Joseph Heller - Catch-22

“Hey, we’ve got to get out of here!” he cried. “We’ll all drown.”

“Is anybody in there?” asked Clevinger with concern, shining a flashlight down from the top.

“It’s Clevinger!” they shouted, and tried to pull him in through the window as he reached down to aid them.

“Look at them!” Clevinger exclaimed indignantly to McWatt, who sat grinning at the wheel of the staff car. “Lying there like a bunch of drunken animals. You too, Nately? You ought to be ashamed! Come on-help me get them out of here before they all die of pneumonia.”

“You know, that don’t sound like such a bad idea,” Chief White Halfoat reflected. “I think I will die of pneumonia.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” answered Chief White Halfoat, and lay back in the mud contentedly with the bottle of rye cuddled in his arms.

“Oh, now look what he’s doing!” Clevinger exclaimed with irritation. “Will you get up and get into the car so we can all go back to the squadron?”

“We can’t all go back. Someone has to stay here to help the Chief with this car he signed out of the motor pool.”

Chief White Halfoat settled back in the staff car with an ebullient, prideful chuckle. “That’s Captain Black’s car,” he informed them jubilantly. “I stole it from him at the officers’ club just now with an extra set of keys he thought he lost this morning.”

“Well, I’ll be damned! That calls for a drink.”

“Haven’t you had enough to drink?” Clevinger began scolding as soon as McWatt started the car. “Look at you. You don’t care if you drink yourselves to death or drown yourselves to death, do you?”

“Just as long as we don’t fly ourselves to death.”

“Hey, open it up, open it up,” Chief White Halfoat urged McWatt. “And turn off the headlights. That’s the only way to do it.”

“Doc Daneeka is right,” Clevinger went on. “People don’t know enough to take care of themselves. I really am disgusted with all of you.”

“Okay, fatmouth, out of the car,” Chief White Halfoat ordered. “Everybody get out of the car but Yossarian. Where’s Yossarian?”

“Get the hell off me.” Yossarian laughed, pushing him away. “You’re all covered with mud.”

Clevinger focused on Nately. “You’re the one who really surprises me. Do you know what you smell like? Instead of trying to keep him out of trouble, you get just as drunk as he is. Suppose he got in another fight with Appleby?” Clevinger’s eyes opened wide with alarm when he heard Yossarian chuckle. “He didn’t get in another fight with Appleby, did he?”

“Not this time,” said Dunbar.

“No, not this time. This time I did even better.”

“This time he got in a fight with Colonel Korn.”

“He didn’t!” gasped Clevinger.

“He did?” exclaimed Chief White Halfoat with delight. “That calls for a drink.”

“But that’s terrible!” Clevinger declared with deep apprehension. “Why in the world did you have to pick on Colonel Korn? Say, what happened to the lights? Why is everything so dark?”

“I turned them off,” answered McWatt. “You know, Chief White Halfoat is right. It’s much better with the headlights off.”

“Are you crazy?” Clevinger screamed, and lunged forward to snap the headlights on. He whirled around upon Yossarian in near hysteria. “You see what you’re doing? You’ve got them all acting like you! Suppose it stops raining and we have to fly to Bologna tomorrow. You’ll be in fine physical condition.”

“It won’t ever gonna stop raining. No, sir, a rain like this really might go on forever.”

“It has stopped raining!” someone said, and the whole car fell silent.

“You poor bastards,” Chief White Halfoat murmured compassionately after a few moments had passed.

“Did it really stop raining?” Yossarian asked meekly.

McWatt switched off the windshield wipers to make certain. The rain had stopped. The sky was starting to clear. The moon was sharp behind a gauzy brown mist.

“Oh, well,” sang McWatt soberly. “What the hell.”

“Don’t worry, fellas,” Chief White Halfoat said. “The landing strip is too soft to use tomorrow. Maybe it’ll start raining again before the field dries out.”

“You goddam stinking lousy son of a bitch,” Hungry Joe screamed from his tent as they sped into the squadron.

“Jesus, is he back here tonight? I thought he was still in Rome with the courier ship.”

“Oh! Ooooh! Oooooooh!” Hungry Joe screamed.

Chief White Halfoat shuddered. “That guy gives me the willies,” he confessed in a grouchy whisper. “Hey, whatever happened to Captain Flume?”

“There’s a guy that gives me the willies. I saw him in the woods last week eating wild berries. He never sleeps in his trailer any more. He looked like hell.”

“Hungry Joe’s afraid he’ll have to replace somebody who goes on sick call, even though there is no sick call. Did you see him the other night when he tried to kill Havermeyer and fell into Yossarian’s slit trench?”

“Ooooh!” screamed Hungry Joe. “Oh! Ooooh! Ooooooh!”

“It sure is a pleasure not having Flume around in the mess hall any more. No more of that ‘Pass the salt, Walt.’”

“Or ‘Pass the bread, Fred.’”

“Or ‘Shoot me a beet, Pete.’”

“Keep away, keep away,” Hungry Joe screamed. “I said keep away, keep away, you goddam stinking lousy son of a bitch.”

“At least we found out what he dreams about,” Dunbar observed wryly. “He dreams about goddam stinking lousy sons of bitches.”

Late that night Hungry Joe dreamed that Huple’s cat was sleeping on his face, suffocating him, and when he woke up, Huple’s cat was sleeping on his face. His agony was terrifying, the piercing, unearthly howl with which he split the moonlit dark vibrating in its own impact for seconds afterward like a devastating shock. A numbing silence followed, and then a riotous din rose from inside his tent.

Yossarian was among the first ones there. When he burst through the entrance, Hungry Joe had his gun out and was struggling to wrench his arm free from Huple to shoot the cat, who kept spitting and feinting at him ferociously to distract him from shooting Huple. Both humans were in their GI underwear. The unfrosted light bulb overhead was swinging crazily on its loose wire, and the jumbled black shadows kept swirling and bobbing chaotically, so that the entire tent seemed to be reeling. Yossarian reached out instinctively for balance and then launched himself forward in a prodigious dive that crushed the three combatants to the ground beneath him. He emerged from the melee with the scruff of a neck in each hand-Hungry Joe’s neck and the cat’s. Hungry Joe and the cat glared at each other savagely. The cat spat viciously at Hungry Joe, and Hungry Joe tried to hit it with a haymaker.

“A fair fight,” Yossarian decreed, and all the others who had come running to the uproar in horror began cheering ecstatically in a tremendous overflow of relief. “We’ll have a fair fight,” he explained officially to Hungry Joe and the cat after he had carried them both outside, still holding them apart by the scruffs of their necks. “Fists, fangs and claws. But no guns,” he warned Hungry Joe. “And no spitting,” he warned the cat sternly. “When I turn you both loose, go. Break clean in the clinches and come back fighting. Go!”

There was a huge, giddy crowd of men who were avid for any diversion, but the cat turned chicken the moment Yossarian released him and fled from Hungry Joe ignominiously like a yellow dog. Hungry Joe was declared the winner. He swaggered away happily with the proud smile of a champion, his shriveled head high and his emaciated chest out. He went back to bed victorious and dreamed again that Huple’s cat was sleeping on his face, suffocating him.