Catch-22(6)

Immediately next door to Yossarian was Havermeyer, who liked peanut brittle and lived all by himself in the two-man tent in which he shot tiny field mice every night with huge bullets from the .45 he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian’s tent. On the other side of Havermeyer stood the tent McWatt no longer shared with Clevinger, who had still not returned when Yossarian came out of the hospital. McWatt shared his tent now with Nately, who was away in Rome courting the sleepy whore he had fallen so deeply in love with there who was bored with her work and bored with him too. McWatt was crazy. He was a pilot and flew his plane as low as he dared over Yossarian’s tent as often as he could, just to see how much he could frighten him, and loved to go buzzing with a wild, close roar over the wooden raft floating on empty oil drums out past the sand bar at the immaculate white beach where the men went swimming naked. Sharing a tent with a man who was crazy wasn’t easy, but Nately didn’t care. He was crazy, too, and had gone every free day to work on the officers’ club that Yossarian had not helped build.

Actually, there were many officers’ clubs that Yossarian had not helped build, but he was proudest of the one on Pianosa. It was a sturdy and complex monument to his powers of determination. Yossarian never went there to help until it was finished; then he went there often, so pleased was he with the large, fine, rambling shingled building. It was truly a splendid structure, and Yossarian throbbed with a mighty sense of accomplishment each time he gazed at it and reflected that none of the work that had gone into it was his.

There were four of them seated together at a table in the officers’ club the last time he and Clevinger had called each other crazy. They were seated in back near the crap table on which Appleby always managed to win. Appleby was as good at shooting crap as he was at playing Ping-Pong, and he was as good at playing Ping-Pong as he was at everything else. Everything Appleby did, he did well. Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God, Motherhood and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him.

“I hate that son of a bitch,” Yossarian growled.

The argument with Clevinger had begun a few minutes earlier when Yossarian had been unable to find a machine gun. It was a busy night. The bar was busy, the crap table was busy, the Ping-Pong table was busy. The people Yossarian wanted to machine-gun were busy at the bar singing sentimental old favorites that nobody else ever tired of. Instead of machine-gunning them, he brought his heel down hard on the Ping-Pong ball that came rolling toward him off the paddle of one of the two officers playing.

“That Yossarian,” the two officers laughed, shaking their heads, and got another ball from the box on the shelf.

“That Yossarian,” Yossarian answered them.

“Yossarian,” Nately whispered cautioningly.

“You see what I mean?” asked Clevinger.

The officers laughed again when they heard Yossarian mimicking them. “That Yossarian,” they said more loudly.

“That Yossarian,” Yossarian echoed.

“Yossarian, please,” Nately pleaded.

“You see what I mean?” asked Clevinger. “He has antisocial aggressions.”

“Oh, shut up,” Dunbar told Clevinger. Dunbar liked Clevinger because Clevinger annoyed him and made the time go slow.

“Appleby isn’t even here,” Clevinger pointed out triumphantly to Yossarian.

“Who said anything about Appleby?” Yossarian wanted to know.

“Colonel Cathcart isn’t here, either.”

“Who said anything about Colonel Cathcart?”

“What son of a bitch do you hate, then?”

“What son of a bitch is here?”

“I’m not going to argue with you,” Clevinger decided. “You don’t know who you hate.”

“Whoever’s trying to poison me,” Yossarian told him.

“Nobody’s trying to poison you.”

“They poisoned my food twice, didn’t they? Didn’t they put poison in my food during Ferrara and during the Great Big Siege of Bologna?”

“They put poison in everybody’s food,” Clevinger explained.

“And what difference does that make?”

“And it wasn’t even poison!” Clevinger cried heatedly, growing more emphatic as he grew more confused.

As far back as Yossarian could recall, he explained to Clevinger with a patient smile, somebody was always hatching a plot to kill him. There were people who cared for him and people who didn’t, and those who didn’t hated him and were out to get him. They hated him because he was Assyrian. But they couldn’t touch him, he told Clevinger, because he had a sound mind in a pure body and was as strong as an ox. They couldn’t touch him because he was Tarzan, Mandrake, Flash Gordon. He was Bill Shakespeare. He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was miracle ingredient Z-247. He was—