6 HUNGRY JOE
Hungry Joe did have fifty missions, but they were no help. He had his bags packed and was waiting again to go home. At night he had eerie, ear- splitting nightmares that kept everyone in the squadron awake but Huple, the fifteen-year-old pilot who had lied about his age to get into the Army and lived with his pet cat in the same tent with Hungry Joe. Huple was a light sleeper, but claimed he never heard Hungry Joe scream. Hungry Joe was sick.
“So what?” Doc Daneeka snarled resentfully. “I had it made, I tell you.
Fifty grand a year I was knocking down, and almost all of it tax-free, since I made my customers pay me in cash. I had the strongest trade association in the world backing me up. And look what happened. Just when I was all set to really start stashing it away, they had to manufacture fascism and start a war horrible enough to affect even me. I gotta laugh when I hear someone like Hungry Joe screaming his brains out every night. I really gotta laugh.
He’s sick? How does he think I feel?”
Hungry Joe was too firmly embedded in calamities of his own to care how Doc Daneeka felt. There were the noises, for instance. Small ones enraged him and he hollered himself hoarse at Aarfy for the wet, sucking sounds he made puffing on his pipe, at Orr for tinkering, at McWatt for the explosive snap he gave each card he turned over when he dealt at blackjack or poker, at Dobbs for letting his teeth chatter as he went blundering clumsily about bumping into things. Hungry Joe was a throbbing, ragged mass of motile irritability. The steady ticking of a watch in a quiet room crashed like torture against his unshielded brain.
“Listen, kid,” he explained harshly to Huple very late one evening, “if you want to live in this tent, you’ve got to do like I do. You’ve got to roll your wrist watch up in a pair of wool socks every night and keep it on the bottom of your foot locker on the other side of the room.”
Huple thrust his jaw out defiantly to let Hungry Joe know he couldn’t be pushed around and then did exactly as he had been told.
Hungry Joe was a jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless face of dingy skin and bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously in the blackened hollows behind his eyes like severed sections of snake. It was a desolate, cratered face, sooty with care like an abandoned mining town.
Hungry Joe ate voraciously, gnawed incessantly at the tips of his fingers, stammered, choked, itched, sweated, salivated, and sprang from spot to spot fanatically with an intricate black camera with which he was always trying to take pictures of naked girls. They never came out. He was always forgetting to put film in the camera or turn on lights or remove the cover from the lens opening. It wasn’t easy persuading naked girls to pose, but Hungry Joe had the knack.
“Me big man,” he would shout. “Me big photographer from Life magazine.
Big picture on heap big cover. Si, si, si! Hollywood star. Multi dinero. Multi divorces. Multi ficky-fick all day long.”
Few women anywhere could resist such wily cajolery, and prostitutes would spring to their feet eagerly and hurl themselves into whatever fantastic poses he requested for them. Women killed Hungry Joe. His response to them as sexual beings was one of frenzied worship and idolatry. They were lovely, satisfying, maddening manifestations of the miraculous, instruments of pleasure too powerful to be measured, too keen to be endured, and too exquisite to be intended for employment by base, unworthy man. He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt he had before Someone caught wise and whisked them away. He could never decide whether to furgle them or photograph them, for he had found it impossible to do both simultaneously. In fact, he was finding it almost impossible to do either, so scrambled were his powers of performance by the compulsive need for haste that invariably possessed him. The pictures never came out, and Hungry Joe never got in. The odd thing was that in civilian life Hungry Joe really had been a photographer for Life magazine.
He was a hero now, the biggest hero the Air Force had, Yossarian felt, for he had flown more combat tours of duty than any other hero the Air Force had.
He had flown six combat tours of duty. Hungry Joe had finished flying his first combat tour of duty when twenty-five missions were all that were necessary for him to pack his bags, write happy letters home and begin hounding Sergeant Towser humorously for the arrival of the orders rotating
him back to the States. While he waited, he spent each day shuffling rhythmically around the entrance of the operations tent, making boisterous wisecracks to everybody who came by and jocosely calling Sergeant Towser a lousy son of a bitch every time Sergeant Towser popped out of the orderly room.
