Catch-22 (4 page)

   ‘Men,’ Colonel Cargill began in Yossarian’s squadron,
measuring his pauses carefully. ‘You’re American officers. The officers of no
other army in the world can make that statement. Think about it.’ Sergeant
Knight thought about it and then politely informed Colonel Cargill that he was
addressing the enlisted men and that the officers were to be found waiting for
him on the other side of the squadron. Colonel Cargill thanked him crisply and
glowed with self-satisfaction as he strode across the area. It made him proud
to observe that twenty-nine months in the service had not blunted his genius
for ineptitude.

   ‘Men,’ he began his address to the officers, measuring his
pauses carefully. ‘You’re American officers. The officers of no other army in
the world can make that statement. Think about it.’ He waited a moment to
permit them to think about it. ‘These people are your guests!’ he shouted
suddenly. ‘They’ve traveled over three thousand miles to entertain you. How are
they going to feel if nobody wants to go out and watch them? What’s going to
happen to their morale? Now, men, it’s no skin off my behind. But that girl that
wants to play the accordion for you today is old enough to be a mother. How
would you feel if your own mother traveled over three thousand miles to play
the accordion for some troops that didn’t want to watch her? How is that kid
whose mother that accordion player is old enough to be going to feel when he
grows up and learns about it? We all know the answer to that one. Now, men,
don’t misunderstand me. This is all voluntary, of course. I’d be the last
colonel in the world to order you to go to that U.S.O. show and have a good
time, but I want every one of you who isn’t sick enough to be in a hospital to
go to that U.S.O. show right now and have a good time, and that’s an order!’
Yossarian did feel almost sick enough to go back into the hospital, and he felt
even sicker three combat missions later when Doc Daneeka still shook his
melancholy head and refused to ground him.

   ‘You think you’ve got troubles?’ Doc Daneeka rebuked him
grievingly. ‘What about me? I lived on peanuts for eight years while I learned
how to be a doctor. After the peanuts, I lived on chicken feed in my own office
until I could build up a practice decent enough to even pay expenses. Then,
just as the shop was finally starting to show a profit, they drafted me. I
don’t know what you’re complaining about.’ Doc Daneeka was Yossarian’s friend
and would do just about nothing in his power to help him. Yossarian listened
very carefully as Doc Daneeka told him about Colonel Cathcart at Group, who
wanted to be a general, about General Dreedle at Wing and General Dreedle’s
nurse, and about all the other generals at Twenty-seventh Air Force
Headquarters, who insisted on only forty missions as a completed tour of duty.

   ‘Why don’t you just smile and make the best of it?’ he
advised Yossarian glumly. ‘Be like Havermeyer.’ Yossarian shuddered at the
suggestion. Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never took evasive action
going in to the target and thereby increased the danger of all the men who flew
in the same formation with him.

   ‘Havermeyer, why the hell don’t you ever take evasive
action?’ they would demand in a rage after the mission.

   ‘Hey, you men leave Captain Havermeyer alone,’ Colonel
Cathcart would order. ‘He’s the best damned bombardier we’ve got.’ Havermeyer
grinned and nodded and tried to explain how he dumdummed the bullets with a
hunting knife before he fired them at the field mice in his tent every night.
Havermeyer was the best damned bombardier they had, but he flew straight and
level all the way from the I.P. to the target, and even far beyond the target
until he saw the falling bombs strike ground and explode in a darting spurt of
abrupt orange that flashed beneath the swirling pall of smoke and pulverized
debris geysering up wildly in huge, rolling waves of gray and black. Havermeyer
held mortal men rigid in six planes as steady and still as sitting ducks while
he followed the bombs all the way down through the plexiglass nose with deep
interest and gave the German gunners below all the time they needed to set
their sights and take their aim and pull their triggers or lanyards or switches
or whatever the hell they did pull when they wanted to kill people they didn’t
know.

   Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never missed. Yossarian
was a lead bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn
whether he missed or not. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt,
and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.

