Cross.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ mumbled General Dreedle, and his ruddy monolithic face softened with amusement. ‘Why aren’t you wearing clothes, Yossarian?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘What do you mean you don’t want to? Why the hell don’t you want to?’ ‘I just don’t want to, sir.’
‘Why isn’t he wearing clothes?’ General Dreedle demanded over his shoulder of Colonel Cathcart. ‘He’s talking to you,’ Colonel Korn whispered over Colonel Cathcart’s shoulder from behind, jabbing his elbow sharply into Colonel Cathcart’s back.
‘Why isn’t he wearing clothes?’ Colonel Cathcart demanded of Colonel Korn with a look of acute pain, tenderly nursing the spot where Colonel Korn had just jabbed him.
‘Why isn’t he wearing clothes?’ Colonel Korn demanded of Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren.
‘A man was killed in his plane over Avignon last week and bled all over him,’ Captain Wren replied. ‘He swears he’s never going to wear a uniform again.’
‘A man was killed in his plane over Avignon last week and bled all over him,’ Colonel Korn reported directly to General Dreedle. ‘His uniform hasn’t come back from the laundry yet.’
‘Where are his other uniforms?’ ‘They’re in the laundry, too.’
‘What about his underwear?’ General Dreedle demanded.
‘All his underwear’s in the laundry, too,’ answered Colonel Korn. ‘That sounds like a lot of crap to me,’ General Dreedle declared. ‘It is a lot of crap, sir,’ Yossarian said.
‘Don’t you worry, sir,’ Colonel Cathcart promised General Dreedle with a threatening look at Yossarian. ‘You have my personal word for it that this man will be severely punished.’
‘What the hell do I care if he’s punished or not?’ General Dreedle replied with surprise and irritation. ‘He’s just won a medal. If he wants to receive it without any clothes on, what the hell business is it of yours?’
‘Those are my sentiments exactly, sir!’ Colonel Cathcart echoed with resounding enthusiasm and mopped his brow with a damp white handkerchief. ‘But would you say that, sir, even in the light of General Peckem’s recent memorandum on the subject of appropriate military attire in combat areas?’
‘Peckem?’ General Dreedle’s face clouded.
‘Yes, sir, sir,’ said Colonel Cathcart obsequiously. ‘General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they’ll make a good impression on the enemy when they’re shot down.’
‘Peckem?’ repeated General Dreedle, still squinting with bewilderment. ‘Just what the hell does
Peckem have to do with it?’
Colonel Korn jabbed Colonel Cathcart sharply again in the back with his elbow.
‘Absolutely nothing, sir!’ Colonel Cathcart responded sprucely, wincing in extreme pain and gingerly rubbing the spot where Colonel Korn had just jabbed him again. ‘And that’s exactly why I decided to take absolutely no action at all until I first had an opportunity to discuss it with you. Shall we ignore it completely, sir?’
General Dreedle ignored him completely, turning away from him in baleful scorn to hand Yossarian his medal in its case.
‘Get my girl back from the car,’ he commanded Colonel Moodus crabbily, and waited in one spot with his scowling face down until his nurse had rejoined him.
‘Get word to the office right away to kill that directive I just issued ordering the men to wear neckties on the combat missions,’ Colonel Cathcart whispered to Colonel Korn urgently out of the corner of his mouth.
‘I told you not to do it,’ Colonel Korn snickered. ‘But you just wouldn’t listen to me.’ ‘Shhhh!’ Colonel Cathcart cautioned. ‘Goddammit, Korn, what did you do to my back?’ Colonel Korn snickered again.
General Dreedle’s nurse always followed General Dreedle everywhere he went, even into the briefing room just before the mission to Avignon, where she stood with her asinine smile at the side of the platform and bloomed like a fertile oasis at General Dreedle’s shoulder in her pink-and-green uniform. Yossarian looked at her and fell in love, desperately. His spirits sank, leaving him empty inside and numb. He sat gazing in clammy want at her full red lips and dimpled cheeks as he listened to Major Danby describe in a monotonous, didactic male drone the heavy concentrations of flak awaiting them at Avignon, and he moaned in deep despair suddenly at the thought that he might never see again this lovely woman to whom he had never spoken a word and whom he now loved so pathetically. He throbbed and ached with sorrow, fear and desire as he stared at her; she was so beautiful. He worshiped the ground she stood on. He licked his parched, thirsting lips with a sticky tongue and moaned in misery again, loudly enough this time to attract the startled, searching glances of the men sitting around him on the rows of crude wooden benches in their chocolate-colored coveralls and stitched white parachute harnesses.
Nately turned to him quickly with alarm. ‘What is it?’ he whispered. ‘What’s the matter?’
Yossarian did not hear him. He was sick with lust and mesmerized with regret. General Dreedle’s nurse was only a little chubby, and his senses were stuffed to congestion with the yellow radiance of her hair and the unfelt pressure of her soft short fingers, with the rounded, untasted wealth of her nubile breasts in her Army-pink shirt that was opened wide at the throat and with the rolling, ripened, triangular confluences of her belly and thighs in her tight, slick forest-green gabardine officer’s pants. He drank her in insatiably from head to painted toenail. He never wanted to lose her.
‘Oooooooooooooh,’ he moaned again, and this time the whole room rippled at his quavering, drawn-out cry. A wave of startled uneasiness broke over the officers on the dais, and even Major Danby, who had begun synchronizing the watches, was distracted momentarily as he counted out the seconds and almost had to begin again. Nately followed Yossarian’s transfixed gaze down the long frame auditorium until he came to General Dreedle’s nurse. He blanched with trepidation when he guessed what was troubling Yossarian.
‘Cut it out, will you?’ Nately warned in a fierce whisper.
‘Ooooooooooooooooooooh,’ Yossarian moaned a fourth time, this time loudly enough for everyone to hear him distinctly.
‘Are you crazy?’ Nately hissed vehemently. ‘You’ll get into trouble.’ ‘Ooooooooooooooooooooh,’ Dunbar answered Yossarian from the opposite end of the room.
Nately recognized Dunbar’s voice. The situation was now out of control, and he turned away with a small moan. ‘Ooh.’
‘Ooooooooooooooooooooh,’ Dunbar moaned back at him.
‘Ooooooooooooooooooooh,’ Nately moaned out loud in exasperation when he realized that he had just moaned.
‘Ooooooooooooooooooooh,’ Dunbar moaned back at him again.
‘Ooooooooooooooooooooh,’ someone entirely new chimed in from another section of the room, and Nately’s hair stood on end.
Yossarian and Dunbar both replied while Nately cringed and hunted about futilely for some hole in which to hide and take Yossarian with him. A sprinkling of people were smothering laughter. An elfin impulse possessed Nately and he moaned intentionally the next time there was a lull. Another new voice answered. The flavor of disobedience was titillating, and Nately moaned deliberately again, the next time he could squeeze one in edgewise. Still another new voice echoed him. The room was boiling irrepressibly into bedlam. An eerie hubbub of voices was rising. Feet were scuffled, and things began to drop from people’s fingers – pencils, computers, map cases, clattering steel flak helmets. A number of men who were not moaning were now giggling openly, and there was no telling how far the unorganized insurrection of moaning might have gone if General Dreedle himself had not come forward to quell it, stepping out determinedly in the center of the platform directly in front of Major Danby, who, with his earnest, persevering head down, was still concentrating on his wrist watch and saying, ‘…twenty-five seconds… twenty… fifteen…’ General Dreedle’s great, red domineering face was gnarled with perplexity and oaken with awesome resolution.
‘That will be all, men,’ he ordered tersely, his eyes glaring with disapproval and his square jaw firm, and that’s all there was. ‘I run a fighting outfit,’ he told them sternly, when the room had grown absolutely quiet and the men on the benches were all cowering sheepishly, ‘and there’ll be no more
moaning in this group as long as I’m in command. Is that clear?’
It was clear to everybody but Major Danby, who was still concentrating on his wrist watch and counting down the seconds aloud. ‘…four… three… two… one… time!’ called out Major Danby, and raised his eyes triumphantly to discover that no one had been listening to him and that he would have to begin all over again. ‘Ooooh,’ he moaned in frustration.
‘What was that?’ roared General Dreedle incredulously, and whirled around in a murderous rage upon Major Danby, who staggered back in terrified confusion and began to quail and perspire. ‘Who is this man?’
‘M-major Danby, sir,’ Colonel Cathcart stammered. ‘My group operations officer.’ ‘Take him out and shoot him,’ ordered General Dreedle.
‘S-sir?’
‘I said take him out and shoot him. Can’t you hear?’
‘Yes, sir!’ Colonel Cathcart responded smartly, swallowing hard, and turned in a brisk manner to his chauffeur and his meteorologist. ‘Take Major Danby out and shoot him.’
‘S-sir?’ his chauffeur and his meteorologist stammered.
‘I said take Major Danby out and shoot him,’ Colonel Cathcart snapped. ‘Can’t you hear?’
The two young lieutenants nodded lumpishly and gaped at each other in stunned and flaccid reluctance, each waiting for the other to initiate the procedure of taking Major Danby outside and shooting him. Neither had ever taken Major Danby outside and shot him before. They inched their way dubiously toward Major Danby from opposite sides. Major Danby was white with fear. His legs collapsed suddenly and he began to fall, and the two young lieutenants sprang forward and seized him under both arms to save him from slumping to the floor. Now that they had Major Danby, the rest seemed easy, but there were no guns. Major Danby began to cry. Colonel Cathcart wanted to rush to his side and comfort him, but did not want to look like a sissy in front of General Dreedle. He remembered that Appleby and Havermeyer always brought their .45 automatics on the missions, and he began to scan the rows of men in search of them.
As soon as Major Danby began to cry, Colonel Moodus, who had been vacillating wretchedly on the sidelines, could restrain himself no longer and stepped out diffidently toward General Dreedle with a sickly air of self-sacrifice. ‘I think you’d better wait a minute, Dad,’ he suggested hesitantly. ‘I don’t think you can shoot him.’
General Dreedle was infuriated by his intervention. ‘Who the hell says I can’t?’ he thundered pugnaciously in a voice loud enough to rattle the whole building. Colonel Moodus, his face flushing with embarrassment, bent close to whisper into his ear. ‘Why the hell can’t I?’ General Dreedle bellowed. Colonel Moodus whispered some more. ‘You mean I can’t shoot anyone I want to?’ General Dreedle demanded with uncompromising indignation. He pricked up his ears with interest as Colonel Moodus continued whispering. ‘Is that a fact?’ he inquired, his rage tamed by
curiosity.
‘Yes, Dad. I’m afraid it is.’
‘I guess you think you’re pretty goddam smart, don’t you?’ General Dreedle lashed out at Colonel Moodus suddenly.
Colonel Moodus turned crimson again. ‘No, Dad, it isn’t -‘
‘All right, let the insubordinate son of a bitch go,’ General Dreedle snarled, turning bitterly away from his son-in-law and barking peevishly at Colonel Cathcart’s chauffeur and Colonel Cathcart’s meteorologist. ‘But get him out of this building and keep him out. And let’s continue this goddam briefing before the war ends. I’ve never seen so much incompetence.’
Colonel Cathcart nodded lamely at General Dreedle and signaled his men hurriedly to push Major Danby outside the building. As soon as Major Danby had been pushed outside, though, there was no one to continue the briefing. Everyone gawked at everyone else in oafish surprise. General Dreedle turned purple with rage as nothing happened. Colonel Cathcart had no idea what to do. He was about to begin moaning aloud when Colonel Korn came to the rescue by stepping forward and taking control. Colonel Cathcart sighed with enormous, tearful relief, almost overwhelmed with gratitude.
‘Now, men, we’re going to synchronize our watches,’ Colonel Korn began promptly in a sharp, commanding manner, rolling his eyes flirtatiously in General Dreedle’s direction. ‘We’re going to synchronize our watches one time and one time only, and if it doesn’t come off in that one time, General Dreedle and I are going to want to know why. Is that clear?’ He fluttered his eyes toward General Dreedle again to make sure his plug had registered. ‘Now set your watches for nine-eighteen.’
