Top Books

Catch-22


CHAPTER 30 - DUNBAR


(AnyBooksFree) CHAPTER 30 - DUNBAR
Yossarian no longer gave a damn where his bombs fell, although he did not go as far
as Dunbar, who dropped his bombs hundreds of yards past the village and would face
a court-martial if it could ever be shown he had done it deliberately. Without a word
even to Yossarian, Dunbar had washed his hands of the mission. The fall in the
hospital had either shown him the light or scrambled his brains;
it was impossible to say which.
Dunbar seldom laughed any more and seemed to be wasting away. He snarled
belligerently at superior officers, even at Major Danby, and was crude and surly and
profane even in front of the chaplain, who was afraid of Dunbar now and seemed to
be wasting away also. The chaplain's pilgrimage to Wintergreen had proved abortive;
another shrine was empty. Wintergreen was too busy to see the chaplain himself. A
brash assistant brought the chaplain a stolen Zippo cigarette lighter as a gift and
informed him condescendingly that Wintergreen was too deeply involved with
wartime activities to concern himself with matters so trivial as the number of
missions men had to fly. The chaplain worried about Dunbar and brooded more over
Yossarian now that Orr was gone. To the chaplain, who lived by himself in a spacious
tent whose pointy top sealed him in gloomy solitude each night like the cap of a tomb,
it seemed incredible that Yossarian really preferred living alone and wanted no
roommates.
As a lead bombardier again, Yossarian had McWatt for a pilot, and that was one
consolation, although he was still so utterly undefended. There was no way to fight
back. He could not even see McWatt and the co-pilot from his post in the nose. All he
could ever see was Aarfy, with whose fustian, moon-faced ineptitude he had finally
lost all patience, and there were minutes of agonizing fury and frustration in the sky
when he hungered to be demoted again to a wing plane with a loaded machine gun in
the compartment instead of the precision bombsight that he really had no need for, a
powerful, heavy fifty-caliber machine gun he could seize vengefully in both hands and
turn loose savagely against all the demons tyrannizing him: at the smoky black puffs
of the flak itself; at the German antiaircraft gunners below whom he could not even
see and could not possibly harm with his machine gun even if he ever did take the
time to open fire, at Havermeyer and Appleby in the lead plane for their fearless
straight and level bomb run on the second mission to Bologna where the flak from
two hundred and twenty-four cannons had knocked out one of Orr's engines for the
very last time and sent him down ditching into the sea between Genoa and La Spezia
just before the brief thunderstorm broke.
341

Actually, there was not much he could do with that powerful machine gun except load
it and test-fire a few rounds. It was no more use to him than the bombsight. He
could really cut loose with it against attacking German fighters, but there were no
German fighters any more, and he could not even swing it all the way around into the
helpless faces of pilots like Huple and Dobbs and order them back down carefully to
the ground, as he had once ordered Kid Sampson back down, which is exactly what he
did want to do to Dobbs and Huple on the hideous first mission to Avignon the
moment he realized the fantastic pickle he was in, the moment he found himself aloft
in a wing plane with Dobbs and Huple in a flight headed by Havermeyer and Appleby.
Dobbs and Huple? Huple and Dobbs? Who were they? What preposterous madness to
float in thin air two miles high on an inch or two of metal, sustained from death by
the meager skill and intelligence of two vapid strangers, a beardless kid named Huple
and a nervous nut like Dobbs, who really did go nuts right there in the plane, running
amuck over the target without leaving his copilot's seat and grabbing the controls
from Huple to plunge them all down into that chilling dive that tore Yossarian's
headset loose and brought them right back inside the dense flak from which they
had almost escaped. The next thing he knew, another stranger, a radio-gunner named
Snowden, was dying in back.
It was impossible to be positive that Dobbs had killed him, for when Yossarian
plugged his headset back in, Dobbs was already on the intercom pleading for someone
to go up front and help the bombardier. And almost immediately Snowden broke in,
whimpering, 'Help me. Please help me. I'm cold. I'm cold.' And Yossarian crawled
slowly out of the nose and up on top of the bomb bay and wriggled back into the rear
section of the plane - passing the first-aid kit on the way that he had to return for -
to treat Snowden for the wrong wound, the yawning, raw, melon-shaped hole as big as
a football in the outside of his thigh, the unsevered, blood-soaked muscle fibers
inside pulsating weirdly like blind things with lives of their own, the oval, naked wound
that was almost a foot long and made Yossarian moan in shock and sympathy the
instant he spied it and nearly made him vomit. And the small, slight tail-gunner was
lying on the floor beside Snowden in a dead faint, his face as white as a
handkerchief, so that Yossarian sprang forward with revulsion to help him first.
Yes, in the long run, he was much safer flying with McWatt, and he was not even safe
with McWatt, who loved flying too much and went buzzing boldly inches off the
ground with Yossarian in the nose on the way back from the training flight to break
in the new bombardier in the whole replacement crew Colonel Cathcart had obtained
after Orr was lost.
342