   The men had loved flying behind Yossarian, who used to come
barreling in over the target from all directions and every height, climbing and
diving and twisting and turning so steeply and sharply that it was all the
pilots of the other five planes could do to stay in formation with him,
leveling out only for the two or three seconds it took for the bombs to drop
and then zooming off again with an aching howl of engines, and wrenching his
flight through the air so violently as he wove his way through the filthy
barrages of flak that the six planes were soon flung out all over the sky like
prayers, each one a pushover for the German fighters, which was just fine with
Yossarian, for there were no German fighters any more and he did not want any
exploding planes near his when they exploded. Only when all the Sturm und Drang
had been left far behind would he tip his flak helmet back wearily on his
sweating head and stop barking directions to McWatt at the controls, who had
nothing better to wonder about at a time like that than where the bombs had
fallen.

   ‘Bomb bay clear,’ Sergeant Knight in the back would announce.

   ‘Did we hit the bridge?’ McWatt would ask.

   ‘I couldn’t see, sir, I kept getting bounced around back here
pretty hard and I couldn’t see. Everything’s covered with smoke now and I can’t
see.’

   ‘Hey, Aarfy, did the bombs hit the target?’

   ‘What target?’ Captain Aardvaark, Yossarian’s plump,
pipe-smoking navigator, would say from the confusion of maps he had created at
Yossarian’s side in the nose of the ship. ‘I don’t think we’re at the target
yet. Are we?’

   ‘Yossarian, did the bombs hit the target?’

   ‘What bombs?’ answered Yossarian, whose only concern had been
the flak.

   ‘Oh, well,’ McWatt would sing, ‘what the hell.’ Yossarian did
not give a damn whether he hit the target or not, just as long as Havermeyer or
one of the other lead bombardiers did and they never had to go back. Every now
and then someone grew angry enough at Havermeyer to throw a punch at him.

   ‘I said you men leave Captain Havermeyer alone,’ Colonel
Cathcart warned them all angrily. ‘I said he’s the best damned bombardier we’ve
got, didn’t I?’ Havermeyer grinned at the colonel’s intervention and shoved
another piece of peanut brittle inside his face.

   Havermeyer had grown very proficient at shooting field mice
at night with the gun he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian’s tent. His
bait was a bar of candy and he would presight in the darkness as he sat waiting
for the nibble with a finger of his other hand inside a loop of the line he had
run from the frame of his mosquito net to the chain of the unfrosted light bulb
overhead. The line was taut as a banjo string, and the merest tug would snap it
on and blind the shivering quarry in a blaze of light. Havermeyer would chortle
exultantly as he watched the tiny mammal freeze and roll its terrified eyes
about in frantic search of the intruder. Havermeyer would wait until the eyes
fell upon his own and then he laughed aloud and pulled the trigger at the same
time, showering the rank, furry body all over the tent with a reverberating
crash and dispatching its timid soul back to his or her Creator.

   Late one night, Havermeyer fired a shot at a mouse that
brought Hungry Joe bolting out at him barefoot, ranting at the top of his
screechy voice and emptying his own.45 into Havermeyer’s tent as he came
charging down one side of the ditch and up the other and vanished all at once
inside one of the slit trenches that had appeared like magic beside every tent
the morning after Milo Minderbinder had bombed the squadron. It was just before
dawn during the Great Big Siege of Bologna, when tongueless dead men peopled
the night hours like living ghosts and Hungry Joe was half out of his mind
because he had finished his missions again and was not scheduled to fly. Hungry
Joe was babbling incoherently when they fished him out from the dank bottom of
the slit trench, babbling of snakes, rats and spiders. The others flashed their
searchlights down just to make sure. There was nothing inside but a few inches
of stagnant rain water.

   ‘You see?’ cried Havermeyer. ‘I told you. I told you he was
crazy, didn’t I?’

   Hungry Joe was crazy, and no one knew it
better than Yossarian, who did everything he could to help him. Hungry Joe just
wouldn’t listen to Yossarian. Hungry Joe just wouldn’t listen because he
thought Yossarian was crazy.

   ‘Why should he listen to you?’ Doc Daneeka inquired of
Yossarian without looking up.

