Catch-22 (34 page)

   ‘What happened to him?’ Milo asked in a voice deadened with
awe.

   ‘He got killed.’

   ‘That’s terrible,’ Milo grieved, and his large brown eyes
filled with tears. ‘That poor kid. It really is terrible.’ He bit his trembling
lip hard, and his voice rose with emotion when he continued. ‘And it will get
even worse if the mess halls don’t agree to buy my cotton. Yossarian, what’s
the matter with them? Don’t they realize it’s their syndicate? Don’t they know
they’ve all got a share?’

   ‘Did the dead man in my tent have a share?’ Yossarian
demanded caustically.

   ‘Of course he did,’ Milo assured him lavishly. ‘Everybody in
the squadron has a share.’

   ‘He was killed before he even got into the squadron.’ Milo
made a deft grimace of tribulation and turned away. ‘I wish you’d stop picking
on me about that dead man in your tent,’ he pleaded peevishly. ‘I told you I
didn’t have anything to do with killing him. Is it my fault that I saw this
great opportunity to corner the market on Egyptian cotton and got us into all
this trouble? Was I supposed to know there was going to be a glut? I didn’t
even know what a glut was in those days. An opportunity to corner a market
doesn’t come along very often, and I was pretty shrewd to grab the chance when
I had it.’ Milo gulped back a moan as he saw six uniformed pallbearers lift the
plain pine coffin from the ambulance and set it gently down on the ground
beside the yawning gash of the freshly dug grave. ‘And now I can’t get rid of a
single penny’s worth,’ he mourned.

   Yossarian was unmoved by the fustian charade of the burial
ceremony, and by Milo’s crushing bereavement. The chaplain’s voice floated up
to him through the distance tenuously in an unintelligible, almost inaudible
monotone, like a gaseous murmur. Yossarian could make out Major Major by his
towering and lanky aloofness and thought he recognized Major Danby mopping his
brow with a handkerchief. Major Danby had not stopped shaking since his run-in
with General Dreedle. There were strands of enlisted men molded in a curve
around the three officers, as inflexible as lumps of wood, and four idle
gravediggers in streaked fatigues lounging indifferently on spades near the
shocking, incongruous heap of loose copperred earth. As Yossarian stared, the
chaplain elevated his gaze toward Yossarian beatifically, pressed his fingers
down over his eyeballs in a manner of affliction, peered upward again toward
Yossarian searchingly, and bowed his head, concluding what Yossarian took to be
a climactic part of the funeral rite. The four men in fatigues lifted the
coffin on slings and lowered it into the grave. Milo shuddered violently.

   ‘I can’t watch it,’ he cried, turning away in anguish. ‘I
just can’t sit here and watch while those mess halls let my syndicate die.’ He
gnashed his teeth and shook his head with bitter woe and resentment. ‘If they
had any loyalty, they would buy my cotton till it hurts so that they can keep
right on buying my cotton till it hurts them some more. They would build fires
and burn up their underwear and summer uniforms just to create bigger demand. But
they won’t do a thing. Yossarian, try eating the rest of this chocolate-covered
cotton for me. Maybe it will taste delicious now.’ Yossarian pushed his hand
away. ‘Give up, Milo. People can’t eat cotton.’ Milo’s face narrowed cunningly.
‘It isn’t really cotton,’ he coaxed. ‘I was joking. It’s really cotton candy,
delicious cotton candy. Try it and see.’

   ‘Now you’re lying.’

   ‘I never lie!’ Milo rejoindered with proud dignity.

   ‘You’re lying now.’

   ‘I only lie when it’s necessary,’ Milo explained defensively,
averting his eyes for a moment and blinking his lashes winningly. ‘This stuff
is better than cotton candy, really it is. It’s made out of real cotton.
Yossarian, you’ve got to help me make the men eat it. Egyptian cotton is the
finest cotton in the world.’

   ‘But it’s indigestible,’ Yossarian emphasized. ‘It will make
them sick, don’t you understand? Why don’t you try living on it yourself if you
don’t believe me?’

