a corner to brood about the sinister import of the name Yossarian popping
up to plague him once again. ‘Why won’t he?’

   ‘His friend Nately was killed in the crash over Spezia. Maybe
that’s why.’

   ‘Who does he think he is—Achilles?’ Colonel Korn was pleased
with the simile and filed a mental reminder to repeat it the next time he found
himself in General Peckem’s presence. ‘He has to fly more missions. He has no
choice. Go back and tell him you’ll report the matter to us if he doesn’t
change his mind.’

   ‘We already did tell him that, sir. It made no difference.’

   ‘What does Major Major say?’

   ‘We never see Major Major. He seems to have disappeared.’

   ‘I wish we could disappear him!’ Colonel Cathcart blurted out
from the corner peevishly. ‘The way they did that fellow Dunbar.’

   ‘Oh, there are plenty of other ways we can handle this one,’
Colonel Korn assured him confidently, and continued to Piltchard and Wren,
‘Let’s begin with the kindest. Send him to Rome for a rest for a few days.
Maybe this fellow’s death really did hurt him a bit.’ Nately’s death, in fact,
almost killed Yossarian too, for when he broke the news to Nately’s whore in
Rome she uttered a piercing, heartbroken shriek and tried to stab him to death
with a potato peeler.

   ‘Bruto!’ she howled at him in hysterical fury as he bent her
arm up around behind her back and twisted gradually until the potato peeler
dropped from her grasp. ‘Bruto! Bruto!’ She lashed at him swiftly with the
long-nailed fingers of her free hand and raked open his cheek. She spat in his
face viciously.

   ‘What’s the matter?’ he screamed in stinging pain and
bewilderment, flinging her away from him all the way across the room to the
wall. ‘What do you want from me?’ She flew back at him with both fists flailing
and bloodied his mouth with a solid punch before he was able to grab her wrists
and hold her still. Her hair tossed wildly. Tears were streaming in single
torrents from her flashing, hate-filled eyes as she struggled against him
fiercely in an irrational frenzy of maddened might, snarling and cursing
savagely and screaming ‘Bruto! Bruto!’ each time he tried to explain. Her great
strength caught him off guard, and he lost his footing. She was nearly as tall
as Yossarian, and for a few fantastic, terror-filled moments he was certain she
would overpower him in her crazed determination, crush him to the ground and
rip him apart mercilessly limb from limb for some heinous crime he had never
committed. He wanted to yell for help as they strove against each other
frantically in a grunting, panting stalemate, arm against arm. At last she
weakened, and he was able to force her back and plead with her to let him talk,
swearing to her that Nately’s death had not been his fault. She spat in his
face again, and he pushed her away hard in disgusted anger and frustration. She
hurled herself down toward the potato peeler the instant he released her. He
flung himself down after her, and they rolled over each other on the floor
several times before he could tear the potato peeler away. She tried to trip
him with her hand as he scrambled to his feet and scratched an excruciating
chunk out of his ankle. He hopped across the room in pain and threw the potato
peeler out the window. He heaved a huge sigh of relief once he saw he was safe.

   ‘Now, please let me explain something to you,’ he cajoled in
a mature, reasoning, earnest voice.

   She kicked him in the groin. Whoosh! went the air out of him,
and he sank down on his side with a shrill and ululating cry, doubled up over
his knees in chaotic agony and retching for breath. Nately’s whore ran from the
room. Yossarian staggered up to his feet not a moment too soon, for she came
charging back in from the kitchen carrying a long bread knife. A moan of
incredulous dismay wafted from his lips as, still clutching his throbbing,
tender, burning bowels in both hands, he dropped his full weight down against
her shins and knocked her legs out from under her. She flipped completely over
his head and landed on the floor on her elbows with a jarring thud. The knife
skittered free, and he slapped it out of sight under the bed. She tried to
lunge after it, and he seized her by the arm and yanked her up. She tried to
kick him in the groin again, and he slung her away with a violent oath of his
own. She slammed into the wall off balance and smashed a chair over into a
vanity table covered with combs, hairbrushes and cosmetic jars that all went
crashing off. A framed picture fell to the floor at the other end of the room,
the glass front shattering.

