Yossarian no longer gave a damn where his bombs fell, although he did not go as far as Dunbar, who dropped hisbombs hundreds of yards past the village and would face a court-martial if it could ever be shown he had done itdeliberately. Without a word even to Yossarian, Dunbar had washed his hands of the mission. The fall in thehospital had either shown him the light or scrambled his brains; it was impossible to say which.
Dunbar seldom laughed any more and seemed to be wasting away. He snarled belligerently at superior officers,even at Major Danby, and was crude and surly and profane even in front of the chaplain, who was afraid of Dunbar now and seemed to be wasting away also. The chaplain’s pilgrimage to Wintergreen had provedabortive; another shrine was empty. Wintergreen was too busy to see the chaplain himself. A brash assistantbrought the chaplain a stolen Zippo cigarette lighter as a gift and informed him condescendingly thatWintergreen was too deeply involved with wartime activities to concern himself with matters so trivial as thenumber of missions men had to fly. The chaplain worried about Dunbar and brooded more over Yossarian nowthat Orr was gone. To the chaplain, who lived by himself in a spacious tent whose pointy top sealed him ingloomy solitude each night like the cap of a tomb, it seemed incredible that Yossarian really preferred livingalone and wanted no roommates.
As a lead bombardier again, Yossarian had McWatt for a pilot, and that was one consolation, although he wasstill so utterly undefended. There was no way to fight back. He could not even see McWatt and the co-pilot fromhis post in the nose. All he could ever see was Aarfy, with whose fustian, moon-faced ineptitude he had finallylost all patience, and there were minutes of agonizing fury and frustration in the sky when he hungered to bedemoted again to a wing plane with a loaded machine gun in the compartment instead of the precision bombsightthat he really had no need for, a powerful, heavy fifty-caliber machine gun he could seize vengefully in bothhands and turn loose savagely against all the demons tyrannizing him: at the smoky black puffs of the flak itself;at the German antiaircraft gunners below whom he could not even see and could not possibly harm with hismachine gun even if he ever did take the time to open fire, at Havermeyer and Appleby in the lead plane for theirfearless straight and level bomb run on the second mission to Bologna where the flak from two hundred andtwenty-four cannons had knocked out one of Orr’s engines for the very last time and sent him down ditching intothe sea between Genoa and La Spezia just before the brief thunderstorm broke.
Actually, there was not much he could do with that powerful machine gun except load it and test-fire a fewrounds. It was no more use to him than the bombsight. He could really cut loose with it against attacking Germanfighters, but there were no German fighters any more, and he could not even swing it all the way around into thehelpless faces of pilots like Huple and Dobbs and order them back down carefully to the ground, as he had onceordered Kid Sampson back down, which is exactly what he did want to do to Dobbs and Huple on the hideousfirst mission to Avignon the moment he realized the fantastic pickle he was in, the moment he found himselfaloft in a wing plane with Dobbs and Huple in a flight headed by Havermeyer and Appleby. Dobbs and Huple?
Huple and Dobbs? Who were they? What preposterous madness to float in thin air two miles high on an inch ortwo of metal, sustained from death by the meager skill and intelligence of two vapid strangers, a beardless kidnamed Huple and a nervous nut like Dobbs, who really did go nuts right there in the plane, running amuck overthe target without leaving his copilot’s seat and grabbing the controls from Huple to plunge them all down intothat chilling dive that tore Yossarian’s headset loose and brought them right back inside the dense flak fromwhich they had almost escaped. The next thing he knew, another stranger, a radio-gunner named Snowden, wasdying in back. It was impossible to be positive that Dobbs had killed him, for when Yossarian plugged hisheadset back in, Dobbs was already on the intercom pleading for someone to go up front and help thebombardier. And almost immediately Snowden broke in, whimpering, “Help me. Please help me. I’m cold. I’mcold.” And Yossarian crawled slowly out of the nose and up on top of the bomb bay and wriggled back into therear section of the plane—passing the first-aid kit on the way that he had to return for—to treat Snowden for thewrong wound, the yawning, raw, melon-shaped hole as big as a football in the outside of his thigh, theunsevered, blood-soaked muscle fibers inside pulsating weirdly like blind things with lives of their own, the oval,naked wound that was almost a foot long and made Yossarian moan in shock and sympathy the instant he spied it and nearly made him vomit. And the small, slight tail-gunner was lying on the floor beside Snowden in a deadfaint, his face as white as a handkerchief, so that Yossarian sprang forward with revulsion to help him first.