Hungry Joe had finished flying his first twenty-five missions during the week of the Salerno beachhead, when Yossarian was laid up in the hospital with a burst of clap he had caught on a low-level mission over a Wac in bushes on a supply flight to Marrakech. Yossarian did his best to catch up with Hungry Joe and almost did, flying six missions in six days, but his twenty-third mission was to Arezzo, where Colonel Nevers was killed, and that was as close as he had ever been able to come to going home. The next day Colonel Cathcart was there, brimming with tough pride in his new outfit and celebrating his assumption of command by raising the number of missions required from twenty-five to thirty. Hungry Joe unpacked his bags and rewrote the happy letters home. He stopped hounding Sergeant Towser humorously. He began hating Sergeant Towser, focusing all blame upon him venomously, even though he knew Sergeant Towser had nothing to do with the arrival of Colonel Cathcart or the delay in the processing of shipping orders that might have rescued him seven days earlier and five times since.
Hungry Joe could no longer stand the strain of waiting for shipping orders and crumbled promptly into ruin every time he finished another tour of duty. Each time he was taken off combat status, he gave a big party for the little circle of friends he had. He broke out the bottles of bourbon he had managed to buy on his four-day weekly circuits with the courier plane and laughed, sang, shuffled and shouted in a festival of inebriated ecstasy until he could no longer keep awake and receded peacefully into slumber. As soon as Yossarian, Nately and Dunbar put him to bed he began screaming in his sleep. In the morning he stepped from his tent looking haggard, fearful and guilt-ridden, an eaten shell of a human building rocking perilously on the brink of collapse.
The nightmares appeared to Hungry Joe with celestial punctuality every single night he spent in the squadron throughout the whole harrowing ordeal when he was not flying combat missions and was waiting once again for the orders sending him home that never came. Impressionable men in the squadron like Dobbs and Captain Flume were so deeply disturbed by
Hungry Joe’s shrieking nightmares that they would begin to have shrieking nightmares of their own, and the piercing obscenities they flung into the air every night from their separate places in the squadron rang against each other in the darkness romantically like the mating calls of songbirds with filthy minds. Colonel Korn acted decisively to arrest what seemed to him to be the beginning of an unwholesome trend in Major Major’s squadron. The solution he provided was to have Hungry Joe fly the courier ship once a week, removing him from the squadron for four nights, and the remedy, like all Colonel Korn’s remedies, was successful.
Every time Colonel Cathcart increased the number of missions and returned Hungry Joe to combat duty, the nightmares stopped and Hungry Joe settled down into a normal state of terror with a smile of relief. Yossarian read Hungry Joe’s shrunken face like a headline. It was good when Hungry Joe looked bad and terrible when Hungry Joe looked good. Hungry Joe’s inverted set of responses was a curious phenomenon to everyone but Hungry Joe, who denied the whole thing stubbornly.
“Who dreams?” he answered, when Yossarian asked him what he dreamed about.
“Joe, why don’t you go see Doc Daneeka?” Yossarian advised.
“Why should I go see Doc Daneeka? I’m not sick.”
“What about your nightmares?”
“I don’t have nightmares,” Hungry Joe lied.
“Maybe he can do something about them.”
“There’s nothing wrong with nightmares,” Hungry Joe answered.
“Everybody has nightmares.”
Yossarian thought he had him. “Every night?” he asked.
“Why not every night?” Hungry Joe demanded.
And suddenly it all made sense. Why not every night, indeed? It made sense to cry out in pain every night. It made more sense than Appleby, who was a stickler for regulations and had ordered Kraft to order Yossarian to take his Atabrine tablets on the flight overseas after Yossarian and Appleby had stopped talking to each other. Hungry Joe made more sense than Kraft, too, who was dead, dumped unceremoniously into doom over Ferrara by an exploding engine after Yossarian took his flight of six planes in over the target a second time. The group had missed the bridge at Ferrara again for the seventh straight day with the bombsight that could put bombs into a pickle barrel at forty thousand feet, and one whole week had already passed
since Colonel Cathcart had volunteered to have his men destroy the bridge in twenty-four hours. Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted. He had lived innocuously for a little while and then had gone down in flame over Ferrara on the seventh day, while God was resting, when McWatt turned and Yossarian guided him in over the target on a second bomb run because Aarfy was confused and Yossarian had been unable to drop his bombs the first time.
