Catch-22 (37 page)

   ‘That’s a fine thing,’ General Dreedle growled at the bar,
gripping his empty shot glass in his burly hand. ‘That’s really a fine thing,
when a man of God begins hanging around a place like this with a bunch of dirty
drunks and gamblers.’ Colonel Cathcart sighed with relief. ‘Yes, sir,’ he
exclaimed proudly. ‘It certainly is a fine thing.’

   ‘Then why the hell don’t you do something about it?’

   ‘Sir?’ Colonel Cathcart inquired, blinking.

   ‘Do you think it does you credit to have your chaplain
hanging around here every night? He’s in here every goddam time I come.’

   ‘You’re right, sir, absolutely right,’ Colonel Cathcart
responded. ‘It does me no credit at all. And I am going to do something about
it, this very minute.’

   ‘Aren’t you the one who ordered him to come here?’

   ‘No, sir, that was Colonel Korn. I intend to punish him
severely, too.’

   ‘If he wasn’t a chaplain,’ General Dreedle muttered, ‘I’d
have him taken outside and shot.’

   ‘He’s not a chaplain, sir.’ Colonel Cathcart advised
helpfully.

   ‘Isn’t he? Then why the hell does he wear that cross on his
collar if he’s not a chaplain?’

   ‘He doesn’t wear a cross on his collar, sir. He wears a
silver leaf. He’s a lieutenant colonel.’

   ‘You’ve got a chaplain who’s a lieutenant colonel?’ inquired
General Dreedle with amazement.

   ‘Oh, no, sir. My chaplain is only a captain.’

   ‘Then why the hell does he wear a silver leaf on his collar
if he’s only a captain?’

   ‘He doesn’t wear a silver leaf on his collar, sir. He wears a
cross.’

   ‘Go away from me now, you son of a bitch,’ said General
Dreedle. ‘Or I’ll have you taken outside and shot!’

   ‘Yes, sir.’ Colonel Cathcart went away from General Dreedle
with a gulp and kicked the chaplain out of the officers’ club, and it was
exactly the way it almost was two months later after the chaplain had tried to
persuade Colonel Cathcart to rescind his order increasing the number of
missions to sixty and had failed abysmally in that endeavor too, and the
chaplain was ready now to capitulate to despair entirely but was restrained by
the memory of his wife, whom he loved and missed so pathetically with such
sensual and exalted ardor, and by the lifelong trust he had placed in the
wisdom and justice of an immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, humane, universal,
anthropomorphic, English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon, pro-American God, which had
begun to waver.

   So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible,
of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island,
Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had
once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to the riddles of creation would be
supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had
Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six
thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven? Where the devil
was heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a finite but expanding
universe in which even the vast, burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state
of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. There were no
miracles; prayers went unanswered, and misfortune tramped with equal brutality
on the virtuous and the corrupt; and the chaplain, who had conscience and
character, would have yielded to reason and relinquished his belief in the God
of his fathers—would truly have resigned both his calling and his commission
and taken his chances as a private in the infantry or field artillery, or even,
perhaps, as a corporal in the paratroopers—had it not been for such successive
mystic phenomena as the naked man in the tree at that poor sergeant’s funeral
weeks before and the cryptic, haunting, encouraging promise of the prophet
Flume in the forest only that afternoon: ‘Tell them I’ll be back when winter
comes.’

   In a way it was all Yossarian’s fault, for
if he had not moved the bomb line during the Big Siege of Bologna, Major—de
Coverley might still be around to save him, and if he had not stocked the
enlisted men’s apartment with girls who had no other place to live, Nately
might never have fallen in love with his whore as she sat naked from the waist
down in the room full of grumpy blackjack players who ignored her. Nately
stared at her covertly from his over-stuffed yellow armchair, marveling at the
bored, phlegmatic strength with which she accepted the mass rejection. She
yawned, and he was deeply moved. He had never witnessed such heroic poise
before.