Yes, in the long run, he was much safer flying with McWatt, and he was not even safe with McWatt, who lovedflying too much and went buzzing boldly inches off the ground with Yossarian in the nose on the way back fromthe training flight to break in the new bombardier in the whole replacement crew Colonel Cathcart had obtainedafter Orr was lost. The practice bomb range was on the other side of Pianosa, and, flying back, McWatt edgedthe belly of the lazing, slow-cruising plane just over the crest of mountains in the middle and then, instead ofmaintaining altitude, jolted both engines open all the way, lurched up on one side and, to Yossarian’sastonishment, began following the falling land down as fast as the plane would go, wagging his wings gaily andskimming with a massive, grinding, hammering roar over each rocky rise and dip of the rolling terrain like adizzy gull over wild brown waves. Yossarian was petrified. The new bombardier beside him sat demurely with abewitched grin and kept whistling “Whee!” and Yossarian wanted to reach out and crush his idiotic face withone hand as he flinched and flung himself away from the boulders and hillocks and lashing branches of trees thatloomed up above him out in front and rushed past just underneath in a sinking, streaking blur. No one had a rightto take such frightful risks with his life.
“Go up, go up, go up!” he shouted frantically at McWatt, hating him venomously, but McWatt was singingbuoyantly over the intercom and probably couldn’t hear. Yossarian, blazing with rage and almost sobbing forrevenge, hurled himself down into the crawlway and fought his way through against the dragging weight ofgravity and inertia until he arrived at the main section and pulled himself up to the flight deck, to stand tremblingbehind McWatt in the pilot’s seat. He looked desperately about for a gun, a gray-black .45 automatic that hecould cock and ram right up against the base of McWatt’s skull. There was no gun. There was no hunting knifeeither, and no other weapon with which he could bludgeon or stab, and Yossarian grasped and jerked the collarof McWatt’s coveralls in tightening fists and shouted to him to go up, go up. The land was still swimming byunderneath and flashing by overhead on both sides. McWatt looked back at Yossarian and laughed joyfully asthough Yossarian were sharing his fun. Yossarian slid both hands around McWatt’s bare throat and squeezed.
McWatt turned stiff:
“Go up,” Yossarian ordered unmistakably through his teeth in a low, menacing voice. “Or I’ll kill you.”
Rigid with caution, McWatt cut the motors back and climbed gradually. Yossarian’s hands weakened onMcWatt’s neck and slid down off his shoulders to dangle inertly. He was not angry any more. He was ashamed.
When McWatt turned, he was sorry the hands were his and wished there were someplace where he could burythem. They felt dead.
McWatt gazed at him deeply. There was no friendliness in his stare. “Boy,” he said coldly, “you sure must be inpretty bad shape. You ought to go home.”
“They won’t let me.” Yossarian answered with averted eyes, and crept away.
Yossarian stepped down from the flight deck and seated himself on the floor, hanging his head with guilt andremorse. He was covered with sweat.
McWatt set course directly back toward the field. Yossarian wondered whether McWatt would now go to theoperations tent to see Piltchard and Wren and request that Yossarian never be assigned to his plane again, just asYossarian had gone surreptitiously to speak to them about Dobbs and Huple and Orr and, unsuccessfully, aboutAarfy. He had never seen McWatt look displeased before, had never seen him in any but the most lightheartedmood, and he wondered whether he had just lost another friend.
But McWatt winked at him reassuringly as he climbed down from the plane and joshed hospitably with thecredulous new pilot and bombardier during the jeep ride back to the squadron, although he did not address aword to Yossarian until all four had returned their parachutes and separated and the two of them were walkingside by side toward their own row of tents. Then McWatt’s sparsely freckled tan Scotch-Irish face brokesuddenly into a smile and he dug his knuckles playfully into Yossarian’s ribs, as though throwing a punch.
“You louse,” he laughed. “Were you really going to kill me up there?”
Yossarian grinned penitently and shook his head. “No. I don’t think so.”
“I didn’t realize you got it so bad. Boy! Why don’t you talk to somebody about it?”
“I talk to everybody about it. What the hell’s the matter with you? Don’t you ever hear me?”
“I guess I never really believed you.”
“Aren’t you ever afraid?”