“I guess we do have to go back again, don’t we?” McWatt had said
somberly over the intercom.
“I guess we do,” said Yossarian.
“Do we?” said McWatt.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, well,” sang McWatt, “what the hell.”
And back they had gone while the planes in the other flights circled safely off in the distance and every crashing cannon in the Hermann Goering Division below was busy crashing shells this time only at them.
Colonel Cathcart had courage and never hesitated to volunteer his men for any target available. No target was too dangerous for his group to attack, just as no shot was too difficult for Appleby to handle on the ping-pong table. Appleby was a good pilot and a superhuman ping-pong player with flies in his eyes who never lost a point. Twenty-one serves were all it ever took for Appleby to disgrace another opponent. His prowess on the ping- pong table was legendary, and Appleby won every game he started until the night Orr got tipsy on gin and juice and smashed open Appleby’s forehead with his paddle after Appleby had smashed back each of Orr’s first five serves. Orr leaped on top of the table after hurling his paddle and came sailing off the other end in a running broad jump with both feet planted squarely in Appleby’s face. Pandemonium broke loose. It took almost a full minute for Appleby to disentangle himself from Orr’s flailing arms and legs and grope his way to his feet, with Orr held off the ground before him by the shirt front in one hand and his other arm drawn back in a fist to smite him dead, and at that moment Yossarian stepped forward and took Orr away from him. It was a night of surprises for Appleby, who was as large as
Yossarian and as strong and who swung at Yossarian as hard as he could with a punch that flooded Chief White Halfoat with such joyous excitement that he turned and busted Colonel Moodus in the nose with a punch that filled General Dreedle with such mellow gratification that he had Colonel Cathcart throw the chaplain out of the officers’ club and ordered Chief White Halfoat moved into Doc Daneeka’s tent, where he could be under a doctor’s care twenty-four hours a day and be kept in good enough physical condition to bust Colonel Moodus in the nose again whenever General Dreedle wanted him to. Sometimes General Dreedle made special trips down from Wing Headquarters with Colonel Moodus and his nurse just to have Chief White Halfoat bust his son-in-law in the nose.
Chief White Halfoat would much rather have remained in the trailer he shared with Captain Flume, the silent, haunted squadron public-relations officer who spent most of each evening developing the pictures he took during the day to be sent out with his publicity releases. Captain Flume spent as much of each evening as he could working in his darkroom and then lay down on his cot with his fingers crossed and a rabbit’s foot around his neck and tried with all his might to stay awake. He lived in mortal fear of Chief White Halfoat. Captain Flume was obsessed with the idea that Chief White Halfoat would tiptoe up to his cot one night when he was sound asleep and slit his throat open for him from ear to ear. Captain Flume had obtained this idea from Chief White Halfoat himself, who did tiptoe up to his cot one night as he was dozing off, to hiss portentously that one night when he, Captain Flume, was sound asleep he, Chief White Halfoat, was going to slit his throat open for him from ear to ear. Captain Flume turned to ice, his eyes, flung open wide, staring directly up into Chief White Halfoat’s, glinting drunkenly only inches away.
“Why?” Captain Flume managed to croak finally.
“Why not?” was Chief White Halfoat’s answer.
Each night after that, Captain Flume forced himself to keep awake as long as possible. He was aided immeasurably by Hungry Joe’s nightmares.
Listening so intently to Hungry Joe’s maniacal howling night after night, Captain Flume grew to hate him and began wishing that Chief White Halfoat would tiptoe up to his cot one night and slit his throat open for him from ear to ear. Actually, Captain Flume slept like a log most nights and merely dreamed he was awake. So convincing were these dreams of lying
awake that he woke from them each morning in complete exhaustion and fell right back to sleep.
