Catch-22 (46 page)

   ‘You come back here,’ Nately ordered her. ‘I forbid you to go
out that way, too!’

   ‘Idiota!’ the kid sister called back at him with dignity
after she had flounced past. ‘Tu sei un pazzo imbecille.’ Nately fumed in
circles of distracted helplessness for several seconds and then sprinted out
into the sitting room to forbid his friends to look at his girl friend while
she complained about him in only her panties.

   ‘Why not?’ asked Dunbar.

   ‘Why not?’ exclaimed Nately. ‘Because she’s my girl now, and
it isn’t right for you to see her unless she’s fully dressed.’

   ‘Why not?’ asked Dunbar.

   ‘You see?’ said his girl with a shrug. ‘Lui è
pazzo!’

   ‘Si, è molto pazzo,’ echoed her kid sister.

   ‘Then make her keep her clothes on if you don’t want us to
see her,’ argued Hungry Joe. ‘What the hell do you want from us?’

   ‘She won’t listen to me,’ Nately confessed sheepishly. ‘So
from now on you’ll all have to shut your eyes or look in the other direction
when she comes in that way. Okay?’

   ‘Madonn’!’ cried his girl in exasperation, and stamped out of
the room.

   ‘Madonn’!’ cried her kid sister, and stamped out behind her.

   ‘Lui è pazzo,’ Yossarian observed good-naturedly.
‘I certainly have to admit it.’

   ‘Hey, you crazy or something?’ Hungry Joe demanded of Nately.
‘The next thing you know you’ll be trying to make her give up hustling.’

   ‘From now on,’ Nately said to his girl, ‘I forbid you to go
out hustling.’

   ‘Perchè?’ she inquired curiously.

   ‘Perchè?’ he screamed with amazement. ‘Because
it’s not nice, that’s why!’

   ‘Perchè no?’

   ‘Because it just isn’t!’ Nately insisted. ‘It just isn’t
right for a nice girl like you to go looking for other men to sleep with. I’ll
give you all the money you need, so you won’t have to do it any more.’

   ‘And what will I do all day instead?’

   ‘Do?’ said Nately. ‘You’ll do what all your friends do.’

   ‘My friends go looking for men to sleep with.’

   ‘Then get new friends! I don’t even want you to associate
with girls like that, anyway. Prostitution is bad! Everybody knows that, even
him.’ He turned with confidence to the experienced old man. ‘Am I right?’

   ‘You’re wrong,’ answered the old man. ‘Prostitution gives her
an opportunity to meet people. It provides fresh air and wholesome exercise,
and it keeps her out of trouble.’

   ‘From now on,’ Nately declared sternly to his girl friend, ‘I
forbid you to have anything to do with that wicked old man.’

   ‘Va fongul!’ his girl replied, rolling her harassed eyes up
toward the ceiling. ‘What does he want from me?’ she implored, shaking her
fists. ‘Lasciami!’ she told him in menacing entreaty. ‘Stupido! If you think my
friends are so bad, go tell your friends not to ficky-fick all the time with my
friends!’

   ‘From now on,’ Nately told his friends, ‘I think you fellows
ought to stop running around with her friends and settle down.’

   ‘Madonn’!’ cried his friends, rolling their harassed eyes up
toward the ceiling.

   Nately had gone clear out of his mind. He wanted them all to
fall in love right away and get married. Dunbar could marry Orr’s whore, and
Yossarian could fall in love with Nurse Duckett or anyone else he liked. After
the war they could all work for Nately’s father and bring up their children in the
same suburb. Nately saw it all very clearly. Love had transmogrified him into a
romantic idiot, and they drove him away back into the bedroom to wrangle with
his girl over Captain Black. She agreed not to go to bed with Captain Black
again or give him any more of Nately’s money, but she would not budge an inch
on her friendship with the ugly, ill-kempt, dissipated, filthy-minded old man,
who witnessed Nately’s flowering love affair with insulting derision and would
not admit that Congress was the greatest deliberative body in the whole world.

   ‘From now on,’ Nately ordered his girl firmly, ‘I absolutely
forbid you even to speak to that disgusting old man.’

   ‘Again the old man?’ cried the girl in wailing confusion.
‘Perchè no?’

   ‘He doesn’t like the House of Representatives.’

   ‘Mamma mia! What’s the matter with you?’

