Catch-22(8)

“What are you doing?” Yossarian asked guardedly when he entered the tent, although he saw at once.

“There’s a leak here,” Orr said. “I’m trying to fix it.”

“Please stop it,” said Yossarian. “You’re making me nervous.”

“When I was a kid,” Orr replied, “I used to walk around all day with crab apples in my cheeks. One in each cheek.”

Yossarian put aside the musette bag from which he had begun removing his toilet articles and braced himself suspiciously. A minute passed. “Why?” he found himself forced to ask finally.

Orr tittered triumphantly. “Because they’re better than horse chestnuts,” he answered.

Orr was kneeling on the floor of the tent. He worked without pause, taking the faucet apart, spreading all the tiny pieces out carefully, counting and then studying each one interminably as though he had never seen anything remotely similar before, and then reassembling the whole small apparatus, over and over and over and over again, with no loss of patience or interest, no sign of fatigue, no indication of ever concluding. Yossarian watched him tinkering and felt certain he would be compelled to murder him in cold blood if he did not stop. His eyes moved toward the hunting knife that had been slung over the mosquito-net bar by the dead man the day he arrived. The knife hung beside the dead man’s empty leather gun holster, from which Havermeyer had stolen the gun.

“When I couldn’t get crab apples,” Orr continued, “I used horse chestnuts. Horse chestnuts are about the same size as crab apples and actually have a better shape, although the shape doesn’t matter a bit.”

“Why did you walk around with crab apples in your cheeks?” Yossarian asked again. “That’s what I asked.”

“Because they’ve got a better shape than horse chestnuts,” Orr answered. “I just told you that.”

“Why,” swore Yossarian at him approvingly, “you evil-eyed, mechanicallyaptituded, disaffiliated son of a bitch, did you walk around with anything in your cheeks?”

“I didn’t,” Orr said, “walk around with anything in my cheeks. I walked around with crab apples in my cheeks. When I couldn’t get crab apples I walked around with horse chestnuts. In my cheeks.”

Orr giggled. Yossarian made up his mind to keep his mouth shut and did. Orr waited. Yossarian waited longer.

“One in each cheek,” Orr said.

“Why?”

Orr pounced. “Why what?”

Yossarian shook his head, smiling, and refused to say.

“It’s a funny thing about this valve,” Orr mused aloud.

“What is?” Yossarian asked.

“Because I wanted—”

Yossarian knew. “Jesus Christ! Why did you want—”

“—apple cheeks.”

“—apple cheeks?” Yossarian demanded.

“I wanted apple cheeks,” Orr repeated. “Even when I was a kid I wanted apple cheeks someday, and I decided to work at it until I got them, and by God, I did work at it until I got them, and that’s how I did it, with crab apples in my cheeks all day long.” He giggled again. “One in each cheek.”

“Why did you want apple cheeks?”

“I didn’t want apple cheeks,” Orr said. “I wanted big cheeks. I didn’t care about the color so much, but I wanted them big. I worked at it just like one of those crazy guys you read about who go around squeezing rubber balls all day long just to strengthen their hands. In fact, I was one of those crazy guys. I used to walk around all day with rubber balls in my hands, too.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you walk around all day with rubber balls in your hands?”

“Because rubber balls—” said Orr.

“—are better than crab apples?”

Orr sniggered as he shook his head. “I did it to protect my good reputation in case anyone ever caught me walking around with crab apples in my cheeks. With rubber balls in my hands I could deny there were crab apples in my cheeks. Every time someone asked me why I was walking around with crab apples in my cheeks, I’d just open my hands and show them it was rubber balls I was walking around with, not crab apples, and that they were in my hands, not my cheeks. It was a good story. But I never knew if it got across or not, since it’s pretty tough to make people understand you when you’re talking to them with two crab apples in your cheeks.”

Yossarian found it pretty tough to understand him then, and he wondered once again if Orr wasn’t talking to him with the tip of his tongue in one of his apple cheeks.

Yossarian decided not to utter another word. It would be futile. He knew Orr, and he knew there was not a chance in hell of finding out from him then why he had wanted big cheeks. It would do no more good to ask than it had done to ask him why that whore had kept beating him over the head with her shoe that morning in Rome in the cramped vestibule outside the open door of Nately’s whore’s kid sister’s room. She was a tall, strapping girl with long hair and incandescent blue veins converging populously beneath her cocoa-colored skin where the flesh was most tender, and she kept cursing and shrieking and jumping high up into the air on her bare feet to keep right on hitting him on the top of his head with the spiked heel of her shoe. They were both naked, and raising a rumpus that brought everyone in the apartment into the hall to watch, each couple in a bedroom doorway, all of them naked except the aproned and sweatered old woman, who clucked reprovingly, and the lecherous, dissipated old man, who cackled aloud hilariously through the whole episode with a kind of avid and superior glee. The girl shrieked and Orr giggled. Each time she landed with the heel of her shoe, Orr giggled louder, infuriating her still further so that she flew up still higher into the air for another shot at his noodle, her wondrously full breasts soaring all over the place like billowing pennants in a strong wind and her buttocks and strong thighs shim-sham-shimmying this way and that way like some horrifying bonanza. She shrieked and Orr giggled right up to the time she shrieked and knocked him cold with a good solid crack on the temple that made him stop giggling and sent him off to the hospital in a stretcher with a hole in his head that wasn’t very deep and a very mild concussion that kept him out of combat only twelve days.