Chief White Halfoat had grown almost fond of Captain Flume since his amazing metamorphosis. Captain Flume had entered his bed that night a buoyant extrovert and left it the next morning a brooding introvert, and Chief White Halfoat proudly regarded the new Captain Flume as his own creation. He had never intended to slit Captain Flume’s throat open for him from ear to ear. Threatening to do so was merely his idea of a joke, like dying of pneumonia, busting Colonel Moodus in the nose or challenging Doc Daneeka to Indian wrestle. All Chief White Halfoat wanted to do when he staggered in drunk each night was go right to sleep, and Hungry Joe often made that impossible. Hungry Joe’s nightmares gave Chief White Halfoat the heebie-jeebies, and he often wished that someone would tiptoe into Hungry Joe’s tent, lift Huple’s cat off his face and slit his throat open for him from ear to ear, so that everybody in the squadron but Captain Flume could get a good night’s sleep.
Even though Chief White Halfoat kept busting Colonel Moodus in the nose for General Dreedle’s benefit, he was still outside the pale. Also outside the pale was Major Major, the squadron commander, who had found that out the same time he found out that he was squadron commander from Colonel Cathcart, who came blasting into the squadron in his hopped-up jeep the day after Major Duluth was killed over Perugia. Colonel Cathcart slammed to a screeching stop inches short of the railroad ditch separating the nose of his jeep from the lopsided basketball court on the other side, from which Major Major was eventually driven by the kicks and shoves and stones and punches of the men who had almost become his friends.
“You’re the new squadron commander,” Colonel Cathcart had bellowed across the ditch at him. “But don’t think it means anything, because it doesn’t. All it means is that you’re the new squadron commander.”
And Colonel Cathcart had roared away as abruptly as he’d come, whipping the jeep around with a vicious spinning of wheels that sent a spray of fine grit blowing into Major Major’s face. Major Major was immobilized by the news. He stood speechless, lanky and gawking, with a scuffed basketball in his long hands as the seeds of rancor sown so swiftly by Colonel Cathcart took root in the soldiers around him who had been playing basketball with him and who had let him come as close to making friends with them as anyone had ever let him come before. The whites of his moony eyes grew
large and misty as his mouth struggled yearningly and lost against the familiar, impregnable loneliness drifting in around him again like suffocating fog.
Like all the other officers at Group Headquarters except Major Danby, Colonel Cathcart was infused with the democratic spirit: he believed that all men were created equal, and he therefore spurned all men outside Group Headquarters with equal fervor. Nevertheless, he believed in his men. As he told them frequently in the briefing room, he believed they were at least ten missions better than any other outfit and felt that any who did not share this confidence he had placed in them could get the hell out. The only way they could get the hell out, though, as Yossarian learned when he flew to visit ex- P.F.C. Wintergreen, was by flying the extra ten missions.
“I still don’t get it,” Yossarian protested. “Is Doc Daneeka right or isn’t he?”
“How many did he say?”
“Forty.”
“Daneeka was telling the truth,” ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen admitted. “Forty missions is all you have to fly as far as Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters is concerned.”
Yossarian was jubilant. “Then I can go home, right? I’ve got forty-eight.”
“No, you can’t go home,” ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen corrected him. “Are you
crazy or something?”
“Why not?”
“Catch-22.”
“Catch-22?” Yossarian was stunned. “What the hell has Catch-22 got to do with it?”
“Catch-22,” Doc Daneeka answered patiently, when Hungry Joe had flown Yossarian back to Pianosa, “says you’ve always got to do what your commanding officer tells you to.”
“But Twenty-seventh Air Force says I can go home with forty missions.”
“But they don’t say you have to go home. And regulations do say you have to obey every order. That’s the catch. Even if the colonel were disobeying a Twenty-seventh Air Force order by making you fly more missions, you’d still have to fly them, or you’d be guilty of disobeying an order of his. And then Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters would really jump on you.”
Yossarian slumped with disappointment. “Then I really have to fly the fifty missions, don’t I?” he grieved.
“The fifty-five,” Doc Daneeka corrected him.
