Catch-22 (3 page)

   Actually, no one was around when Yossarian
returned from the hospital but Orr and the dead man in Yossarian’s tent. The
dead man in Yossarian’s tent was a pest, and Yossarian didn’t like him, even
though he had never seen him. Having him lying around all day annoyed Yossarian
so much that he had gone to the orderly room several times to complain to
Sergeant Towser, who refused to admit that the dead man even existed, which, of
course, he no longer did. It was still more frustrating to try to appeal
directly to Major Major, the long and bony squadron commander, who looked a
little bit like Henry Fonda in distress and went jumping out the window of his
office each time Yossarian bullied his way past Sergeant Towser to speak to him
about it. The dead man in Yossarian’s tent was simply not easy to live with. He
even disturbed Orr, who was not easy to live with, either, and who, on the day
Yossarian came back, was tinkering with the faucet that fed gasoline into the
stove he had started building while Yossarian was in the hospital.

   ‘What are you doing?’ Yossarian asked guardedly when he
entered the tent, although he saw at once.

   ‘There’s a leak here,’ Orr said. ‘I’m trying to fix it.’

   ‘Please stop it,’ said Yossarian. ‘You’re making me nervous.’

   ‘When I was a kid,’ Orr replied, ‘I used to walk around all
day with crab apples in my cheeks. One in each cheek.’ Yossarian put aside the
musette bag from which he had begun removing his toilet articles and braced
himself suspiciously. A minute passed. ‘Why?’ he found himself forced to ask
finally.

   Orr tittered triumphantly. ‘Because they’re better than horse
chestnuts,’ he answered.

   Orr was kneeling on the floor of the tent. He worked without
pause, taking the faucet apart, spreading all the tiny pieces out carefully,
counting and then studying each one interminably as though he had never seen
anything remotely similar before, and then reassembling the whole apparatus,
over and over and over and over again, with no loss of patience or interest, no
sign of fatigue, no indication of ever concluding. Yossarian watched him
tinkering and felt certain he would be compelled to murder him in cold blood if
he did not stop. His eyes moved toward the hunting knife that had been slung
over the mosquito-net bar by the dead man the day he arrived. The knife hung beside
the dead man’s empty leather gun holster, from which Havermeyer had stolen the
gun.

   ‘When I couldn’t get crab apples,’ Orr continued, ‘I used
horse chestnuts. Horse chestnuts are about the same size as crab apples and
actually have a better shape, although the shape doesn’t matter a bit.’

   ‘Why did you walk around with crab apples in your cheeks?’
Yossarian asked again. ‘That’s what I asked.’

   ‘Because they’ve got a better shape than horse chestnuts,’
Orr answered. ‘I just told you that.’

   ‘Why,’ swore Yossarian at him approvingly, ‘you evil-eyed,
mechanically-aptituded, disaffiliated son of a bitch, did you walk around with
anything in your cheeks?’

   ‘I didn’t,’ Orr said, ‘walk around with anything in my
cheeks. I walked around with crab apples in my cheeks. When I couldn’t get crab
apples I walked around with horse chestnuts. In my cheeks.’ Orr giggled.
Yossarian made up his mind to keep his mouth shut and did. Orr waited.
Yossarian waited longer.

   ‘One in each cheek,’ Orr said.

   ‘Why?’ Orr pounced. ‘Why what?’ Yossarian shook his head,
smiling, and refused to say.

   ‘It’s a funny thing about this valve,’ Orr mused aloud.

   ‘What is?’ Yossarian asked.

   ‘Because I wanted—’ Yossarian knew. ‘Jesus Christ! Why did
you want—’

   ‘—apple cheeks.’

   ‘—apple cheeks?’ Yossarian demanded.

   ‘I wanted apple cheeks,’ Orr repeated. ‘Even when I was a kid
I wanted apple cheeks someday, and I decided to work at it until I got them,
and by God, I did work at it until I got them, and that’s how I did it, with
crab apples in my cheeks all day long.’ He giggled again. ‘One in each cheek.’

