Catch-22(66)

The plane was slammed again suddenly with another loud, jarring explosion that almost rocked it over on its back, and the nose filled immediately with sweet clouds of blue smoke. Something was on fire! Yossarian whirled to escape and smacked into Aarfy, who had struck a match and was placidly lightning his pipe. Yossarian gaped at his grinning, moon-faced navigator in utter shock and confusion. It occurred to him that one of them was mad.

“Jesus Christ!” he screamed at Aarfy in tortured amazement. “Get the hell out of the nose! Are you crazy? Get out!”

“What?” said Aarfy.

“Get out!” Yossarian yelled hysterically, and began clubbing Aarfy backhanded with both fists to drive him away. “Get out!”

“I still can’t hear you,” Aarfy called back innocently with an expression of mild and reproving perplexity. “You’ll have to talk a little louder.”

“Get out of the nose!” Yossarian shrieked in frustration. “They’re trying to kill us! Don’t you understand? They’re trying to kill us!”

“Which way should I go, goddammit?” McWatt shouted furiously over the intercom in a suffering, high-pitched voice. “Which way should I go?”

“Turn left! Left, you goddam dirty son of a bitch! Turn left hard!”

Aarfy crept up close behind Yossarian and jabbed him sharply in the ribs with the stem of his pipe. Yossarian flew up toward the ceiling with a whinnying cry, then jumped completely around on his knees, white as a sheet and quivering with rage. Aarfy winked encouragingly and jerked his thumb back toward McWatt with a humorous moue.

“What’s eating him?” he asked with a laugh.

Yossarian was struck with a weird sense of distortion. “Will you get out of here?” he yelped beseechingly, and shoved Aarfy over with all his strength. “Are you deaf or something? Get back in the plane!” And to McWatt he screamed, “Dive! Dive!”

Down they sank once more into the crunching, thudding, voluminous barrage of bursting antiaircraft shells as Aarfy came creeping back behind Yossarian and jabbed him sharply in the ribs again. Yossarian shied upward with another whinnying gasp.

“I still couldn’t hear you,” Aarfy said.

“I said get out of here!” Yossarian shouted, and broke into tears. He began punching Aarfy in the body with both hands as hard as he could. “Get away from me! Get away!”

Punching Aarfy was like sinking his fists into a limp sack of inflated rubber. There was no resistance, no response at all from the soft, insensitive mass, and after a while Yossarian’s spirit died and his arms dropped helplessly with exhaustion. He was overcome with a humiliating feeling of impotence and was ready to weep in self-pity.

“What did you say?” Aarfy asked.

“Get away from me,” Yossarian answered, pleading with him now. “Go back in the plane.”

“I still can’t hear you.”

“Never mind,” wailed Yossarian, “never mind. Just leave me alone.”

“Never mind what?”

Yossarian began hitting himself in the forehead. He seized Aarfy by the shirt front and, struggling to his feet for traction, dragged him to the rear of the nose compartment and flung him down like a bloated and unwieldy bag in the entrance of the crawlway. A shell banged open with a stupendous clout right beside his ear as he was scrambling back toward the front, and some undestroyed recess of his intelligence wondered that it did not kill them all. They were climbing again. The engines were howling again as though in pain, and the air inside the plane was acrid with the smell of machinery and fetid with the stench of gasoline. The next thing he knew, it was snowing!

Thousands of tiny bits of white paper were falling like snowflakes inside the plane, milling around his head so thickly that they clung to his eyelashes when he blinked in astonishment and fluttered against his nostrils and lips each time he inhaled. When he spun around in bewilderment, Aarfy was grinning proudly from ear to ear like something inhuman as he held up a shattered paper map for Yossarian to see. A large chunk of flak had ripped up from the floor through Aarfy’s colossal jumble of maps and had ripped out through the ceiling inches away from their heads. Aarfy’s joy was sublime.

“Will you look at this?” he murmured, waggling two of his stubby fingers playfully into Yossarian’s face through the hole in one of his maps. “Will you look at this?”

Yossarian was dumbfounded by his state of rapturous contentment. Aarfy was like an eerie ogre in a dream, incapable of being bruised or evaded, and Yossarian dreaded him for a complex of reasons he was too petrified to untangle. Wind whistling up through the jagged gash in the floor kept the myriad bits of paper circulating like alabaster particles in a paperweight and contributed to a sensation of lacquered, waterlogged unreality. Everything seemed strange, so tawdry and grotesque. His head was throbbing from a shrill clamor that drilled relentlessly into both ears. It was McWatt, begging for directions in an incoherent frenzy. Yossarian continued staring in tormented fascination at Aarfy’s spherical countenance beaming at him so serenely and vacantly through the drifting whorls of white paper bits and concluded that he was a raving lunatic just as eight bursts of flak broke open successively at eye level off to the right, then eight more, and then eight more, the last group pulled over toward the left so that they were almost directly in front.