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“Catch-22” <strong>By</strong> <strong>Joseph</strong> Heller 171<br />
after Dobbs had turned him down. The stove Orr was manufacturing out of an inverted<br />
metal drum stood in the middle of the smooth cement floor he had constructed. He was<br />
working sedulously on both knees. Yossarian tried paying no attention to him and<br />
limped wearily to his cot and sat down with a labored, drawn-out grunt. Prickles of<br />
perspiration were turning chilly on his forehead. Dobbs had depressed him. Doc<br />
Daneeka depressed him. An ominous vision of doom depressed him when he looked at<br />
Orr. He began ticking with a variety of internal tremors. Nerves twitched, and the vein in<br />
one wrist began palpitating.<br />
Orr studied Yossarian over his shoulder, his moist lips drawn back around convex<br />
rows of large buck teeth. Reaching sideways, he dug a bottle of warm beer out of his<br />
foot locker, and he handed it to Yossarian after prying off the cap. Neither said a word.<br />
Yossarian sipped the bubbles off the top and tilted his head back. Orr watched him<br />
cunningly with a noiseless grin. Yossarian eyed Orr guardedly. Orr snickered with a<br />
slight, mucid sibilance and turned back to his work, squatting. Yossarian grew tense.<br />
‘Don’t start,’ he begged in a threatening voice, both hands tightening around his beer<br />
bottle. ‘Don’t start working on your stove.’ Orr cackled quietly. ‘I’m almost finished.’<br />
‘No, you’re not. You’re about to begin.’<br />
‘Here’s the valve. See? It’s almost all together.’<br />
‘And you’re about to take it apart. I know what you’re doing, you bastard. I’ve seen you<br />
do it three hundred times.’ Orr shivered with glee. ‘I want to get the leak in this gasoline<br />
line out,’ he explained. ‘I’ve got it down now to where it’s only an ooze.’<br />
‘I can’t watch you,’ Yossarian confessed tonelessly. ‘If you want to work with<br />
something big, that’s okay. But that valve is filled with tiny parts, and I just haven’t got<br />
the patience right now to watch you working so hard over things that are so goddam<br />
small and unimportant.’<br />
‘Just because they’re small doesn’t mean they’re unimportant.’<br />
‘I don’t care.’<br />
‘Once more?’<br />
‘When I’m not around. You’re a happy imbecile and you don’t know what it means to<br />
feel the way I do. Things happen to me when you work over small things that I can’t<br />
even begin to explain. I find out that I can’t stand you. I start to hate you, and I’m soon<br />
thinking seriously about busting this bottle down on your head or stabbing you in the<br />
neck with that hunting knife there. Do you understand?’ Orr nodded very intelligently. ‘I<br />
won’t take the valve apart now,’ he said, and began taking it apart, working with slow,<br />
tireless, interminable precision, his rustic, ungainly face bent very close to the floor,<br />
picking painstakingly at the minute mechanism in his fingers with such limitless,<br />
plodding concentration that he seemed scarcely to be thinking of it at all.<br />
Yossarian cursed him silently and made up his mind to ignore him. ‘What the hell’s<br />
your hurry with that stove, anyway?’ he barked out a moment later in spite of himself.<br />
‘It’s still hot out. We’re probably going swimming later. What are you worried about the<br />
cold for.’<br />
‘The days are getting shorter,’ Orr observed philosophically. ‘I’d like to get this all<br />
finished for you while there’s still time. You’ll have the best stove in the squadron when<br />
I’m through. It will burn all night with this feed control I’m fixing, and these metal plates<br />
will radiate the heat all over the tent. If you leave a helmet full of water on this thing<br />
when you go to sleep, you’ll have warm water to wash with all ready for you when you<br />
wake up. Won’t that be nice? If you want to cook eggs or soup, all you’ll have to do is<br />
set the pot down here and turn the fire up.’<br />
‘What do you mean, me?’ Yossarian wanted to know. ‘Where are you going to be?’<br />
Orr’s stunted torso shook suddenly with a muffled spasm of amusement. ‘I don’t know,’<br />
he exclaimed, and a weird, wavering giggle gushed out suddenly through his chattering<br />
buck teeth like an exploding jet of emotion. He was still laughing when he continued,<br />
and his voice was clogged with saliva. ‘If they keep on shooting me down this way, I<br />
don’t know where I’m going to be.’ Yossarian was moved. ‘Why don’t you try to stop<br />
flying, Orr? You’ve got an excuse.’