   ‘Why did you want apple cheeks?’

   ‘I didn’t want apple cheeks,’ Orr said. ‘I wanted big cheeks.
I didn’t care about the color so much, but I wanted them big. I worked at it
just like one of those crazy guys you read about who go around squeezing rubber
balls all day long just to strengthen their hands. In fact, I was one of those
crazy guys. I used to walk around all day with rubber balls in my hands, too.’

   ‘Why?’

   ‘Why what?’

   ‘Why did you walk around all day with rubber balls in your
hands?’

   ‘Because rubber balls—’ said Orr.

   ‘—are better than crab apples?’ Orr sniggered as he shook his
head. ‘I did it to protect my good reputation in case anyone ever caught me
walking around with crab apples in my cheeks. With rubber balls in my hands I
could deny there were crab apples in my cheeks. Every time someone asked me why
I was walking around with crab apples in my cheeks, I’d just open my hands and
show them it was rubber balls I was walking around with, not crab apples, and
that they were in my hands, not my cheeks. It was a good story. But I never
knew if it got across or not, since it’s pretty tough to make people understand
you when you’re talking to them with two crab apples in your cheeks.’ Yossarian
found it pretty tough to understand him then, and he wondered once again if Orr
wasn’t talking to him with the tip of his tongue in one of his apple cheeks.

   Yossarian decided not to utter another word. It would be
futile. He knew Orr, and he knew there was not a chance in hell of finding out
from him then why he had wanted big cheeks. It would do no more good to ask
than it had done to ask him why that whore had kept beating him over the head
with her shoe that morning in Rome in the cramped vestibule outside the open
door of Nately’s whore’s kid sister’s room. She was a tall, strapping girl with
long hair and incandescent blue veins converging populously beneath her
cocoa-colored skin where the flesh was most tender, and she kept cursing and
shrieking and jumping high up into the air on her bare feet to keep right on
hitting him on the top of his head with the spiked heel of her shoe. They were
both naked, and raising a rumpus that brought everyone in the apartment into
the hall to watch, each couple in a bedroom doorway, all of them naked except
the aproned and sweatered old woman, who clucked reprovingly, and the
lecherous, dissipated old man, who cackled aloud hilariously through the whole
episode with a kind of avid and superior glee. The girl shrieked and Orr
giggled. Each time she landed with the heel of her shoe, Orr giggled louder,
infuriating her still further so that she flew up still higher into the air for
another shot at his noodle, her wondrously full breasts soaring all over the
place like billowing pennants in a strong wind and her buttocks and strong
thighs shim-sham-shimmying this way and that way like some horrifying bonanza.
She shrieked and Orr giggled right up to the time she shrieked and knocked him
cold with a good solid crack on the temple that made him stop giggling and sent
him off to the hospital in a stretcher with a hole in his head that wasn’t very
deep and a very mild concussion that kept him out of combat only twelve days.

   Nobody could find out what had happened, not even the
cackling old man and clucking old woman, who were in a position to find out
everything that happened in that vast and endless brothel with its
multitudinous bedrooms on facing sides of the narrow hallways going off in
opposite directions from the spacious sitting room with its shaded windows and
single lamp. Every time she met Orr after that, she’d hoist her skirts up over
her tight white elastic panties and, jeering coarsely, bulge her firm, round
belly out at him, cursing him contemptuously and then roaring with husky
laughter as she saw him giggle fearfully and take refuge behind Yossarian.
Whatever he had done or tried to do or failed to do behind the closed door of
Nately’s whore’s kid sister’s room was still a secret. The girl wouldn’t tell
Nately’s whore or any of the other whores or Nately or Yossarian. Orr might
tell, but Yossarian had decided not to utter another word.

   ‘Do you want to know why I wanted big cheeks?’ Orr asked.

   Yossarian kept his mouth shut.