Colonel Korn synchronized their watches without a single hitch and moved ahead with confidence. He gave the men the colors of the day and reviewed the weather conditions with an agile, flashy versatility, casting sidelong, simpering looks at General Dreedle every few seconds to draw increased encouragement from the excellent impression he saw he was making. Preening and pruning himself effulgendy and strutting vaingloriously about the platform as he picked up momentum, he gave the men the colors of the day again and shifted nimbly into a rousing pep talk on the importance of the bridge at Avignon to the war effort and the obligation of each man on the mission to place love of country above love of life. When his inspiring dissertation was finished, he gave the men the colors of the day still one more time, stressed the angle of approach and reviewed the weather conditions again. Colonel Korn felt himself at the full height of his powers. He belonged in the spotlight.
Comprehension dawned slowly on Colonel Cathcart; when it came, he was struck dumb. His face grew longer and longer as he enviously watched Colonel Korn’s treachery continue, and he was almost afraid to listen when General Dreedle moved up beside him and, in a whisper blustery
enough to be heard throughout the room, demanded, ‘Who is that man?’
Colonel Cathcart answered with wan foreboding, and General Dreedle then cupped his hand over his mouth and whispered something that made Colonel Cathcart’s face glow with immense joy. Colonel Korn saw and quivered with uncontainable rapture. Had he just been promoted in the field by General Dreedle to full colonel? He could not endure the suspense. With a masterful flourish, he brought the briefing to a close and turned expectantly to receive ardent congratulations from General Dreedle – who was already striding out of the building without a glance backward, trailing his nurse and Colonel Moodus behind him. Colonel Korn was stunned by this disappointing sight, but only for an instant. His eyes found Colonel Cathcart, who was still standing erect in a grinning trance, and he rushed over jubilantly and began pulling on his arm.
‘What’d he say about me?’ he demanded excitedly in a fervor of proud and blissful anticipation. ‘What did General Dreedle say?’
‘He wanted to know who you were.’
‘I know that. I know that. But what’d he say about me? What’d he say?’ ‘You make him sick.’
MILO THE MAYOR
That was the mission on which Yossarian lost his nerve. Yossarian lost his nerve on the mission to Avignon because Snowden lost his guts, and Snowden lost his guts because their pilot that day was Huple, who was only fifteen years old, and their co-pilot was Dobbs, who was even worse and who wanted Yossarian to join with him in a plot to murder Colonel Cathcart. Huple was a good pilot, Yossarian knew, but he was only a kid, and Dobbs had no confidence in him, either, and wrested the controls away without warning after they had dropped their bombs, going berserk in mid-air and tipping the plane over into that heart-stopping, ear-splitting, indescribably petrifying fatal dive that tore Yossarian’s earphones free from their connection and hung him helplessly to the roof of the nose by the top of his head.
Oh, God! Yossarian had shrieked soundlessly as he felt them all falling. Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God! he had shrieked beseechingly through lips that could not open as the plane fell and he dangled without weight by the top of his head until Huple managed to seize the controls back and leveled the plane out down inside the crazy, craggy, patchwork canyon of crashing antiaircraft fire from which they had climbed away and from which they would now have to escape again. Almost at once there was a thud and a hole the size of a big fist in the plexiglass. Yossarian’s cheeks were stinging with shimmering splinters. There was no blood.
‘What happened? What happened?’ he cried, and trembled violently when he could not hear his own voice in his ears. He was cowed by the empty silence on the intercom and almost too horrified to move as he crouched like a trapped mouse on his hands and knees and waited without daring to
breathe until he finally spied the gleaming cylindrical jack plug of his headset swinging back and forth in front of his eyes and jammed it back into its receptacle with fingers that rattled. Oh, God! he kept shrieking with no abatement of terror as the flak thumped and mushroomed all about him. Oh, God!
Dobbs was weeping when Yossarian jammed his jack plug back into the intercom system and was able to hear again.
‘Help him, help him,’ Dobbs was sobbing. ‘Help him, help him.’ ‘Help who? Help who?’ Yossarian called back. ‘Help who?’
‘The bombardier, the bombardier,’ Dobbs cried. ‘He doesn’t answer. Help the bombardier, help the bombardier.’
‘I’m the bombardier,’ Yossarian cried back at him. ‘I’m the bombardier. I’m all right. I’m all right.’ ‘Then help him, help him,’ Dobbs wept. ‘Help him, help him.’
‘Help who? Help who?’
‘The radio-gunner,’ Dobbs begged. ‘Help the radio-gunner.’
‘I’m cold,’ Snowden whimpered feebly over the intercom system then in a bleat of plaintive agony. ‘Please help me. I’m cold.’
And Yossarian crept out through the crawlway and climbed up over the bomb bay and down into the rear section of the plane where Snowden lay on the floor wounded and freezing to death in a yellow splash of sunlight near the new tail-gunner lying stretched out on the floor beside him in a dead faint.
Dobbs was the worst pilot in the world and knew it, a shattered wreck of a virile young man who was continually striving to convince his superiors that he was no longer fit to pilot a plane. None of his superiors would listen, and it was the day the number of missions was raised to sixty that Dobbs stole into Yossarian’s tent while Orr was out looking for gaskets and disclosed the plot he had formulated to murder Colonel Cathcart. He needed Yossarian’s assistance.
‘You want us to kill him in cold blood?’ Yossarian objected.
‘That’s right,’ Dobbs agreed with an optimistic smile, encouraged by Yossarian’s ready grasp of the situation. ‘We’ll shoot him to death with the Luger I brought back from Sicily that nobody knows I’ve got.’
‘I don’t think I could do it,’ Yossarian concluded, after weighing the idea in silence awhile. Dobbs was astonished. ‘Why not?’
‘Look. Nothing would please me more than to have the son of a bitch break his neck or get killed in a crash or to find out that someone else had shot him to death. But I don’t think I could kill him.’ ‘He’d do it to you,’ Dobbs argued. ‘In fact, you’re the one who told me he is doing it to us by keeping us in combat so long.’
‘But I don’t think I could do it to him. He’s got a right to live, too, I guess.’
‘Not as long as he’s trying to rob you and me of our right to live. What’s the matter with you?’ Dobbs was flabbergasted. ‘I used to listen to you arguing that same thing with Clevinger. And look what happened to him. Right inside that cloud.’
‘Stop shouting, will you?’ Yossarian shushed him.
‘I’m not shouting!’ Dobbs shouted louder, his face red with revolutionary fervor. His eyes and nostrils were running, and his palpitating crimson lower lip was splattered with a foamy dew. ‘There must have been close to a hundred men in the group who had finished their fifty-five missions when he raised the number to sixty. There must have been at least another hundred like you with just a couple more to fly. He’s going to kill us all if we let him go on forever. We’ve got to kill him first.’
Yossarian nodded expressionlessly, without committing himself. ‘Do you think we could get away with it?’
‘I’ve got it all worked out. I -‘ ‘Stop shouting, for Christ’s sake!’ ‘I’m not shouting. I’ve got it -‘ ‘Will you stop shouting!’
‘I’ve got it all worked out,’ Dobbs whispered, gripping the side of Orr’s cot with white-knuckled hands to constrain them from waving. ‘Thursday morning when he’s due back from that goddam farmhouse of his in the hills, I’ll sneak up through the woods to that hairpin turn in the road and hide in the bushes. He has to slow down there, and I can watch the road in both directions to make sure there’s no one else around. When I see him coming, I’ll shove a big log out into the road to make him stop his jeep. Then I’ll step out of the bushes with my Luger and shoot him in the head until he’s dead. I’ll bury the gun, come back down through the woods to the squadron and go about my business just like everybody else. What could possibly go wrong?’
Yossarian had followed each step attentively. ‘Where do I come in?’ he asked in puzzlement. ‘I couldn’t do it without you,’ Dobbs explained. ‘I need you to tell me to go ahead.’
Yossarian found it hard to believe him. ‘Is that all you want me to do? Just tell you to go ahead?’ ‘That’s all I need from you,’ Dobbs answered. ‘Just tell me to go ahead and I’ll blow his brains out all by myself the day after tomorrow.’ His voice was accelerating with emotion and rising again. ‘I’d like to shoot Colonel Korn in the head, too, while we’re at it, although I’d like to spare Major Danby, if that’s all right with you. Then I’d murder Appleby and Havermeyer also, and after we finish murdering Appleby and Havermeyer I’d like to murder McWatt.’
‘McWatt?’ cried Yossarian, almost jumping up in horror. ‘McWatt’s a friend of mine. What do you want from McWatt?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dobbs confessed with an air of floundering embarrassment. ‘I just thought that as long as we were murdering Appleby and Havermeyer we might as well murder McWatt too. Don’t
you want to murder McWatt?’
Yossarian took a firm stand. ‘Look, I might keep interested in this if you stop shouting it all over the island and if you stick to killing Colonel Cathcart. But if you’re going to turn this into a blood bath, you can forget about me.’
‘All right, all right,’ Dobbs sought to placate him. ‘Just Colonel Cathcart. Should I do it? Tell me to go ahead.’
Yossarian shook his head. ‘I don’t think I could tell you to go ahead.’
Dobbs was frantic. ‘I’m willing to compromise,’ he pleaded vehemently. ‘You don’t have to tell me to go ahead. Just tell me it’s a good idea. Okay? Is it a good idea?’
Yossarian still shook his head. ‘It would have been a great idea if you had gone ahead and done it without even speaking to me. Now it’s too late. I don’t think I can tell you anything. Give me some more time. I might change my mind.’
‘Then it will be too late.’
Yossarian kept shaking his head. Dobbs was disappointed. He sat for a moment with a hangdog look, then spurted to his feet suddenly and stamped away to have another impetuous crack at persuading Doc Daneeka to ground him, knocking over Yossarian’s washstand with his hip when he lurched around and tripping over the fuel line of the stove Orr was still constructing. Doc Daneeka withstood Dobbs’s blustering and gesticulating attack with a series of impatient nods and sent him to the medical tent to describe his symptoms to Gus and Wes, who painted his gums purple with gentian-violet solution the moment he started to talk. They painted his toes purple, too, and forced a laxative down his throat when he opened his mouth again to complain, and then they sent him away.
Dobbs was in even worse shape than Hungry Joe, who could at least fly missions when he was not having nightmares. Dobbs was almost as bad as Orr, who seemed happy as an undersized, grinning lark with his deranged and galvanic giggle and shivering warped buck teeth and who was sent along for a rest leave with Milo and Yossarian on the trip to Cairo for eggs when Milo bought cotton instead and took off at dawn for Istanbul with his plane packed to the gun turrets with exotic spiders and unripened red bananas. Orr was one of the homeliest freaks Yossarian had ever encountered, and one of the most attractive. He had a raw bulgy face, with hazel eyes squeezing from their sockets like matching brown halves of marbles and thick, wavy particolored hair sloping up to a peak on the top of his head like a pomaded pup tent. Orr was knocked down into the water or had an engine shot out almost every time he went up, and he began jerking on Yossarian’s arm like a wild man after they had taken off for Naples and come down in Sicily to find the scheming, cigar-smoking, ten-year-old pimp with the two twelve-year-old virgin sisters waiting for them in town in front of the hotel in which there was room for only Milo. Yossarian pulled back from Orr adamantly, gazing with some concern and bewilderment at Mt. Etna instead of Mt. Vesuvius and
wondering what they were doing in Sicily instead of Naples as Orr kept entreating him in a tittering, stuttering, concupiscent turmoil to go along with him behind the scheming ten-year-old pimp to his two twelve-year-old virgin sisters who were not really virgins and not really sisters and who were really only twenty-eight.
‘Go with him,’ Milo instructed Yossarian laconically. ‘Remember your mission.’
‘All right,’ Yossarian yielded with a sigh, remembering his mission. ‘But at least let me try to find a hotel room first so I can get a good night’s sleep afterward.’
‘You’ll get a good night’s sleep with the girls,’ Milo replied with the same air of intrigue. Remember your mission.’
