Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [149]
‘What’s so special about her?’ Aarfy sneered with mock surprise. ‘She’s only a whore.’
‘And don’t call her a whore!’ The girl shrugged impassively after a few more seconds and ambled toward the door. Nately bounded forward wretchedly to hold it open. He wandered back in a heartbroken daze, his sensitive face eloquent with grief.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Yossarian counseled him as kindly as he could. ‘You’ll probably be able to find her again. We know where all the whores hang out.’
‘Please don’t call her that,’ Nately begged, looking as though he might cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ murmured Yossarian.
Aarfy thundered jovially, ‘There are hundreds of whores just as good crawling all over the streets. That one wasn’t even pretty.’ He chuckled mellifluously with resonant disdain and authority. ‘Why, you rushed forward to open that door as though you were in love with her.’
‘I think I am in love with her,’ Nately confessed in a shamed, far-off voice.
Aarfy wrinkled his chubby round rosy forehead in comic disbelief. ‘Ho, ho, ho, ho!’ he laughed, patting the expansive forest-green sides of his officer’s tunic prosperously. ‘That’s rich. You in love with her? That’s really rich.’ Aarfy had a date that same afternoon with a Red Cross girl from Smith whose father owned an important milk-of-magnesia plant. ‘Now, that’s the kind of girl you ought to be associating with, and not with common sluts like that one. Why, she didn’t even look clean.’
‘I don’t care!’ Nately shouted desperately. ‘And I wish you’d shut up, I don’t even want to talk about it with you.’
‘Aarfy, shut up,’ said Yossarian.
‘Ho, ho, ho, ho!’ Aarfy continued. ‘I just can’t imagine what your father and mother would say if they knew you were running around with filthy trollops like that one. Your father is a very distinguished man, you know.’
‘I’m not going to tell him,’ Nately declared with determination. ‘I’m not going to say a word about her to him or Mother until after we’re married.’
‘Married?’ Aarfy’s indulgent merriment swelled tremendously. ‘Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho! Now you’re really talking stupid. Why, you’re not even old enough to know what true love is.’ Aarfy was an authority on the subject of true love because he had already fallen truly in love with Nately’s father and with the prospect of working for him after the war in some executive capacity as a reward for befriending Nately. Aarfy was a lead navigator who had never been able to find himself since leaving college. He was a genial, magnanimous lead navigator who could always forgive the other man in the squadron for denouncing him furiously each time he got lost on a combat mission and led them over concentrations of antiaircraft fire. He got lost on the streets of Rome that same afternoon and never did find the eligible Red Cross girl from Smith with the important milk-of-magnesia plant. He got lost on the mission to Ferrara the day Kraft was shot down and killed, and he got lost again on the weekly milk run to Parma and tried to lead the planes out to sea over the city of Leghorn after Yossarian had dropped his bombs on the undefended inland target and settled back against his thick wall of armor plate with his eyes closed and a fragrant cigarette in his fingertips. Suddenly there was flak, and all at once McWatt was shrieking over the intercom, ‘Flak! Flak! Where the hell are we? What the hell’s going on?’ Yossarian flipped his eyes open in alarm and saw the totally unexpected bulging black puffs of flak crashing down in toward them from high up and Aarfy’s complacent melon-round tiny-eyed face gazing out at the approaching cannon bursts with affable bemusement. Yossarian was flabbergasted. His leg went abruptly to sleep. McWatt had started to climb and was yelping over the intercom for instructions. Yossarian sprang forward to see where they were and remained in the same place. He was unable to move. Then he realized he was sopping wet. He looked down at his crotch with a sinking, sick sensation. A wild crimson blot was crawling upward rapidly along his shirt front like an enormous sea monster rising to devour him. He was hit! Separate trickles of blood spilled to a puddle on the floor through one saturated trouser leg like countless unstoppable swarms of wriggling red worms. His heart stopped. A second solid jolt struck the plane. Yossarian shuddered with revulsion at the queer sight of his wound and screamed at Aarfy for help.