   ‘I did try,’ admitted Milo gloomily. ‘And it made me sick.’
The graveyard was yellow as hay and green as cooked cabbage. In a little while
the chaplain stepped back, and the beige crescent of human forms began to break
up sluggishly, like flotsam. The men drifted without haste or sound to the
vehicles parked along the side of the bumpy dirt road. With their heads down
disconsolately, the chaplain, Major Major and Major Danby moved toward their
jeeps in an ostracized group, each holding himself friendlessly several feet
away from the other two.

   ‘It’s all over,’ observed Yossarian.

   ‘It’s the end,’ Milo agreed despondently. ‘There’s no hope
left. And all because I left them free to make their own decisions. That should
teach me a lesson about discipline the next time I try something like this.’

   ‘Why don’t you sell your cotton to the government?’ Yossarian
suggested casually, as he watched the four men in streaked fatigues shoveling
heaping bladefuls of the copper-red earth back down inside the grave.

   Milo vetoed the idea brusquely. ‘It’s a matter of principle,’
he explained firmly. ‘The government has no business in business, and I would
be the last person in the world to ever try to involve the government in a
business of mine. But the business of government is business,’ he remembered
alertly, and continued with elation. ‘Calvin Coolidge said that, and Calvin
Coolidge was a President, so it must be true. And the government does have the
responsibility of buying all the Egyptian cotton I’ve got that no one else
wants so that I can make a profit, doesn’t it?’ Milo’s face clouded almost as
abruptly, and his spirits descended into a state of sad anxiety. ‘But how will
I get the government to do it?’

   ‘Bribe it,’ Yossarian said.

   ‘Bribe it!’ Milo was outraged and almost lost his balance and
broke his neck again. ‘Shame on you!’ he scolded severely, breathing virtuous
fire down and upward into his rusty mustache through his billowing nostrils and
prim lips. ‘Bribery is against the law, and you know it. But it’s not against
the law to make a profit, is it? So it can’t be against the law for me to bribe
someone in order to make a fair profit, can it? No, of course not!’ He fell to
brooding again, with a meek, almost pitiable distress. ‘But how will I know who
to bribe?’

   ‘Oh, don’t you worry about that,’ Yossarian comforted him with
a toneless snicker as the engines of the jeeps and ambulance fractured the
drowsy silence and the vehicles in the rear began driving away backward. ‘You
make the bribe big enough and they’ll find you. Just make sure you do
everything right out in the open. Let everyone know exactly what you want and
how much you’re willing to pay for it. The first time you act guilty or
ashamed, you might get into trouble.’

   ‘I wish you’d come with me,’ Milo remarked. ‘I won’t feel
safe among people who take bribes. They’re no better than a bunch of crooks.’

   ‘You’ll be all right,’ Yossarian assured him with confidence.
‘If you run into trouble, just tell everybody that the security of the country
requires a strong domestic Egyptian-cotton speculating industry.’

   ‘It does,’ Milo informed him solemnly. ‘A strong
Egyptian-cotton speculating industry means a much stronger America.’

   ‘Of course it does. And if that doesn’t work, point out the
great number of American families that depend on it for income.’

   ‘A great many American families do depend on it for income.’

   ‘You see?’ said Yossarian. ‘You’re much better at it than I
am. You almost make it sound true.’

   ‘It is true,’ Milo exclaimed with a strong trace of old
hauteur.

   ‘That’s what I mean. You do it with just the right amount of
conviction.’

   ‘You’re sure you won’t come with me?’ Yossarian shook his
head.

   Milo was impatient to get started. He stuffed the remainder
of the chocolate-covered cotton ball into his shirt pocket and edged his way
back gingerly along the branch to the smooth gray trunk. He threw this arms
about the trunk in a generous and awkward embrace and began shinnying down, the
sides of his leather-soled shoes slipping constantly so that it seemed many
times he would fall and injure himself. Halfway down, he changed his mind and
climbed back up. Bits of tree bark stuck to his mustache, and his straining
face was flushed with exertion.

   ‘I wish you’d put your uniform on instead of going around
naked that way,’ he confided pensively before he climbed back down again and
hurried away. ‘You might start a trend, and then I’ll never get rid of all this
goldarned cotton.’