   ‘Because he’s got troubles.’ Doc Daneeka snorted scornfully.
‘He thinks he’s got troubles? What about me?’ Doc Daneeka continued slowly with
a gloomy sneer. ‘Oh, I’m not complaining. I know there’s a war on. I know a lot
of people are going to have to suffer for us to win it. But why must I be one
of them? Why don’t they draft some of these old doctors who keep shooting their
kissers off in public about what big sacrifices the medical game stands ready
to make? I don’t want to make sacrifices. I want to make dough.’ Doc Daneeka
was a very neat, clean man whose idea of a good time was to sulk. He had a dark
complexion and a small, wise, saturnine face with mournful pouches under both
eyes. He brooded over his health continually and went almost daily to the
medical tent to have his temperature taken by one of the two enlisted men there
who ran things for him practically on their own, and ran it so efficiently that
he was left with little else to do but sit in the sunlight with his stuffed
nose and wonder what other people were so worried about. Their names were Gus
and Wes and they had succeeded in elevating medicine to an exact science. All
men reporting on sick call with temperatures above 102 were rushed to the
hospital. All those except Yossarian reporting on sick call with temperatures
below 102 had their gums and toes painted with gentian violet solution and were
given a laxative to throw away into the bushes. All those reporting on a sick
call with temperatures of exactly 102 were asked to return in an hour to have
their temperatures taken again. Yossarian, with his temperature of 101, could
go to the hospital whenever he wanted to because he was not afraid of them.

   The system worked just fine for everybody, especially for Doc
Daneeka, who found himself with all the time he needed to watch old Major—de
Coverley pitching horseshoes in his private horseshoe-pitching pit, still
wearing the transparent eye patch Doc Daneeka had fashioned for him from the
strip of celluloid stolen from Major Major’s orderly room window months before
when Major—de Coverley had returned from Rome with an injured cornea after
renting two apartments there for the officers and enlisted men to use on their
rest leaves. The only time Doc Daneeka ever went to the medical tent was the
time he began to feel he was a very sick man each day and stopped in just to
have Gus and Wes look him over. They could never find anything wrong with him.
His temperature was always 96.8, which was perfectly all right with them, as
long as he didn’t mind. Doc Daneeka did mind. He was beginning to lose
confidence in Gus and Wes and was thinking of having them both transferred back
to the motor pool and replaced by someone who could find something wrong.

   Doc Daneeka was personally familiar with a number of things
that were drastically wrong. In addition to his health, he worried about the
Pacific Ocean and flight time. Health was something no one ever could be sure
of for a long enough time. The Pacific Ocean was a body of water surrounded on
all sides by elephantiasis and other dread diseases to which, if he ever
displeased Colonel Cathcart by grounding Yossarian, he might suddenly find
himself transferred. And flight time was the time he had to spend in airplane
flight each month in order to get his flight pay. Doc Daneeka hated to fly. He
felt imprisoned in an airplane. In an airplane there was absolutely no place in
the world to go except to another part of the airplane. Doc Daneeka had been told
that people who enjoyed climbing into an airplane were really giving vent to a
subconscious desire to climb back into the womb. He had been told this by
Yossarian, who made it possible for Dan Daneeka to collect his flight pay each
month without ever climbing back into the womb. Yossarian would persuade McWatt
to enter Doc Daneeka’s name on his flight log for training missions or trips to
Rome.

   ‘You know how it is,’ Doc Daneeka had wheedled, with a sly,
conspiratorial wink. ‘Why take chances when I don’t have to?’

   ‘Sure,’ Yossarian agreed.

   ‘What difference does it make to anyone if I’m in the plane
or not?’

   ‘No difference.’

   ‘Sure, that’s what I mean,’ Doc Daneeka said. ‘A little
grease is what makes this world go round. One hand washes the other. Know what
I mean? You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’ Yossarian knew what he meant.

   ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Doc Daneeka said, as Yossarian
began scratching his back. ‘I’m talking about co-operation. Favors. You do a
favor for me, I’ll do one for you. Get it?’