   The girl had climbed five steep flights of stairs to sell
herself to the group of satiated enlisted men, who had girls living there all
around them; none wanted her at any price, not even after she had stripped
without real enthusiasm to tempt them with a tall body that was firm and full
and truly voluptuous. She seemed more fatigued than disappointed. Now she sat
resting in vacuous indolence, watching the card game with dull curiosity as she
gathered her recalcitrant energies for the tedious chore of donning the rest of
her clothing and going back to work. In a little while she stirred. A little
while later she rose with an unconscious sigh and stepped lethargically into
her tight cotton panties and dark skirt, then buckled on her shoes and left.
Nately slipped out behind her; and when Yossarian and Aarfy entered the
officers’ apartment almost two hours later, there she was again, stepping into
her panties and skirt, and it was almost like the chaplain’s recurring
sensation of having been through a situation before, except for Nately, who was
moping inconsolably with his hands in his pockets.

   ‘She wants to go now,’ he said in a faint, strange voice. ‘She
doesn’t want to stay.’

   ‘Why don’t you just pay her some money to let you spend the
rest of the day with her?’ Yossarian advised.

   ‘She gave me my money back,’ Nately admitted. ‘She’s tired of
me now and wants to go looking for someone else.’ The girl paused when her
shoes were on to glance in surly invitation at Yossarian and Aarfy. Her breasts
were pointy and large in the thin white sleeveless sweater she wore that
squeezed each contour and flowed outward smoothly with the tops of her enticing
hips. Yossarian returned her gaze and was strongly attracted. He shook his
head.

   ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ was Aarfy’s unperturbed
response.

   ‘Don’t say that about her!’ Nately protested with passion
that was both a plea and a rebuke. ‘I want her to stay with me.’

   ‘What’s so special about her?’ Aarfy sneered with mock
surprise. ‘She’s only a whore.’

   ‘And don’t call her a whore!’ The girl shrugged impassively
after a few more seconds and ambled toward the door. Nately bounded forward
wretchedly to hold it open. He wandered back in a heartbroken daze, his
sensitive face eloquent with grief.

   ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Yossarian counseled him as kindly as
he could. ‘You’ll probably be able to find her again. We know where all the
whores hang out.’

   ‘Please don’t call her that,’ Nately begged, looking as
though he might cry.

   ‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Yossarian.

   Aarfy thundered jovially, ‘There are hundreds of whores just
as good crawling all over the streets. That one wasn’t even pretty.’ He chuckled
mellifluously with resonant disdain and authority. ‘Why, you rushed forward to
open that door as though you were in love with her.’

   ‘I think I am in love with her,’ Nately confessed in a
shamed, far-off voice.

   Aarfy wrinkled his chubby round rosy forehead in comic
disbelief. ‘Ho, ho, ho, ho!’ he laughed, patting the expansive forest-green
sides of his officer’s tunic prosperously. ‘That’s rich. You in love with her?
That’s really rich.’ Aarfy had a date that same afternoon with a Red Cross girl
from Smith whose father owned an important milk-of-magnesia plant. ‘Now, that’s
the kind of girl you ought to be associating with, and not with common sluts
like that one. Why, she didn’t even look clean.’

   ‘I don’t care!’ Nately shouted desperately. ‘And I wish you’d
shut up, I don’t even want to talk about it with you.’

   ‘Aarfy, shut up,’ said Yossarian.

   ‘Ho, ho, ho, ho!’ Aarfy continued. ‘I just can’t imagine what
your father and mother would say if they knew you were running around with
filthy trollops like that one. Your father is a very distinguished man, you
know.’

   ‘I’m not going to tell him,’ Nately declared with
determination. ‘I’m not going to say a word about her to him or Mother until
after we’re married.’