The practice bomb range was on the other side of Pianosa, and, flying back, McWatt
edged the belly of the lazing, slow-cruising plane just over the crest of mountains in
the middle and then, instead of maintaining altitude, jolted both engines open all the
way, lurched up on one side and, to Yossarian's astonishment, began following the
falling land down as fast as the plane would go, wagging his wings gaily and skimming
with a massive, grinding, hammering roar over each rocky rise and dip of the rolling
terrain like a dizzy gull over wild brown waves. Yossarian was petrified. The new
bombardier beside him sat demurely with a bewitched grin and kept whistling
'Whee!' and Yossarian wanted to reach out and crush his idiotic face with one hand
as he flinched and flung himself away from the boulders and hillocks and lashing
branches of trees that loomed up above him out in front and rushed past just
underneath in a sinking, streaking blur. No one had a right to take such frightful
risks with his life.
'Go up, go up, go up!' he shouted frantically at McWatt, hating him venomously, but
McWatt was singing buoyantly over the intercom and probably couldn't hear.
Yossarian, blazing with rage and almost sobbing for revenge, hurled himself down into
the crawlway and fought his way through against the dragging weight of gravity and
inertia until he arrived at the main section and pulled himself up to the flight deck,
to stand trembling behind McWatt in the pilot's seat. He looked desperately about
for a gun, a gray-black .45 automatic that he could cock and ram right up against the
base of McWatt's skull. There was no gun. There was no hunting knife either, and no
other weapon with which he could bludgeon or stab, and Yossarian grasped and jerked
the collar of McWatt's coveralls in tightening fists and shouted to him to go up, go
up. The land was still swimming by underneath and flashing by overhead on both sides.
McWatt looked back at Yossarian and laughed joyfully as though Yossarian were
sharing his fun. Yossarian slid both hands around McWatt's bare throat and
squeezed. McWatt turned stiff:
'Go up,' Yossarian ordered unmistakably through his teeth in a low, menacing voice.
'Or I'll kill you.'
Rigid with caution, McWatt cut the motors back and climbed gradually. Yossarian's
hands weakened on McWatt's neck and slid down off his shoulders to dangle inertly.
He was not angry any more. He was ashamed. When McWatt turned, he was sorry the
hands were his and wished there were someplace where he could bury them.
They felt dead.
McWatt gazed at him deeply. There was no friendliness in his stare. 'Boy,'
he said coldly, 'you sure must be in pretty bad shape. You ought to go home.'
'They won't let me.' Yossarian answered with averted eyes, and crept away.
343

Yossarian stepped down from the flight deck and seated himself on the floor,
hanging his head with guilt and remorse. He was covered with sweat.
McWatt set course directly back toward the field. Yossarian wondered whether
McWatt would now go to the operations tent to see Piltchard and Wren and request
that Yossarian never be assigned to his plane again, just as Yossarian had gone
surreptitiously to speak to them about Dobbs and Huple and Orr and, unsuccessfully,
about Aarfy. He had never seen McWatt look displeased before, had never seen him
in any but the most lighthearted mood, and he wondered whether he had just lost
another friend.
But McWatt winked at him reassuringly as he climbed down from the plane and
joshed hospitably with the credulous new pilot and bombardier during the jeep ride
back to the squadron, although he did not address a word to Yossarian until all four
had returned their parachutes and separated and the two of them were walking side
by side toward their own row of tents. Then McWatt's sparsely freckled tan ScotchIrish face broke suddenly into a smile and he dug his knuckles playfully into
Yossarian's ribs, as though throwing a punch.
'You louse,' he laughed. 'Were you really going to kill me up there?'
Yossarian grinned penitently and shook his head. 'No. I don't think so.'
'I didn't realize you got it so bad. Boy! Why don't you talk to somebody about it?'
'I talk to everybody about it. What the hell's the matter with you? Don't you ever
hear me?'
'I guess I never really believed you.'
'Aren't you ever afraid?'
'Maybe I ought to be.'
'Not even on the missions?'
'I guess I just don't have brains enough.' McWatt laughed sheepishly.
'There are so many ways for me to get killed,' Yossarian commented,
'and you had to find one more.'
344

