Joseph Heller - Catch-22

Dobbs was in even worse shape than Hungry Joe, who could at least fly missions when he was not having nightmares. Dobbs was almost as bad as Orr, who seemed happy as an undersized, grinning lark with his deranged and galvanic giggle and shivering warped buck teeth and who was sent along for a rest leave with Milo and Yossarian on the trip to Cairo for eggs when Milo bought cotton instead and took off at dawn for Istanbul with his plane packed to the gun turrets with exotic spiders and unripened red bananas. Orr was one of the homeliest freaks Yossarian had ever encountered, and one of the most attractive. He had a raw bulgy face, with hazel eyes squeezing from their sockets like matching brown halves of marbles and thick, wavy particolored hair sloping up to a peak on the top of his head like a pomaded pup tent. Orr was knocked down into the water or had an engine shot out almost every time he went up, and he began jerking on Yossarian’s arm like a wild man after they had taken off for Naples and come down in Sicily to find the scheming, cigar-smoking, ten-year-old pimp with the two twelve-year-old virgin sisters waiting for them in town in front of the hotel in which there was room for only Milo. Yossarian pulled back from Orr adamantly, gazing with some concern and bewilderment at Mt. Etna instead of Mt. Vesuvius and wondering what they were doing in Sicily instead of Naples as Orr kept entreating him in a tittering, stuttering, concupiscent turmoil to go along with him behind the scheming ten-year-old pimp to his two twelve-year-old virgin sisters who were not really virgins and not really sisters and who were really only twenty-eight.

“Go with him,” Milo instructed Yossarian laconically. “Remember your mission.”

“All right,” Yossarian yielded with a sigh, remembering his mission. “But at least let me try to find a hotel room first so I can get a good night’s sleep afterward.”

“You’ll get a good night’s sleep with the girls,” Milo replied with the same air of intrigue. Remember your mission.”

But they got no sleep at all, for Yossarian and Orr found themselves jammed into the same double bed with the two twelve-year-old twenty-eight-year-old prostitutes, who turned out to be oily and obese and who kept waking them up all night long to ask them to switch partners. Yossarian’s perceptions were soon so fuzzy that he paid no notice to the beige turban the fat one crowding into him kept wearing until late the next morning when the scheming ten-year-old pimp with the Cuban panatella snatched it off in public in a bestial caprice that exposed in the brilliant Sicilian daylight her shocking, misshapen and denudate skull. Vengeful neighbors had shaved her hair to the gleaming bone because she had slept with Germans. The girl screeched in feminine outrage and waddled comically after the scheming ten-year-old pimp, her grisly, bleak, violated scalp slithering up and down ludicrously around the queer darkened wart of her face like something bleached and obscene. Yossarian had never laid eyes on anything so bare before. The pimp spun the turban high on his finger like a trophy and kept himself skipping inches ahead of her finger tips as he led her in a tantalizing circle around the square congested with people who were howling with laughter and pointing to Yossarian with derision when Milo strode up with a grim look of haste and puckered his lips reprovingly at the unseemly spectacle of so much vice and frivolity. Milo insisted on leaving at once for Malta.

“We’re sleepy,” Orr whined.

“That’s your own fault,” Milo censured them both selfrighteously. “If you had spent the night in your hotel room instead of with these immoral girls, you’d both feel as good as I do today.”

“You told us to go with them,” Yossarian retorted accusingly. “And we didn’t have a hotel room. You were the only one who could get a hotel room.”

“That wasn’t my fault, either,” Milo explained haughtily. “How was I supposed to know all the buyers would be in town for the chick-pea harvest?”

“You knew it,” Yossarian charged. “That explains why we’re here in Sicily instead of Naples. You’ve probably got the whole damned plane filled with chick-peas already.”

“Shhhhhh!” Milo cautioned sternly, with a meaningful glance toward Orr. “Remember your mission.”

The bomb bay, the rear and tail sections of the plane and most of the top turret gunner’s section were all filled with bushels of chick-peas when they arrived at the airfield to take off for Malta.

Yossarian’s mission on the trip was to distract Orr from observing where Milo bought his eggs, even though Orr was a member of Milo’s syndicate and, like every other member of Milo’s syndicate, owned a share. His mission was silly, Yossarian felt, since it was common knowledge that Milo bought his eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and sold them to the mess halls in his syndicate for five cents apiece.

“I just don’t trust him,” Milo brooded in the plane, with a backward nod toward Orr, who was curled up like a tangled rope on the low bushels of chick-peas, trying torturedly to sleep. “And I’d just as soon buy my eggs when he’s not around to learn my business secrets. What else don’t you understand?”

Yossarian was riding beside him in the co-pilot’s seat. “I don’t understand why you buy eggs for seven cents apiece in Malta and sell them for five cents.”

“I do it to make a profit.”

“But how can you make a profit? You lose two cents an egg.”

“But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don’t make the profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share.”

Yossarian felt he was beginning to understand. “And the people you sell the eggs to at four and a quarter cents apiece make a profit of two and three quarter cents apiece when they sell them back to you at seven cents apiece. Is that right? Why don’t you sell the eggs directly to you and eliminate the people you buy them from?”

“Because I’m the people I buy them from,” Milo explained. “I make a profit of three and a quarter cents apiece when I sell them to me and a profit of two and three quarter cents apiece when I buy them back from me. That’s a total profit of six cents an egg. I lose only two cents an egg when I sell them to the mess halls at five cents apiece, and that’s how I can make a profit buying eggs for seven cents apiece and selling them for five cents apiece. I pay only one cent apiece at the hen when I buy them in Sicily.”

“In Malta,” Yossarian corrected. “You buy your eggs in Malta, not Sicily.”

Milo chortled proudly. “I don’t buy eggs in Malta,” he confessed, with an air of slight and clandestine amusement that was the only departure from industrious sobriety Yossarian had ever seen him make. “I buy them in Sicily for one cent apiece and transfer them to Malta secretly at four and a half cents apiece in order to get the price of eggs up to seven cents apiece when people come to Malta looking for them.”

“Why do people come to Malta for eggs when they’re so expensive there?”

“Because they’ve always done it that way.”

“Why don’t they look for eggs in Sicily?”

“Because they’ve never done it that way.”

“Now I really don’t understand. Why don’t you sell your mess halls the eggs for seven cents apiece instead offer five cents apiece?”

“Because my mess halls would have no need for me then. Anyone can buy seven-cents-apiece eggs for seven cents apiece.”

“Why don’t they bypass you and buy the eggs directly from you in Malta at four and a quarter cents apiece?”