“Maybe I ought to be.”
“Not even on the missions?”
“I guess I just don’t have brains enough.” McWatt laughed sheepishly.
“There are so many ways for me to get killed,” Yossarian commented, “and you had to find one more.”
McWatt smiled again. “Say, I bet it must really scare you when I buzz your tent, huh?”
“It scares me to death. I’ve told you that.”
“I thought it was just the noise you were complaining about.” McWatt made a resigned shrug. “Oh, well, whatthe hell,” he sang. “I guess I’ll just have to give it up.”
But McWatt was incorrigible, and, while he never buzzed Yossarian’s tent again, he never missed an opportunityto buzz the beach and roar like a fierce and low-flying thunderbolt over the raft in the water and the secludedhollow in the sand where Yossarian lay feeling up Nurse Duckett or playing hearts, poker or pinochle with Nately, Dunbar and Hungry Joe. Yossarian met Nurse Duckett almost every afternoon that both were free andcame with her to the beach on the other side of the narrow swell of shoulder-high dunes separating them from thearea in which the other officers and enlisted men went swimming nude. Nately, Dunbar and Hungry Joe wouldcome there, too. McWatt would occasionally join them, and often Aarfy, who always arrived pudgily in fulluniform and never removed any of his clothing but his shoes and his hat; Aarfy never went swimming. The othermen wore swimming trunks in deference to Nurse Duckett, and in deference also to Nurse Cramer, whoaccompanied Nurse Duckett and Yossarian to the beach every time and sat haughtily by herself ten yards away.
No one but Aarfy ever made reference to the naked men sun-bathing in full view farther down the beach orjumping and diving from the enormous white-washed raft that bobbed on empty oil drums out beyond the siltsand. Nurse Cramer sat by herself because she was angry with Yossarian and disappointed in Nurse Duckett.
Nurse Sue Ann Duckett despised Aarfy, and that was another one of the numerous fetching traits about NurseDuckett that Yossarian enjoyed. He enjoyed Nurse Sue Ann Duckett’s long white legs and supple, callipygousass; he often neglected to remember that she was quite slim and fragile from the waist up and hurt herunintentionally in moments of passion when he hugged her too roughly. He loved her manner of sleepyacquiescence when they lay on the beach at dusk. He drew solace and sedation from her nearness. He had acraving to touch her always, to remain always in physical communication. He liked to encircle her ankle looselywith his fingers as he played cards with Nately, Dunbar and Hungry Joe, to lightly and lovingly caress the downyskin of her fair, smooth thigh with the backs of his nails or, dreamily, sensuously, almost unconsciously, slide hisproprietary, respectful hand up the shell-like ridge of her spine beneath the elastic strap of the top of the two-piece bathing suit she always wore to contain and cover her tiny, long-nippled breasts. He loved Nurse Duckett’sserene, flattered response, the sense of attachment to him she displayed proudly. Hungry Joe had a craving to feelNurse Duckett up, too, and was restrained more than once by Yossarian’s forbidding glower. Nurse Duckettflirted with Hungry Joe just to keep him in heat, and her round light-brown eyes glimmered with mischief everytime Yossarian rapped her sharply with his elbow or fist to make her stop.
The men played cards on a towel, undershirt, or blanket, and Nurse Duckett mixed the extra deck of cards, sittingwith her back resting against a sand dune. When she was not shuffling the extra deck of cards, she sat squintinginto a tiny pocket mirror, brushing mascara on her curling reddish eyelashes in a birdbrained effort to make themlonger permanently. Occasionally she was able to stack the cards or spoil the deck in a way they did not discoveruntil they were well into the game, and she laughed and glowed with blissful gratification when they all hurledtheir cards down disgustedly and began punching her sharply on the arms or legs as they called her filthy namesand warned her to stop fooling around. She would prattle nonsensically when they were striving hardest to think,and a pink flush of elation crept into her cheeks when they gave her more sharp raps on the arms and legs withtheir fists and told her to shut up. Nurse Duckett reveled in such attention and ducked her short chestnut bangswith joy when Yossarian and the others focused upon her. It gave her a peculiar feeling of warm and expectantwell-being to know that so many naked boys and men were idling close by on the other side of the sand dunes.
