Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [105]
‘I’m sorry,’ the chaplain apologized contritely. ‘I really am sorry. It’s just that I’m so completely stunned by all you’re telling me that I don’t even realize what I’m saying. I’m really very grateful to you.’
‘Then how about letting me send out those form letters?’ Corporal Whitcomb demanded immediately. ‘Can I begin working on the first drafts?’ The chaplain’s jaw dropped in astonishment. ‘No, no,’ he groaned. ‘Not now.’ Corporal Whitcomb was incensed. ‘I’m the best friend you’ve got and you don’t even know it,’ he asserted belligerently, and walked out of the chaplain’s tent. He walked back in. ‘I’m on your side and you don’t even realize it. Don’t you know what serious trouble you’re in? That C.I.D. man has gone rushing back to the hospital to write a brand-new report on you about that tomato.’
‘What tomato?’ the chaplain asked, blinking.
‘The plum tomato you were hiding in your hand when you first showed up here. There it is. The tomato you’re still holding in your hand right this very minute!’ The captain unclenched his fingers with surprise and saw that he was still holding the plum tomato he had obtained in Colonel Cathcart’s office. He set it down quickly on the bridge table. ‘I got this tomato from Colonel Cathcart,’ he said, and was struck by how ludicrous his explanation sounded. ‘He insisted I take it.’
‘You don’t have to lie to me,’ Corporal Whitcomb answered. ‘I don’t care whether you stole it from him or not.’
‘Stole it?’ the chaplain exclaimed with amazement. ‘Why should I want to steal a plum tomato?’
‘That’s exactly what had us both stumped,’ said Corporal Whitcomb. ‘And then the C.I.D. man figured out you might have some important secret papers hidden away inside it.’ The chaplain sagged limply beneath the mountainous weight of his despair. ‘I don’t have any important secret papers hidden away inside it,’ he stated simply. ‘I didn’t even want it to begin with. Here, you can have it and see for yourself.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘Please take it away,’ the chaplain pleaded in a voice that was barely audible. ‘I want to be rid of it.’
‘I don’t want it,’ Corporal Whitcomb snapped again, and stalked out with an angry face, suppressing a smile of great jubilation at having forged a powerful new alliance with the C.I.D. man and at having succeeded again in convincing the chaplain that he was really displeased.
Poor Whitcomb, sighed the chaplain, and blamed himself for his assistant’s malaise. He sat mutely in a ponderous, stultifying melancholy, waiting expectantly for Corporal Whitcomb to walk back in. He was disappointed as he heard the peremptory crunch of Corporal Whitcomb’s footsteps recede into silence. There was nothing he wanted to do next. He decided to pass up lunch for a Milky Way and a Baby Ruth from his foot locker and a few swallows of luke-warm water from his canteen. He felt himself surrounded by dense, overwhelming fogs of possibilities in which he could perceive no glimmer of light. He dreaded what Colonel Cathcart would think when the news that he was suspected of being Washington Irving was brought to him, then fell to fretting over what Colonel Cathcart was already thinking about him for even having broached the subject of sixty missions. There was so much unhappiness in the world, he reflected, bowing his head dismally beneath the tragic thought, and there was nothing he could do about anybody’s, least of all his own.
Catch-22
General Dreedle
Colonel Cathcart was not thinking anything at all about the chaplain, but was tangled up in a brand-new, menacing problem of his own: Yossarian!
Yossarian! The mere sound of that execrable, ugly name made his blood run cold and his breath come in labored gasps. The chaplain’s first mention of the name Yossarian! had tolled deep in his memory like a portentous gong. As soon as the latch of the door had clicked shut, the whole humiliating recollection of the naked man in formation came cascading down upon him in a mortifying, choking flood of stinging details. He began to perspire and tremble. There was a sinister and unlikely coincidence exposed that was too diabolical in implication to be anything less than the most hideous of omens. The name of the man who had stood naked in ranks that day to receive his Distinguished Flying Cross from General Dreedle had also been