   ‘Do one for me,’ Yossarian requested.

   ‘Not a chance,’ Doc Daneeka answered.

   There was something fearful and minute about Doc Daneeka as
he sat despondently outside his tent in the sunlight as often as he could,
dressed in khaki summer trousers and a short-sleeved summer shirt that was
bleached almost to an antiseptic gray by the daily laundering to which he had
it subjected. He was like a man who had grown frozen with horror once and had
never come completely unthawed. He sat all tucked up into himself, his slender
shoulders huddled halfway around his head, his suntanned hands with their
luminous silver fingernails massaging the backs of his bare, folded arms gently
as though he were cold. Actually, he was a very warm, compassionate man who
never stopped feeling sorry for himself.

   ‘Why me?’ was his constant lament, and the question was a
good one.

   Yossarian knew it was a good one because Yossarian was a
collector of good questions and had used them to disrupt the educational
sessions Clevinger had once conducted two nights a week in Captain Black’s
intelligence tent with the corporal in eyeglasses who everybody knew was
probably a subversive. Captain Black knew he was a subversive because he wore
eyeglasses and used words like panacea and utopia, and because he disapproved
of Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of combating un-American
activities in Germany. Yossarian attended the educational sessions because he
wanted to find out why so many people were working so hard to kill him. A
handful of other men were also interested, and the questions were many and good
when Clevmger and the subversive corporal finished and made the mistake of
asking if there were any.

   ‘Who is Spain?’

   ‘Why is Hitler?’

   ‘When is right?’

   ‘Where was that stooped and mealy-colored old man I used to
call Poppa when the merry-go-round broke down?’

   ‘How was trump at Munich?’

   ‘Ho-ho beriberi.’ and ‘Balls!’ all rang out in rapid
succession, and then there was Yossarian with the question that had no answer:
‘Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?’ The question upset them, because
Snowden had been killed over Avignon when Dobbs went crazy in mid-air and
seized the controls away from Huple.

   The corporal played it dumb. ‘What?’ he asked.

   ‘Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?’

   ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

   ‘Où sont les Neigedens d’antan?’ Yossarian said to
make it easier for him.

   ‘Parlez en anglais, for Christ’s sake,’ said the corporal.
‘Je ne parle pas français.’

   ‘Neither do I,’ answered Yossarian, who was ready to pursue
him through all the words in the world to wring the knowledge from him if he
could, but Clevinger intervened, pale, thin, and laboring for breath, a humid
coating of tears already glistening in his undernourished eyes.

   Group Headquarters was alarmed, for there was no telling what
people might find out once they felt free to ask whatever questions they wanted
to. Colonel Cathcart sent Colonel Korn to stop it, and Colonel Korn succeeded with
a rule governing the asking of questions. Colonel Korn’s rule was a stroke of
genius, Colonel Korn explained in his report to Colonel Cathcart. Under Colonel
Korn’s rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never
did. Soon the only people attending were those who never asked questions, and
the sessions were discontinued altogether, since Clevinger, the corporal and
Colonel Korn agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate
people who never questioned anything.

   Colonel Cathcart and Lieutenant Colonel Korn lived and worked
in the Group Headquarters building, as did all the members of the headquarters
staff, with the exception of the chaplain. The Group Headquarters building was
an enormous, windy, antiquated structure built of powdery red stone and banging
plumbing. Behind the building was the modern skeet-shooting range that had been
constructed by Colonel Cathcart for the exclusive recreation of the officers at
Group and at which every officer and enlisted man on combat status now, thanks
to General Dreedle, had to spend a minimum of eight hours a month.

   Yossarian shot skeet, but never hit any. Appleby shot skeet
and never missed. Yossarian was as bad at shooting skeet as he was at gambling.
He could never win money gambling either. Even when he cheated he couldn’t win,
because the people he cheated against were always better at cheating too. These
were two disappointments to which he had resigned himself: he would never be a
skeet shooter, and he would never make money.