But they got no sleep at all, for Yossarian and Orr found themselves jammed into the same double bed with the two twelve-year-old twenty-eight-year-old prostitutes, who turned out to be oily and obese and who kept waking them up all night long to ask them to switch partners. Yossarian’s perceptions were soon so fuzzy that he paid no notice to the beige turban the fat one crowding into him kept wearing until late the next morning when the scheming ten-year-old pimp with the Cuban panatella snatched it off in public in a bestial caprice that exposed in the brilliant Sicilian daylight her shocking, misshapen and denudate skull. Vengeful neighbors had shaved her hair to the gleaming bone because she had slept with Germans. The girl screeched in feminine outrage and waddled comically after the scheming ten-year-old pimp, her grisly, bleak, violated scalp slithering up and down ludicrously around the queer darkened wart of her face like something bleached and obscene. Yossarian had never laid eyes on anything so bare before. The pimp spun the turban high on his finger like a trophy and kept himself skipping inches ahead of her finger tips as he led her in a tantalizing circle around the square congested with people who were howling with laughter and pointing to Yossarian with derision when Milo strode up with a grim look of haste and puckered his lips reprovingly at the unseemly spectacle of so much vice and frivolity. Milo insisted on leaving at once for Malta.
‘We’re sleepy,’ Orr whined.
‘That’s your own fault,’ Milo censured them both selfrighteously. ‘If you had spent the night in your hotel room instead of with these immoral girls, you’d both feel as good as I do today.’
‘You told us to go with them,’ Yossarian retorted accusingly. ‘And we didn’t have a hotel room. You were the only one who could get a hotel room.’
‘That wasn’t my fault, either,’ Milo explained haughtily. ‘How was I supposed to know all the buyers would be in town for the chick-pea harvest?’
‘You knew it,’ Yossarian charged. ‘That explains why we’re here in Sicily instead of Naples. You’ve probably got the whole damned plane filled with chick-peas already.’
‘Shhhhhh!’ Milo cautioned sternly, with a meaningful glance toward Orr. ‘Remember your mission.’ The bomb bay, the rear and tail sections of the plane and most of the top turret gunner’s section
were all filled with bushels of chick-peas when they arrived at the airfield to take off for Malta. Yossarian’s mission on the trip was to distract Orr from observing where Milo bought his eggs, even though Orr was a member of Milo’s syndicate and, like every other member of Milo’s syndicate, owned a share. His mission was silly, Yossarian felt, since it was common knowledge that Milo bought his eggs in Malta for seven cents apiece and sold them to the mess halls in his syndicate for five cents apiece.
‘I just don’t trust him,’ Milo brooded in the plane, with a backward nod toward Orr, who was curled up like a tangled rope on the low bushels of chick-peas, trying torturedly to sleep. ‘And I’d just as soon buy my eggs when he’s not around to learn my business secrets. What else don’t you understand?’
Yossarian was riding beside him in the co-pilot’s seat. ‘I don’t understand why you buy eggs for seven cents apiece in Malta and sell them for five cents.’
‘I do it to make a profit.’
‘But how can you make a profit? You lose two cents an egg.’
‘But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don’t make the profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share.’
Yossarian felt he was beginning to understand. ‘And the people you sell the eggs to at four and a quarter cents apiece make a profit of two and three quarter cents apiece when they sell them back to you at seven cents apiece. Is that right? Why don’t you sell the eggs directly to you and eliminate the people you buy them from?’
‘Because I’m the people I buy them from,’ Milo explained. ‘I make a profit of three and a quarter cents apiece when I sell them to me and a profit of two and three quarter cents apiece when I buy them back from me. That’s a total profit of six cents an egg. I lose only two cents an egg when I sell them to the mess halls at five cents apiece, and that’s how I can make a profit buying eggs for seven cents apiece and selling them for five cents apiece. I pay only one cent apiece at the hen when I buy them in Sicily.’
‘In Malta,’ Yossarian corrected. ‘You buy your eggs in Malta, not Sicily.’
Milo chortled proudly. ‘I don’t buy eggs in Malta,’ he confessed, with an air of slight and clandestine amusement that was the only departure from industrious sobriety Yossarian had ever seen him make. ‘I buy them in Sicily for one cent apiece and transfer them to Malta secretly at four and a half cents apiece in order to get the price of eggs up to seven cents apiece when people come to Malta looking for them.’
‘Why do people come to Malta for eggs when they’re so expensive there?’ ‘Because they’ve always done it that way.’
‘Why don’t they look for eggs in Sicily?’
‘Because they’ve never done it that way.’
‘Now I really don’t understand. Why don’t you sell your mess halls the eggs for seven cents apiece instead offor five cents apiece?’
‘Because my mess halls would have no need for me then. Anyone can buy seven-cents-apiece eggs for seven cents apiece.’
‘Why don’t they bypass you and buy the eggs directly from you in Malta at four and a quarter cents apiece?’
‘Because I wouldn’t sell it to them.’ ‘Why wouldn’t you sell it to them?’
‘Because then there wouldn’t be as much room for profit. At least this way I can make a bit for myself as a middleman.’
‘Then you do make a profit for yourself,’ Yossarian declared.
‘Of course I do. But it all goes to the syndicate. And everybody has a share. Don’t you understand? It’s exactly what happens with those plum tomatoes I sell to Colonel Cathcart.’
‘Buy,’ Yossarian corrected him. ‘You don’t sell plum tomatoes to Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. You buy plum tomatoes from them.’
‘No, sell,’ Milo corrected Yossarian. ‘I distribute my plum tomatoes in markets all over Pianosa under an assumed name so that Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn can buy them up from me under their assumed names at four cents apiece and sell them back to me the next day for the syndicate at five cents apiece. They make a profit of one cent apiece. I make a profit of three and a half cents apiece, and everybody comes out ahead.’
‘Everybody but the syndicate,’ said Yossarian with a snort. ‘The syndicate is paying five cents apiece for plum tomatoes that cost you only half a cent apiece. How does the syndicate benefit?’ ‘The syndicate benefits when I benefit,’ Milo explained, ‘because everybody has a share. And the syndicate gets Colonel Cathcart’s and Colonel Korn’s support so that they’ll let me go out on trips like this one. You’ll see how much profit that can mean in about fifteen minutes when we land in Palermo.’
‘Malta,’ Yossarian corrected him. ‘We’re flying to Malta now, not Palermo.’
‘No, we’re flying to Palermo,’ Milo answered. ‘There’s an endive exporter in Palermo I have to see for a minute about a shipment of mushrooms to Bern that were damaged by mold.’
‘Milo, how do you do it?’ Yossarian inquired with laughing amazement and admiration. ‘You fill out a flight plan for one place and then you go to another. Don’t the people in the control towers ever raise hell?’
‘They all belong to the syndicate,’ Milo said. ‘And they know that what’s good for the syndicate is good for the country, because that’s what makes Sammy run. The men in the control towers have a share, too, and that’s why they always have to do whatever they can to help the syndicate.’
‘Do I have a share?’ ‘Everybody has a share.’ ‘Does Orr have a share?’ ‘Everybody has a share.’
‘And Hungry Joe? He has a share, too?’ ‘Everybody has a share.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ mused Yossarian, deeply impressed with the idea of a share for the very first time.
Milo turned toward him with a faint glimmer of mischief. ‘I have a sure-fire plan for cheating the federal government out of six thousand dollars. We can make three thousand dollars apiece without any risk to either of us. Are you interested?’
‘No.’
Milo looked at Yossarian with profound emotion. ‘That’s what I like about you,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re honest! You’re the only one I know that I can really trust. That’s why I wish you’d try to be of more help to me. I really was disappointed when you ran off with those two tramps in Catania yesterday.’
Yossarian stared at Milo in quizzical disbelief. ‘Milo, you told me to go with them. Don’t you remember?’
‘That wasn’t my fault,’ Milo answered with dignity. ‘I had to get rid of Orr some way once we reached town. It will be a lot different in Palermo. When we land in Palermo, I want you and Orr to leave with the girls right from the airport.’
‘With what girls?’
‘I radioed ahead and made arrangements with a four-year-old pimp to supply you and Orr with two eight-year-old virgins who are half Spanish. He’ll be waiting at the airport in a limousine. Go right in as soon as you step out of the plane.’
‘Nothing doing,’ said Yossarian, shaking his head. ‘The only place I’m going is to sleep.’
Milo turned livid with indignation, his slim long nose flickering spasmodically between his black eyebrows and his unbalanced orange-brown mustache like the pale, thin flame of a single candle. ‘Yossarian, remember your mission,’ he reminded reverently.
‘To hell with my mission,’ Yossarian responded indifferently. ‘And to hell with the syndicate too, even though I do have a share. I don’t want any eight-year-old virgins, even if they are half Spanish.’
‘I don’t blame you. But these eight-year-old virgins are really only thirty-two. And they’re not really half Spanish but only one-third Estonian.’
‘I don’t care for any virgins.’
‘And they’re not even virgins,’ Milo continued persuasively. ‘The one I picked out for you was
married for a short time to an elderly schoolteacher who slept with her only on Sundays, so she’s really almost as good as new.’
But Orr was sleepy, too, and Yossarian and Orr were both at Milo’s side when they rode into the city of Palermo from the airport and discovered that there was no room for the two of them at the hotel there either, and, more important, that Milo was mayor.
The weird, implausible reception for Milo began at the airfield, where civilian laborers who recognized him halted in their duties respectfully to gaze at him with full expressions of controlled exuberance and adulation. News of his arrival preceded him into the city, and the outskirts were already crowded with cheering citizens as they sped by in their small uncovered truck. Yossarian and Orr were mystified and mute and pressed close against Milo for security.
Inside the city, the welcome for Milo grew louder as the truck slowed and eased deeper toward the middle of town. Small boys and girls had been released from school and were lining the sidewalks in new clothes, waving tiny flags. Yossarian and Orr were absolutely speechless now. The streets were jammed with joyous throngs, and strung overhead were huge banners bearing Milo’s picture. Milo had posed for these pictures in a drab peasant’s blouse with a high collar, and his scrupulous, paternal countenance was tolerant, wise, critical and strong as he stared out at the populace omnisciently with his undisciplined mustache and disunited eyes. Sinking invalids blew kisses to him from windows. Aproned shopkeepers cheered ecstatically from the narrow doorways of their shops. Tubas crumped. Here and there a person fell and was trampled to death. Sobbing old women swarmed through each other frantically around the slow-moving truck to touch Milo’s shoulder or press his hand. Milo bore the tumultuous celebrations with benevolent grace. He waved back to everyone in elegant reciprocation and showered generous handfuls of foilcovered Hershey kisses to the rejoicing multitudes. Lines of lusty young boys and girls skipped along behind him with their arms linked, chanting in hoarse and glassy-eyed adoration, ‘Milo! Mi-lo! Mi-lo!’
Now that his secret was out, Milo relaxed with Yossarian and Orr and inflated opulently with a vast, shy pride. His cheeks turned flesh-colored. Milo had been elected mayor of Palermo – and of nearby Carini, Monreale, Bagheria, Termini Imerese, Cefalu, Mistretta and Nicosia as well – because he had brought Scotch to Sicily.
Yossarian was amazed. ‘The people here like to drink Scotch that much?’
‘They don’t drink any of the Scotch,’ Milo explained. ‘Scotch is very expensive, and these people here are very poor.’
‘Then why do you import it to Sicily if nobody drinks any?’
‘To build up a price. I move the Scotch here from Malta to make more room for profit when I sell it back to me for somebody else. I created a whole new industry here. Today Sicily is the third largest exporter of Scotch in the world, and that’s why they elected me mayor.’
‘How about getting us a hotel room if you’re such a hotshot?’ Orr grumbled impertinently in a voice
slurred with fatigue.
Milo responded contritely. ‘That’s just what I’m going to do,’ he promised. ‘I’m really sorry about forgetting to radio ahead for hotel rooms for you two. Come along to my office and I’ll speak to my deputy mayor about it right now.’
Milo’s office was a barbershop, and his deputy mayor was a pudgy barber from whose obsequious lips cordial greetings foamed as effusively as the lather he began whipping up in Milo’s shaving cup.
‘Well, Vittorio,’ said Milo, settling back lazily in one of Vittorio’s barber chairs, ‘how were things in my absence this time?’
‘Very sad, Signor Milo, very sad. But now that you are back, the people are all happy again.’ ‘I was wondering about the size of the crowds. How come all the hotels are full?’
‘Because so many people from other cities are here to see you, Signor Milo. And because we have all the buyers who have come into town for the artichoke auction.’
Milo’s hand soared up perpendicularly like an eagle and arrested Vittorio’s shaving brush. ‘What’s artichoke?’ he inquired.
‘Artichoke, Signor Milo? An artichoke is a very tasty vegetable that is popular everywhere. You must try some artichokes while you are here, Signor Milo. We grow the best in the world.’
