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“Catch-22” <strong>By</strong> <strong>Joseph</strong> Heller 137<br />
the morning after the night he slept alone in the sitting room, only to be interrupted<br />
almost immediately by her incorrigible kid sister, who came bursting in without warning<br />
and hurled herself onto the bed jealously so that Nately could embrace her, too. Nately’s<br />
whore sprang up snarling to whack her angrily and jerked her to her feet by her hair.<br />
The twelve-year-old girl looked to Nately like a plucked chicken or like a twig with the<br />
bark peeled off her sapling body embarrassed everyone in her precocious attempts to<br />
imitate her elders, and she was always being chased away to put clothes on and<br />
ordered out into the street to play in the fresh air with the other children. The two sisters<br />
swore and spat at each other now savagely, raising a fluent, deafening commotion that<br />
brought a whole crowd of hilarious spectators swarming into the room. Nately gave up in<br />
exasperation. He asked his girl to get dressed and took her downstairs for breakfast.<br />
The kid sister tagged along, and Nately felt like the proud head of a family as the three<br />
of them ate respectably in a nearby open-air café. But Nately’s whore was<br />
already bored by the time they started back, and she decided to go streetwalking with<br />
two other girls rather than spend more time with him. Nately and the kid sister followed<br />
meekly a block behind, the ambitious youngster to pick up valuable pointers, Nately to<br />
eat his liver in mooning frustration, and both were saddened when the girls were<br />
stopped by soldiers in a staff car and driven away.<br />
Nately went back to the café and bought the kid sister chocolate ice cream<br />
until her spirits improved and then returned with her to the apartment, where Yossarian<br />
and Dunbar were flopped out in the sitting room with an exhausted Hungry Joe, who<br />
was still wearing on his battered face the blissful, numb, triumphant smile with which he<br />
had limped into view from his massive harem that morning like a person with numerous<br />
broken bones. The lecherous and depraved old man was delighted with Hungry Joe’s<br />
split lips and black-and-blue eyes. He greeted Nately warmly, still wearing the same<br />
rumpled clothes of the evening before. Nately was profoundly upset by his seedy and<br />
disreputable appearance, and whenever he came to the apartment he wished that the<br />
corrupt, immoral old man would put on a clean Brooks Brothers shirt, shave, comb his<br />
hair, wear a tweed jacket, and grow a dapper white mustache so that Nately would not<br />
have to suffer such confusing shame each time he looked at him and was reminded of<br />
his father.<br />
Milo<br />
April had been the best month of all for Milo. Lilacs bloomed in April and fruit ripened<br />
on the vine. Heartbeats quickened and old appetites were renewed. In April a livelier iris<br />
gleamed upon the burnished dove. April was spring, and in the spring Milo<br />
Minderbinder’s fancy had lightly turned to thoughts of tangerines.<br />
‘Tangerines?’<br />
‘Yes, sir.’<br />
‘My men would love tangerines,’ admitted the colonel in Sardinia who commanded<br />
four squadrons of B-26s.<br />
‘There’ll be all the tangerines they can eat that you’re able to pay for with money from<br />
your mess fund,’ Milo assured him.<br />
‘Casaba melons?’<br />
‘Are going for a song in Damascus.’<br />
‘I have a weakness for casaba melons. I’ve always had a weakness for casaba<br />
melons.’<br />
‘Just lend me one plane from each squadron, just one plane, and you’ll have all the<br />
casabas you can eat that you’ve money to pay for.’<br />
‘We buy from the syndicate?’<br />
‘And everybody has a share.’<br />
‘It’s amazing, positively amazing. How can you do it?’<br />
‘Mass purchasing power makes the big difference. For example, breaded veal cutlets.’<br />
‘I’m not so crazy about breaded veal cutlets,’ grumbled the skeptical B-25 commander