   It was already some time since the
chaplain had first begun wondering what everything was all about. Was there a
God? How could he be sure? Being an Anabaptist minister in the American Army
was difficult enough under the best of circumstances; without dogma, it was
almost intolerable.

   People with loud voices frightened him. Brave, aggressive men
of action like Colonel Cathcart left him feeling helpless and alone. Wherever
he went in the Army, he was a stranger. Enlisted men and officers did not
conduct themselves with him as they conducted themselves with other enlisted
men and officers, and even other chaplains were not as friendly toward him as
they were toward each other. In a world in which success was the only virtue,
he had resigned himself to failure. He was painfully aware that he lacked the
ecclesiastical aplomb and savoir-faire that enabled so many of his colleagues
in other faiths and sects to get ahead. He was just not equipped to excel. He
thought of himself as ugly and wanted daily to be home with his wife.

   Actually, the chaplain was almost good-looking, with a
pleasant, sensitive face as pale and brittle as sandstone. His mind was open on
every subject.

   Perhaps he really was Washington Irving, and perhaps he
really had been signing Washington Irving’s name to those letters he knew
nothing about. Such lapses of memory were not uncommon in medical annals, he
knew. There was no way of really knowing anything. He remembered very
distinctly—or was under the impression he remembered very distinctly—his
feeling that he had met Yossarian somewhere before the first time he had met
Yossarian lying in bed in the hospital. He remembered experiencing the same
disquieting sensation almost two weeks later when Yossarian appeared at his
tent to ask to be taken off combat duty. By that time, of course, the chaplain
had met Yossarian somewhere before, in that odd, unorthodox ward in which every
patient seemed delinquent but the unfortunate patient covered from head to toe
in white bandages and plaster who was found dead one day with a thermometer in
his mouth. But the chaplain’s impression of a prior meeting was of some
occasion far more momentous and occult than that, of a significant encounter
with Yossarian in some remote, submerged and perhaps even entirely spiritual
epoch in which he had made the identical, foredooming admission that there was
nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him.

   Doubts of such kind gnawed at the chaplain’s lean, suffering
frame insatiably. Was there a single true faith, or a life after death? How
many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and with what matters did God
occupy himself in all the infinite aeons before the Creation? Why was it
necessary to put a protective seal on the brow of Cain if there were no other
people to protect him from? Did Adam and Eve produce daughters? These were the
great, complex questions of ontology that tormented him. Yet they never seemed
nearly as crucial to him as the question of kindness and good manners. He was
pinched perspinngly in the epistemological dilemma of the skeptic, unable to
accept solutions to problems he was unwilling to dismiss as unsolvable. He was
never without misery, and never without hope.

   ‘Have you ever,’ he inquired hesitantly of Yossarian that day
in his tent as Yossarian sat holding in both hands the warm bottle of Coca-Cola
with which the chaplain had been able to solace him, ‘been in a situation which
you felt you had been in before, even though you knew you were experiencing it
for the first time?’ Yossarian nodded perfunctorily, and the chaplain’s breath
quickened in anticipation as he made ready to join his will power with
Yossarian’s in a prodigious effort to rip away at last the voluminous black
folds shrouding the eternal mysteries of existence. ‘Do you have that feeling
now?’ Yossarian shook his head and explained that déjà vu
was just a momentary infinitesimal lag in the operation of two coactive sensory
nerve centers that commonly functioned simultaneously. The chaplain scarcely
heard him. He was disappointed, but not inclined to believe Yossarian, for he
had been given a sign, a secret, enigmatic vision that he still lacked the
boldness to divulge.

   There was no mistaking the awesome implications of the
chaplain’s revelation: it was either an insight of divine origin or a
hallucination; he was either blessed or losing his mind. Both prospects filled
him with equal fear and depression. It was neither déjà
vu, presque vu nor jamais vu. It was possible that there were other vus of
which he had never heard and that one of these other vus would explain
succinctly the bafing phenomenon of which he had been both a witness and a
part; it was even possible that none of what he thought had taken place, really
had taken place, that he was dealing with an aberration of memory rather than
of perception, that he never really had thought he had seen, that his
impression now that he once had thought so was merely the illusion of an
illusion, and that he was only now imagining that he had ever once imagined
seeing a naked man sitting in a tree at the cemetery.