‘Really?’ said Milo. ‘How much are artichokes selling for this year?’
‘It looks like a very good year for artichokes. The crops were very bad.’
‘Is that a fact?’ mused Milo, and was gone, sliding from his chair so swiftly that his striped barber’s apron retained his shape for a second or two after he had gone before it collapsed. Milo had vanished from sight by the time Yossarian and Orr rushed after him to the doorway.
‘Next?’ barked Milo’s deputy mayor officiously. ‘Who’s next?’
Yossarian and Orr walked from the barbershop in dejection. Deserted by Milo, they trudged homelessly through the reveling masses in futile search of a place to sleep. Yossarian was exhausted. His head throbbed with a dull, debilitating pain, and he was irritable with Orr, who had found two crab apples somewhere and walked with them in his cheeks until Yossarian spied them there and made him take them out. Then Orr found two horse chestnuts somewhere and slipped those in until Yossarian detected them and snapped at him again to take the crab apples out of his mouth. Orr grinned and replied that they were not crab apples but horse chestnuts and that they were not in his mouth but in his hands, but Yossarian was not able to understand a single word he said because of the horse chestnuts in his mouth and made him take them out anyway. A sly light twinkled in Orr’s eyes. He rubbed his forehead harshly with his knuckles, like a man in an alcoholic stupor, and snickered lewdly.
‘Do you remember that girl -‘ He broke off to snicker lewdly again. ‘Do you remember that girl who was hitting me over the head with that shoe in that apartment in Rome, when we were both naked?’
he asked with a look of cunning expectation. He waited until Yossarian nodded cautiously. ‘If you let me put the chestnuts back in my mouth I’ll tell you why she was hitting me. Is that a deal?’ Yossarian nodded, and Orr told him the whole fantastic story of why the naked girl in Nately’s whore’s apartment was hitting him over the head with her shoe, but Yossarian was not able to understand a single word because the horse chestnuts were back in his mouth. Yossarian roared with exasperated laughter at the trick, but in the end there was nothing for them to do when night fell but eat a damp dinner in a dirty restaurant and hitch a ride back to the airfield, where they slept on the chill metal floor of the plane and turned and tossed in groaning torment until the truck drivers blasted up less than two hours later with their crates of artichokes and chased them out onto the ground while they filled up the plane. A heavy rain began falling. Yossarian and Orr were dripping wet by the time the trucks drove away and had no choice but to squeeze themselves back into the plane and roll themselves up like shivering anchovies between the jolting corners of the crates of artichokes that Milo flew up to Naples at dawn and exchanged for the cinnamon sticks, cloves, vanilla beans and pepper pods that he rushed right back down south with that same day to Malta, where, it turned out, he was Assistant Governor-General. There was no room for Yossarian and Orr in Malta either. Milo was Major Sir Milo Minderbinder in Malta and had a gigantic office in the governor-general’s building. His mahogany desk was immense. In a panel of the oak wall, between crossed British flags, hung a dramatic arresting photograph of Major Sir Milo Minderbinder in the dress uniform of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. His mustache in the photograph was clipped and narrow, his chin was chiseled, and his eyes were sharp as thorns. Milo had been knighted, commissioned a major in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and named Assistant Governor-General of Malta because he had brought the egg trade there. He gave Yossarian and Orr generous permission to spend the night on the thick carpet in his office, but shortly after he left a sentry in battle dress appeared and drove them from the building at the tip of his bayonet, and they rode out exhaustedly to the airport with a surly cab driver, who overcharged them, and went to sleep inside the plane again, which was filled now with leaking gunny sacks of cocoa and freshly ground coffee and reeking with an odor so rich that they were both outside retching violently against the landing gear when Milo was chauffeured up the first thing the next morning, looking fit as a fiddle, and took right off for Oran, where there was again no room at the hotel for Yossarian and Orr, and where Milo was Vice-Shah. Milo had at his disposal sumptuous quarters inside a salmon-pink palace, but Yossarian and Orr were not allowed to accompany him inside because they were Christian infidels. They were stopped at the gates by gargantuan Berber guards with scimitars and chased away. Orr was snuffling and sneezing with a crippling head cold. Yossarian’s broad back was bent and aching. He was ready to break Milo’s neck, but Milo was Vice-Shah of Oran and his person was sacred. Milo was not only the Vice-Shah of Oran, as it turned out, but also the Caliph of Baghdad, the Imam of Damascus, and the Sheik of Araby. Milo was the corn god, the rain god and
the rice god in backward regions where such crude gods were still worshiped by ignorant and superstitious people, and deep inside the jungles of Africa, he intimated with becoming modesty, large graven images of his mustached face could be found overlooking primitive stone altars red with human blood. Everywhere they touched he was acclaimed with honor, and it was one triumphal ovation after another for him in city after city until they finally doubled back through the Middle East and reached Cairo, where Milo cornered the market on cotton that no one else in the world wanted and brought himself promptly to the brink of ruin. In Cairo there was at last room at the hotel for Yossarian and Orr. There were soft beds for them with fat fluffed-up pillows and clean, crisp sheets. There were closets with hangers for their clothes. There was water to wash with. Yossarian and Orr soaked their rancid, unfriendly bodies pink in a steaming-hot tub and then went from the hotel with Milo to eat shrimp cocktails and filet mignon in a very fine restaurant with a stock ticker in the lobby that happened to be clicking out the latest quotation for Egyptian cotton when Milo inquired of the captain of waiters what kind of machine it was. Milo had never imagined a machine so beautiful as a stock ticker before.
‘Really?’ he exclaimed when the captain of waiters had finished his explanation. ‘And how much is Egyptian cotton selling for?’ The captain of waiters told him, and Milo bought the whole crop.
But Yossarian was not nearly so frightened by the Egyptian cotton Milo bought as he was by the bunches of green red bananas Milo had spotted in the native market place as they drove into the city, and his fears proved justified, for Milo shook him awake out of a deep sleep just after twelve and shoved a partly peeled banana toward him. Yossarian choked back a sob.
‘Taste it,’ Milo urged, following Yossarian’s writhing face around with the banana insistently. ‘Milo, you bastard,’ moaned Yossarian, ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’
‘Eat it and tell me if it’s good,’ Milo persevered. ‘Don’t tell Orr I gave it to you. I charged him two piasters for his.’
Yossarian ate the banana submissively and closed his eyes after telling Milo it was good, but Milo shook him awake again and instructed him to get dressed as quickly as he could, because they were leaving at once for Pianosa.
‘You and Orr have to load the bananas into the plane right away,’ he explained. ‘The man said to watch out for spiders while you’re handling the bunches.’
‘Milo, can’t we wait until morning?’ Yossarian pleaded. ‘I’ve got to get some sleep.’
‘They’re ripening very quickly,’ answered Milo, ‘and we don’t have a minute to lose. Just think how happy the men back at the squadron will be when they get these bananas.’
But the men back at the squadron never even saw any of the bananas, for it was a seller’s market for bananas in Istanbul and a buyer’s market in Beirut for the caraway seeds Milo rushed with to Bengasi after selling the bananas, and when they raced back into Pianosa breathlessly six days later at the conclusion of Orr’s rest leave, it was with a load of best white eggs from Sicily that Milo said
were from Egypt and sold to his mess halls for only four cents apiece so that all the commanding officers in his syndicate would implore him to speed right back to Cairo for more bunches of green red bananas to sell in Turkey for the caraway seeds in demand in Bengasi. And everybody had a share.
NATELY’S OLD MAN
The only one back in the squadron who did see any of Milo’s red bananas was Aarfy, who picked up two from an influential fraternity brother of his in the Quartermaster Corps when the bananas ripened and began streaming into Italy through normal black-market channels and who was in the officer’s apartment with Yossarian the evening Nately finally found his whore again after so many fruitless weeks of mournful searching and lured her back to the apartment with two girl friends by promising them thirty dollars each.
‘Thirty dollars each?’ remarked Aarfy slowly, poking and patting each of the three strapping girls skeptically with the air of a grudging connoisseur. ‘Thirty dollars is a lot of money for pieces like these. Besides, I never paid for it in my life.’
‘I’m not asking you to pay for it,’ Nately assured him quickly. ‘I’ll pay for them all. I just want you guys to take the other two. Won’t you help me out?’
Aarfy smirked complacently and shook his soft round head. ‘Nobody has to pay for it for good old Aarfy. I can get all I want any time I want it. I’m just not in the mood right now.’
‘Why don’t you just pay all three and send the other two away?’ Yossarian suggested.
‘Because then mine will be angry with me for making her work for her money,’ Nately replied with an anxious look at his girl, who was glowering at him restlessly and starting to mutter. ‘She says that if I really like her I’d send her away and go to bed with one of the others.’
‘I have a better idea,’ boasted Aarfy. ‘Why don’t we keep the three of them here until after the curfew and then threaten to push them out into the street to be arrested unless they give us all their money? We can even threaten to push them out the window.’
‘Aarfy!’ Nately was aghast.
‘I was only trying to help,’ said Aarfy sheepishly. Aarfy was always trying to help Nately because Nately’s father was rich and prominent and in an excellent position to help Aarfy after the war. ‘Gee whiz,’ he defended himself querulously. ‘Back in school we were always doing things like that. I remember one day we tricked these two dumb high-school girls from town into the fraternity house and made them put out for all the fellows there who wanted them by threatening to call up their parents and say they were putting out for us. We kept them trapped in bed there for more than ten hours. We even smacked their faces a little when they started to complain. Then we took away their nickels and dimes and chewing gum and threw them out. Boy, we used to have fun in that fraternity house,’ he recalled peacefully, his corpulent cheeks aglow with the jovial, rubicund warmth of nostalgic recollection. ‘We used to ostracize everyone, even each other.’
But Aarfy was no help to Nately now as the girl Nately had fallen so deeply in love with began swearing at him sullenly with rising, menacing resentment. Luckily, Hungry Joe burst in just then, and everything was all right again, except that Dunbar staggered in drunk a minute later and began embracing one of the other giggling girls at once. Now there were four men and three girls, and the seven of them left Aarfy in the apartment and climbed into a horse-drawn cab, which remained at the curb at a dead halt while the girls demanded their money in advance. Nately gave them ninety dollars with a gallant flourish, after borrowing twenty dollars from Yossarian, thirty-five dollars from Dunbar and seventeen dollars from Hungry Joe. The girls grew friendlier then and called an address to the driver, who drove them at a clopping pace halfway across the city into a section they had never visited before and stopped in front of an old, tall building on a dark street. The girls led them up four steep, very long flights of creaking wooden stairs and guided them through a doorway into their own wonderful and resplendent tenement apartment, which burgeoned miraculously with an infinite and proliferating flow of supple young naked girls and contained the evil and debauched ugly old man who irritated Nately constantly with his caustic laughter and the clucking, proper old woman in the ash-gray woolen sweater who disapproved of everything immoral that occurred there and tried her best to tidy up.
The amazing place was a fertile, seething cornucopia of female nipples and navels. At first, there were just their own three girls, in the dimly-lit, drab brown sitting room that stood at the juncture of three murky hallways leading in separate directions to the distant recesses of the strange and marvelous bordello. The girls disrobed at once, pausing in different stages to point proudly to their garish underthings and bantering all the while with the gaunt and dissipated old man with the shabby long white hair and slovenly white unbuttoned shirt who sat cackling lasciviously in a musty blue armchair almost in the exact center of the room and bade Nately and his companions welcome with a mirthful and sardonic formality. Then the old woman trudged out to get a girl for Hungry Joe, dipping her captious head sadly, and returned with two big-bosomed beauties, one already undressed and the other in only a transparent pink half slip that she wiggled out of while sitting down. Three more naked girls sauntered in from a different direction and remained to chat, then two others. Four more girls passed through the room in an indolent group, engrossed in conversation; three were barefoot and one wobbled perilously on a pair of unbuckled silver dancing shoes that did not seem to be her own. One more girl appeared wearing only panties and sat down, bringing the total congregating there in just a few minutes to eleven, all but one of them completely unclothed.