   ‘È pazzo,’ observed her kid sister
philosophically. ‘That’s what’s the matter with him.’

   ‘Si,’ the older girl agreed readily, tearing at her long
brown hair with both hands. ‘Lui è pazzo.’ But she missed Nately
when he was away and was furious with Yossarian when he punched Nately in the
face with all his might and knocked him into the hospital with a broken nose.

   It was actually all Sergeant Knight’s
fault that Yossarian busted Nately in the nose on Thanksgiving Day, after
everyone in the squadron had given humble thanks to Milo for providing the
fantastically opulent meal on which the officers and enlisted men had gorged
themselves insatiably all afternoon and for dispensing like inexhaustible
largess the unopened bottles of cheap whiskey he handed out unsparingly to
every man who asked. Even before dark, young soldiers with pasty white faces
were throwing up everywhere and passing out drunkenly on the ground. The air
turned foul. Other men picked up steam as the hours passed, and the aimless,
riotous celebration continued. It was a raw, violent, guzzling saturnalia that
spilled obstreperously through the woods to the officers’ club and spread up
into the hills toward the hospital and the antiaircraft-gun emplacements. There
were fist fights in the squadron and one stabbing. Corporal Kolodny shot
himself through the leg in the intelligence tent while playing with a loaded
gun and had his gums and toes painted purple in the speeding ambulance as he
lay on his back with the blood spurting from his wound. Men with cut fingers,
bleeding heads, stomach cramps and broken ankles came limping penitently up to
the medical tent to have their gums and toes painted purple by Gus and Wes and
be given a laxative to throw into the bushes. The joyous celebration lasted
long into the night, and the stillness was fractured often by wild, exultant
shouts and by the cries of people who were merry or sick. There was the
recurring sound of retching and moaning, of laughter, greetings, threats and
swearing, and of bottles shattering against rock. There were dirty songs in the
distance. It was worse than New Year’s Eve.

   Yossarian went to bed early for safety and soon dreamed that
he was fleeing almost headlong down an endless wooden staircase, making a loud,
staccato clatter with his heels. Then he woke up a little and realized someone
was shooting at him with a machine gun. A tortured, terrified sob rose in his
throat. His first thought was that Milo was attacking the squadron again, and
he rolled of his cot to the floor and lay underneath in a trembling, praying
ball, his heart thumping like a drop forge, his body bathed in a cold sweat.
There was no noise of planes. A drunken, happy laugh sounded from afar. ‘Happy
New Year, Happy New Year!’ a triumphant familiar voice shouted hilariously from
high above between the short, sharp bursts of machine gun fire, and Yossarian
understood that some men had gone as a prank to one of the sandbagged
machine-gun emplacements Milo had installed in the hills after his raid on the
squadron and staffed with his own men.

   Yossarian blazed with hatred and wrath when he saw he was the
victim of an irresponsible joke that had destroyed his sleep and reduced him to
a whimpering hulk. He wanted to kill, he wanted to murder. He was angrier than
he had ever been before, angrier even than when he had slid his hands around
McWatt’s neck to strangle him. The gun opened fire again. Voices cried ‘Happy
New Year!’ and gloating laughter rolled down from the hills through the
darkness like a witch’s glee. In moccasins and coveralls, Yossarian charged out
of his tent for revenge with his.45, ramming a clip of cartridges up into the
grip and slamming the bolt of the gun back to load it. He snapped off the
safety catch and was ready to shoot. He heard Nately running after him to
restrain him, calling his name. The machine gun opened fire once more from a
black rise above the motor pool, and orange tracer bullets skimmed like
low-gliding dashes over the tops of the shadowy tents, almost clipping the
peaks. Roars of rough laughter rang out again between the short bursts.
Yossarian felt resentment boil like acid inside him; they were endangering his
life, the bastards! With blind, ferocious rage and determination, he raced
across the squadron past the motor pool, running as fast as he could, and was
already pounding up into the hills along the narrow, winding path when Nately
finally caught up, still calling ‘Yo-Yo! Yo-Yo!’ with pleading concern and
imploring him to stop. He grasped Yossarian’s shoulders and tried to hold him
back. Yossarian twisted free, turning. Nately reached for him again, and
Yossarian drove his fist squarely into Nately’s delicate young face as hard as
he could, cursing him, then drew his arm back to hit him again, but Nately had
dropped out of sight with a groan and lay curled up on the ground with his head
buried in both hands and blood streaming between his fingers. Yossarian whirled
and plunged ahead up the path without looking back.