McWatt smiled again. 'Say, I bet it must really scare you when I
buzz your tent, huh?'
'It scares me to death. I've told you that.'
'I thought it was just the noise you were complaining about.' McWatt made a
resigned shrug. 'Oh, well, what the hell,' he sang. 'I guess I'll just have to give it up.'
But McWatt was incorrigible, and, while he never buzzed Yossarian's tent again, he
never missed an opportunity to buzz the beach and roar like a fierce and low-flying
thunderbolt over the raft in the water and the secluded hollow in the sand where
Yossarian lay feeling up Nurse Duckett or playing hearts, poker or pinochle with
Nately, Dunbar and Hungry Joe. Yossarian met Nurse Duckett almost every
afternoon that both were free and came with her to the beach on the other side of
the narrow swell of shoulder-high dunes separating them from the area in which the
other officers and enlisted men went swimming nude. Nately, Dunbar and Hungry Joe
would come there, too. McWatt would occasionally join them, and often Aarfy, who
always arrived pudgily in full uniform and never removed any of his clothing but his
shoes and his hat; Aarfy never went swimming.
The other men wore swimming trunks in deference to Nurse Duckett, and in
deference also to Nurse Cramer, who accompanied Nurse Duckett and Yossarian to
the beach every time and sat haughtily by herself ten yards away. No one but Aarfy
ever made reference to the naked men sun-bathing in full view farther down the
beach or jumping and diving from the enormous white-washed raft that bobbed on
empty oil drums out beyond the silt sand. Nurse Cramer sat by herself because she
was angry with Yossarian and disappointed in Nurse Duckett.
Nurse Sue Ann Duckett despised Aarfy, and that was another one of the numerous
fetching traits about Nurse Duckett that Yossarian enjoyed. He enjoyed Nurse Sue
Ann Duckett's long white legs and supple, callipygous ass; he often neglected to
remember that she was quite slim and fragile from the waist up and hurt her
unintentionally in moments of passion when he hugged her too roughly. He loved her
manner of sleepy acquiescence when they lay on the beach at dusk. He drew solace
and sedation from her nearness. He had a craving to touch her always, to remain
always in physical communication . He liked to encircle her ankle loosely with his
fingers as he played cards with Nately, Dunbar and Hungry Joe, to lightly and lovingly
caress the downy skin of her fair, smooth thigh with the backs of his nails or,
dreamily, sensuously, almost unconsciously, slide his proprietary, respectful hand up
the shell-like ridge of her spine beneath the elastic strap of the top of the two-piece
bathing suit she always wore to contain and cover her tiny, long-nippled breasts.
345

He loved Nurse Duckett's serene, flattered response, the sense of attachment to
him she displayed proudly. Hungry Joe had a craving to feel Nurse Duckett up, too,
and was restrained more than once by Yossarian's forbidding glower. Nurse Duckett
flirted with Hungry Joe just to keep him in heat, and her round light-brown eyes
glimmered with mischief every time Yossarian rapped her sharply with his elbow or
fist to make her stop.
The men played cards on a towel, undershirt, or blanket, and Nurse Duckett mixed
the extra deck of cards, sitting with her back resting against a sand dune. When she
was not shuffling the extra deck of cards, she sat squinting into a tiny pocket mirror,
brushing mascara on her curling reddish eyelashes in a birdbrained effort to make
them longer permanently. Occasionally she was able to stack the cards or spoil the
deck in a way they did not discover until they were well into the game, and she
laughed and glowed with blissful gratification when they all hurled their cards down
disgustedly and began punching her sharply on the arms or legs as they called her
filthy names and warned her to stop fooling around. She would prattle nonsensically
when they were striving hardest to think, and a pink flush of elation crept into her
cheeks when they gave her more sharp raps on the arms and legs with their fists and
told her to shut up. Nurse Duckett reveled in such attention and ducked her short
chestnut bangs with joy when Yossarian and the others focused upon her. It gave her
a peculiar feeling of warm and expectant well-being to know that so many naked boys
and men were idling close by on the other side of the sand dunes.
She had only to stretch her neck or rise on some pretext to see twenty or forty
undressed males lounging or playing ball in the sunlight. Her own body was such a
familiar and unremarkable thing to her that she was puzzled by the convulsive
ecstasy men could take from it, by the intense and amusing need they had merely to
touch it, to reach out urgently and press it, squeeze it, pinch it, rub it. She did not
understand Yossarian's lust; but she was willing to take his word for it.
Evenings when Yossarian felt horny he brought Nurse Duckett to the beach with two
blankets and enjoyed making love to her with most of their clothes on more than he
sometimes enjoyed making love to all the vigorous bare amoral girls in Rome.
Frequently they went to the beach at night and did not make love, but just lay
shivering between the blankets against each other to ward off the brisk, damp chill.
The ink-black nights were turning cold, the stars frosty and fewer. The raft swayed
in the ghostly trail of moonlight and seemed to be sailing away. A marked hint of cold
weather penetrated the air. Other men were just starting to build stoves and came
to Yossarian's tent during the day to marvel at Orr's workmanship.
346