There was bare flesh lounging everywhere, most of it plump, and Hungry Joe began to die. He stood stock still in rigid, cataleptic astonishment while the girls ambled in and made themselves comfortable. Then he let out a piercing shriek suddenly and bolted toward the door in a headlong dash back toward the enlisted men’s apartment for his camera, only to be halted in his tracks with
another frantic shriek by the dreadful, freezing premonition that this whole lovely, lurid, rich and colorful pagan paradise would be snatched away from him irredeemably if he were to let it out of his sight for even an instant. He stopped in the doorway and sputtered, the wiry veins and tendons in his face and neck pulsating violently. The old man watched him with victorious merriment, sitting in his musty blue armchair like some satanic and hedonistic deity on a throne, a stolen U.S. Army blanket wrapped around his spindly legs to ward off a chill. He laughed quietly, his sunken, shrewd eyes sparkling perceptively with a cynical and wanton enjoyment. He had been drinking. Nately reacted on sight with bristling enmity to this wicked, depraved and unpatriotic old man who was old enough to remind him of his father and who made disparaging jokes about America. ‘America,’ he said, ‘will lose the war. And Italy will win it.’
‘America is the strongest and most prosperous nation on earth,’ Nately informed him with lofty fervor and dignity. ‘And the American fighting man is second to none.’
‘Exactly,’ agreed the old man pleasantly, with a hint of taunting amusement. ‘Italy, on the other hand, is one of the least prosperous nations on earth. And the Italian fighting man is probably second to all. And that’s exactly why my country is doing so well in this war while your country is doing so poorly.’
Nately guffawed with surprise, then blushed apologetically for his impoliteness. ‘I’m sorry I laughed at you,’ he said sincerely, and he continued in a tone of respectful condescension. ‘But Italy was occupied by the Germans and is now being occupied by us. You don’t call that doing very well, do you?’
‘But of course I do,’ exclaimed the old man cheerfully. ‘The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying any more. But American and German soldiers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I am quite certain that Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been destroyed.’
Nately could scarcely believe his ears. He had never heard such shocking blasphemies before, and he wondered with instinctive logic why G-men did not appear to lock the traitorous old man up. ‘America is not going to be destroyed!’ he shouted passionately.
‘Never?’ prodded the old man softly. ‘Well…’ Nately faltered.
The old man laughed indulgently, holding in check a deeper, more explosive delight. His goading remained gentle. ‘Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in twenty-five million years or so.’
Nately squirmed uncomfortably. ‘Well, forever is a long time, I guess.’
‘A million years?’ persisted the jeering old man with keen, sadistic zest. ‘A half million? The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as… the frog?’
Nately wanted to smash his leering face. He looked about imploringly for help in defending his country’s future against the obnoxious calumnies of this sly and sinful assailant. He was disappointed. Yossarian and Dunbar were busy in a far corner pawing orgiastically at four or five frolicsome girls and six bottles of red wine, and Hungry Joe had long since tramped away down one of the mystic hallways, propelling before him like a ravening despot as many of the broadest-hipped young prostitutes as he could contain in his frail wind-milling arms and cram into one double bed.
Nately felt himself at an embarrassing loss. His own girl sat sprawled out gracelessly on an overstuffed sofa with an expression of otiose boredom. Nately was unnerved by her torpid indifference to him, by the same sleepy and inert poise that he remembered so vivdly, so sweetly, and so miserably from the first time she had seen him and ignored him at the packed penny-ante blackjack game in the living room of the enlisted men’s apartment. Her lax mouth hung open in a perfect O, and God alone knew at what her glazed and smoky eyes were staring in such brute apathy. The old man waited tranquilly, watching him with a discerning smile that was both scornful and sympathetic. A lissome, blond, sinuous girl with lovely legs and honey-colored skin laid herself out contentedly on the arm of the old man’s chair and began molesting his angular, pale, dissolute face languidly and coquettishly. Nately stiffened with resentment and hostility at the sight of such lechery in a man so old. He turned away with a sinking heart and wondered why he simply did not take his own girl and go to bed.
This sordid, vulturous, diabolical old man reminded Nately of his father because the two were nothing at all alike. Nately’s father was a courtly white-haired gentleman who dressed impeccably; this old man was an uncouth bum. Nately’s father was a sober, philosophical and responsible man; this old man was fickle and licentious. Nately’s father was discreet and cultured; this old man was a boor. Nately’s father believed in honor and knew the answer to everything; this old man believed in nothing and had only questions. Nately’s father had a distinguished white mustache; this old man had no mustache at all. Nately’s father – and everyone else’s father Nately had ever met – was dignified, wise and venerable; this old man was utterly repellent, and Nately plunged back into debate with him, determined to repudiate his vile logic and insinuations with an ambitious vengeance that would capture the attention of the bored, phlegmatic girl he had fallen so intensely in love with and win her admiration forever.
‘Well, frankly, I don’t know how long America is going to last,’ he proceeded dauntlessly. ‘I suppose
we can’t last forever if the world itself is going to be destroyed someday. But I do know that we’re going to survive and triumph for a long, long time.’
‘For how long?’ mocked the profane old man with a gleam of malicious elation. ‘Not even as long as the frog?’
‘Much longer than you or me,’ Nately blurted out lamely.
‘Oh, is that all! That won’t be very much longer then, considering that you’re so gullible and brave and that I am already such an old, old man.’
‘How old are you?’ Nately asked, growing intrigued and charmed with the old man in spite of himself.
‘A hundred and seven.’ The old man chuckled heartily at Nately’s look of chagrin. ‘I see you don’t believe that either.’
‘I don’t believe anything you tell me,’ Nately replied, with a bashful mitigating smile. ‘The only thing I do believe is that America is going to win the war.’
‘You put so much stock in winning wars,’ the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. ‘The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we’ve done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn’t a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.’
Nately gaped at him in undisguised befuddlement. ‘Now I really don’t understand what you’re saying. You talk like a madman.’
‘But I live like a sane one. I was a fascist when Mussolini was on top, and I am an anti-fascist now that he has been deposed. I was fanatically pro-German when the Germans were here to protect us against the Americans, and now that the Americans are here to protect us against the Germans I am fanatically pro-American. I can assure you, my outraged young friend’ – the old man’s knowing, disdainful eyes shone even more effervescently as Nately’s stuttering dismay increased – ‘that you and your country will have a no more loyal partisan in Italy than me – but only as long as you remain in Italy.’
‘But,’ Nately cried out in disbelief, ‘you’re a turncoat! A time-server! A shameful, unscrupulous opportunist!’
‘I am a hundred and seven years old,’ the old man reminded him suavely. ‘Don’t you have any principles?’
‘Of course not.’ ‘No morality?’
‘Oh, I am a very moral man,’ the villainous old man assured him with satiric seriousness, stroking the bare hip of a buxom black-haired girl with pretty dimples who had stretched herself out seductively on the other arm of his chair. He grinned at Nately sarcastically as he sat between both naked girls in smug and threadbare splendor, with a sovereign hand on each.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Nately remarked grudgingly, trying stubbornly not to watch him in relationship to the girls. ‘I simply can’t believe it.’
‘But it’s perfectly true. When the Germans marched into the city, I danced in the streets like a youthful ballerina and shouted, “Heil Hitler!” until my lungs were hoarse. I even waved a small Nazi flag that I snatched away from a beautiful little girl while her mother was looking the other way. When the Germans left the city, I rushed out to welcome the Americans with a bottle of excellent brandy and a basket of flowers. The brandy was for myself, of course, and the flowers were to sprinkle upon our liberators. There was a very stiff and stuffy old major riding in the first car, and I hit him squarely in the eye with a red rose. A marvelous shot! You should have seen him wince.’
Nately gasped and was on his feet with amazement, the blood draining from his cheeks. ‘Major – de Coverley!’ he cried.
‘Do you know him?’ inquired the old man with delight. ‘What a charming coincidence!’
Nately was too astounded even to hear him. ‘So you’re the one who wounded Major – de Coverley!’ he exclaimed in horrified indignation. ‘How could you do such a thing?’
The fiendish old man was unperturbed. ‘How could I resist, you mean. You should have seen the arrogant old bore, sitting there so sternly in that car like the Almighty Himself, with his big, rigid head and his foolish, solemn face. What a tempting target he made! I got him in the eye with an American Beauty rose. I thought that was most appropriate. Don’t you?’
‘That was a terrible thing to do!’ Nately shouted at him reproachfully. ‘A vicious and criminal thing! Major – de Coverley is our squadron executive officer!’
‘Is he?’ teased the unregenerate old man, pinching his pointy jaw gravely in a parody of repentance. ‘In that case, you must give me credit for being impartial. When the Germans rode in, I almost stabbed a robust young Oberleutnant to death with a sprig of edelweiss.’
Nately was appalled and bewildered by the abominable old man’s inability to perceive the enormity of his offence. ‘Don’t you realize what you’ve done?’ he scolded vehemently. ‘Major – de Coverley is a noble and wonderful person, and everyone admires him.’
‘He’s a silly old fool who really has no right acting like a silly young fool. Where is he today? Dead?’
Nately answered softly with somber awe. ‘Nobody knows. He seems to have disappeared.’
‘You see? Imagine a man his age risking what little life he has left for something so absurd as a country.’
Nately was instantly up in arms again. ‘There is nothing so absurd about risking your life for your country!’ he declared.
‘Isn’t there?’ asked the old man. ‘What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can’t all be worth dying for.’
‘Anything worth living for,’ said Nately, ‘is worth dying for.’
‘And anything worth dying for,’ answered the sacrilegious old man, ‘is certainly worth living for. You know, you’re such a pure and naive young man that I almost feel sorry for you. How old are you? Twenty-five? Twenty-six?’
‘Nineteen,’ said Nately. ‘I’ll be twenty in January.’
‘If you live.’ The old man shook his head, wearing, for a moment, the same touchy, meditating frown of the fretful and disapproving old woman. ‘They are going to kill you if you don’t watch out, and I can see now that you are not going to watch out. Why don’t you use some sense and try to be more like me? You might live to be a hundred and seven, too.’
‘Because it’s better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees,’ Nately retorted with triumphant and lofty conviction. ‘I guess you’ve heard that saying before.’
‘Yes, I certainly have,’ mused the treacherous old man, smiling again. ‘But I’m afraid you have it backward. It is better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees. That is the way the saying goes.’ ‘Are you sure?’ Nately asked with sober confusion. ‘It seems to make more sense my way.’
‘No, it makes more sense my way. Ask your friends.’
Nately turned to ask his friends and discovered they had gone. Yossarian and Dunbar had both disappeared. The old man roared with contemptuous merriment at Nately’s look of embarrassed surprise. Nately’s face darkened with shame. He vacillated helplessly for a few seconds and then spun himself around and fled inside the nearest of the hallways in search of Yossarian and Dunbar, hoping to catch them in time and bring them back to the rescue with news of the remarkable clash between the old man and Major – de Coverley. All the doors in the hallways were shut. There was light under none. It was already very late. Nately gave up his search forlornly. There was nothing left for him to do, he realized finally, but get the girl he was in love with and lie down with her somewhere to make tender, courteous love to her and plan their future together; but she had gone off to bed, too, by the time he returned to the sitting room for her, and there was nothing left for him to do then but resume his abortive discussion with the loathsome old man, who rose from his armchair with jesting civility and excused himself for the night, abandoning Nately there with two bleary-eyed girls who could not tell him into which room his own whore had gone and who padded off to bed several seconds later after trying in vain to interest him in themselves, leaving him to sleep alone in the sitting room on the small, lumpy sofa.
Nately was a sensitive, rich, good-looking boy with dark hair, trusting eyes, and a pain in his neck when he awoke on the sofa early the next morning and wondered dully where he was. His nature was invariably gentle and polite. He had lived for almost twenty years without trauma, tension, hate, or neurosis, which was proof to Yossarian of just how crazy he really was. His childhood had been a pleasant, though disciplined, one. He got on well with his brothers and sisters, and he did not hate his mother and father, even though they had both been very good to him.
Nately had been brought up to detest people like Aarfy, whom his mother characterized as climbers, and people like Milo, whom his father characterized as pushers, but he had never learned how, since he had never been permitted near them. As far as he could recall, his homes in Philadelphia, New York, Maine, Palm Beach, Southampton, London, Deauville, Paris and the south of France had always been crowded only with ladies and gentlemen who were not climbers or pushers. Nately’s mother, a descendant of the New England Thorntons, was a Daughter of the American Revolution. His father was a Son of a Bitch.