   It was obvious to the chaplain now that he was not
particularly well suited to his work, and he often speculated whether he might
not be happier serving in some other branch of the service, as a private in the
infantry or field artillery, perhaps, or even as a paratrooper. He had no real
friends. Before meeting Yossarian, there was no one in the group with whom he
felt at ease, and he was hardly at ease with Yossarian, whose frequent rash and
insubordinate outbursts kept him almost constantly on edge and in an ambiguous
state of enjoyable trepidation. The chaplain felt safe when he was at the
officers’ club with Yossarian and Dunbar, and even with just Nately and McWatt.
When he sat with them he had no need to sit with anyone else; his problem of
where to sit was solved, and he was protected against the undesired company of
all those fellow officers who invariably welcomed him with excessive cordiality
when he approached and waited uncomfortably for him to go away. He made so many
people uneasy. Everyone was always very friendly toward him, and no one was
ever very nice; everyone spoke to him, and no one ever said anything. Yossarian
and Dunbar were much more relaxed, and the chaplain was hardly uncomfortable
with them at all. They even defended him the night Colonel Cathcart tried to
throw him out of the officers’ club again, Yossarian rising truculently to
intervene and Nately shouting out, ‘Yossarian!’ to restrain him. Colonel
Cathcart turned white as a sheet at the sound of Yossarian’s name, and, to
everyone’s amazement, retreated in horrified disorder until he bumped into
General Dreedle, who elbowed him away with annoyance and ordered him right back
to order the chaplain to start coming into the officers’ club every night
again.

   The chaplain had almost as much trouble keeping track of his
status at the officers’ club as he had remembering at which of the ten mess
halls in the group he was scheduled to eat his next meal. He would just as soon
have remained kicked out of the officers’ club, had it not been for the
pleasure he was now finding there with his new companions. If the chaplain did
not go to the officers’ club at night, there was no place else he could go. He
would pass the time at Yossarian’s and Dunbar’s table with a shy, reticent
smile, seldom speaking unless addressed, a glass of thick sweet wine almost
untasted before him as he toyed unfamiliarly with the tiny corncob pipe that he
affected selfconsciously and occasionally stuffed with tobacco and smoked. He
enjoyed listening to Nately, whose maudlin, bittersweet lamentations mirrored
much of his own romantic desolation and never failed to evoke in him resurgent
tides of longing for his wife and children. The chaplain would encourage Nately
with nods of comprehension or assent, amused by his candor and immaturity. Nately
did not glory too immodestly that his girl was a prostitute, and the chaplain’s
awareness stemmed mainly from Captain Black, who never slouched past their
table without a broad wink at the chaplain and some tasteless, wounding gibe
about her to Nately. The chaplain did not approve of Captain Black and found it
difficult not to wish him evil.

   No one, not even Nately, seemed really to appreciate that he,
Chaplain Robert Oliver Shipman, was not just a chaplain but a human being, that
he could have a charming, passionate, pretty wife whom he loved almost insanely
and three small blue-eyed children with strange, forgotten faces who would grow
up someday to regard him as a freak and who might never forgive him for all the
social embarrassment his vocation would cause them. Why couldn’t anybody
understand that he was not really a freak but a normal, lonely adult trying to
lead a normal, lonely adult life? If they pricked him, didn’t he bleed? And if
he was tickled, didn’t he laugh? It seemed never to have occurred to them that
he, just as they, had eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses and affections,
that he was wounded by the same kind of weapons they were, warmed and cooled by
the same breezes and fed by the same kind of food, although, he was forced to concede,
in a different mess hall for each successive meal. The only person who did seem
to realize he had feelings was Corporal Whitcomb, who had just managed to
bruise them all by going over his head to Colonel Cathcart with his proposal
for sending form letters of condolence home to the families of men killed or
wounded in combat.

