Catch-22

by Joseph Heller

  '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.

  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.'
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  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 offor 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?'

  'Because I wouldn't sell it to them.'

  'Why wouldn't you sell it to them?'

  'Because then there wouldn't be as much room for profit. At least this way I can make a bit for myself as a middleman.'

  'Then you do make a profit for yourself,' Yossarian declared.

  'Of course I do. But it all goes to the syndicate. And everybody has a share. Don't you understand? It's exactly what happens with those plum tomatoes I sell to Colonel Cathcart.'

  'Buy,' Yossarian corrected him. 'You don't sell plum tomatoes to Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. You buy plum tomatoes from them.'

  'No, sell,' Milo corrected Yossarian. 'I distribute my plum tomatoes in markets all over Pianosa under an assumed name so that Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn can buy them up from me under their assumed names at four cents apiece and sell them back to me the next day for the syndicate at five cents apiece. They make a profit of one cent apiece. I make a profit of three and a half cents apiece, and everybody comes out ahead.'

  'Everybody but the syndicate,' said Yossarian with a snort. 'The syndicate is paying five cents apiece for plum tomatoes that cost you only half a cent apiece. How does the syndicate benefit?'

  'The syndicate benefits when I benefit,' Milo explained, 'because everybody has a share. And the syndicate gets Colonel Cathcart's and Colonel Korn's support so that they'll let me go out on trips like this one. You'll see how much profit that can mean in about fifteen minutes when we land in Palermo.'

  ' Malta,' Yossarian corrected him. 'We're flying to Malta now, not Palermo.'

  'No, we're flying to Palermo,' Milo answered. 'There's an endive exporter in Palermo I have to see for a minute about a shipment of mushrooms to Bern that were damaged by mold.'

  ' Milo, how do you do it?' Yossarian inquired with laughing amazement and admiration. 'You fill out a flight plan for one place and then you go to another. Don't the people in the control towers ever raise hell?'

  'They all belong to the syndicate,' Milo said. 'And they know that what's good for the syndicate is good for the country, because that's what makes Sammy run. The men in the control towers have a share, too, and that's why they always have to do whatever they can to help the syndicate.'

  'Do I have a share?'

  'Everybody has a share.'

  'Does Orr have a share?'

  'Everybody has a share.'

  'And Hungry Joe? He has a share, too?'

  'Everybody has a share.'

  'Well, I'll be damned,' mused Yossarian, deeply impressed with the idea of a share for the very first time.

  Milo turned toward him with a faint glimmer of mischief. 'I have a sure-fire plan for cheating the federal government out of six thousand dollars. We can make three thousand dollars apiece without any risk to either of us. Are you interested?'

  'No.' Milo looked at Yossarian with profound emotion. 'That's what I like about you,' he exclaimed. 'You're honest! You're the only one I know that I can really trust. That's why I wish you'd try to be of more help to me. I really was disappointed when you ran off with those two tramps in Catania yesterday.' Yossarian stared at Milo in quizzical disbelief. ' Milo, you told me to go with them. Don't you remember?'

  'That wasn't my fault,' Milo answered with dignity. 'I had to get rid of Orr some way once we reached town. It will be a lot different in Palermo. When we land in Palermo, I want you and Orr to leave with the girls right from the airport.'

  'With what girls?'

  'I radioed ahead and made arrangements with a four-year-old pimp to supply you and Orr with two eight-year-old virgins who are half Spanish. He'll be waiting at the airport in a limousine. Go right in as soon as you step out of the plane.'

  'Nothing doing,' said Yossarian, shaking his head. 'The only place I'm going is to sleep.' Milo turned livid with indignation, his slim long nose flickering spasmodically between his black eyebrows and his unbalanced orange-brown mustache like the pale, thin flame of a single candle. 'Yossarian, remember your mission,' he reminded reverently.

  'To hell with my mission,' Yossarian responded indifferently. 'And to hell with the syndicate too, even though I do have a share. I don't want any eight-year-old virgins, even if they are half Spanish.'

  'I don't blame you. But these eight-year-old virgins are really only thirty-two. And they're not really half Spanish but only one-third Estonian.'

  'I don't care for any virgins.'

  'And they're not even virgins,' Milo continued persuasively. 'The one I picked out for you was married for a short time to an elderly schoolteacher who slept with her only on Sundays, so she's really almost as good as new.' But Orr was sleepy, too, and Yossarian and Orr were both at Milo's side when they rode into the city of Palermo from the airport and discovered that there was no room for the two of them at the hotel there either, and, more important, that Milo was mayor.

  The weird, implausible reception for Milo began at the airfield, where civilian laborers who recognized him halted in their duties respectfully to gaze at him with full expressions of controlled exuberance and adulation. News of his arrival preceded him into the city, and the outskirts were already crowded with cheering citizens as they sped by in their small uncovered truck. Yossarian and Orr were mystified and mute and pressed close against Milo for security.