It thrilled Nurse Duckett rapturously that Yossarian could not keep his hands off
her when they were together, although she would not let him slip them inside her
bathing shorts during the day when anyone was near enough to see, not even when the
only witness was Nurse Cramer, who sat on the other side of her sand dune with her
reproving nose in the air and pretended not to see anything.
Nurse Cramer had stopped speaking to Nurse Duckett, her best friend, because of
her liaison with Yossarian, but still went everywhere with Nurse Duckett since Nurse
Duckett was her best friend. She did not approve of Yossarian or his friends. When
they stood up and went swimming with Nurse Duckett, Nurse Cramer stood up and
went swimming, too, maintaining the same ten-yard distance between them, and
maintaining her silence, snubbing them even in the water. When they laughed and
splashed, she laughed and splashed; when they dived, she dived; when they swam to
the sand bar and rested, Nurse Cramer swam to the sand bar and rested. When they
came out, she came out, dried her shoulders with her own towel and seated herself
aloofly in her own spot, her back rigid and a ring of reflected sunlight burnishing her
light-blond hair like a halo. Nurse Cramer was prepared to begin talking to Nurse
Duckett again if she repented and apologized. Nurse Duckett preferred things the
way they were. For a long time she had wanted to give Nurse Cramer a rap to make
her shut up.
Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him. She
loved to watch him taking short naps with his face down and his arm thrown across
her, or staring bleakly at the endless tame, quiet waves breaking like pet puppy dogs
against the shore, scampering lightly up the sand a foot or two and then trotting
away. She was calm in his silences. She knew she did not bore him, and she buffed or
painted her fingernails studiously while he dozed or brooded and the desultory warm
afternoon breeze vibrated delicately on the surface of the beach. She loved to look
at his wide, long, sinewy back with its bronzed, unblemished skin. She loved to bring
him to flame instantly by taking his whole ear in her mouth suddenly and running her
hand down his front all the way. She loved to make him burn and suffer till dark, then
satisfy him. Then kiss him adoringly because she had brought him such bliss.
Yossarian was never lonely with Nurse Duckett, who really did know how to keep her
mouth shut and was just capricious enough. He was haunted and tormented by the
vast, boundless ocean. He wondered mournfully, as Nurse Duckett buffed her nails,
about all the people who had died under water. There were surely more than a million
already. Where were they? What insects had eaten their flesh? He imagined the
awful impotence of breathing in helplessly quarts and quarts of water. Yossarian
followed the small fishing boats and military launches plying back and forth far out
and found them unreal; it did not seem true that there were full-sized men aboard,
going somewhere every time.
347