   The chaplain’s wife was the one thing in the world he could
be certain of, and it would have been sufficient, if only he had been left to
live his life out with just her and the children. The chaplain’s wife was a
reserved, diminutive, agreeable woman in her early thirties, very dark and very
attractive, with a narrow waist, calm intelligent eyes, and small, bright,
pointy teeth in a childlike face that was vivacious and petite; he kept
forgetting what his children looked like, and each time he returned to their
snapshots it was like seeing their faces for the first time. The chaplain loved
his wife and children with such tameless intensity that he often wanted to sink
to the ground helplessly and weep like a castaway cripple. He was tormented
inexorably by morbid fantasies involving them, by dire, hideous omens of
illness and accident. His meditations were polluted with threats of dread
diseases like Ewing’s tumor and leukemia; he saw his infant son die two or
three times every week because he had never taught his wife how to stop
arterial bleeding; watched, in tearful, paralyzed silence, his whole family
electrocuted, one after the other, at a baseboard socket because he had never
told her that a human body would conduct electricity; all four went up in
flames almost every night when the water heater exploded and set the two-story
wooden house afire; in ghastly, heartless, revolting detail he saw his poor
dear wife’s trim and fragile body crushed to a viscous pulp against the brick
wall of a market building by a half-wined drunken automobile driver and watched
his hysterical five-year-old daughter being led away from the grisly scene by a
kindly middle-aged gentleman with snow-white hair who raped and murdered her
repeatedly as soon as he had driven her off to a deserted sandpit, while his
two younger children starved to death slowly in the house after his wife’s
mother, who had been baby-sitting, dropped dead from a heart attack when news
of his wife’s accident was given to her over the telephone. The chaplain’s wife
was a sweet, soothing, considerate woman, and he yearned to touch the warm
flesh of her slender arm again and stroke her smooth black hair, to hear her
intimate, comforting voice. She was a much stronger person than he was. He
wrote brief, untroubled letters to her once a week, sometimes twice. He wanted
to write urgent love letters to her all day long and crowd the endless pages
with desperate, uninhibited confessions of his humble worship and need and
xwith careful instructions for administering artificial respiration. He wanted
to pour out to her in torrents of self-pity all his unbearable loneliness and
despair and warn her never to leave the boric acid or the aspirin in reach of
the children or to cross a street against the traffic light. He did not wish to
worry her. The chaplain’s wife was intuitive, gentle, compassionate and
responsive. Almost inevitably, his reveries of reunion with her ended in
explicit acts of love-making.

   The chaplain felt most deceitful presiding at funerals, and
it would not have astonished him to learn that the apparition in the tree that
day was a manifestation of the Almighty’s censure for the blasphemy and pride
inherent in his function. To simulate gravity, feign grief and pretend
supernatural intelligence of the hereafter in so fearsome and arcane a
circumstance as death seemed the most criminal of offenses. He recalled—or was
almost convinced he recalled—the scene at the cemetery perfectly. He could
still see Major Major and Major Danby standing somber as broken stone pillars
on either side of him, see almost the exact number of enlisted men and almost
the exact places in which they had stood, see the four unmoving men with
spades, the repulsive coffin and the large, loose, triumphant mound of
reddish-brown earth, and the massive, still, depthless, muffling sky, so
weirdly blank and blue that day it was almost poisonous. He would remember them
forever, for they were all part and parcel of the most extraordinary event that
had ever befallen him, an event perhaps marvelous, perhaps pathological—the
vision of the naked man in the tree. How could he explain it? It was not
already seen or never seen, and certainly not almost seen; neither déjà
vu, jamais vu nor presque vu was elastic enough to cover it. Was it a ghost,
then? The dead man’s soul? An angel from heaven or a minion from hell? Or was
the whole fantastic episode merely the figment of a diseased imagination, his
own, of a deteriorating mind, a rotting brain? The possibility that there
really had been a naked man in the tree—two men, actually, since the first had
been joined shortly by a second man clad in a brown mustache and sinister dark
garments from head to toe who bent forward ritualistically along the limb of
the tree to offer the first man something to drink from a brown goblet—never
crossed the chaplain’s mind.