   ‘Married?’ Aarfy’s indulgent merriment swelled tremendously.
‘Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho! Now you’re really talking stupid. Why, you’re not even old
enough to know what true love is.’ Aarfy was an authority on the subject of
true love because he had already fallen truly in love with Nately’s father and
with the prospect of working for him after the war in some executive capacity
as a reward for befriending Nately. Aarfy was a lead navigator who had never
been able to find himself since leaving college. He was a genial, magnanimous
lead navigator who could always forgive the other man in the squadron for
denouncing him furiously each time he got lost on a combat mission and led them
over concentrations of antiaircraft fire. He got lost on the streets of Rome
that same afternoon and never did find the eligible Red Cross girl from Smith
with the important milk-of-magnesia plant. He got lost on the mission to
Ferrara the day Kraft was shot down and killed, and he got lost again on the
weekly milk run to Parma and tried to lead the planes out to sea over the city
of Leghorn after Yossarian had dropped his bombs on the undefended inland
target and settled back against his thick wall of armor plate with his eyes
closed and a fragrant cigarette in his fingertips. Suddenly there was flak, and
all at once McWatt was shrieking over the intercom, ‘Flak! Flak! Where the hell
are we? What the hell’s going on?’ Yossarian flipped his eyes open in alarm and
saw the totally unexpected bulging black puffs of flak crashing down in toward
them from high up and Aarfy’s complacent melon-round tiny-eyed face gazing out
at the approaching cannon bursts with affable bemusement. Yossarian was
flabbergasted. His leg went abruptly to sleep. McWatt had started to climb and
was yelping over the intercom for instructions. Yossarian sprang forward to see
where they were and remained in the same place. He was unable to move. Then he
realized he was sopping wet. He looked down at his crotch with a sinking, sick
sensation. A wild crimson blot was crawling upward rapidly along his shirt
front like an enormous sea monster rising to devour him. He was hit! Separate
trickles of blood spilled to a puddle on the floor through one saturated
trouser leg like countless unstoppable swarms of wriggling red worms. His heart
stopped. A second solid jolt struck the plane. Yossarian shuddered with
revulsion at the queer sight of his wound and screamed at Aarfy for help.

   ‘I lost my balls! Aarfy, I lost my balls!’ Aarfy didn’t hear,
and Yossarian bent forward and tugged at his arm. ‘Aarfy, help me,’ he pleaded,
almost weeping, ‘I’m hit! I’m hit!’ Aarfy turned slowly with a bland, quizzical
grin. ‘What?’

   ‘I’m hit, Aarfy! Help me!’ Aarfy grinned again and shrugged
amiably. ‘I can’t hear you,’ he said.

   ‘Can’t you see me?’ Yossarian cried incredulously, and he
pointed to the deepening pool of blood he felt splashing down all around him
and spreading out underneath. ‘I’m wounded! Help me, for God’s sake! Aarfy,
help me!’

   ‘I still can’t hear you,’ Aarfy complained tolerantly,
cupping his podgy hand behind the blanched corolla of his ear. ‘What did you
say?’ Yossarian answered in a collapsing voice, weary suddenly of shouting so
much, of the whole frustrating, exasperating, ridiculous situation. He was
dying, and no one took notice. ‘Never mind.’

   ‘What?’ Aarfy shouted.

   ‘I said I lost my balls! Can’t you hear me? I’m wounded in
the groin!’

   ‘I still can’t hear you,’ Aaxfy chided.

   ‘I said never mind!’ Yossarian screamed with a trapped
feeling of terror and began to shiver, feeling very cold suddenly and very
weak.

   Aarfy shook his head regretfully again and lowered his
obscene, lactescent ear almost directly into Yossarian’s face. ‘You’ll just
have to speak up, my friend. You’ll just have to speak up.’

   ‘Leave me alone, you bastard! You dumb, insensitive bastard,
leave me alone!’ Yossarian sobbed. He wanted to pummel Aarfy, but lacked the
strength to lift his arms. He decided to sleep instead and keeled over sideways
into a dead faint.

   He was wounded in the thigh, and when he recovered consciousness
he found McWatt on both knees taking care of him. He was relieved, even though
he still saw Aarfy’s bloated cherub’s face hanging down over McWatt’s shoulder
with placid interest. Yossarian smiled feebly at McWatt, feeling ill, and
asked, ‘Who’s minding the store?’ McWatt gave no sign that he heard. With
growing horror, Yossarian gathered in breath and repeated the words as loudly
as he could.

   McWatt looked up. ‘Christ, I’m glad you’re still alive!’ he
exclaimed, heaving an enormous sigh. The good-humored, friendly crinkles about
his eyes were white with tension and oily with grime as he kept unrolling an
interminable bandage around the bulky cotton compress Yossarian felt strapped
burdensomely to the inside of one thigh. ‘Nately’s at the controls. The poor
kid almost started bawling when he heard you were hit. He still thinks you’re
dead. They knocked open an artery for you, but I think I’ve got it stopped. I
gave you some morphine.’