   ‘What do you want from me?’ he yelled at her in whining and
exasperated confusion. ‘I didn’t kill him.’ She hurled a heavy glass ash tray
at his head. He made a fist and wanted to punch her in the stomach when she
came charging at him again, but he was afraid he might harm her. He wanted to
clip her very neatly on the point of the jaw and run from the room, but there
was no clear target, and he merely skipped aside neatly at the last second and
helped her along past him with a strong shove. She banged hard against the
other wall. Now she was blocking the door. She threw a large vase at him. Then
she came at him with a full wine bottle and struck him squarely on the temple,
knocking him down half-stunned on one knee. His ears were buzzing, his whole
face was numb. More than anything else, he was embarrassed. He felt awkward
because she was going to murder him. He simply did not understand what was
going on. He had no idea what to do. But he did know he had to save himself,
and he catapulted forward off the floor when he saw her raise the wine bottle
to clout him again and barreled into her midriff before she could strike him.
He had momentum, and he propelled her before him backward in his driving rush
until her knees buckled against the side of the bed and she fell over onto the
mattress with Yossarian sprawled on top of her between her legs. She plunged
her nails into the side of his neck and gouged as he worked his way up the
supple, full hills and ledges of her rounded body until he covered her
completely and pressed her into submission, his fingers pursuing her thrashing
arm persistently until they arrived at the wine bottle finally and wrenched it
free. She was still kicking and cursing and scratching ferociously. She tried
to bite him cruelly, her coarse, sensual lips stretched back over her teeth
like an enraged omnivorous beast’s. Now that she lay captive beneath him, he
wondered how he would ever escape her without leaving himself vulnerable. He
could feel the tensed, straddling inside of her buffeting thighs and knees
squeezing and churning around one of his legs. He was stirred by thoughts of
sex that made him ashamed. He was conscious of the voluptuous flesh of her
firm, young-woman’s body straining and beating against him like a humid, fluid,
delectable, unyielding tide, her belly and warm, live, plastic breasts
thrusting upward against him vigorously in sweet and menacing temptation. Her
breath was scalding. All at once he realized—though the writhing turbulence
beneath him had not diminished one whit—that she was no longer grappling with
him, recognized with a quiver that she was not fighting him but heaving her
pelvis up against him remorselessly in the primal, powerful, rhapsodic
instinctual rhythm of erotic ardor and abandonment. He gasped in delighted surprise.
Her face—as beautiful as a blooming flower to him now—was distorted with a new
kind of torture, the tissues serenely swollen, her half-closed eyes misty and
unseeing with the stultifying languor of desire.

   ‘Caro,’ she murmured hoarsely as though from the depths of a
tranquil and luxurious trance. ‘Ooooh, caro mio.’ He stroked her hair. She
drove her mouth against his face with savage passion. He licked her neck. She
wrapped her arms around him and hugged. He felt himself falling, falling
ecstatically in love with her as she kissed him again and again with lips that
were steaming and wet and soft and hard, mumbling deep sounds to him adoringly
in an incoherent oblivion of rapture, one caressing hand on his back slipping
deftly down inside his trouser belt while the other groped secretly and
treacherously about on the floor for the bread knife and found it. He saved
himself just in time. She still wanted to kill him! He was shocked and
astounded by her depraved subteruge as he tore the knife from her grasp and
hurled it away. He bounded out of the bed to his feet. His face was agog with
befuddlement and disillusion. He did not know whether to dart through the door
to freedom or collapse on the bed to fall in love with her and place himself
abjectly at her mercy again. She spared him from doing either by bursting
unpredictably into tears. He was stunned again.

   This time she wept with no other emotion than grief,
profound, debilitating, humble grief, forgetting all about him. Her desolation
was pathetic as she sat with her tempestuous, proud, lovely head bowed, her
shoulders sagging, her spirit melting. This time there was no mistaking her
anguish. Great racking sobs choked and shook her. She was no longer aware of
him, no longer cared. He could have walked from the room safely then. But he
chose to remain and console and help her.