  Inside the city, the welcome for Milo grew louder as the truck slowed and eased deeper toward the middle of town. Small boys and girls had been released from school and were lining the sidewalks in new clothes, waving tiny flags. Yossarian and Orr were absolutely speechless now. The streets were jammed with joyous throngs, and strung overhead were huge banners bearing Milo's picture. Milo had posed for these pictures in a drab peasant's blouse with a high collar, and his scrupulous, paternal countenance was tolerant, wise, critical and strong as he stared out at the populace omnisciently with his undisciplined mustache and disunited eyes. Sinking invalids blew kisses to him from windows. Aproned shopkeepers cheered ecstatically from the narrow doorways of their shops. Tubas crumped. Here and there a person fell and was trampled to death. Sobbing old women swarmed through each other frantically around the slow-moving truck to touch Milo's shoulder or press his hand. Milo bore the tumultuous celebrations with benevolent grace. He waved back to everyone in elegant reciprocation and showered generous handfuls of foilcovered Hershey kisses to the rejoicing multitudes. Lines of lusty young boys and girls skipped along behind him with their arms linked, chanting in hoarse and glassy-eyed adoration, ' Milo! Mi-lo! Mi-lo!' Now that his secret was out, Milo relaxed with Yossarian and Orr and inflated opulently with a vast, shy pride. His cheeks turned flesh-colored. Milo had been elected mayor of Palermo --and of nearby Carini, Monreale, Bagheria, Termini Imerese, Cefalu, Mistretta and Nicosia as well--because he had brought Scotch to Sicily.

  Yossarian was amazed. 'The people here like to drink Scotch that much?'

  'They don't drink any of the Scotch,' Milo explained. 'Scotch is very expensive, and these people here are very poor.'

  'Then
why do you import it to Sicily if nobody drinks any?'

  'To build up a price. I move the Scotch here from Malta to make more room for profit when I sell it back to me for somebody else. I created a whole new industry here. Today Sicily is the third largest exporter of Scotch in the world, and that's why they elected me mayor.'

  'How about getting us a hotel room if you're such a hotshot?' Orr grumbled impertinently in a voice slurred with fatigue.

  Milo responded contritely. 'That's just what I'm going to do,' he promised. 'I'm really sorry about forgetting to radio ahead for hotel rooms for you two. Come along to my office and I'll speak to my deputy mayor about it right now.' Milo's office was a barbershop, and his deputy mayor was a pudgy barber from whose obsequious lips cordial greetings foamed as effusively as the lather he began whipping up in Milo's shaving cup.

  'Well, Vittorio,' said Milo, settling back lazily in one of Vittorio's barber chairs, 'how were things in my absence this time?'

  'Very sad, Signor Milo, very sad. But now that you are back, the people are all happy again.'

  'I was wondering about the size of the crowds. How come all the hotels are full?'

  'Because so many people from other cities are here to see you, Signor Milo. And because we have all the buyers who have come into town for the artichoke auction.' Milo's hand soared up perpendicularly like an eagle and arrested Vittorio's shaving brush. 'What's artichoke?' he inquired.

  'Artichoke, Signor Milo? An artichoke is a very tasty vegetable that is popular everywhere. You must try some artichokes while you are here, Signor Milo. We grow the best in the world.'

  'Really?' said Milo. 'How much are artichokes selling for this year?'

  'It looks like a very good year for artichokes. The crops were very bad.'

  'Is that a fact?' mused Milo, and was gone, sliding from his chair so swiftly that his striped barber's apron retained his shape for a second or two after he had gone before it collapsed. Milo had vanished from sight by the time Yossarian and Orr rushed after him to the doorway.

  'Next?' barked Milo's deputy mayor officiously. 'Who's next?' Yossarian and Orr walked from the barbershop in dejection. Deserted by Milo, they trudged homelessly through the reveling masses in futile search of a place to sleep. Yossarian was exhausted. His head throbbed with a dull, debilitating pain, and he was irritable with Orr, who had found two crab apples somewhere and walked with them in his cheeks until Yossarian spied them there and made him take them out. Then Orr found two horse chestnuts somewhere and slipped those in until Yossarian detected them and snapped at him again to take the crab apples out of his mouth. Orr grinned and replied that they were not crab apples but horse chestnuts and that they were not in his mouth but in his hands, but Yossarian was not able to understand a single word he said because of the horse chestnuts in his mouth and made him take them out anyway. A sly light twinkled in Orr's eyes. He rubbed his forehead harshly with his knuckles, like a man in an alcoholic stupor, and snickered lewdly.