She had only to stretch her neck or rise on some pretext to see twenty or forty undressed males lounging orplaying ball in the sunlight. Her own body was such a familiar and unremarkable thing to her that she waspuzzled by the convulsive ecstasy men could take from it, by the intense and amusing need they had merely totouch it, to reach out urgently and press it, squeeze it, pinch it, rub it. She did not understand Yossarian’s lust;but she was willing to take his word for it.
Evenings when Yossarian felt horny he brought Nurse Duckett to the beach with two blankets and enjoyedmaking love to her with most of their clothes on more than he sometimes enjoyed making love to all the vigorousbare amoral girls in Rome. Frequently they went to the beach at night and did not make love, but just layshivering between the blankets against each other to ward off the brisk, damp chill. The ink-black nights wereturning cold, the stars frosty and fewer. The raft swayed in the ghostly trail of moonlight and seemed to besailing away. A marked hint of cold weather penetrated the air. Other men were just starting to build stoves andcame to Yossarian’s tent during the day to marvel at Orr’s workmanship. It thrilled Nurse Duckett rapturouslythat Yossarian could not keep his hands off her when they were together, although she would not let him slipthem inside her bathing shorts during the day when anyone was near enough to see, not even when the onlywitness was Nurse Cramer, who sat on the other side of her sand dune with her reproving nose in the air andpretended not to see anything.
Nurse Cramer had stopped speaking to Nurse Duckett, her best friend, because of her liaison with Yossarian, butstill went everywhere with Nurse Duckett since Nurse Duckett was her best friend. She did not approve ofYossarian or his friends. When they stood up and went swimming with Nurse Duckett, Nurse Cramer stood upand went swimming, too, maintaining the same ten-yard distance between them, and maintaining her silence,snubbing them even in the water. When they laughed and splashed, she laughed and splashed; when they dived,she dived; when they swam to the sand bar and rested, Nurse Cramer swam to the sand bar and rested. Whenthey came out, she came out, dried her shoulders with her own towel and seated herself aloofly in her own spot,her back rigid and a ring of reflected sunlight burnishing her light-blond hair like a halo. Nurse Cramer wasprepared to begin talking to Nurse Duckett again if she repented and apologized. Nurse Duckett preferred thingsthe way they were. For a long time she had wanted to give Nurse Cramer a rap to make her shut up.
Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him. She loved to watch him takingshort naps with his face down and his arm thrown across her, or staring bleakly at the endless tame, quiet wavesbreaking like pet puppy dogs against the shore, scampering lightly up the sand a foot or two and then trottingaway. She was calm in his silences. She knew she did not bore him, and she buffed or painted her fingernailsstudiously while he dozed or brooded and the desultory warm afternoon breeze vibrated delicately on the surfaceof the beach. She loved to look at his wide, long, sinewy back with its bronzed, unblemished skin. She loved tobring him to flame instantly by taking his whole ear in her mouth suddenly and running her hand down his frontall the way. She loved to make him burn and suffer till dark, then satisfy him. Then kiss him adoringly becauseshe had brought him such bliss.
Yossarian was never lonely with Nurse Duckett, who really did know how to keep her mouth shut and was justcapricious enough. He was haunted and tormented by the vast, boundless ocean. He wondered mournfully, asNurse Duckett buffed her nails, about all the people who had died under water. There were surely more than amillion already. Where were they? What insects had eaten their flesh? He imagined the awful impotence ofbreathing in helplessly quarts and quarts of water. Yossarian followed the small fishing boats and militarylaunches plying back and forth far out and found them unreal; it did not seem true that there were full-sized menaboard, going somewhere every time. He looked toward stony Elba, and his eyes automatically searchedoverhead for the fluffy, white, turnip-shaped cloud in which Clevinger had vanished. He peered at the vaporousItalian skyline and thought of Orr. Clevinger and Orr. Where had they gone? Yossarian had once stood on a jettyat dawn and watched a tufted round log that was drifting toward him on the tide turn unexpectedly into the bloated face of a drowned man; it was the first dead person he had ever seen. He thirsted for life and reached outravenously to grasp and hold Nurse Duckett’s flesh. He studied every floating object fearfully for somegruesome sign of Clevinger and Orr, prepared for any morbid shock but the shock McWatt gave him one daywith the plane that came blasting suddenly into sight out of the distant stillness and hurtled mercilessly along theshore line with a great growling, clattering roar over the bobbing raft on which blond, pale Kid Sampson, hisnaked sides scrawny even from so far away, leaped clownishly up to touch it at the exact moment some arbitrarygust of wind or minor miscalculation of McWatt’s senses dropped the speeding plane down just low enough for apropeller to slice him half away.
