Catch-22 (8 page)

   ‘What’s this?’ cried McWatt, staring in mystification at the
ripped half of his bedsheet.

   ‘It’s half of the bedsheet that was stolen from your tent
this morning,’ Milo explained. ‘I’ll bet you didn’t even know it was stolen.’

   ‘Why should anyone want to steal half a bedsheet?’ Yossarian
asked.

   Milo grew flustered. ‘You don’t understand,’ he protested.
‘He stole the whole bedsheet, and I got it back with the package of pitted
dates you invested. That’s why the quarter of the bedsheet is yours. You made a
very handsome return on your investment, particularly since you’ve gotten back
every pitted date you gave me.’ Milo next addressed himself to McWatt. ‘Half
the bedsheet is yours because it was all yours to begin with, and I really
don’t understand what you’re complaining about, since you wouldn’t have any
part of it if Captain Yossarian and I hadn’t intervened in your behalf.’

   ‘Who’s complaining?’ McWatt exclaimed. ‘I’m just trying to
figure out what I can do with half a bedsheet.’

   ‘There are lots of things you can do with half a bedsheet,’
Milo assured him. ‘The remaining quarter of the bedsheet I’ve set aside for
myself as a reward for my enterprise, work and initiative. It’s not for myself,
you understand, but for the syndicate. That’s something you might do with half
the bedsheet. You can leave it in the syndicate and watch it grow.’

   ‘What syndicate?’

   ‘The syndicate I’d like to form someday so that I can give
you men the good food you deserve.’

   ‘You want to form a syndicate?’

   ‘Yes, I do. No, a mart. Do you know what a mart is?’

   ‘It’s a place where you buy things, isn’t it?’

   ‘And sell things,’ corrected Milo.

   ‘And sell things.’

   ‘All my life I’ve wanted a mart. You can do lots of things if
you’ve got a mart. But you’ve got to have a mart.’

   ‘You want a mart?’

   ‘And every man will have a share.’ Yossarian was still
puzzled, for it was a business matter, and there was much about business
matters that always puzzled him.

   ‘Let me try to explain it again,’ Milo offered with growing
weariness and exasperation, jerking his thumb toward the thief with the sweet
tooth, still grinning beside him. ‘I knew he wanted the dates more than the
bedsheet. Since he doesn’t understand a word of English, I made it a point to
conduct the whole transaction in English.’

   ‘Why didn’t you just hit him over the head and take the
bedsheet away from him?’ Yossarian asked.

   Pressing his lips together with dignity, Milo shook his head.
‘That would have been most unjust,’ he scolded firmly. ‘Force is wrong, and two
wrongs never make a right. It was much better my way. When I held the dates out
to him and reached for the bedsheet, he probably thought I was offering to
trade.’

   ‘What were you doing?’

   ‘Actually, I was offering to trade, but since he doesn’t
understand English, I can always deny it.’

   ‘Suppose he gets angry and wants the dates?’

   ‘Why, we’ll just hit him over the head and take them away
from him,’ Milo answered without hesitation. He looked from Yossarian to McWatt
and back again. ‘I really can’t see what everyone is complaining about. We’re
all much better off than before. Everybody is happy but this thief, and there’s
no sense worrying about him, since he doesn’t even speak our language and
deserves whatever he gets. Don’t you understand?’ But Yossarian still didn’t
understand either how Milo could buy eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and
sell them at a profit in Pianosa for five cents.

   Not even Clevinger understood how Milo
could do that, and Clevinger knew everything. Clevinger knew everything about
the war except why Yossarian had to die while Corporal Snark was allowed to
live, or why Corporal Snark had to die while Yossarian was allowed to live. It
was a vile and muddy war, and Yossarian could have lived without it—lived
forever, perhaps. Only a fraction of his countrymen would give up their lives
to win it, and it was not his ambition to be among them. To die or not to die,
that was the question, and Clevinger grew limp trying to answer it. History did
not demand Yossarian’s premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it,
progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would
die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of
circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but
circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was
that it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their
parents.

   Clevinger knew so much because Clevinger was a genius with a
pounding heart and blanching face. He was a gangling, gawky, feverish, famish-eyed
brain. As a Harvard undergraduate he had won prizes in scholarship for just
about everything, and the only reason he had not won prizes in scholarship for
everything else was that he was too busy signing petitions, circulating
petitions and challenging petitions, joining discussion groups and resigning
from discussion groups, attending youth congresses, picketing other youth
congresses and organizing student committees in defense of dismissed faculty
members. Everyone agreed that Clevinger was certain to go far in the academic
world. In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence
and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out.

   In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like
one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on
one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger’s
predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the
other side at all. Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from
left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending
his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to
his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never
defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope.

   He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious
dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved
afterwards in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the
obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he
took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from
him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at
once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing
faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy
it.

   Yossarian tried to help him. ‘Don’t be a dope,’ he had
counseled Clevinger when they were both at cadet school in Santa Ana,
California.