   ‘It takes brains not to make money,’ Colonel Cargill wrote in
one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over
General Peckem’s signature. ‘Any fool can make money these days and most of
them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one
poet who makes money.’

   ‘T. S. Eliot,’ ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen said in his mail-sorting
cubicle at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters, and slammed down the
telephone without identifying himself.

   Colonel Cargill, in Rome, was perplexed.

   ‘Who was it?’ asked General Peckem.

   ‘I don’t know,’ Colonel Cargill replied.

   ‘What did he want?’

   ‘I don’t know.’

   ‘Well, what did he say?’

   ‘“T. S. Eliot”,’ Colonel Cargill informed him.

   ‘What’s that?’

   ‘“T. S. Eliot”,’ Colonel Cargill repeated.

   ‘Just “T. S. —”‘

   ‘Yes, sir. That’s all he said. Just “T. S. Eliot.”‘

   ‘I wonder what it means,’ General Peckem reflected. Colonel
Cargill wondered, too.

   ‘T. S. Eliot,’ General Peckem mused.

   ‘T. S. Eliot,’ Colonel Cargill echoed with the same funereal
puzzlement.

   General Peckem roused himself after a moment with an unctuous
and benignant smile. His expression was shrewd and sophisticated. His eyes
gleamed maliciously. ‘Have someone get me General Dreedle,’ he requested
Colonel Cargill. ‘Don’t let him know who’s calling.’ Colonel Cargill handed him
the phone.

   ‘T. S. Eliot,’ General Peckem said, and hung up.

   ‘Who was it?’ asked Colonel Moodus.

   General Dreedle, in Corsica, did not reply. Colonel Moodus
was General Dreedle’s son-in-law, and General Dreedle, at the insistence of his
wife and against his own better judgment, had taken him into the military
business. General Dreedle gazed at Colonel Moodus with level hatred. He
detested the very sight of his son-in-law, who was his aide and therefore in
constant attendance upon him. He had opposed his daughter’s marriage to Colonel
Moodus because he disliked attending weddings. Wearing a menacing and
preoccupied scowl, General Dreedle moved to the full-length mirror in his
office and stared at his stocky reflection. He had a grizzled, broad-browed
head with iron-gray tufts over his eyes and a blunt and belligerent jaw. He
brooded in ponderous speculation over the cryptic message he had just received.
Slowly his face softened with an idea, and he curled his lips with wicked
pleasure.

   ‘Get Peckem,’ he told Colonel Moodus. ‘Don’t let the bastard
know who’s calling.’

   ‘Who was it?’ asked Colonel Cargill, back in Rome.

   ‘That same person,’ General Peckem replied with a definite
trace of alarm. ‘Now he’s after me.’

   ‘What did he want?’

   ‘I don’t know.’

   ‘What did he say?’

   ‘The same thing.’

   ‘“T. S. Eliot”?’

   ‘Yes, “T. S. Eliot.” That’s all he said.’ General
Peckem had a hopeful thought. ‘Perhaps it’s a new code or something, like the
colors of the day. Why don’t you have someone check with Communications and see
if it’s a new code or something or the colors of the day?’ Communications
answered that T. S. Eliot was not a new code or the colors of the day.

   Colonel Cargill had the next idea. ‘Maybe I ought to phone
Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters and see if they know anything about it.
They have a clerk up there named Wintergreen I’m pretty close to. He’s the one
who tipped me off that our prose was too prolix.’ Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen told
Cargill that there was no record at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters of a
T. S. Eliot.

   ‘How’s our prose these days?’ Colonel Cargill decided to
inquire while he had ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen on the phone. ‘It’s much better now,
isn’t it?’

   ‘It’s still too prolix,’ ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen replied.

   ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if General Dreedle were behind the
whole thing,’ General Peckem confessed at last. ‘Remember what he did to that
skeet-shooting range?’ General Dreedle had thrown open Colonel Cathcart’s
private skeet-shooting range to every officer and enlisted man in the group on
combat duty. General Dreedle wanted his men to spend as much time out on the
skeet-shooting range as the facilities and their flight schedule would allow.
Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them. It trained
them to shoot skeet.