   ‘Give me some more.’

   ‘It might be too soon. I’ll give you some more when it starts
to hurt.’

   ‘It hurts now.’

   ‘Oh, well, what the hell,’ said McWatt and injected another
syrette of morphine into Yossarian’s arm.

   ‘When you tell Nately I’m all right…’ said Yossarian to
McWatt, and lost consciousness again as everything went fuzzy behind a film of
strawberry-strained gelatin and a great baritone buzz swallowed him in sound.
He came to in the ambulance and smiled encouragement at Doc Daneeka’s
weevil-like, glum and overshadowed countenance for the dizzy second or two he
had before everything went rose-petal pink again and then turned really black
and unfathomably still.

   Yossarian woke up in the hospital and went to sleep. When he
woke up in the hospital again, the smell of ether was gone and Dunbar was lying
in pajamas in the bed across the aisle maintaining that he was not Dunbar but a
fortiori. Yossarian thought he was cracked. He curled his lip skeptically at
Dunbar’s bit of news and slept on it fitfully for a day or two, then woke up
while the nurses were elsewhere and eased himself out of bed to see for
himself. The floor swayed like the floating raft at the beach and the stitches
on the inside of his thigh bit into his flesh like fine sets of fish teeth as
he limped across the aisle to peruse the name on the temperature card on the
foot of Dunbar’s bed, but sure enough, Dunbar was right: he was not Dunbar any
more but Second Lieutenant Anthony F. Fortiori.

   ‘What the hell’s going on?’ A. Fortiori got out of bed and
motioned to Yossarian to follow. Grasping for support at anything he could
reach, Yossarian limped along after him into the corridor and down the adjacent
ward to a bed containing a harried young man with pimples and a receding chin.
The harried young man rose on one elbow with alacrity as they approached. A.
Fortiori jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said, ‘Screw.’ The harried
young man jumped out of bed and ran away. A. Fortiori climbed into the bed and
became Dunbar again.

   ‘That was A. Fortiori,’ Dunbar explained. ‘They didn’t have
an empty bed in your ward, so I pulled my rank and chased him back here into
mine. It’s a pretty satisfying experience pulling rank. You ought to try it
sometime. You ought to try it right now, in fact, because you look like you’re
going to fall down.’ Yossarian felt like he was going to fall down. He turned
to the lantern jawed, leather-faced middle-aged man lying in the bed next to
Dunbar’s, jerked his thumb over his shoulder and said ‘Screw.’ The middle-aged
man stiffened fiercely and glared.

   ‘He’s a major,’ Dunbar explained. ‘Why don’t you aim a little
lower and try becoming Warrant Officer Homer Lumley for a while? Then you can
have a father in the state legislature and a sister who’s engaged to a champion
skier. Just tell him you’re a captain.’ Yossarian turned to the startled
patient Dunbar had indicated. ‘I’m a captain,’ he said, jerking his thumb over
his shoulder. ‘Screw.’ The startled patient jumped down to the floor at
Yossarian’s command and ran away. Yossarian climbed up into his bed and became
Warrant Officer Homer Lumley, who felt like vomiting and was covered suddenly
with a clammy sweat. He slept for an hour and wanted to be Yossarian again. It
did not mean so much to have a father in the state legislature and a sister who
was engaged to a champion skier. Dunbar led the way back to Yossarian’s ward,
where he thumbed A. Fortiori out of bed to become Dunbar again for a while.
There was no sign of Warrant Officer Homer Lumley. Nurse Cramer was there,
though, and sizzled with sanctimonious anger like a damp firecracker. She
ordered Yossarian to get right back into his bed and blocked his path so he
couldn’t comply. Her pretty face was more repulsive than ever. Nurse Cramer was
a good-hearted, sentimental creature who rejoiced unselfishly at news of
weddings, engagements, births and anniversaries even though she was
unacquainted with any of the people involved.

   ‘Are you crazy?’ she scolded virtuously, shaking an indignant
finger in front of his eyes. ‘I suppose you just don’t care if you kill
yourself, do you?’