Joseph Heller - Catch-22

“What are you shushing him for?” asked Kid Sampson, peeling a tangerine with his front teeth as he perused the dog-eared pages of a comic book. “He isn’t even saying anything.”

“Screw,” said Yossarian to Kid Sampson, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder toward the entrance of the tent.

Kid Sampson cocked his blond eyebrows discerningly and rose to co-operate. He whistled upward four times into his drooping yellow mustache and spurted away into the hills on the dented old green motorcycle he had purchased secondhand months before. Yossarian waited until the last faint bark of the motor had died away in the distance. Things inside the tent did not seem quite normal. The place was too neat. Dobbs was watching him curiously, smoking a fat cigar. Now that Yossarian had made up his mind to be brave, he was deathly afraid.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s kill Colonel Cathcart. We’ll do it together.”

Dobbs sprang forward off his cot with a look of wildest terror. “Shush!” he roared. “Kill Colonel Cathcart? What are you talking about?”

“Be quiet, damn it,” Yossarian snarled. “The whole island will hear. Have you still got that gun?”

“Are you crazy or something?” shouted Dobbs. “Why should I want to kill Colonel Cathcart?”

“ Why? ” Yossarian stared at Dobbs with an incredulous scowl. “ Why? It was your idea, wasn’t it? Didn’t you come to the hospital and ask me to do it?”

Dobbs smiled slowly. “But that was when I had only fifty-eight missions,” he explained, puffing on his cigar luxuriously. “I’m all packed now and I’m waiting to go home. I’ve finished my sixty missions.”

“So what?” Yossarian replied. “He’s only going to raise them again.”

“Maybe this time he won’t.”

“He always raises them. What the hell’s the matter with you, Dobbs? Ask Hungry Joe how many time he’s packed his bags.”

“I’ve got to wait and see what happens,” Dobbs maintained stubbornly. “I’d have to be crazy to get mixed up in something like this now that I’m out of combat.” He flicked the ash from his cigar. “No, my advice to you,” he remarked, “is that you fly your sixty missions like the rest of us and then see what happens.”

Yossarian resisted the impulse to spit squarely in his eye. “I may not live through sixty,” he wheedled in a flat, pessimistic voice. “There’s a rumor around that he volunteered the group for Bologna again.”

“It’s only a rumor,” Dobbs pointed out with a self-important air. “You mustn’t believe every rumor you hear.”

“Will you stop giving me advice?”

“Why don’t you speak to Orr?” Dobbs advised. “Orr got knocked down into the water again last week on that second mission to Avignon. Maybe he’s unhappy enough to kill him.”

“Orr hasn’t got brains enough to be unhappy.”

Orr had been knocked down into the water again while Yossarian was still in the hospital and had eased his crippled airplane down gently into the glassy blue swells off Marseilles with such flawless skill that not one member of the six-man crew suffered the slightest bruise. The escape hatches in the front and rear sections flew open while the sea was still foaming white and green around the plane, and the men scrambled out as speedily as they could in their flaccid orange Mae West life jackets that failed to inflate and dangled limp and useless around their necks and waists. The life jackets failed to inflate because Milo had removed the twin carbon-dioxide cylinders from the inflating chambers to make the strawberry and crushed-pineapple ice-cream sodas he served in the officers’ mess hall and had replaced them with mimeographed notes that read: “What’s good for M amp; M Enterprises is good for the country.” Orr popped out of the sinking airplane last.

“You should have seen him!” Sergeant Knight roared with laughter as he related the episode to Yossarian. “It was the funniest goddam thing you ever saw. None of the Mae Wests would work because Milo had stolen the carbon dioxide to make those ice-cream sodas you bastards have been getting in the officers’ mess. But that wasn’t too bad, as it turned out. Only one of us couldn’t swim, and we lifted that guy up into the raft after Orr had worked it over by its rope right up against the fuselage while we were all still standing on the plane. That little crackpot sure has a knack for things like that. Then the other raft came loose and drifted away, so that all six of us wound up sitting in one with our elbows and legs pressed so close against each other you almost couldn’t move without knocking the guy next to you out of the raft into the water. The plane went down about three seconds after we left it and we were out there all alone, and right after that we began unscrewing the caps on our Mae Wests to see what the hell had gone wrong and found those goddam notes from Milo telling us that what was good for him was good enough for the rest of us. That bastard! Jesus, did we curse him, all except that buddy of yours, Orr, who just kept grinning as though for all he cared what was good for Milo might be good enough for the rest of us.

“I swear, you should have seen him sitting up there on the rim of the raft like the captain of a ship while the rest of us just watched him and waited for him to tell us what to do. He kept slapping his hands on his legs every few seconds as though he had the shakes and saying, ‘All right now, all right,’ and giggling like a crazy little freak, then saying, ‘All right now, all right,’ again, and giggling like a crazy little freak some more. It was like watching some kind of a moron. Watching him was all that kept us from going to pieces altogether during the first few minutes, what with each wave washing over us into the raft or dumping a few of us back into the water so that we had to climb back in again before the next wave came along and washed us right back out. It was sure funny. We just kept falling out and climbing back in. We had the guy who couldn’t swim stretched out in the middle of the raft on the floor, but even there he almost drowned, because the water inside the raft was deep enough to keep splashing in his face. Oh, boy!

“Then Orr began opening up compartments in the raft, and the fun really began. First he found a box of chocolate bars and he passed those around so we sat there eating salty chocolate bars while the waves kept knocking us out of the raft into the water. Next he found some bouillon cubes and aluminum cups and made us some soup. Then he found some tea. Sure, he made it! Can’t you see him serving us tea as we sat there soaking wet in water up to our ass? Now I was falling out of the raft because I was laughing so much. We were all laughing. And he was dead serious, except for that goofy giggle of his and that crazy grin. What a jerk! Whatever he found he used. He found some shark repellent and he sprinkled it right out into the water. He found some marker dye and he threw it into the water. The next thing he finds is a fishing line and dried bait, and his face lights up as though the Air-Sea Rescue launch had just sped up to save us before we died of exposure or before the Germans sent a boat out from Spezia to take us prisoner or machine-gun us. In no time at all, Orr had that fishing line out into the water, trolling away as happy as a lark. ‘Lieutenant, what do you expect to catch?’ I asked him. ‘Cod,’ he told me. And he meant it. And it’s a good thing he didn’t catch any, because he would have eaten that codfish raw if he had caught any, and would have made us eat it, too, because he had found this little book that said it was all right to eat codfish raw.

“The next thing he found was this little blue oar about the size of a Dixie-cup spoon, and, sure enough, he began rowing with it, trying to move all nine hundred pounds of us with that little stick. Can you imagine? After that he found a small magnetic compass and a big waterproof map, and he spread the map open on his knees and set the compass on top of it. And that’s how he spent the time until the launch picked us up about thirty minutes later, sitting there with that baited fishing line out behind him, with the compass in his lap and the map spread out on his knees, and paddling away as hard as he could with that dinky blue oar as though he was speeding to Majorca. Jesus!”