   ‘I’m going to tell him,’ Clevinger insisted, as the two of
them sat high in the reviewing stands looking down on the auxiliary
paradeground at Lieutenant Scheisskopf raging back and forth like a beardless
Lear.

   ‘Why me?’ Lieutenant Scheisskopf wailed.

   ‘Keep still, idiot,’ Yossarian advised Clevinger avuncularly.

   ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Clevinger
objected.

   ‘I know enough to keep still, idiot.’ Lieutenant Scheisskopf
tore his hair and gnashed his teeth. His rubbery cheeks shook with gusts of
anguish. His problem was a squadron of aviation cadets with low morale who
marched atrociously in the parade competition that took place every Sunday
afternoon. Their morale was low because they did not want to march in parades
every Sunday afternoon and because Lieutenant Scheisskopf had appointed cadet
officers from their ranks instead of permitting them to elect their own.

   ‘I want someone to tell me,’ Lieutenant Scheisskopf beseeched
them all prayerfully. ‘If any of it is my fault, I want to be told.’

   ‘He wants someone to tell him,’ Clevinger said.

   ‘He wants everyone to keep still, idiot,’ Yossarian answered.

   ‘Didn’t you hear him?’ Clevinger argued.

   ‘I heard him,’ Yossarian replied. ‘I heard him say very
loudly and very distinctly that he wants every one of us to keep our mouths
shut if we know what’s good for us.’

   ‘I won’t punish you,’ Lieutenant Scheisskopf swore.

   ‘He says he won’t punish me,’ said Clevinger.

   ‘He’ll castrate you,’ said Yossarian.

   ‘I swear I won’t punish you,’ said Lieutenant Scheisskopf.
‘I’ll be grateful to the man who tells me the truth.’

   ‘He’ll hate you,’ said Yossarian. ‘To his dying day he’ll
hate you.’ Lieutenant Scheisskopf was an R.O.T.C. graduate who was rather glad
that war had broken out, since it gave him an opportunity to wear an officer’s
uniform every day and say ‘Men’ in a clipped, military voice to the bunches of
kids who fell into his clutches every eight weeks on their way to the butcher’s
block. He was an ambitious and humorless Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who confronted
his responsibilities soberly and smiled only when some rival officer at the
Santa Ana Army Air Force Base came down with a lingering disease. He had poor
eyesight and chronic sinus trouble, which made war especially exciting for him,
since he was in no danger of going overseas. The best thing about him was his
wife and the best thing about his wife was a girl friend named Dori Duz who did
whenever she could and had a Wac uniform that Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife put
on every weekend and took off every weekend for every cadet in her husband’s
squadron who wanted to creep into her.

   Dori Duz was a lively little tart of copper-green and gold
who loved doing it best in toolsheds, phone booths, field houses and bus
kiosks. There was little she hadn’t tried and less she wouldn’t. She was
shameless, slim, nineteen and aggressive. She destroyed egos by the score and
made men hate themselves in the morning for the way she found them, used them
and tossed them aside. Yossarian loved her. She was a marvelous piece of ass
who found him only fair. He loved the feel of springy muscle beneath her skin
everywhere he touched her the only time she’d let him. Yossarian loved Dori Duz
so much that he couldn’t help flinging himself down passionately on top of
Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife every week to revenge himself upon Lieutenant
Scheisskopf for the way Lieutenant Scheisskopf was revenging himself upon
Clevinger.

   Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife was revenging herself upon
Lieutenant Scheisskopf for some unforgettable crime of his she couldn’t recall.
She was a plump, pink, sluggish girl who read good books and kept urging
Yossarian not to be so bourgeois without the r. She was never without a good
book close by, not even when she was lying in bed with nothing on her but
Yossarian and Dori Duz’s dog tags. She bored Yossarian, but he was in love with
her, too. She was a crazy mathematics major from the Wharton School of Business
who could not count to twenty-eight each month without getting into trouble.

   ‘Darling, we’re going to have a baby again,’ she would say to
Yossarian every month.

   ‘You’re out of your goddam head,’ he would reply.

   ‘I mean it, baby,’ she insisted.

   ‘So do I.’

   ‘Darling, we’re going to have a baby again,’ she would say to
her husband.

   ‘I haven’t the time,’ Lieutenant Scheisskopf would grumble
petulantly. ‘Don’t you know there’s a parade going on?’ Lieutenant Scheisskopf
cared very deeply about winning parades and about bringing Clevinger up on
charges before the Action Board for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the
cadet officers Lieutenant Scheisskopf had appointed. Clevinger was a
troublemaker and a wise guy. Lieutenant Scheisskopf knew that Clevinger might
cause even more trouble if he wasn’t watched. Yesterday it was the cadet
officers; tomorrow it might be the world. Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant
Scheisskopf had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at
times. Such men were dangerous, and even the new cadet officers whom Clevinger
had helped into office were eager to give damning testimony against him. The
case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something
to charge him with.