   ‘Do you remember,’ Orr said, ‘that time in Rome when that
girl who can’t stand you kept hitting me over the head with the heel of her
shoe? Do you want to know why she was hitting me?’ It was still impossible to
imagine what he could have done to make her angry enough to hammer him over the
head for fifteen or twenty minutes, yet not angry enough to pick him up by the
ankles and dash his brains out. She was certainly tall enough, and Orr was
certainly short enough. Orr had buck teeth and bulging eyes to go with his big
cheeks and was even smaller than young Huple, who lived on the wrong side of
the railroad tracks in the tent in the administration area in which Hungry Joe
lay screaming in his sleep every night.

   The administration area in which Hungry Joe had pitched his
tent by mistake lay in the center of the squadron between the ditch, with its
rusted railroad tracks, and the tilted black bituminous road. The men could
pick up girls along that road if they promised to take them where they wanted
to go, buxom, young, homely, grinning girls with missing teeth whom they could
drive off the road and lie down in the wild grass with, and Yossarian did
whenever he could, which was not nearly as often as Hungry Joe, who could get a
jeep but couldn’t drive, begged him to try. The tents of the enlisted men in
the squadron stood on the other side of the road alongside the open-air movie
theater in which, for the daily amusement of the dying, ignorant armies clashed
by night on a collapsible screen, and to which another U.S.O. troupe came that
same afternoon.

   The U.S.O. troupes were sent by General P. P. Peckem, who had
moved his headquarters up to Rome and had nothing better to do while he schemed
against General Dreedle. General Peckem was a general with whom neatness
definitely counted. He was a spry, suave and very precise general who knew the
circumference of the equator and always wrote ‘enhanced’ when he meant
‘increased’. He was a prick, and no one knew this better than General Dreedle,
who was incensed by General Peckem’s recent directive requiring all tents in
the Mediterranean theater of operations to be pitched along parallel lines with
entrances facing back proudly toward the Washington Monument. To General
Dreedle, who ran a fighting outfit, it seemed a lot of crap. Furthermore, it
was none of General Peckem’s goddam business how the tents in General Dreedle’s
wing were pitched. There then followed a hectic jurisdictional dispute between
these overlords that was decided in General Dreedle’s favor by ex-P.F.C.
Wintergreen, mail clerk at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters. Wintergreen
determined the outcome by throwing all communications from General Peckem into
the wastebasket. He found them too prolix. General Dreedle’s views, expressed
in less pretentious literary style, pleased ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen and were sped
along by him in zealous observance of regulations. General Dreedle was
victorious by default.

   To regain whatever status he had lost, General Peckem began
sending out more U.S.O. troupes than he had ever sent out before and assigned
to Colonel Cargill himself the responsibility of generating enough enthusiasm
for them.

   But there was no enthusiasm in Yossarian’s group. In
Yossarian’s group there was only a mounting number of enlisted men and officers
who found their way solemnly to Sergeant Towser several times a day to ask if
the orders sending them home had come in. They were men who had finished their
fifty missions. There were more of them now than when Yossarian had gone into
the hospital, and they were still waiting. They worried and bit their nails.
They were grotesque, like useless young men in a depression. They moved
sideways, like crabs. They were waiting for the orders sending them home to
safety to return from Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters in Italy, and while
they waited they had nothing to do but worry and bite their nails and find
their way solemnly to Sergeant Towser several times a day to ask if the order
sending them home to safety had come.

   They were in a race and knew it, because they knew from
bitter experience that Colonel Cathcart might raise the number of missions
again at any time. They had nothing better to do than wait. Only Hungry Joe had
something better to do each time he finished his missions. He had screaming
nightmares and won fist fights with Huple’s cat. He took his camera to the
front row of every U.S.O. show and tried to shoot pictures up the skirt of the
yellow-headed singer with two big ones in a sequined dress that always seemed
ready to burst. The pictures never came out.

   Colonel Cargill, General Peckem’s troubleshooter, was a
forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had been an alert, hardhitting,
aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel
Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought
after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the
civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a
dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure
often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down,
and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter.
It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced,
disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole,
and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a
forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel
Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the
ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.