Catch-22(16)

Doc Daneeka had been drafted and shipped to Pianosa as a flight surgeon, even though he was terrified of flying.

“I don’t have to go looking for trouble in an airplane,” he noted, blinking his beady, brown, offended eyes myopically. “It comes looking for me. Like that virgin I’m telling you about that couldn’t have a baby.”

“What virgin?” Yossarian asked. “I thought you were telling me about some newlyweds.”

“That’s the virgin I’m telling you about. They were just a couple of young kids, and they’d been married, oh, a little over a year when they came walking into my office without an appointment. You should have seen her. She was so sweet and young and pretty. She even blushed when I asked about her periods. I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving that girl. She was built like a dream and wore a chain around her neck with a medal of Saint Anthony hanging down inside the most beautiful bosom I never saw. ‘It must be a terrible temptation for Saint Anthony,’ I joked—just to put her at ease, you know. ‘Saint Anthony?’ her husband said. ‘Who’s Saint Anthony?’ ‘Ask your wife,’ I told him. ‘She can tell you who Saint Anthony is.’ ‘Who is Saint Anthony?’ he asked her. ‘Who?’ she wanted to know. ‘Saint Anthony,’ he told her. ‘Saint Anthony?’ she said. ‘Who’s Saint Anthony?’ When I got a good look at her inside my examination room I found she was still a virgin. I spoke to her husband alone while she was pulling her girdle back on and hooking it onto her stockings. ‘Every night,’ he boasted. A real wise guy, you know. ‘I never miss a night,’ he boasted. He meant it, too. ‘I even been puttin’ it to her mornings before the breakfasts she makes me before we go to work,’ he boasted. There was only one explanation. When I had them both together again I gave them a demonstration of intercourse with the rubber models I’ve got in my office. I’ve got these rubber models in my office with all the reproductive organs of both sexes that I keep locked up in separate cabinets to avoid a scandal. I mean I used to have them. I don’t have anything any more, not even a practice. The only thing I have now is this low temperature that I’m really starting to worry about. Those two kids I’ve got working for me in the medical tent aren’t worth a damn as diagnosticians. All they know how to do is complain. They think they’ve got troubles? What about me? They should have been in my office that day with those two newlyweds looking at me as though I were telling them something nobody’d ever heard of before. You never saw anybody so interested. ‘You mean like this?’ he asked me, and worked the models for himself awhile. You know, I can see where a certain type of person might get a big kick out of doing just that. ‘That’s it,’ I told him. ‘Now, you go home and try it my way for a few months and see what happens. Okay?’ ‘Okay,’ they said, and paid me in cash without any argument. ‘Have a good time,’ I told them, and they thanked me and walked out together. He had his arm around her waist as though he couldn’t wait to get her home and put it to her again. A few days later he came back all by himself and told my nurse he had to see me right away. As soon as we were alone, he punched me in the nose.”

“He did what?”

“He called me a wise guy and punched me in the nose. ‘What are you, a wise guy?’ he said, and knocked me flat on my ass. Pow! Just like that. I’m not kidding.”

“I know you’re not kidding,” Yossarian said. “But why did he do it?”

“How should I know why he did it?” Doc Daneeka retorted with annoyance.

“Maybe it had something to do with Saint Anthony?”

Doc Daneeka looked at Yossarian blankly. “Saint Anthony?” he asked with astonishment. “Who’s Saint Anthony?”

“How should I know?” answered Chief White Halfoat, staggering inside the tent just then with a bottle of whiskey cradled in his arm and sitting himself down pugnaciously between the two of them.

Doc Daneeka rose without a word and moved his chair outside the tent, his back bowed by the compact kit of injustices that was his perpetual burden. He could not bear the company of his roommate.

Chief White Halfoat thought he was crazy. “I don’t know what’s the matter with that guy,” he observed reproachfully. “He’s got no brains, that’s what’s the matter with him. If he had any brains he’d grab a shovel and start digging. Right here in the tent, he’d start digging, right under my cot. He’d strike oil in no time. Don’t he know how that enlisted man struck oil with a shovel back in the States? Didn’t he ever hear what happened to that kid—what was the name of that rotten rat bastard pimp of a snotnose back in Colorado?”