   It could not be anything to do with parades, for Clevinger
took the parades almost as seriously as Lieutenant Scheisskopf himself. The men
fell out for the parades early each Sunday afternoon and groped their way into
ranks of twelve outside the barracks. Groaning with hangovers, they limped in
step to their station on the main paradeground, where they stood motionless in
the heat for an hour or two with the men from the sixty or seventy other cadet
squadrons until enough of them had collapsed to call it a day. On the edge of
the field stood a row of ambulances and teams of trained stretcher bearers with
walkie-talkies. On the roofs of the ambulances were spotters with binoculars. A
tally clerk kept score. Supervising this entire phase of the operation was a
medical officer with a flair for accounting who okayed pulses and checked the
figures of the tally clerk. As soon as enough unconscious men had been
collected in the ambulances, the medical officer signaled the bandmaster to
strike up the band and end the parade. One behind the other, the squadrons
marched up the field, executed a cumbersome turn around the reviewing stand and
marched down the field and back to their barracks.

   Each of the parading squadrons was graded as it marched past
the reviewing stand, where a bloated colonel with a big fat mustache sat with
the other officers. The best squadron in each wing won a yellow pennant on a
pole that was utterly worthless. The best squadron on the base won a red
pennant on a longer pole that was worth even less, since the pole was heavier
and was that much more of a nuisance to lug around all week until some other
squadron won it the following Sunday. To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as
prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic
medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done
something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

   The parades themselves seemed equally absurd. Yossarian hated
a parade. Parades were so martial. He hated hearing them, hated seeing them,
hated being tied up in traffic by them. He hated being made to take part in
them. It was bad enough being an aviation cadet without having to act like a
soldier in the blistering heat every Sunday afternoon. It was bad enough being
an aviation cadet because it was obvious now that the war would not be over
before he had finished his training. That was the only reason he had
volunteered for cadet training in the first place. As a soldier who had
qualified for aviation cadet training, he had weeks and weeks of waiting for
assignment to a class, weeks and weeks more to become a bombardier-navigator,
weeks and weeks more of operational training after that to prepare him for
overseas duty. It seemed inconceivable then that the war could last that long,
for God was on his side, he had been told, and God, he had also been told,
could do whatever He wanted to. But the war was not nearly over, and his
training was almost complete.

   Lieutenant Scheisskopf longed desperately to win parades and
sat up half the night working on it while his wife waited amorously for him in
bed thumbing through Krafft-Ebing to her favorite passages. He read books on
marching. He manipulated boxes of chocolate soldiers until they melted in his
hands and then maneuvered in ranks of twelve a set of plastic cowboys he had
bought from a mail-order house under an assumed name and kept locked away from
everyone’s eyes during the day. Leonardo’s exercises in anatomy proved
indispensable. One evening he felt the need for a live model and directed his
wife to march around the room.

   ‘Naked?’ she asked hopefully.

   Lieutenant Scheisskopf smacked his hands over his eyes in
exasperation. It was the despair of Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s life to be chained
to a woman who was incapable of looking beyond her own dirty, sexual desires to
the titanic struggles for the unattainable in which noble man could become
heroically engaged.

   ‘Why don’t you ever whip me?’ she pouted one night.

   ‘Because I haven’t the time,’ he snapped at her impatiently.
‘I haven’t the time. Don’t you know there’s a parade going on?’ And he really
did not have the time. There it was Sunday already, with only seven days left
in the week to get ready for the next parade. He had no idea where the hours
went. Finishing last in three successive parades had given Lieutenant
Scheisskopf an unsavory reputation, and he considered every means of
improvement, even nailing the twelve men in each rank to a long two-by-four
beam of seasoned oak to keep them in line. The plan was not feasible, for
making a ninety-degree turn would have been impossible without nickel-alloy
swivels inserted in the small of every man’s back, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf
was not sanguine at all about obtaining that many nickel-alloy swivels from
Quartermaster or enlisting the cooperation of the surgeons at the hospital.

   The week after Lieutenant Scheisskopf followed Clevinger’s
recommendation and let the men elect their own cadet officers, the squadron won
the yellow pennant. Lieutenant Scheisskopf was so elated by his unexpected
achievement that he gave his wife a sharp crack over the head with the pole
when she tried to drag him into bed to celebrate by showing their contempt for
the sexual mores of the lower middle classes in Western civilization. The next
week the squadron won the red flag, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf was beside
himself with rapture. And the week after that his squadron made history by
winning the red pennant two weeks in a row! Now Lieutenant Scheisskopf had confidence
enough in his powers to spring his big surprise. Lieutenant Scheisskopf had
discovered in his extensive research that the hands of marchers, instead of
swinging freely, as was then the popular fashion, ought never to be moved more
than three inches from the center of the thigh, which meant, in effect, that
they were scarcely to be swung at all.