‘Always remember,’ his mother had reminded him frequently, ‘that you are a Nately. You are not a Vanderbilt, whose fortune was made by a vulgar tugboat captain, or a Rockefeller, whose wealth was amassed through unscrupulous speculations in crude petroleum; or a Reynolds or Duke, whose income was derived from the sale to the unsuspecting public of products containing cancer-causing resins and tars; and you are certainly not an Astor, whose family, I believe, still lets rooms. You are a Nately, and the Natelys have never done anything for their money.’
‘What your mother means, son,’ interjected his father affably one time with that flair for graceful and economical expression Nately admired so much, ‘is that old money is better than new money and that the newly rich are never to be esteemed as highly as the newly poor. Isn’t that correct, my dear?
Nately’s father brimmed continually with sage and sophisticated counsel of that kind. He was as ebullient and ruddy as mulled claret, and Nately liked him a great deal, although he did not like mulled claret. When war broke out, Nately’s family decided that he would enlist in the armed forces, since he was too young to be placed in the diplomatic service, and since his father had it on excellent authority that Russia was going to collapse in a matter of weeks or months and that Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Gandhi, Franco, Peron and the Emperor of Japan would then all sign a peace treaty and live together happily ever after. It was Nately’s father’s idea that he join the Air Corps, where he could train safely as a pilot while the Russians capitulated and the details of the armistice were worked out, and where, as an officer, he would associate only with gentlemen.
Instead, he found himself with Yossarian, Dunbar and Hungry Joe in a whore house in Rome, poignantly in love with an indifferent girl there with whom he finally did lie down the morning after the night he slept alone in the sitting room, only to be interrupted almost immediately by her incorrigible kid sister, who came bursting in without warning and hurled herself onto the bed
jealously so that Nately could embrace her, too. Nately’s whore sprang up snarling to whack her angrily and jerked her to her feet by her hair. The twelve-year-old girl looked to Nately like a plucked chicken or like a twig with the bark peeled off her sapling body embarrassed everyone in her precocious attempts to imitate her elders, and she was always being chased away to put clothes on and ordered out into the street to play in the fresh air with the other children. The two sisters swore and spat at each other now savagely, raising a fluent, deafening commotion that brought a whole crowd of hilarious spectators swarming into the room. Nately gave up in exasperation. He asked his girl to get dressed and took her downstairs for breakfast. The kid sister tagged along, and Nately felt like the proud head of a family as the three of them ate respectably in a nearby open-air caf‚. But Nately’s whore was already bored by the time they started back, and she decided to go streetwalking with two other girls rather than spend more time with him. Nately and the kid sister followed meekly a block behind, the ambitious youngster to pick up valuable pointers, Nately to eat his liver in mooning frustration, and both were saddened when the girls were stopped by soldiers in a staff car and driven away.
Nately went back to the caf‚ and bought the kid sister chocolate ice cream until her spirits improved and then returned with her to the apartment, where Yossarian and Dunbar were flopped out in the sitting room with an exhausted Hungry Joe, who was still wearing on his battered face the blissful, numb, triumphant smile with which he had limped into view from his massive harem that morning like a person with numerous broken bones. The lecherous and depraved old man was delighted with Hungry Joe’s split lips and black-and-blue eyes. He greeted Nately warmly, still wearing the same rumpled clothes of the evening before. Nately was profoundly upset by his seedy and disreputable appearance, and whenever he came to the apartment he wished that the corrupt, immoral old man would put on a clean Brooks Brothers shirt, shave, comb his hair, wear a tweed jacket, and grow a dapper white mustache so that Nately would not have to suffer such confusing shame each time he looked at him and was reminded of his father.
MILO
April had been the best month of all for Milo. Lilacs bloomed in April and fruit ripened on the vine. Heartbeats quickened and old appetites were renewed. In April a livelier iris gleamed upon the burnished dove. April was spring, and in the spring Milo Minderbinder’s fancy had lightly turned to thoughts of tangerines.
‘Tangerines?’ ‘Yes, sir.’
‘My men would love tangerines,’ admitted the colonel in Sardinia who commanded four squadrons of B-26s.
‘There’ll be all the tangerines they can eat that you’re able to pay for with money from your mess fund,’ Milo assured him.
‘Casaba melons?’
‘Are going for a song in Damascus.’
‘I have a weakness for casaba melons. I’ve always had a weakness for casaba melons.’
‘Just lend me one plane from each squadron, just one plane, and you’ll have all the casabas you can eat that you’ve money to pay for.’
‘We buy from the syndicate?’ ‘And everybody has a share.’
‘It’s amazing, positively amazing. How can you do it?’
‘Mass purchasing power makes the big difference. For example, breaded veal cutlets.’
‘I’m not so crazy about breaded veal cutlets,’ grumbled the skeptical B-25 commander in the north of Corsica.
‘Breaded veal cutlets are very nutritious,’ Milo admonished him piously. ‘They contain egg yolk and bread crumbs. And so are lamb chops.’
‘Ah, lamb chops,’ echoed the B-25 commander. ‘Good lamb chops?’ ‘The best,’ said Milo, ‘that the black market has to offer.’
‘Baby lamb chops?’
‘In the cutest little pink paper panties you ever saw. Are going for a song in Portugal.’ ‘I can’t send a plane to Portugal. I haven’t the authority.’
‘I can, once you lend the plane to me. With a pilot to fly it. And don’t forget – you’ll get General Dreedle.’
‘Will General Dreedle eat in my mess hall again?’
‘Like a pig, once you start feeding him my best white fresh eggs fried in my pure creamery butter. There’ll be tangerines too, and casaba melons, honeydews, filet of Dover sole, baked Alaska, and cockles and mussels.’
‘And everybody has a share?’
‘That,’ said Milo, ‘is the most beautiful part of it.’
‘I don’t like it,’ growled the unco-operative fighter-plane commander, who didn’t like Milo either. ‘There’s an unco-operative fighter-plane commander up north who’s got it in for me,’ Milo complained to General Dreedle. ‘It takes just one person to ruin the whole thing, and then you wouldn’t have your fresh eggs fried in my pure creamery butter any more.’
General Dreedle had the unco-operative fighter-plane commander transferred to the Solomon Islands to dig graves and replaced him with a senile colonel with bursitis and a craving for litchi nuts who introduced Milo to the B-17 general on the mainland with a yearning for Polish sausage. ‘Polish sausage is going for peanuts in Cracow,’ Milo informed him.
‘Polish sausage,’ sighed the general nostalgically. ‘You know, I’d give just about anything for a good hunk of Polish sausage. Just about anything.’
‘You don’t have to give anything. Just give me one plane for each mess hall and a pilot who will do what he’s told. And a small down payment on your initial order as a token of good faith.’
‘But Cracow is hundreds of miles behind the enemy lines. How will you get to the sausage?’ ‘There’s an international Polish sausage exchange in Geneva. I’ll just fly the peanuts into Switzerland and exchange them for Polish sausage at the open market rate. They’ll fly the peanuts back to Cracow and I’ll fly the Polish sausage back to you. You buy only as much Polish sausage as you want through the syndicate. There’ll be tangerines too, with only a little artificial coloring added. And eggs from Malta and Scotch from Sicily. You’ll be paying the money to yourself when you buy from the syndicate, since you’ll own a share, so you’ll really be getting everything you buy for nothing. Doesn’t that makes sense?’
‘Sheer genius. How in the world did you ever think of it?’
‘My name is Milo Minderbinder. I am twenty-seven years old.’
Milo Minderbinder’s planes flew in from everywhere, the pursuit planes, bombers, and cargo ships streaming into Colonel Cathcart’s field with pilots at the controls who would do what they were told. The planes were decorated with flamboyant squadron emblems illustrating such laudable ideals as Courage, Might, Justice, Truth, Liberty, Love, Honor and Patriotism that were painted out at once by Milo’s mechanics with a double coat of flat white and replaced in garish purple with the stenciled name M & M ENTERPRISES, FINE FRUITS AND PRODUCE. The ‘M & M’ In ‘M & M ENTERPRISES’ stood for Milo & Minderbinder, and the & was inserted, Milo revealed candidly, to nullify any impression that the syndicate was a one-man operation. Planes arrived for Milo from airfields in Italy, North Africa and England, and from Air Transport Command stations in Liberia, Ascension Island, Cairo, and Karachi. Pursuit planes were traded for additional cargo ships or retained for emergency invoice duty and small-parcel service; trucks and tanks were procured from the ground forces and used for short-distance road hauling. Everybody had a share, and men got fat and moved about tamely with toothpicks in their greasy lips. Milo supervised the whole expanding operation by himself. Deep otter-brown lines of preoccupation etched themselves permanently into his careworn face and gave him a harried look of sobriety and mistrust. Everybody but Yossarian thought Milo was a jerk, first for volunteering for the job of mess officer and next for taking it so seriously. Yossarian also thought that Milo was a jerk; but he also knew that Milo was a genius.
One day Milo flew away to England to pick up a load of Turkish halvah and came flying back from Madagascar leading four German bombers filled with yams, collards, mustard greens and black-eyed Georgia peas. Milo was dumbfounded when he stepped down to the ground and found a contingent of armed M.P.s waiting to imprison the German pilots and confiscate their planes. Confiscate! The mere word was anathema to him, and he stormed back and forth in excoriating condemnation, shaking a piercing finger of rebuke in the guilt-ridden faces of Colonel Cathcart, Colonel Korn and the poor battle-scarred captain with the submachine gun who commanded the
M.P.s.
‘Is this Russia?’ Milo assailed them incredulously at the top of his voice. ‘Confiscate?’ he shrieked, as though he could not believe his own ears. ‘Since when is it the policy of the American government to confiscate the private property of its citizens? Shame on you! Shame on all of you for even thinking such a horrible thought.’
‘But Milo,’ Major Danby interrupted timidly, ‘we’re at war with Germany, and those are German planes.’
‘They are no such thing!’ Milo retorted furiously. ‘Those planes belong to the syndicate, and everybody has a share. Confiscate? How can you possibly confiscate your own private property? Confiscate, indeed! I’ve never heard anything so depraved in my whole life.’
And sure enough, Milo was right, for when they looked, his mechanics had painted out the German swastikas on the wings, tails and fuselages with double coats of flat white and stenciled in the words M & M ENTERPRISES, FINE FRUITS AND PRODUCE. Right before their eyes he had transformed his syndicate into an international cartel.
Milo’s argosies of plenty now filled the air. Planes poured in from Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Sweden, Finland, Poland – from everywhere in Europe, in fact, but Russia, with whom Milo refused to do business. When everybody who was going to had signed up with M & M Enterprises, Fine Fruits and Produce, Milo created a wholly owned subsidiary, M & M Fancy Pastry, and obtained more airplanes and more money from the mess funds for scones and crumpets from the British Isles, prune and cheese Danish from Copenhagen, ‚clairs, cream puffs, Napoleons and petits fours from Paris, Reims and Grenoble, Kugelhopf, pumpernickel and Pfefferkuchen from Berlin, Linzer and Dobos Torten from Vienna, Strudel from Hungary and baklava from Ankara. Each morning Milo sent planes aloft all over Europe and North Africa hauling long red tow signs advertising the day’s specials in large square letters: ‘EYEROUND, 79›. . . WHITING, 21›.’ He boosted cash income for the syndicate by leasing tow signs to Pet Milk, Gaines Dog Food, and Noxzema. In a spirit of civic enterprise, he regularly allotted a certain amount of free aerial advertising space to General Peckem for the propagation of such messages in the public interest as NEATNESS COUNTS, HASTE MAKES WASTE, and THE FAMILY THAT PRAYS TOGETHER STAYS TOGETHER. Milo purchased
spot radio announcements on Axis Sally’s and Lord Haw Haw’s daily propaganda broadcasts from Berlin to keep things moving. Business boomed on every battlefront.
Milo’s planes were a familiar sight. They had freedom of passage everywhere, and one day Milo contracted with the American military authorities to bomb the German-held highway bridge at Orvieto and with the German military authorities to defend the highway bridge at Orvieto with antiaircraft fire against his own attack. His fee for attacking the bridge for America was the total cost of the operation plus six per cent and his fee from Germany for defending the bridge was the
same cost-plus-six agreement augmented by a merit bonus of a thousand dollars for every American plane he shot down. The consummation of these deals represented an important victory for private enterprise, he pointed out, since the armies of both countries were socialized institutions. Once the contracts were signed, there seemed to be no point in using the resources of the syndicate to bomb and defend the bridge, inasmuch as both governments had ample men and material right there to do so and were perfectly happy to contribute them, and in the end Milo realized a fantastic profit from both halves of his project for doing nothing more than signing his name twice.
