Catch-22

by Joseph Heller

  'Boy, are you bastards in for it!' he announced exuberantly, splashing away from the puddle forming at his feet. 'I just got a call from Colonel Korn. Do you know what they've got waiting for you at Bologna? Ha! Ha! They've got the new Lepage glue gun. It glues a whole formation of planes together in mid-air.'

  'My God, it's true!' Yossarian shrieked, and collapsed against Nately in terror.

  'There is no God,' answered Dunbar calmly, coming up with a slight stagger.

  'Hey, give me a hand with him, will you? I've got to get him back in his tent.'

  'Says who?'

  'Says me. Gee, look at the rain.'

  'We've got to get a car.'

  'Steal Captain Black's car,' said Yossarian. 'That's what I always do.'

  'We can't steal anybody's car. Since you began stealing the nearest car every time you wanted one, nobody leaves the ignition on.'

  'Hop in,' said Chief White Halfoat, driving up drunk in a covered jeep. He waited until they had crowded inside and then spurted ahead with a suddenness that rolled them all over backward. He roared with laughter at their curses. He drove straight ahead when he left the parking lot and rammed the car into the embankment on the other side of the road. The others piled forward in a helpless heap and began cursing him again. 'I forgot to turn,' he explained.

  'Be careful, will you?' Nately cautioned. 'You'd better put your headlights on.' Chief White Halfoat pulled back in reverse, made his turn and shot away up the road at top speed. The wheels were sibilant on the whizzing blacktop surface.

  'Not so fast,' urged Nately.

  'You'd better take me to your squadron first so I can help you put him to bed. Then you can drive me back to my squadron.'

  'Who the hell are you?'

  ' Dunbar.'

  'Hey, put your headlights on,' Nately shouted. 'And watch the road!'

  'They are on. Isn't Yossarian in this car? That's the only reason I let the rest of you bastards in.' Chief White Halfoat turned completely around to stare into the back seat.

  'Watch the road!'

  'Yossarian? Is Yossarian in here?'

  'I'm here, Chief. Let's go home. What makes you so sure? You never answered my question.'

  'You see? I told you he was here.'

  'What question?'

  'Whatever it was we were talking about.'

  'Was it important?'

  'I don't remember if it was important or not. I wish to God I knew what it was.'

  'There is no God.'

  'That's what we were talking about,' Yossarian cried. 'What makes you so sure?'

  'Hey, are you sure your headlights are on?' Nately called out.

  'They're on, they're on. What does he want from me? It's all this rain on the windshield that makes it look dark from back there.'

  'Beautiful, beautiful rain.'

  'I hope it never stops raining. Rain, rain, go a--'

  '--way. Come a--'

  '--again some oth--'

  '--er day. Little Yo-Yo wants--'

  '--to play. In--'

  '--the meadow, in--' Chief White Halfoat missed the next turn in the road and ran the jeep all the way up to the crest of a steep embankment. Rolling back down, the jeep turned over on its side and settled softly in the mud. There was a frightened silence.

  'Is everyone all right?' Chief White Halfoat inquired in a hushed voice. No one was injured, and he heaved a long sigh of relief. 'You know, that's my trouble,' he groaned. 'I never listen to anybody. Somebody kept telling me to put my headlights on, but I just wouldn't listen.'

  'I kept telling you to put your headlights on.'

  'I know, I know. And I just wouldn't listen, would I? I wish I had a drink. I do have a drink. Look. It's not broken.'

  'It's raining in,' Nately noticed. 'I'm getting wet.' Chief White Halfoat got the bottle of rye open, drank and handed it off. Lying tangled up on top of each other, they all drank but Nately, who kept groping ineffectually for the door handle. The bottle fell against his head with a clunk, and whiskey poured down his neck. He began writhing convulsively.

  '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 Wh
ite 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.

  Catch-22

  Major--De Coverley

  Moving the bomb line did not fool the Germans, but it did fool Major--de Coverley, who packed his musette bag, commandeered an airplane and, under the impression that Florence too had been captured by the Allies, had himself flown to that city to rent two apartments for the officers and the enlisted men in the squadron to use on rest leaves. He had still not returned by the time Yossarian jumped back outside Major Major's office and wondered whom to appeal to next for help.

  Major--de Coverley was a splendid, awe-inspiring, grave old man with a massive leonine head and an angry shock of wild white hair that raged like a blizzard around his stern, patriarchal face. His duties as squadron executive officer did consist entirely, as both Doc Daneeka and Major Major had conjectured, of pitching horseshoes, kidnaping Italian laborers, and renting apartments for the enlisted men and officers to use on rest leaves, and he excelled at all three.