“What fifty-five?”
“The fifty-five missions the colonel now wants all of you to fly.”
Hungry Joe heaved a huge sigh of relief when he heard Doc Daneeka and broke into a grin. Yossarian grabbed Hungry Joe by the neck and made him fly them both right back to ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen.
“What would they do to me,” he asked in confidential tones, “if I refused to fly them?”
“We’d probably shoot you,” ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen replied.
“We?” Yossarian cried in surprise. “What do you mean, we? Since when are you on their side?”
“If you’re going to be shot, whose side do you expect me to be on?” ex- P.F.C. Wintergreen retorted.
Yossarian winced. Colonel Cathcart had raised him again.
7 McWATT
Ordinarily, Yossarian’s pilot was McWatt, who, shaving in loud red, clean pajamas outside his tent each morning, was one of the odd, ironic, incomprehensible things surrounding Yossarian. McWatt was the craziest combat man of them all probably, because he was perfectly sane and still did not mind the war. He was a short-legged, wide-shouldered, smiling young soul who whistled bouncy show tunes continuously and turned over cards with sharp snaps when he dealt at blackjack or poker until Hungry Joe disintegrated into quaking despair finally beneath their cumulative impact and began ranting at him to stop snapping the cards.
“You son of a bitch, you only do it because it hurts me,” Hungry Joe would yell furiously, as Yossarian held him back soothingly with one hand. “That’s the only reason he does it, because he likes to hear me scream—you goddam son of a bitch!”
McWatt crinkled his fine, freckled nose apologetically and vowed not to snap the cards any more, but always forgot. McWatt wore fleecy bedroom slippers with his red pajamas and slept between freshly pressed colored bedsheets like the one Milo had retrieved half of for him from the grinning thief with the sweet tooth in exchange for none of the pitted dates Milo had borrowed from Yossarian. McWatt was deeply impressed with Milo, who, to the amusement of Corporal Snark, his mess sergeant, was already buying eggs for seven cents apiece and selling them for five cents. But McWatt was
never as impressed with Milo as Milo had been with the letter Yossarian had obtained for his liver from Doc Daneeka.
“What’s this?” Milo had cried out in alarm, when he came upon the enormous corrugated carton filled with packages of dried fruit and cans of fruit juices and desserts that two of the Italian laborers Major --- de Coverley had kidnaped for his kitchen were about to carry off to Yossarian’s tent.
“This is Captain Yossarian, sir,” said Corporal Snark with a superior smirk.
Corporal Snark was an intellectual snob who felt he was twenty years ahead of his time and did not enjoy cooking down to the masses. “He has a letter from Doc Daneeka entitling him to all the fruit and fruit juices he wants.”
“What’s this?” cried out Yossarian, as Milo went white and began to sway.
“This is Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder, sir,” said Corporal Snark with a derisive wink. “One of our new pilots. He became mess officer while you were in the hospital this last time.”
“What’s this?” cried out McWatt, late in the afternoon, as Milo handed him half his bedsheet.
“It’s half of the bedsheet that was stolen from your tent this morning,” Milo explained with nervous self-satisfaction, his rusty mustache twitching rapidly. “I’ll bet you didn’t even know it was stolen.”
“Why should anyone want to steal half a bedsheet?” Yossarian asked.
Milo grew flustered. “You don’t understand,” he protested.
And Yossarian also did not understand why Milo needed so desperately to invest in the letter from Doc Daneeka, which came right to the point. “Give Yossarian all the dried fruit and fruit juices he wants,” Doc Daneeka had written. “He says he has a liver condition.”
“A letter like this,” Milo mumbled despondently, “could ruin any mess officer in the world.” Milo had come to Yossarian’s tent just to read the letter again, following his carton of lost provisions across the squadron like a mourner. “I have to give you as much as you ask for. Why, the letter doesn’t even say you have to eat all of it yourself.”
“And it’s a good thing it doesn’t,” Yossarian told him, “because I never eat any of it. I have a liver condition.”
“Oh, yes, I forgot,” said Milo, in a voice lowered deferentially. “Is it bad?”
