“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 170
saying, "All right now, all right," again, and giggling like a crazy little freak some more. It
was like watching some kind of a moron. Watching him was all that kept us from going
to pieces altogether during the first few minutes, what with each wave washing over us
into the raft or dumping a few of us back into the water so that we had to climb back in
again before the next wave came along and washed us right back out. It was sure
funny. We just kept falling out and climbing back in. We had the guy who couldn’t swim
stretched out in the middle of the raft on the floor, but even there he almost drowned,
because the water inside the raft was deep enough to keep splashing in his face. Oh,
boy!
‘Then Orr began opening up compartments in the raft, and the fun really began. First
he found a box of chocolate bars and he passed those around so we sat there eating
salty chocolate bars while the waves kept knocking us out of the raft into the water. Next
he found some bouillon cubes and aluminum cups and made us some soup. Then he
found some tea. Sure, he made it! Can’t you see him serving us tea as we sat there
soaking wet in water up to our ass? Now I was falling out of the raft because I was
laughing so much. We were all laughing. And he was dead serious, except for that goofy
giggle of his and that crazy grin. What a jerk! Whatever he found he used. He found
some shark repellent and he sprinkled it right out into the water. He found some marker
dye and he threw it into the water. The next thing he finds is a fishing line and dried bait,
and his face lights up as though the Air-Sea Rescue launch had just sped up to save us
before we died of exposure or before the Germans sent a boat out from Spezia to take
us prisoner or machine-gun us. In no time at all, Orr had that fishing line out into the
water, trolling away as happy as a lark. "Lieutenant, what do you expect to catch?" I
asked him. "Cod," he told me. And he meant it. And it’s a good thing he didn’t catch any,
because he would have eaten that codfish raw if he had caught any, and would have
made us eat it, too, because he had found this little book that said it was all right to eat
codfish raw.
‘The next thing he found was this little blue oar about the size of a Dixie-cup spoon,
and, sure enough, he began rowing with it, trying to move all nine hundred pounds of us
with that little stick. Can you imagine? After that he found a small magnetic compass
and a big waterproof map, and he spread the map open on his knees and set the
compass on top of it. And that’s how he spent the time until the launch picked us up
about thirty minutes later, sitting there with that baited fishing line out behind him, with
the compass in his lap and the map spread out on his knees, and paddling away as
hard as he could with that dinky blue oar as though he was speeding to Majorca. Jesus!’
Sergeant Knight knew all about Majorca, and so did Orr, because Yossarian had told
them often of such sanctuaries as Spain, Switzerland and Sweden where American
fliers could be interned for the duration of the war under conditions of utmost ease and
luxury merely by flying there. Yossarian was the squadron’s leading authority on
internment and had already begun plotting an emergency heading into Switzerland on
every mission he flew into northernmost Italy. He would certainly have preferred
Sweden, where the level of intelligence was high and where he could swim nude with
beautiful girls with low, demurring voices and sire whole happy, undisciplined tribes of
illegitimate Yossarians that the state would assist through parturition and launch into life
without stigma; but Sweden was out of reach, too far away, and Yossarian waited for the
piece of flak that would knock out one engine over the Italian Alps and provide him with
the excuse for heading for Switzerland. He would not even tell his pilot he was guiding
him there. Yossarian often thought of scheming with some pilot he trusted to fake a
crippled engine and then destroy the evidence of deception with a belly landing, but the
only pilot he really trusted was McWatt, who was happiest where he was and still got a
big boot out of buzzing his plane over Yossarian’s tent or roaring in so low over the
bathers at the beach that the fierce wind from his propellers slashed dark furrows in the
water and whipped sheets of spray flapping back for seconds afterward.
Dobbs and Hungry Joe were out of the question, and so was Orr, who was tinkering
with the valve of the stove again when Yossarian limped despondently back into the tent