   ‘Please,’ he urged her inarticulately with his arm about her
shoulders, recollecting with pained sadness how inarticulate and enfeebled he
had felt in the plane coming back from Avignon when Snowden kept whimpering to
him that he was cold, he was cold, and all Yossarian could offer him in return
was ‘There, there. There, there.’

   ‘Please,’ he repeated to her sympathetically. ‘Please,
please.’ She rested against him and cried until she seemed too weak to cry any
longer, and did not look at him once until he extended his handkerchief when
she had finished. She wiped her cheeks with a tiny, polite smile and gave the
handkerchief back, murmuring ‘Grazie, grazie’ with meek, maidenly propriety,
and then, without any warning whatsoever of a change in mood, clawed suddenly
at his eyes with both hands. She landed with each and let out a victorious
shriek.

   ‘Ha! Assassino!’ she hooted, and raced joyously across the
room for the bread knife to finish him off.

   Half blinded, he rose and stumbled after her. A noise behind
him made him turn. His senses reeled in horror at what he saw. Nately’s whore’s
kid sister, of all people, was coming after him with another long bread knife!

   ‘Oh, no,’ he wailed with a shudder, and he knocked the knife
out of her hand with a sharp downward blow on her wrist. He lost patience
entirely with the whole grotesque and incomprehensible melee. There was no
telling who might lunge at him next through the doorway with another long bread
knife, and he lifted Nately’s whore’s kid sister off the floor, threw her at
Nately’s whore and ran out of the room, out of the apartment and down the
stairs. The two girls chased out into the hall after him. He heard their footsteps
lag farther and farther behind as he fled and then cease altogether. He heard
sobbing directly overhead. Glancing backward up the stair well, he spied
Nately’s whore sitting in a heap on one of the steps, weeping with her face in
both hands, while her pagan, irrepressible kid sister hung dangerously over the
banister shouting ‘Bruto! Bruto!’ down at him happily and brandished her bread
knife at him as though it were an exciting new toy she was eager to use.

   Yossarian escaped, but kept looking back over his shoulder
anxiously as he retreated through the street. People stared at him strangely,
making him more apprehensive. He walked in nervous haste, wondering what there
was in his appearance that caught everyone’s attention. When he touched his hand
to a sore spot on his forehead, his fingers turned gooey with blood, and he
understood. He dabbed his face and neck with a handkerchief. Wherever it
pressed, he picked up new red smudges. He was bleeding everywhere. He hurried
into the Red Cross building and down the two steep flights of white marble
stairs to the men’s washroom, where he cleansed and nursed his innumerable
visible wounds with cold water and soap and straightened his shirt collar and
combed his hair. He had never seen a face so badly bruised and scratched as the
one still blinking back at him in the mirror with a dazed and startled
uneasiness. What on earth had she wanted from him?

   When he left the men’s room, Nately’s whore was waiting
outside in ambush. She was crouched against the wall near the bottom of the
staircase and came pouncing down upon him like a hawk with a glittering silver
steak knife in her fist. He broke the brunt of her assault with his upraised
elbow and punched her neatly on the jaw. Her eyes rolled. He caught her before
she dropped and sat her down gently. Then he ran up the steps and out of the
building and spent the next three hours hunting through the city for Hungry Joe
so that he could get away from Rome before she could find him again. He did not
feel really safe until the plane had taken off. When they landed in Pianosa,
Nately’s whore, disguised in a mechanic’s green overalls, was waiting with her
steak knife exactly where the plane stopped, and all that saved him as she
stabbed at his chest in her leather-soled high-heeled shoes was the gravel
underfoot that made her feet roll out from under her. Yossarian, astounded,
hauled her up into the plane and held her motionless on the floor in a double
armlock while Hungry Joe radioed the control tower for permission to return to
Rome. At the airport in Rome, Yossarian dumped her out of the plane on the taxi
strip, and Hungry Joe took right off for Pianosa again without even cutting his
engines. Scarcely breathing, Yossarian scrutinized every figure warily as he
and Hungry Joe walked back through the squadron toward their tents. Hungry Joe
eyed him steadily with a funny expression.