“Just bad enough,” Yossarian answered cheerfully.
“I see,” said Milo. “What does that mean?”
“It means that it couldn’t be better...”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“...without being worse. Now do you see?”
“Yes, now I see. But I still don’t think I understand.”
“Well, don’t let it trouble you. Let it trouble me. You see, I don’t really have a liver condition. I’ve just got the symptoms. I have a Garnett-Fleischaker syndrome.”
“I see,” said Milo. “And what is a Garnett-Fleischaker syndrome?”
“A liver condition.”
“I see,” said Milo, and began massaging his black eyebrows together wearily with an expression of interior pain, as though waiting for some stinging discomfort he was experiencing to go away. “In that case,” he continued finally, “I suppose you do have to be very careful about what you eat, don’t you?.
“Very careful indeed,” Yossarian told him. “A good Garnett-Fleischaker syndrome isn’t easy to come by, and I don’t want to ruin mine. That’s why I never eat any fruit.”
“Now I do see,” said Milo. “Fruit is bad for your liver?”
“No, fruit is good for my liver. That’s why I never eat any.”
“Then what do you do with it?” demanded Milo, plodding along doggedly through his mounting confusion to fling out the question burning on his
lips. “Do you sell it?”
“I give it away.”
“To who?” cried Milo, in a voice cracking with dismay.
“To anyone who wants it,” Yossarian shouted back.
Milo let out a long, melancholy wail and staggered back, beads of perspiration popping out suddenly all over his ashen face. He tugged on his unfortunate mustache absently, his whole body trembling.
“I give a great deal of it to Dunbar,” Yossarian went on.
“Dunbar?” Milo echoed numbly.
“Yes. Dunbar can eat all the fruit he wants and it won’t do him a damned bit of good. I just leave the carton right out there in the open for anyone who wants any to come and help himself. Aarfy comes here to get prunes because he says he never gets enough prunes in the mess hall. You might look into that when you’ve got some time because it’s no fun having Aarfy hanging around here. Whenever the supply runs low I just have Corporal Snark fill me up again. Nately always takes a whole load of fruit along with him whenever he goes to Rome. He’s in love with a whore there who hates
me and isn’t at all interested in him. She’s got a kid sister who never leaves them alone in bed together, and they live in an apartment with an old man and woman and a bunch of other girls with nice fat thighs who are always kidding around also. Nately brings them a whole cartonful every time he
goes.”
“Does he sell it to them?”
“No, he gives it to them.”
Milo frowned. “Well, I suppose that’s very generous of him,” he remarked
with no enthusiasm.
“Yes, very generous,” Yossarian agreed.
“And I’m sure it’s perfectly legal,” said Milo, “since the food is yours once you get it from me. I suppose that with conditions as hard as they are, these people are very glad to get it.”
“Yes, very glad,” Yossarian assured him. “The two girls sell it all on the black market and use the money to buy flashy costume jewelry and cheap perfume.”
Milo perked up. “Costume jewelry!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know that.
How much are they paying for cheap perfume?”
“The old man uses his share to buy raw whiskey and dirty pictures. He’s a
lecher.”
“A lecher?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“Is there much of a market in Rome for dirty pictures?” Milo asked.
“You’d be surprised. Take Aarfy, for instance. Knowing him, you’d never
suspect, would you?”
“That he’s a lecher?”
“No, that he’s a navigator. You know Captain Aardvaark, don’t you? He’s that nice guy who came up to you your first day in the squadron and said, ‘Aardvaark’s my name, and navigation is my game.’ He wore a pipe in his face and probably asked you what college you went to. Do you know him?”
Milo was paying no attention. “Let me be your partner,” he blurted out imploringly.
Yossarian turned him down, even though he had no doubt that the truckloads of fruit would be theirs to dispose of any way they saw fit once Yossarian had requisitioned them from the mess hall with Doc Daneeka’s letter. Milo was crestfallen, but from that moment on he trusted Yossarian with every secret but one, reasoning shrewdly that anyone who would not
steal from the country he loved would not steal from anybody. Milo trusted Yossarian with every secret but the location of the holes in the hills in which he began burying his money once he returned from Smyrna with his planeload of figs and learned from Yossarian that a C.I.D. man had come to the hospital. To Milo, who had been gullible enough to volunteer for it, the position of mess officer was a sacred trust.