   Soon he saw the machine gun. Two figures leaped up in
silhouette when they heard him and fled into the night with taunting laughter
before he could get there. He was too late. Their footsteps receded, leaving
the circle of sandbags empty and silent in the crisp and windless moonlight. He
looked about dejectedly. Jeering laughter came to him again, from a distance. A
twig snapped nearby. Yossarian dropped to his knees with a cold thrill of
elation and aimed. He heard a stealthy rustle of leaves on the other side of
the sandbags and fired two quick rounds. Someone fired back at him once, and he
recognized the shot.

   ‘ Dunbar? he called.

   ‘Yossarian?’ The two men left their hiding places and walked
forward to meet in the clearing with weary disappointment, their guns down.
They were both shivering slightly from the frosty air and wheezing from the
labor of their uphill rush.

   ‘The bastards,’ said Yossarian. ‘They got away.’

   ‘They took ten years off my life,’ Dunbar exclaimed. ‘I
thought that son of a bitch Milo was bombing us again. I’ve never been so
scared. I wish I knew who the bastards were.

   ‘One was Sergeant Knight.’

   ‘Let’s go kill him.’ Dunbar’s teeth were chattering. ‘He had
no right to scare us that way.’ Yossarian no longer wanted to kill anyone.
‘Let’s help Nately first. I think I hurt him at the bottom of the hill.’ But
there was no sign of Nately along the path, even though Yossarian located the
right spot by the blood on the stones. Nately was not in his tent either, and
they did not catch up with him until the next morning when they checked into
the hospital as patients after learning he had checked in with a broken nose
the night before. Nately beamed in frightened surprise as they padded into the
ward in their slippers and robes behind Nurse Cramer and were assigned to their
beds. Nately’s nose was in a bulky cast, and he had two black eyes. He kept
blushing giddily in shy embarrassment and saying he was sorry when Yossarian
came over to apologize for hitting him. Yossarian felt terrible; he could
hardly bear to look at Nately’s battered countenance, even though the sight was
so comical he was tempted to guffaw. Dunbar was disgusted by their
sentimentality, and all three were relieved when Hungry Joe came barging in
unexpectedly with his intricate black camera and trumped-up symptoms of
appendicitis to be near enough to Yossarian to take pictures of him feeling up
Nurse Duckett. Like Yossarian, he was soon disappointed. Nurse Duckett had
decided to marry a doctor—any doctor, because they all did so well in
business—and would not take chances in the vicinity of the man who might
someday be her husband. Hungry Joe was irate and inconsolable until—of all
people—the chaplain was led in wearing a maroon corduroy bathrobe, shining like
a skinny lighthouse with a radiant grin of self-satisfaction too tremendous to
be concealed. The chaplain had entered the hospital with a pain in his heart
that the doctors thought was gas in his stomach and with an advanced case of
Wisconsin shingles.

   ‘What in the world are Wisconsin shingles?’ asked Yossarian.

   ‘That’s just what the doctors wanted to know!’ blurted out
the chaplain proudly, and burst into laughter. No one had ever seen him so
waggish, or so happy. ‘There’s no such thing as Wisconsin shingles. Don’t you
understand? I lied. I made a deal with the doctors. I promised that I would let
them know when my Wisconsin shingles went away if they would promise not to do
anything to cure them. I never told a lie before. Isn’t it wonderful?’ The
chaplain had sinned, and it was good. Common sense told him that telling lies
and defecting from duty were sins. On the other hand, everyone knew that sin
was evil, and that no good could come from evil. But he did feel good; he felt
positively marvelous. Consequently, it followed logically that telling lies and
defecting from duty could not be sins. The chaplain had mastered, in a moment
of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he
was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at
all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into
abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into
honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into
justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required
no character. With effervescent agility the chaplain ran through the whole
gamut of orthodox immoralities, while Nately sat up in bed with flushed
elation, astounded by the mad gang of companions of which he found himself the
nucleus. He was flattered and apprehensive, certain that some severe official
would soon appear and throw the whole lot of them out like a pack of bums. No
one bothered them. In the evening they all trooped exuberantly out to see a
lousy Hollywood extravaganza in Technicolor, and when they trooped exuberantly
back in after the lousy Hollywood extravaganza, the soldier in white was there,
and Dunbar screamed and went to pieces.