He looked toward stony Elba, and his eyes automatically searched overhead for the
fluffy, white, turnip-shaped cloud in which Clevinger had vanished. He peered at the
vaporous Italian skyline and thought of Orr. Clevinger and Orr. Where had they
gone? Yossarian had once stood on a jetty at dawn and watched a tufted round log
that was drifting toward him on the tide turn unexpectedly into the bloated face of a
drowned man; it was the first dead person he had ever seen. He thirsted for life and
reached out ravenously to grasp and hold Nurse Duckett's flesh.
He studied every floating object fearfully for some gruesome sign of Clevinger and
Orr, prepared for any morbid shock but the shock McWatt gave him one day with the
plane that came blasting suddenly into sight out of the distant stillness and hurtled
mercilessly along the shore line with a great growling, clattering roar over the
bobbing raft on which blond, pale Kid Sampson, his naked sides scrawny even from so
far away, leaped clownishly up to touch it at the exact moment some arbitrary gust
of wind or minor miscalculation of McWatt's senses dropped the speeding plane down
just low enough for a propeller to slice him half away.
Even people who were not there remembered vividly exactly what happened next.
There was the briefest, softest *tsst!* filtering audibly through the shattering,
overwhelming howl of the plane's engines, and then there were just Kid Sampson's
two pale, skinny legs, still joined by strings somehow at the bloody truncated hips,
standing stock-still on the raft for what seemed a full minute or two before they
toppled over backward into the water finally with a faint, echoing splash and turned
completely upside down so that only the grotesque toes and the plaster-white soles
of Kid Sampson's feet remained in view.
On the beach, all hell broke loose. Nurse Cramer materialized out of thin air suddenly
and was weeping hysterically against Yossarian's chest while Yossarian hugged her
shoulders and soothed her. His other arm bolstered Nurse Duckett, who was
trembling and sobbing against him, too, her long, angular face dead white. Everyone at
the beach was screaming and running, and the men sounded like women. They
scampered for their things in panic, stooping hurriedly and looking askance at each
gentle, knee-high wave bubbling in as though some ugly, red, grisly organ like a liver
or a lung might come washing right up against them. Those in the water were
struggling to get out, forgetting in their haste to swim, wailing, walking, held back in
their flight by the viscous, clinging sea as though by a biting wind.
Kid Sampson had rained all over. Those who spied drops of him on their limbs or
torsos drew back with terror and revulsion, as though trying to shrink away from
their own odious skins. Everybody ran in a sluggish stampede, shooting tortured,
horrified glances back, filling the deep, shadowy, rustling woods with their frail gasps
and cries.
348

Yossarian drove both stumbling, faltering women before him frantically, shoving them
and prodding them to make them hurry, and raced back with a curse to help when
Hungry Joe tripped on the blanket or the camera case he was carrying and fell
forward on his face in the mud of the stream.
Back at the squadron everyone already knew. Men in uniform were screaming and
running there too, or standing motionless in one spot, rooted in awe, like Sergeant
Knight and Doc Daneeka as they gravely craned their heads upward and watched the
guilty, banking, forlorn airplane with McWatt circle and circle slowly and climb.
'Who is it?' Yossarian shouted anxiously at Doc Daneeka as he ran up, breathless and
limp, his somber eyes burning with a misty, hectic anguish. 'Who's in the plane?'
'McWatt,' said Sergeant Knight. 'He's got the two new pilots with him on a training
flight. Doc Daneeka's up there, too.'
'I'm right here,' contended Doc Daneeka, in a strange and troubled voice, darting an
anxious look at Sergeant Knight.
'Why doesn't he come down?' Yossarian exclaimed in despair
'Why does he keep going up?'
'He's probably afraid to come down,' Sergeant Knight answered, without moving his
solemn gaze from McWatt's solitary climbing airplane. 'He knows what kind of
trouble he's in.'
And McWatt kept climbing higher and higher, nosing his droning airplane upward
evenly in a slow, oval spiral that carried him far out over the water as he headed
south and far in over the russet foothills when he had circled the landing field again
and was flying north. He was soon up over five thousand feet. His engines were soft
as whispers. A white parachute popped open suddenly in a surprising puff. A second
parachute popped open a few minutes later and coasted down, like the first, directly
in toward the clearing of the landing strip. There was no motion on the ground. The
plane continued south for thirty seconds more, following the same pattern, familiar
and predictable now, and McWatt lifted a wing and banked gracefully around into his
turn.
'Two more to go,' said Sergeant Knight. 'McWatt and Doc Daneeka.'
'I'm right here, Sergeant Knight,' Doc Daneeka told him plaintively.
'I'm not in the plane.'
349

'Why don't they jump?' Sergeant Knight asked, pleading aloud to himself.
'Why don't they jump?'
'It doesn't make sense,' grieved Doc Daneeka, biting his lip.
'It just doesn't make sense.'
But Yossarian understood suddenly why McWatt wouldn't jump, and went running
uncontrollably down the whole length of the squadron after McWatt's plane, waving
his arms and shouting up at him imploringly to come down, McWatt, come down; but
no one seemed to hear, certainly not McWatt, and a great, choking moan tore from
Yossarian's throat as McWatt turned again, dipped his wings once in salute, decided
oh, well, what the hell, and flew into a mountain.
Colonel Cathcart was so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he
raised the missions to sixty-five.
350






Back to Table of content


TOP AUTHORS
Copyright © novelfull thefreeonlinenovel.com All Rights Reserved.