“I didn’t even realize we weren’t serving enough prunes,” he had admitted that first day. “I suppose it’s because I’m still so new. I’ll raise the question with my first chef.”
Yossarian eyed him sharply. “What first chef?” he demanded. “You don’t have a first chef.”
“Corporal Snark,” Milo explained, looking away a little guiltily. “He’s the only chef I have, so he really is my first chef, although I hope to move him over to the administrative side. Corporal Snark tends to be a little too creative, I feel. He thinks being a mess sergeant is some sort of art form and is always complaining about having to prostitute his talents. Nobody is asking him to do any such thing! Incidentally, do you happen to know why he was busted to private and is only a corporal now?”
“Yes,” said Yossarian. “He poisoned the squadron.”
Milo went pale again. “He did what?”
“He mashed hundreds of cakes of GI soap into the sweet potatoes just to show that people have the taste of Philistines and don’t know the difference between good and bad. Every man in the squadron was sick. Missions were canceled.”
“Well!” Milo exclaimed, with thin-upped disapproval. “He certainly found out how wrong he was, didn’t he?”
“On the contrary,” Yossarian corrected. “He found out how right he was.
We packed it away by the plateful and clamored for more. We all knew we were sick, but we had no idea we’d been poisoned.”
Milo sniffed in consternation twice, like a shaggy brown hare. “In that case, I certainly do want to get him over to the administrative side. I don’t want anything like that happening while I’m in charge. You see,” he confided earnestly, “what I hope to do is give the men in this squadron the best meals in the whole world. That’s really something to shoot at, isn’t it? If a mess officer aims at anything less, it seems to me, he has no right being mess officer. Don’t you agree?”
Yossarian turned slowly to gaze at Milo with probing distrust. He saw a simple, sincere face that was incapable of subtlety or guile, an honest, frank face with disunited large eyes, rusty hair, black eyebrows and an unfortunate reddish-brown mustache. Milo had a long, thin nose with sniffing, damp nostrils heading sharply off to the right, always pointing away from where the rest of him was looking. It was the face of a man of hardened integrity who could no more consciously violate the moral principles on which his virtue rested than he could transform himself into a despicable toad. One of these moral principles was that it was never a sin to charge as much as the traffic would bear. He was capable of mighty paroxysms of righteous indignation, and he was indignant as could be when he learned that a C.I.D. man was in the area looking for him.
“He’s not looking for you,” Yossarian said, trying to placate him. “He’s looking for someone up in the hospital who’s been signing Washington Irving’s name to the letters he’s been censoring.”
“I never signed Washington Irving’s name to any letters,” Milo declared.
“Of course not.”
“But that’s just a trick to get me to confess I’ve been making money in the black market.” Milo hauled violently at a disheveled hunk of his off-colored mustache. “I don’t like guys like that. Always snooping around people like us. Why doesn’t the government get after ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, if it wants to do some good? He’s got no respect for rules and regulations and keeps cutting prices on me.”
Milo’s mustache was unfortunate because the separated halves never matched. They were like Milo’s disunited eyes, which never looked at the same thing at the same time. Milo could see more things than most people, but he could see none of them too distinctly. In contrast to his reaction to news of the C.I.D. man, he learned with calm courage from Yossarian that Colonel Cathcart had raised the number of missions to fifty-five.
“We’re at war,” he said. “And there’s no use complaining about the number of missions we have to fly. If the colonel says we have to fly fifty-five missions, we have to fly them.”
“Well, I don’t have to fly them,” Yossarian vowed. “I’ll go see Major Major.”
“How can you? Major Major never sees anybody.”
“Then I’ll go back into the hospital.”
“You just came out of the hospital ten days ago,” Milo reminded him reprovingly. “You can’t keep running into the hospital every time something happens you don’t like. No, the best thing to do is fly the missions. It’s our duty.”