The arrangements were fair to both sides. Since Milo did have freedom of passage everywhere, his planes were able to steal over in a sneak attack without alerting the German antiaircraft gunners; and since Milo knew about the attack, he was able to alert the German antiaircraft gunners in sufficient time for them to begin firing accurately the moment the planes came into range. It was an ideal arrangement for everyone but the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, who was killed over the target the day he arrived.
‘I didn’t kill him!’ Milo kept replying passionately to Yossarian’s angry protest. ‘I wasn’t even there that day, I tell you. Do you think I was down there on the ground firing an antiaircraft gun when the planes came over?’
‘But you organized the whole thing, didn’t you?’ Yossarian shouted back at him in the velvet darkness cloaking the path leading past the still vehicles of the motor pool to the open-air movie theater.
‘And I didn’t organize anything,’ Milo answered indignantly, drawing great agitated sniffs of air in through his hissing, pale, twitching nose. ‘The Germans have the bridge, and we were going to bomb it, whether I stepped into the picture or not. I just saw a wonderful opportunity to make some profit out of the mission, and I took it. What’s so terrible about that?’
‘What’s so terrible about it? Milo, a man in my tent was killed on that mission before he could even unpack his bags.’
‘But I didn’t kill him.’
‘You got a thousand dollars extra for it.’
‘But I didn’t kill him. I wasn’t even there, I tell you. I was in Barcelona buying olive oil and skinless and boneless sardines, and I’ve got the purchase orders to prove it. And I didn’t get the thousand dollars. That thousand dollars went to the syndicate, and everybody got a share, even you.’ Milo was appealing to Yossarian from the bottom of his soul. ‘Look, I didn’t start this war, Yossarian, no matter what that lousy Wintergreen is saying. I’m just trying to put it on a businesslike basis. Is anything wrong with that? You know, a thousand dollars ain’t such a bad price for a medium bomber and a crew. If I can persuade the Germans to pay me a thousand dollars for every plane they shoot down, why shouldn’t I take it?’
‘Because you’re dealing with the enemy, that’s why. Can’t you understand that we’re fighting a war?
People are dying. Look around you, for Christ’s sake!’
Milo shook his head with weary forbearance. ‘And the Germans are not our enemies,’ he declared. ‘Oh I know what you’re going to say. Sure, we’re at war with them. But the Germans are also members in good standing of the syndicate, and it’s my job to protect their rights as shareholders. Maybe they did start the war, and maybe they are killing millions of people, but they pay their bills a lot more promptly than some allies of ours I could name. Don’t you understand that I have to respect the sanctity of my contract with Germany? Can’t you see it from my point of view?’
‘No,’ Yossarian rebuffed him harshly.
Milo was stung and made no effort to disguise his wounded feelings. It was a muggy, moonlit night filled with gnats, moths, and mosquitoes. Milo lifted his arm suddenly and pointed toward the open-air theater, where the milky, dust-filled beam bursting horizontally from the projector slashed a conelike swath in the blackness and draped in a fluorescent membrane of light the audience tilted on the seats there in hypnotic sags, their faces focused upward toward the aluminized movie screen. Milo’s eyes were liquid with integrity, and his artless and uncorrupted face was lustrous with a shining mixture of sweat and insect repellent.
‘Look at them,’ he exclaimed in a voice choked with emotion. ‘They’re my friends, my countrymen, my comrades in arms. A fellow never had a better bunch of buddies. Do you think I’d do a single thing to harm them if I didn’t have to? Haven’t I got enough on my mind? Can’t you see how upset I am already about all that cotton piling up on those piers in Egypt?’ Milo’s voice splintered into fragments, and he clutched at Yossarian’s shirt front as though drowning. His eyes were throbbing visibly like brown caterpillars. ‘Yossarian, what am I going to do with so much cotton? It’s all your fault for letting me buy it.’
The cotton was piling up on the piers in Egypt, and nobody wanted any. Milo had never dreamed that the Nile Valley could be so fertile or that there would be no market at all for the crop he had bought. The mess halls in his syndicate would not help; they rose up in uncompromising rebellion against his proposal to tax them on a per capita basis in order to enable each man to own his own share of the Egyptian cotton crop. Even his reliable friends the Germans failed him in this crisis: they preferred ersatz. Milo’s mess halls would not even help him store the cotton, and his warehousing costs skyrocketed and contributed to the devastating drain upon his cash reserves. The profits from the Orvieto mission were sucked away. He began writing home for the money he had sent back in better days; soon that was almost gone. And new bales of cotton kept arriving on the wharves at Alexandria every day. Each time he succeeded in dumping some on the world market for a loss it was snapped up by canny Egyptian brokers in the Levant, who sold it back to him at the original price, so that he was really worse off than before.
M & M Enterprises verged on collapse. Milo cursed himself hourly for his monumental greed and stupidity in purchasing the entire Egyptian cotton crop, but a contract was a contract and had to be
honored, and one night, after a sumptuous evening meal, all Milo’s fighters and bombers took off, joined in formation directly overhead and began dropping bombs on the group. He had landed another contract with the Germans, this time to bomb his own outfit. Milo’s planes separated in a well co-ordinated attack and bombed the fuel stocks and the ordnance dump, the repair hangars and the B-25 bombers resting on the lollipop-shaped hardstands at the field. His crews spared the landing strip and the mess halls so that they could land safely when their work was done and enjoy a hot snack before retiring. They bombed with their landing lights on, since no one was shooting back. They bombed all four squadrons, the officers’ club and the Group Headquarters building. Men bolted from their tents in sheer terror and did not know in which direction to turn. Wounded soon lay screaming everywhere. A cluster of fragmentation bombs exploded in the yard of the officers’ club and punched jagged holes in the side of the wooden building and in the bellies and backs of a row of lieutenants and captains standing at the bar. They doubled over in agony and dropped. The rest of the officers fled toward the two exits in panic and jammed up the doorways like a dense, howling dam of human flesh as they shrank from going farther.
Colonel Cathcart clawed and elbowed his way through the unruly, bewildered mass until he stood outside by himself. He stared up at the sky in stark astonishment and horror. Milo’s planes, ballooning serenely in over the blossoming treetops with their bomb bay doors open and wing flaps down and with their monstrous, bug-eyed, blinding, fiercely flickering, eerie landing lights on, were the most apocalyptic sight he had ever beheld. Colonel Cathcart let go a stricken gasp of dismay and hurled himself headlong into his jeep, almost sobbing. He found the gas pedal and the ignition and sped toward the airfield as fast as the rocking car would carry him, his huge flabby hands clenched and bloodless on the wheel or blaring his horn tormentedly. Once he almost killed himself when he swerved with a banshee screech of tires to avoid plowing into a bunch of men running crazily toward the hills in their underwear with their stunned faces down and their thin arms pressed high around their temples as puny shields. Yellow, orange and red fires were burning on both sides of the road. Tents and trees were in flames, and Milo’s planes kept coming around interminably with their blinking white landing lights on and their bomb bay doors open. Colonel Cathcart almost turned the jeep over when he slammed the brakes on at the control tower. He leaped from the car while it was still skidding dangerously and hurtled up the flight of steps inside, where three men were busy at the instruments and the controls. He bowled two of them aside in his lunge for the nickel-plated microphone, his eyes glittering wildly and his beefy face contorted with stress. He squeezed the microphone in a bestial grip and began shouting hysterically at the top of his voice.
‘Milo, you son of a bitch! Are you crazy? What the hell are you doing? Come down! Come down!’ ‘Stop hollering so much, will you?’ answered Milo, who was standing there right beside him in the control tower with a microphone of his own. ‘I’m right here.’ Milo looked at him with reproof and
turned back to his work. ‘Very good, men, very good,’ he chanted into his microphone. ‘But I see one supply shed still standing. That will never do, Purvis – I’ve spoken to you about that kind of shoddy work before. Now, you go right back there this minute and try it again. And this time come in slowly… slowly. Haste makes waste, Purvis. Haste makes waste. If I’ve told you that once, I must have told you that a hundred times. Haste makes waste.’
The loudspeaker overhead began squawking. ‘Milo, this is Alvin Brown. I’ve finished dropping my bombs. What should I do now?’
‘Strafe,’ said Milo.
‘Strafe?’ Alvin Brown was shocked.
‘We have no choice,’ Milo informed him resignedly. ‘It’s in the contract.’ ‘Oh, okay, then,’ Alvin Brown acquiesced. ‘In that case I’ll strafe.’
This time Milo had gone too far. Bombing his own men and planes was more than even the most phlegmatic observer could stomach, and it looked like the end for him. High-ranking government officials poured in to investigate. Newspapers inveighed against Milo with glaring headlines, and Congressmen denounced the atrocity in stentorian wrath and clamored for punishment. Mothers with children in the service organized into militant groups and demanded revenge. Not one voice was raised in his defense. Decent people everywhere were affronted, and Milo was all washed up until he opened his books to the public and disclosed the tremendous profit he had made. He could reimburse the government for all the people and property he had destroyed and still have enough money left over to continue buying Egyptian cotton. Everybody, of course, owned a share. And the sweetest part of the whole deal was that there really was no need to reimburse the government at all.
‘In a democracy, the government is the people,’ Milo explained. ‘We’re people, aren’t we? So we might just as well keep the money and eliminate the middleman. Frankly, I’d like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry. If we pay the government everything we owe it, we’ll only be encouraging government control and discouraging other individuals from bombing their own men and planes. We’ll be taking away their incentive.’ Milo was correct, of course, as everyone soon agreed but a few embittered misfits like Doc Daneeka, who sulked cantankerously and muttered offensive insinuations about the morality of the whole venture until Milo mollified him with a donation, in the name of the syndicate, of a lightweight aluminum collapsible garden chair that Doc Daneeka could fold up conveniently and carry outside his tent each time Chief White Halfoat came inside his tent and carry back inside his tent each time Chief White Halfoat came out. Doc Daneeka had lost his head during Milo’s bombardment; instead of running for cover, he had remained out in the open and performed his duty, slithering along the ground through shrapnel, strafing and incendiary bombs like a furtive, wily lizard from casualty to casualty, administering tourniquets, morphine, splints and
sulfanilamide with a dark and doleful visage, never saying one word more than he had to and reading in each man’s bluing wound a dreadful portent of his own decay. He worked himself relentlessly into exhaustion before the long night was over and came down with a snife the next day that sent him hurrying querulously into the medical tent to have his temperature taken by Gus and Wes and to obtain a mustard plaster and vaporizer.
Doc Daneeka tended each moaning man that night with the same glum and profound and introverted grief he showed at the airfield the day of the Avignon mission when Yossarian climbed down the few steps of his plane naked, in a state of utter shock, with Snowden smeared abundantly all over his bare heels and toes, knees, arms and fingers, and pointed inside wordlessly toward where the young radio-gunner lay freezing to death on the floor beside the still younger tail-gunner who kept falling back into a dead faint each time he opened his eyes and saw Snowden dying.
Doc Daneeka draped a blanket around Yossarian’s shoulders almost tenderly after Snowden had been removed from the plane and carried into an ambulance on a stretcher. He led Yossarian toward his jeep. McWatt helped, and the three drove in silence to the squadron medical tent, where McWatt and Doc Daneeka guided Yossarian inside to a chair and washed Snowden off him with cold wet balls of absorbent cotton. Doc Daneeka gave him a pill and a shot that put him to sleep for twelve hours. When Yossarian woke up and went to see him, Doc Daneeka gave him another pill and a shot that put him to sleep for another twelve hours. When Yossarian woke up again and went to see him, Doc Daneeka made ready to give him another pill and a shot.
‘How long are you going to keep giving me those pills and shots?’ Yossarian asked him. ‘Until you feel better.’
‘I feel all right now.’
Doc Daneeka’s frail suntanned forehead furrowed with surprise. ‘Then why don’t you put some clothes on? Why are you walking around naked?’
‘I don’t want to wear a uniform any more.’
Doc Daneeka accepted the explanation and put away his hypodermic syringe. ‘Are you sure you feel all right?’