Even people who were not there remembered vividly exactly what happened next. There was the briefest, softesttsst! filtering audibly through the shattering, overwhelming howl of the plane’s engines, and then there were justKid Sampson’s two pale, skinny legs, still joined by strings somehow at the bloody truncated hips, standingstock-still on the raft for what seemed a full minute or two before they toppled over backward into the waterfinally with a faint, echoing splash and turned completely upside down so that only the grotesque toes and theplaster-white soles of Kid Sampson’s feet remained in view.
On the beach, all hell broke loose. Nurse Cramer materialized out of thin air suddenly and was weepinghysterically against Yossarian’s chest while Yossarian hugged her shoulders and soothed her. His other armbolstered Nurse Duckett, who was trembling and sobbing against him, too, her long, angular face dead white.
Everyone at the beach was screaming and running, and the men sounded like women. They scampered for theirthings in panic, stooping hurriedly and looking askance at each gentle, knee-high wave bubbling in as thoughsome ugly, red, grisly organ like a liver or a lung might come washing right up against them. Those in the waterwere struggling to get out, forgetting in their haste to swim, wailing, walking, held back in their flight by theviscous, clinging sea as though by a biting wind.
Kid Sampson had rained all over. Those who spied drops of him on their limbs or torsos drew back with terrorand revulsion, as though trying to shrink away from their own odious skins. Everybody ran in a sluggishstampede, shooting tortured, horrified glances back, filling the deep, shadowy, rustling woods with their frailgasps and cries. Yossarian drove both stumbling, faltering women before him frantically, shoving them andprodding them to make them hurry, and raced back with a curse to help when Hungry Joe tripped on the blanketor the camera case he was carrying and fell forward on his face in the mud of the stream.
Back at the squadron everyone already knew. Men in uniform were screaming and running there too, or standingmotionless in one spot, rooted in awe, like Sergeant Knight and Doc Daneeka as they gravely craned their headsupward and watched the guilty, banking, forlorn airplane with McWatt circle and circle slowly and climb.
“Who is it?” Yossarian shouted anxiously at Doc Daneeka as he ran up, breathless and limp, his somber eyesburning with a misty, hectic anguish. “Who’s in the plane?”
“McWatt,” said Sergeant Knight. “He’s got the two new pilots with him on a training flight. Doc Daneeka’s upthere, too.”
“I’m right here,” contended Doc Daneeka, in a strange and troubled voice, darting an anxious look at Sergeant Knight.
“Why doesn’t he come down?” Yossarian exclaimed in despair. “Why does he keep going up?”
“He’s probably afraid to come down,” Sergeant Knight answered, without moving his solemn gaze fromMcWatt’s solitary climbing airplane. “He knows what kind of trouble he’s in.”
And McWatt kept climbing higher and higher, nosing his droning airplane upward evenly in a slow, oval spiralthat carried him far out over the water as he headed south and far in over the russet foothills when he had circledthe landing field again and was flying north. He was soon up over five thousand feet. His engines were soft aswhispers. A white parachute popped open suddenly in a surprising puff. A second parachute popped open a fewminutes later and coasted down, like the first, directly in toward the clearing of the landing strip. There was nomotion on the ground. The plane continued south for thirty seconds more, following the same pattern, familiarand predictable now, and McWatt lifted a wing and banked gracefully around into his turn.
“Two more to go,” said Sergeant Knight. “McWatt and Doc Daneeka.”
“I’m right here, Sergeant Knight,” Doc Daneeka told him plaintively. “I’m not in the plane.”
“Why don’t they jump?” Sergeant Knight asked, pleading aloud to himself. “Why don’t they jump?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” grieved Doc Daneeka, biting his lip. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
But Yossarian understood suddenly why McWatt wouldn’t jump, and went running uncontrollably down thewhole length of the squadron after McWatt’s plane, waving his arms and shouting up at him imploringly to comedown, McWatt, come down; but no one seemed to hear, certainly not McWatt, and a great, choking moan torefrom Yossarian’s throat as McWatt turned again, dipped his wings once in salute, decided oh, well, what the hell,and flew into a mountain.
Colonel Cathcart was so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he raised the missions to sixty-five.