Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [16]
‘T. S. Eliot,’ General Peckem said, and hung up.
‘Who was it?’ asked Colonel Moodus.
General Dreedle, in Corsica, did not reply. Colonel Moodus was General Dreedle’s son-in-law, and General Dreedle, at the insistence of his wife and against his own better judgment, had taken him into the military business. General Dreedle gazed at Colonel Moodus with level hatred. He detested the very sight of his son-in-law, who was his aide and therefore in constant attendance upon him. He had opposed his daughter’s marriage to Colonel Moodus because he disliked attending weddings. Wearing a menacing and preoccupied scowl, General Dreedle moved to the full-length mirror in his office and stared at his stocky reflection. He had a grizzled, broad-browed head with iron-gray tufts over his eyes and a blunt and belligerent jaw. He brooded in ponderous speculation over the cryptic message he had just received. Slowly his face softened with an idea, and he curled his lips with wicked pleasure.
‘Get Peckem,’ he told Colonel Moodus. ‘Don’t let the bastard know who’s calling.’
‘Who was it?’ asked Colonel Cargill, back in Rome.
‘That same person,’ General Peckem replied with a definite trace of alarm. ‘Now he’s after me.’
‘What did he want?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What did he say?’
‘The same thing.’
‘“T. S. Eliot”?’
‘Yes, “T. S. Eliot.” That’s all he said.’ General Peckem had a hopeful thought. ‘Perhaps it’s a new code or something, like the colors of the day. Why don’t you have someone check with Communications and see if it’s a new code or something or the colors of the day?’ Communications answered that T. S. Eliot was not a new code or the colors of the day.
Colonel Cargill had the next idea. ‘Maybe I ought to phone Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters and see if they know anything about it. They have a clerk up there named Wintergreen I’m pretty close to. He’s the one who tipped me off that our prose was too prolix.’ Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen told Cargill that there was no record at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters of a T. S. Eliot.
‘How’s our prose these days?’ Colonel Cargill decided to inquire while he had ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen on the phone. ‘It’s much better now, isn’t it?’
‘It’s still too prolix,’ ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen replied.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if General Dreedle were behind the whole thing,’ General Peckem confessed at last. ‘Remember what he did to that skeet-shooting range?’ General Dreedle had thrown open Colonel Cathcart’s private skeet-shooting range to every officer and enlisted man in the group on combat duty. General Dreedle wanted his men to spend as much time out on the skeet-shooting range as the facilities and their flight schedule would allow. Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them. It trained them to shoot skeet.
Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years.
‘I think you’re crazy,’ was the way Clevinger had responded to Dunbar ’s discovery.
‘Who wants to know?’ Dunbar answered.
‘I mean it,’ Clevinger insisted.
‘Who cares?’ Dunbar answered.
‘I really do. I’ll even go so far as to concede that life seems longer I—’
‘—is longer I—’
‘—is longer—Is longer? All right, is longer if it’s filled with periods of boredom and discomfort, b—’
‘Guess how fast?’ Dunbar said suddenly.
‘Huh?’
‘They go,’ Dunbar explained.
‘Years.’
‘Years.’
‘Years,’ said Dunbar. ‘Years, years, years.’
‘Clevinger, why don’t you let Dunbar alone?’ Yossarian broke in. ‘Don’t you realize the toll this is taking?’
‘It’s all right,’ said Dunbar magnanimously. ‘I have some decades to spare. Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?’
‘And you shut up also,’ Yossarian told Orr, who had begun to snigger.
‘I was just thinking about that girl,’ Orr said. ‘That girl in Sicily. That girl in Sicily with the bald head.