   ‘He’s back!’ Dunbar screamed. ‘He’s back! He’s back!’
Yossarian froze in his tracks, paralyzed as much by the eerie shrillness in
Dunbar’s voice as by the familiar, white, morbid sight of the soldier in white
covered from head to toe in plaster and gauze. A strange, quavering,
involuntary noise came bubbling from Yossarian’s throat.

   ‘He’s back!’ Dunbar screamed again.

   ‘He’s back!’ a patient delirious with fever echoed in
automatic terror.

   All at once the ward erupted into bedlam. Mobs of sick and
injured men began ranting incoherently and running and jumping in the aisle as
though the building were on fire. A patient with one foot and one crutch was
hopping back and forth swiftly in panic crying, ‘What is it? What is it? Are we
burning? Are we burning?’

   ‘He’s back!’ someone shouted at him. ‘Didn’t you hear him?
He’s back! He’s back!’

   ‘Who’s back?’ shouted someone else. ‘Who is it?’

   ‘What does it mean? What should we do?’

   ‘Are we on fire?’

   ‘Get up and run, damn it! Everybody get up and run!’
Everybody got out of bed and began running from one end of the ward to the
other. One C.I.D. man was looking for a gun to shoot one of the other C.I.D.
men who had jabbed his elbow into his eye. The ward had turned into chaos. The
patient delirious with the high fever leaped into the aisle and almost knocked
over the patient with one foot, who accidentally brought the black rubber tip
of his crutch down on the other’s bare foot, crushing some toes. The delirious
man with the fever and the crushed toes sank to the floor and wept in pain
while other men tripped over him and hurt him more in their blind, milling,
agonized stampede. ‘He’s back!’ all the men kept mumbling and chanting and
calling out hysterically as they rushed back and forth. ‘He’s back, he’s back!’
Nurse Cramer was there in the middle suddenly like a spinning policeman, trying
desperately to restore order, dissolving helplessly into tears when she failed.
‘Be still, please be still,’ she urged uselessly through her massive sobs. The
chaplain, pale as a ghost, had no idea what was going on. Neither did Nately,
who kept close to Yossarian’s side, clinging to his elbow, or Hungry Joe, who
followed dubiously with his scrawny fists clenched and glanced from side to
side with a face that was scared.

   ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ Hungry Joe pleaded. ‘What the hell is
going on?’

   ‘It’s the same one!’ Dunbar shouted at him emphatically in a
voice rising clearly above the raucous commotion. ‘Don’t you understand? It’s
the same one.’

   ‘The same one!’ Yossarian heard himself echo, quivering with
a deep and ominous excitement that he could not control, and shoved his way
after Dunbar toward the bed of the soldier in white.

   ‘Take it easy, fellas,’ the short patriotic Texan counseled
affably, with an uncertain grin. ‘There’s no cause to be upset. Why don’t we
all just take it easy?’

   ‘The same one!’ others began murmuring, chanting and
shouting.

   Suddenly Nurse Duckett was there, too. ‘What’s going on?’ she
demanded.

   ‘He’s back!’ Nurse Cramer screamed, sinking into her arms.
‘He’s back, he’s back!’ It was, indeed, the same man. He had lost a few inches
and added some weight, but Yossarian remembered him instantly by the two stiff
arms and the two stiff, thick, useless legs all drawn upward into the air
almost perpendicularly by the taut ropes and the long lead weights suspended
from pulleys over him and by the frayed black hole in the bandages over his
mouth. He had, in fact, hardly changed at all. There was the same zinc pipe
rising from the hard stone mass over his groin and leading to the clear glass
jar on the floor. There was the same clear glass jar on a pole dripping fluid
into him through the crook of his elbow. Yossarian would recognize him
anywhere. He wondered who he was.

   ‘There’s no one inside!’ Dunbar yelled out at him
unexpectedly.

   Yossarian felt his heart skip a beat and his legs grow weak.
‘What are you talking about?’ he shouted with dread, stunned by the haggard,
sparking anguish in Dunbar’s eyes and by his crazed look of wild shock and
horror. ‘Are you nuts or something? What the hell do you mean, there’s no one
inside?’