  Each time the fall of a city like Naples, Rome or Florence seemed imminent, Major--de Coverley would pack his musette bag, commandeer an airplane and a pilot, and have himself flown away, accomplishing all this without uttering a word, by the sheer force of his solemn, domineering visage and the peremptory gestures of his wrinkled finger. A day or two after the city fell, he would be back with leases on two large and luxurious apartments there, one for the officers and one for the enlisted men, both already staffed with competent, jolly cooks and maids. A few days after that, newspapers would appear throughout the world with photographs of the first American soldiers bludgeoning their way into the shattered city through rubble and smoke. Inevitably, Major--de Coverley was among them, seated straight as a ramrod in a jeep he had obtained from somewhere, glancing neither right nor left as the artillery fire burst about his invincible head and lithe young infantrymen with carbines went loping up along the sidewalks in the shelter of burning buildings or fell dead in doorways. He seemed eternally indestructible as he sat there surrounded by danger, his features molded firmly into that same fierce, regal, just and forbidding countenance which was recognized and revered by every man in the squadron.

  To German intelligence, Major--de Coverley was a vexatious enigma; not one of the hundreds of American prisoners would ever supply any concrete information about the elderly white-haired officer with the gnarled and menacing brow and blazing, powerful eyes who seemed to spearhead every important advance so fearlessly and successfully. To American authorities his identity was equally perplexing; a whole regiment of crack C.I.D. men had been thrown into the front lines to find out who he was, while a battalion of combat-hardened public-relations officers stood on red alert twenty-four hours a day with orders to begin publicizing him the moment he was located.

  In Rome, Major--de Coverley had outdone himself with the apartments. For the officers, who arrived in groups of four or five, there was an immense double room for each in a new white stone building, with three spacious bathrooms with walls of shimmering aquamarine tile and one skinny maid named Michaela who tittered at everything and kept the apartment in spotless order. On the landing below lived the obsequious owners. On the landing above lived the beautiful rich black-haired Countess and her beautiful, rich black-haired daughter-in-law, both of whom would put out only for Nately, who was too shy to want them, and for Aarfy, who was too stuffy to take them and tried to dissuade them from ever putting out for anyone but their husbands, who had chosen to remain in the north with the family's business interests.

  'They're really a couple of good kids,' Aarfy confided earnestly to Yossarian, whose recurring dream it was to have the nude milk-white female bodies of both these beautiful rich black-haired good kids lying stretched out in bed erotically with him at the same time.

  The enlisted men descended upon Rome in gangs of twelve or more with Gargantuan appetites and heavy crates filled with canned food for the women to cook and serve to them in the dining room of their own apartment on the sixth floor of a red brick building with a clinking elevator. There was always more activity at the enlisted men's place. There were always more enlisted men, to begin with, and more women to cook and serve and sweep and scrub, and then there were always the gay and silly sensual young girls that Yossarian had found and brought there and those that the sleepy enlisted men returning to Pianosa after their exhausting seven-day debauch had brought there on their own and were leaving behind for whoever wanted them next. The girls had shelter and food for as long as they wanted to stay. All they had to do in return was hump any of the men who asked them to,
which seemed to make everything just about perfect for them.

  Every fourth day or so Hungry Joe came crashing in like a man in torment, hoarse, wild, and frenetic, if he had been unlucky enough to finish his missions again and was flying the courier ship. Most times he slept at the enlisted men's apartment. Nobody was certain how many rooms Major--de Coverley had rented, not even the stout black-bodiced woman in corsets on the first floor from whom he had rented them. They covered the whole top floor, and Yossarian knew they extended down to the fifth floor as well, for it was in Snowden's room on the fifth floor that he had finally found the maid in the lime-colored panties with a dust mop the day after Bologna, after Hungry Joe had discovered him in bed with Luciana at the officers' apartment that same morning and had gone running like a fiend for his camera.

  The maid in the lime-colored panties was a cheerful, fat, obliging woman in her mid-thirties with squashy thighs and swaying hams in lime-colored panties that she was always rolling off for any man who wanted her. She had a plain broad face and was the most virtuous woman alive: she laid for everybody, regardless of race, creed, color or place of national origin, donating herself sociably as an act of hospitality, procrastinating not even for the moment it might take to discard the cloth or broom or dust mop she was clutching at the time she was grabbed. Her allure stemmed from her accessibility; like Mt. Everest, she was there, and the men climbed on top of her each time they felt the urge. Yossarian was in love with the maid in the lime-colored panties because she seemed to be the only woman left he could make love to without falling in love with. Even the bald-headed girl in Sicily still evoked in him strong sensations of pity, tenderness and regret.