Milo had rigid scruples that would not even allow him to borrow a package of pitted dates from the mess hall that day of McWatt’s stolen bedsheet, for the food at the mess hall was all still the property of the government.
“But I can borrow it from you,” he explained to Yossarian, “since all this fruit is yours once you get it from me with Doctor Daneeka’s letter. You can do whatever you want to with it, even sell it at a high profit instead of giving it away free. Wouldn’t you want to do that together?”
“No.”
Milo gave up. “Then lend me one package of pitted dates,” he requested.
“I’ll give it back to you. I swear I will, and there’ll be a little something extra for you.”
Milo proved good as his word and handed Yossarian a quarter of McWatt’s yellow bedsheet when he returned with the unopened package of dates and with the grinning thief with the sweet tooth who had stolen the bedsheet from McWatt’s tent. The piece of bedsheet now belonged to Yossarian. He had earned it while napping, although he did not understand how. Neither did McWatt.
“What’s this?” cried McWatt, staring in mystification at the ripped half of his bedsheet.
“It’s half of the bedsheet that was stolen from your tent this morning,” Milo explained. “I’ll bet you didn’t even know it was stolen.”
“Why should anyone want to steal half a bedsheet?” Yossarian asked.
Milo grew flustered. “You don’t understand,” he protested. “He stole the whole bedsheet, and I got it back with the package of pitted dates you invested. That’s why the quarter of the bedsheet is yours. You made a very handsome return on your investment, particularly since you’ve gotten back every pitted date you gave me.” Milo next addressed himself to McWatt.
“Half the bedsheet is yours because it was all yours to begin with, and I really don’t understand what you’re complaining about, since you wouldn’t have any part of it if Captain Yossarian and I hadn’t intervened in your behalf.”
“Who’s complaining?” McWatt exclaimed. “I’m just trying to figure out what I can do with half a bedsheet.”
“There are lots of things you can do with half a bedsheet,” Milo assured him. “The remaining quarter of the bedsheet I’ve set aside for myself as a reward for my enterprise, work and initiative. It’s not for myself, you understand, but for the syndicate. That’s something you might do with half the bedsheet. You can leave it in the syndicate and watch it grow.”
“What syndicate?”
“The syndicate I’d like to form someday so that I can give you men the
good food you deserve.”
“You want to form a syndicate?”
“Yes, I do. No, a mart. Do you know what a mart is?”
“It’s a place where you buy things, isn’t it?”
“And sell things,” corrected Milo.
“And sell things.”
“All my life I’ve wanted a mart. You can do lots of things if you’ve got a
mart. But you’ve got to have a mart.”
“You want a mart?”
“And every man will have a share.”
Yossarian was still puzzled, for it was a business matter, and there was much about business matters that always puzzled him.
“Let me try to explain it again,” Milo offered with growing weariness and exasperation, jerking his thumb toward the thief with the sweet tooth, still grinning beside him. “I knew he wanted the dates more than the bedsheet.
Since he doesn’t understand a word of English, I made it a point to conduct the whole transaction in English.”
“Why didn’t you just hit him over the head and take the bedsheet away from him?” Yossarian asked.
Pressing his lips together with dignity, Milo shook his head. “That would have been most unjust,” he scolded firmly. “Force is wrong, and two wrongs never make a right. It was much better my way. When I held the dates out to him and reached for the bedsheet, he probably thought I was
offering to trade.”
“What were you doing?”
“Actually, I was offering to trade, but since he doesn’t understand English, I can always deny it.”
“Suppose he gets angry and wants the dates?”
“Why, we’ll just hit him over the head and take them away from him,” Milo answered without hesitation. He looked from Yossarian to McWatt and back
again. “I really can’t see what everyone is complaining about. We’re all much better off than before. Everybody is happy but this thief, and there’s no sense worrying about him, since he doesn’t even speak our language and deserves whatever he gets. Don’t you understand?”
But Yossarian still didn’t understand either how Milo could buy eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and sell them at a profit in Pianosa for five cents.
