Joseph Heller - Catch-22

Oh, God! Yossarian had shrieked soundlessly as he felt them all falling. Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! he had shrieked beseechingly through lips that could not open as the plane fell and he dangled without weight by the top of his head until Huple managed to seize the controls back and leveled the plane out down inside the crazy, craggy, patchwork canyon of crashing antiaircraft fire from which they had climbed away and from which they would now have to escape again. Almost at once there was a thud and a hole the size of a big fist in the plexiglass. Yossarian’s cheeks were stinging with shimmering splinters. There was no blood.

“What happened? What happened?” he cried, and trembled violently when he could not hear his own voice in his ears. He was cowed by the empty silence on the intercom and almost too horrified to move as he crouched like a trapped mouse on his hands and knees and waited without daring to breathe until he finally spied the gleaming cylindrical jack plug of his headset swinging back and forth in front of his eyes and jammed it back into its receptacle with fingers that rattled. Oh, God! he kept shrieking with no abatement of terror as the flak thumped and mushroomed all about him. Oh, God!

Dobbs was weeping when Yossarian jammed his jack plug back into the intercom system and was able to hear again.

“Help him, help him,” Dobbs was sobbing. “Help him, help him.”

“Help who? Help who?” Yossarian called back. “Help who?”

“The bombardier, the bombardier,” Dobbs cried. “He doesn’t answer. Help the bombardier, help the bombardier.”

“I’m the bombardier,” Yossarian cried back at him. “I’m the bombardier. I’m all right. I’m all right.”

“Then help him, help him,” Dobbs wept. “Help him, help him.”

“Help who? Help who?”

“The radio-gunner,” Dobbs begged. “Help the radio-gunner.”

“I’m cold,” Snowden whimpered feebly over the intercom system then in a bleat of plaintive agony. “Please help me. I’m cold.”

And Yossarian crept out through the crawlway and climbed up over the bomb bay and down into the rear section of the plane where Snowden lay on the floor wounded and freezing to death in a yellow splash of sunlight near the new tail-gunner lying stretched out on the floor beside him in a dead faint.

Dobbs was the worst pilot in the world and knew it, a shattered wreck of a virile young man who was continually striving to convince his superiors that he was no longer fit to pilot a plane. None of his superiors would listen, and it was the day the number of missions was raised to sixty that Dobbs stole into Yossarian’s tent while Orr was out looking for gaskets and disclosed the plot he had formulated to murder Colonel Cathcart. He needed Yossarian’s assistance.

“You want us to kill him in cold blood?” Yossarian objected.

“That’s right,” Dobbs agreed with an optimistic smile, encouraged by Yossarian’s ready grasp of the situation. “We’ll shoot him to death with the Luger I brought back from Sicily that nobody knows I’ve got.”

“I don’t think I could do it,” Yossarian concluded, after weighing the idea in silence awhile.

Dobbs was astonished. “Why not?”

“Look. Nothing would please me more than to have the son of a bitch break his neck or get killed in a crash or to find out that someone else had shot him to death. But I don’t think I could kill him.”

“He’d do it to you,” Dobbs argued. “In fact, you’re the one who told me he is doing it to us by keeping us in combat so long.”

“But I don’t think I could do it to him. He’s got a right to live, too, I guess.”

“Not as long as he’s trying to rob you and me of our right to live. What’s the matter with you?” Dobbs was flabbergasted. “I used to listen to you arguing that same thing with Clevinger. And look what happened to him. Right inside that cloud.”

“Stop shouting, will you?” Yossarian shushed him.

“I’m not shouting!” Dobbs shouted louder, his face red with revolutionary fervor. His eyes and nostrils were running, and his palpitating crimson lower lip was splattered with a foamy dew. “There must have been close to a hundred men in the group who had finished their fifty-five missions when he raised the number to sixty. There must have been at least another hundred like you with just a couple more to fly. He’s going to kill us all if we let him go on forever. We’ve got to kill him first.”

Yossarian nodded expressionlessly, without committing himself. “Do you think we could get away with it?”

“I’ve got it all worked out. I-“

“Stop shouting, for Christ’s sake!”

“I’m not shouting. I’ve got it-“

“Will you stop shouting!”

“I’ve got it all worked out,” Dobbs whispered, gripping the side of Orr’s cot with white-knuckled hands to constrain them from waving. “Thursday morning when he’s due back from that goddam farmhouse of his in the hills, I’ll sneak up through the woods to that hairpin turn in the road and hide in the bushes. He has to slow down there, and I can watch the road in both directions to make sure there’s no one else around. When I see him coming, I’ll shove a big log out into the road to make him stop his jeep. Then I’ll step out of the bushes with my Luger and shoot him in the head until he’s dead. I’ll bury the gun, come back down through the woods to the squadron and go about my business just like everybody else. What could possibly go wrong?”

Yossarian had followed each step attentively. “Where do I come in?” he asked in puzzlement.

“I couldn’t do it without you,” Dobbs explained. “I need you to tell me to go ahead.”

Yossarian found it hard to believe him. “Is that all you want me to do? Just tell you to go ahead?”

“That’s all I need from you,” Dobbs answered. “Just tell me to go ahead and I’ll blow his brains out all by myself the day after tomorrow.” His voice was accelerating with emotion and rising again. “I’d like to shoot Colonel Korn in the head, too, while we’re at it, although I’d like to spare Major Danby, if that’s all right with you. Then I’d murder Appleby and Havermeyer also, and after we finish murdering Appleby and Havermeyer I’d like to murder McWatt.”

“McWatt?” cried Yossarian, almost jumping up in horror. “McWatt’s a friend of mine. What do you want from McWatt?”

“I don’t know,” Dobbs confessed with an air of floundering embarrassment. “I just thought that as long as we were murdering Appleby and Havermeyer we might as well murder McWatt too. Don’t you want to murder McWatt?”

Yossarian took a firm stand. “Look, I might keep interested in this if you stop shouting it all over the island and if you stick to killing Colonel Cathcart. But if you’re going to turn this into a blood bath, you can forget about me.”

“All right, all right,” Dobbs sought to placate him. “Just Colonel Cathcart. Should I do it? Tell me to go ahead.”

Yossarian shook his head. “I don’t think I could tell you to go ahead.”

Dobbs was frantic. “I’m willing to compromise,” he pleaded vehemently. “You don’t have to tell me to go ahead. Just tell me it’s a good idea. Okay? Is it a good idea?”

Yossarian still shook his head. “It would have been a great idea if you had gone ahead and done it without even speaking to me. Now it’s too late. I don’t think I can tell you anything. Give me some more time. I might change my mind.”

“Then it will be too late.”

Yossarian kept shaking his head. Dobbs was disappointed. He sat for a moment with a hangdog look, then spurted to his feet suddenly and stamped away to have another impetuous crack at persuading Doc Daneeka to ground him, knocking over Yossarian’s washstand with his hip when he lurched around and tripping over the fuel line of the stove Orr was still constructing. Doc Daneeka withstood Dobbs’s blustering and gesticulating attack with a series of impatient nods and sent him to the medical tent to describe his symptoms to Gus and Wes, who painted his gums purple with gentian-violet solution the moment he started to talk. They painted his toes purple, too, and forced a laxative down his throat when he opened his mouth again to complain, and then they sent him away.