‘I feel fine. I’m just a little logy from all those pills and shots you’ve been giving me.’
Yossarian went about his business with no clothes on all the rest of that day and was still naked late the next morning when Milo, after hunting everywhere else, finally found him sitting up a tree a small distance in back of the quaint little military cemetery at which Snowden was being buried. Milo was dressed in his customary business attire – olive-drab trousers, a fresh olive-drab shirt and tie, with one silver first lieutenant’s bar gleaming on the collar, and a regulation dress cap with a stiff leather bill.
‘I’ve been looking all over for you,’ Milo called up to Yossarian from the ground reproachfully. ‘You should have looked for me in this tree,’ Yossarian answered. ‘I’ve been up here all morning.’
‘Come on down and taste this and tell me if it’s good. It’s very important.’
Yossarian shook his head. He sat nude on the lowest limb of the tree and balanced himself with both hands grasping the bough directly above. He refused to budge, and Milo had no choice but to stretch both arms about the trunk in a distasteful hug and start climbing. He struggled upward clumsily with loud grunts and wheezes, and his clothes were squashed and crooked by the time he pulled himself up high enough to hook a leg over the limb and pause for breath. His dress cap was askew and in danger of falling. Milo caught it just in time when it began slipping. Globules of perspiration glistened like transparent pearls around his mustache and swelled like opaque blisters under his eyes. Yossarian watched him impassively. Cautiously Milo worked himself around in a half circle so that he could face Yossarian. He unwrapped tissue paper from something soft, round and brown and handed it to Yossarian.
‘Please taste this and let me know what you think. I’d like to serve it to the men.’ ‘What is it?’ asked Yossarian, and took a big bite.
‘Chocolate-covered cotton.’
Yossarian gagged convulsively and sprayed his big mouthful of chocolate-covered cotton right into Milo’s face. ‘Here, take it back!’ he spouted angrily. ‘Jesus Christ! Have you gone crazy? You didn’t even take the goddam seeds out.’
‘Give it a chance, will you?’ Milo begged. ‘It can’t be that bad. Is it really that bad?’ ‘It’s even worse.’
‘But I’ve got to make the mess halls feed it to the men.’ ‘They’ll never be able to swallow it.’
‘They’ve got to swallow it,’ Milo ordained with dictatorial grandeur, and almost broke his neck when he let go with one arm to wave a righteous finger in the air.
‘Come on out here,’ Yossarian invited him. ‘You’ll be much safer, and you can see everything.’ Gripping the bough above with both hands, Milo began inching his way out on the limb sideways with utmost care and apprehension. His face was rigid with tension, and he sighed with relief when he found himself seated securely beside Yossarian. He stroked the tree affectionately. ‘This is a pretty good tree,’ he observed admiringly with proprietary gratitude.
‘It’s the tree of life,’ Yossarian answered, waggling his toes, ‘and of knowledge of good and evil, too.’
Milo squinted closely at the bark and branches. ‘No it isn’t,’ he replied. ‘It’s a chestnut tree. I ought to know. I sell chestnuts.’
‘Have it your way.’
They sat in the tree without talking for several seconds, their legs dangling and their hands almost straight up on the bough above, the one completely nude but for a pair of crepe-soled sandals, the other completely dressed in a coarse olive-drab woolen uniform with his tie knotted tight. Milo
studied Yossarian diffidently through the corner of his eye, hesitating tactfully.
‘I want to ask you something,’ he said at last. ‘You don’t have any clothes on. I don’t want to butt in or anything, but I just want to know. Why aren’t you wearing your uniform?’
‘I don’t want to.’
Milo nodded rapidly like a sparrow pecking. ‘I see, I see,’ he stated quickly with a look of vivid confusion. ‘I understand perfectly. I heard Appleby and Captain Black say you had gone crazy, and I just wanted to find out.’ He hesitated politely again, weighing his next question. ‘Aren’t you ever going to put your uniform on again?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Milo nodded with spurious vim to indicate he still understood and then sat silent, ruminating gravely with troubled misgiving. A scarlet-crested bird shot by below, brushing sure dark wings against a quivering bush. Yossarian and Milo were covered in their bower by tissue-thin tiers of sloping green and largely surrounded by other gray chestnut trees and a silver spruce. The sun was high overhead in a vast sapphire-blue sky beaded with low, isolated, puffy clouds of dry and immaculate white. There was no breeze, and the leaves about them hung motionless. The shade was feathery. Everything was at peace but Milo, who straightened suddenly with a muffled cry and began pointing excitedly.
‘Look at that!’ he exclaimed in alarm. ‘Look at that! That’s a funeral going on down there. That looks like the cemetery. Isn’t it?’
Yossarian answered him slowly in a level voice. ‘They’re burying that kid who got killed in my plane over Avignon the other day. Snowden.’
‘What happened to him?’ Milo asked in a voice deadened with awe. ‘He got killed.’
‘That’s terrible,’ Milo grieved, and his large brown eyes filled with tears. ‘That poor kid. It really is terrible.’ He bit his trembling lip hard, and his voice rose with emotion when he continued. ‘And it will get even worse if the mess halls don’t agree to buy my cotton. Yossarian, what’s the matter with them? Don’t they realize it’s their syndicate? Don’t they know they’ve all got a share?’
‘Did the dead man in my tent have a share?’ Yossarian demanded caustically.
‘Of course he did,’ Milo assured him lavishly. ‘Everybody in the squadron has a share.’ ‘He was killed before he even got into the squadron.’
Milo made a deft grimace of tribulation and turned away. ‘I wish you’d stop picking on me about that dead man in your tent,’ he pleaded peevishly. ‘I told you I didn’t have anything to do with killing him. Is it my fault that I saw this great opportunity to corner the market on Egyptian cotton and got us into all this trouble? Was I supposed to know there was going to be a glut? I didn’t even know what a glut was in those days. An opportunity to corner a market doesn’t come along very often, and I was pretty shrewd to grab the chance when I had it.’ Milo gulped back a moan as he
saw six uniformed pallbearers lift the plain pine coffin from the ambulance and set it gently down on the ground beside the yawning gash of the freshly dug grave. ‘And now I can’t get rid of a single penny’s worth,’ he mourned.
Yossarian was unmoved by the fustian charade of the burial ceremony, and by Milo’s crushing bereavement. The chaplain’s voice floated up to him through the distance tenuously in an unintelligible, almost inaudible monotone, like a gaseous murmur. Yossarian could make out Major Major by his towering and lanky aloofness and thought he recognized Major Danby mopping his brow with a handkerchief. Major Danby had not stopped shaking since his run-in with General Dreedle. There were strands of enlisted men molded in a curve around the three officers, as inflexible as lumps of wood, and four idle gravediggers in streaked fatigues lounging indifferently on spades near the shocking, incongruous heap of loose copperred earth. As Yossarian stared, the chaplain elevated his gaze toward Yossarian beatifically, pressed his fingers down over his eyeballs in a manner of affliction, peered upward again toward Yossarian searchingly, and bowed his head, concluding what Yossarian took to be a climactic part of the funeral rite. The four men in fatigues lifted the coffin on slings and lowered it into the grave. Milo shuddered violently.
‘I can’t watch it,’ he cried, turning away in anguish. ‘I just can’t sit here and watch while those mess halls let my syndicate die.’ He gnashed his teeth and shook his head with bitter woe and resentment. ‘If they had any loyalty, they would buy my cotton till it hurts so that they can keep right on buying my cotton till it hurts them some more. They would build fires and burn up their underwear and summer uniforms just to create bigger demand. But they won’t do a thing. Yossarian, try eating the rest of this chocolate-covered cotton for me. Maybe it will taste delicious now.’
Yossarian pushed his hand away. ‘Give up, Milo. People can’t eat cotton.’
Milo’s face narrowed cunningly. ‘It isn’t really cotton,’ he coaxed. ‘I was joking. It’s really cotton candy, delicious cotton candy. Try it and see.’
‘Now you’re lying.’
‘I never lie!’ Milo rejoindered with proud dignity. ‘You’re lying now.’
‘I only lie when it’s necessary,’ Milo explained defensively, averting his eyes for a moment and blinking his lashes winningly. ‘This stuff is better than cotton candy, really it is. It’s made out of real cotton. Yossarian, you’ve got to help me make the men eat it. Egyptian cotton is the finest cotton in the world.’
‘But it’s indigestible,’ Yossarian emphasized. ‘It will make them sick, don’t you understand? Why don’t you try living on it yourself if you don’t believe me?’
‘I did try,’ admitted Milo gloomily. ‘And it made me sick.’
The graveyard was yellow as hay and green as cooked cabbage. In a little while the chaplain stepped back, and the beige crescent of human forms began to break up sluggishly, like flotsam.
The men drifted without haste or sound to the vehicles parked along the side of the bumpy dirt road. With their heads down disconsolately, the chaplain, Major Major and Major Danby moved toward their jeeps in an ostracized group, each holding himself friendlessly several feet away from the other two.
‘It’s all over,’ observed Yossarian.
‘It’s the end,’ Milo agreed despondently. ‘There’s no hope left. And all because I left them free to make their own decisions. That should teach me a lesson about discipline the next time I try something like this.’
‘Why don’t you sell your cotton to the government?’ Yossarian suggested casually, as he watched the four men in streaked fatigues shoveling heaping bladefuls of the copper-red earth back down inside the grave.
Milo vetoed the idea brusquely. ‘It’s a matter of principle,’ he explained firmly. ‘The government has no business in business, and I would be the last person in the world to ever try to involve the government in a business of mine. But the business of government is business,’ he remembered alertly, and continued with elation. ‘Calvin Coolidge said that, and Calvin Coolidge was a President, so it must be true. And the government does have the responsibility of buying all the Egyptian cotton I’ve got that no one else wants so that I can make a profit, doesn’t it?’ Milo’s face clouded almost as abruptly, and his spirits descended into a state of sad anxiety. ‘But how will I get the government to do it?’
‘Bribe it,’ Yossarian said.
‘Bribe it!’ Milo was outraged and almost lost his balance and broke his neck again. ‘Shame on you!’ he scolded severely, breathing virtuous fire down and upward into his rusty mustache through his billowing nostrils and prim lips. ‘Bribery is against the law, and you know it. But it’s not against the law to make a profit, is it? So it can’t be against the law for me to bribe someone in order to make a fair profit, can it? No, of course not!’ He fell to brooding again, with a meek, almost pitiable distress. ‘But how will I know who to bribe?’
‘Oh, don’t you worry about that,’ Yossarian comforted him with a toneless snicker as the engines of the jeeps and ambulance fractured the drowsy silence and the vehicles in the rear began driving away backward. ‘You make the bribe big enough and they’ll find you. Just make sure you do everything right out in the open. Let everyone know exactly what you want and how much you’re willing to pay for it. The first time you act guilty or ashamed, you might get into trouble.’
‘I wish you’d come with me,’ Milo remarked. ‘I won’t feel safe among people who take bribes. They’re no better than a bunch of crooks.’
‘You’ll be all right,’ Yossarian assured him with confidence. ‘If you run into trouble, just tell everybody that the security of the country requires a strong domestic Egyptian-cotton speculating industry.’
‘It does,’ Milo informed him solemnly. ‘A strong Egyptian-cotton speculating industry means a much stronger America.’
‘Of course it does. And if that doesn’t work, point out the great number of American families that depend on it for income.’
‘A great many American families do depend on it for income.’
‘You see?’ said Yossarian. ‘You’re much better at it than I am. You almost make it sound true.’ ‘It is true,’ Milo exclaimed with a strong trace of old hauteur.
‘That’s what I mean. You do it with just the right amount of conviction.’ ‘You’re sure you won’t come with me?’
Yossarian shook his head.
Milo was impatient to get started. He stuffed the remainder of the chocolate-covered cotton ball into his shirt pocket and edged his way back gingerly along the branch to the smooth gray trunk. He threw this arms about the trunk in a generous and awkward embrace and began shinnying down, the sides of his leather-soled shoes slipping constantly so that it seemed many times he would fall and injure himself. Halfway down, he changed his mind and climbed back up. Bits of tree bark stuck to his mustache, and his straining face was flushed with exertion.
‘I wish you’d put your uniform on instead of going around naked that way,’ he confided pensively before he climbed back down again and hurried away. ‘You might start a trend, and then I’ll never get rid of all this goldarned cotton.’
